July 21
TEXAS:
Penalty trial opens for police officer's killer
Testimony resumes in Houston as prosecutors seek the death penalty for a
23-year-old man convicted of capital murder in the Christmas Eve killings 2
years ago of a Houston-area police officer and an auto body shop owner.
The punishment phase begins Monday in a state district court in the trial of
Harlem Lewis III. The Harris County jury found Lewis guilty of capital murder
Friday in the deaths of Bellaire officer Jimmie Norman and auto body shop owner
Terry Taylor.
Prosecutors say Norman had stopped Lewis for a traffic violation, got into a
struggle with him and was shot. Authorities say Taylor was shot when he tried
to help Norman.
Jurors can now sentence Lewis to life in prison without parole or death by
lethal injection.
(source: Associated Press)
MISSISSIPPI:
Death row inmate Michelle Byrom moved to Tishomingo jail to await new trial
Death row inmate Michelle Byrom has been moved to the Tishomingo County jail
where she will await a new trial.
No trial date has been announced.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections says Byrom was moved Saturday to the
jail in Iuka.
The state Supreme Court in March threw out Byrom's capital murder conviction
and ordered a new trial. The court did not elaborate on its decision.
Byrom, now 57, was sentenced to death in 2000 for the killing of her husband,
Edward "Eddie" Byrom Sr., and for recruiting her son in the plot. Eddie Byrom
Sr. was fatally shot on June 4, 1999, at the couple's home in Iuka.
Byrom's attorneys say they have new evidence in the case and that Byrom now
argues that her son committed the slaying.
(source: Associated Press)
LOUISIANA:
Trial looms for mentally ill man suspected in 2 slayings -- Road to trial long
for Charenton man accused of 2 fatal '13 shootings
The Charenton man suspected in the fatal shootings of a Chitimacha tribe police
officer and another man in January 2013 was evaluated last week by state
psychiatrists, who will weigh in on whether Wilbert Thibodeaux is mentally fit
to stand trial.
Thibodeaux, 49, was evaluated at Louisiana's mental hospital in Jackson on July
14. The results of the all-day sanity test could open up a path for Thibodeaux
to one day stand trial in St. Mary Parish on 2 counts of 1st-degree murder and
2 counts of attempted 1st-degree murder.
Or he may never stand trial.
"It wouldn't be extremely unusual to never get him to trial," said Paul Marx,
who heads the Public Defender's Office for the 15th Judicial District. Marx's
office represents low-income defendants in Lafayette, Vermilion and Acadia
parishes. Marx has no connection to the Thibodeaux case but has defended many
like him.
"I've had some who have never been able to go to trial," he said.
Thibodeaux has been an inmate in the mental ward at the Elayn Hunt Correctional
Center in St. Gabriel since he was arrested Jan. 26, 2013. St. Mary Parish
detectives believe Thibodeaux shot to death 78-year-old Eddie Lyons and
Chitimacha tribal police Officer Rick Riggenbach, who was 52 and a veteran cop
who had responded to a report of Thibodeaux walking down a Charenton street
armed with a gun.
Thibodeaux also is accused of burning down Lyons' mobile home and trying to
kill 2 sheriff's deputies who responded to the shootings.
Prosecutors in August 2013 told state district Judge Keith Comeaux they will
seek the death penalty.
Craig Colwart, Thibodeaux's lead public defender, said psychiatrists who
evaluated Thibodeaux last Monday will write a report for Judge Comeaux to use
in determining whether Thibodeaux, on medication, is mentally competent to
stand trial.
The report should be completed in two to three months, Colwart said, but he
couldn't say when Comeaux would rule.
Colwart said the mental competency issue is but one part of the long drama.
"If they come back and say he's competent, then we have to go through whether
he was insane at the time of the offense," Colwart said. "Could he tell right
from wrong at the time?"
If Thibodeaux is ruled incompetent to stand trial, the road to a trial is
blocked until the day he is deemed mentally stable and cognizant enough to face
his accusers in court.
In the 18 months since Riggenbach and Lyons were killed, Colwart and other
public defenders have tried to collect records documenting the mental health
problems that have plagued Thibodeaux since he was young.
Neighbors in Charenton said that although Thibodeaux had mental issues all his
life, he had never been violent until January 2013.
Colwart said the records unearthed - such as those documenting an extended stay
at a Texas mental facility one month before the shootings - were given to the
psychiatrists at the mental hospital in Jackson last Monday.
"Because this is a 1st-degree murder case, with all the complications ... we
wanted to get as much information about his situation to the doctors," Colwart
said.
Thibodeaux also has been uncooperative, refusing at times to meet with
attorneys who traveled from St. Mary Parish to the Elayn Hunt prison in
Iberville Parish to discuss his case. And he has refused to sign legal
documents needed to help his defense, Colwart said.
(source: The Advocate)
ARIZONA:
Appeals court postpones Arizona man's execution
A federal appeals court on Saturday granted an Arizona death row inmate's
request to postpone his pending execution, putting it on hold until prison
officials reveal details on the 2-drug combination that will be used to put him
to death.
The preliminary injunction granted by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
reversing a lower federal court comes four days before the scheduled execution
of Joseph Rudolph Wood.
Without weighing in on the "ultimate merits" of Wood's case, the court wrote:
"Wood has presented serious questions going to the merits of his claim, and
that the balance of hardships tips sharply in his favor."
Wood's lawyers argued prison officials violated their client's First Amendment
rights by refusing to provide the detailed information, such as the makers of
the drugs and how the state developed its method for lethal injections.
"Today the Court has made a well-reasoned ruling affirming the core First
Amendment principles regarding the public's right to know, which aid all parts
of our democratic government," Wood's lawyer Dale Baich said in a statement.
Attorneys for the state argued there was no First Amendment right to the
information Wood is seeking.
Representatives from the attorney general's office said they had not yet seen
the decision, but based on the severity of Wood's crime they intended to
appeal. Spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said the state would decide Monday how to
proceed.
The arguments by Wood's attorneys are an example of a new legal tactic in death
penalty cases, which emerged as states face problems getting supplies of
lethal-injection drugs.
In the past, states used the same 3-drug combination and didn't have problems
getting access to the drugs, until the maker of a sedative used in executions
decided not to make it anymore. Then, states started to shield the identity of
the drugmakers.
The legal dispute in Arizona is emerging as concerns over the death penalty
mount after a botched April 29 execution of an Oklahoma inmate and an incident
in January in which an Ohio inmate snorted and gasped during the 26 minutes it
took him to die.
"There is a continuing and intensifying debate over lethal injection in the
country," Baich said in a statement, "and the court said it's important that
specific and detailed information be provided so the public can know about how
safely and reliably the death penalty is administered."
Arizona prison officials intend to use the same drugs - the sedative midazolam
and painkiller hydromorphone - used in the Ohio execution. A different drug
combination was used in the Oklahoma case.
Wood, 55, had been scheduled to be executed Wednesday in the August 1989
shooting deaths of his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father,
Eugene Dietz, at an automotive shop in Tucson.
(source: Associated Press)
CALIFORNIA:
A Lifetime on California's Death Row
"How has it gone on this long?" Justice Antonin Scalia asked a lawyer for the
State of Florida during oral arguments in March on a condemned inmate's appeal.
The legal issue in that case had to do with how states define intellectual
disability, but Justice Scalia was troubled that Freddie Lee Hall had been on
Florida's death row for more than 3 decades.
In that same session, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that the last 10 people
executed by the state had spent an average of 24.9 years on death row.
"Do you think that that is consistent with the purposes of the death penalty,"
Justice Kennedy asked the state's lawyer, "and is it consistent with sound
administration of the justice system?"
Last Wednesday, in an unrelated case, a federal judge in California answered
that question with a resounding no. The state's death-penalty system is "so
plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay," wrote United States District
Judge Cormac Carney, that it violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and
unusual punishment.
In a remarkable ruling overturning the death sentence of Ernest Dewayne Jones,
who was sentenced in 1995 for the murder of his girlfriend's mother, Judge
Carney, an appointee of President George W. Bush, pointed out that of the more
than 900 people California has sentenced to death since 1978, 13 have been
executed. More than 40 % of the rest have been on death row for at least 19
years, and the backlog is growing.
The judge found that the delays are primarily due not to inmates' repeated
appeals, as is often assumed, but to the state's own foot-dragging and
underfunding of its indigent defense system.
California law provides for an automatic appeal of all death sentences, but it
takes 3 to 5 years before death-row inmates - all of whom are indigent - are
even assigned a lawyer. It takes 4 more years for the lawyer to go through the
voluminous trial record and file an appeal, and 2 to 3 years for the State
Supreme Court, which hears only 20 to 25 death-penalty appeals per year, to
schedule oral arguments.
Tack on another 3 to 5 years for state habeas corpus petitions, which bring
claims that often don't arise in the 1st appeal, such as ineffective assistance
of counsel. Add 10 for federal habeas corpus claims, and the result is what
Judge Carney charitably called a "completely dysfunctional" system.
Executions that are so long delayed and so rarely carried out, the judge wrote,
are "antithetical to any civilized notion of just punishment." They neither
deter future crimes nor serve society's interest in retribution for past ones -
2 common rationales given by supporters of capital punishment. Whether an
inmate is executed depends not on the nature of the crime or even the date of
his sentence, the judge said, but on "arbitrary factors" like the length of his
various appeals.
California is, of course, far from alone on the issue. Nationwide, the average
time from sentencing to execution is almost 16 years, and executions have hit
all-time lows as states fight litigation on multiple fronts. (Because of
continuing litigation over the state's lethal-injection protocol, California
has not executed anyone since 2006.)
States including Florida, Alabama and North Carolina have responded to similar
delays by moving to streamline death-row appeals. But speed is not the point if
it comes at the expense of accuracy. As Judge Carney said, "death is a
punishment different in kind from any other," and so requires more careful
scrutiny than any other.
That extra scrutiny is "vitally important," the judge pointed out: Half of
California???s death sentences that were reviewed by a federal court were
eventually vacated.
(source: Editorial, New York Times)
***************
Cruel and Unusual
Anxiety shook me when my 5th-grade teacher assigned us a paragraph on what we
thought about Stanley "Tookie" William's death sentence. Williams, a former
leader of the Crips charged with several accounts of 1st-degree murder, was put
on death row in California. In prison, he began writing anti-gang and
anti-violence books for children, some of which we had read in class.
Williams became an icon for many activists and leaders, with more than 2,000
attending his funeral. Before his execution, he left behind a recorded message
for his mourners. "The war within me is over. I battled my demons and was
triumphant," Williams said in his recording. "Teach them how to avoid our
destructive footsteps. Teach them to strive for higher education. Teach them to
promote peace and teach them to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods that you,
others and I helped destroy."
As a fledgling 10-year-old citizen, I had vague intuitions about the dilemma of
justice presented before me. Part of me questioned whether it was morally just
to penalize murder by executing murder under the thin veil of a bureaucratic
procedure. As a young adult, I am more cognizant of the rhetorical moves
supporters and opposers of this legal process use, which I explore here.
To begin with, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney ruled the death penalty
unconstitutional in California, citing that it violated the constitutional
prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Carney also contended that
the system also leaves inmates with undecided fates for decades. In the past 7
years, 6 states have abolished the death penalty, but in 2012, California
voters rejected such a ban.
One argument weighing in favor of the death penalty is grounded in utility -
how useful or beneficial to the majority something is. For example, murder is
reasonably considered a crime against society, and it would seem to benefit
society as a whole to eliminate anyone who poses a threat to the so-called
greater good. But a stronger utilitarian argument exists for abolishing the
death penalty. Fiscally speaking, putting a prisoner on death row is expensive
and wastes taxpayer money that could go to other social service programs.
California has spent $4 billion on death row inmates since 1978, which boils
down to roughly $177 million per inmate a year. The money accrues from factors
such as costlier lawyers, as well as incarceration expenses such as individual
cells and multiple guards present for visitors. The death row population in
California is currently at 748 inmates, but only 13 inmates have been executed
since 1978.
In the same vein of utility, proponents also suggest the death penalty also
deters murder. But other factors, such as demography, policing, culture and the
job market, could also affect the murder rate. In fact, an epistemological
study conducted by America's National Research Council found in 2012 that
research to date is not informative about whether or not the death penalty
bears any weight on fluctuating homicide rates. Life imprisonment without
parole, however, is a considerable alternative to the death penalty that can
substantially yield social utility (not to say, though, that life imprisonment
isn't severe). Craig Datesman, for example, an inmate at Gratersford Prison in
Pennsylvania, has coordinated a program called Lifers to help younger people
who have trouble with the law go "straight." Life imprisonment may also offer
grieving families of victims financial and emotional restitution. One concept
involves having lifers work in prisons for better wages in order to offer the
victim's family financial restitution, one figure set at $150,000.
Additionally,Murder Victim Families For Reconciliation, for example, opposes
the death penalty and emphasizes justice as a transformation from violence to
healing.
In contrast, those who advocate the death penalty also appeal to the more
individualistic argument of human dignity. They lever the "life for a life"
argument, suggesting that the death penalty approaches the defendant with human
dignity, treating him or her as a free moral agent. Institutionalizing a
correction legal process like the death penalty enables the government to
protect the "negative rights" (freedom from interference) of citizens, like the
right not to be killed.
But what about mistakes? Legally, the death penalty may not be so clean or
clear-cut after all, extinguishing the rights of those who are innocent. A
study conducted by statisticians and legal experts reveal that almost 4 percent
of U.S. capital punishment sentences are wrongfully convicted and that about
120 of 3,000 inmates are not guilty. Medically speaking, botched lethal
injections can be easily interpreted as experimental and cruel. Clayton
Lockett, for example, was given a new 3-drug method that left him in pain for
several minutes, dying 43 minutes after his injection. One alternative to the
lethal injection death is a firing squad death, which is only legal in Utah. It
can bring about heart death in about 1 minute. But the mental image of a firing
squad is gruesome, uncovering an uncomfortable moral question about
state-sanctioned death.
To this day, I don't recall what I wrote for my assignment. But the fear and
shock remain. As a child yet to be corrupted by cynicism, I wondered what
redemption meant and if the most extreme measures of institutionalized
retributive measures could ever make up for the loss in human life, which may
or may not have been carried out heinously. I was aghast by how the line
between life and death depended so much upon social mores. But I was also
aghast by how it depended so much on the whims of 1 authoritative individual -
in this case, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who denied Williams clemency.
The only difference is that now, as a young adult, I bluntly oppose the death
penalty as a means of administering justice.
(soruce: Stacey Nguyen, The Daily Californian)
WASHINGTON:
New Jersey Police Arrest Man Suspected Of Killing 2 Gay Men In Seattle----If
convicted, he could face the death penalty
New Jersey authorities have arrested a fugitive suspected of killing 2 men in
Seattle last month. Police apprehended Ali Muhammad Brown, 30, in West Orange,
N.J., July 18 - weeks after he was identified as a suspect in the double
homicide case.
Brown, who is held at a correctional facility, was charged with 2 counts of
aggravated 1st-degree murder and could face the death penalty if convicted,
KIRO 7 reports. He was also wanted for a robbery and attempted carjacking in
New Jersey.
Ahmed Said, 27, and Dwone Anderson-Young, 23, were found shot to death June 1
in Seattle???s Leschi neighborhood. Prosecutors accuse Brown of targeting the
men on mobile dating apps for gay men before meeting them outside R Place, a
gay club, that night.
In court documents released July 2, prosecutors say Brown allegedly planned the
attack and that Seattle police were investigating the case as a possible
anti-gay hate crime, reports KIRO 7.
According to the documents, Said communicated with Brown on a gay dating app
"like Grindr or Jack'd" while at the nightclub and told friends there he was
meeting someone that night. Shortly after the bar closed, the victims met Brown
and then drove to Anderson-Young's house in Leschi, at which point police say
Brown shot them multiple times and stole Said's car. Evidence collected by
homicide investigators suggests the victims were "essentially executed,"
according to the report.
Additionally, prosecutors said that homicide investigators linked Brown to the
murders after finding fingerprints and 9mm casings in Said's car, which was
found abandoned in South Seattle.
Authorities say they will continue to investigate. In a statement, Mayor Ed
Murray said, "All of our communities are safer today as a result. I hope his
arrest brings some initial measure of closure to the families of Dwone
Anderson-Young and Ahmed Said."
(source: buzzfeed.com)
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