Nov. 6
CALIFORNIA:
Hit man in 'Yom Kippur murders' dies of natural causes on death row
A San Quentin State Prison inmate convicted in the murder-for-hire deaths of a
Brentwood couple in 1985, dubbed the "Yom Kippur murders," died Wednesday of
natural causes, authorities said.
Steven Homick, 74, died at a nearby hospital, according to California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The former Los Angeles police officer was sentenced to death in 1995 for the
murders of Gerald and Vera Woodman. They were gunned down Sept. 25, 1985, while
parking their Mercedes after a dinner marking the end of Yom Kippur.
Authorities said Gerald Woodman opened the door to his car and was fatally shot
by Homick, armed with a .38-caliber pistol. Woodman, 67, was struck twice, and
Vera Woodman, 63, 3 times.
Authorities determined that Homick and his brother Robert Homick, a Westside
attorney, were hired by the couple's sons as hit men.
They were both convicted of 1st-degree murder, but Robert Homick was sentenced
to life in prison.
1 of the couple's sons, Neil Woodman, was sentenced to 25 years to life for his
role. A 2nd son, Stewart, was convicted of 1st-degree murder and given a life
sentence. He escaped a possible death sentence by agreeing to testify against
Neil.
The case also gained notoriety as the "ninja murders" because a witness
confused a black-hooded sweatshirt worn by one of the assailants with the garb
worn by ninjas.
At the time of the slayings, the Woodman family was in a bitter business
dispute.
Prosecutors said the Woodman brothers expected to collect $506,000 from their
mother's insurance policy. They said Neil and Stewart Woodman needed the money
to prop up a failing Chatsworth-based plastic company their father had founded.
Since 1978 when California reinstated the death penalty, 65 condemned inmates
have died from natural causes, 23 committed suicide and 13 have been executed.
1 was executed in Missouri and 6 have died from other causes, the state
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said.
There are 749 people on California's death row.
(source: Los Angeles Times)
USA:
Court will cast wide net for bombing trial's jury
In a matter of weeks, the federal court in Boston will be looking for people
over 18 to perform a civil service for about 5 months, with compensation of
about $40 a day. If you are 70 or older you can refuse, and active duty
soldiers, police officers, or firefighters won???t be asked to serve, either.
But if you can speak and read English, you could be enlisted, and unless you
have an extreme hardship - such as a young child to care for, or a terminally
ill relative - you have few chances of being excused.
Those who make the final list will become part of one of the most significant
trials the country has seen in recent times, one that will become part of the
history of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath.
Jury selection in the case of accused Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is
slated to begin in January, and US District Court Judge George A. O'Toole Jr.
plans to begin by calling at least 1,000 people to the court for what could be
a long, complex process to impanel a jury of 12, with 6 alternates.
Most people from Eastern Massachusetts could qualify, as long as they assure
lawyers and the judge that they are capable of handing out the death penalty,
if the punishment is warranted.
"The unique part about this case is you need what's called a death-qualified
jury," said Robert Sheketoff, a prominent Boston lawyer. "You have to find
people who are willing to impose the death penalty."
Tsarnaev and admitted serial killer Gary Lee Sampson, who goes before a jury in
February, both face the possibility of the death penalty. That is a rarity in
Massachusetts, where there is no death penalty for state crimes.
A Boston Globe poll in July found that 62 % of respondents supported US
Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to seek the death penalty for Tsarnaev,
while 29 % opposed.
O'Toole in September rejected a defense request to relocate the trial, ensuring
that a local jury will be seated at the courthouse in South Boston, only a few
miles from the Boston Marathon finish line. That raises the possibility that
potential jurors could also have a personal connection to the bombings because
they were at the Marathon that day, know someone who was, or know someone
involved in the extraordinary manhunt afterward.
"I bet you everybody you know is only three degrees of separation from someone
who was there," said David Hoose, a Northhampton-based attorney who specializes
in death penalty cases. "If people are honest, and I think most people are, I
think it's going to be very difficult to get most people to say, 'I'm not going
to be influenced by the emotional reaction of what was going on.'"
With the trial slated to begin Jan. 5, legal analysts outlined for the Globe
the possibilities of being picked and what the lawyers will be looking for in
jurors.
"No one wants a juror improperly seated," said Sheketoff, who defended Sampson
in a death penalty trial a decade ago.
Sampson's 1st jury sentenced him to death, but the decision was overturned in
2011 after lawyers learned that one of the jurors had lied during the
impanelment process.
O'Toole said at a recent court hearing that he will summon at least 1,000
potential jurors to court during the 1st full week in January for Tsarnaev's
trial, and he will call more if needed. The summons will be sent at least 6
weeks in advance, meaning they could arrive within weeks.
James McAlear, the jury administrator for the federal court system in
Massachusetts, said the recipients of a summons would include anyone over 18
who has lived in the same judicial district for at least a year. Jurors will
come from the Eastern Division of the District of Massachusetts, meaning they
would live in the counties of Essex, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Bristol,
Plymouth, and Barnstable, as well as Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket,
Chappaquiddick Island, and the Elizabeth Islands.
The names of potential jurors will be picked at random from a list of potential
jurors provided by the Massachusetts jury commissioner. That list will include
the names of 35,000 qualified jurors from the Eastern Division, and each county
within the division shall be represented in proportion to the number of
potential jurors from that county.
Potential jurors could ask to be dismissed if they are over 70 or have served
at least 5 days of state jury service or any federal jury service within the
last three years. Anyone who has been convicted in a state or federal court of
a crime punishable by a year or more in prison could also be dismissed.
And anyone with a demonstrable hardship, such as a young child to care for or a
sick relative, could ask to be excluded. But the court is reluctant to grant a
hardship for economic reasons, so it encourages employers to continue to pay
jurors while they are out of work.
Jurors would be paid $40 a day for their service, but federal court officials
tell employers, "Paying the difference between your employee's salary and the
juror attendance fee is strongly encouraged, if possible."
Anyone who refuses to comply with a court summons can be fined $1,000 and/or
imprisoned for up to three days and/or required to perform community service.
Hoose said if he were on the Tsarnaev case, he would look to dismiss any
potential jurors who seemed too willing to serve, however.
"I just think they'd have an ulterior motive," he said.
While the judge will use a lengthy questionnaire to screen jurors' backgrounds,
he and lawyers on each side will then interview each potential juror who has
not been excluded, a process that could take weeks.
"I think you're going to find that the bulk of the questions focus on the death
penalty," said Hoose, who represented Kristen Gilbert, the Veterans Affairs
nurse who was convicted in 2001 of killing her patients in the 1st federal
capital punishment case in Massachusetts in modern history.
A jury spared her of the death penalty, however, and Hoose said Tsarnaev's
lawyers will want to impanel similar jurors - those who say they can choose the
death penalty if warranted, but who can also agree on a sentence of life in
prison.
"All you need is one juror who will hold [out] for life," Hoose said. "You're
looking for jurors who will have the courage to vote for life in an unpopular
case."
(source: Boston Globe)
US MILITARY:
Alleged USS Cole mastermind seeks to avoid death penalty
The defense team for a Saudi man accused of organizing the attack on the USS
Cole asked a Guantanamo Bay judge Wednesday to stop him from facing capital
punishment.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri faces the death penalty if convicted of charges
stemming the Cole suicide bombing, and from the attack on the MV Limburg French
oil tanker.
17 sailors died on the Cole in 2000 in Yemen; a Bulgarian sailor was killed in
the 2002 Limburg attack.
Al-Nashiri's lawyers have provisionally had the Limburg charges withdrawn,
though the United States is appealing that ruling.
In their motion to withdraw the death penalty in the Cole charges, the lawyers
said "there is no military necessity served by executing the accused," adding
that he is "far from the original theater of war in which he was captured" in
2002.
"There's no deterrence in executing Mr Nashiri," said military defense lawyer
Major Allison Danels, adding that such an action would only inflame tensions
and would likely play into the hands of Islamic State jihadists.
"It would do nothing but enrage the terrorists and give them reasons for their
brutalities," she said at a preliminary hearing at the US naval prison camp in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Al-Nashiri was initially held for several years in secret CIA prisons.
"Even if Mr Nashiri is acquitted, he can be detained indefinitely by the US,
he's no danger for public security," Danels added.
Military judge Colonel Vance Spath will decide on the motion later, but he
acknowledged how long the case is taking to play out.
"This case needs to move forward, because it's (been) here for a long time," he
said, noting that the US government was still appealing the dismissal of the
Limburg charges.
Spath dismissed those charges this summer because he said the US military had
not shown it had jurisdiction pertaining to the attack on a French vessel.
The judge declined to give a date for al-Nashiri's trial, though it was
initially supposed to open in February 2015.
(source: Agence France-Presse)
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