June 22
TEXAS:
Death penalty view
Texas has executed its 9th victim this year.
The victim was injected with a single dose of pentobarbital shortly after 6pm
and pronounced dead at 6.49pm.
The drug's provenance is not disclosed by the state.
This follows the execution of another inmate after 32 years on death row whose
guilt was based on purely circumstantial evidence and after a witness came
forward who said she knew who the actual killers were.
Since 1976 Texas has executed 521 men and 6 women, including victims who were
mentally incompetent juvenile when the crime was committed and foreign
nationals refused consular access and help.
Meanwhile two death row inmates have been exonerated, one when the charges were
dismissed after 10 years on death row and another after 18 years on death row.
It is a statistical certainty that others of the 521 executed men were
innocent.
The death penalty is an abomination that has no place in a democratic world.
Dieter Moeckel
Wonbah
(source: Letter to the Editor, NewsMail)
NORTH CAROLINA:
Death-penalty cases that end in dismissal or acquittal costly, too, study says
As many states across the country debate whether capital punishment should be
an option for heinous crimes or scrapped altogether over cost concerns, the
Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina has just released a study
that adds a new layer to the discussion.
While many death penalty studies focus on the wrongfully convicted and the cost
of those prosecutions and defense, the nonprofit law firm in Durham did a
quantitative and qualitative review of 56 capital cases in North Carolina that
ended in dismissal or acquittal.
It's a group, death penalty researchers acknowledge, that has largely been
ignored. "We wanted to go behind the numbers to look at the stories of the
actual individuals caught up in that system," Ken Rose, senior staff attorney
at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.
The findings, Rose and others say, are illuminating and show trends that likely
play out in other states.
They include:
-- The state spent nearly $2.4 million - in defense costs alone - to pursue
the failed cases capitally. Had the defendants been charged non-capitally, the
study creators contend, much of that money could have been saved.
-- The defendants spent an average of 2 years in jail before a jury acquitted
them or prosecutors dropped the charges.
-- Serious errors or misconduct played a role in many of the cases. The study
found incidences of witness coercion, hidden evidence, bungled investigations,
the use of improper forensic evidence and using jailhouse snitches as
witnesses.
-- By the time the 56 defendants were cleared of wrongdoing, many had lost
homes, jobs, businesses, savings accounts, and seen personal relationships
destroyed. Though compensation is available for the wrongfully convicted,
defendants whose cases result in acquittal or dismissal are not eligible for
the same recompense.
Rose, a critic of the death penalty, said he was surprised to find through the
study of the 56 cases between 1989 and 2015 that prosecutors had pursued
capital punishment in cases with "such weak evidence."
Advocates for the death penalty often say the prospect of state-supported
execution should be held up as a deterrent and used in the most heinous cases.
"What this study showed is prosecutors are charging the maximum penalty in
order to have some negotiating strength in the weakest cases," Rose said.
That can lead to coerced confessions that are later to be proven to be false by
murder defendants worried about wrongful convictions, he said. It can also set
up an arbitrariness that makes it impossible to administer capital punishment
fairly.
"The complete story is a huge number of people suffer a very heavy price," Rose
said.
North Carolina has 148 inmates on death row. In September 2014, the state's
longest-serving death-row inmate was exonerated.
Henry McCollum and his brother, Leon Brown, who served 30 years in prison for a
1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old Robeson County girl, were declared
innocent by a judge and ordered released in September. The brothers, both
mentally disabled, had been coerced into false confessions that they quickly
recanted, according to court testimony. The case against them, which had been
weak from the start, fell apart when DNA evidence implicated another man.
McCollum was on death row. Brown initially was sentenced to death, but he
eventually got life without parole until his exoneration last year.
Though it took 9 months, Gov. Pat McCrory granted pardons of innocence for
Brown and McCollum, making each of the men eligible to receive $750,000 in
compensation from the state.
CASE STUDY
The case of Leslie Lincoln in Pitt County was one the Center for Death Penalty
Litigation used to illustrate the difficulties of being accused of a capital
crime that ends with a jury acquittal.
Lincoln was 46 in 2002, when she thought she was starting to pull her life
together. She had suffered a painful divorce, but just landed a job as an
administrator at an assisted living center earning $42,000 a year.
She lived close to her mother and checked in on her frequently. Then on St.
Patrick's Day in 2002, Arlene Lincoln, Leslie's mother, was found dead at home,
the doors unlocked, stabbed more than 30 times.
Leslie Lincoln, reached on Saturday, said she was the last to see her mother,
but she never thought in those early days she would be sent off to jail accused
of her murder.
She still wonders what happened and breaks down in tears as she runs through
scenarios in her mind about who might have fatally stabbed her mother.
"She was the type of person everyone loved," Leslie Lincoln said. "Always
working in the garden, very involved in the church."
But that's what happened in a case where there was botched DNA evidence and
testimony from several jailhouse snitches.
From September 2002 until March 2007, when a jury acquitted her, Leslie Lincoln
was either in jail or under house arrest.
Not only had she lost her mother, a woman she calls "her best bud," she lost
the horses she had in 2002, her house, her boyfriend and her truck. Since her
acquittal, she has lived in a truck, gone between homelessness and living in
low-cost housing she can barely afford.
She suffers from the stress of her experience and now has back troubles, too,
that make it difficult to work.
"There are still people that look at me like 'I don't know how you got away
with it,'" Lincoln said. "It really makes you want to move somewhere where
nobody knows you."
Had prosecutors not sought capital punishment, Rose said, and instead pursued
murder accusations without the maximum penalty, Lincoln might have been able to
get bail sooner and try to keep her life together. She tried to sue the SBI,
Pitt County district attorney and
Lincoln's is just 1 story of many that death-penalty critics say could add a
deeper level to the debate about the future of capital punishment.
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a
national organization that provides analysis and information on capital
punishment, said on Friday that he would like to see more studies that look at
capital prosecutions that don???t end in convictions.
North Carolina has no database that tracks such cases and many other states are
in a similar situation.
"One of the most important things," Dunham said about the study, "is it shines
a spotlight at all the other stages at which problems occur. There are problems
at all stages of the proceedings. It's wishful thinking to to think that if
somebody doesn't get sentenced to death the process is error-free."
(source: News & Observer)
SOUTH CAROLINA:
Charleston suspect up against South Carolina's record on death penalty
Charleston's chief prosecutor has yet to decide whether to seek the death
penalty for the man accused of murdering 9 African-Americans at a landmark
church, but South Carolina is a state with a history of embracing capital
punishment.
South Carolina has an execution rate of 8.3 per every 10,000 people, the
seventh highest in the country, according to Death Penalty Resource and Defense
Center, a group that opposes capital punishment.
Since 1979, 180 people have been sent to death row, the center says, and a
total of 43 prisoners have been put to death in the four decades since capital
punishment was reinstated in the Palmetto State.
"This is a state that has the death penalty and it imposes it," said Miller
Shealy, a former South Carolina Assistant State Attorney General.
Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white man, is accused of gunning down the nine
victims during a Bible study class at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church. It was a premeditated shooting, prosecutors say, and it
shocked the nation in its apparent callousness and the racist motivations that
may lie behind the attack.
The intense publicity could galvanize public support for executing the suspect
if he is convicted, just as it did in the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man
convicted in the Boston Marathon bombing, some officials say.
"This is our Boston bomber," said Shealy, who now works as a professor at
Charleston School of Law.
Prosecutor Scarlett Wilson will likely spend months building her case,
considering evidence and psychological evaluations of the suspect, before
announcing her intentions.
After Roof's arrest, she said she would not comment on the progress or
direction of her investigation. Ashley Pennington, a public defender
representing Roof, did not return calls seeking comment.
Despite the state's record, the Charleston case stands out in at least one
respect that could work against a decision to seek the death penalty against
Roof.
In a gesture that reflected deep religious conviction, the families voiced
tearful forgiveness for the suspect during his first court appearance on
Friday.
While none of them have said publicly whether they want the prosecutor to seek
death, their merciful stances suggest that they may well oppose execution,
experts in capital punishment say. Those wishes could prove difficult for
Wilson to ignore.
"All prosecutors say that they are very influenced by the family," said Eric M.
Freedman, a professor of constitutional rights at the Maurice A. Deane School
of Law at Hofstra University. "It's a factor, but it's not the biggest factor."
There are many precedents when families of murder victims have persuaded
prosecutors to seek life sentences, rather than the death penalty, said Robert
Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a
Washington-based non-profit.
"Ultimately, the choice is for the prosecutor to make," said Dunham, adding
that Charleston may present a special case.
"When you have victims whose lives where about peace and inclusiveness and
whose families have called for forgiveness and mercy, seeking the death penalty
against their will could amount to further victimization by the system."
Interviews on the streets of Charleston in the days after the shooting suggest
residents are divided in their feelings over the issue.
Bob Morrison, a white man who said his Catholic faith leads him to oppose the
death penalty in general, said he feels differently in Roof's case.
"When you do something as hideous as this, I don't think the taxpayer should be
supporting him for his whole life in jail," Morrison said from the historic
Charleston City market.
But Michael Taylor, a 56-year-old postal worker who is black, said he did not
want to see Roof executed. "It would just be more death," he said.
Around the country a majority of U.S. adults still favors the death penalty but
support has slipped to 55 % in 2013 from 62 % in 2011, a Pew Research Center
survey found.
Since 1912, South Carolina has executed 282 people, 74 of them white and 208
black, according to the state Department of Corrections. Prior to that,
counties carried out executions by hanging.
Now, South Carolina uses lethal injection as its primary method, but it is 1 of
8 states that still turns to the electric chair if the drugs used in executions
are unavailable, according to DPIC.
In light of drug shortages affecting executions across the country, a bill is
pending in the South Carolina Legislature to add firing squads to the state's
roster of execution methods.
Currently, there are 44 inmates on South Carolina's death row, housed at the
Broad River Correctional Institution in the capital city of Columbia.
The size of South Carolina's death row ranks 16th out of the 31 states with
capital punishment, plus the U.S. military and the federal government,
according the to DPIC. California leads with 746, and Wyoming and New Hampshire
have 1 each.
In terms of executions that are carried out, South Carolina and North Carolina
are tied for ninth place, with 43 executions, DPIC data shows. Texas is the
leader by far with 526, followed by Oklahoma with 112.
South Carolina has also fallen in line with the national trend of turning to
the death penalty less frequently in recent years. The last time the state
executed an inmate was in 2011.
(source: Reuters)
FLORIDA:
Time to put an end to death penalty
"To die, to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep
of death what dreams may come..." - Shakespeare: "Hamlet."
What do we do when a little Chihuahua is old and suffering? We bring him to the
vet and put him to sleep. We call it euthanasia, a humane act of compassion.
When a human being is convicted of murder, we bring him to the executioner to
him put to sleep. We call that an act of justice.
What's the difference? Same method, same result: relief to the afflicted.
Lester Bower Jr., 67, was put to death by authorities in Texas earlier this
month. Was it an act of compassion or an act of justice? Bower was convicted of
a 1983 quadruple murder, of which he forever claimed innocence. While questions
remain about his guilt, we will assume Bower committed the dastardly crime.
But, have we punished him, or have we provided him relief from suffering?
Bower spent more than 30 years on death row. Never mind that the cost of his
trial, incarceration and perpetual appeal process cost the taxpayer upwards of
$4 million. The truth is that Bower served 2 sentences for his crime: Life,
plus death. 30 years is significantly more than the average time spent by
prisoners condemned to life behind bars.
Most studies have concluded that the cost of a death penalty conviction is
three times the cost to taxpayers than life without parole (LWOP) sentences.
Inmates who are serving LWOP are usually afforded one automatic appeal at
taxpayer cost, whereas the appeals are infinite in most death penalty cases.
That means LWOP inmates are basically condemned to die naturally in prison
where every day is a hell on earth.
Consider these points:
--LWOP sentences prevent wrongful executions. Without capital punishment, no
innocent person can ever be executed.
--LWOP is far more horrible than being put to sleep.
--LWOP sentences bring instant closure for all parties concerned, rather than
20 or 30 years of anticipation.
--Lester Bower was 35 years old when he committed the crime of murder. Did we
execute the same person at age 67? If an 18 year-old boy shoots a store owner,
are we executing the same person when he's 50?
--If premeditated killing is inherently wrong, are states committing an
inherently wrong act?
--10 % of death row inmates have ordered legal teams to suspend appeals,
preferring death to prison.
--Studies have proven that capital punishment is no deterrent to committing
murder.
Since 1973, 154 condemned inmates have been released from death row based on
evidence of their innocence. 3 from Ohio were released last year. They had
spent 39 years on death row. Florida leads the nation with death row
exonerations with 15.
This year, Nebraska became the 18th state to abolish the death penalty. 7
states have abolished capital punishment since 2007. Of the 1,409 executions in
America since 1976, Florida ranks 3rd, with 64. Texas leads with 379. One can
only imagine how many might have been innocent. "One" would be too many.
Brevard County's William Dillon could easily have been sentenced to death in
1982, but served 27 years instead as an innocent man in prison before DNA
proved his innocence. Had he been executed, he would forever be branded:
murderer.
The justice system is designed not only to convict the guilty, but to protect
the innocent. Should not the latter be most important? Meanwhile, the United
States remains the only nation in the free world that executes.
So let's stop euthanizing murderers and deal out real punishment. Meanwhile, we
must concentrate on ensuring the innocent remain innocent.
The facts are indisputable. What are we waiting for?
(source: Marshall Frank is an author and retired Miami police detective who
lives in Melbourne----Florida Today)
KANSAS:
Death penalty in white supremacist case a tricky proposition
A Kansas prosecutor is facing some unusual challenges in the capital murder
case against a Missouri man accused of killing 3 people at 2 Jewish sites in
suburban Kansas City.
Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe has rejected 2 offers from Frazier
Glenn Miller Jr.'s attorneys to have Miller plead guilty in exchange for taking
the death penalty off the table. Howe says the most severe crimes deserve the
stiffest punishment allowed by law.
Critics say Howe's pursuit of the death penalty is politically motivated,
especially since the 74-year-old defendant is dying of chronic emphysema and
probably won't live long enough to be executed. Howe would not comment on the
ongoing case.
Miller is charged with killing William Lewis Corporon, Reat Griffin Underwood
and Terri LaManno in April 2014.
(source: Associated Press)
USA:
Latino Evangelicals Say No to the Death Penalty
The National Latino Evangelical Coalition announced in March that it would no
longer support the death penalty, making it the 1st U.S. evangelical
association to take this stand. Coalition president Gabriel Salguero announced
the change at a press conference in Orlando, Fla., and urged NaLEC's 3,000
member congregations to work toward ending capital punishment nationwide.
"As Christ-followers, we are called to work toward justice for all. And as
Latinos, we know too well that justice is not always even-handed," said
Salguero.
This groundbreaking move by Latino evangelicals puts them at odds with the
pro-death penalty stance of the National Association of Evangelicals, although
"sources within the NAE say that leadership is considering a change in the
months ahead," according to Religion News Service.
NaLEC did not come to this new position lightly. It came after 2 years of
prayer and reflection accompanied by intensive dialogue between NaLEC's
leadership and Equal Justice USA and the Constitution Project, 2 leading
anti-death penalty organizations. In addition, coalition members met with a
number of wrongly convicted former prisoners such as Fernando Bermudez, who
spent 18 years in prison in New York for a murder he did not commit.
According to Salguero, selecting Florida for the announcement was intentional.
Florida was the 1st state to reintroduce capital punishment after the Supreme
Court struck down the 1972 moratorium. Since executions were resumed, 25 people
on Florida's death row have been exonerated. This record of mistaken
convictions is the highest of any state. It is particularly disturbing that
Florida has on its books the so-called Timely Justice Act that mandates a swift
execution process. With 394 people currently on Florida's death row and the
prevalence of mishandled cases and inadequate defense, especially for
minorities, this law exacerbates existing problems in a system plagued by
errors.
(source: Sojourners Magazine)
*********************
Stronger penalties needed for using guns
A cop dead and it will happen again and again, whether it's an officer or an
innocent civilian, because society puts up with it. The man who shot Officer
Sonny Kim committed armed robbery a few years earlier and only got 90 days'
lockup and 1 year probation. Really.
Our criminal system doesn't take crime committed with a gun very seriously. Any
crime committed with the use of a gun should be automatic life in prison, if
not the death penalty. You keep letting people get away with it, they'll keep
doing it
Tom Deitsch, Bridgetown
(source: Letter to the Editor, cincinnati.com)
*****************
The Destruction of Defendants' Rights
The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (A.E.D.P.A.) is
surely one of the worst statutes ever passed by Congress and signed into law by
a President. The heart of the law is a provision saying that, even when a state
court misapplies the Constitution, a defendant cannot necessarily have his day
in federal court. Instead, he must prove that the state court???s decision was
"contrary to" what the Supreme Court has determined is "clearly established
federal law," or that the decision was "an unreasonable application of" it.
This law gutted the federal writ of habeas corpus, which a federal court can
use to order the release of someone wrongly imprisoned. It is often called the
Great Writ because of its extraordinary power to protect the liberty of
individuals. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court expanded the law of habeas corpus
as a protection against the unfair treatment of defendants at every stage of
the criminal process, from arrest and interrogation through trial and
sentencing, especially in cases leading to death sentences. This expansion was
controversial and, under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the Court later
restricted the availability of the writ. But the protection that the writ gave,
even when it was limited, was indispensable. A dramatically high percentage of
individuals sentenced to death had their sentences reversed owing to errors by
trial courts.
A landmark Columbia Law School study of virtually every state and federal
death-penalty appeal from 1973 to 1995 reported that "courts found serious,
reversible error in nearly 7 of every 10 of the thousands of capital sentences
that were fully reviewed during the period." There were so many mistakes, the
study found, that after "state courts threw out 47% of death sentences due to
serious flaws, a later federal review found 'serious error'- error undermining
the reliability of the outcome - in 40% of the remaining sentences." Without
federal habeas corpus, those serious errors would have gone unchecked. Instead
of later being found not to deserve the death penalty, as happened in 73 % of
the cases, or instead of being found innocent, as happened in 9 % of the cases,
these defendants likely would have been put to death.
When A.E.D.P.A. became law, it fell like an "atomic bomb" on the federal
judiciary and the "structure of habeas corpus law," according to "Federal
Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure," the leading treatise by Randy Hertz and
James S. Liebman. Of the 70 or so cases in which the Justices have interpreted
the statute, there are some in which a defendant seeking a new trial through a
writ of habeas corpus has prevailed, but they are in the minority. The Court's
A.E.D.P.A. jurisprudence is basically made up of decisions in which the
Justices have increasingly narrowed the chances of review under the statute.
As a result of A.E.D.P.A., and the Court's interpretation of it, Liebman and a
colleague estimate, the reversal rate of state courts in death penalty cases
has been reduced by about 40 %. There is no reason to believe that state courts
have improved in the past 2 decades, which would have been a factor in the
decline. That 40 % decline translates into a failure to catch many serious
errors in cases where individuals did not deserve the death penalty - and some
serious errors in cases where individuals were, very likely, innocent.
More than 1/3 of the Supreme Court's A.E.D.P.A. cases have come from the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers the Western states, Alaska, Hawaii,
Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands). The Supreme Court's decisions in these
cases are regularly reprimands, which have sometimes appeared to be directed at
1 judge, Stephen Reinhardt, a prominent liberal who has been on the Ninth
Circuit for 35 years. Before this Supreme Court term, Reinhardt, who is 1 of 44
judges on the court, wrote the majority opinion in 5 of the 25 Ninth Circuit
cases the Court reviewed and took part in 10.
Last week, the Supreme Court overturned another Ninth Circuit decision, again
written by Reinhardt, calling for the retrial or release of a California inmate
on death row. 26 years ago, a California state court convicted Hector Ayala of
murdering 3 men during the armed robbery of an auto-repair shop. The court
sentenced him to death. The prosecution had struck each of the 7 black or
Hispanic people available in the pool of more than 200 prospective jurors,
apparently to keep members of those groups from serving in the trial of Ayala,
who is Hispanic. Ayala's counsel charged that the strikes amounted to racial
discrimination. The trial judge asked the prosecution to justify each strike in
a private hearing, without Ayala's counsel present. The judge accepted those
justifications without providing them to Ayala's counsel, which made it
impossible for the defense team to respond.
The California Supreme Court held that the trial court had acted in error, but
that the error had no effect on the outcome of the case. In the law's
vocabulary, the error was "harmless." A federal trial judge affirmed that view
and denied Ayala's petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The Ninth Circuit,
however, overruled that decision, holding that Ayala was entitled to have his
petition granted. It found that the state trial judge had seriously reduced
Ayala's ability to win his claim that racial discrimination in jury selection
influenced the outcome of his trial.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled as close observers of the court have come
to expect. With Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. writing the majority opinion for
the conservatives and Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a dissent for the
moderate liberals, the Supreme Court held that "the decision of the California
Supreme Court represented an entirely reasonable application of controlling
precedent."
Unusually, however, Judge Reinhardt had something to say about it. In an
article published in the current issue of the Michigan Law Review, Reinhardt
made clear that the disagreement in the Ayala case is not between one side
arguing for safeguarding a prisoner's constitutional rights and the other
insisting on respect for the state's criminal-justice process. Rather, it is
about a callous, well-developed body of Supreme Court law interpreting
A.E.D.P.A. and how much deference - submission, really - to that process the
Court's habeas jurisprudence requires.
While A.E.D.P.A. was "misconceived at its inception," Reinhardt writes, the
"deeply conservative" Supreme Court has "repeatedly interpreted it in the most
inflexible and unyielding manner possible" so that "constitutional rulings by
state courts" are "nearly unreviewable by the federal judiciary." The appeals
courts, including the Ninth Circuit, "dutifully follow the existing Supreme
Court law." The Court "often reverses us not for failing to apply the law it
has previously enunciated, but by creating new, previously undeclared, and
extreme rules that serve to limit the ability of federal courts to enforce the
rights embodied in the Constitution."
The new rule created in Davis v. Ayala is particularly unjust, as the Sotomayor
dissent explained. The adversary system is built on the premise that a court is
most likely to discover the truth when it hears from both sides - and "that
secret decisions based on only one side of the story will prove inaccurate more
often than those made after hearing from both sides," as Chief Justice John G.
Roberts, Jr. wrote in an opinion last year.
By keeping Ayala's counsel out of the hearing about the striking of black and
Hispanic jurors, the state trial judge prevented the counsel from making
compelling arguments about why some, or all, of those strikes were
discriminatory. Under those circumstances, it was impossible for a court
reviewing the case to be confident the error was harmless. Supreme Court
precedents, which the Ninth Circuit followed, required treating the error as
harmful - until the Court created the extreme rule in this case.
The Ayala case is one of the rare instances where the federal courts, including
the Supreme Court, had the opportunity to hold a state prosecutor to account
for using trumped-up reasons to justify racial discrimination in a jury
selection. This happens frequently in American criminal cases (as Gilad Edelman
explained earlier this month), and it is a national disgrace.
But the demise of habeas corpus is equally disgraceful. As Reinhardt writes in
his law-review article, the Great Writ "has been transformed over the past 2
decades from a vital guarantor of liberty into an instrument for ratifying the
power of state courts to disregard the protections of the Constitution."
(source: Lincoln Caplan, The New Yorker)
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