June 23
TEXAS:
Letters from Death Row: The Biology of Trauma----New studies show that trauma
biologically alters the brains of young boys in ways that affect their adult
behavior.
Of the 41 inmates who responded to an informal Observer survey, 22 of them (54
%) reported have violent or abusive childhoods. An additional 9 inmates (22 %)
described their childhoods as "hard," or said they had some sort of dominant
negative issue.
This is the 4th, and final, story in a series.
***
Juan Ramirez grew up in poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, in a neighborhood
infested with drug-and gang-related violence. By the age of 10 he'd started
smoking marijuana and using inhalants. Within a couple of years he'd moved on
to cocaine. By his middle teens he was drinking alcohol and smoking weed daily.
A game he and his friends used to play in the Valley, called WAWA, involved
spraying paint into a bag, sealing the lip around their mouths, and inhaling
the fumes to get high.
Ramirez is the middle of 5 children and, according to court documents, his
mother and father were alcoholics who disciplined their kids by whipping them
with belts, clothes hangers, shoes - even tree branches. The severity of those
beatings depended on the parents' moods. Consequently, Ramirez spent most of
his time playing outside in the street.
Inevitably, perhaps, he dropped out of school, became a drug addict and spent
time in Texas Youth Commission facilities for juvenile offenders. But it was a
single incident in 2003 that sealed his fate. One night in early January, 11
masked men burst into a small house in Hidalgo County to steal marijuana. By
the time they left, 6 members of a rival drug gang in the house were dead.
Ramirez was just 20 years old and the youngest of those the police said were
responsible. Although he wasn't identified as the gunman, under Texas' law of
parties, prosecutors successfully sought the death penalty.
For the uninitiated, the law of parties holds that if a person "solicits,
encourages, directs, aids, or attempts to aid the other person to commit the
offense," then he or she is criminally responsible for the conduct of the other
person. Of course the law can be applied inconsistently - and it often is.
This is Ramirez's 11th year on death row, housed at the notorious Polunsky Unit
in the rural East Texas town of Livingston. And his is one of numerous stories
of childhood abuse and violence that condemned inmates have told the Observer
as part of an informal yet wide-ranging survey of the men waiting for Texas to
exercise the most brutal manifestation of its power.
Last year, I sent a questionnaire to each of the 292 inmates on Texas' death
row. It was designed to elicit information often missed in narratives about the
death penalty: the effect that solitary confinement has on them; whether they
had found religion in prison; and what sort of childhoods they had. I wanted to
see if any patterns emerged.
41 inmates responded. Ramirez was among 22 inmates (54 %) who reported having
violent or abusive childhoods. An additional nine inmates (22 %) described
their childhoods as "hard," or said they had some sort of dominant negative
issue - whether it was growing up in poverty and/or in a crime-filled
neighborhood or that they endured the potentially debilitating experience of
having a parent walk out on them. This is the final story in a series based on
information obtained from those responses. 3 others, which explore what books
the inmates read, the effects of solitary confinement, and how religion factors
into their lives, ran previously on the Observer website.
This is not an attempt to retry those cases or to mitigate the harm these men
caused. But too often, defense attorneys lack the resources to launch in-depth
investigations into the backgrounds of those facing capital convictions. And to
quote the Death Penalty Information Center, "Almost all defendants in capital
cases cannot afford their own attorneys. In many cases, the appointed attorneys
are overworked, underpaid, or lacking the trial experience required for death
penalty cases." The center cites a Dallas Morning News examination of 461
capital cases that found nearly 1 in 4 inmates was represented at trial or on
appeal by court-appointed attorneys who had been disciplined for professional
misconduct. Additionally, an investigation by the Texas Defender Service found
death row inmates "faced a 1-in-3 chance of being executed without having the
case properly investigated by a competent attorney."
It's also important to acknowledge that the stories of inmates' childhoods that
have emerged from the Observer's survey are told in the inmates' own words.
When possible, they have been corroborated with court documents or
contextualized by news reports.
The responses in our correspondence offer new evidence that supports findings
from studies that show a correlation between childhood trauma and the potential
for future violent offending. As Texas leads the nation's death penalty states
in executions, the letters also act as important reminders that it's time we
ask what this says about the fractured minds of those we execute and rethink
the extent of our moral culpability.
At his trial, prosecutors said Ramirez was a member of a Rio Grande Valley gang
known as the Tri-City Bombers. But of the 11 alleged perpetrators of what
became known as the Edinburg Massacre, only 2 received a death sentence.
Another, Robert Garza, was executed in 2013 for an unrelated offense. That same
year, the alleged ringleader of the gang, Jeffrey Juarez, known as "Dragon,"
got 20 years for drug conspiracy and trafficking but escaped prosecution for
the killings in Edinburg due to lack of witnesses. Likewise, Reymundo Sauceda,
who prosecutors said approved the homicides, had the capital murder indictment
against him dismissed. The others in the gang either received prison terms or
remain fugitives from the law.
In a letter to the Observer, Ramirez wrote, "I come from the poorest region of
the nation, from a poor household. I pretty much had all the strikes against me
before I had a choice of my own."
In their paper "The Cycle of Violence," published by the American Psychological
Association, David Lisak and Sara Beszterczey, researchers at the University of
Massachusetts Boston, looked at the life histories of 43 men on death row. They
discovered that all of them reported having been neglected as children, that an
astonishing 94 % had been physically abused, 59 % sexually abused, and 83 % had
witnessed violence in adolescence.
Another study, "Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Criminality," published
in 2013 in The (Kaiser) Permanente Journal, surveyed 151 offenders and compared
their answers with a "normative sample" of the population. The researchers
found that the offender group reported nearly 4 times as many adverse events in
childhood as the control group.
"The presence of pathological family interactions in the histories of capital
murderers is consistent with an extensive body of research demonstrating the
role of disrupted attachment and disturbed family relationships in the etiology
of violence."
Many, if not most, condemned men were abandoned by their fathers, lived in
foster care, or were abused or neglected, according to Mark Cunningham and Mark
Vigen, who 13 years ago conducted a critical review of the literature on death
row inmates for the journal Behavioral Sciences & the Law. This observation,
they wrote, is supported by the findings of 7 of the clinical studies they
looked at. "The presence of pathological family interactions in the histories
of capital murderers is consistent with an extensive body of research
demonstrating the role of disrupted attachment and disturbed family
relationships in the etiology of violence," they wrote. In the United Kingdom
(which doesn't have the death penalty), Gwyneth Boswell, a professor at the
University of East Anglia, has spent 22 years conducting research into why
young people become violent, and she has identified that trauma experiences in
childhood are key features. 2 of her studies suggest a high prevalence of abuse
and traumatic loss in young offenders' lives. In one study, Boswell examined
the files of 200 young offenders and discovered 72 % had experienced some kind
of abuse - be it emotional, sexual, ritual, or a combination. And 57 % had
experienced the death or loss of contact of a parent. The total number of young
offenders who had experienced abuse and/or loss was 91 %. "Unresolved trauma,"
Boswell wrote, "is likely to manifest itself in some way at a later date. Many
children become depressed, disturbed, violent or all 3, girls tending to
internalize and boys to externalize their responses."
Reading through the stories contained in the questionnaires that the inmates
returned, you are confronted with a litany of childhood horror. There's Eugene
Broxton, sent to an orphanage before being cared for by an older sister whose
partner then beat him. Broxton was sentenced to death in 1992 after breaking
into a hotel room, tying up, robbing and shooting a couple that was staying
there. The woman died; her husband survived. In response to Broxton's defense
counsel's argument in mitigation concerning his home life, the state said, "his
sister, his half-sister, his half-brother got the same kind of discipline. And
they didn't turn out to be mass murderers." Willie Trottie - who was executed
in September - wrote that he had an abusive and violent mother who beat him and
his siblings with extension cords until they bled. "I was abandoned at a hotel
in Houston, placed in foster homes, was beaten there, and I ran away from all
of them only to be returned to [the homes] to be abused again," he wrote. "I
was about 7 or 8 years old."
Trottie was convicted of the 1993 shooting deaths of his ex-girlfriend, Barbara
Canada, and her brother Titus. Prosecutors said he had threatened to kill
Barbara if she didn't come back to him. Trottie admitted shooting the pair but
said it was in self-defense after Titus Canada shot him first. (Trottie was
arrested after driving himself to the hospital with gunshot wounds.)
In an appeal to the Supreme Court, Trottie's lawyers argued that attorneys
representing him at his original trial failed to produce sufficient testimony
about Trottie's abusive childhood. Maurie Levin, an attorney with vast
experience defending capital cases, and who represented Trottie in his
litigation concerning the lethal injection protocol, told me that all of her
clients survived miserable childhoods rampant with sexual, physical and
emotional abuse. "They were impoverished, often entirely outside the social
safety net. ... How much does it affect later behavior? Every current study
says it does - developmentally, neurologically, you name it - and our clients'
stories bear that out."
Jeff Wood, who was convicted under the law of parties for being an accomplice
to the murder of a convenience store clerk in Kerrville in the mid-1990s, wrote
that his father used to hit him with a razor strap so badly that Child
Protective Services was called. During the punishment phase of his trial, Wood
instructed his attorneys not to call any witnesses, and so evidence of his
abusive childhood was never presented.
Clinton Young, who faces execution for his part in a double murder in the
course of a carjacking, wrote that he grew up with an abusive father and an
emotionally abusive stepfather. "My dad beat me with a 2x4 and [kicked me with]
steel toe-capped boots. My step dad focused on making sure I feared him and
that I knew my real father didn't care about me - and that I wouldn't amount
to, in his words, 'a hill of rabbit shit in life.'"
Anibal Canales strangled his cellmate in 1997 and was sentenced to death 3
years later. "I think it would take way too much paper to try and talk about my
childhood," he wrote in response to the Observer's questionnaire. "I grew up in
a house that was both violent and abusive. My father was a deeply violent man
[who] abused me and my family regularly. My mother was an alcoholic and abusive
also. I lived in a jungle, and I learned to hide myself in the foliage that was
my life - and hide deep. It wasn't until late in life that I was able to talk
about that part of my life."
In his findings at Canales' Fifth Circuit appeal, the judge conceded that "by
[his] trial counsel's own admission [he] did not hire a mitigation specialist,
interview family members or others who knew him growing up, or 'collect any
records or any historical data on his life.'" During Canales' sentencing, the
only mitigation presented by his attorney was that he was "a gifted artist" and
"a peacemaker in prison."
The 5th Circuit added that if Canales' trial attorneys had conducted a
mitigation investigation, "they would have discovered an extensive history of
physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. Canales's mother was an alcoholic
who neglected her children, and his father was violent, angry, and irrational.
After Canales's parents separated, his mother married a man who was physically
abusive, beating Canales with a belt and fist and forcing him to strip naked
prior to these beatings. Canales's step-father sexually abused his sister, and
Canales attempted, in vain, to protect her. The family lived in poor housing,
infested with flea[s] and lice and located in 'gang central.' Canales's
grandparents were also physically and verbally abusive. Eventually, Canales's
mother left him with his father. The beatings then resumed, and Canales's
father would beat him 'until his father got tired.' This led Canales to abuse
drugs and alcohol, 'hook up with the wrong people,' and begin committing
crimes. He lived in half-way houses for part of his teenage years. Canales's
sister stated that the death of Canales's mother affected Canales severely and
that he 'went off the deep end' after she passed away."
Thomas Whitaker wrote that his childhood was emotionally derelict, with no
friends or peers and no connection to his family. In December 2003, a couple of
weeks before Christmas, Whitaker and his family returned to their Houston home
after dinner. Inside the house, a masked gunman shot and killed Whitaker's
brother, Kevin, and his mother, Tricia, before wounding his father, Kent, and
Whitaker himself. Although it looked like a robbery, police eventually arrested
Whitaker. He later confessed to hiring the gunman to kill his family because of
what prosecutors termed an "irrational hate."
And there's Jedidiah Murphy, whose parents abandoned him at 5, forcing him to
live out his childhood in a series of foster homes. "I could not tell you all
of it were you to have all day," he wrote. "It was violent and it did not help
me in life at all. I don't blame all my life's ills on my childhood but I never
had a shot with the way that I grew up. I learned the wrong way right off the
bat, and hell it took forever to see what I was doing was wrong. By that time I
was lost to alcoholism like my father and his father and so on."
As if an abusive childhood weren't bad enough, Hector Medina, another death row
inmate who responded to the questionnaire, spent his in a country torn apart by
a bitter civil war.
Medina, who has been on death row for 6 years, was born in El Salvador in 1979,
1 of 8 children. The family lived in poverty in a house made of sticks held
together with mud and plaster, with no electricity. The only source of water
was 45 minutes away on foot. The civil war between the militaryled government
and a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups began 6 months after Medina was
born and lasted until he was 12.
In an affidavit from Selena Sermeno, a clinical psychologist who looked into
Medina's social history for his appeal hearings, she quotes his brother, Jose
Reynaldo, who explained to her what the siblings went through as children: "The
Medina children wondered nightly, before falling asleep, if a grenade or bomb
would fall on their house, killing them and their parents as they watched the
lights of small mortars pass overhead in the darkness."
According to Medina, when they heard gunfire and grenades they'd hide under the
family's mud stove - the only place in the house he felt safe. When he was 11
he went alone to a nearby river to catch fish and was raped by a member of 1 of
the guerilla armies while another stood watch. Later, Medina was forced to
watch his father wrap a neighbor's dead body in a blanket after he was caught
in the crossfire of battle. Inevitably, according to the affidavit, Medina
exhibited signs of traumatic stress.
After migrating to the U.S., he found work, eventually naturalized as a
citizen, settled down and had 2 children. But when his girlfriend left him in
March 2007, Medina borrowed a friend's gun and a box of bullets and 2 days
later used the weapon to shoot each of their kids - Javier, 3, and Diana, 8
months - in their necks and heads. He then walked into the front yard and shot
himself in the neck, but survived.
Sermeno, who specializes in the impact of political and social violence on
moral development, and is an expert in the ramifications of sociopolitical
violence on Salvadoran youth particularly, wrote that it was her opinion that
violent and traumatic childhood experiences prevented Medina from developing
the social and emotional foundations for dealing with life's most difficult
challenges - such as the intense emotional pain that comes from a sense of
betrayal, in his case the experience of his girlfriend walking out on him.
A few years ago I conducted some research on the death penalty for the Dart
Center, an organization set up to help journalists who cover trauma and
violence. Steven Teich, a forensic psychiatrist who has worked in the field for
more than 40 years and who has studied death row populations, told me that in
his experience, when there has been some kind of violent physical action, it's
highly probable that some kind of serious trauma had occurred in the
individual's childhood, usually before the age of 8. "And this gets translated
through non-verbal language in the actions they are charged with," he said.
Teich told me that if defense attorneys are going to raise issues regarding
mental health or the inmate's state of mind at the time of the murder, it's
important that they look into their history and go right back to that traumatic
event. "There are a lot of people who are tried where they do have mental
issues, but these are never recognized and not really examined," he said.
This is my 12th year as a journalist who covers the death penalty, but since my
very 1st visit to the Polunsky Unit back in 2003, it's been all-too apparent
that the people I've interviewed share a common story: one of poverty; violent
households, violent communities; and lack of opportunities in early life that
can help steer us along the right course. For more than a decade I've thought
about this correlation. So, in sending out that questionnaire, I anticipated
some responses alluding to it, but I didn't expect the volume of physical and
emotional abuse relayed in those letters.
Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, founder and chairman emeritus of the Dart Center
and a pioneer in the study of trauma, isn't surprised. "We knew intuitively
that if you treat a child badly there's a much higher risk for a bad outcome in
adulthood," he told me by phone from his home in Michigan. But it's only
relatively recently that this insight has been studied - and confirmed - by
academics.
According to Ochberg, in order to be healthy, rational adults, we require in
childhood a reasonable amount of self-esteem and to feel loved, but a great
percentage of the human population doesn't ever get to enjoy that trust,
confidence, love or health, and in fact receives exactly the opposite: neglect,
abuse and bad examples of how to treat other people. Like any mammal, Ochberg
said, we require our biology to respond appropriately to threat - it
establishes our essential fight-or-flight mechanism - but we shouldn't feel
threatened all the time. For many death row inmates, though, it's that system
that's been profoundly damaged.
"These early adverse situations reduce the resilience of human biology and they
change us in very fundamental ways. Our brains are altered. And that's what
this research is bearing out."
Ochberg said it's not simply learned behavior. "There are a lot of people
exposed to a great deal of violence and vengeance every day and they don't
behave in this violent, destructive, criminal way," he said. "It's also clear
that not all criminality is the product of childhood abuse. But these early
adverse situations reduce the resilience of human biology and they change us in
very fundamental ways. Our brains are altered. And that's what this research is
bearing out."
Most stories about the death penalty begin with the moment of violence - that
one, often unplanned and unforeseen episode that changed everything.
These stories - in newspapers, magazines and in documentary film - discuss the
minutiae of the crime, perhaps relay some element of repentance on behalf of
the convicted inmate, and often include interviews with the victim's family.
But what most of these narratives lack is an attempt to establish what went
before by taking us back even further into the life of the condemned, before he
committed any crime, to that incubation period that molded him - to the trauma.
And often that's the key to unlocking the "why" in these stories.
Just last year, Jeffery Prevost, a 54-year-old auto mechanic, was condemned to
die by lethal injection for brutally torturing and killing his former
girlfriend and her son after she had broken up with him. Prevost's defense
attorney, Allen Tanner, told the court that his client had had traumatic
relationships with women that could be traced back to the time his sister
choked to death - an incident that caused his mother to spend the remainder of
her life in and out of mental hospitals. What's more, Tanner said, his client
had a daughter who was born with a birth defect and died before the age of 2.
But it didn't sway the jury.
One of the more high-profile cases where childhood trauma has been raised (too
late, unfortunately) in mitigating the crime is that of Johnny Frank Garrett,
executed in 1992 for the brutal rape and murder of a nun 11 years earlier - a
crime he committed when he was 17. As Amnesty International notes, the
execution went ahead despite Garrett's history of childhood abuse and severe
mental illness.
According to Amnesty, Garrett was raped by his stepfather, introduced to
alcohol and various drugs by family members when he was 10, and forced to
perform sexual acts in pornographic films from the age of 14 at the behest of
his stepfather, who also hired him out to other men for sex. He was regularly
beaten, and once placed on the burner of a stove, resulting in severe scarring,
according to Amnesty. The organization says none of this information was made
available to the jury at his trial. Though he received a 30-day reprieve from
then-Gov. Ann Richards after Pope John Paul II appealed for clemency, Garrett
was ultimately executed after Texas' Board of Pardons and Paroles voted not to
commute his sentence.
Clearly not everyone who experiences a violent or abusive childhood goes on to
commit heinous crimes. But what is glaringly apparent is that most of those who
find themselves in prison for violent crimes have had some kind of trauma in
childhood or adolescence.
Clearly not everyone who experiences a violent or abusive childhood goes on to
commit heinous crimes. But what is glaringly apparent is that most of those who
find themselves in prison for violent crimes have had some kind of trauma in
childhood or adolescence. So what should we do with that information?
Ochberg once acted as an expert witness to save the life of a man on trial for
multiple murders. "And it turned out he was not only a product of childhood
abuse, including sexual abuse, but was a product of abuse in the state hospital
to which he was sent as well," Ochberg told me. "When he was 14 his mother
couldn't take care of him and so she sent him to a state hospital in Indiana,
and it was there that one of the employees sexually abused him."
Ochberg obtained records detailing the abuse, and when he was examined he made
the compelling point that, although we try to maintain safety within our
institutions, sometimes we fail. "And we can't then execute the product of our
failures when we have a responsibility to care for those people," Ochberg said.
That man was spared the death penalty.
In a way, Ochberg told me, we're all complicit in having developed these
systems that let our own people down. And that's the bottom line, really. If we
fail to catch these men (and women) in a safety net when they're at their most
vulnerable - people such as Juan Ramirez, who endured beating after beating by
his mother and father with belts, clothes hangers and shoes - then we shouldn't
be surprised when that violence cycles back around. But we must acknowledge the
fact that we have chosen to dispose of these broken souls rather than try to
fix them.
(source: Alex Hannaford writes about the death penalty, crime, prisons,
religion and human interest issues----The Texas Observer)
NORTH CAROLINA:
New report alleges death penalty overused in North Carolina
At least 56 people who faced capital murder charges in North Carolina since
1989 were either acquitted or had their cases dismissed by prosecutors before
going to trial because the evidence against them was insufficient to convict.
That is a finding in a report published Monday by the Center for Death Penalty
Litigation, a Durham-based nonprofit organization whose lawyers represent
death-row inmates. It also does legal training, research and other activities
related to the death penalty.
5 of the cases were Cumberland County homicides.
The center argues that these cases show that there are serious flaws in the
state's criminal justice system and that the death penalty needs to be
abolished in North Carolina.
"People are being charged capitally based on the thinnest of evidence," Ken
Rose, the senior staff lawyer for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, said
in a statement issued with the report. "Prosecutors are using the threat of the
death penalty to persuade people to plead guilty. If we keep using the death
penalty like this, North Carolina will sentence more innocent people to death."
Rose's latter comment refers to people sentenced to death who later were found
to have been wrongly convicted.
Death penalty cases cost significantly more to prosecute and defend than
non-capital cases, the report says. It estimates these cases boosted taxpayer
expense just for the defense side of the cases by nearly $2.4 million.
Cumberland County District Attorney Billy West and officers with the N.C.
Conference of District Attorneys were unavailable to comment on the report and
its findings because they are attending a meeting in Pinehurst through
Wednesday.
Even though the defendants were ultimately determined to be not guilty, the
murder charges upended their lives, the report says. They often ended up
destitute and some became homeless.
The cases include:
A Pitt County woman who spent three years in jail charged with her mother's
murder after a state lab mixed up DNA samples from the crime scene, wrongly
leading police to conclude they had physical evidence that she was there. After
that finding, the case was tried non-capitally, and the jury found her not
guilty.
A Cleveland County man jailed for 17 months in a stabbing death based on a
statement from a paid informant and another from a jailhouse informant. The
charge was ultimately dropped.
A Columbus County woman charged with murdering her 17-month-old son after he
died in a house fire. Arson investigators used scientific methods, which were
once accepted but later found to be unreliable, to conclude that the fire was
set. Further investigation found the fire likely was caused by faulty wiring.
The charges were dropped.
The report says the flawed cases generally had inaccurate or untruthful
witnesses, false confessions, misconduct by police or prosecutors, tainted or
flawed evidence, or "tunnel vision" on the part of investigators and
prosecutors.
In instances of tunnel vision, the report says, investigators and prosecutors
focused so intently on a particular suspect that they discounted or refused to
consider evidence that they were mistaken, the report says. For example, the
report cites the case of a man accused of murdering his girlfriend in Gaston
County even though his cell phone records suggested he was in his home an hour
away from her when she was killed.
The Gaston County man was found not guilty at trial, but by then he had lost
his business and declared bankruptcy. His home was foreclosed after his trial.
The report shows that North Carolina needs reform in its criminal justice
system, said former N.C. Supreme Court Associate Justice Bob Orr.
"If we're going to have capital punishment in North Carolina, then you want a
system that operates as fairly and as impartially and as accurately as
possible," Orr said. "And the report certainly raises a number of questions
about whether that's been the case in the past."
Orr said that in his time as a Supreme Court associate justice, he was struck
at how inconsistently prosecutors throughout the state chose to seek the death
penalty.
He thinks it would be better to have an independent panel review potential
death penalty cases to decide whether they should be prosecuted capitally, he
said.
(source: Fayetteville Observer)
****************
STUDY: NC Prosecutors Have A History Of Pursuing Death Penalty In NC Without
Enough Evidence
North Carolina prosecutors have sought the death penalty against about 2 people
per year since 1989 without enough evidence to prove their guilt, according to
the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. The advocacy group opposes the death
penalty and helped represent former death row inmate Henry McCollum, who was
recently exonerated after 30 years in jail.
Executive director Gretchen Engel says stories like McCollum's trouble people
who want to believe that false imprisonment is a problem of the past. The new
report disproves that notion even for those who are never convicted, Engel
says.
"It's been persistent, consistent. And it's the same kinds of problems that we
see in exonerations: reliance on paid snitches, unreliable junk science,
coerced confessions," she said. "All the things that we see in exonerations are
what we see in these cases."
North Carolina spent nearly $2.4 million in defense costs to pursue failed
capital cases over the last 25 years, according to the report. The North
Carolina Conference of District Attorneys declined to comment, saying
representatives have not had time to properly review the cases in the report.
(source: WUNC.org)
GEORGIA:
Death penalty sought in alleged Craigslist killing of Runion couple
Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for a Telfair County man accused of
killing an Atlanta-area husband and wife he allegedly lured to south Georgia
after the husband posted a Craigslist ad seeking a vintage Ford Mustang.
Ronnie Adrian "Jay" Towns, 28, was jailed Jan. 26, charged with robbing and
killing Marietta retirees June Runion, 66, and her husband, Elrey "Bud" Runion,
69, who had ridden down from Cobb County a few days earlier.
On Monday, prosecutors filed their notice to seek the death penalty, citing 4
aggravating circumstances, factors the state must prove for Towns to be
executed.
Aside from the broad, commonly used terminology in capital punishment cases
that the alleged killer's act "was outrageously or wantonly vile," they also
contend that Towns killed the pair while stealing from them.
The bodies of the slain couple were found the same day Towns was arrested. The
2 were shot in the head and hidden along a dirt road near the Telfair farm
where Towns' parents live. The property lies east of U.S. 441 between Abbeville
and Hazlehurst, roughly 75 miles southeast of Macon.
On Jan. 22, the Runions had apparently gone to meet someone about buying a 1966
Ford Mustang near the Ocmulgee River hamlet of Jacksonville, where Towns was
raised.
The day he was arrested, the Runions' 2003 GMC Envoy was found sunk in a pond
not far from where their bodies turned up.
News that prosecutors were seeking death for his client didn't come as a
surprise to Towns' attorney, Franklin J. Hogue of Macon.
"I've known from the beginning of this case ... that the death penalty was in
play as a possibility," Hogue said.
The couple's slaying drew international attention early on, largely because of
its apparent link to the prominent online classified advertising site
Craigslist.
Bud Runion had posted a Craigslist ad saying he was interested in buying a 1966
Ford Mustang. Authorities believe Towns fooled him into thinking such a car was
for sale.
Prosecutors have said that in January, days before the killings, Towns was
fired from his job at a tree-removal company and was desperate for cash.
At an April hearing where Towns was denied bond, a prosecutor said Towns not
only shot and killed the Runions, but he had also tried to trick other
potential victims into thinking he was selling things they'd posted want ads
for on Craigslist.
Prosecutor Joshua Powell said at that hearing that Towns bought a "burner"
cellphone and was in touch with people -- the Runions among them -- who were
looking to buy merchandise, including antique cars.
"Jay Towns had a personal cellphone," Powell said, "but instead decided to buy
this 2nd telephone to contact the Runions."
Powell said Towns was "in contact with multiple other individuals concerning
(them) coming to Telfair County -- the same address that was given to the
Runions -- to look at other vehicles."
Towns' arraignment, originally set for June 25, won't happen until after a
so-called first proceeding, the initial step in a death penalty prosecution,
which won't likely come for a month or so.
(source: Macon Telegraph)
*****************
Columbus man again faces death in brutal murders of wife, stepdaughter
A Columbus man who in a drug-fueled rampage in 1995 raped and fatally stabbed
his stepdaughter before smashing his wife's skull with a baseball bat again is
facing death by lethal injection.
Chief Superior Court Judge Bemon McBride reinstated the death sentence for
Johnnie Alfred Worsley on Monday, 3 years after Judge John Allen vacated the
sentence and ordered a new penalty phase for Worsley's trial.
Allen first said he would vacate the sentence on March 14, 2012, and issued the
order in writing the following Aug. 28. Prosecutors appealed a few days later,
on Sept. 4.
The Georgia Supreme Court overturned Allen's ruling on July 1, 2013, sending
the case back to Muscogee Superior Court. On March 19 of this year the district
attorney moved to reinstate Worsley's death penalty, prompting his hearing
Monday.
Worsley now is represented by the Georgia Capital Defenders Office, which said
it again will appeal Worsley's conviction and sentence.
Worsley's crime was particularly brutal, and he did not deny the 2 murders.
According to the state Supreme Court's review of the case. Worsley married wife
Flora Worsley in 1984, but they separated 4 years later because of his cocaine
addiction. They started talking again in 1993, and in January 1995 he moved
back in with her and her daughter, Yameika Bell.
But his addiction persisted, and he became increasingly hostile. In late
February 1995, his wife said she'd leave him if he kept using coke, and he said
he'd kill her if she tried.
The following March 6, Bell noticed money missing from her purse and blamed
Johnnie Worsley, who denied taking it, but gave her some back. About 2 a.m. the
next day, he got a butcher knife from the kitchen, went into Bell's bedroom,
raped and stabbed her. She was 17.
Investigators said they found her naked under a pile of comforters on the bed,
her feet on the floor, her legs spread and her underwear at her feet. She had 9
stab wounds and 11 slashes to her neck, and 9 stab wounds to her chest and
upper abdomen. Foam around Bell's mouth showed she was still breathing when
Worsley stabbed her, authorities said.
Worsley left the house to buy crack cocaine, then came back and smoked it. At 8
a.m., his wife came home after working a late shift, and he crushed her skull
with a "full-force swing" of a baseball bat and stabbed her in the neck.
Authorities later found her on the bedroom floor, also lying under a comforter.
Relatives became worried when Flora Worsley didn't call her mother that morning
like she usually did. Instead Johnnie Worsley called her and asked her
forgiveness "for what I have done." Police summoned to the Worsley residence
saw nothing suspicious, but did not go inside.
The next day, a friend entered and found the bodies amid rooms splattered with
blood. That same day, Johnnie Worsley drove his Oldsmobile Cutlass to a Phenix
City car dealership and took a blue Geo Metro for a test drive. He did not
return, and left a note in the Cutlass in part saying, "I now must go to hell
and pay for what I am."
He drove the Geo to a church in Twiggs County, where he met a deacon and asked
forgiveness for killing 2 people. The deacon called the sheriff, who later saw
the Geo on Interstate 16 and tried to stop it. For 4 miles the suspect led a
chase at up to 95 mph before he finally gave up.
His trial began Nov. 12, 1998, and ended the following Nov. 14, when the jury
found him guilty and recommended the death penalty. Johnnie Worsley had pleaded
guilty but mentally ill.
During his trial, defense attorneys called to the stand a psychologist who said
the defendant suffered from a sustained depression, came from an abusive and
dysfunctional home, had an IQ of 78, read at a 4th-grade level and had a
7th-grade grasp of math. The psychologist also said Johnnie Worsley likely
suffered from brain damage.
Allen in his review of the case found the defense failed to properly convey
such mitigating circumstances to the jury as it pondered the death penalty, and
neglected to object when the victims??? family said he deserved the death
penalty, which is considered improper in victim-impact statements.
The state Supreme Court said the family's remarks during the sentencing hearing
made minimal references to the death penalty, and the crime was so obviously
heinous that their comments hardly mattered. The defense sufficiently reminded
jurors of the psychologist's testimony regarding the defendant's diminished
mental capacity, the court ruled.
Allen also had said the defense failed to call Johnnie Worsley's family to
testify to his hardships, but the Supreme Court decided that was a reasonable
tactic, as his relatives could have contradicted what the psychologist said,
damaging the defense.
(source: ledger-enquirer.com)
**********************
Ga. Supreme Court stops jury selection in Athens death penalty case
The Georgia Supreme Court has stopped jury selection in the death penalty trial
of admitted cop killer Jamie Hood to allow time for the justices to consider
issues over the decision to choose jurors from Elbert County who would hear the
case in Athens.
Judge Patrick Haggard had approved Hood's request for a change in venue because
of publicity around the 2011 shooting death of Athens-Clarke County police
officer Elmer "Buddy" Christian and the wounding of officer Tony Howard.
Haggard decided jurors would be selected from Elbert County, 2 counties over
and on the South Carolina line. Once seated they would be brought to Athens to
sequestered for the duration of the case.
Hood, who is representing himself, asked for the change in venue. The
prosecution, however, asked the Georgia Supreme Court to step in after the
district attorney asked at least 3 times that Haggard reconsider his choice of
Elbert County because they had been unable to find people who did not already
have strong opinions on the case.
The Monday order said the high court was issuing the temporary stay of jury
selection so it could consider the prosecution's motion to reverse Haggard's
decision. District Attorney also wants the high court to review Haggard's
decision to add to the jury pool that was initially called as well as
"unconstitutional gag orders," including 1 prohibiting the media from reporting
on jury selection proceedings and one prohibiting reporting on the reasons
District Attorney Ken Mauldin wanted the judge to reconsider his choice of
Elbert County.
(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
KANSAS:
Death penalty a tricky proposition
A Kansas capital murder case involving a white supremacist who is dying of
emphysema poses some unusual challenges for a district attorney pursuing the
death penalty for the 1st time.
Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe has twice rejected offers from
Frazier Glenn Miller's attorneys to have Miller plead guilty to killing 3
people at 2 Jewish community centers last year in exchange for taking the death
penalty off the table.
Howe says he believes Miller's alleged crimes deserve the most severe
punishment.
Kansas hasn't executed anyone in 50 years, however, and there's virtually no
chance the 74-year-old will be the next.
Critics say Howe's insistence appears to be aimed solely at scoring political
points, with taxpayers picking up the tab.
"No death sentence they impose on this guy is ever going to be carried out. He
was terminally ill and that's why he did this in the first place," said Sean
O'Brien, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who has defended
dozens of death penalty cases since 1983.
Miller does not deny gunning down Dr. William Lewis Corporon, 69; his
14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood; and 53-year-old Terri LaManno at
2 Jewish centers in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, on April
13, 2014.
He said he felt it was his duty to kill Jewish people before he died; he didn't
know all 3 were Christians. And last week, Miller submitted a motion for
acquittal in which he called the shootings justified.
Still, the Aurora, Missouri, man has pleaded not guilty and has insisted on his
constitutional right to a speedy trial, which is to begin Aug. 17.
Since the state is seeking the death penalty, it's unclear whether he would be
allowed to plead guilty because of Kansas' ban on assisted suicide.
Several states have laws forbidding a defendant from pleading guilty when a
death sentence is a possibility, and it's also not allowed under the federal
Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Kansas has no law addressing that specific issue.
"Yes, there is a question of whether pleading guilty and getting the death
sentence violates suicide laws," said John Blume, a Cornell Law School
professor who is director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project.
"But why does that matter? Despite the language differences, the end result is
the same."
Miller's attorneys, who were ordered by the judge to remain as standby counsel
after Miller fired them last month, have repeatedly said an August trial date
does not give them time to build a competent defense.
Johnson County District Judge Kelly Ryan has issued a gag order barring
attorneys from discussing the case, which Howe cited in declining to comment.
Howe, a Republican, was first elected as district attorney in the state's most
populous county in 2008, then ran unopposed in 2012 and hasn't announced his
intentions for 2016.
Both of his predecessors also served as Kansas attorney general, but Howe
hasn't publicly expressed an interest in that position.
One of Howe's counterparts in Missouri, Platte County prosecutor Eric Zahnd,
said elected prosecutors either reflect the values of their communities or they
don't get re-elected.
But they don't take death penalty decisions lightly, he said, nor make them for
political gain.
"Some murders are so terrible that they cry out for capital punishment," he
said.
Miller told the Associated Press last month that his respiratory condition is
getting worse and he's undergoing 6 breathing treatments a day.
"I've thought about killing myself in here, but I can't figure out how to do
it," said Miller, who added that he'd plead guilty, even with the death penalty
a possibility, as long as he gets a chance to justify his actions before the
court at sentencing.
As for pursuing a death sentence against someone unlikely to survive long
enough to go through the mandatory appeals process, Zahnd said: "If we knew a
murder defendant had cancer with a life expectancy of just 6 months, would that
make a 1-year sentence appropriate? I think not."
(source: Associated Press)
NEBRASKA:
Group unveils ads aimed at death penalty petition drive
A group that opposes Nebraska's death penalty petition drive has released 2
television ads urging voters not to sign a petition that seeks to put the issue
on the 2016 ballot.
Nebraskans for Public Safety posted the ads on social media on Monday and said
they will run on television starting Tuesday.
The ads feature Nebraska voters Martha Brown, Timorree Adams Klinger and state
Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln, a conservative who led the repeal effort in the
Legislature this year.
Danielle Conrad, a spokeswoman for the group, says the death penalty is broken
and should left in the past. Nebraska last executed an inmate in 1997.
The ads can be viewed online at http://bit.ly/1SDB1wL.
The group Nebraskans for the Death Penalty has until Aug. 27 to gather
signatures.
(source: KETV news)
USA:
Aurora theater shooting trial strategies focus on head vs. heart----Defense
poised to begin its case in Aurora theater shooting trial
There were days when police officers wept on the witness stand and days when
autopsy photographs lingered before jurors, but the toughest days so far in the
Aurora movie theater shooting trial were those when seats disappeared from a
row in the courtroom gallery.
Those were the days when room had to be made for someone in a wheelchair. They
were the days when the people hurt the most in the shooting came to testify.
When prosecutors rested their case Friday after calling their 222nd witness, a
wheelchair-bound Ashley Moser, it tied a bow in a thread they wove throughout
their portion of the trial. Even amid technical testimony about psychiatric
diagnoses and credit card purchases, prosecutors held their case together with
emotion.
The goal was as blunt as the evidence presented. Prosecutors - who fought to
show a crime scene video taken before the dead had been removed from the
theater and asked survivors to pound their hands onto the witness stand to
demonstrate the cadence of the gunfire - wanted jurors not just to learn about
the shooting but to feel it.
That stands in contrast to defense attorneys, who, when beginning their portion
of the trial Thursday, will ask jurors to take a far more intellectual approach
in assessing the case. They have indicated they will call at least 2 mental
health experts, who will probably eschew emotional testimony and instead make
scholarly arguments about James Holmes' psychiatric state at the time of the
shooting.
Heart versus head
After 2 months of trial, this is the philosophical battle underlying the
courtroom fight over sanity versus insanity and guilt versus innocence. It's
heart versus head.
"The defense will want to reframe it as that central question of mental
status," said Ken Broda-Bahm, a litigation consultant in Denver with the firm
Persuasion Strategies.
Aurora theater shooting trial
But social science research suggests jurors may have a difficult time seeing
past what prosecutors showed them.
Vivid images and traumatic stories stick in the mind more than dry analysis.
And a growing number of studies show that emotional evidence changes the way
jurors decide cases.
A 2006 study that used college students as mock jurors in a hypothetical
criminal trial found that those students who were shown graphic images and
heard dramatic testimony voted for conviction at a rate more than 3 times
higher than students who didn't see photos or hear gruesome testimony. That
matched with previous studies showing that disturbing images - such as autopsy
photos - can sway jurors to be more punitive, especially if the images are in
color.
Research on human decisionmaking suggests a reason: When people are angry about
something, they tend to think in starker terms when assigning blame. Initial
judgments harden in confidence. Stereotypes can take hold. One review of the
research puts it this way: There is less "effortful cognitive processing of
information."
Lawrence White, a Beloit College professor of psychology and legal studies who
is an expert on the topic, said the studies "lead to a tentative conclusion
that the strong emotions elicited by gruesome photographs and victims' stories
can interfere with a juror's ability to consider other kinds of evidence in a
rational, deliberate manner."
Denver-based trial consultant Jessica Brylo put it more succinctly.
"It creates a mental shortcut," she said.
The Aurora theater shooting trial presents jurors with a thicket of complex
information. Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors
are seeking the death penalty. Jurors are required to make nuanced decisions
about mental health and legal standards of intent.
That's why legal experts such as Brylo said prosecutors gave jurors emotional
guideposts to follow. Only a handful of the case's 34 days of testimony went by
without a shooting survivor taking the witness stand.
Prosecutors started their case by calling Katie Medley, whose husband, Caleb,
was paralyzed in the attack and who gave birth to the couple's 1st child only
days later in the same hospital where Caleb was undergoing yet another
life-saving surgery.
Prosecutors closed Friday by calling Moser, who, in addition to her own
injuries, lost her unborn child in the shooting and whose 6-year-old daughter,
Veronica, was killed.
In the weeks between, they presented their more rational testimony - from
forensic experts describing fingerprint analysis and ballistic comparison
testing, from retailers detailing firearm and ammunition purchases that Holmes
made and from 2 independent psychiatrists who evaluated Holmes and found him
sane at the time of the attack, which left 12 people dead and 70 wounded. But
prosecutors argued throughout the case that their more emotional evidence was
just as relevant.
"They are presenting what they believe is the most direct evidence of what
happened," said Samuel Pillsbury, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los
Angeles.
Defense attorneys won't entirely abstain from making emotional arguments,
either. They acknowledged the shooting's tragedy during opening statements,
and, if Holmes is convicted and faces a death-penalty sentencing phase, they
will probably call people such as his parents to humanize him.
But they have also frequently asked Judge Carlos Samour Jr. to limit the
prosecution's emotional presentation, saying it could bias the jury. During
opening statements, defense attorney Daniel King sought to immunize the jury
from emotional bias, telling them to expect a barrage of graphic photos and
traumatic stories.
"And when you hear that evidence," he told jurors, "understand that it's not
being contested and ask why it is being presented."
Emotional evidence
Samour has curtailed some emotional evidence, and he has repeatedly told jurors
they cannot base decisions on sympathy for the victims. Brylo said that creates
a risk the prosecution's strategy could backfire. If jurors feel the
prosecution is trying to manipulate their emotions, they could turn off to the
rest of the arguments, as well.
Others say there is reason to think jurors can balance their emotions with more
intellectual analysis. Broda-Bahm pointed to brain-imaging studies that suggest
the mind is able to switch easily between processing emotional and rational
thoughts, but it just can't process both at the same time.
Meanwhile, White said even if emotions have an impact individually, jurors
don't make decisions alone. They have to work together, forming what Broda-Bahm
called "a sense of temporary identity" in the job before them.
If only a couple of jurors encourage the rest to restrain their emotions, the
impact of months' worth of the testimony could be dulled.
"A few deliberate thinkers," White said, "can induce the whole group to think
deliberately."
(source: Denver Post)
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