Jan. 18
TEXAS:
San Antonio man gets death sentence for slaying of deputy
A man convicted of fatally shooting a Central Texas sheriff's deputy as both
were stopped at a San Antonio traffic light more than 4 years ago has been
sentenced to death.
The San Antonio Express-News (http://bit.ly/2089eIJ ) reports 46-year-old Mark
Anthony Gonzalez was sentenced Friday after a jury found him competent on Jan.
11.
In October, a jury found him guilty of capital murder and recommended the death
penalty, but sentencing was delayed so another jury could weigh his lawyers'
arguments that he wasn't competent.
Gonzalez fired dozens of bullets at Bexar County Sheriff's Sgt. Kenneth Vann in
May 2011. Authorities said Vann was hit 26 times.
On investigator testified that no motive could be established. Gonzalez's
attorneys said he was saddled by drugs and alcohol at the time.
(source: Associated Press)
CONNECTICUT:
Hearing on Connecticut death penalty: Did court get it wrong?
On Jan. 7, less than 5 months after a bitterly divided Supreme Court decided by
a 4-3 majority in State of Connecticut v. Eduardo Santiago to abolish the death
penalty, the issue was back before the court in a hearing on Russell Peeler's
appeal of his death sentence. Peeler was convicted and sentenced to death in
2007 for arranging the murders in 1999 of Karen Clarke and her 8-year-old son,
Leroy "BJ" Clarke, potential witnesses against Peeler in another homicide.
But the hearing had little to do with the notorious Peeler case. It focused,
instead, on the question of whether the court erred in deciding in Santiago
that the General Assembly's 2012 prospective-only repeal of the death penalty
violated the state's constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual
punishment. Public Act 12-5 repealed the death penalty for all crimes committed
on or after April 25, 2012, the date the act took effect.
2 months after 12-5 took effect, the Supreme Court upheld a habeas court
decision affirming Santiago's conviction for participating in a murder-for-hire
scheme. But it overturned his death sentence because the trial judge had not
allowed the jury to see certain potentially mitigating evidence in the penalty
phase and remanded the case for another determination of the penalty.
The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual
punishment, which includes punishment that is excessive and disproportionate.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that, in determining whether a punishment is
excessive and disproportionate, a court must first determine whether it
comports with contemporary standards of decency and then whether it promotes a
legitimate penological goal such as deterrence or retribution. The state
Supreme Court likewise has said that whether a punishment is cruel and unusual
is determined by considering whether it comports with the "evolving standards
of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and is penologically
justified.
Santiago appealed the decision to remand his case for a new penalty phase on
the grounds that 12-5 represented a fundamental change in the contemporary
standards of decency and a rejection of the penological justification for the
death penalty, thereby eliminating the constitutional basis for the penalty.
Arguments were heard on his motion in 2014.
Last August, the Supreme Court decided Santiago was right and the General
Assembly was wrong. Writing for the majority, Justice Richard N. Palmer said
that, following the prospective repeal of the death penalty, it no longer
comported with contemporary standards of decency and no longer served any
legitimate penological purpose. For those reasons, the execution of those who
committed capital felonies prior to April 25, 2012, would violate the
constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
After the Santiago decision was published in August, the state filed a motion
for argument and reconsideration which was denied by the same 4-3 majority. It
then filed a motion to postpone the application of Santiago pending resolution
of Peeler's appeal. That motion was denied by the same 4-3 majority and
Santiago was subsequently resentenced to life without parole. The state then
filed a motion to present arguments against the Santiago decision in the Peeler
case. Such requests are rarely granted but last month the court agreed to hear
oral arguments.
It had been apparent for some time that the General Assembly was skating on
thin ice, constitutionally speaking, in enacting a prospective-only repeal of
the death penalty. It enacted such a repeal in 2009. Coming as it did less than
2 years after the murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters Hayley and
Michaela in Cheshire in July 2007 but before the men charged in that horrendous
crime had been tried, that formula appealed to many legislators.
But in testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Chief State's Attorney Kevin
T. Kane warned presciently that if the proposed legislation became law the
Supreme Court would probably decide, under the evolved community standard of
decency doctrine, that the death penalty constituted cruel and unusual
punishment. And it was likely the selective retention of the death penalty for
some but not for others who committed the same crime, where the only
distinction between the 2 was the date on which the crime was committed, would
be regarded as unconstitutional. The act was adopted by the General Assembly
but vetoed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell.
3 years later, the General Assembly, spurred on by an active anti-death penalty
movement, again passed a prospective-only repeal. And again, in hearings before
the Judiciary Committee, Kane warned that, after enacting such a repeal, an
effort to execute any of those on death row - which by then included the men
who murdered the 3 members of the Petit family - would not pass constitutional
muster and would in effect nullify the death penalty for those not yet
executed.
But coming as it did only months after Joshua Komisarjevsky had been sentenced
to death in January 2012 - Steven Hayes had been sentenced in 2010 - a
prospective-only repeal was politically irresistible. The General Assembly
approved 12-5 by 30 to 16 in the Senate and 86 to 62 in the House, after which
Gov. Dannel Malloy signed it into law.
If the General Assembly was on thin ice in adopting a prospective-only repeal
of the death penalty, the Jan. 7 hearing - in particular, the lengthy
interchange between Palmer and Senior Assistant State's Attorney Harry Weller -
suggested the court may have erred in Santiago and that, rather than sweeping
away what remained of the death penalty, it should have either deferred to the
General Assembly and accepted its prospective-only repeal or ruled Public Act
12-5 unconstitutional and left it up to the General Assembly to decide whether
to abolish or retain the death penalty.
Weller made a strong case for the view, forcefully argued by the three
dissenting justices in Santiago, that the court erred in concluding that 12-5
demonstrated that the death penalty no longer comported with contemporary
standards of decency in the state. The U.S. Supreme Court said in Atkins v.
Virginia (2002) "the clearest and most reliable objective evidence of
contemporary values is the legislation enacted by the country's legislatures."
Weller argued that 12-5 reflected the clear intention of the General Assembly
to maintain the death penalty for individuals who committed certain crimes
prior to the statute's effective date and was the result of a democratic
legislative process, one in which the General Assembly rather than the court
has the final word and to which the court should defer.
He also noted more than once the court in State v. Rizzo in 2011, 2 years after
the General Assembly had approved a prospective-only repeal for the 1st time,
said, "as long as there remains powerful evidence of strong public support for
the death penalty in the form of long-standing laws enacted by the
democratically-elected representatives of this state...we will not attempt to
discern a contrary view of the public will, or to answer complex policy
questions best answered by the legislative process."
Surprisingly, in view of what it said in Rizzo, the Santiago majority didn't
consider the public's view of the death penalty. Had it done so, it would have
found ample evidence of strong public support for retention of the death
penalty, not just for crimes committed prior to the effective date but for
crimes committed in the future as well.
A Quinnipiac poll of 1,745 registered voters in the state conducted in the week
before 12-5 took effect in April 2012 found that 62 % supported the death
penalty while 30 % opposed it and that 62 % thought the decision to abolish the
death penalty was bad. Given that contemporaneous evidence, it's not at all
obvious that the death penalty no longer comports with contemporary standards
of decency in the state.
The state also challenged the Santiago majority's claim that, after enactment
of 12-5, the death penalty was devoid of any legitimate penological
justification. The majority stated that the primary rationale for the
prospective-only repeal was neither deterrence nor retribution - both
legitimate justifications - but rather vengeance against those on death row -
in particular, against the men who murdered 3 members of the Petit family. It
argued that, while retention of the death penalty for those already sentenced
may serve some minimal retributive function, the prospective repeal, coupled
with the lengthy, if not interminable delays, in applying the penalty - the
state has executed only one person in the last 55 years, Michael Ross, who
insisted on being executed - has deprived it of any retributive justification.
Weller argued, probably correctly, that, for many in the General Assembly who
supported 12-5 as well as for many in the public as well, the desire to retain
it for those on death row had nothing to do with personal, emotional vengeance
and everything to do with retribution for the crimes they committed.
In concluding, Weller suggested, albeit fleetingly, that rather than
transforming 12-5 into something the General Assembly didn't intend - a blanket
abolition of the death penalty - the court should have declared it
unconstitutional on the grounds that allowing the death penalty to be applied
to some and not to others for the same crime solely on the basis of the date
when the crime was committed violated the Eighth Amendment. At least a few
observers left this month's hearing convinced that is what the court should
have done - and left it up to the General Assembly to decide whether it wanted
to eliminate or retain the death penalty for all who committed certain crimes
regardless of date.
Will the court reverse its decision in Santiago? Probably not. Stare decisis -
to stand by that which has been decided - is a powerful doctrine. Chief Justice
Chase T. Rogers, despite her very forceful dissents from the Santiago majority,
was clearly concerned, as were others, about reversing the decision, especially
with a new justice having just come onto the court in place of one who retired.
In all likelihood, the Santiago decision will remain in force and, sooner or
later, Peeler and the others on death row will be resentenced to life without
parole. And the question will remain: Did the court get it right?
(source: David R. Cameron is a professor of political science at
Yale----Register Citizen)
VIRGINIA:
Imperfect justice system executes innocent people
I am not sure what Maurice S. Fisher, Sr. wanted to accomplish with his bizarre
Jan. 11 commentary, "Making Virginia's death row a well-executed system." But
he repeats false stereotypes about the system of capital punishment in the
commonwealth.
First, the penalty of life in prison without parole is cheaper than the death
penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that "death is different," and have
accordingly required a complex punishment phase in capital trials as well as
mandatory state and federal court appeals of death sentences. These legal
expenses far exceed the cost of lifetime incarceration.
2nd, our criminal justice system often makes mistakes. Since 1976 there have
been 155 exonerations from death row across the nation compared to 1,423
executions. That is a ratio of 1 innocent person sentenced to death for every 9
executions.
3rd, Virginia is the fastest in the nation from death sentence to execution -
just over 7 years on average. For most of the 155 death row exonerations, it
took far longer than that for evidence of innocence to be found. Who knows how
many innocent men are among the 111 executed by Virginia since 1976?
Imperfect human beings have created a death penalty system here in Virginia
that is far from perfect. Abolition of the death penalty is needed to ensure
that no more innocent people are executed by the commonwealth.
MICHAEL STONE, Executive Director
Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
RICHMOND
(source: Letter to the Editor, Roanoke Times)
FLORIDA:
Florida judges must decide how to implement Supreme Court decision on death
penalty
The U.S. Supreme Court tossed out Florida's death penalty statute last week..
Still unclear, though, is who will live and who will die.
That decision now falls to the Florida Supreme Court. The 7 justices must
answer 2 key questions that will largely determine who among the 390 inmates on
Florida's death row will get relief.
Lawyers, judges and death penalty specialists disagree on what that court will
do. Many, though, say it's a good bet that the U.S. Supreme Court decision will
affect all the defendants who have not exhausted their appeals.
That could be about 60 percent of Florida's death row population.
For those, the benefit may not be an automatic conversion of their sentence to
life in prison. It might be a new sentencing hearing, which could leave inmates
right back where they started, with new death sentences, should the Florida
Legislature, as expected, rewrite the state's capital punishment statute.
The death penalty cases, said Michael Pirolo, chief assistant to the Public
Defender in Brevard County, "are coming back, but it's 1 by 1. It's not just
some blanket order."
The 2 key questions before the Florida Supreme Court are:
--Is the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling retroactive?
--Was the ruling a fundamental change in the law or merely procedural?
The Florida court could provide answers in the next 3 weeks, because the state
is scheduled to execute a 2-time murderer, Cary Michael Lambrix, on Feb. 11.
On Friday, the court refused to halt the execution. A few days earlier, Florida
Attorney General Pam Bondi had said there was no need for a stay because the
new ruling does not apply to him.
The court will hear arguments Feb. 2, and then rule.
By an 8-1 vote the U.S. Supreme Court declared Florida's capital sentencing
system unconstitutional, ruling that in death penalty cases, juries - not
judges - must specify at least 1 reason why the defendant should be put to
death.
Under the old system, jurors listened to evidence, and then voted on whether to
recommend death or life in prison without the possibility of parole. Their
decision did not have to be unanimous.
The final decision was left to a judge.
In Tuesday's majority opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that by having the
judge make the final decision, Florida was violating a defendant's right to be
tried by a jury of his peers.
The test case involved Timothy Lee Hurst, who was convicted of murder in 1998.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not convert his sentence to life in prison. It
merely threw out his death sentence. He is still a convicted murderer. It's now
up to the state to figure out what sentence to impose and how to do it.
The U.S. high court said the Florida Supreme Court, or perhaps a trial court,
must now determine whether Hurst would have been given the same sentence if a
jury - rather than a judge - had pronounced sentence.
Last week's ruling was broad. It means that everyone on Florida's death row was
sentenced under a law that has now been ruled unconstitutional.
But there is a wide span of opinion on how it will affect the people on
Florida's death row.
Some lawyers argue that everyone there should have their sentences converted to
life in prison. Others say they should all get new sentencing hearings.
Orlando criminal appeals specialist Paula Coffman and Orange-Osceola State
Attorney Jeff Ashton predicted that the sentences of a few death row inmates
would be reduced.
"It's going to apply to very few inmates," Coffman said.
Retired Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. of Sanford, a death-penalty scholar,
predicted that in several months, the Florida Supreme Court would make a single
ruling involving every condemned murderer who is still has an active appeal,
and reduce their sentences to life.
The court would do that, he said, to spare the expense and danger of
transporting inmates back to the counties where they were originally tried.
Despite the wide range in opinion, many experts agree on some basics: The new
ruling is likely to do nothing to help at least 150 death row inmates who have
exhausted their appeals.
Defense attorneys are expected to flood state courts with paperwork because of
the new ruling.
Maria DeLiberato, a Tampa-area attorney, works for Capital Collateral Regional
Counsel, a state agency that represents indigent death row inmates. She has 11
clients on death row.
"Certainly we will be arguing that all of those people, most if not all have
been sentenced under an unconstitutional statute and they should be given a new
hearing," she said. "Certainly the Florida Supreme Court will weigh in on
whether the decision is retroactive and how many people it ultimately affects."
One of the biggest issues Florida judges will face is whether the error harmed
a defendant. That is something that must be reviewed case by case basis, Pirolo
said.
It's a complex set of issues, said Robert Wesley, the elected public defender
for Orange and Osceola counties.
"Nothing could be more important. ... This is going to foster a lot of
litigation, and it's not going to be easy and a quick fix by the Legislature
and by the Florida courts."
(source: Orlando Sentinel)
**************
High court decision allows chance to rethink broken system
John Barnes, spokesman for Montana Attorney General Tim Fox, said juries in
Montana still must decide whether an "aggravating circumstance" exists in a
murder case - and that a judge can't impose a death sentence unless there is an
aggravating circumstance. Gov. Jack Markell has said he would sign a repeal
bill if it made its way to his desk.
"One of the tragedies, I think, that's unfolding before us is, how many people
have their lives been taken by a state, and it's found that they didn't commit
the crime?" And generous, because Florida legislators now have an opportunity
to fix a broken system that has been challenged for being arbitrary, racist and
cruel. The jury voted 7-5 in favor of death, and a judge imposed the death
sentence. "I would rather have DE as a state make the choice to get rid of the
death penalty, instead, of waiting for the Supreme Court to do that for us".
Where Florida's death penalty system goes next, may be in the hands of
lawmakers. The case, Hurst v. Florida, involves Timothy Lee Hurst's conviction
for the murder of his co-worker Cynthia Harrison in 1998.
The state, which has the second-highest number of inmates on death row in the
country, received a request from a condemned inmate shortly after the high
court's ruling to delay his execution.
The ruling's direct impact is limited to Florida and does not include the
bigger and more divisive question of the constitutionality of the death penalty
in general.
Dimmig said prosecutors may argue in some cases that juries did make those
determinations, so death sentences in those cases should stand.
More than 20 percent of death sentences imposed in the US since 2010 have been
the product of non-unanimous jury recommendations of death-a practice barred in
all states but Florida, Alabama, and Delaware.
In addition to the content, no one yet knows whether the ruling is retroactive,
potentially affecting all death row inmates.
The US Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to a speedy and
public trial by an impartial jury.
The ruling was opposed by Justice Samuel Alito, who called the Florida judge's
process in the Hurst case a "harmless error". He argues that the Court has
purportedly reversed its course that strikes down Florida's capital systems.
Sotomayor said Florida's system is flawed because it allows a sentencing judge
to find aggravating factors "independent of a jury's fact-finding".
In an interview, Bondi told the Herald/Times she was unsure of the death
penalty's future in Florida. When Jeb Bush was governor, he pushed for a
10-year limit on death row appeals, even after 2 Florida Supreme Court justices
cautioned against it. But it's the judge who's charged with finding facts, and
judges can and do frequently disregard the jury's recommendation.
Michael Radelet, an expert on the death penalty in Florida, says the bottom
line after today's ruling is uncertainty.
(source: leadercall.com)
ALABAMA:
Supreme Court decision raises questions about Alabama death penalty
A U.S. Supreme Court decision released this week deemed part of the Florida
death penalty system unconstitutional.
Hurst vs. Florida addresses the issue of judicial override, something only
legal in Florida, Delaware and Alabama.
Here's how it works. If a jury recommends a sentence, the judge has the power
to overrule its decision to sentence someone to life in prison or to death.
The Supreme Court decision that came out this week doesn't make that illegal,
but it does rein in the judge's power.
In the Hurst case, the judge held an independent fact-finding hearing to
determine the sentence. According to SCOTUS opinion, "The Sixth Amendment
protects a defendant's right to an impartial jury. This right required Florida
to base Timothy Hurst's death sentence on a jury's verdict, not a judge's
factfinding."
Although judicial override wasn't completely struck down by the decision, some
experts say it was weakened.
According to attorney David Kochman, judicial override was originally created
to eliminate jury bias in sentencing. It was believed judges would remain more
level-headed in the face of gruesome details and thus less likely to sentence
convicts to death.
But according to the Equal Justice Initiative, since 1976 judges in Alabama
have overruled jury verdicts 111 times. And in 91 % of those overrides, judges
chose the death penalty.
"We have a scheme now where a system that was predicated upon mercy and
compassion has instead become a scheme of almost a punitive nature," Kochman
said.
The attorney of death row inmate Christopher Brooks is asking for a stay on his
execution in light of this decision. Brooks was supposed to be executed on
January 21st.
But Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange says our system is constitutional,
and so is the one in Florida. He filed a friend of the court brief with the
Montana attorney general, saying judicial sentencing is less arbitrary and more
consistent than jury sentencing.
Alabama's system was last challenged in 2013 in Mario Dion Woodward v. Alabama.
SCOTUS declined to hear the case, but Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent, "No
other State condemns prisoners to death despite the considered judgment
rendered by a cross-section of its citizens that the defendant ought to live.
We owe the validity of Alabama's system a fresh look."
(source: WAAY news)
LOUISIANA:
Derrick Todd Lee gets medical treatment outside of Angola; officials mum on
location for 'security reasons'
Convicted serial killer and death row inmate Derrick Todd Lee on Sunday was
receiving medical care outside the fences of the Louisiana State Penitentiary
at Angola.
Corrections Department spokeswoman Pam Laborde confirmed in a statement that
Lee, 47, was transported away from the Angola prison for medical care but
declined to say where he'd been taken or what medical issues he is being
treated for, citing state and federal privacy laws.
"Due to security reasons and offender privacy under state and federal laws, the
Department (of Corrections) cannot provide any additional information at this
time," Laborde said.
Lee was sentenced to death for the 2002 murder of 22-year-old LSU graduate
student Charlotte Murray Pace in her Baton Rouge home.
A jury also convicted Lee of 2nd-degree murder in the 2002 killing of
21-year-old Geralyn Barr DeSoto, of Addis, for which he was sentenced to life
in prison.
Lee is suspected by authorities of killing 5 other women in south Louisiana
between 1998 and 2003: Gina Wilson Green and Carrie Lynn Yoder, of Baton Rouge;
Trineisha Dene Colomb, of Lafayette; Randi Mebruer, of Zachary; and Pam
Kinamore, of Briarwood. Lee has not been tried in those cases.
According to prosecutors, DNA evidence linked Lee to those 5 slayings. Evidence
from these cases was introduced during the penalty phase of Lee's 2004 trial in
Pace's murder.
Lee is appealing his conviction and death sentence in federal court. The
Louisiana Supreme Court rejected Lee's final state court appeal in September.
(source: The Advocate)
KENTUCKY:
Man Accused In Stabbing Death Of 6-Year-Old Pleads Not Guilt
The Indiana man accused of stabbing and killing a 6-year-old Versailles boy
during a home invasion pleaded not guilty.
Police say Ronald Exantus stabbed Logan Tipton to death during a home invasion
last year.
Officers said Logan was in his room asleep when Exantus allegedly entered the
home and stabbed him. Police said after the stabbing, Logan's father got into a
fight with Exantus in the home's hallway. Logan's sisters were also assaulted.
Officers arrested Exantus at the scene.
It was the first time that Logan Tipton's family had seen Exantus since that
tragic night in December. Family members filled the first two rows of the
courtroom.
Afterwards, Logan Tipton's mother issued a statement to the media.
"I just wanted to say thank you to the whole community and everyone for their
thoughts and prayers and support and just continue to keep my family especially
my children in your prayers," Heather Pujol-Tipton told reporters.
Exantus' attorney, Bridget Hofler told LEX 18 that her client is mentally
unstable.
"His mental state is in and out. Some days are better than others. He is
obviously not himself, nor has he been since I've come to know him." Hofler
told LEX 18.
The hearing was held in Woodford County's District Court building. Exantus
waived formal arraignment.
A Woodford County grand jury indicted Exantus for murder, burglary and assault.
He could face the death penalty.
(source: lex18.com)
CALIFORNIA:
O.C. victim's father doesn't expect to see death penalty carried out
Steve Herr assumes he won't live to see the execution of the man convicted of
murdering and then decapitating his son in the attic of an Orange County
theater.
"Realistically, I'm not going to be around when he's put to death," Herr, 67,
said a few days after a jury recommended the death penalty for Daniel Wozniak.
"I'll be dead."
Orange County Superior Court Judge John Conley is scheduled in March to
sentence Wozniak, 31, for the shooting and beheading of 26-year-old Army
veteran Sam Herr and the shooting of Herr's friend Juri "Julie" Kibuishi, 23,
in May 2010.
Wozniak, a community theater actor from Costa Mesa, was desperate for money to
fund his upcoming wedding, so he killed the 2 as part of a plan to steal
$62,000 from Herr's bank account, according to prosecutors.
After Wozniak's conviction last month, jurors took less than an hour last
Monday to decide that he deserved to die for the slayings. Orange County Dist.
Atty. Tony Rackauckas said it was the fastest capital punishment decision he
could recall.
Wozniak's case took more than 5 years to go to trial, and despite the jury's
decisiveness, its death sentence verdict is just the beginning of another long
process that may or may not end with Wozniak's execution.
In California, where capital punishment has been on hold for a decade, it's an
open question whether convicts sent to death row today will ever have their
sentences carried out.
In 2006, the state placed a moratorium on the death penalty when a judge ruled
that a 3-drug lethal injection could cause inhumane suffering.
In November, officials unveiled a 1-drug injection that could lead to a
resumption of executions, but the method still faces months of public vetting
and possible legal challenges.
Even before the moratorium, "the reality in California is that, of those who
are sentenced to death, very few have been executed and it's taken an
enormously long time," said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine law
school.
Since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1977, juries have sent
900 inmates to death row and 13 have been executed, according to court papers
written by Cormac Carney, a federal judge in Orange County.
On average, there is a 25-year delay between a death sentence being handed down
and it being carried out, and that gap is getting longer, according to the
judge.
Many factors contribute to the decades of lag time between a death sentence and
an execution, Chemerinsky said.
To begin with, all death sentences in California are automatically appealed.
Before any work can be done on the case, a lawyer must be appointed. That in
itself can take years.
A 2004 report commissioned by the California Legislature blamed that on budget
cuts at the state public defender's office and on the low pay offered to
private attorneys willing to take the assignments.
Another factor is that all such appeals go directly to California's Supreme
Court, which hears only about 20 to 25 such cases a year, according to Carney.
After years of reviewing and briefing their cases, attorneys might wait 2 to 3
more years before the court has time to hear their arguments, the judge wrote.
Inmates who lose their appeal to the Supreme Court can appeal again for the
court's consideration. If those appeals are exhausted, inmates can petition a
federal court for review, further extending the process.
More condemned inmates die of natural causes than are put to death, according
to California Department of Corrections figures that Carney cited in his
decision.
"As for the random few for whom execution does become a reality, they will have
languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no
retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary," Carney wrote.
But such arguments and capital punishment's murky future did not deter the
Orange County district attorney's office from pursuing a death sentence for
Wozniak.
"Cases like this are a perfect example of why the death penalty is
appropriate," Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Murphy said at a news conference
after the jury's decision.
Prosecutors in Orange County seek capital punishment on only about 4% of
eligible cases, but the brutality of Wozniak's crimes called for the severest
penalty, Murphy said.
During the trial, jurors heard testimony that Wozniak dismembered Herr's body
before tossing some of the parts in a Long Beach park in a failed attempt to
throw police off his trail.
To further the coverup, Wozniak used Herr's phone to lure Kibuishi to Herr's
apartment, then killed her and staged her body to make it seem as if Herr had
raped her and fled, Murphy said.
(source: Los Angeles Times)
**************
10 Years After Last Execution, California's Death Row Continues to Grow
10 years ago today, on January 17, 2006, California executed Clarence Ray
Allen, the oldest person ever put to death in the state. It was just after
midnight - the day after Allen's 76 birthday - and the execution was couched in
controversy. Allen was legally blind, diabetic, and relied on a wheelchair. He
had suffered a heart attack the previous fall. Later, when he asked that they
just let him die if he were to have another heart attack before his execution
date, prison officials said they could do no such thing.
Yet when the press told the story of Allen's death, the prevailing descriptions
were of a man in fine health - not nearly as weak as described by the attorneys
who had tried to save his life. "In final moments, killer didn't seem so
frail," read the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle, which noted Allen's
"robust ability": how he stood up on his own from his wheelchair before being
helped to the gurney by 4 prison guards; how he "vigorously craned his head"
toward his supporters in the viewing chamber. California Assemblyman Todd
Spitzer, who witnessed the execution, called it "incredibly humane," remarking,
"For 76 years old, he looked to be in remarkably good shape." When it was
revealed that officials at San Quentin had to inject Allen with a second deadly
dose of potassium chloride - raising potential questions about the efficacy of
the state's execution protocol - the Associated Press presented this as proof
that the "barrel-chested prisoner's heart was strong to the end."
The narrative was comforting in its reassurances: Regardless of any last legal
challenges or activist hysterics, this was a dangerous killer, not a feeble old
man. And Allen certainly had much blood on his hands: Sentenced to life in
prison for killing his accomplice in a 1974 robbery, he was then convicted and
sentenced to death a few years later for ordering 3 more murders while behind
bars at Folsom Prison. In a state that had struggled to carry out executions
for decades, Allen's death could be seen as a righteous way to usher in what
was expected at the time to be a busy era for the execution chamber. With
appeals running out for a number of prisoners, 2006 was to be the year
California resumed executions "at a pace unseen in more than a generation,"
according to the Sacramento Bee.
Yet a full decade later, California has not executed a single person. Soon
after Allen's death in 2006, problems with state's lethal injection protocols
brought the state's execution machinery to a halt. It has never restarted. In
the meantime, California's death row, by far the largest in the country, has
continued to grow, from 646 people in January 2006 to some 750 today. Last
year, California officially ran out of space for its condemned prisoners,
prompting Gov. Jerry Brown to request $3.2 million from lawmakers to expand its
death row cells.
But the past decade is only the latest chapter in California's long and sordid
death penalty saga, a history that has seen the state pour resources into a
punishment regime that, when measured in executions at least, exists more in
theory than in practice. To date, only 13 people have been executed since the
state brought back the death penalty in 1977. Meanwhile, more than 100 have
died facing execution - 1/4 of these prisoners have committed suicide,
according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
(CDCR). The cost to California taxpayers, according to a 2011 study, has been
more than $4 billion - and by 2030, the projected cost will reach $9 billion,
with more than 1,000 people on death row.
Today, a growing number of Californians have reached the inevitable conclusion
that it's time to get rid of the death penalty once and for all. In 2012, a
hard-fought ballot initiative to replace capital punishment with life without
parole lost by a narrow margin - and in 2014 support for the death penalty
dropped to a 50-year low. Yet some remain committed to reviving executions in
California - and late last year the state took a number of steps in that
direction. In November, the same month a federal judge overturned a ruling that
had declared the state's death penalty unconstitutional on 8th Amendment
grounds, officials introduced a new "humane and dignified" lethal injection
protocol, replacing its embattled 3-drug cocktail with an array of one-dose
options. In December, pro-death penalty activists began collecting signatures
in support of a ballot measure that would jumpstart executions by quickening
the appellate process and shorten the amount of time between conviction and
execution. This coming November, backers of the measure will face off against
an opposing measure that again seeks to abolish the death penalty. Last week, a
field poll found California voters evenly divided on the 2 ballot initiatives.
None of this activity makes executions imminent in California. The state's new
lethal injection protocol will be subject to a lengthy public vetting process.
And even if the pro-death penalty ballot measure prevails, implementing its
changes would be costly and complicated. Still, should the state start killing
again, Californians can expect to see a lot more prisoners who look like
Clarence Ray Allen make their way to the gurney. As of now, the next 16
prisoners in line to die are mostly old men, all of whose sentences date back
to the 1980s. 1/2 are in their 60s, and 2 are more than 70; the oldest is 78.
TO JEANNE WOODFORD, who once oversaw executions as the warden at San Quentin,
killing these men "serves no penological purpose." The murders they committed
"are horrible crimes, no doubt about it," she says. But decades later, their
executions seem senseless and arbitrary, devoid even of any retributive value.
In Allen's case, the father of 1 of his victims waited 25 years for his
execution, only to die months before it was carried out.
Nor do such executions keep Californians safer, Woodford says. It is understood
that for a punishment to be a deterrent to crime, it must be "swift and
certain." Today, more than ever, the death penalty in California is the exact
opposite.
Jeanne Woodford, former San Quentin Warden an now Executive Director of Death
Penalty Focus, a national non-profit organization dedicated to educating the
public about the death penalty and its alternatives, stands for a portrait in
her new offices on Market Street on May 27, 2011 in San Francisco, Calif. She
says overseeing four executions convinced her that putting people to death is
not right.
Woodford worked at San Quentin for more than 25 years. When she started, there
were only 6 people on death row. By the time she left in 2006, the number was
more than 700. A lot of the prisoners she saw were young men - "gang members,"
she recalls, "the very people whose behavior changes over time."
"These were not the people most Americans would imagine as the 'worst of the
worst,'" she says. Many had been convicted under a 1978 ballot measure known as
the Briggs initiative, which significantly expanded the kinds of crimes
eligible for the death penalty. "When they widened the net, they included a lot
of people who aren't serial killers," Woodford said. As she reached the end of
her time at San Quentin, Woodford saw a death row population that was
increasingly aging and infirm - "guys with dementia," she says. Dozens had died
of old age, illness, and suicide. "There is a wide gap between who the public
thinks is on death row and who is actually on death row."
After she left the CDCR, Woodford became an anti-death penalty activist,
briefly heading the group Death Penalty Focus, which led the fight for
Proposition 34, the 2012 ballot measure to abolish the death penalty. In doing
so, she encountered the unlikeliest of allies: The man who authored the Briggs
initiative, a former prosecutor-turned defense attorney named Donald Heller.
Once a staunch supporter of capital punishment - he once said he would "throw
the switch??? for a criminal defendant - Heller designed the 1978 ballot
initiative at the behest of California State Senator John Briggs, a right-wing
conservative who aspired to join the U.S. Senate. The measure was designed to
increase the number of eligible death penalty crimes through the use of
"special circumstances" - aggravating factors that would automatically set the
range of punishments for a criminal defendant as either death or life without
parole. "Unfortunately," Heller recalls, "I did a really good job." The
initiative passed overwhelmingly. A Loyola law professor who conducted a study
of the death penalty for the Senate Judiciary Committee later decried the
"reckless drafting" of the initiative as well as the political campaign around
it: the ballot pamphlet told voters that only those who intended to carry out a
murder would receive the death penalty under Briggs, but this did not turn out
to be true.
After the Briggs measure passed, prosecutors rushed to seek the death penalty -
"Everyone was trying to put a notch on their gun," Heller recalled. "There were
a tremendous number of capital cases filed."
As Heller watched the wave of new death sentences, "I had second thoughts about
what I wrote." He started to realize that he had made a number of erroneous
assumptions about the death penalty. "The 1st was that it would deter murders,"
he says, a claim for which he says there is no empirical evidence. "The 2nd: I
assumed defendants would have competent representation." Heller was "shocked"
to see just how shoddy the representation could be for people facing death row.
But the case that ultimately turned Heller against the death penalty for good
was that of a man named Tommy Thompson, one of the few people in California
whose death sentence has culminated with his execution. Sent to death row in
1984 largely on the word of a jailhouse snitch, Thompson was convicted for a
rape and murder that prosecutors later pinned on his codefendant - but only
after Heller had already been condemned to die. Once the state "switched
theories," Heller told the Los Angeles Times in 2011, "the prosecutor made no
effort to notify Thompson's trial judge that evidence now showed that Thompson
was not the actual murderer."
Heller was so disturbed by Thompson's case, he agreed to testify at his
clemency hearing, "I laid out in detail the reasons that I felt this was wrong,
that it violated the letter and spirit of the initiative, the fundamental law,
the prosecutor's obligation, and was an injustice," he told the Times. But
Governor Pete Wilson declined to commute the sentence and Thompson was executed
in 1998. His last words were read by the warden after his death at 12:06AM.
"For 17 years the AG has been pursuing the wrong man," Thompson said. "I don't
want anyone to avenge my death. Instead I want you to stop killing people. God
bless."
The experience forever altered Heller's feelings about capital punishment.
"Something I wrote was utilized to execute someone who was innocent," Heller
says. He no longer believes the death penalty is worth the financial or human
cost. "If you have imperfect system taking someone's life, it's a little bit
frightening," Heller says. "Especially with the number of people who have been
shown to be actually innocent. It makes you think."
Not everyone in the state is learning from the past. Indeed, as far as stalled
executions are concerned, California has been here before. It took 15 years,
after bringing back capital punishment in 1977, for the state to carry out its
1st execution, in 1992. In the meantime, hundreds were sent to death row. In
1990, a year that saw 33 new death sentences in the state, the Los Angeles
Times ran an article titled: "Next To Die In Gas Chamber: It's Anybody's
Guess." Of the 275 people on death row at the time, the story speculated, only
those who were willing to drop their appeals and be executed were likely to be
executed anytime soon. But even that was no guarantee. One man, on death row
since the 80s for killing his wife, told the Times, "I don't wish to die, but I
don't wish to live under these conditions." More than 25 years later, that man,
Jerry Stanley, is still alive and now in his 70s. He has continued to ask for
death. In 2011, as dubious lethal injection drugs made national news, he wrote
to the Times, "I am willing to be the experimental guy to see whether or not
they work."
These days California sends fewer people to death row. But the state still
appears to be in denial about its death row crisis. In 2008, after four years
of studying the state's death penalty system, the bipartisan California
Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice declared it "dysfunctional."
In addition to raising alarm about wrongful convictions, the commission warned
lawmakers that sentencing an average of 20 prisoners per year to death - while
executing no one - was creating "a backlog ... so severe that California would
have to execute 5 prisoners per month for the next 12 years just to carry out
the sentences of those currently on death row."
The backlog, the commission found, is inextricable from the fact that virtually
every person on California???s death row is indigent - and thus reliant on the
state for representation. But even as California has added scores to death row,
it has defunded the office of the State Public Defender. So, while death
penalty supporters like to blame prisoners??? lengthy appeals for clogging the
path to justice, in reality condemned inmates spend years just waiting to be
appointed lawyers who can handle their case. Indeed, the commission found
"excessive delay" delay at every stage of the review process: Prisoners
sentenced to death wait between 3 to 5 years for an attorney to be assigned to
their direct appeal. Longer still is the wait for counsel for state habeas
petitions (8 to 10 years). These are followed by additional years of waiting
for courts to rule: the commission found a more than 6-year wait for a
decisions on federal habeas petitions. In all, the commission found, "the total
lapsed time from judgment of death to execution is 20-25 years."
That prisoners spend so long languishing on death row was at the heart of a
2014 ruling by U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, who overturned the death
sentence of a California man who had spent 20 years facing execution - and at
the same time declared the state's death penalty system unconstitutional on 8th
Amendment grounds. For most prisoners on California's death row, he wrote,
their sentence "has been quietly transformed into one no rationale jury or
legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of
death."
Compounding the problem are prosecutors who continue to seek death sentences
despite the state's clear inability to carry them out. In 2015, which marked
historic lows in new death sentences across the country, California condemned
more people to die than any other state. As in the rest of the country, these
sentences were clustered in specific jurisdictions, where a single stubborn DA
can still send a lot of people to death row. Of California's 14 new death
sentences last year, prosecutors in Riverside County were responsible for 8. In
Slate last fall, Robert J. Smith called Riverside "the buckle of a new Death
Belt," a place that has "produced more death sentences since 2010 than any
other county in America except one - Los Angeles County, which is 4 times its
size."
"In one sense, it's irrational," Heller says of prosecutors currently seeking
death sentences in California. But more obviously, it is political.
"Prosecutors still use it as a notch, I think, more than anything else."
It also means that the state will continue to invest in its death row
infrastructure. "Honestly, I don't think they have a choice," says Woodford.
"The death penalty is in place because of the voters in the state of
California." Keeping it in place means meeting certain constitutional
standards. Most recently, responding to a ruling by a federal judge, prison
authorities hastily revamped a new medical unit at San Quentin to convert it
into a 39-bed psychiatric unit for prisoners with mental illness. ("We are
curing them to make them executable," Berkeley law professor and death penalty
scholar Frank Zimring told the L.A. Times.)
But perhaps the ultimate emblem of capital punishment in California is the
death chamber at San Quentin - a $853,000 renovation project completed years
ago, and built by prisoners themselves. In 2010, members of the press were
invited to inspect the new and improved death chamber. Reporters noted the
roominess of the space (4 times larger than the old one); its hexagonal shape,
and the "pistachio-colored vinyl" covering the gurney (the "only splash of
color" in the sterile room). The warden told reporters at the time that the
prison was "fully prepared to carry out an execution," anticipating it would do
so within a week. More than 5 years later, the execution chamber remains
unused.
Last December, just 2 days after Christmas, the CDCR once more allowed
journalists inside the death chamber. ("It smells of new paint," an L.A. Times
reporter observed.) 20 media outlets participated in the 6-hour tour, which
gave rare access to San Quentin's death row corridors, along with the solitary
confinement unit the CDCR calls the Adjustment Center (otherwise known as "the
hole"). The department denied there was any specific reason for the timing.
("One reporter recently asked to visit, and then another," a CDCR official
wrote in an email to The Intercept.) The subsequent stories portrayed a grim
universe, a prison within a prison that has grown out of the long legal limbo
of its inhabitants. ???Some two dozen wheelchairs sit parked outside the cells
of aging men no longer able to walk," the Times noted. Meals are eaten in their
cells, behind mesh screens. "Group therapy" is an assembly of men in metal
cages. (The 21 women on death row are housed in a different prison in
Chowchilla, 2 1/2 hours away.)
With no end in sight to their time on death row, prisoners do what they can -
writing, exercising, listening to the radio. But there is no escaping the sense
of neglect - of being forgotten. Speaking to the alternative weekly
Metroactive, one prisoner summed up his life as "being left on a shelf."
Another said he had just ended a 27-day hunger strike to protest the absence of
capital defense attorneys. "Guys are dying," he said, "and nobody is up here
saying, 'You are a human being.'"
(source: theintercept.com)
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