April 16
OHIO:
Death penalty still possible for Youngstown triple murder suspect
The death remains a possibility in the case of 48-year-old Robert Seman, who is
accused of raping a 10-year-old girl then setting a fire to kill her and her
grandparents.
Judge Maureen Sweeney denied the motion to remove the death penalty on Friday,
2 days after Attorney Thomas Zena filed the request.
Seman is charged with the murders of 10-year-old Corinne Gump, 63-year-old
William Schmidt and 61-year-old Judith Smith.
The bodies of all 3 victims were found inside the Schmidt's burning Powers Way
home on March 30, 2015 just hours before Seman was scheduled to go on trial for
raping the girl.
The indictment charges Seman with 10 counts of aggravated murder, 3 counts of
burglary and 3 counts of arson.
A pre-trial is scheduled for May 4 in common pleas court.
(source: WFMJ news)
TENNESSEE:
Severe mental illness should rule out death penalty
The state of Texas recently executed Adam Ward, a man with a long history of
severe mental illness. Tennessee has also pursued the death penalty for
individuals like Ward. Occasionally, these individuals are executed. Other
times, the cases are litigated for decades, ending in a sentence less than
death, but not before putting victims' families through a process that delays
legal finality and costs taxpayers millions.
Take the Tennessee case of Richard Taylor, convicted in 1981 for joyriding and
robbery. While incarcerated, Taylor killed corrections officer Ronald Moore
after prison officials stopped giving Taylor his anti-psychotic medication. He
was sentenced to death.
In 2003, Taylor was granted a new trial but allowed to represent himself,
calling no witnesses and introducing no evidence. The jury sentenced Taylor to
death again. After his conviction and death sentence were reversed again in
2008, Taylor received a life sentence - 27 years after his 1st capital trial.
Though most individuals with severe mental illness are not violent - they are
more likely to become crime victims than perpetrators - a lack of access to
treatment can lead to delusions, disassociation and sometimes violence. And in
Tennessee today, there is simply not enough access to treatment.
The result is that law enforcement has become increasingly responsible for
these individuals. In a 2014 column in the Tennessean, Davidson County Mental
Health Court Judge Daniel Eisenstein wrote:
"Mental health treatment has in many cases been shifted from state-run mental
health facilities and community programs to courts, jails and prisons."
To complicate matters, those with severe mental illness do not always recognize
their illness, leading them to fire their counsel and represent themselves,
like Taylor; or they may simply refuse to participate in their defense.
And what about the risk of wrongful conviction?
A 2012 University of Michigan study on wrongful convictions found that roughly
70 % of the defendants who had a mental illness or disability confessed to
crimes they did not commit, whereas only 10 percent of defendants without a
mental illness made false confessions. Individuals with these illnesses are
more susceptible to police pressure and may not understand the charges against
them or their Miranda rights.
Still, when an individual who has a severe mental illness is guilty of
committing a heinous crime, there must be consequences. But is the death
penalty appropriate? A coalition of mental health advocates and others called
the Tennessee Alliance for the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion believes that
individuals with severe mental illness who commit these crimes should be held
accountable, but with appropriate sentences - life or life without parole, not
the death penalty.
And there is precedent. In the United States, we don't execute minors or those
with intellectual disabilities. Excluding individuals with severe mental
illness from the death penalty on a case-by-case basis (also under
consideration in North Carolina and Ohio) is just smart policy as victims'
families are spared decades of litigation, costs to taxpayers are reduced,
resources can be dedicated to mental health care and support for police, and
Tennessee can move toward a criminal justice system that is better for all.
(source: Opinion; Hannah Cox is the coordinator for the Tennessee Alliance for
the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion. She is a former policy advocate for the
National Alliance on Mental Illness, and a long-time champion for those with
mental illness----Knoxville News Sentinel)
CALIFORNIA:
Newly found photo could bolster prosecution's case in Berkeley-Oakland death
penalty trial
A Berkeley man facing multiple murder charges may have inadvertently tipped off
the prosecution to a notable piece of evidence by insisting he get access to
material on his old cellphone.
Police had confiscated the phone of Darnell Williams Jr. at the time of his
arrest in Berkeley in 2013. He has been charged with the murders of an
8-year-old girl in Oakland and a 22-year-old father with ties to the same West
Berkeley neighborhood where Williams lived. The trial began 2 weeks ago. If
convicted, Williams could face the death penalty.
Thursday, after excusing the jury until Tuesday morning, attorneys and Alameda
County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Horner stayed on in the courtroom to update
the written record following two conversations they'd had earlier in chambers.
The defendant's cellphone was the topic of those conversations. The defense
team had, for some time, been pushing Prosecutor John Brouhard to turn over all
material from the phone at their client's urging. Police had tried in the past
to download texts and other information from it, but been stymied by technical
difficulties.
Defense attorneys "thought it was a really stupid and bad idea"
This week, the Fremont Police Department was able to download the entirety of
the phone contents. Brouhard said a review of those records led to the
discovery of a photograph that shows a pistol that could have been used to kill
8-year-old Alaysha Carradine in July 2013. She had been playing at a friend's
house during a sleepover and was not the intended target. 3 other people, 2
children and their grandmother, were injured.
The cellphone image is significant because the prosecution previously had
identified and presented in court several photographs from Williams' phone of
Glock pistols a firearms expert said could have been used in the September 2013
shooting in Berkeley of Anthony "Tone" Medearis Jr.
But no photographs had previously been found on the phone showing the type of
pistol used in the Oakland shooting. (Police never found any guns they were
able to link to the killings.)
Defense attorney Deborah Levy said she and co-counsel Darryl Billups had tried
to convince Williams not to pursue the material on the phone because it could
harm his case. But he was determined to get it.
"Both Mr. Billups and I thought it was a really stupid and bad idea," Levy told
the court. She said she and Billups had been "very concerned" about digging up
the records, but also acknowledged they had signed the April 12 order that
allowed the prosecution to search the phone further.
That order required the prosecution to find a way to get the phone records to
the defense team as quickly as possible. Brouhard described how Oakland
investigators had only been able to get some of the photographs off the phone,
not download its entire contents. After trying twice, they gave up.
At one point, more recently, all 3 attorneys had spent an hour going through
texts on the phone as an officer paged through them, but it was an arduous
process, and Williams wanted to look at the information too. His defense
attorneys passed on the message, so Brouhard said he began looking into how
that might work.
Brouhard said he considered having an officer sit with Williams to show him the
contents of the phone, but was concerned about the resources that might take,
and the officer's safety.
Brouhard said he also spoke with someone in the county crime lab who said he
could photograph every piece of information on the phone one screenshot at a
time to "manually extract" the contents. Brouhard said he had been ready to get
that done when a different investigator came up with the idea to ask Fremont
for help.
Wednesday morning, Fremont was able to do the download. Brouhard said, as a
result, all the attorneys got access to the data.
Brouhard said several text messages on the phone, which had photographs
attached, came to his attention. All 3 were sent from the phone early in the
morning of July 19, 2013, less than 2 days after Alaysha was killed at her best
friend's apartment. The prosecution has said Williams went there to take
revenge on the family of a man he believed had killed his close friend earlier
that day.
All 3 texts showed firearms, Brouhard said: an M1 rifle, a SIG Sauer pistol and
a Glock. In connection with the third, Wiliams wrote that he had three guns and
was trying to "get some more." He had told his girlfriend at the time, she
testified, he was intent on getting rid of the gun from the Oakland shooting.
Brouhard had a firearms expert look at the photograph of the SIG Sauer in
particular. After test-firing that kind of gun, using the type of bullet found
at the Oakland crime scene, the expert determined the SIG Sauer could have been
the weapon used to kill Alaysha.
"They look the same," Brouhard told the court, of the firing pin impressions
and ejector marks - 2 indicators of consistency during forensic firearm
analysis - on the casings from the crime scene and the test casings.
Brouhard cannot definitively say the SIG Sauer in the photo was the one used to
kill Alaysha. But he can now present evidence to the jury to indicate Williams
appears to have had access to a gun that could have been used in that shooting.
The jury, judge and attorneys are in recess until Tuesday morning. Brouhard
said he plans to question several witnesses next week about the cellphone
download and the phone???s location data.
Levy noted that there are more than 130 pages of text messages from the phone
she hopes to review before then.
(All of the prior discussion took place as part of the official court record;
the attorneys are prohibited from communicating with the media about the case
due to a gag order.)
Much of the testimony this week has focused on the Berkeley shooting of
Medearis.
(source: berkeleyside.com)
USA:
The death penalty situation in the US has just become even more absurd -
something has to give----743 inmates are on California's death row - but only
13 have been executed since 1978, the last one a decade ago. And all this at a
cost of no less than $4bn in taxpayers' money
The creeping death of capital punishment in America is now becoming as ghoulish
as the death penalty itself. No longer is the debate about the basic merits of
a practice that has been abolished either de jure or de facto by three quarters
of the countries on the planet. It's about whether the companies and pharmacies
that provide the drugs used for lethal injection - in effect the sole method of
execution used here - should have their identities protected by law to spare
them public protest and commercial embarrassment.
Take the latest convoluted turn of events in Virginia. This one-time
cornerstone of the Confederacy has traditionally been an enthusiastic
practitioner of capital punishment. But Virginia's "machinery of death" - to
use the term coined by Harry Blackmun, the great Supreme Court justice who in
the 1990s turned from acquiescence to outright opposition to the death penalty
- is now paralysed by the difficulty of obtaining the drugs, and by the
arguments over a "shield" law for suppliers.
As a result Virginia has managed to put only 1 person to death in the last 3
years. And other death penalty states like Arkansas, Ohio and Missouri are
being forced into similar legal contortions, as they seek to get hold of the
drugs while concealing the source of them.
This week, Governor Terry McAuliffe tried to cut the Gordian knot. McAuliffe,
it should be noted, is a Democrat and a Catholic who personally opposes capital
punishment. But Virginia's legislature is Republican-controlled and in favour
of the death penalty, and McAuliffe has said he will abide by its wishes. So he
came up with a compromise.
He vetoed a Republican bill that would have simply ordered that if drugs
couldn't be found for a lethal injection, then the electric chair, Virginia's
former method of execution, should be used instead. The chair, McAuliffe said,
was "reprehensible and inhumane." Instead, he put forward an amendment to the
bill, requiring that the names of drug suppliers should be kept secret, even in
the event of a botched execution.
McAuliffe will probably have his way. Liberal Democrats are furious that he's
maintaining capital punishment, but the Republican majority in the state's
Assembly has little choice but to go along if it wants a death penalty at all.
And thereby hangs (if you pardon the pun) a larger problem. America, slowly but
surely, is turning towards getting rid of it.
In its latest report into the death penalty worldwide, Amnesty International
stated that 1,634 known judicial executions took place in 2015, a jump of over
50 % in a year. But the vast bulk were in 3 countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran and
Pakistan.
Then of course there's China, which releases no figures, but whose total might
well double the Amnesty figure. The US, however, is now a very modest
contributor to the total.
In 2015, only 28 people were executed here, the least in a quarter century (and
one of them after a 36-year wait on death row.) Moreover, all but 4 died in
just 3 states: Texas, Georgia and Missouri.
Of the 50 US states, 34 haven't executed anyone over the last 5 years, and soon
South Carolina, another historical bastion of the death penalty, will join
them.
Juries too are handing down far fewer death sentences, only 49 in 2015. Texas,
long America's chief executioner, was responsible for only 2 of them. For the
1st time in decades, the death row population has dropped below 3,000 - and
only a relative handful of them will actually meet their end in the execution
chamber.
Nowhere is the situation more absurd than in California, where the machinery is
so rusty it's falling to pieces. Its death row, housing 743 inmates, is the
most populous of any state, and no wonder. Since California re-instated the
death penalty in 1978, just 13 people have been executed, the last of them a
decade ago. And all this at a cost of no less than $4bn in taxpayers' money. In
economic terms alone, capital punishment is a lousy deal.
But that's far from the only reason the tide is turning. The biggest one is the
near certainty, as DNA evidence has become more conclusive, that innocent
people have been put to death.
Last year alone, 6 death row inmates were exonerated. It's anyone's guess how
many more wrongly convicted murderers are still there, victims of tampered
evidence, over-zealous prosecutors and clueless, ill-paid defence lawyers.
Small wonder a majority of Americans, when offered the choice, prefer life
imprisonment without parole to the lethal injection gurney.
Thus far the demise of the death penalty has been gradual and incremental.
McAuliffe's manoevring is part of the process - and it too could come to grief
as journalists use the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment to
identify suppliers of the drugs, and condemned inmates seek the latters' names,
arguing a constitutional right to do so.
But everything could soon change. The ultimate arbiter is the Supreme Court,
which during a quarter century of conservative control has merely chipped away
at the death penalty, for instance by barring the execution of minors and the
mentally incompetent. Otherwise it has deferred to the states.
It has shied clear of reviewing the underlying constitutionality of the death
penalty, not only under the 8th amendment barring "cruel and unusual
punishment," but also the 14th, that stipulates "equal protection of the laws"
for all.
In reality the ultimate punishment is disproportionately reserved for blacks
and Hispanics, and its imposition is a lottery. The death penalty is supposed
to be for the "worst of the worst" - but in 1 state, even one county of the
same state, you could be sentenced to death, but in another state or county
receive 20 years for an identical offence. So much for equal protection.
Now, however, the Supreme Court that Blackmun once graced could be transformed,
should Democrats win back the presidency and control of the Senate (as polls
suggest they will, if Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is the Republican nominee.)
Right now there is a vacancy on the 9-man bench, meaning an equal split between
4 conservatives and 4 liberals.
But a new Democratic president could, and surely would, choose a liberal,
meaning there would be a majority ready to accept a case challenging the very
constitutionality of capital punishment. And if the Court were to agree, not
only would Terry McAuliffe be off the hook. America would be a better place
(source: Opinion, Rupert Cornwell----The Independent)
***************
Killing in the name of justice is insanity
Between 1977 and 2009, more than 1,188 people were killed by means of the death
penalty.
Most of these subjects were in fact murderers themselves, meaning that the
punishment for unlawful death classified as "murder" results in unlawful deaths
classified as "justice" or "the death penalty." Insanity.
Do we teach our kids not to hit by beating them? I may not have kids myself,
but I know that is not an effective way to teach humans.
Some people may say that the death penalty gives justice to the victim's
family, but in reality would any grieving person wish that same pain and hurt
on another family? Would anyone with morals want to give that heartache to
another mother or father?
That is what happens when our government decides to take an inmate's life to
give "justice" to a victim. Come on, America. Let's think rationally here.
Caley Elizabeth Henry
Salt Lake City
(source: Letter to the Editor, Salt Lake Tribune)
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