Aug. 17
NEBRASKA:
Attorney general disputes death penalty costs
Attorney General Doug Peterson on Tuesday disputed the estimated $14.6 million
annual cost of retaining the death penalty in Nebraska cited a day earlier in a
study commissioned by supporters of ending capital punishment in the state.
"Relying heavily on studies from California, Florida, Texas and other states,
this group's report fails to accurately reflect actual costs associated with
the death penalty in Nebraska," Peterson said.
Pointing to the major cost factor of death penalty appeals cited by Creighton
University economist Ernie Goss in the report prepared for Retain a Just
Nebraska, the attorney general noted that his office handles all criminal
appeals filed by the state of Nebraska, including those filed by inmates facing
the death penalty.
"The total number of criminal appeals filed is approximately 500 per year,"
Peterson said, and less than 1 % of those appeals are filed in capital cases
annually.
"It is misleading for this report to conclude that, on an annual basis, having
the death penalty costs an amount that far exceeds the total annual budgets of
both the Nebraska attorney general's office and the state public defender's
office combined," he said.
"Nebraska voters are entitled to accurate Nebraska figures as they determine
whether to keep the death penalty in Nebraska."
The study by Goss and Associates Economic Solutions stated that costs
associated with the death penalty as opposed to a sentence of life without
parole are higher at every stage of the judicial and correctional process,
including legal defense, pre-trial activities, jury selection, length of trial,
incarceration and appeal.
(source: Lincoln Journal Star)
IDAHO:
County to seek death penalty in double-murder case
The Teton County Prosecutor's office confirmed that they will be seeking the
death penalty for Erik Ohlson, 39, of Jackson.
Ohlson will be arraigned in an Idaho District Court on Sept. 6 with 2 charges
of 1st degree murder.
Ohlson faces 1 murder charge for the shooting death of Jennifer Nalley, 39, of
Driggs. The 2nd count stems from the death of Nalley's unborn child.
Ohlson was arrested for a DUI after crashing his vehicle into a utility pole.
While he was in custody, he told investigators he shot Nalley after coming to
her home in Driggs. He said he was in a relationship with Nalley and was aware
that she was pregnant.
There, he will have the opportunity to plead guilty or not guilty.
County Prosecutor Kathy Spitzer confirmed that prosecutors would declare their
intent to seek the death penalty before then.
Cases involving the death penalty can become very expensive.
"The cost of a capital case can vary widely depending on the specifics of the
case and the speed at which the prosecution and defense come to a settlement,"
said Idaho Association of Counties Associate General Counsel Dan Blocksom. "The
range can be anywhere from about $10,000 to $500,000..."
By seeking the death penalty, the county is triggering the Capital Crimes
Defense Fund, CCDF, which is designed to "ease the burden of the cost of trials
for death penalty cases."
The fund, which counties pay into on a per capita basis, is governed by the
Idaho Association of Counties, IAC.
"Counties don't have to pay into the fund, but if they don't, then the State
Appellate Public Defender will not handle the defense for their appeals," said
Blocksom.
The CCDF works kind of like an insurance policy, with a deductible of $10,000
and an annual "premium" based on county population.
According to Blocksom, Teton County's dues amount from 2007 to 2016 has been
$3,095 per year.
Once the county pays the deductible, "the CCDF will pay the costs for the
second attorney [required for death penalty cases] and all other related trial
costs including but not limited to preparation, investigation, forensics,
mitigation, etc."
These requirements can get very expensive.
"Even if the capital defense kicks in, some counties can almost go broke over
prosecuting something like this," said Blocksom.
This is in part because the CCDF pays for only 1 of the defendant's attorneys
and does not pay any of the prosecution's bills.
"IAC has been primarily concerned about ensuring the 6th Amendment right to
counsel for indigent defendants, and thus has been urging the Idaho Legislature
to provide state funding to the counties to protect this right," said Blocksom.
"Prosecution, on the other hand, is not a constitutional issue in the same way
that public defense is, so IAC's handling of this issue is only indirectly
through its assistance of the CCDF board's discussions."
Just the reimbursable parts of a capital case can reach the hundreds of
thousands.
The CCDF paid more than $400,000 in claims to Latah County's defense of Dale
Shackelford, who killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend and then set fire to the
building where their bodies were found.
Shoshone County Clerk Peggy White is dealing with the payments for one such
capital case, where a 26-year-old woman was charged with murdering a 22 month
old child. The case is still ongoing, but no longer involves the death penalty.
For White, paying for the case has proven a challenge.
"It's devastating to have a murder case," said White. "So far, I've got a ton
of bills. Approximately $168,000 thus far ... It's a big deal to us."
Shoshone County, which is 76 % public land and has a population of about
12,600, had to pay for trial costs upfront by forming a trust account, which
the Defense Fund reimburses.
To be reimbursed, the expenses have to first be approved by the CCDF board,
made up of representative county commissioners from each state district.
Furthermore, according to the CCDF's guidelines, "if a case is converted from a
capital case to a non-capital case prior to trial, the CCDF shall pay only
those amounts incurred prior to conversion to a non-capital case."
Prosecutors can remove the intent to have capital punishment at any time.
Ohlson's defense has not returned a request for comment.
(source: Teton Valley News)
WASHINGTON:
Debating the death penalty
Editor's note: Today's editorials appeared in The Columbian. Editorial content
from other publications is provided to give readers a sampling of regional and
national opinion and does not necessarily reflect positions endorsed by the
Editorial Board of The Daily News.
The pending criminal case against Brent Luyster provides an opportunity for
necessary discussions about issues surrounding the death penalty in Washington.
Many of those topics were explored recently in an article by Columbian reporter
Jessica Prokop. The story focused on the financial costs of pursuing capital
punishment - costs that, according to a Seattle University study, typically run
about $1 million per case. And yet the social costs surrounding the death
penalty are equally important as debate continues throughout the nation over
the moral and philosophical dilemma engulfing capital punishment.
Gov. Jay Inslee already has weighed in with his opinion about these costs. In
2014, he implemented a moratorium on capital punishment in the state, saying he
would offer a reprieve to those who have been sentenced to death but would not
commute sentences. "Equal justice under the law is the state's primary
responsibility," Inslee said at the time. "And in death penalty cases, I'm not
convinced equal justice is being served"
Certainly, there is room for debate surrounding capital punishment. There is
room for discussion about inequity in how the punishment is handed out; in how
laws vary from state to state; and in how there is the persistent possibility
of executing somebody who, in truth, is innocent of the crimes for which they
have been convicted. But the fact is that Washington voters have approved the
death penalty, establishing the state's current capital punishment law in 1981.
And the fact is that Inslee has a duty to carry out the laws of the state
rather than unilaterally imposing his vision of fairness and equity.
The governor's stance on the issue should not influence those in the office of
the Clark County Prosecutor, who will decide whether or not to pursue the death
penalty against Luyster. He has been charged with gunning down 2 friends on the
porch of a rural Woodland home, then barging inside and shooting 2 women, 1 of
whom died. Clark County Prosecutor Tony Golik said: "This is an issue that
prosecutor offices statewide wrestle with. We are in a difficult position as
prosecutors in this state where we have the death penalty that is continuously
approved by voters. The law provides for that sentence in certain
circumstances, but we also have, conversely, the governor's position and also
the knowledge that the Supreme Court has routinely reversed death-penalty
decisions."
It also is an issue that voters should again wrestle with. Last year, the
Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys announced that it planned to
push the Legislature to put a death-penalty referendum before voters. But no
such measure is on this year's ballot, leaving prosecutors to weigh a state law
that passed a generation ago against the governor's moratorium. In the
meantime, taxpayers are left to weigh the cost of capital-punishment cases
against the cost of incarcerating the most abhorrent criminals for the rest of
their lives - a toll that runs about $36,000 a year for each death-row inmate.
In the long run, money should not be a significant factor in considering the
death penalty. What is most important is the notion of justice and the equity
with which it is handed out. Establishing and implementing a system that
reflects our highest ideals and that engenders the trust of the public has a
value that is priceless in a civilized society.
(source: tdn.com)
USA:
Donald J Trump phoned in to Fox & Friends in May 2015, shortly after 2 police
officers were shot dead in Mississippi.
Presenter Steve Doocy wanted to know what an appropriate punishment for the
killers would be.
"Well, it's the death penalty," Trump said airily. "We have people who are,
these 2, animals who shot the cops ... the death penalty, it should be brought
back and it should be brought back strong."
A month later, Trump announced he was running for president. He has barely said
the words "death penalty" in public since, although a top adviser has called
for Hillary Clinton's execution, saying she "should be put in the firing line
and shot for treason".
Clinton only talks about capital punishment when pressed and then, clumsily.
Unlike most of her own party - including running mate Tim Kaine - the Democrat
supports death in the case of terrorists. She has said she would be happy if
someone would outlaw execution. Someone else.
In campaign 2016, the safest stance on the ultimate punishment may be silence.
Both candidates need to woo disaffected members of the other's party. Neither
can afford to lose their own loyal base.
"Why bring it up if it's going to stir the pot if you don't have to?" said
Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior fellow at the University of Southern California's
Sol Price School of Public Policy.
For the 1st time since 1972, the Democratic party platform advocates repealing
the death penalty. Mainstream Republican opinion has begun to turn away from
it, too. Executions and death sentences are down nationwide, while the number
of exonerated death row inmates creeps upward.
The percentage of Americans who support the death penalty has been steadily
declining since its high of 80% in the mid-1990s, although a comfortable
majority - 61% according to Gallup, and 56% according to the Pew Research
Center - still favor the use of capital punishment for a person convicted of
murder.
And California - with the biggest death row in the country - could become the
6th state in recent years to do away with executions as voters there face
dueling ballot measures in November, one to repeal the death penalty, the other
to streamline it.
Trump has increasingly positioned himself as a law and order candidate. He
doubled down on fear of immigrant criminals in his speech to the Republican
national convention and recently said he supported "extreme vetting" of people
from other countries. Yet he has so far shied away from promising grisly
execution for murderers.
The main exception was a December speech to the New England Police Benevolent
Association, a police officers' union, in which he promised an executive order
mandating death sentences for cop-killers. (This would not work out, in any
case; mandatory death sentences were rendered unconstitutional by a 1976
supreme court decision.)
Perhaps the most illuminating examples of Trump's death penalty position are
the newspaper advertisements he took out in 1989 demanding death for five black
and Latino teenagers - the so-called Central Park 5 - who were convicted of the
rape and attempted murder of a woman that year. The 5 men were exonerated in
2002.
The full-page advertisements are classic Trump. Under the vast headline "BRING
BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!" is a lengthy screed, much of it
in capital letters.
"I want to hate these muggers and murderers," Trump wrote. "They should be
forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their
crimes."
The Republican platform, recently ratified at the party's convention in
Cleveland, contains just 2 sentences on the subject of capital punishment.
"The constitutionality of the death penalty is firmly settled by its explicit
mention in the Fifth Amendment," it says. "With the murder rate soaring in our
great cities, we condemn the Supreme Court's erosion of the right of the people
to enact capital punishment in their states."
This reflects an emerging Republican critique of the death penalty, which more
and more conservatives oppose, said Michael Radelet, a professor of sociology
at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies capital punishment.
The rising conservative critique is based on 3 pillars, the 1st of which is
financial. "It costs a zillion dollars to send anybody to death row, so fiscal
conservatives want to cut down on that money," Radelet said.
The 2nd, he said, is religious principle; the pope condemned capital punishment
in his 2015 speech to Congress, and "if we get a survey of religious leaders in
the US there???s no question that the overwhelming majority would stand opposed
to the death penalty."
The 3rd pillar, according to Radelet, is a simpler attitude of distrust in
governmental efficiency, summarized as "hell, the government can't even fill a
pothole properly", so why should it be trusted with the power of life and
death? None of these arguments appear to carry any weight with the party's
nominee. Trump has stayed largely silent on the subject, with the exception of
his remarks on Fox & Friends, and a 2015 New York Times interview in which he
said that the death penalty was a deterrent because when somebody is executed
"you know that person's not going to kill again".
In the 1980s and 90s, opposition to the death penalty was "political poison in
most elections", said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty
Information Center. "Now, you are seeing Republican legislators, many of them
conservative Republicans, openly oppose the death penalty."
Still, most of the decline in death penalty support comes from Democrats,
according to a 2015 study by Pew Research Center. Nearly 60% of Democrats
oppose the death penalty, compared to just 25% in 1996.
Which may be part of the problem for Clinton, who was roundly criticized for
her awkward responses to questions about the death penalty during the primary
season.
Both of her primary rivals - Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland
governor Martin O'Malley - opposed capital punishment. Now that the general
election is under way , a Clinton challenge will be getting Sanders' fervent
and progressive supporters to the polls.
Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has been criticized for her awkward
responses to questions about the death penalty.
At a CNN/TV One town hall meeting in Ohio in March, an undecided voter named
Ricky Jackson stood up to ask the former secretary of state a question. Jackson
had spent 39 years in prison for murder before being exonerated and freed in
2014.
"Senator, I spent some of those years on death row, and," Jackson began. He
paused. Wiped tears from his eyes. "Excuse me, I'm sorry. I came perilously
close to my own execution ... I would like to know how can you still take your
stance on the death penalty in light of what we know right now."
"You know, this is such a profoundly difficult question," Clinton began
cautiously.
"And what I have said and what I continue to believe is that the states have
proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials that give any defendant
all of the rights a defendant should have, all of the support that the
defendant's lawyer should have."
Then she stepped into deep trouble, with a response critics roundly decried as
typical triangulation, a kind of squishy have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too caution.
"I have said I would breathe a sigh of relief if either the supreme court or
the states, themselves, began to eliminate the death penalty," she said.
"At this point, given the challenges we face from terrorist activities
primarily in our country that end up under federal jurisdiction for very
limited purposes," she continued, "I think that it can still be held in reserve
for those."
Maybe, she said, "it is distinction that is hard to support."
(source: The Guardian)
*************
Nearly 2 weeks of new hearings planned in Rodriguez death penalty appeal
Nearly 2 weeks have been set aside next spring and summer for court hearings in
Alfonso Rodriguez Jr.'s appeal of his death sentence.
4 days starting March 28 are allotted for an evidentiary hearing on forensic
issues in the murder case. An evidentiary hearing on Rodriguez's mental health
is slated to start June 20 and last f4 days or more.
U.S. District Judge Ralph Erickson made the scheduling decisions Tuesday, Aug.
16, at a hearing in Fargo's federal court. Erickson said he expects the mental
health hearing may take longer than four days given the complexity of the
issues at hand.
Rodriguez, 63, of Crookston was sentenced to death for the 2003 kidnapping,
rape and murder of 22-year-old Dru Sjodin, a University of North Dakota
student. The question of Rodriguez's mental capacity is a key element of his
appeal, as the U.S. Supreme Court has held it's unconstitutional to execute an
intellectually disabled person.
Rodriguez's attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Victor Abreu, told the judge
that the mental health hearing will involve a significant number of witnesses,
more than the forensic hearing.
The 2 hearings could be the longest period of testimony seen in the case since
the trial that resulted in Rodriguez's conviction in 2006.
The progress of Rodriguez's appeal has lately been slowed by a change in his
defense attorneys. Abreu is one of the attorneys from the Federal Community
Defender Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania recently tapped to
represent Rodriguez.
Rodriguez had been represented by court-appointed attorneys Michael Wiseman,
Joseph Margulies and Andrew Mohring during his appeal. But in March, the 3
asked to be replaced by the FCDO because of staffing changes in the federal
defender system and the FCDO's expertise.
On Tuesday, at the request of the defense, the judge extended the appointment
of Rodriguez's outgoing attorneys until Oct. 6, allowing them to help with the
case until the FCDO is ready to take over full time.
Complicating the handoff are tens of thousands of pages of case documents that
must be transferred from Rodriguez's old attorneys to his new ones. Abreu told
the judge the transfer is 90 % complete.
In 2011, attorneys filed a habeas corpus motion to appeal Rodriguez's death
sentence. Considered a last-resort appeal after his direct appeals were turned
down by the U.S. Supreme Court, the motion argues he is mentally disabled and
was insane at the time of the crime, making him ineligible for the death
penalty.
(source: Duluth News Tribune)
*************
Hearings in North Dakota death penalty case pushed back
A federal judge on Tuesday pushed back the next hearing in a North Dakota death
penalty case to allow a new defense team to catch up on evidence.
U.S. District Judge Ralph Erickson had re-assigned the case of Alfonso
Rodriguez Jr. in June to the Federal Community Defender Office, or FCDO, in
Pennsylvania. The move was viewed primarily as a cost-cutting measure.
A jury in 2005 convicted Rodriguez, of Crookston, Minnesota, for kidnapping and
killing University of North Dakota student Dru Sjodin, of Pequot Lakes,
Minnesota, in November 2003. It was North Dakota's 1st federal death penalty
case and led to tougher laws for sex offenders.
The next hearing in the case was expected to take place on Nov. 1 in Fargo,
with a 2nd hearing to follow on Jan. 17. During a 10-minute session in open
court Tuesday, Erickson scheduled a hearing on forensic issues for March 28 and
hearing on mental health issues for June 20.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Keith Reisenauer, who filed court documents in March
arguing against the change in lawyers, had no objection to the new timeline and
called it the best approach "to move forward."
Erickson tentatively scheduled 2 weeks for the hearing on mental health issues
after Victor Abreu, an assistant federal defender, said there would be "a
significant amount of witnesses" expected to take the stand.
Abreu and federal prosecutors declined to comment after the hearing.
The habeas corpus motion, considered the last step in the appeal process, was
originally filed in 2011. Erickson called on prominent death penalty Joseph
Margulies, a Cornell University law professor, to lead the defense team.
The nearly 300-page appeal by Margulies says, among other things, that
Rodriguez is mentally disabled, his trial lawyers were ineffective and the
medical examiner made numerous mistakes.
"In large part, this is a case about junk science and false forensics," the
appeal says.
(source: Associated Press)
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