Nov. 10
GEORGIA----impending execution//volunteer
Killer still refuses to appeal sentence as execution date nears
Even though Georgia has scheduled Steven Spears' execution for the 2001 murder
of his ex-girlfriend, he still refuses to meet with his lawyer to appeal his
death sentence.
Spears has rebuffed his lawyer's attempts to talk, or even meet, for more than
a year. If this continues, Spears will go to his death by lethal injection on
Nov. 16 without bringing an appeal other than the automatic one that was filed
after he was condemned for killing Sherri Holland.
And it would be the 1st time Georgia has executed a murderer who never
voluntarily challenged his trial, conviction, or sentence.
"I sent a letter (saying), 'Please let us fight for you. There is something
worth fighting for,'" said Clayton attorney Allyn Stockton, who represented
Spears at trial and remains his attorney of record.
No answer.
And when Stockton has gone to the prison near Jackson, Spears has refused to
come out.
"Seeking the death penalty was justified, and there wouldn't be an injustice
done if he is executed," said Jeffrey Langley, district attorney for the
4-county Enotah Judicial Circuit, which includes Lumpkin, where the killing
took place.
Spears, 54, would be the 8th person Georgia has executed in 2016 , more than
any other state this year. The last time Georgia executed 8 or more people in a
year was 1957, when 16 men were electrocuted. Georgia most recently executed
cop killer Gregory Lawler on Oct. 12.
Since the death penalty was reinstated nationwide in 1976, 144 people have
voluntarily gone to their deaths, the most recent in Texas last year, according
to Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
"That is uncommon, but it is not rare," Dunham said.
Not Just A Question Of Guilt
John Blume, a Cornell Law School professor who has researched inmates who
"volunteer" to be executed, said the percentage of death row prisoners who give
up their appeals mirrors free-world suicides.
"Every death-row volunteer inevitably presents us with the following question:
Should a death-row inmate who wishes to waive his appeals be viewed as a client
making a legal decision to accept the justness of his punishment, or as a
person seeking the aid of the state in committing suicide?" Blume wrote in a
paper published by Cornell Law School, "Killing the Willing."
"It's not that everybody shouldn't be able to do it," Blume said in an
interview. "The court should at least inquire as to what the motivation is. It
might be there is a person who has no mental illness and doesn't appear to be
suicidal. It may be (a case of) 'I can't live with what I did. I deserve to die
for what I did.'"
The risk of avoiding appeals, Dunham said, is that "someone who is mentally
ill, emotionally disturbed or intellectually disabled will be executed. ...
There may not be a question about guilt. That does not mean it's not an
unjustified execution."
The courts have said inmates with mental, emotional or intellectual
disabilities cannot be executed, but Georgia's standard for proving those
disabilities is the toughest in the nation.
Kill Me, Or I Will Kill You
Sometimes, of course, a death penalty "volunteer" will change his mind. Larry
Lonchar, sentenced to die for a DeKalb County triple murder, initially refused
to appeal his sentence. But twice within hours of his scheduled execution, he
agreed to let his lawyers appeal, once because he wanted legislators to pass a
law allowing him to donate his organs. Lonchar was electrocuted in 1996.
Stockton said Spears has wavered many times about whether he wanted to be put
to death. Spears has said he did not want to live in prison and that death
would be a relief.
Also, when he was on trial in Lumpkin County in 2007, Spears would not let his
defense team present any evidence that might have persuaded the jury to give
him life in prison, Stockton said.
Stockton said Spears told his lawyers there would be consequences if they
fought for a life sentence. "'I will take the stand (and testify), and if I get
out (of prison) I will come and kill you,'" Stockton said Spears told him.
4 Ways To Murder 1 Woman
Spears readily confessed to murdering Holland, telling investigators, "If I had
to do it again, I'd do it."
The couple dated for about 3 years, despite Spears having told Holland that
he'd choke her to death if he ever caught her with somebody else, Spears told
investigators.
After their breakup, Spears suspected Holland had found someone new. So he
plotted her murder, coming up with plans to electrocute her, beat her to death,
shoot her or suffocate her.
He told investigators he put everything in place for each plan so things would
be ready when it was time to kill her.
Spears connected wires to the bathroom plumbing in the crawlspace under
Holland's house so she could be electrocuted when she showered during a
thunderstorm. "Pretty creative, ain't it," Spears told investigators, according
to court records.
He fashioned a bat out of a tree limb and hid it under a canoe in her yard so
he could grab it easily if he decided to beat Holland to death.
Spears also crawled through an air conditioning vent into her house. He loaded
Holland's shotgun, put it back in place and left. "If she brought somebody else
in there I was just gonna shoot him," Spears said.
'Last Thing She Said Was ...' Spears followed his 4th plan.
On Aug. 24, 2001, around 10 p.m., Spears hid in the closet of the bedroom where
Holland's son usually slept. The 13-year-old boy was visiting his father for
the weekend.
4 hours later, Spears went into Holland's bedroom and started binding her hands
and feet with duct tape. They struggled and at one point he punched her in the
head and began to choke her.
"Last thing she said was she loved me," Spears told investigators. "Swear to
God, that's the last thing she said."
He carried the unconscious woman back to her bed, wrapped her face and mouth
with duct tape, placed a plastic bag over her head and secured the bag with
duct tape. She smothered.
Before leaving Holland's house, Spears set the thermostat for the heater to 90
degrees and secured her bedroom door with a padlock.
After changing clothes at his house, Spears drove to a nearby store, bought
fishing gear and a fishing license, then went fishing, according to testimony.
Holland's ex-husband and her son found her body on Aug. 26, 2001, a day after
she was killed.
Spears was almost immediately suspected. He had dropped a flashlight at
Holland's house. In his car, investigators found a receipt for a green light
bulb he'd placed under Holland's house so he could see while he tampered with
her plumbing and wiring. And Holland's purse was discovered in Spears' trailer.
10 days later, after hiding in the woods, Spears was spotted walking along a
Lumpkin County road. He told a deputy he was headed to town to turn himself in.
Spears told investigators he killed Holland because he loved her. "I told her I
wasn't letting her go, and I didn't."
(source: myajc.com)
NORTH CAROLINA:
North Carolina Hasn't Executed Anyone in 10 Years. So Why Is Capital Punishment
Still on the Books? ---- With a de facto moratorium in place, the 150 people on
death row find themselves in limbo
For Lyle May, the death penalty is not a cause, a protest, or a political
debate - at least, not entirely. It's the sound of prison guards' boots pinging
against the floor as they approach a condemned man's cell. It's looking on as a
friend packs his few belongings into a cardboard box. It's hugging his neck
during a final goodbye. It's knowing that after his heart beats for the last
time, some other inmate is one moment closer to the day he, too, feels the
sting of a needle.
May has been down that particular road dozens of times since he was convicted
of killing a woman and her son and disposing of their bodies along the Blue
Ridge Parkway near Asheville nearly 20 years ago. And not every man he has seen
take the long, lonely walk to Central Prison's "death watch" block - the
solitary section of death row that sits adjacent to the execution chamber - has
stoically accepted his fate.
Eddie Hartman was a mentor of sorts, a man May shared countless laughs with
over card games. So as his execution date approached in the fall of 2003, May
tried his best to be both a shoulder to cry on and a sounding board for the
friend who found himself, at long last, contemplating his fleeting mortality.
"At some point, you just have to be OK with being executed, with dying," May
says. "Well, he wasn't. He said, point blank, 'I don't want to die. I don't
want this to end.' What do you say to someone who you know is about to die? I
wanted to be anywhere but this place."
There's nothing dignified about those last few days, nothing to signal to the
men left on the row that everything will be OK. Just a handshake. A long,
emotional embrace. And then, for hours, silence - an eerie calm May likens to
waiting for a storm to pass.
"You try to find something to take your mind away from what's happening," he
says. "And just like a tornado, once it's over, [dwelling on the aftermath] is
useless. There's nothing you can do."
It's the unease that comes with knowing that you, too, will one day take that
same final walk that makes living on the row a unique incarceration experience.
For May, that wait is his personal hell.
"It's absolutely torture," he says. "It's absolutely on my mind every day I
wake up, every time I go to sleep. In here, it's really difficult to think
about having a future. Without that threat - that constant worry that all I'm
doing now would be for nothing and that I will eventually die in an execution
chamber - life would be incredibly different."
And in North Carolina, thanks to a de facto moratorium that has been in place
for more than 10 years, that wait is indeterminate - because, here, the death
penalty is a cause, a protest, and a political debate.
North Carolina hasn't broken out the needle since 2006, when Samuel Flippen was
executed as punishment for murdering his 2-year-old stepdaughter. But the
moratorium - a result of legal challenges stemming from arguments that lethal
injection violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment"
to the 2009 passage of the Racial Justice Act, which allowed (until its repeal
in 2013) death row inmates to challenge their convictions on the grounds of
racial bias - has not yet prompted the state to eliminate capital punishment
from the books.
That fact troubles death-penalty abolitionists, who have argued that the costs
associated with trying capital cases - the millions spent on both the
prosecution and defense and on the many appeals guaranteed to the condemned -
is simply too heavy a burden for taxpayers. More important, they note that in
the last ten years, murder rates have declined (thus debunking the deterrent
argument), 4 death-row inmates have been exonerated, the State Bureau of
Investigations admitted to falsifying evidence in dozens of trials, and a judge
found evidence of statewide racial bias in the use of the death penalty.
Meanwhile, public support for the death penalty has plummeted. A Pew Research
poll released in September revealed that fewer than half of Americans - 49 % -
were in favor of capital punishment, a decrease of 7 % points from 2015. In
North Carolina, 68 % of those polled in 2013 were in favor of life in prison
without the possibility of parole as the state's maximum sentence, and the
majority of those who think the death penalty is antiquated - 61 % - disagree
with the notion that capital punishment deters criminals.
So why, they ask, are men and women still being sentenced to die, even though
experts, including many of the district attorneys who try these cases, say the
death penalty likely won't be used for years to come, if ever? And is forcing
someone, guilty or not, to wait in limbo for an execution that might not ever
come itself a form of cruel and unusual punishment?
Susanna Birdsong, the policy counsel for the state ACLU, says it is.
"If somebody wakes up every day having to think about that and the gravity of
that - the uncertainty of it - it's certainly psychological torture in a way,"
she says.
She continues: "More and more people are saying, we shouldn't, as a state, be
putting people to death and, you know, it's been ten years since the last
execution in North Carolina, and in that time, four more people have been
exonerated. And a lot of times people talk about, 'We need the death penalty.
It really helps to lower the crime rate when people know they could be
sentenced to death by the state.' But in the time that there has been this de
facto moratorium in North Carolina, the murder rate has, in fact, declined. So
it disproves that myth. The state and the people would be much better served by
doing away with [the death penalty] completely."
The cost of capital punishment in North Carolina can be measured in more than
the toll it takes on the 147 men and three women who are waiting to die. It
imposes a substantial economic burden on the state's taxpayers as well.
According to a 2009 Duke University study by Philip Cook, the standard-bearer
of rigorous evaluations on capital punishment in North Carolina, death-penalty
prosecutions cost taxpayers at least $11 million a year. Why? Because the vast
majority of inmates residing on the row have been deemed indigent and,
consequently, are guaranteed a legal defense on North Carolina's dime. These
cases require 2 attorneys and a team of investigators and a direct appeal to
the N.C. Supreme Court upon conviction.
"On average, defending a capital case costs four times as much as a
first-degree murder trial in which the defendant faces a maximum of life
imprisonment," Cook concluded. And that figure doesn't include prosecution
costs, "despite the fact that death-penalty cases can eat up hundreds of hours
in state-funded district attorneys' offices and law enforcement agencies." An
earlier study, conducted by Duke researchers in 2007, found that it costs North
Carolina more than $2 million to prosecute a capital homicide and see it
through to execution.
"The bottom line is that the death penalty is a financial burden on the state
and a resource-absorbing burden on the trial courts," Cook wrote. "That
conclusion is relevant to the debate over whether preserving the death penalty
is in the public interest, but surely not among the most important
considerations."
Prosecutors are finding it more and more difficult to justify pursuing the
death penalty. In fact, the number of capital cases in North Carolina has been
on the decline for the better part of a decade. Since the moratorium took
effect, no more than a handful have been tried statewide in any given year.
Many district attorneys shy away from such undertakings because finding jurors
willing to send someone to his or her death can be difficult. Others know that
a death sentence is, at this point, more symbolic than anything - not worth the
man hours required to see it through. Last year, North Carolina saw zero
capital convictions - an exclamation point on a downward trend that has seen
the number of new death-row inmates nosedive since the turn of the century.
Durham District Attorney Roger Echols knows all too well what it takes to put
together a capital case. His office will soon argue to a jury that Craig Hicks
should be sentenced to death for murdering three Muslim students in February
2015. Despite that case - the first capital case he's tried during his 2 years
as DA - he acknowledges that determining a death sentence is not something to
pursue lightly and that current legal hurdles and waning public support have
changed the equation. So what does he use as guidance when making the call?
"Are there aggravating circumstances, which is what legally have to be present
to seek the death penalty? Are those things present?" he says. "Some people may
think that it's just a decision, whether you want to go for the death penalty
or not, but there are legal hurdles. Every case that is charged, and every case
that we may think that there is an argument for 1st-degree murder, does not
qualify for death-penalty prosecution. I think that's one thing we're looking
at. I'm also looking at the nature of the offense, meaning obviously it's
homicide, but what are the facts involved? How heinous is it? What effectively
makes this case different from any homicide case?"
As required by state law, he also has to consider what the victim's family
wants.
"We consult the victim or the victim's family in the case of a homicide, and
the victim's-rights case, before we make certain types of decisions," Echols
says. "I'm not going to be seeking the death penalty just because I can. And
generally, the public doesn't want it."
Of course, not everyone sees it that way. During closing arguments in Lyle
May's trial, prosecutors argued that for some people, life in prison is too
lenient a sentence - and the jury listened.
"I know it's hard when you sit here and you look at [May] like that in his
shirt and sometimes his tie, it's hard to picture him in a prison yard playing
cards with the guys, in a prison gym punching a punching bag, in a prison cell
having a snack, watching TV or listening to the radio," the prosecutor said.
"But if your verdict is life, one day soon, that's what he'll be doing, and
life will not be worse for him. He isn't someone who will sit there
contemplating what he's done and where he's gone wrong. He'll sit there eating
his fireballs, savoring his memory of how much he enjoyed what he did."
Every door and stretch of trim inside death row is painted red - a deep
burgundy that serves as a reminder for people like May that the end of their
story has already been scripted.
"Red is synonymous with death," May says. "Red. You know, because there's blood
on our hands."
The paint isn't the only thing that differentiates death row from Central
Prison's general population. There's a single TV located in the dayroom that
serves those 147 men. In the yard, there's a dirt lot next to a concrete lot;
aside from a beat-up football and 2 worn basketball goals, there's not much to
engage with during the hour the inmates are permitted to spend outside on days
when the weather is fair.
May embraces those 60 minutes. He finds they offer him a sense of normalcy. "I
like the smell of the fresh air," he says, before acknowledging that even that
serves as a grim reminder of his circumstance. "I don't think I've seen a night
sky in 19 years. I'd love to be under one."
While conditions on the row are quieter and cleaner than one might encounter in
a county jail, at every turn May is confronted with a routine he says would be
far more bearable if he were serving a life sentence somewhere else.
"If you add into [a life sentence] that threat of death and the fact that
you're isolated from the population and denied the ability to gain access to
work programs, school programs, vocational programs, to have contact visits,
the ability to engage in discourse with a varying population, there's nothing
to work toward in here," he says. "I mean, not too long ago, we got to use
plastic chairs to bring into the dayroom, and that was a big deal for us. Those
are the things we have to look forward to. And having things to look forward
to, you have no idea how humanizing that can be."
May has spent the better part of his life on the row, looking for, as he
describes it, "something to distract you from the inevitable truth that it
means absolutely nothing." Little things like phone access - a privilege
granted in March that ultimately enabled May and other inmates to contact the
INDY for this story - allow the men to feel, if only in bursts, human again.
But fifteen minutes on the phone or an hour outside can only do so much.
"You have to really find a way to give meaning to your life," he says. "Each
day is like an obstacle course that starts with that door opening, the lights
coming on, and those guards screaming into the intercom, 'Chow time. Chow
time,' at 6 a.m."
Still, as May reflects on his first few years there, he admits those days were
cathartic.
"No matter how much time you spend in prison, whether it's with a life sentence
or a death sentence, you can't help but go over the mistakes you've made in the
past," he says. "Even if you don't see them as mistakes, you're going to
rethink everything that got you to this point. And there's gonna be some kind
of unintentional rehabilitation that comes with that. ... You know, I'm here
because I lost my mind. I lost my mind one time and now I'm here. For the first
handful of years, it's all I thought about, but eventually, you're forced to
think about and deal with it because if you don't, it's gonna keep coming back
to pound you into the ground until you're dead or crazy."
But with that realization came a yearning to find a way to make up for his past
transgressions. And that, he says, is another aspect of a death sentence people
on the outside simply don't understand - and certainly not something the
prosecutor in his case believed him capable of.
"Out there," he says, "is an opportunity to grow and learn the way you can't
when you're in death row. We're capable of change."
The Killing Machine
North Carolinians have been debating the constitutionality of the death penalty
since 1917, when Rufus Satterfield was electrocuted for more than 6 minutes
before he was pronounced dead. Legislators argued that his death amounted to
unconstitutional torture, prompting legislation passed in 1935 that changed the
method of execution to lethal gas.
Nearly 40 years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty itself
was unconstitutional, but that 1972 decision was later amended, and, in 1976,
the court allowed executions to again be carried out, so long as jurors had a
choice between capital punishment and life imprisonment.
By 1984, North Carolina's death row was back in business, but dissent lingered.
In 2003, state senator Eleanor Kinnaird, D-Orange, proposed a bill to create a
2-year study on the inequalities in capital sentencing. The measure, however,
was defeated in the state House.
The 1st real blow to capital punishment came in 2007, when the North Carolina
Medical Board issued an ethics policy prohibiting a doctor from doing anything
more than being present at an execution - and threatened disciplinary action
against doctors who facilitated one. The order was in direct conflict with the
state's execution procedures, which required that a doctor be present and
monitor the inmate's essential body functions until he or she was dead. That
obstacle was cleared in 2009, when the N.C. Supreme Court ruled against the
state medical board.
The same year, however, with the passage of the Racial Justice Act, inmates
were given an opportunity to appeal their convictions on the grounds of racial
bias, complicating matters further. And even though the legislature repealed it
in 2013, injunctions and reviews of Racial Justice Act cases have left the
state unable to carry out lethal injections. And so, for more than a decade -
and probably for years hence - those on death row have been left in limbo.
(source: indyweek.com)
OHIO:
Ohio Supreme Court denies defense requests in 1990s Cincinnati murder
cases----Lawyers filed requests after federal case
The Ohio Supreme Court denied motions Wednesday for two death row inmates from
Cincinnati seeking to avoid the death penalty in unrelated cases.
Lawyers for Bobby Sheppard sought to have his death sentence vacated and
lawyers for Angelo Fears sought a stay of execution after the U.S. Supreme
Court found Florida's capital punishment system violated the Sixth Amendment.
Sheppard, 40, shot and killed store owner Dennis Willhide during a College Hill
robbery on Aug. 19, 1994. He was later found guilty of aggravated robbery and
murder and sentenced to death.
Fears, 43, shot and killed Antwuan Gilliam during a drug deal-turned-robbery on
March 29, 1997 in Over-the-Rhine. He was later found guilty of aggravated
murder and sentenced to death.
Fears was scheduled to be put to death on Sept. 17, 2015, but the execution was
delayed due to a shortage of lethal drugs.
In the Florida case, the U.S. Supreme court said that the jurors in Timothy
Hurst's trial did not have enough say in deciding he should be executed for a
1998 murder.
The Ohio Supreme Court has decided that the Florida case does not apply to
Ohio's death penalty system. However, Justice William O'Neill dissented from
the majority decision in both cases, saying Sheppard should get a resentencing
the Fears' execution should be stayed.
The court also denied a motion to vacate a death sentence in a case out of
Greene County Wednesday.
(source: WCPO news)
NEBRASKA:
With death penalty reinstated in Nebraska, Ricketts to focus on carrying it out
Now that Nebraskans have reinstated the death penalty, Gov. Pete Ricketts said
Wednesday he will focus on carrying out the executions of the 10 men on death
row.
As for the results of Tuesday's presidential election, Ricketts said it was
"exciting" that Donald Trump was able to pull off an upset.
"I think it really sends a message that the people of this county were looking
for a different direction," Ricketts said.
Although the governor's parents initially supported an anti-Trump PAC, they
eventually got behind the candidate.
Ricketts himself did not publicly endorse Trump until late in the primary
season.
Regarding the death penalty, the Republican governor said he was not surprised
that about 61 % of voters who cast ballots in Tuesday's election voted to
repeal the Legislature's 2015 abolishment of capital punishment. He said he
heard strong support for the death penalty during his travels across the state.
"Now that we have the will of the people on this subject, I will be working
with the attorney general to get the substances to carry out the sentences,"
Ricketts said during a press call from China, where he is on an
agriculture-related trade mission.
He deflected follow-up questions about just how he would go about obtaining
fresh supplies of 2 drugs that make up Nebraska's 3-drug lethal injection
protocol. His administration failed in its attempts to import the drugs last
year from a drug broker in India, to a large degree because of an importation
ban by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The governor put a hold on attempts to obtain the drugs last year, pending the
outcome of Tuesday's vote.
(source: Omaha World-Herald)
************
Sen. Chambers on death penalty reinstatement: 'Not a surprise'
The Nebraska death penalty was reinstated Tuesday after state lawmakers took
capital punishment off the table last year.
Sen. Ernie Chambers has fought for 40 years to repeal it.
"It's not unexpected," Chambers said. "It's not a surprise."
The vote is a setback, Chambers added.
"When January comes, I will have a repeal bill drafted and I will offer it and
push for it the remaining 4 years that I have here," he said.
Just because capital punishment is back on the books doesn't mean any of the
inmates on death row will be executed, Chambers said. There are federal
challenges that could affect Nebraska's law and the state has had trouble
getting some of the drugs needed to carry out a death sentence.
The latest attempt, through a foreign broker, ended with no drugs and the state
out $54,000.
"If somehow a new protocol for carrying out an execution would be put in place,
that will create new avenues for appeal," Chambers said.
Chambers said he's unfazed that there will be 17 new lawmakers this session. 7
received campaign contributions from Gov. Pete Ricketts.
"It won't be any change for me because I have always had opposition," Chambers
said. "It will just be a different kind. But it will remain to be seen whether
they are going to be their own people or those who join the ranks of what I
call 'Ricketts' crickets.'" Chambers said he is used to standing alone on many
issues, including this one.
"I don't want a barbaric provision like that on the law books of the state I
live so I'm going to try to have it removed even though with it there I doubt
there will be another execution in Nebraska," Chambers said.
(source: KETV news)
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