Dec. 7
TEXAS:
Love triangle dismemberment murderer found guilty; takes stand during
sentencing
Michael Scott Quinn was supposed to be begging jurors not give him the death
penalty. Instead, the San Antonio man made inappropriate jokes as he took the
stand in his own defense.
Jurors found Quinn guilty of capital murder on Monday taking less than 20
minutes to deliberate. Quinn is eligible for the death penalty.
Quinn told jurors he is not a monster or a killer. While he admits to sawing
off Albert Guerra's legs in the 2013 murder, Quinn says his former lover,
Connie Yanez, was the one who killed him. Guerra was beaten to death with a
hammer in his north side home. After he was murdered, the house was set on
fire.
"I told her that I would try to the wrap if we got caught," Quinn said. "I
wasn't planning on getting caught, but we got caught, so I'll take it."
The jury didn't believe Quinn. He was convicted and the case continued with the
sentencing phase to decide if Quinn will get life in prison or be put to death.
Despite the seriousness of his situation, Quinn caused jurors to gasp and laugh
when his lawyer asked if he felt sorry for killing Guerra.
"If is the biggest 2-letter word there is," said Quinn. "If my sister had a
d**k, she'd have been my brother."
The jury will hear from a psychologist on Tuesday who will testify about how
previous abuse in Quinn's life might have affected him.
(source: KHOU news)
DELAWARE:
Court arguments set on retroactivity of death penalty ruling
Delaware's Supreme Court is hearing arguments on whether its ruling declaring
the state's death penalty law unconstitutional can be applied retroactively to
a dozen men already sentenced to death.
Wednesday's oral arguments come in an appeal filed by Derrick Powell, who was
sentenced to death in 2011 for killing Georgetown police officer Chad Spicer in
2009.
In August, a majority of the Supreme Court justices declared that Delaware's
death penalty law was unconstitutional because it allowed judges too much
discretion in sentencing and did not require that a jury find unanimously and
beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant deserves execution.
Attorney General Matt Denn declined to appeal that ruling in federal court but
said he believes that it cannot be applied retroactively to offenders already
sentenced to death.
(soruce: Associated Press)
NORTH CAROLINA:
Prosecutor: Evidence of torture in Granville County murders
Prosecutors in the gruesome murders of an elderly Granville County couple on
New Year's Eve 2014 are revealing new details in the case.
The prosecutors said in court Tuesday that the couple may have been tortured
before being killed.
The deaths of 73-year old Jerome Faulkner and his 62-year old wife Dora at
their home near Oak Hill made national headlines when the accused killers set
off on a multi-state crime spree from Texas to West Virginia.
Prosecutors also claimed there is evidence that Jerome's death was a slow one.
Lawyers for a 23-year-old man accused asked a judge Tuesday to take the death
penalty off the table.
The judge said he would delay the ruling on the death penalty until the start
of the trial, saying it would be premature to for the court to remove the
option at the current time. Jury selection is set for February 27 and could
take weeks.
One of the suspects, 52-year-old Edward Campbell, later killed himself in
Raleigh's Central Prison. Now his son Eric, the other suspect, is putting all
the blame on his dad as he tries to stay off death row.
In a motion, the defense says the younger Campbell was threatened and abused by
his father and he was afraid of him. It says Eric Campbell didn't know his
father intended to kill the couple. He thought it was just going to be a
robbery.
"Eric said over and over again, 'I just thought it was going to be a robbery. I
didn't want him to kill anybody. I didn't want to commit a robbery. I didn't
want anyone to be robbed. I didn't want anyone to be killed,'" his defense
lawyer said.
After the murders, the Faulkner's bodies were loaded into their pickup truck
which the Campbells drove to West Virginia. After shootout with police there
the next day - New Year's 2015 - investigators found the bodies in the truck
bed under a mattress.
If the judge refuses to take the death penalty off the table, Campbell could be
the first defendant to face a capital punishment trial in Granville County in
25 years.
The judge denied a change of venue on Tuesday.
(source: ABC news)
****************
Judge in Granville County murder case delays ruling on death penalty request
The judge who presided over a hearing Tuesday to determine whether Eric
Campbell should continue to face the death penalty said it was premature to
issue such a ruling until closer to the trial.
Campbell, 23, is accused of murder, arson, robbery and other charges related to
the killings of Jerome and Dora Faulkner of Granville County on Dec. 31, 2014.
Campbell was arrested in West Virginia in early 2015, after the Faulkners were
brutally stabbed and killed, and their home near Oak Hill was torched. Jury
selection in his trial is set to begin on Feb. 27.
Prosecutors have said Campbell was part of a father-and-son team who selected
the retirees at random while on the run from Texas authorities.
Eric Alexander Campbell is the son of Edward Campbell, who died in March 2015
at age 54 when officials at Central Prison found him unresponsive in his cell
after he had attempted to hang himself.
In a court document associated with the hearing in front of Judge Henry Hight
in Granville County Superior Court, Amos Tyndall, a Chapel Hill attorney
representing the younger Campbell, and William Durham, a lawyer with the Center
for Death Penalty Litigation, provided details of a multi-state crime spree in
which Eric Campbell reportedly was so afraid of his father that he could not
extricate himself from his grip.
The defense team described Edward Campbell as a tyrannical parent who abused
drugs and manufactured methamphetamines, held his children upside down and beat
them, shot the family dog and beat his wife so viciously that she escaped him
late one night while he slept.
The defense also asked for a change of venue in the case, but the judge
rejected that request.
(source: newsobserver.com)
GEORGIA:
Cobb DA seeks death penalty in rape, murder, house fire case
The Cobb County District Attorney is asking for the death penalty in a case of
a stepfather accused of raping and killing a 14-year-old and burning the house
to hide his crime.
Dafareya Hunter was arrested by a fugitive task force in Florida a month after
escaping a house fire on Shadowridge Drive in Marietta. Hunter's stepdaughter
was found dead in a bedroom on July 23.
His stepson was able to escape the fire through a window.
Rescuers knew immediately the fire wasn't the cause of the girl's death and
quickly called the case a homicide investigation, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution previously reported.
The grand jury indictment, and the notice to seek the death penalty, indicates
Hunter raped the teenager, stabbed her, then set the home on fire.
A witness told police Hunter was sitting in his car acting strangely before
firefighters arrived.
"Crazy bent out of shape and upset, just crazy," Robert McNelley said. "One of
the police officers asked me where he was at and I said up there in his car."
Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds has never in his 4 years in office
asked for the death penalty, but he told Channel 2 Action News the
egregiousness of this case calls for the most severe penalty.
"I pray on these decisions," Reynolds said. "And I came to the conclusion from
a legal perspective and from a moral perspective that it was the appropriate
thing to do."
(source: Atlanta Journal Constitution)
ALABAMA----impending execution
Alabama asks US Supreme Court to allow Ronald Bert Smith's execution
The state of Alabama is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the execution of
an inmate scheduled for lethal injection on Thursday.
The attorney general's office asked the justices in court papers Tuesday to
deny a stay requested by Ronald Bert Smith, convicted of killing Huntsville
store clerk Casey Wilson in 1994.
A judge imposed death after jurors recommended life without parole, which Smith
contends conflicts with a Supreme Court decision released earlier this year
from Florida. Both Alabama and Florida allow judges to override jurors'
recommendations in capital cases.
The state argues that the Florida decision doesn't apply to Smith's case and
that he waited too long to raise his objections.
Alabama in January executed Christopher Brooks, the state's 1st execution since
2013.
(source: Associated Press)
*****************
In Alabama, You Can Be Sentenced to Death Even if Jurors Don't Agree Judges
have uniquely uncommon power in the state.
Ronald Bert Smith walked into a Huntsville, Ala., convenience store with a Colt
.45 semi-automatic pistol on Nov. 8, 1994, and shot clerk Casey Wilson to death
during a robbery captured on video.
A jury in August 1995 unanimously convicted Smith of capital murder. Then the
jurors, in a 7-5 vote, recommended that the judge sentence Smith to life
without parole instead of death.
So why, 21 years later, is Smith, now 45, set to be strapped down to a gurney
and executed by lethal injection on Thursday?
The answer lies in Alabama's death-penalty law, the only one of its kind in the
country.
31 states have the death penalty, and 30 of them require unanimity from a jury
in crucial phases of sentencing. Not in Alabama, where a jury can impose a
death sentence with a vote of at least 10 to 2. The jury may also recommend
life imprisonment, as it did in Smith's case, but the judge can overrule
jurors' findings no matter what they decide.
Until recently, 2 other states kept Alabama company - Delaware and Florida. But
each has now revised its code in light of state and federal court rulings,
leaving Alabama isolated.
And while the Alabama Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the
death-penalty statute as recently as September, the defense bar as well as
experts on capital punishment are seeing increasing pressure on Alabama to make
jury unanimity the law and do away with judicial override.
With indecisive juries, and judges free to go their own way, the likelihood of
injustice grows, legal experts say. In fact, jurors who vote against the death
penalty may harbor doubts about the guilty verdict they imposed earlier, said
the authors of a recent article in The Yale Law Journal. "We know of at least 3
cases in Alabama where an innocent (later exonerated) person was convicted of
capital murder and the judge overrode the jury's recommendations for life,"
said Patrick Mulvaney, who with Catherine Chamblee, of the Southern Center for
Human Rights, wrote the article. "We think that override is really a problem."
Mulvaney also warned that politics can play a role - especially in
tough-on-crime states like Alabama, which elects its judges.
Of the 57 executions in Alabama since the death penalty was reinstated in 1983,
29 involved non-unanimous jury votes, ranging from 11 to 1 for death to 11 to 1
for life, according to an AL.com, Marshall Project review of each case.
Alabama executions by jury sentencing recommendation
Death-penalty sentencing schemes vary widely around the United States, but all
- except Alabama's - lean toward the jury having the final say in sentencing.
In Alabama, more than 1/2 of the executions since the reinstatement of capital
punishment have come in cases where a jury did not unanimously recommend a
death sentence.
Death-penalty sentencing schemes vary widely around the United States, but all
- except Alabama's - lean toward the jury???s having the final say in
sentencing, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty
Information Center.
In Montana and Nebraska, for example, juries don't make sentencing
recommendations, he said. Instead, they are required to issue a unanimous
fact-finding verdict that at least one aggravating circumstance exists in order
for the death penalty to be applied in the case. The judge determines the
actual sentence.
In Indiana, which changed its statute in 2002, if there is a unanimous verdict
for a sentence, then the judge cannot disregard it. If the jury can't make a
unanimous recommendation, then it is treated as if there was no recommendation
and it's up to the judge.
Most other states have jury sentencing in capital cases, and those verdicts
must be unanimous for the death penalty, Dunham said. There are also states
where a judge can override a jury-imposed death sentence in favor of life
without the possibility of parole, which is "a safeguard against runaway
juries," he said.
Alabama judges can also override a unanimous jury recommendation for death, but
that has rarely happened. Alabama judges were the only ones to exercise their
override authority to impose death over the past 16 years.
Until this year, Delaware and Florida permitted juries to issue non-unanimous
verdicts for the death penalty and also allowed judges to override jurors'
recommendations. But in January, a United States Supreme Court decision in a
murder case, Hurst v. Florida, compelled both states to change their
procedures.
In Hurst, the High Court found that Florida???s law failed to give juries
enough influence in deciding whether to sentence a defendant to death. The jury
had voted 7 to 5 for the death penalty. The judge then reviewed the facts of
the case separately and concurred. But the High Court rejected that approach.
Writing for an 8 to 1 majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said "The Sixth
Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact to impose a sentence
of death. A jury's mere recommendation is not enough." The Hurst decision grew
out of the High Court's prior ruling in Ring v. Arizona (2002), holding that
juries - not judges - must find the facts necessary for a case to be
death-penalty eligible.
How many jurors must vote for a death sentence?
Each death penalty state has its own procedures for the role of juries in
capital cases. But in almost all of them, jurors must be unanimous in finding a
defendant guilty and in recommending he be sentenced to death. After Florida
and Delaware rethought their capital sentencing schemes this year, Alabama is
now the only state where someone can be sentenced to death by only 10 out of 12
jurors.
----
Note: Juries in Nebraska and Montana must reach a unanimous decision on at
least 1 aggravating factor, then the judge or a panel impose the sentence. The
Florida Supreme Court ruled that unaminous juries are needed to impose a death
sentence but this change is not yet reflected on the state's statute. Colorado,
Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon are not enforcing the death penalty due to
gubernatorial moratoriums. The Delaware Supreme Court struck down its death
penalty statute in August.
[source: Death Penalty Information Center ]
----
As a result, in August, the Delaware Supreme Court struck the state's death
penalty law, saying that a jury - not a judge - must decide the sentence and
that it must be unanimous on the part of jurors.
Then, in October, Florida s top court ruled that juries must be unanimous in
their recommendations for death.
So far, however, legal authorities in Alabama have rejected Hurst as a
blueprint for change.
Although defense lawyers around the state have filed a flood of petitions
seeking to stave off possible death sentences in the wake of the Hurst
decision, prosecutors and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange have
repeatedly argued that Alabama's law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in
1995 and is not the same as the portion of the Florida law struck down in
Hurst.
Florida's law had required the judge - not the jury - to find the existence of
an aggravating circumstance in order for the defendant to be subject to the
death penalty.
"In the Florida case, the holding is that a jury must find the aggravating
factor in order to make someone eligible for the death penalty," the Alabama
attorney general has stated. "Alabama's system already requires the jury to do
just that."
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange has repeatedly argued that Alabama's
death penalty law is not the same as the portion of the law struck down in
Hurst v. Florida, which held that a jury must find the aggravating factor in
order to make someone eligible for capital punishment.
In capital murder cases with the death penalty in Alabama, the jury must find
an aggravating factor - murder during the commission of a robbery, kidnapping
or rape, for example. Therefore, at the time of conviction, the jury has
already agreed upon at least 1 aggravating factor that would make the defendant
eligible for a death sentence, according to the Alabama Supreme Court.
Dunham asserts that Alabama prosecutors are relying on a very narrow difference
between Alabama's death-sentencing scheme and the one that was in place in
Florida in the Hurst case. "If a judge considers aggravating facts that the
jury does not find and weighs them that would be a violation of Hurst," he
said.
"The judge in Alabama is free to disregard a jury's recommendation of life ...
I don't think that you need better proof than that that it is independent
fact-finding by the judge," Dunham said.
Defense lawyers also have repeatedly argued that the Hurst ruling means juries
must have the final say in what sentence - life or death - a capital murder
defendant gets. And in that regard, they say, Alabama law falls short.
"I think we are finding that one individual [a judge] should not be the final
voice on whether someone should live or die. That should be a decision for 12
people," said Emory Anthony, a Birmingham lawyer who has filed motions for
several defendants seeking to have their capital murder charges dismissed in
light of the Hurst decision. If dismissed, prosecutors could seek murder
charges that wouldn???t allow for the death penalty.
Although the future of Alabama's sentencing law is unclear, there are signs
that the U.S. Supreme Court is keeping watch. This spring, the High Court sent
back the cases of 3 death row inmates and asked the Alabama Court of Criminal
Appeals to review them in light of the Hurst decision. The high court didn't
say in its brief orders what it was about each of those cases that the
appellate court should consider because in each case the judges followed
jurors' recommendations for death. One recommendation was unanimous and the
other 2 split decisions, with 1 or 2 jurors voting against death.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals hasn't yet acted on that request. But in
a ruling in June it ordered a state circuit judge to vacate her March 3 ruling
that declared the state's capital punishment sentencing scheme unconstitutional
in light of Hurst.
"Alabama is out on the limb and the U.S. Supreme Court has already suggested it
might be pulling out the saw," Dunham recently told AL.com.
For Ronald Bert Smith, any attempts to repeal or refine Alabama's sentencing
law will come too late. The jury's split decision for life in prison and the
judge's sentence of death remain unchanged.
One of his defense lawyers at the trial, Jackie Graham, said recently, "I'm
sure I was surprised since the jury had voted for life and due to the fact he
was a young guy. He had a young child." Smith's 2 accomplices got lesser
sentences.
Graham, who defended clients in 3 capital murder trials, says she isn't against
the death penalty. But she believes the jury should have the say in both the
verdict and sentence. "I honestly think the jury should make the decision,"
Graham said. "If they are going to make a recommendation, then why shouldn't
that recommendation be binding?"
(source: themarshallproject.org)
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