May 18
TEXAS:
Did Texas execute an innocent man? Film revisits a haunting question.
Texans will have an opportunity to revisit a question that should haunt anyone
who believes in the integrity of our criminal justice system: Did our state
execute an innocent man? The new film “Trial by Fire” tells the true story of
Cameron Todd Willingham, who was sentenced to death for setting a fire to his
home in Corsicana that killed his three young daughters in 1991. The film is
based on an investigative story by David Grann that appeared in the New Yorker
in 2009, five years after Willingham was executed over his vociferous
protestations of innocence.
In my experience of serving 8 years on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and
4 years as a state district judge in Travis County, the Willingham case stands
out to me for many of the same reasons it stood out to filmmaker Edward Zwick,
who calls it a veritable catalogue of everything that’s wrong with the criminal
justice system and, especially, the death penalty. False testimony, junk
science, a jailhouse informant, and ineffective legal representation all played
a role in Willingham’s conviction.
In October 2010, I presided over a posthumous Court of Inquiry at the request
of two of Willingham’s family members seeking to clear his name. I heard
compelling testimony from scientific experts who thoroughly debunked the arson
evidence used against Willingham at his 1992 trial (a trial that lasted just
two days). The tragic deaths of Willingham’s children likely were the result of
a terrible accident, not a crime.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia notoriously wrote that there has not
been “a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed
for a crime he did not commit. If such an event has occurred in recent years,
we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the
rooftops.”
For Zwick, “Trial by Fire” provides an opportunity to do just that: shout it
from the rooftops and channel the rage he felt after reading David Grann’s
article. His film is an honest portrayal of an unsympathetic man condemned as
much by how people perceived him as the false evidence presented at his trial.
My own “shout” came in the form of an 18-page legal opinion, which would have
granted the petition for a posthumous exoneration. I based my decision on the
overwhelming, credible and reliable evidence presented during that hearing in
2010, weighing both the faulty forensic science as well as the dubious
statements of Johnny Webb, the jailhouse informant whose testimony also was
instrumental in Willingham’s conviction.
The Texas judicial system that failed Willingham at every turn also prevented
me from issuing my order, however. Regrettably, the Third Court of Appeals
halted the inquiry to consider whether I had authority to examine the case; I
retired from the bench before that issue was resolved.
Through “Trial by Fire,” Willingham has another opportunity to make his case
from beyond the grave – not just to those who played a role in his death but
anyone coming into contact with the criminal justice system today.
Ed Zwick would like the person who served as the foreman of the jury that
convicted Willingham – after deliberating less than an hour – to see this film.
I would like all future jurors out there to watch “Trial by Fire” and confront
the realities of this irrevocably broken system.
15 years may have passed since the state of Texas executed Cameron Todd
Willingham, but his case and the lessons it should teach us still matter. See
the film and then shout from the rooftops.
(source: Commentary; Charlie Baird retired as judge of the 299th District Court
of Travis County in 2010. He continues to practice law as a criminal defense
attorney in Austin----Austin American-Statesman)
****************************
New Podcast: Emmy- and Oscar-Award Winning Director Edward Zwick on His New
Film, Trial By Fire
In the latest episode of the Discussions with DPIC podcast, Emmy- and
Oscar-winner Edward Zwick speaks about his newmovie, Trial By Fire. The film,
which Zwick co-produced and directed, tells the story of Cameron Todd
Willingham, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992 for the deaths of
his three children in a house fire that prosecutors wrongly claimed had been
intentionally set. As Willingham’s execution approached in 2004, evidence came
to light that arson investigators had relied on flawed and outdated methods.
The trial prosecutor also withheld evidence that a jailhouse informant who
claimed that Willingham had confessed to him had been provided favorable
treatment in exchange for implicating Willingham.
Willingham’s case featured what Zwick called a “catalog” of problems: “it had
the withholding of exculpatory evidence, it had junk science, it had jailhouse
snitches who would testify in exchange for reduced sentences, [and] it had a
piss-poor public defender.” In an interview with DPIC’s Managing Director, Anne
Holsinger, Zwick describes why he decided to tell Willingham’s story, what he
learned from the experience, and how he hopes the film will affect audiences.
Trial By Fire opens on May 17, 2019.
Trial By Fire is largely based on an investigative article of the same name
written by David Grann and published in The New Yorker in 2009. Zwick called
Grann’s account of the case a “categorical denunciation of everything that was
wrong with the prosecutions in death-penalty cases.” The movie focuses on the
relationship between Willingham (Jack O’Connell) and his penpal, Elizabeth
Gilbert (Laura Dern). Gilbert worked with the filmmakers and offered them
access to her correspondence with Willingham. Zwick said he chose to portray
that relationship because it was a “beautiful juxtaposition to the horrors of
the case.” He expressed gratitude to Gilbert for sharing the letters, which he
said showed the “internal workings and the value of a man’s life, so he was
more than just a statistic.” He also said that the friendship between
Willingham and Gilbert humanized the story and helped the film avoid being
didactic. “People go to the movies because they want to invest in the
characters and in the relationships. They don’t go to the movies to learn about
issues, but that doesn’t say that they can’t have both.”
Zwick characterized Willingham’s story as embodying the systemic problems in
the way the death penalty is carried out in the United States. “In a system
that cannot be guaranteed to be infallible, if a single innocent person has
been put to death, that more than justifies getting rid of the death penalty,”
he said. Capital punishment, he said, is emblematic of the inequities in the
criminal justice system at large: “The death penalty sits on top of the pyramid
of charging and sentencing and trials, and that if it is so flawed and revealed
to be unjust and if its absurdities can be so accepted, how then can we reform
the rest of the system, before dealing with it?” The interview concluded with a
discussion of the filmmaker’s hopes for how the audience will respond to the
movie. “I know that it’s a Pollyanna-ish notion that a single film can do
anything that affects policy itself. What it can do is add a set of images and
a warm-bloodedness and a personal understanding of something that an audience
might have only understood in more philosophical or political terms.”
Storytelling can be part of cultural “paradigm shifts,” he said, noting that
pop culture depictions of same-sex relationships helped shape public opinion on
same-sex marriage. “Change happens," Zwick said, "but how it happens and when
it happens, and the rate at which it happens is unpredictable, and all that one
can do in any kind of activist cause is to keep your head down and keep doing
the work that you do because you are committed to that change.”
(source: Death Penalty Information Center)
*************************
Don’t hide death penalty from public
As a student of criminal justice, a political conservative and socially a
liberal, I feel a duty to point out the irony in state Sen. John Whitmire’s
shock to the publication of John William King’s written statement (after he was
executed).
As a country, we have been trying to remove ourselves from the process of
executing someone for decades — gas chambers bothered us; the electric chair
bothered us; lethal injection is somehow a cleaner way to kill someone, though
even that is debatable.
What I hear Sen. Whitmire saying is that he doesn’t want the ugliness of the
death penalty brought to his attention, which is disturbing, as it is common
knowledge that the process is flawed.
As a state, as a nation, we shouldn’t be hiding the death penalty from the
public. Is it truly “lingering” when for every 10 people executed since the
late 1970s we have exonerated 1 person on death row as factually innocent? A
dozen of those were Texans.
The senator is aware of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was found factually
innocent after his execution due to junk science. Or of Michael Toney, who was
exonerated in 2009 due to prosecutorial misconduct.
Quite simply, we cannot trust our system to get it right. Therefore, we should
not be hiding the realities of the death penalty from the public; instead, the
public should be made more aware of the imperfections in the system, and we
must do the right thing by working together to abolish such a final and flawed
solution.
Michelle Hassell,
Sanger
(source: Letter to the Editor, Denton Record Chronicle)
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
As N.H. considers repealing the death penalty, the lone man on death row looms
large
To the mother of the man he murdered, Michael Addison is a swaggering killer
she forced herself to stare down in court. To the psychologist who interviewed
him for his defense last year, he is a deeply traumatized and
sometimes-suicidal person broken by a childhood filled with violence and abuse.
The only man on death row in New Hampshire spends his days alone in a concrete
cell with a mattress, a sink, a toilet, and a tall, narrow window. His visitors
are members of his legal team, who file the court documents that constitute his
only communication with the wider world.
But as the state grapples with the likelihood that the Legislature will vote
this month to override a gubernatorial veto and repeal the death penalty,
Addison looms large on both sides of the debate. He is a black man in an almost
all-white state who killed a police officer and father of 2, and who was
sentenced to death weeks after a white millionaire also facing the death
penalty was given life in prison. In the philosophical clash over ethics and
justice, Addison is a brutal fact.
“When we talk about the death penalty in the abstract, there’s a growing
movement toward abolition because of concerns about fairness, accuracy,
discrimination, and cruelty,” Northeastern University law professor Daniel
Medwed said. “But on a granular level, in an individual case, it gets
complicated.”
Manchester police Officer Michael Briggs was an hour from the end of his shift
in the early morning of Oct. 16, 2006, patrolling the east side of the city on
his bike, when the call came in: a gunshot fired during a domestic incident in
an apartment. He and his partner pedaled to the scene.
Briggs knew Addison. Several years earlier, he had been the officer on scene
when Addison was shot, and he had tended his wound. He was aware now that
Addison was coming off a crime spree with a friend and that both were wanted in
a shooting. But Briggs could not have known of the threat Addison made when
friends told him the police were searching for him: He had vowed to shoot.
Briggs and his partner searched the apartment building with other officers, but
Addison and his friend were gone. The 2 officers set off into the darkness.
Briggs was 35, quiet and direct and funny, a former Marine who grew up prowling
the woods and swimming holes of Epsom, N.H. He and his father were always
outdoors, talking on walkie talkies, digging for worms to use as fishing bait,
and trapping and hunting deer and birds, said his mother, Maryann Briggs.
Michael wanted to be just like his dad, and he followed him into police work.
In the Manchester department, he was known for his love of his wife and two
sons, his bravery, and the good-natured, respectful way he interacted with
everybody, criminal or civilian. Before joining the force, Briggs had worked as
a corrections officer in the county jail, and he often ran into former inmates
out on the street, Manchester officers who knew him well say. At night,
officers would converge on the local bars as they started to let out for the
night, and it was not unusual to hear a happy, drunken voice call out, “C.O.
Briggs."
Briggs always did the right thing, fellow officers thought. He had his head on
straight. He could defuse any situation. He never seemed afraid.
On the night he was killed, Briggs and his partner spotted Addison and his
friend just before 3 a.m., walking down an alley with their hoods pulled up.
“Stop, police!” Briggs shouted. Addison’s friend halted, but Addison kept
walking, his hands near the gun tucked out of view in his waistband. Briggs
shouted again, and Addison hunched his back and slowed. Briggs was an arm’s
length away when he shouted for a 3rd time.
Now, Addison spun. In a sweeping motion, he raised the gun and fired a single
shot straight into Briggs’s head.
Briggs fell. Addison ran.
Police found Addison after a massive search, hiding in his grandmother’s
apartment in Boston.
Briggs never regained consciousness. He died the next day.
The outcry over Briggs’s death swept New Hampshire. His funeral procession
wound for miles through downtown Manchester, thousands of police officers
escorting a hearse and a riderless horse into a baseball stadium filled with
hundreds of civilians, where, according to local media, his casket was laid on
home plate.
His killing sparked heated debate over capital punishment. Then-Attorney
General Kelly Ayotte announced she’d seek the death penalty, and legislators
earmarked a budget for the case bigger than her office’s entire litigation
budget for that fiscal year, legislators said at the time. Then-Governor John
Lynch called the killing of Briggs a crime that “strikes at the very heart and
fabric of our society.”
The state hadn’t executed anyone since 1939. Two men were sentenced to death in
1959, but their lives were spared when the US Supreme Court struck down state
death penalty laws in 1972. The last time the death penalty was sought before
Addison was in a 1997 killing of an Epsom police officer, but that case ended
in a plea arrangement that allowed the defendant to avoid execution. Execution
was rarely pursued and hotly contested when it was.
But then, a little more than a month after Addison killed Briggs, police
arrested New Hampshire self-made millionaire John “Jay” Brooks and charged him
with murdering a handyman in an elaborate scheme involving 3 hired men. Murder
for hire is a capital offense in New Hampshire. Suddenly, the state was seeking
the death penalty against 2 defendants in separate cases at the same time — 1
black, 1 white.
Brooks, who made his fortune inventing a plastic instrument tray for surgeries
before selling his company and moving to Las Vegas, had plotted for 2 years to
kill Jack Reid Sr., whom he had hired to help him move some of his belongings.
Reid, 57, was an Army veteran and retired trucker with five children; he lived
quietly in a trailer parked behind an auto repair shop in Derry running a
business called “Man with a Dump Truck.” His daughter remembered that once he
had talked excitedly of doing a job for a millionaire inventor, saying the man
was important — and a friend. He had never mentioned any trouble.
But Brooks, according to court documents and prosecutors at the time, harbored
a simmering obsession, believing that Reid had stolen motorcycles, jewelry, and
an urn containing his father’s ashes from Brooks’s rental truck and trailer in
September 2003, when he had worked for him.
In late 2003, he paid two men $5,000 to kill Reid, but the attempt failed.
Then, in June of 2005, he succeeded. He hired his accomplices, flew to New
Hampshire, and lured Reid to a friend’s home. Brooks and his accomplices beat
Reid to death, wrapped him in a tarp, and left his body in his truck in a
Target parking lot in Saugus.
Brooks and Addison were different in many ways beyond race. Brooks, 54, had
long been seen as an upstanding member of society, had served in the military,
and had invented a medical device that helped surgeons care for patients.
Addison was the child of a teenage drug user who, he said, once tried to sell
him to a drug dealer for crack, according to court documents. He grew up amid
gang members who solved problems by shooting each other, and he was in and out
of jail for acts of violence from the time he was a teenager. Both of their
victims were white, but the man Brooks killed lived a simple, anonymous life;
the man Addison killed was publicly beloved and mourned.
Both were found guilty by New Hampshire juries. Brooks was found to have
planned his crime meticulously. Addison was found to have acted impulsively.
Only Addison received the death penalty.
“It’s harder to kill somebody who looks like you than it is to kill somebody
who doesn’t look like you,” said attorney Albert “Buzz” Scherr, a professor of
law at the University of New Hampshire School of Law who spent 13 years as a
public defender, and has tried homicide cases and one capital case. “Michael
Addison fits the stereotypical, superficial profile of ‘the other.’ And John
Brooks doesn’t.”
***
For decades, one of the clearest voices in New Hampshire arguing against the
death penalty has been Representative Robert Renny Cushing, a Hampton Democrat
whose own father was murdered and who is the primary sponsor of the repeal
effort that is currently awaiting a final vote, House Bill 455.
“I think the death penalty is a human rights violation,” Cushing said. “I think
it’s a failed public policy. I think it doesn’t work for law enforcement. It
certainly doesn’t work for victims of crime.”
Cushing’s father was shot to death in 1988 by a neighbor in the doorway of his
family home. Cushing had always been against the death penalty, he said, but he
had never had to examine his beliefs. But when a friend told him he hoped the
shooter would get the death penalty, Cushing recoiled. Giving in to a desire
for vengeance, he said, would mean he had lost his father and his values. The
man who killed his father was an off-duty police officer who tried to claim
insanity as a defense; he was ultimately sentenced to life in prison.
New Hampshire’s death penalty statute can only be applied to certain types of
murders, including the murder of an on-duty police officer or judge, murder for
hire, murder connected to a kidnapping, and murder during a rape. Bills aiming
to abolish capital punishment have come before the Legislature nearly every
session for the past two decades, Cushing said, and at times, repeal advocates
have come close to success. In 2000, the House and Senate both passed
legislation to end the death penalty, only to see it vetoed by then-Governor
Jeanne Shaheen. In 2014, repeal legislation failed on a tie vote in the state
Senate. Last year, current Governor Chris Sununu vetoed a bill identical to
House Bill 455.
Today, though, the death penalty seems poised to fall. The House and Senate
both passed the current bill, and while Sununu vetoed it May 3, the Legislature
appears for the first time to have enough votes to override the veto. The House
is expected to vote on it Thursday. If that override passes, the Senate is
expected to vote the following week.
The repeal would not be retroactive, and so it would not directly affect
Addison’s case, though legal experts and precedent suggest the courts would not
allow him to be executed if New Hampshire no longer had the death penalty.
Still, Addison has figured prominently in the public dialogue. When Sununu
vetoed the repeal bill, he did so from inside the Manchester Police Athletic
League Officer Michael Briggs Community Center, blocks from where Briggs was
killed, flanked by police officers and Briggs’s family.
“This is common sense,” Sununu said. “New Hampshire has always exercised great
prudence, great responsibility, in its application of the death penalty. I
firmly see, along with many folks across this state, this bill is an injustice.
Not just to Officer Briggs and his family, but to law enforcement and other
victims of violent crime across the state.”
Those who believe in the death penalty say it protects police who put their
lives on the line to protect the people, and they say it serves as a deterrent
to criminals contemplating heinous acts. Some crimes, they say, deserve the
ultimate punishment. And if anyone deserves death, they would say, it is
Michael Addison, an irredeemably violent criminal who killed a cop, a hero, a
husband, a father.
Cushing and other repeal advocates cite the enormous financial cost of capital
punishment, with millions of dollars poured into endless appeals that can turn
killers into celebrities. They talk about the impossibility of removing human
error from the judicial process, and they point to the exonerations of death
row inmates proven innocent by advances in DNA analysis and other scientific
testing.
They also raise the stark racial inequities in how the death penalty is
applied. More than a third of defendants executed in America since 1976, when
the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, have been black, according to
the Death Penalty Information Center, even though only 13 percent of the
American population is black. And a person who kills a white victim is
disproportionately likely to be put to death — more than 3/4 of victims in
cases resulting in execution were white, according to the Information Center,
even though only 1/2 of murder victims nationally are white. New Hampshire is
94 % white.
In this context, some repeal advocates say, the Addison case stands out as a
case study on the flaws in the system.
“It became somewhat freakish to think that of the thousands of homicides that
have taken place since 1939, we singled out one to impose the death penalty,”
Cushing said. “And the only person we decide to put on death row is
African-American.”
***
To many of those who live every day with the tragedy of Briggs’s death,
Addison’s sentence is the only just outcome, and the thought that it could be
stripped away is a betrayal.
“These parents lost their only son,” Manchester police Captain Allen Aldenberg
said. “They’re looking for what’s right.”
Maryann Briggs sat through every single court hearing in Addison’s trial and
subsequent appeals, she said. She listened to the terrible, clinical details of
his autopsy, the savagery inflicted on her boy. When the prosecutor brought out
the clothing her son was wearing the night he was killed — his shirt, his belt,
his boots, his socks — she forced herself to look.
“Mike was a good boy,” she said. “He’s not here anymore. He’s not driving in
the driveway. He’s not here for our Sunday dinners. He’s just not here
anymore.”
The Manchester officers who loved Briggs got his badge number tattooed on their
bodies. They carry guilt — could they, somehow, have prevented his murder? The
anniversaries tick by, and suddenly, a sergeant who looked up to Briggs like an
older brother is 35 with a wife and kids, like Briggs was when he was killed,
and his understanding deepens, and the pain is new again.
The Legislature will decide the law, and the courts will probably decide
Addison’s fate. The death penalty is about more than 1 case, said Pat Sullivan,
executive director of the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police.
“However, Michael Addison is in our memories,” Sullivan said. “Michael Briggs
is in our memories.”
(source: Boston Globe)
MASSACHUSETTS:
Bill would impose death penalty for cop killers in Massachusetts
Cop killers could be sentenced to death in Massachusetts under a bill filed by
lawmakers who say police are “under attack,” after the state lost 3 officers in
the line of duty in recent years.
“Our law enforcement officers are under attack and under assault,” Rep. Shaunna
O’Connell told the Herald. “We need to show our law enforcement officers that
we support them, that we stand with them and we need to show criminals that, if
you take the life of a law enforcement officer, you’re going to face that same
fate.”
O’Connell (R-Taunton) filed a bill with Rep. David DeCoste (R-Norwell) to have
the option to sentence adults over the age of 18 to death if they murder a
police officer. They were prompted to act by the deaths of Weymouth Sgt.
Michael Chesna, Yarmouth Sgt. Sean Gannon and Auburn police officer Ronald
Tarentino, who were all killed in the line of duty in recent years.
The Chesna family are constituents of DeCoste, who has long been a proponent of
instituting the death penalty in Massachusetts.
“The murder of Sgt. Chesna simply reinforced my belief that juries should have
the option of executing criminals who murders police officers,” DeCoste said.
“Police officers represent the line between civilization and anarchy. When we
start tolerating people who execute police officers, we’re dabbling with
anarchy.”
After Chesna died last summer, Gov. Charlie Baker said, “I certainly do support
the death penalty for people who kill a police officer, for a lot of reasons.”
Boston-based attorney Martin Rosenthal, who co-chaired the Massachusetts
Citizens Against the Death Penalty in the 1990s when a broad bill almost passed
to reinstate capital punishment, said he’s against this bill for the same
reasons.
“I yield to nobody in my respect for police officers, but I do not think their
lives are worth more than the average person,” Rosenthal said. “The death
penalty perpetuates a cycle of revenge and I actually believe that it creates a
more violent society.”
A similar bill was filed by Rep. Shawn Dooley (R-Norfolk), who is concerned
that society is becoming “desensitized,” to line-of-duty deaths, which
increased by 12 % from 2017 to 2018, according to the Law Enforcement
Fatalities Report.
“We’re at a point in our nation’s history where they’re actually being targeted
as victims. They’re being ambushed, they’re being hijacked, they’re being
sought out and attacked, which is something we’ve never seen before,” Dooley
said. “I think it should send a chill down everyone’s spine that there are
people that are so depraved and so violent that they’re willing to murder a
police officer.”
Chelsea police Chief Brian Kyes, president of the Massachusetts Major City
Chiefs Association, said that although the death penalty is a “drastic”
measure, the hope is that the law would act as a deterrent and wouldn’t have to
actually be used.
“We feel that this type of penalty is necessary,” Kyes said. “We need to send a
clear message that attacks on police, which also represent an attack on law and
order in our society, will be dealt with in a swift and very certain manner.”
(source: Boston Herald)
NORTH CAROLINA:
Death sought in Hania case
Robeson County’s district attorney will seek the death penalty against the man
accused of kidnapping and killing a 13-year-old Lumberton girl.
Matt Scott told The Robesonian Friday that the trial of Michael Ray McLellan,
of Fairmont, would be a capital case.
McLellan faces 10 felony charges in the death of Hania Aguilar. Those charges
are 1st-degree murder, 1st-degree rape, 1st-degree forced sex offense,
statutory rape of a child, statutory sex offense with a child, 1st-degree
kidnapping, felonious restraint, abduction of a child, concealing the death of
a child and larceny of a motor vehicle.
A grand jury seated in the Robeson County Courthouse in Lumberton indicted
McLellan on all 10 charges on May 6, according to information from the District
Attorney’s Office. All grand jury hearings are closed to the public.
McLellan’s next court appearance is scheduled for June 3 in Superior Court in
Lumberton. It will be an administrative hearing in which a court date may be
scheduled and the attorneys may discuss procedural matters.
Aguilar was kidnapped about 6:50 a.m. on Nov. 5 when she went to start her
aunt’s Ford Explorer sport utility vehicle parked outside their home in
Rosewood Mobile Home Park on Elizabethtown Road in Lumberton. Aguilar’s cousin
saw the incident and told law enforcement that a black man, wearing dark
clothing and a yellow bandana on his face, approached the girl, forced her into
the SUV and drove away.
Her disappearance gripped Robeson County residents with sorrow and fear about
what might have happened to the teenager and sparked many gestures of support
for the teenager’s family. Dozens of local, state and federal law enforcement
personnel were involved in the effort to find her. The story of her
disappearance and the search for her became national news.
Aguilar’s body was found Nov. 27 in a small pond off Wiregrass Road in Orrum.
An autopsy revealed she had been raped and likely died from strangulation.
The last person executed in North Carolina was Samuel Flippen, who was put to
death Aug. 18, 2006, for the murder of his 2-year-old stepdaughter, according
to multiple online sources.
There has essentially been an unofficial moratorium on executions in North
Carolina because of legal challenges calling the process brutal, and many
district attorneys electing not to pursue the death penalty.
(source: robesonian.com)
SOUTH CAROLINA:
Store clerk killer is 1st in SC sent to death row since 2014
South Carolina's death row is getting its 1st new prisoner in more than 5 years
after a jury sentenced a man to death for the shooting of a store clerk during
a robbery.
Jerome Jenkins did not dispute he killed Balla Paruchuri at a Conway
convenience store in January 2015. But he did ask a Horry County jury to spare
his life.
Instead, news outlets report the jurors chose the death penalty Thursday,
making Jenkins the first addition to death row in South Carolina since Ricky
Blackwell was sent there in 2014 by a Spartanburg County jury for killing an
8-year-old girl to get back at his ex-wife.
Jenkins was only being tried this week for killing Paruchuri, but a few weeks
after his death, authorities said he also killed Trisha Stull in a robbery at a
different Sunhouse convenience store.
Prosecutors referenced both killings and Jenkins' two co-defendants who have
already pleaded guilty throughout their case. Solicitor Jimmy Richardson said
video from the stores show Jenkins was a cold killer who got the money and
everything else he demanded and then turned around and fired as he left.
"They done had the money. They done had the money. And they killed them
anyway," Richardson said.
Prosecutors also emphasized a letter Jenkins wrote his mother from jail.
"Before I take my life, I want you to know I love you Mama, and I did kill that
man and that woman. I ain't sorry for what I did, but I wish I can take it
back," Jenkins wrote.
Officials did not report any attempt by Jenkins to take his life.
Jenkins' lawyer asked the jury for mercy because of an upbringing that included
living in a trailer without electricity or running water and a father who spent
long stretches in prison.
Defense attorney Ralph Wilson said every man in Jenkins' life was either dead
or in prison. "If you spare his life, maybe, his son won't appear in front of
12 people," Wilson said.
Jenkins' ultimate fate is up in the air. He is the 38th person — all men — on
the state's death row, which was moved to Kirkland Correctional Institution in
Columbia in 2017.
But South Carolina hasn't executed an inmate since 2011 because the state
doesn't have any drugs to carry out the punishment and pharmacies have refused
to sell them.
Attempts to switch the execution method to electrocution or add a firing squad
haven't made it through the Legislature the past few years.
Many prosecutors have begun accepting pleas to life in prison without parole in
exchange for a defendant agreeing not to appeal. A man who admitted killing 7
people in Spartanburg County and a man who killed a Forest Acres police officer
in Richland County each accepted those types of pleas in cases where
prosecutors used to typically seek the death penalty.
Prosecutors are trying to send a 2nd man to death row this month. In Lexington
County, Timothy Jones Jr. is standing trial for killing his five children in
August 2014.
(source: Associated Press)
FLORIDA----impending execution
Florida Supreme Court denies bid to stop execution of Bobby Joe Long----The
notorious serial killer is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Thursday.
The Florida Supreme Court has turned down an appeal aimed at stopping the
Thursday execution of Tampa serial killer Bobby Joe Long.
In a 22-page opinion released Friday, the state high court unanimously upheld a
circuit court judge's denial of 7 claims Long raised, including a challenge to
the state's lethal injection procedure.
Long, 65, was convicted of murdering at least 8 women in the Tampa Bay area in
1980s. He received a death sentence for the May 1984 stabbing and beating of
22-year-old Michelle Denise Simms.
A footnote in the Supreme Court's opinion notes that Long received life
sentences for 7 other murders and refers to him as a serial killer.
Florida's 3-drug lethal injection protocol was the focus of a daylong court
hearing May 3 in Tampa. Long's defense attorney, Robert Norgard, argued that
the drug etomidate, a sedative intended to render the condemned inmate
unconscious, might cause Long to have a seizure. Long suffers from temporal
lobe epilepsy.
Circuit Judge Michelle Sisco rejected that argument after hearing testimony
from doctors and pharmacists.
Friday's decision narrows Long's legal options as his scheduled execution
looms. His most likely next step is to appeal through the federal court system,
with the last stop at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The execution is set for 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison near Starke.
(source: Tampa Bay Times)
ALABAMA:
Executed murderer’s lawyer: Despite Alabama abortion ban, governor isn’t
pro-life
A lawyer for a condemned inmate said he hoped Gov. Kay Ivey might a grant
clemency request and block the execution after she talked about her belief that
“life is precious” in signing a bill to virtually outlaw abortion in Alabama.
It wasn't to be.
Michael Brandon Samra was put to death by lethal injection Thursday night for
his capital murder conviction in a quadruple killing after Ivey, a Republican,
rejected his request for a reprieve just hours after signing the abortion law.
Steve Sears, the defense attorney, said he had a hard time reconciling Ivey's
"pro-life" position on abortion with her approval of the execution.
"I guess she didn't mean it," he said after the execution at Holman prison.
In approving the new abortion law, Ivey said the legislation "stands as a
powerful testament to Alabamians' deeply held belief that every life is
precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God."
After the execution, Ivey seemed to draw a line between that position and her
stance on capital punishment for Samra, noting that "4 lives were brutally
taken far too soon."
"Alabama will not stand for the loss of life in our state, and with this
heinous crime, we must respond with punishment," she said in a statement.
Samra, 41, and a friend, Mark Duke, were convicted of capital murder in the
deaths of Duke's father, the father's girlfriend and the woman's 2
elementary-age daughters in 1997. The two adults were shot and the children had
their throats slit. Evidence showed Duke planned the killings because he was
angry his father wouldn't let him use his pickup.
Families of the victims thanked law enforcement and the community for support
in a statement read by Prison Commissioner Jeff Dunn after the execution.
"This has been a painful journey. Today justice was carried out," said the
statement from relatives, 6 of whom were witnesses.
Samra was aware of the new state law on abortion, Sears said, but Ivey's
position didn't give him any hope for a reprieve.
"He was resigned the whole time," he said Friday. "Even if there had been a
real chance for hope he wouldn't have had it."
Republican lawmakers passed the abortion law in hope of sparking a court
challenge that will result in the U.S. Supreme Court reconsidering the 1973
decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The law outlaws abortion except in
cases where the mother's life is in danger and doesn't include exceptions for
cases of rape or incest.
While women would not face criminal charges for seeking an abortion, anyone
performing the procedure could be sentenced to as long as 99 years in prison.
(source: al.com)
LOUISIANA:
Executing innocent people via the death penalty is a risk worth taking
A response to the response to my letter concerning the death penalty: The
advances made in Forensic Evidence, led by DNA analysis, have greatly improved
the possibility of finding and convicting murderers, with more certainty that
the right person is executed. But not all investigations yield Forensic
evidence. The chance for mistaken executions is greatly lessened, but still
exists.
Yes, enforcing the death penalty may result in the death of an innocent. But we
face risks of death every day. It is part of living and we are willing to take
the risks. For instance: taking some medicines can result in unintended death.
We weigh the good that may result in taking the medicine against the
possibility of death. As a citizen of Louisiana, taking the risk of being
mistakenly executed because of a strictly enforced death penalty law is a risk
I am more than willing to take.
We must consider how many innocent people will be saved from murder because of
the deterrent value of a strict and speedily enforced death penalty law and
compare that to the number of people who might be mistakenly executed.
— John Spires, West Monroe
(source: Letter to the Editor, Monroe News Star)
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