Oct. 4
TEXAS----impending execution
Next Thursday, 10 October 2019, World Day against the Death Penalty, Randy
Halprin is scheduled to be executed in Texas. The Community of Sant’Egidio has
published an urgent appeal on her website to stop this execution. It can be
sent online to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles – and to Texas Governor
Greg Abbott.
Because this execution is scheduled on such a particular day I invite you to
all sign this petition and ask others to do the same.
Just click on the following link: http://nodeathpenalty.santegidio.org/
[nodeathpenalty.santegidio.org]
Thank you !
(source: Annemarie Pieters, Community of Sant’Egidio)
*****************
Judge won’t reduce bond for Border Agent accused of killings
A judge in Texas has declined to reduce the bond for a U.S. Border Patrol agent
accused of killing 4 women last year who prosecutors say were sex workers.
KGNS-TV says the judge in the border city of Laredo on Thursday denied the bond
reduction request for Juan David Ortiz. Ortiz, who is charged with capital
murder , remains in Webb County jail on $2.5 million bond.
Those testifying at the hearing included Erika Pena , who told investigators
she escaped from Ortiz’s truck after he pointed a gun at her. She ran to a
state trooper who was refueling his vehicle and, with her help, authorities
were able to find Ortiz and arrest him in September 2018.
The district attorney has said he’ll seek the death penalty in the case.
(source: Associated Press)
*********************
False witness: why is the US still using hypnosis to convict criminals? For
decades, US law enforcement has used ‘forensic hypnosis’ to help solve crimes –
yet despite growing evidence that it is junk science, this method is still
being used to send people to death row.
In January 2016, Charles Flores, a Texas prisoner, was moved to death watch,
where inmates awaiting execution spend their final months. Seventeen years
earlier, Flores had been convicted of murdering a woman in a Dallas suburb in
the course of a robbery, a crime he says he did not commit. All of his appeals
had been denied and his lethal injection was scheduled for 2 June.
Flores’s new neighbour on death watch, who was due to die in two weeks, gave
him the name of his attorney, Gregory Gardner. Gardner specialised in fighting
capital punishment convictions and had helped this man take his case to the US
supreme court. Flores wrote to Gardner, telling him about the troubling course
his trial had taken. No physical evidence had been presented to tie him to the
murder, his defence had failed him in multiple ways and, perhaps most
troublingly, the only eye witness who claimed to have seen him at the scene of
the crime had been hypnotised by police during questioning.
Hypnosis has been used as a forensic tool by US law enforcement and
intelligence agencies since the 2nd world war. Proponents argue that it allows
victims and witnesses to recall traumatic events with greater clarity by
detaching them from emotions that muddy the memory. In the case that led police
departments across the country to begin using forensic hypnosis, a school bus
driver in California, who had been abducted and buried alive with 26 students
in an underground trailer, later accurately recalled most of the licence plate
of his abductors while under hypnosis. (All 27 captives survived the ordeal,
after they dug themselves out of the trailer with a piece of wood.)
That was in 1976. In recent decades, the scientific validity of forensic
hypnosis has been called into question by experts who study how memory
operates, especially in police interviews and courtrooms. It is one example of
a growing number of forensic practices – including the analysis of blood
spatter patterns and the study of what distinguishes arson from accidental
fires – that prosecutors once relied on to secure convictions, but which are
now considered to be unreliable. “The breadth of scientific error in forensic
disciplines is breathtaking,” Ben Wolff, an attorney for Flores, told me.
After reading about Flores’s case, Gardner got in touch with a hypnosis expert
named Dr Steven Lynn. As a young psychologist in the 1970s, Lynn was a “true
believer” in the power of hypnosis to retrieve memories, he later testified in
a hearing in Flores’s case. But when Lynn began to test this assumption, he
found that in study after study, hypnosis actually harmed subjects’ recall. It
led them to “recover” at least as many false memories as accurate ones, while
increasing their confidence in the memories’ accuracy. “Maybe they’re having a
very vivid experience during hypnosis, but that experience is not necessarily a
truthful experience,” Lynn told the court.
After contacting Lynn, Gardner filed an appeal before the highest criminal
court in Texas. He based the appeal on a law passed in Texas three years
earlier, in May 2013, known as the junk science statute. Among other things,
the statute held that convictions could be thrown out if it was shown that they
relied on discredited or misused scientific evidence. It was the 1st law of its
kind in the US and a major step forward for fighting wrongful convictions – but
it had not yet been tested in a forensic hypnosis case. “It felt like we were
at the casino and pushing all the chips in,” Flores said.
In an affidavit included with Flores’s appeal, Lynn wrote that “a significant
development in the study of psychology over the past two decades or so has been
the decline and fall of the idea that memory is a vast, permanent and
potentially accessible storehouse of information.” In a subsequent hearing,
Lynn testified that the hypnosis in the Flores case had relied on this faulty
concept of memory and that it may have contributed to the witness’s confidence
in her testimony. At trial, the witness had said she was “over 100% positive”
that she saw Flores at the crime scene.
On 27 May 2016, 6 days before he was supposed to be put to death, the court
granted Flores a stay of execution and sent the case back to a lower court for
review. In October 2018, that court affirmed the original conviction, which
means Flores is still on death row. He is now waiting for his final appeal to
be heard by Texas’s highest criminal court.
His case, along with another, similar case from Texas, could determine the
future of forensic hypnosis in the state and across the country. Since 1987,
the supreme court has held that information and testimony from hypnotised
witnesses cannot automatically be thrown out of court. Texas is one of 13
states that allow hypnotically induced testimony, as long as the hypnosis is
carried out according to certain guidelines; a further four states permit it
unconditionally. Of these 17 states, 10 also have active capital punishment
laws, which means they can put potentially innocent people to death on the
basis of what Alexis Agathocleous, a lawyer for the Innocence Project, which
works to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners, calls “deeply unreliable”
evidence. Nationally, DNA evidence has been used to exonerate at least six
people who were convicted of crimes partially on the basis of hypnotically
induced testimony, according to data from the Innocence Project, which is now
briefing the court against the use of forensic hypnosis in Flores’s case.
If Flores’s appeal is successful and his conviction is overturned, Texas is
highly likely to join the 27 states that have already banned the use of
forensic hypnosis as a result of the growing expert consensus that it is junk
science. (Another six states have no forensic hypnosis case law, leaving its
legal status there highly ambiguous.) This would add the momentum of the US’s
second most populous state to a nationwide push to scrap the practice. If the
appeal fails, Flores’s case could still go to the US supreme court, which could
decide to ban forensic hypnosis across the country. But Flores could also lose
all his appeals, which might lead to his execution, and entrench the use of
forensic hypnosis in states such as Texas.
The way hypnotists describe their art usually depends on what they want
hypnosis to achieve. Those who see it as a therapeutic tool talk about it
almost like a drug – one that eases physical pain and anxiety, lowers emotional
defences and makes the hypnotised person open to seeing their lives in a more
positive light. Those who use hypnosis forensically talk about it as if it were
a searchlight, able to pick out particular memories in the murky corners of a
traumatised mind. The very things that make hypnosis valuable in clinical
circumstances – such as a hypnotised patient’s openness to suggestions from the
therapist and the expectation that hypnosis will work – are dangerous when it
comes to trying to establish facts in settings such as a courtroom. “Think of
hypnosis like a memory pill,” Lynn, who is also a professor of psychology at
the State University of New York at Binghamton, told me. “If you believe that
after you take this pill your memory will be improved, then, when questioned
about whatever you recall, you will be more likely to say: ‘Yeah that was an
accurate memory, I’m confident in my recall of that.’ It acts almost like a
placebo.”
Hypnosis is difficult to research at scale, but many small studies suggest that
the relationship between hypnosis and memory is highly problematic. In 1983, a
study at Concordia University in Montreal found that hypnotised subjects tend
to be particularly susceptible to the implantation of false memories by
hypnotists. In another study, in 2006, Lynn explored the memories of people
after the death of Princess Diana. Using a range of memory recall techniques,
he asked them to remember what they did on the day she died, and then
fact-checked their memories. He found that hypnotised subjects remembered less
than those who were not hypnotised and omitted more details. Many studies have
also found that hypnosis increases subjects’ confidence in their memories,
regardless of whether those memories are accurate or not. This is the case even
when the “hypnosis” undergone by subjects wouldn’t be recognised as such by
most practitioners. “Simply defining a procedure as hypnosis carries some risk
that people’s confidence in their memories will be boosted,” Lynn said.
Many practitioners of forensic hypnosis know that it can create false memories,
but it is a risk they willingly take. “More memory, how could that be a bad
thing?” said Carol Denicker, a hypnotist in New York state.
Bob Erdody, a hypnosis consultant and retired NYPD officer, told me most of the
information obtained in interviews can be corroborated, so false memories get
weeded out. His most successful use of hypnosis was with a young man who was
able to remember a decal on the window of a car involved in a shooting, which
resulted in an arrest. But he also acknowledged that forensic hypnosis could be
unreliable: he had consulted on a case in which hypnosis led to a wrongful
charge of sexual assault.
There is a deeper problem, though, which is that inaccurate memories are common
even in non-hypnotic police interviews. An accumulating body of research shows
that the thing almost every investigation relies on to some extent – witness
memory – is not good forensic evidence. The Innocence Project has used DNA
testing to uncover 367 wrongful convictions; almost 70% of these involved a
witness misidentifying the perpetrator.
“There’s still a common lay belief that memory works as a recording device,”
said Elizabeth Loftus, an expert in eyewitness identifications at the
University of California at Irvine. About half of jurors believe memory works
this way, according to a study Loftus conducted in 2006. Partly as a result,
juries are strongly compelled by eyewitnesses, especially when those witnesses
express a high degree of confidence in their memories. “The confidence
expressed by a witness is the single most important factor in persuading jurors
that a witness correctly identified the criminal,” Lynn and his colleagues have
written. As Gardner put it, “it is way too risky” to use such testimony,
“particularly in a state that has capital punishment or life without parole”.
But if memory itself is unreliable, defenders of forensic hypnosis argue, then
logically you have a choice: you can either keep forensic hypnosis, or throw
out witness statements altogether. “Opponents of the police use of hypnosis,
they would have you believe that we don’t know how to get down here to this
office tomorrow or what we did yesterday or what I had for supper last night,”
said Marx Howell, a former Texas patrolman who, in 1979, created a forensic
hypnosis training programme for Texas police and has since trained thousands of
officers. “Memory is fallible, but we use memory a lot. It can’t be so fallible
that you can’t use it.”
Of course, if memory were entirely reliable, there wouldn’t have been a need
for something like forensic hypnosis in the first place.
Forensic hypnosis became popular, in part, because its successes were
front-page news. “‘Major Break’ Expected in Mass Abduction” ran the headline of
an article on the cover of the New York Times in July 1976, about the
buried-alive bus driver who had recalled the licence plate number of his
abductors. That case was “the catalyst case for law enforcement use” across the
country, said Howell, who led the establishment of Texas’s hypnosis programme
three years later. In Los Angeles in the late 70s and early 80s, the police
were conducting an average of more than 100 hypnoses per year; the head of the
LAPD’s hypnosis programme claimed that three-quarters of these yielded
information of value to the case.
By Howell’s lights, the Texas programme was successful: he told me that during
the first 10 years of its existence, roughly three out of every four forensic
hypnosis sessions in the state resulted in more information. By 1986, more than
800 Texas police officers had been trained in hypnosis. In perhaps the most
celebrated hypnosis case in the state in the 80s, the technique was used to
solve the murder of a leftwing radical in Austin that had occurred 13 years
earlier, in 1967. (The murderer in that case also killed his mother, sawed her
body into pieces and scattered them along the highway between Oklahoma and
Arkansas.)
But as forensic hypnosis became more widespread, its weaknesses became more
evident. In one case in Minnesota in 1980, “a hypnotised person recalled eating
pizza in a restaurant that did not serve pizza, seeing tattoos on someone who
did not have tattoos and being stabbed with scissors or a knife where there was
no physical evidence that a weapon had been used,” Lynn and his colleagues have
written.
Thus began “a tidal change” in attitudes towards forensic hypnosis among
jurists and psychologists, according to Lynn and his colleagues. In 1981, New
Jersey adopted a 6-part test for the admissibility of hypnotically induced
testimony, designed to minimise the risk that witnesses were having false
memories suggested to them by the police. The following year, the supreme court
of California ruled that hypnotically induced testimony was inadmissible in
court. This dovetailed with the emergence among scientists of the view that
memory was reconstructive rather than recording – more like collage than like
photojournalism.
In 1987, after a legal challenge by the man convicted of murdering the radical
activist (and later his mother), Texas, too, adopted a set of standards for
evaluating the admissibility of hypnotically induced testimony; they are known
as the Zani guidelines, after the name of the killer. “The problem with
hypnosis … is that it tends greatly to facilitate not only the retrieval of
genuinely remembered data, but also construction of false but nevertheless
plausible data to fill in gaps in true memory,” wrote a judge in the Zani case.
“Moreover, once this ‘confabulation’ takes place, neither expert nor jury nor
even the witness himself can differentiate historical fact from fantasy.”
Over the next two decades, other states followed in blocking or restricting the
use of forensic hypnosis. In 2006, New Jersey abandoned its guidelines and
banned the practice altogether after a case in which a hypnotised witness in a
sexual assault case identified someone they couldn’t possibly have seen. By
this time, even one of the pioneers of forensic hypnosis, Martin Orne, who had
created New Jersey’s guidelines, agreed that the practice should be consigned
to history. In fact, the guidelines were part of the problem, creating an
illusion of reliability: it was like advertising seatbelts for a car without
brakes.
Supporters of forensic hypnosis argue that the practice shouldn’t be banned
because of a few bad cases. “They threw the baby out with the bathwater,”
Howell said of the 2006 decision in New Jersey. But the push to end forensic
hypnosis has been part of a broader movement against the use of junk science to
convict people. In 2004, in one of the most famous junk science cases, Texas
executed Cameron Todd Willingham for the murder by arson of his 3 children on
the basis of scientific techniques which have since been discredited. This
ultimately led to the creation of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which
examines junk science, and the junk science statute that is now being used to
challenge Flores’s conviction.
Texas’s “forensic commission represents the gold standard” for determining what
sorts of evidence should be allowed in court, said Agathocleous, the Innocence
Project lawyer. The state has worked its way through a handful of junk science
issues, such as the use of bite marks to identify a suspect (now totally
debunked) and the practice of matching hairs found at a crime scene to
suspects. Forensic hypnosis could be next. But whether the science that could
sway the commission will be heeded by the criminal court hearing Flores’s
appeal is a separate question. “Hopefully the Texas court understands what we
now know,” Agathocleous said.
The hypnosis in the case that put Flores on death row was particularly bizarre.
The witness, a Dallas woman named Jill Bargainer, lived next door to the
victim. Early on the morning of 29 January 1998, Bargainer thought she saw two
white men get out of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle parked in her neighbour Betty
Black’s driveway. A couple of hours later, Betty’s husband came home from work
to find Betty and their doberman, Santana, shot dead.
Later that day, at the local police station, Bargainer identified the driver of
the car in a number of photo arrays. (He turned out to be the boyfriend of
Betty’s daughter-in-law and owned a pink and purple VW Beetle with a flame
design running down the side.) Five days after that, police asked for
Bargainer’s help creating a composite sketch of the passenger, but by this
time, she was unravelling. She told them she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t stop
shaking, and asked if they could hypnotise her so that she could “relax and do
a good composite”, according to subsequent testimony. Bargainer could not
recall later how she knew that hypnosis was something they might offer.
The next day, a patrol officer trained in forensic hypnosis hypnotised
Bargainer. It was the first and last forensic hypnosis he ever performed. In a
video recording of the session, he tells Bargainer to imagine she is sitting in
a cinema, holding a remote control; she can use the remote any time she likes
to stop the film, or fast forward. Hypnotists call this the “movie theatre
technique”. It has often been used to help emotionally traumatised witnesses
feel they can control their memories.
Bargainer mentioned a few new details in the course of the hypnosis – the first
suspect was holding a beer bottle; the second had brown eyes – but nothing
particularly substantive emerged. Then, at the end of the session, the officer
told her that she would “be able to recall more of the events as time goes on”.
After the hypnosis, she helped police draw a composite sketch of the passenger
she thought she saw – a thin caucasian man with long hair.
Police then showed Bargainer a series of photo arrays including images of the
person they believed to be the passenger: a heavy-set, brown-skinned,
short-haired latino man, who had been caught setting the VW on fire two days
after the murder – Charles Flores. But Flores did not match Bargainer’s
description of the passenger and she did not identify him at that time.
Eventually, prosecutors gathered enough circumstantial evidence to prosecute
Flores anyway. At his trial in February 1999, 13 months after the killing,
Bargainer was called as a witness. But after she took the stand, the defence
called for a Zani hearing. The Zani guidelines use a minimum of 10 criteria to
determine whether the testimony of a previously hypnotised witness should be
admissible in court. The criteria include: the interviewer should not be
otherwise involved in the case; a recording of the hypnosis should be made that
shows everyone in the room at the time of the hypnosis; and no suggestions
should be made to the hypnotee.
Despite the fact that Bargainer’s hypnosis violated these three guidelines and
a number of the other ones, the judge allowed Bargainer to take the stand. In a
shocking reversal of what she had told police during the investigation, she
identified Flores, who was sitting at the defence table, as the second man she
saw that morning.
Lynn called the identification “astounding”. “I cannot tell you a single time,
personally, when I couldn’t recognise something and then 13 months later I was
completely positive,” he told a court hearing in the Flores case in 2017. Lynn
considered it particularly problematic that the hypnotist told Bargainer she
would remember more as time went on.
“The fact that Flores has found some people to be hoodwinked by his media show
sounds good and makes for a good article, but is not what happened here,” Jason
January, the prosecutor who secured Flores’s original conviction, told me.
Several people testified in court that they had seen Flores with the other
suspect on the day of the murder, and another testified that Flores had
admitted to shooting the dog. January called the murder “an open and shut
case”. Bargainer’s inability to identify Flores until the trial did not bother
him, he said, because people’s appearance can change and in-court
identifications happen all the time. The hypnosis was a way to relax, he said –
a “glorified spa session”. He didn’t see any reason that Flores’s conviction
should be overturned, or to ban forensic hypnosis in general.
But those supporting Flores, including Agathocleous, believe his case is an
extraordinarily compelling example of why forensic hypnosis should be banned.
“So many of the different misidentification phenomena all appear” in the Flores
case, Agathocleous said. These include the low, early morning light in which
Bargainer saw the suspects; the short amount of time she saw them; the fact
that she was standing at a significant distance from them; the mismatch between
her initial description of the second suspect and Flores; the development of a
composite sketch, which is known to compromise eyewitness memory; the use of a
suggestive photo array in which Flores stood out; the eyewitness’s failure to
identify Flores in that array; and the eyewitness’s exposure to media images of
Flores after his arrest. “Then, given the interaction between the unreliable
identification and the overlay of hypnosis,” Agathocleous added, “there are
very, very troubling questions here.”
While he waits indefinitely for a decision from Texas’s court of criminal
appeals, Flores spends a lot of time in his cell on death row, meditating and
writing. If he wins his appeal, his case will go back down to a trial court for
a new trial, two decades after the first one. In the meantime, the driver of
the Volkswagen struck a deal in 2000 after pleading guilty to the murder and
indicating the gun used in the crime was his, and has been out on parole for
three years. (Under Texas law, multiple people can be found guilty of a murder
if it happens in the course of them committing another crime, like the robbery
in the Flores case.)
But there is still a high chance that Texas will eventually execute Flores. In
a cruel irony, his case has drawn enough attention to the problems with
forensic hypnosis that, even if the state does put him to death, it may still
ban forensic hypnosis.
One of the key figures challenging the practice is Juan Hinojosa, a Texas state
senator who has been involved in fighting the use of forensic junk science
since the early 2000s, when he was deeply upset by the execution of Todd
Willingham, the man wrongfully convicted and then executed for burning his
children to death. “I think quite frankly, we convicted wrongfully an innocent
man,” Hinojosa told me. In the wake of Willingham’s execution, he worked to
establish the Forensic Science Commission. The goal, he said, was to have
forensics “based on some actual research and data, and not just on somebody’s
intuition or bias within the criminal justice system”. He also began to read
widely about other potentially dubious forms of forensic science, including
hypnosis. He has been trying to pass a bill that would make hypnotically
induced testimony automatically inadmissible in Texas courts.
In another high-profile case involving forensic hypnosis, Kosoul
Chanthakoummane, a friend of Flores’s on death row, is also awaiting a decision
from the criminal court of appeals. He was convicted in 2007 for the killing of
a real estate agent in McKinney, Texas. A hypnotised witness was also used in
this case, alongside bite mark analysis and questionable DNA evidence. The case
has so many bits of forensic science gone wrong that Ben Wolff, Flores’s
lawyer, calls it a “parade of horrors”. This case, too, could help sway the
Texas judiciary against forensic hypnosis.
“The timing is critical,” Agathocleous said of Flores’s case. The US is in the
midst of a vast re-evaluation of the validity of many kinds of forensic
evidence. In addition to blood spatter analysis, arson science, bite mark
analysis and hair microscopy, practices such as ballistics testing and picking
suspects out of line-ups using sniffer dogs have all been challenged to varying
degrees. Even the validity of matching a suspect’s fingerprints to those found
at a crime scene has been called into question. This could aid Flores’s case
and the movement to end forensic hypnosis nationwide.
But banning forensic hypnosis opens up bigger questions than those posed by the
end of some other forensic techniques. It points to the need for a broader
reconsideration of the way that police and prosecutors influence the memories
of witnesses and suspects. “Inaccurate memories that eyewitnesses express with
any degree of inflated certainty in the courtroom can carry life or death
consequences,” Steven Lynn told me. What do we do with this dangerous thing
that courts have been relying on since time immemorial, that we need to be able
to rely on, even when it proves so fleeting? As lawyers from the Innocence
Project put it in a brief in Flores’s case, “memory can be easily contaminated”
– just like a crime scene.
(source: The Guardian)
MASSACHUSETTS:
Mass. can prevent wrongful convictions like mine----Bill increases transparency
of incentivized witnesses
What would a person say to get out of jail? I learned the answer the hard way.
Lies told by incentivized informants put me on death row for a murder I didn’t
commit.
Today, October 2, is Wrongful Conviction Day, a global movement to raise
awareness about the causes and remedies of convictions of the innocent. I hope
that sharing my story will inspire Massachusetts to do more to protect against
false incentivized testimony, one of the leading contributors to wrongful
convictions. In 1972, at the age of 19, I was arrested for the brutal
bludgeoning death of a Boston transit worker. The state’s star witnesses were
Wyatt Moore and his sister Susie, who claimed that I confessed to them at their
mother’s house. Despite my entire family verifying that I was home with them at
the time of the crime, I was convicted and sentenced to death in 1974. My life
was spared when Massachussetts abolished the death penalty the following year,
but I would spend another 3 decades behind bars before I was exonerated.
Decades after my conviction, critical evidence about Wyatt and Susie Moore was
uncovered. Both were facing criminal charges that were reduced or dismissed
after they testified. In fact, Wyatt, who was being detained for a serious
felony, was released the day after my trial ended. Additionally, records showed
that he was incarcerated on the date he claimed I confessed to him in his
mother’s home.
The Commonwealth had all of this information at my trial, but did not follow
its constitutional obligation to turn it over. As a result, my attorney could
not raise concerns about the reliability of the Moores to the judge and the
jury. Soon after this evidence was discovered, Susie Moore admitted on her
deathbed that she had lied. In 2004, I finally cleared my name and was freed.
It’s hard to describe what it was like to lose 30 years of my life. My family
and I aren’t the only ones who suffered. The victims in wrongful conviction
cases are denied justice, and the actual perpetrators may go on to harm others.
And what message does it send to the victims of the informant’s crimes when
leniency is the reward for testimony?
Massachusetts can prevent what happened to me from happening again. There has
been a growing national movement to increase transparency and scrutiny of
incentivized witnesses. In July, Connecticut passed a new law that will create
the nation’s first statewide system to track the use of jailhouse informants
and the benefits they receive. Additionally, judges must hold pre-trial
hearings to screen out unreliable testimony from being admitted as evidence.
Last year, Illinois also adopted a pre-trial test before incentivized witnesses
can testify. Recently, Nebraska and Texas enacted laws specifying when and what
types of informant evidence must be disclosed to the defense, and requiring
prosecutors to keep a central record of informant testimony and deals.
(source: Laurance Adams was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1974, based
largely on the testimony of jailhouse informants, and spent 30 years in prison
before being exonerated. He lives in Plymouth County----Commonwealth Magazine)
FLORIDA----imending execution
Justices reject appeal from death row inmate convicted in 1985 murder of teen
With his execution scheduled for Nov. 7, the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday
rejected an appeal from a death row inmate convicted in the 1985 murder of a
14-year-old girl in Pinellas County.
Justices unanimously ruled against James Dailey, who raised a series of
arguments, including that there had been “newly discovered evidence” in the
case.
Gov. Ron DeSantis last week signed a death warrant for Dailey, who was
convicted in the May 1985 murder of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio, who had been
hitchhiking with her twin sister and another girl near St. Petersburg,
according to court documents.
Dailey and another man, Jack Pearcy, were accused of taking Boggio to an area
near Indian Rocks Beach, where her body was later found with multiple stab
wounds. Pearcy was sentenced to life in prison for the murder, while Dailey
received the death penalty.
The arguments at the Supreme Court involved issues such as evidence that
Dailey’s attorneys contended discredited a jail inmate, Paul Skalnik, who
testified against Dailey. But the Supreme Court questioned why Dailey hadn’t
raised the issues before.
“Dailey neglects to explain why this information could not have been discovered
earlier,” the ruling said.
The Innocence Project of Florida, however, released a statement Thursday
criticizing the looming execution.
“There is nothing more shocking than the thought of executing an innocent man,”
Seth Miller, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida, said in
the statement. “Yet, that’s what will happen if Florida proceeds with the
execution of James M. Dailey, a Vietnam veteran who has spent more than 30
years on death row for a crime he did not commit. There is no physical or
eyewitness evidence tying Mr. Dailey to this tragic crime. Prosecutors used
discredited snitch testimony to wrongfully convict him.”
(source: news4jax.com)
MISSISSIPPI:
Noted North Carolina attorney to join Curtis Flowers' defense team--With the
possibility of a seventh trial looming, Curtis Flowers' defense team is adding
to its ranks.
Attorneys for the Mississippi man, whose conviction and death sentence were
reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, announced Thursday that North
Carolina lawyer Henderson Hill will join their team. Hill is a longtime
opponent of capital punishment with expertise in death penalty trials and
appeals.
Flowers has been tried 6 times for the 1996 murders of four people at Tardy
Furniture in Winona. Two of those trials ended in hung juries; four resulted in
convictions later overturned on appeal. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that
the prosecutor in the case, District Attorney Doug Evans, violated Flowers'
constitutional rights by intentionally removing black prospective jurors at the
6th trial, in 2010. In the coming months, Evans will decide whether to try
Flowers a 7th time. If he does, Flowers' defense team, now led by Mississippi
lawyer Rob McDuff, is planning a vigorous defense.
Flowers has been incarcerated for more than 2 decades and has continuously
claimed that he was wrongly convicted. His case was the subject of Season Two
of In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports, which found
significant flaws in the case against him.
"The justice system's serial abuse of Curtis Flowers — poor, black and innocent
— must and will stop," Hill said in a statement. "I am honored to work ... to
achieve that to which Mr. Flowers is so deeply entitled: a full measure of
justice and vindication."
Flowers isn't Hill's first high-profile, out-of-state client. In 2008, he led a
marquee defense team in the Atlanta trial of Brian Nichols, who stood accused
of murdering a judge, stenographer and 2 law enforcement officers during a 2005
courthouse shooting spree. Nichols' defense reportedly cost taxpayers $3.2
million. Nichols was convicted but spared the death penalty.
Hill's resume of capital defense work is lengthy. He founded the Center for
Death Penalty Litigation and directed the 8th Amendment Project, a nonprofit
legal advocacy group aimed at abolishing the death penalty in the United
States. He spent more than a decade in public defense, both in Washington,
D.C., and at the federal defender service in Charlotte, N.C. He's helped
numerous clients avoid death sentences at trial and won clemency or
commutations for several men on death row.
Hill joins the team as co-counsel to McDuff. The men attended Harvard Law
School at the same time. McDuff, a Mississippi native with a practice based in
Jackson, brings local expertise, experience litigating against Evans and years
of civil rights work in the South, including several cases that he took up to
U.S. Supreme Court and won. McDuff expects Hill's skills to complement his.
"Henderson Hill is known throughout the country as an excellent lawyer with
considerable courtroom experience in criminal defense and capital cases,"
McDuff said. "He is a tireless proponent of fairness in our justice system, and
his presence will add greatly to the effort to finally obtain justice for
Curtis Flowers."
The Mississippi Center for Justice — a nonprofit that advocates "on behalf of
low-income people and communities of color," according to its website, and with
which McDuff is affiliated — is backing Flowers' defense. Findings uncovered by
In the Dark — which include the recantations of two key prosecution witnesses
and evidence implicating an alternate suspect — will "play an important role
going forward," according to Thursday's statement from Flowers' legal team.
(source: northernpublicradio.org)
OHIO:
Inside convicted killer George Brinkman’s confession to killing Stark County
couple
George Brinkman pleaded guilty to the murders of Rogell “Gene” John and Roberta
“Bobbi” John Tuesday morning.
Brinkman confessed to shooting and killing Gene and Bobbi John in their Lake
Township home when they got home from vacation.
The trial continued Wednesday in front of a three-judge panel for the
sentencing phase. Brinkman faces the death penalty.
Brinkman has already been sentenced to death for the murders of Suzanne Taylor
and her daughters Taylor and Kylie Pifer in their North Royalton home in June
2017.
Investigators say Brinkman killed Gene and Bobbi John after he killed Suzanne
and her daughters.
A video of Brinkman’s confession to killing the Johns back in June 2017 was
played by the prosecution in court on Tuesday.
He sat in the courtroom with his head in his hands, watching his taped
confession.
“I told Bobbi and Gene to both go upstairs, I wanted them to sit on the bed,”
Brinkman said on the video.
Brinkman had Gene's gun in his hand when the couple got home.
He was watching their dog and he said Bobbi accused him of not giving the dog
its medication.
“And she just wouldn't shut up, Gene wouldn't shut up. And when we got to the
bedroom I went to shut the door and I heard Gene get up behind me, and I turned
around and the gun went off and I hit him in the head. And I didn't know it was
loaded,” Brinkman said.
“He's still moving, but he hits the floor. But Bobbi, she snapped. She broke. I
just shot her husband,” Brinkman said.
Brinkman had his head in his hands as the confession played in the courtroom.
He said he hit Bobbi in the head with the gun several times.
“Bobbi wouldn't shut up, she wouldn't. And Gene started to get up because I was
hitting Bobbi, and that's when I shot him two more times. And I turned around
and put Bobbi's head down and said please shut up and I had the gun and the
trigger went off,” Brinkman said.
“I think I grabbed a pillow and put it over her head,” he said later in the
video.
Brinkman said he stole money from the Johns after he killed them and threw
their phones out on the highway.
Police later found him in Brunswick at a friend’s house.
The confession played in the courtroom was 40 minutes long.
It was edited so it did not include Brinkman’s confession to the North Royalton
murders.
Brinkman was a family friend of the Johns, a former employee who dated their
daughter.
He gave no clear motive for the crime.
(source: cleveland19.com)
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