[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide
JANUARY 1 SAUDI ARABIA: Saudi beheadings soar in 2015 under discretionary rulings Saudi Arabia carried out at least 157 executions in 2015, with beheadings reaching their highest level in the kingdom in 2 decades, according to several advocacy groups that monitor the death penalty worldwide. Coinciding with the rise in executions is the number of people executed for non-lethal offenses that judges have wide discretion to rule on, particularly for drug-related crimes. Rights group Amnesty International said in November that at least 63 people had been executed since the start of the year for drug-related offenses. That figure made for at least 40 % of the total number of executions in 2015, compared to less than 4 % for drug-related executions in 2010. Amnesty said Saudi Arabia had exceeded its highest level of executions since 1995, when 192 executions were recorded. But while most crimes, such as premeditated murder, may carry fixed punishments under Saudi Arabia's interpretation of the Islamic law, or Shariah, drug-related offenses are considered "ta'zir", meaning neither the crime nor the punishment is defined in Islam. Discretionary judgments for "ta'zir" crimes have led to arbitrary rulings with contentious outcomes. In a lengthy report issued in August, Amnesty International noted the case of Lafi al-Shammari, a Saudi national with no previous criminal record who was executed in mid-2015 for drug trafficking. The person arrested with him and charged with the same offenses received a 10-year prison sentence, despite having prior arrests related to drug trafficking. Human Rights Watch found that of the first 100 prisoners executed in 2015, 56 had been based on judicial discretion and not for crimes for which Islamic law mandates a specific death penalty punishment. Shariah scholars hold vastly different views on the application of the death penalty, particularly for cases of "ta'zir." Delphine Lourtau, research director at Cornell Law School's Death Penalty Worldwide, adds that there are Shariah law experts "whose views are that procedural safeguards surrounding capital punishment are so stringent that they make death penalty almost virtually impossible." She says in Saudi Arabia, defendants are not provided defense lawyers and in numerous cases of South Asians arrested for drug trafficking, they are not provided translators in court hearings. She said there are also questions "over the degree of influence the executive has on trial outcomes" when it comes to cases where Shiite activists are sentenced to death. Emory Law professor and Shariah scholar Abdullahi An-Naim said because there is an "inherent infallibility in court systems," no judicial system can claim to enforce an immutable, infallible form of Shariah. "There is a gap between what Islam is and what Islam is as understood by human beings," he said. "Shariah was never intended to be coercively applied by the state." Similar to how the U.S. Constitution is seen as a living document with interpretations that have expanded over the years, more so is the Quran, which serves as a cornerstone of Shariah, he said. The other half to Shariah is the judgments carried out by the Prophet Muhammad. Virtually anything else becomes an interpretation of Shariah and not Shariah itself, An-Naim said. Of Islam's four major schools of thought, the underpinning of Saudi Arabia's legal system is based on the most conservative Hanbali branch and an ideology widely known as Wahhabism. A 2005 royal decree issued in Saudi Arabia to combat narcotics further codified the right of judges to issue execution sentences "as a discretionary penalty" against any person found guilty of smuggling, receiving, or manufacturing drugs. HRW's Middle East researcher Adam Coolge says Saudi Arabia executed 158 people in total in 2015 compared to 90 the year before. Catherine Higham, a caseworker for Reprieve, which works against the death penalty worldwide, says her organization documented 157 executions in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia does not release annual tallies, though it does announce individual executions in state media throughout the year. Saudi law allows for execution in cases of murder, drug offenses and rape. Though seldom carried out, the death penalty also applies to adultery, apostasy and witchcraft. In defense of how Saudi Arabia applies Shariah, the kingdom's representative to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Bandar al-Aiban, said in an address in Geneva in March that capital punishment applies "only (to) those who commit heinous crimes that threaten security." Because Saudi Arabia carries out most executions through beheading and sometimes in public, it has been compared to the extremist Islamic State group, which also carries out public beheadings and claims to be implementing Shariah. Saudi Arabia strongly rejects this. In December, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----MO., UTAH, WYO., CALIF.
January 1 MISSOURI: Juror who voted to execute killer now hopes for mercy 18 years ago, Andrew Dazey thought David Barnett's murder of his grandparents in Glendale was so heinous that he and 11 other jurors voted to put Barnett to death. But a federal judge overturned the sentence in August. If the state's appeal of that order fails, it will leave prosecutors to decide whether to settle for a life term or seek a new hearing to try again for an execution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1J8kBvN ) reports. U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber wrote that although some of the evidence about Barnett's difficult past had been presented at his murder trial, "horrors," including sexual abuse, were missed. Webber reasoned that "at least 1 juror would have determined the balance of aggravating and mitigating circumstances did not warrant death in Mr. Barnett's case." Dazey would have been that juror. "David should not be on death row," said the former jury foreman in a recent interview. "There's no way" he would vote for death, knowing what he now knows, he explained. Dazey, now 63, said that he was "very, very comfortable" with what the jury did at the time. Even as recently as 2013, Dazey wrote to Barnett in prison, telling him that although he thought of Barnett and prayed for the condemned man, his actions had been "reprehensible." But after reading Webber's opinion, Dazey believes that the majority of jurors would have decided differently "had a fraction of this information been available." That part remains unknown. Juror James Chickos said he had not reviewed Webber's ruling in detail. "I don't know if I would have changed my mind," he said. "I'm glad that the federal judge did what he did. It certainly could have made a difference." Another juror declined to review the new data, saying that she had needed therapy after the trial. The others either could not be reached or didn't respond to messages. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch's office referred questions to Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster's office, which has filed the appeal of Webber's ruling. Koster's office declined to comment. 5 different knives On Feb. 4, 1996, Barnett, now 39, used 5 knives to stab Clifford Barnett, 82, and Leona Barnett, 75, more than 20 times. He broke into their home and waited for them to return from church and brunch. They were his adoptive father's parents. Barnett then stole their car and $120 in cash. The next morning, he confessed and later even re-enacted the crime for investigators. After his conviction on two counts of first-degree murder, his attorneys argued for leniency in the penalty phase, saying he had suffered from depression, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder from a troubled and unstable childhood. Barnett had mulled suicide at 8 and again at 15, and later overdosed on prescription drugs and once set himself on fire. Prosecutors cited aggravating factors, including that Barnett had murdered for money and the crime was "outrageously vile." After deliberating for 16 hours over two days, jurors voted for death. They found aggravating circumstances, including that the killings were "unreasonably brutal," that he "committed repeated and excessive acts of physical abuse" on each grandparent, and that each murder took place while Barnett was committing other crimes, Webber's ruling says. Trial failures Barnett's current attorneys have long argued that Dazey and other jurors should have been presented in the penalty phase of the trial with more evidence to mitigate the severity of his crime. Barnett's 1999 appeal did not detail the witnesses who should have been called. It was a failure that would dog him through years of unsuccessful appeals. In 2012, his attorneys appealed again, citing a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Again, they were turned down. But Barnett's attorneys asked Webber to reconsider and he did, triggering nine days of hearings in August and September of 2014. "The increased quantity and detail of the evidence presented before this Court cannot be ignored, as they are directly relevant in determining how much the scales would likely have shifted in favor of Mr. Barnett in the eyes of the jury," Webber wrote in his opinion a year later. He called the sexual abuse allegations "powerful evidence" for the jury to weigh. Dazey said the jury had heard some claims about physical and sexual abuse. But with more time and more people to work on the case, Barnett's appellate lawyers had found his biological father, and new information about alleged physical and sexual abuse. Jurors didn't hear 11 witnesses with "critically important (and potentially juror-persuading) evidence," including Barnett's mother, Shirley Pullen Acree, the judge noted. During her pregnancy, Acree allegedly drank and took diet pills so she could stay awake and "party"
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, CONN., PENN., VA., N.C., ALA.
January 1 TEXAS: Texas' top criminal court halted far more executions in 2015 The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted an unprecedented number of execution stays in 2015, the 1st year on the court for 3 judges elected in 2014. "There's absolutely been a change, and we're still seeing where the splits are," said Scott Henson, author of Texas criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast. An analysis of data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and annual reports from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which tracks executions and stays, shows that Texas courts halted 14 executions this year. 2 of those were later rescheduled and carried out. That's nearly twice the number of stays granted most years. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, long known as one of the most conservative, tough-on-crime courts in the nation, gave 8 death row inmates more time to appeal their sentences in 2015. That is more than double the number of stays the court has granted in any year since at least 2007. Trial courts or prosecutors withdrew the remaining execution dates in 2015. Legal experts say the increased number of stays from the state's top criminal court might be the result of its changing membership. In 2015, 3 new judges joined the bench: Bert Richardson, a former state and federal prosecutor; Kevin Yeary, who worked as a defense lawyer and prosecutor; and David Newell, a former prosecutor. But the change could also reflect the increasingly skeptical attitude of the public nationwide toward the death penalty, experts said. The number of executions in the United States hit a 24-year low in 2015, dropping to 28. Nearly 1/2 of those took place in Texas. "You're seeing a national trend show up in state-level decision-making," said Lee Kovarsky, a professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law who works on Texas death penalty cases. State and national polls show public support for the death penalty on a steady decline over the last decade. At the same time, the number of new death sentences and executions in Texas and other death penalty states has also decreased. Appeals court orders granting the 8 execution stays in 2015 provide something of a window on divisions among the 9 judges. Just 1 of the 8 stays was granted unanimously. All 9 judges agreed to stay the execution of Julius Murphy, whose lawyers argued that prosecutors coerced false testimony from 2 witnesses who were key to his 1998 conviction in a robbery that turned deadly. Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, who has been on the court since 1994, and Judge Lawrence Meyers, who joined in 1992, partnered to dissent in 1/2 of the stays granted this year. Meyers disagreed with the majority in all the remaining stays. In the case of Randall Mays, Keller and Meyers wrote the lone dissenting opinion objecting to a stay of execution. Mays was convicted and sentenced to death in 2008 in the fatal shooting of a sheriff's deputy. The majority of the court chose to stay his execution, allowing more time to determine whether Mays is mentally competent to face the ultimate punishment. Keller and Meyers disagreed with the majority's decision. While Mays' lawyers had shown he was mentally ill, the 2 judges believed his attorneys failed to prove he did not understand how and why he was being punished. "Mental illness and incompetence to be executed are not the same thing," Keller wrote in the dissent. In the other stays the court granted last year, lawyers for death row inmates sought clemency for a variety of reasons. Some said they needed more time to investigate new evidence. Others argued that new scientific developments could help prove their innocence. A few contended they had shoddy legal help. Shannon Edmonds, staff attorney for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, said the new judges might have been more likely to agree to stays out of a desire to be more cautious. Since 1989, there have been 240 exonerations in Texas, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, including 11 men who had been on death row. "For lack of a better term, [the judges] might not be as jaded as they might be in the future after they see these kinds of claims brought up time after time after time," Edmonds said. But Kovarsky said the increase in stays might have less to do with the makeup of the court than with the general shift away from the death penalty nationally and in Texas. According to Gallup Poll data, the number who don't favor the death penalty for murderers grew from about 28 % of respondents nationally in 2000 to more than 37 % in 2015. In 2015, Texas courts issued just two new death sentences, the lowest since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a 1972 Supreme Court decision led to a de facto moratorium on capital punishment. "I strongly suspect that the [Court of Criminal Appeals] would still rank very
