[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, CONN., FLA., TENN.
Aug. 15 TEXAS: Death penalty foes to hold vigil Aug. 26 The Lubbock chapter of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty will host a vigil from 5:45-6:15 p.m. Aug. 26 at the corner of University Avenue and 15th Street, in front of St. John's United Methodist Church. The prayer vigil will coincide with a scheduled state execution of a prison inmate. The public is invited. (source: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal) Former Texas DA an opponent of death penalty Advocates looking for a death penalty opponent would be hard-pressed to find one more convincing than Texas lawyer Tim Cole. Currently Cole, who has recently made headlines in his home state for speaking out publicly against capital punishment, is a Fort Worth-based criminal defense attorney. But for 14 years, Cole was the district attorney in rural North Texas (he spent time as assistant DA before and after he served in that elected position). 20 years a prosecutor, Cole has tried 36 murder cases, he tells me in a phone interview. Of these, he says, 3 were death penalty cases. In another case (not one that he tried), he granted a request from a childhood acquaintance - to die on his birthday. Texas is, perhaps, one of the least likely places to find a prosecutor, even a former one, willing to speak out publicly against capital punishment. Since 1976, according to statistics kept by the Death Penalty Information Center, the state far outstrips any other in executions with 527 inmates put to death. By contrast, Pennsylvania has executed 3 people over that same period. If you want to have an erudite conversation about shades of legal gray, Cole doesn't seem like your guy. As recounted in a wrenching essay in the Texas Monthly (about a decades-old murder trial that still troubles him), Cole became known for his uncompromising stances. As a young prosecutor, he had a man sentenced to a 45-year prison term for stealing a tractor. But the DA who had few qualms about imposing tough sentences, and an evident and profound respect for justice, had never been a death penalty advocate, he says, because it left life and death in one person's hand. Interestingly, it is in part the lack of clear criteria for capital punishment cases that bothered Cole - where he might view a certain crime as death-penalty-eligible, the DA in the next county over would look at the same set of circumstances and come to a different conclusion. It became pretty obvious that the death penalty is arbitrarily decided depending on the county and the prosecutor, he says. In addition, says Cole, capital punishment cases can be ruinously expensive. The increased cost of the death penalty is enormous he says, noting that in Montague County, an area with few economic resources, the commissioners had to raise the tax rate on the heels of a death penalty prosecution. Like others during the 1990's, when DNA evidence began to be widely available and used in trials, the numbers of exonerations jumped - and it became evident that testimony had sometimes been tainted, both by the use of jailhouse snitches and the poor judgment of a few prosecutors. It just showed that we prosecutors had it wrong more often than we thought, says Cole. Personally I don't believe keeping the death penalty is worth the execution of an innocent person. We can correct incarceration. We can't bring someone back to life. In addition, suggests Cole, political considerations, and the grief of the victim's family, may affect a prosecutor's decision to seek the death penalty or a less final sentence. Now, he says, prosecutors seem to be seeking death penalty verdicts less often, suggesting to him that it's seen as more acceptable to make the choice of life without parole. (Texas was one of the last states to adopt that as a possible sentence, he says). Last February, Cole was the keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Texas Coalitions to Abolish the Death Penalty. Though he's not surprised that he hasn't heard from his former colleagues in DA's offices across the state, he's got a hunch that some of them agree that capital punishment is both exceedingly expensive and a long drawn-out process (on average in Texas, an inmate can spend 12 years on death row before he or she is executed, he says). As a nation we are moving away from the death penalty, says Heather Beaudoin one of the national coordinators for Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a project of the criminal justice reform group Equal Justice. Beaudoin, who comes from a conservative religious background, works particularly closely with evangelicals. The more we know about the death penalty, the more public opinion has shifted away from it, she says. It's just not worth it anymore. While Cole also emerged from a solidly conservative religious background, he says that in the case of capital punishment, it's not religious conviction or his
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, CONN., FLA., TENN., KAN., MO.
June 7 TEXAS: AG, Lawyers for Hank Skinner Argue Over DNA in Death Penalty Case Lawyers for death row inmate Hank Skinner told a court, in documents filed Friday, that testing on long-sought-after DNA evidence in his case should be enough to forestall his execution. State prosecutors, who also submitted legal arguements on Friday, said the same evidence should convince the judge to confirm the 52-year-old's death sentence. Jurors in 1995 found Skinner guilty of strangling and bludgeoning to death his live-in girlfriend, Twila Busby, and fatally stabbing her 2 adult sons, Elwin Caler and Randy Busby. Skinner has long proclaimed his innocence. He has said he was so intoxicated from a mixture of vodka and codeine that he could not have overpowered the victims. Since 2001, Skinner has sought DNA testing to prove his theory that the real killer was Busby's maternal uncle, who has since died but had a history of violence. State prosecutors agreed to testing in 2012. Last February, state District Judge Stephen Emmert held a 2-day hearing in Gray County on the DNA evidence. Defense attorney Rob Owen said at the DNA hearing and again in the proposed findings of fact submitted to Emmert, that the issue was not whether DNA could prove his client is actually innocent. Instead, Owen wrote, the issue is whether the jury would have convicted Skinner if the DNA results had been available at the time of the trial. Skinner's defense team argued in the papers filed Friday that 3 hairs found in Busby's hands were dissimiliar to any of the residents of the house and could give a reasonable juror basis to harbor reasonable doubt about Mr. Skinner's guilt. The statute, as written, asks not whether the newly available DNA results necessarily compel the conclusion that the defendant is innoncent of the crime, but whether they would have raised reasonable doubt about his guilt, Owen wrote. But in the proposed findings that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office filed, state prosecutors argue that the DNA tests proved exactly the opposite, that it is reasonably probable that Skinner would have been convicted, in 1995. At the hearing in February, the state's expert, Brent Hester, a forensic scientist from the Texas Department of Public Safety's Lubbock laboratory, said that more than half of the items from the crime scene that analysts tested either produced no results or produced results that couldn't be interpreted. The DNA tests that produced results allowed the state to identify Skinner's DNA at 19 new locations at the crime scene, including on a knife blade used in the crime and in blood smears on the walls. But, state lawyers emphasized, the DNA testing revealed no evidence that Busby's uncle was at the crime scene. Despite Demand, Halfway Houses Struggle to Provide Care When Terry Pelz, a former warden with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, testified against a prison gang leader, Mark Fronckiewicz, in the 1993 capital murder trial of a fellow inmate, he had choice words for him. At his best, Pelz said, Fronckiewicz was a true convict. At his worst, he was a little turd. Decades later, after an appeals court overturned Fronckiewicz's death sentence and he was paroled, the men became friends. The former inmate, who had found work as a paralegal and become a fierce advocate for prisoner rehabilitation, had started the Hand Up, a for-profit halfway house for former convicts. It was really a turnaround, Pelz said. Fronckiewicz died last month at a time when the transition program in southeast Houston is facing eviction after missing a rent payment. While demand for transitional housing is high, few former offenders can afford the $550 a month they must pay for rent, meals and utilities, said Sheila Jarboe-Lickteig, who co-founded the program last year with Fronckiewicz, her husband. Advocates for prisoner rights say the conundrum is typical. Few of the thousands of offenders released by the Texas prison system each year are able to find steady jobs or stable housing, both of which help prevent recidivism. Roughly a quarter of them are back in prison within 3 years, according to criminal justice department data. The state has contracts with 7 halfway houses to offer subsidized housing to about 1,800 former inmates upon their release. Last year alone, about 72,000 people were released from state prisons. It's a problem, said Jorge Renaud, a policy analyst for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. There is nowhere near the amount of transitional housing that we need. Jason Clark, a spokesman with the criminal justice department, said the agency is working to secure additional halfway house beds, but demand remains higher than the beds that are available. Priority is given to those who need closer supervision and special services or who lack family and community resources, he said.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, CONN., FLA., TENN., IDAHO
March 31 TEXAS: Mexican national on Texas death row loses appeal at Supreme Court; Ramiro Hernandez condemned for 1997 of Glen Lich at Kerrville-area ranch The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review the case of a 44-year-old Mexican national set to die next week for the beating death of a man who employed him at his Kerrville-area ranch. Attorneys for Ramiro Hernandez contended he was mentally impaired and ineligible for execution for the 1997 slaying of 48-year-old Glen Lich. Hernandez, from Tamaulipas, Mexico, also argued he had deficient legal help at his trial, contending evidence of a previous murder conviction and prison term in Mexico was improperly allowed. He's set for lethal injection April 9. In a related case, his attorneys are arguing in state courts the Texas prison system should be forced to identify a new source of pentobarbital used to execute him. Texas prison officials want the provider's name kept secret. (source: Associated Press) *** Texas Won't Have to Identify Its Execution-Drug Supplier After All The last time the Texas Department of Criminal Justice secured a cache of pentobarbital, the drug it uses to execute prisoners, the Houston-area compounding pharmacy that supplied it had second thoughts. [I]t was my belief that this information would be kept on the 'down low,' and that it was unlikely that it would be discovered that my pharmacy provided these drugs, Dr. Joseph Lavoi of The Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy wrote once the involvement of his business was disclosed. I find myself in the middle of a firestorm I was not advised of and did not bargain for. Here's the thing: ethical debates about the death penalty aside, the identity of government vendors is public under state open records laws. It's one of the more bread-and-butter tenets of open government; otherwise, how to tell if taxpayer money is being well spent? With the Lavoi-supplied pentobarbital set to expire on April 1 (TDCJ refused his demand that it return the drug), and a pair of executions looming, Texas again finds itself in the awkward position of fighting to hide the source of its new supply of execution drug. Awkward because Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office, which is representing the state, is the arbiter of the state's Public Information Act, which contains no exemptions for pentobarbital manufacturers. At the same time, past experience has shown that releasing their identity will hinder the state's ability to get the drug and, by extension, legally execute prisoners. That's not what the state's actually saying, of course. Arguing last week that condemned inmates Tommy Lynn Sells (set to die April 3) and Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas (April 9) should not be told the source of the drugs that will soon be coursing through their veins, assistant AG Nicole Bunker-Henderson said the need for secrecy trumps the need for open government because there has been a significant, real concrete threat against similarly situated pharmacists. Maybe so, and if the threats were physical, they should be dealt with by law enforcement. But the main threat is clearly to a pharmacy's reputation which, if you're supplying execution drugs to the government, seems like fair game. State District Judge Suzanne Covington split the baby on Thursday, ruling that the drug maker's identity should be released, but only to Sells, Hernandez-Llanas, and their lawyers. An appeals court agreed on Friday morning but, later on Friday, the Texas Supreme Court issued a stay. A full hearing will take place in mid- to late-April, meaning that, unless Sells and Hernandez-Llanas' executions are delayed by a criminal appeals court (the Supreme Court handles only civil matters), neither man will be around to learn the final outcome. (source: Dallas Observer) CONNECTICUT: Conn. lawyer for death row inmate: 'State will have to kill me before they kill my client' A Connecticut public defender vowed the state will have to kill her before she allows it to execute her client in a triple murder case she said never should have gone to trial because the defendant is mentally ill. Assistant Public Defender Corrie-Ann Mainville made the comments in an email to the Connecticut Post, the newspaper reported Monday. She told The Associated Press that the proclamation was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but she's serious about the appeal in the case of Richard Roszkowski. The 49-year-old Roszkowski was convicted of killing 2 adults and a 9-year-old girl in Bridgeport in 2006. A jury recommended the death penalty 2 weeks ago after hearing testimony that Roszkowski was mentally ill, and a judge is expected to sentence him to lethal injection May 22. Mainville says Roszkowski has a severe mental illness - paranoid delusion disorder - and was high on heroin, crack cocaine and other drugs at the time of the killings. She said he never should have been
