Dec. 3
TEXAS----stay of impending execution
Battaglia again wins stay of execution days before he was condemned to die for
killing daughters
2 weeks after a judge found John Battaglia mentally fit to be executed for
killing his 2 daughters in 2001, the Dallas man has received another stay of
execution.
The state Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Friday that Battaglia's competency
needs to be evaluated further.
In 2001, Battaglia made national headlines when he shot his daughters,
9-year-old Faith and 6-year-old Liberty, at his Deep Ellum loft while their
mother listened helplessly on the phone.
"No, Daddy! Don't do it!" Faith pleaded, seconds before her father pulled the
trigger in an act of revenge against his ex-wife.
Battaglia was to be put to death next Wednesday after State District Judge
Robert Burns ruled on Nov. 18 that he understands his case and execution well
enough to remain on death row.
According to a report from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Battaglia's attorneys
now have 60 days to file a brief with the appeals court concerning his
competency, court spokesman Abel Acosta said.
Battaglia was previously scheduled to be executed in March but was granted a
stay, again to sort out competency concerns.
A defendant is considered competent for execution under Texas law if he
understands why he's been sentenced to die and that his execution is imminent.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys agree that the 61-year-old former accountant
and Marine has a factual understanding of his conviction and execution date,
but there had been debate over whether he has a "rational understanding" of it
all.
Psychologists testified that Battaglia suffers from a delusional disorder that
makes him believe he did not kill his children, but Burns questioned whether he
has developed this delusion as a coping mechanism.
After the murders, Battaglia had 2 roses tattooed on his arm in memory of his
girls. He then left a chilling message on the family's answering machine.
"Goodnight, my little babies," he said in the message. "I hope you are resting
in a different place. I love you."
(source: Dallas Morning News)
**************************
Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----20
Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----538
Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #
21---------January 11---------------Christoper Wilkins----539
22---------January 25---------------Kosoul Chanthakoummane----540
23---------January 26---------------Terry Edwards---------541
24---------February 2---------------John Ramirez----------542
25---------February 7---------------Tilon Carter----------543
26---------March 14-----------------James Bigby-----------544
27---------April 12-----------------Paul Storey-----------545
28---------June 28------------------Steven Long-----------546
(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)
*************************
Mental health services lacking in Texas jails, UT study finds
University of Texas law students hope their report on 10 in-custody deaths will
change the way jails handle prisoners with mental illness, but for Katie Cheek,
the goal is much more personal.
The Houston woman's son, Greg Cheek, died in February 2011 after 3 1/2 months
in the Nueces County Jail on a trespassing charge. Katie said she called
repeatedly to inform jail officials about his history of mental illness and the
medication he needed for paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, with no
results.
"I was utterly powerless," she said. "I could not control what had happened to
him. It was in other people's hands, and I couldn't convince them of the
severity of his illness, of the need to have him put in a hospital so I could
have him with me today."
Greg Cheek, a well-known surfer and artist in Corpus Christi, was found
unresponsive on the floor of his cell, where he took to sleeping on the cold
concrete after tearing up his bedding. Suffering from low body temperature and
a severe infection, the 29-year-old died the next day, weighing 146 pounds, 30
less than when he arrived.
Cheek's mother participated in the report, "Preventable Tragedies" - released
this month by the UT Law School's Civil Rights Clinic - in hopes of sparing
other parents her pain and of prodding jail officials to adopt reforms.
"The lack of communication by the jail was so dismal. It all was preventable,
completely preventable," she said. "We all know that mental illness is a
disease. What I find abhorrent is that some people automatically think these
people are damaged goods."
Jail deaths
The UT report, initially inspired by the suicide of Sandra Bland in the Waller
County Jail after a traffic stop in July 2015, acknowledges that county jails
are often called upon to serve as mental health facilities, "and they shouldn't
be," said Ranjana Natarajan, director of the Civil Rights Clinic.
According to the report, studies have estimated that 14.5 % of men and 31 % of
women in U.S. jails have a serious mental illness, yet jails provide the
opposite of a therapeutic setting - instead they are places where the lights,
noise, rules and violence can be particularly harmful to those with mental
disorders.
"Preventable Tragedies" begins with the stories of Greg Cheek and 9 others who
died in jail, including:
- Eric Dykes, 25, hanged himself in 2011 in the Hays County Jail, where he had
been housed for 14 months awaiting trial for stealing a purse. Dykes warned
that he would kill himself if placed in solitary confinement, but guards later
said they didn't believe the affable prisoner, who was receiving his medication
for bipolar disorder. In addition to paying a $40,000 settlement, Hays County
agreed to improve the jail's suicide prevention protocols.
- Jesse Jacobs, 32, had been taking Xanax for 10 years to treat anxiety
disorder and manic depression. Despite bringing the pills and a doctor's note
to the Galveston County Jail, records show he didn't receive the medication. He
experienced at least 4 withdrawal-related seizures and died 8 days into a 12-
to 15-day sentence for driving while intoxicated.
- Amy Lynn Cowling, 33, was booked into the Gregg County Jail on Christmas Eve
2010 after a traffic stop revealed 2 misdemeanor arrest warrants. The jail
refused to let her take medications for anxiety and bipolar disorder and
declined to let her continue methadone treatments for an opioid addiction, and
Cowling died 5 days later from withdrawal seizures. The county paid $1.9
million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit.
"These are really sad and compelling stories, and we hope they have an impact
and make jail administrators focus on how we can prevent these sort of things
in the future," Natarajan said. "Helping push this conversation along, we
think, would be really fruitful."
Recommendations
The 2nd half of the 107-page UT report was devoted to recommendations to
improve the way jails identify and treat prisoners with mental illness.
One suggestion sought additional training to help guards recognize signs of
mental illness and suicide risk. Another recommended using mental health
professionals to screen newly arrived prisoners.
Many of the in-custody deaths pointed to the need for better, more flexible
plans to help prisoners withdraw from alcohol and other commonly abused
substances, and jails should scrap policies that allow prescription medications
to be withheld from inmates, the report said.
County jails should reduce the use of solitary confinement and improve policies
and training on the use of force against prisoners with mental illness, the
report said.
The law students also asked the Legislature to clarify the law requiring judges
to be notified about mental illness and suicide risks shortly after an arrest,
allowing for better pretrial diversion into mental health treatment.
"In Texas, state health officials estimate that 30 % of jail inmates have one
or more serious mental illnesses," the report noted, adding that it costs about
$60 a day to care for those people in jail, while outpatient treatment costs
$13.52 a day through state mental health services.
"These inmates have substantial needs for health care, and when those needs are
unmet, the consequences can be fatal," the report said.
(source: Austin American-Statesman)
VIRGINIA:
Severe mental illness and Virginia's death penalty
Earlier this year, Russell Brown was found insane by both prosecution and
defense experts testifying at his trial for the tragic murder of a Virginia
state trooper. Yet the jury disregarded the experts and rejected his insanity
defense. This meant that someone who had just been found insane - meaning he
did not know the nature of his acts, or that they were wrong - could now be
sentenced to death.
While the jury eventually declined to impose the death penalty, there was no
statutory protection available against the highest punishment for a man who, by
the admission of all experts, did not have the highest culpability.
Such severely mentally ill people should not be eligible for execution. And yet
prosecutors continue to charge people who have substantial mental health
problems. Fortunately, legislation has been introduced to the Virginia General
Assembly to address this problem and a coalition is supporting it. The law
should be enacted.
In the months before the killing, Brown had been talking in fantastical and
paranoid ways, making little sense, and losing his grip on reality. He had been
talking to himself, acting erratically, and obsessing over the Mayan calendar,
the book of Revelation, and conspiracy theories. He left with his girlfriend to
live in the woods in an abandoned cabin, "eating bark off a tree and drinking
water out of a stream." Brown had stopped sleeping.
After Brown shot the trooper he took his clothes off and fled into the woods.
He had no sane motive to do this. He later said God told him to shoot the
trooper. Such a person is much less blameworthy, obviously, than a rational and
deliberate killer.
Arguably, he should have been found insane and confined to a mental
institution, perhaps for a long, long time - but 1 reason jurors are reluctant
to find defendants insane is that jurors are not told that such confinement
occurs if a person is found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). As a
result, successful insanity defenses are extremely rare.
According to the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental
Services, there is an average of 35 NGRI acquittals per year - in all criminal
cases, not just death penalty ones. Nationally, the NGRI defense is raised in
only 1 % of all criminal cases and, when raised, successful only 25 % of the
time.
In any case, a defendant with the kind of severe impairments suffered by
Russell Brown certainly should not even be eligible for the death penalty. The
proposed legislation would remedy this issue. It would provide a failsafe for
defendants who fell short of being found not guilty by reason of insanity, but
who nonetheless suffer from serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or
bipolar disorder. The bill provides that, if found guilty, the defendant would
receive a sentence of life in prison without parole.
Individuals with severe delusions or with bipolar disorder, for example, are
simply not the worst of the worst murderers for whom the death penalty is
intended. The Supreme Court - and Virginia law - already forbid the death
penalty for persons with intellectual disability and juveniles, because their
impairments diminish their culpability.
Despite their similar impairments, individuals with severe mental illness can
still be executed. People with severe mental illnesses should be treated the
same way as people with intellectual disability. No doubt the courts will
someday conclude as much.
If lawmakers believe that we should retain the death penalty in Virginia, we
must be confident that we are not sentencing to death severely mentally ill
people who cannot be fully blamed for their actions.
. (source: Brandon Garrett is the Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished
Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He is working on
a new book, "The Triumph of Mercy: How the Demise of the Death Penalty Can
Revive Criminal Justice," which explores the lessons from the decline in
American death sentencing----Richmond Times-Dispatch)
SOUTH CAROLINA:
Goodbye to South Carolina's 'Doctor Death'
In a year where voters in many jurisdictions have ousted some of the most
aggressive prosecutors in the country, it's worth pausing to bid farewell to
Donnie Myers, the solicitor of South Carolina's 11th Judicial Circuit. After
his 3rd alcohol-related charge in a decade, and because he is approaching the
mandatory retirement age of 72, Myers announced in March that he would not run
for reelection when his term expires next month. And a federal appeals court
recently handed down a fitting parting reversal for the prosecutor who is a
legend in the state and seems to have walked straight out of a paperback novel
- a man "known for courtroom theatrics, a flashy wardrobe [and] chewing
tobacco."
He was also known for his affinity for capital punishment. Myers earned the
nicknames "Doctor Death" and "Death Penalty Donnie" for his record-setting
pursuit of executions. The State published a definitive profile of Myers in
March. No prosecutor in the state has tried more death penalty cases than he
has, and in 28 of those cases he's persuaded a jury to vote unanimously in his
favor (although only 6 of those defendants have been executed). He is famous
for over-the-top, made-for-television closing arguments, as exhibited in these
2 examples from the State's profile:
THE STATE V. FINKLEA. In this case, 1 of Myers' most vivid courtroom stunts was
found to be legal by the S.C. Supreme Court. The case involved Ron Finklea, who
had been convicted of robbing an ATM and in the process, shooting a security
guard, dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire with a lighter,
killing him.
At trial, during his death penalty argument, Myers held out a large,
match-shaped, metal fire-starter before the jury and ignited it, saying,
"Gasoline pouring on another human being and the fire, the fire, the burning.
When you're cooking sometimes and you touch the stove ... and you touch that
hot thing or you're grilling, whooo, oh, it hurts, it's painful."
Over defense protests, the high court approved Myers' use of flicking a lighter
to make his point during the jury argument.
Finklea remains on death row. His appeals are pending.
THE STATE V. NORTHCUTT. In this 2007 decision, the S.C. Supreme Court
overturned the death sentence of Ron Northcutt, who was convicted of the 2001
killing of his infant daughter, Breanna, by beating her to death because she
would not stop crying.
In his argument to the jury seeking death, Myers had, among other over-the-top
actions, inflamed the jury "by producing a large black shroud and draping it
over (a) baby's crib," the Supreme Court ruled. Myers then wheeled the crib
from the courtroom in a staged funeral procession and also improperly told the
jury they would "declare open season on babies in Lexington County" if they did
not give Northcutt the death penalty.
After another sentencing trial, Northcutt was sentenced again to death. He is
now on death row.
But it's likely that the last major court decision in his career will be the
one affirmed days ago by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. On Nov.
21 - hat tip to Nashville attorney Daniel Horwitz, who flagged the ruling on
Twitter - that court upheld a federal trial judge's decision to vacate the
death sentence of Johnny Bennett - a man convicted in 2000 of kidnapping, armed
robbery, larceny and a murder in which he stabbed his victim more than 70 times
with a Phillips-head screwdriver - because of the way Myers's arguments in the
sentencing phase of the trial had relied on racist appeals to an all-white
jury.
Myers had referred to Bennett, a black man standing 6 1/2 feet tall and
weighing 300 pounds, as "King Kong" and labeled him a "caveman." During a
cross-examination, Myers also appeared to go out of his way to highlight for
the jury the fact that Bennett had been involved in a sexual relationship with
a white woman.
Then there was this, as summed up by Andrew Cohen at the Marshall Project in
March:
When one witness, a white woman, testified that Bennett had attacked her weeks
before the murder, Myers asked the witness if she had dreamt of anything while
in a coma. Yes, she told jurors, "Indians were chasing me trying to kill me,
and the thing I thought was they were black." Both before and after that
answer, Bennett's lawyer objected and moved for a mistrial. It was denied; the
prosecutor had not elicited the "black Indian" dream testimony, a state judge
subsequently (and erroneously) ruled.
All the more damning was the fact that Myers seemed to have tailored his
argument to stir up racial animus in the white jurors. In the initial trial, a
mixed-race jury had sentenced Bennett to death, but that sentence was reversed
on appeal by the South Carolina Supreme Court. The jury for the 2nd sentencing
proceeding was made up completely of white jurors and, as the recent appeals
court ruling puts it, "before this all-white jury, Myers chose to use racially
charged language from the first sentence of his opening argument to his final
soliloquy, casting aside the race-neutral presentation he had employed with the
mixed-race jury."
It seemed to work. More from Cohen:
Then, 6 years later, one of Bennett's post-conviction lawyers asked one of the
jurors from that 2000 sentencing why the juror had thought Bennett had killed
his victim." "Because he was just a dumb [n-----]," the juror candidly
responded. "I apologize for saying that word," the juror then said under oath,
"but after going through that thing for an entire week and all the evidence
piling up against him, that was just the way I felt about it."
The state's Supreme Court was unmoved by all this, ruling in 2006 that Myers's
comments "did not improperly inject racial issues into the trial." Bennett's
appeals would continue to be denied, until March of this year when U.S.
District Judge Richard Gergel vacated the death sentence based on Myers's
racist appeals.
His 40-year career, and the Bennett case in particular, is worth considering
further in the context of South Carolina's poisonous police culture - examined
in a 4-part series here at The Watch - and as we await a verdict in the murder
trial of former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, who shot Walter
Scott, an unarmed black motorist, as he fled a traffic stop last year. Slager
has testified that he felt "total fear" when Scott grabbed his Taser during the
altercation - a common refrain in recent incidents involving white police
officers and black, often unarmed, men and an echo of racist depictions from
the past of black men as especially aggressive and prone to violence.
The closing paragraph of the 4th Circuit's ruling on the Bennett case serves as
a decent summary of our predicament in policing and the criminal-justice system
as a whole:
The criminal justice system must win the trust of all Americans by delivering
justice without regard to the race or ethnicity of those who come before it.
The many instances where the system performs its duties admirably help to build
the trust of the people. A proceeding like this one threatens to tear that
trust apart.
(source: Opinion, Steven Hale is a staff writer at the Nashville Scene, where
he covers politics and public policy, with an emphasis on criminal justice----
Washington Post)
GEORGIA:
Killer first sentenced to death now gets life for 1973 murder
An aging killer was sentenced to life without parole on Friday, 43 years after
the murder for which he is being punished.
Wilburn Wiley Dobbs, now 67 and in poor health, used a cane to walk into the
courtroom in LaFayette.
On Dec. 14, 1973, during an armed robbery of a Chickamauga food store, Dobbs
used a shotgun to kill Roy Lee Sizemore Sr. as Sizemore lay on the floor of his
grocery.
Dobbs was sentenced to death in 1974 - 1 of the first killers to be condemned
after Georgia reinstated the death penalty. But a federal court set aside the
sentence in 1998 and ordered a new sentencing trial for Dobbs. The
re-sentencing hearing took place Friday at the Walker County Courthouse.
Dobbs is just a year older than Eddie Sizemore, who came upon his father's dead
body all those years ago and has never forgotten the horror of it.
"I found my father killed," Sizemore told Judge Kristina Cook Graham. "I see it
every day."
After testifying, he went back to his seat and wept.
Sizemore was 23 when his father was shot and beaten. Now he is 66, bald and has
a white beard.
Sizemore walked with a slight limp as he passed a few feet from Dobbs on his
way to the witness stand Friday afternoon. Speaking for his nieces and his
sister in the courtroom, Sizemore paused frequently as he spoke to Graham, the
chief judge of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit. The weeping man covered
his face with his hands once he reached his seat next to his sister, his only
surviving sibling out of the original 7.
"I want him in prison for the rest of his life," Sizemore said.
Dobbs was convicted and sentenced to die on May 22, 1974. But his punishment
had been in limbo since 1998, when the 11th U.S. Circuit Court ordered him
re-sentenced on the grounds that Dobbs' lawyer had done little to persuade
jurors to at least consider a life sentence.
The federal court noted that during the sentencing portion of the 1st trial,
Dobbs' lawyer spent a majority of time reading one of the consenting opinions
to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the death penalty in 1972.
Georgia had re-established the death penalty in 1973 using the Supreme Court's
1972 ruling as a guide. Dobbs' lawyer argued that Georgia's new death penalty
was unlikely to survive.
Instead, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1976 reinstated capital punishment
nationwide.
In September 2002, the district attorney filed notice that he would again seek
the death penalty against Dobbs.
But there was little effort to hold a new sentencing trial. Even though his
death sentence was set aside, Dobbs remained on death row until his health
started to fail in recent years.
"It's taken a great deal of time for us to get here," Judge Graham said.
At the start of Friday's brief sentencing hearing, Graham said prosecutors and
defense attorneys were ready for a trial on Dobbs' punishment. If prosecutors
had decided to re-pursue the death penalty, it would have required seating new
jurors to hear all the evidence.
Instead both sides agreed that it made sense to accept life without parole,
especially in light of Dobbs' poor health. Dobbs suffers numerous health
problems and has only 1 kidney because he donated the other to his mother in
1993.
"At this stage it makes no sense to go through a death penalty trial," said
Dobbs attorney Jack Martin. "The man sentenced to life without parole (on
Friday) is not the same man (who murdered Sizemore)."
To execute Dobbs now, Martin said, "would be like executing a proxy."
There are 58 men on Georgia's death row and the state is preparing to carry out
its ninth lethal injection of the year on Tuesday.
(source: myajc.com)
ALABAMA:
Prosecutors to seek death penalty in Tuscaloosa murder trial
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in a murder trial scheduled to begin
Monday.
James Turner Morris Jr., 36, is 1 of 4 people accused of kidnapping and beating
a disabled veteran to death in 2012.
Barring a potential plea agreement, jury selection is expected to begin Monday
morning before Tuscaloosa County Circuit Court Judge John England.
Morris, also known as "Applejack," Jeffrey "Jay-Zoo" Sanders, Cynthia "Red"
Mack and her husband Leroy Hines were all charged after Greta Johnson was found
dead in an abandoned trailer in April 2012.
Mack, 39, pleaded guilty to felony murder in October after agreeing to offer
testimony during the trials of the other defendants. She hasn't yet been
sentenced.
Cases are still pending against Hines, 36, and Sanders, 33.
Investigators believe that Johnson owed the suspects money for drugs, and their
attempts to recover the money turned deadly. Johnson, 50, had been dead for
weeks when her body was discovered in April 2012, authorities said at the time.
An autopsy revealed that Johnson died from blunt-force trauma to her face and
head. Shards from a large porcelain or glass cat figurine were found near her
body.
According to police, Johnson was arrested on a public intoxication charge.
Morris and his girlfriend picked her up when she was released from the
Tuscaloosa County Jail.
The investigators believe that Morris' girlfriend drove to an alley near the
jail where Sanders and Hines jumped into the back seat. They believe that
Sanders choked her with a jacket, demanded the money that she owed and wouldn't
let her call her brother for a loan, according to the investigator's court
testimony in 2012.
They drove to the abandoned trailer off Sanders Ferry Road, according to
witness statements read in court, where the suspects forced Johnson inside and
began to beat her.
Morris told police that Mack had hit the victim with the cat figurine after
Hines punched her in the face and tried to cut her throat with a box cutter.
Mack, Hines and Sanders were all arrested shortly after Johnson's body was
discovered. Morris wasn't charged until 2014.
Johnson was born in Arkansas and moved to Alabama in 1993. She was a member of
the women's basketball team at Olivet College and later at Glen Oaks Community
College. She served in the U.S. Army in Germany, where she was injured in a
Humvee accident and forced into medical retirement. She enjoyed playing
basketball, chess and going to church.
(source: Tuscaloosa News)
***************
Alabama inmate seeks execution stay from US Supreme Court
An Alabama inmate is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stay his upcoming
execution to consider whether a judge should have been able to give him a death
sentence when the jury recommended life imprisonment.
Attorneys for Ronald Bert Smith on Friday filed the stay request. Smith is
scheduled to be executed by lethal injection next Thursday for the 1994 slaying
of Huntsville convenience store clerk Casey Wilson.
A jury recommended life imprisonment by a 7-5 vote, but a judge sentenced Smith
to the death penalty.
Smith's attorneys said Alabama is the only state that continues to allow
judicial override of a jury's recommendation.
(source: Associated Press)
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