Jan. 27
TEXAS----impending execution
No late appeals expected in Texas execution----James Freeman, 34, is set to die
Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, for a Texas game warden in 2007
No late appeals are expected for a man who is set to be executed for a Texas
game warden's death during a 2007 shootout.
James Freeman's scheduled lethal injection would be the 2nd in as many weeks in
Texas, which carries out capital punishment more than any other state. The U.S.
Supreme Court earlier this month refused to review Freeman's case, and his
attorney, Don Vernay, said he doesn't plan any new appeals to try to block the
execution from happening Wednesday in Huntsville.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday declined a clemency petition
from Freeman.
Freeman was suspected of illegally hunting at night from his truck in Southeast
Texas' Wharton County when a game warden spotted him. Freeman sped away,
leading authorities on a 90-minute chase that reached 130 mph. It ended near a
cemetery not far from his home in Lissie with Freeman stepping out of his
disabled pickup truck and shooting at officers.
He emptied his 11-shot .357-caliber handgun, then switched to an AK-47 assault
rifle with a 30-round clip.
When it was over, Freeman had been shot four times and Justin Hurst, a Texas
Parks and Wildlife game warden who had joined the March 17, 2007, chase, was
fatally wounded. It was Hurst's 34th birthday.
Steve Lightfoot, an agency spokesman who knew Hurst, said the married father of
a 4-month-old son represented "the very essence of what this agency is about
and what game wardens are about."
"He was very passionate in his role concerning the state???s resources and
protecting those resources," Lightfoot said.
18 Texas game wardens, including Hurst, have died in the line of duty since
game wardens began enforcing conservation laws in 1895. Hurst had been with the
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for 12 years, the last 5 as a game warden.
Hurst was an alligator and waterfowl specialist before moving to law
enforcement. A state wildlife management area where he once worked in Brazoria
County and about 60 miles south of Houston now carries his name.
Vernay said Freeman's lack of a previous criminal record should have influenced
jurors he didn't deserve the death penalty, which in Texas requires a jury to
find a capital murder offender would be a continuing threat.
"This is a troublesome case," the appeals lawyer said. "He never did anything
wrong in his life other than a DUI. This kid was not a future danger, he was
just a loser. ... He got drunk and got in a shooting."
A psychologist testifying at Freeman's trial said Freeman told him he drank
about 9 beers while watching a football game on TV at his home and then decided
to drive around and shoot snakes and birds that night - something he enjoyed
doing.
Freeman's trial lawyer, Stanley Schneider, said heavy alcohol use and severe
depression led the unemployed welder to try to commit "suicide by cop" in his
confrontation with officers.
"It was totally senseless," Schneider said of the fatal shooting. "It really is
very sad that it happened, that 2 families are suffering like this."
Prosecutors convinced jurors that Freeman had an uncontrollable and
unpredictable temper. He was on probation after being convicted of driving
while intoxicated, and it was about to be revoked because he had failed to
comply with the terms, court records showed.
Freeman, 34, is 1 of at least 8 Texas prisoners with execution dates in the
coming months. Last year, Texas lethally injected 13 convicted killers,
accounting for nearly 1/2 of the 28 executions carried out nationwide.
(source: Associated Press)
FLORIDA:
Racial bias plagues Florida's death penalty
This month, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida's death penalty statute
because judges rather than jurors were making the ultimate decision about who
should be sentenced to die. This narrow ruling highlights a serious problem
with Florida's capital punishment scheme, but new research suggests that this
is just one of many flaws in how the state determines who should be executed.
I recently conducted a study that looked at the race of victims in all
homicides in Florida since 1976, including those that resulted in execution. I
found that executions are very rare: just 0.30 % of homicides lead to an
execution. But there are tremendous disparities depending on the
characteristics of the victim: homicides involving white female victims are 6.5
times more likely to result in an execution than those involving black male
victims. In fact, 72 % of all executions carried out in Florida between 1976
and 2014 were for crimes involving white victims despite the fact that 56 % of
all homicide victims are white. Similarly, only 26 % of all homicide victims
are female, but 43 % of all executions carried out in Florida were for
homicides involving female victims.
What's even more shocking, though, is that no white person has been executed in
Florida for a homicide involving a black victim to date. In contrast, 71 % of
the executions carried out against black inmates were for homicides involving
white victims. The vast majority of homicides occur with offenders and victims
of the same race.
With 40 years of experience with the modern death penalty, and over 30,000
homicides in Florida, the fact that no white person has ever been executed for
killing a black person needs to be recognized for what it is: evidence of a
severely broken system based on race.
We can quibble about racial disparities that are measured by a few % points.
But the results of my study are not like that. These are stark results with
effects measured by orders of magnitude. They clearly show that Florida's death
penalty system is plagued by vast racial and gender disparities, and that black
lives are not valued the same as white lives.
When a black male is murdered, chances that that offender will be executed are
0.23 %. When the victim is a white female, odds are 1.5 %. Those are all very
low numbers, suggesting that the death penalty is not as central to the fight
against crime as some might imagine. But one is 6.5 times greater than the
other, and when we add in the race of the offender, we can't even calculate the
statistics because the white offender-black victim category shows no executions
in modern Florida history.
Bias enters the process at many different points, from the prosecutor's initial
decision about whether the charge the crime as 1st or 2nd degree murder, to
their decision to seek either life in prison or the death penalty. This
exacerbated by the fact that Florida's death penalty statute is so broad that
the vast majority of homicides could be charged as 1st degree murders eligible
for the death penalty and that decision is completely up to the discretion of
the local prosecutor. It is also worth noting that Florida is the only state
that doesn't require any unanimity in a capital jury verdict.
Prosecutorial and judicial discretion may also explain dramatic geographic
variation in the use of the death penalty. Just 6 out of Florida's 67 counties
are responsible for more than 1/2 of the state's 89 executions. Only 4 counties
(Miami-Dade, Orange, Duval and Pinellas) have produced more than 5 executions,
while 36 counties have never produced an execution.
The homicide rate in counties that have produced no executions is significantly
lower than the homicide rate in counties with executions. It's difficult to
argue that executions are deterring future murderers with numbers like these.
With the Supreme Court ruling that Florida's procedures must be revised, and
with this comprehensive review of the distribution of executions across
different counties and categories of victims revealing shocking disparities in
patterns of actual usage, maybe time has come to question whether the system is
worth it.
Florida had almost 30,000 homicides from 1984 through 2012, and 89 executions
through 2014: Just 0.30 % of homicides result in an execution. Given the flaws
and inequities my study revealed, maybe it's just not worth it.
(source: Frank R. Baumgartner is a professor of political science at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of "The Impact of
Race, Gender, and Geography on Florida Executions." The full study can be found
here: http://bit.ly/1RN4BAV----Gainesville Sun)
MISSISSIPPI:
Hood wants prison re-entry, election law, death penalty reforms
Attorney General Jim Hood is calling on lawmakers to pass prison re-entry and
election law reforms, adopt alternative methods of executing death-row convicts
and to grant him authority to wiretap phones, at least for human trafficking
investigations.
"Our 2016 legislative agenda puts citizen safety at the forefront of this
session, right where it belongs," Hood said, releasing his 2016 legislative
agenda in a press conference on Wednesday. He said it prioritizes "key issues
such as better laws for child victims including child victims of human
trafficking."
Hood is calling for the Legislature to create a re-entry program to provide
inmates a better transition back into society, noting that more are being
released from prison after lawmakers passed criminal justice reforms in 2014.
Hood said he has pushed for such re-entry improvements for more many years,
starting when he was a district attorney.
"I wrote a letter to (former House Speaker) Tim Ford 25 years ago on this,"
Hood said. "We're just turning them out, not giving them any job training or
other help."
Hood said that with legal attacks on states' methods of execution, including
Mississippi's, he wants lawmakers to provide for alternatives to lethal
injection, "should the lethal injection drugs be unavailable or lethal
injection itself be declared unconstitutional." Hood said he's not trying to
start political debate over the death penalty, but wants lawmakers to provide
alternate ways to carry it out given the way litigation is going.
"Alternative means includes nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution or firing squad,"
Hood said. "... The old gas chamber is still there right beside the lethal
injection chamber."
Hood is also calling for the identities of the state execution team and lethal
injection drug or other vendors to be exempt from public records law, because
anti-death penalty advocates have targeted them with social media and other
outing.
Hood is pushing several election-law reforms, including measures to prohibit
the personal use of campaign-finance funds by politicians and clarify that
candidates must detail credit card purchases on their campaign finance reports.
(source: Clarion-Ledger)
MISSOURI:
Bill to repeal death penalty moves to Senate floor
Sen. Paul Wieland, R-Imperial, made headlines last week for his legislation
that would repeal the death penalty in Missouri and now, he's made history.
SB 816 has taken the next step to becoming law by moving onto the Senate floor
after passing out of committee by a 4-2 vote in committee Tuesday after it was
taken up again after the committee tabled the issue last week.
It is the 1st time a death penalty repeal bill has moved onto the floor of the
Senate.
"One of my motivations [to run for office] was defending human life," Wieland
said. "As a pro-life person, I needed to be congruent with my conscience."
While Sen. Rob Schaaf, R-St. Joseph, the chair of the General Laws and Pensions
Committee, was receptive to the idea, alluding to the racial disparity of death
sentences, the other Republicans in the committee were not. Sen. Bob Onder,
R-St. Charles, expressed his belief that some people were too dangerous to be
left alive in prison, lest they do harm to their fellow inmates or prison
guards.
"Someone executed will never murder again," he commented.
Sen. Dave Schatz, R-Washington, believed that the death penalty was an
effective and necessary deterrent to heinous crime and rejected testimony that
the criminal justice system did not do its job.
"I don't think we have a broken criminal justice system that's the problem,"
Schatz said. "It's a morally bankrupt society."
Sen. Joe Keaveny, D-St. Louis, an avid opponent of the death penalty, disagreed
with Schatz' take.
"I've fought this fight since I got elected," he said. "If the death penalty
was actually a deterrent, we wouldn't be executing anyone, would we?"
Many witnesses testified in support of the bill, including the Missouri
Catholic Conference, the NAACP and the Missouri Conservatives Concerned About
the Death Penalty. Each had their own concerns with capital punishment from the
fact that it may be racist institution, that they could be executing innocent
people that may be exonerated by new evidence, or that they simply don't trust
the government to put people to death.
Jennifer Bukowsky, a Columbia-based attorney that has worked as a public
defender, said that her experience with the Missouri criminal justice system
made her want to "hit the pause button" on such punishments because mistakes
could be made in sentencing people to death. If the state carried out on those
mistakes, Bukowsky argues that "history will not treat us kindly."
"Public defenders are inadequately funded and we can't have enough confidence
in the integrity of the results of our system to kill," she said Tuesday. "Just
because a person's in prison doesn't mean the case is solved."
(source: The Missouri Times)
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