Feb. 19 CALIFORNIA: Death Penalty Will Be Sought in Guard's Death The San Bernardino County district attorney announced Friday that he would seek the death penalty against the inmate who allegedly killed a Chino prison correctional officer in January. Inmate Jon Christopher Blaylock, 35, allegedly stabbed veteran correctional officer Manuel A. Gonzalez Jr. 3 times with a homemade knife Jan. 10 at the Chino Institution for Men, killing the 43-year-old father of six from Whittier. Blaylock was serving a life sentence for the attempted murder of a police officer. "We have to protect our guards in prison," Dist. Atty. Michael Ramos said at a news conference attended by the officer's family. "The only message to send [prisoners] from this case is that if you kill, we're going to take your life. [Blaylock] took the life of a wonderful human being." Blaylock is expected to be arraigned within 2 weeks. Manuel Gonzalez's slaying - the 1st of a state correctional officer in 20 years - is being investigated by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, the state Office of the Inspector General and a special panel organized by the Department of Corrections. John A. Ferrone and Mark J. Peacock, attorneys representing the Gonzalez family, said they will file a civil lawsuit against the Department of Corrections and the Chino Institution for Men for alleged misconduct related to the slaying. The attorneys say Warden Lori DiCarlo was negligent because she failed to move Blaylock to another prison despite his violent history. She also failed to isolate him while he was held at the Chino prison, and did not distribute protective vests to correctional officers even though the vests were in storage at the prison, they said. Gonzalez was not wearing a vest when he was stabbed in the upper torso and abdomen while in the prison's reception center. (source: Los Angeles Times) ***************************** Officer killer ruled incompetent for 3rd time A man who confessed to killing a Millbrae police officer in 1998 was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial for the 3rd time. Judge H. James Ellis ruled Thursday that Marvin Patrick Sullivan, 50, should return to Napa State Hospital, where he has been treated for paranoid schizophrenia since being indicted for murdering Officer David Chetcuti. He had been able to regain competency with medication. But in June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice of forcibly medicating defendants to ensure their competency can occur only under limited circumstances. The case has led the officer's family to voice frustration with the state's mental-competency laws. Chetcuti's widow, Gail, became an outspoken advocate for reform before she died last year of brain cancer. "I think it's a waste of taxpayer money. Lock him in a dark corner. Why keep bringing him back?" David Chetcuti's brother, Joe, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Send him back to the hospital, leave him there and close the case." On April 25, 1998, Millbrae motorcycle officer David Chetcuti assisted another officer who had stopped Sullivan for a traffic violation on Highway 101. Sullivan allegedly shot Chetcuti more than 12 times with a high-powered rifle before driving off. He was found the same day on the San Mateo Bridge with pipe bombs strapped to his body. Sullivan has confessed to the crimes, saying he believed he was the target of a government assassination attempt, according to his attorneys. (source: Associated Press) NEW YORK: David Kaczynski, executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, talked to the Editorial Board. Q. The Court of Appeals threw out New York's death penalty on a sentencing technicality. The Senate has voted to repair the law, but the Assembly is balking. Shouldn't the Assembly just have an up or down vote on whether to repair the law? There are thousands of bills submitted by members every year. There is a committee structure to study each of these proposals. This is really what the recent Assembly hearings have been about, a chance for members of 3 different committees to hear and weigh the evidence. Q. You criticize New York's law because it's expensive to apply. But many of those costs are because of the protections it offers defendants. The death penalty has cost taxpayers $170-$200 million in the last 10 years. The money spent on a capital trial is far greater than the amount needed to incarcerate someone for life. That money could have been used to prevent crime, support law enforcement or provide aid to victims. We've poured money into a failed and unfair program that could have gone to help New Yorkers. We could choose to have a system like Texas, with few procedural safeguards, but I don't think anyone would want that. On the other hand, we could try and create a better death penalty law and in the end, spend much more money and convict even fewer people and we'd still not be sure that we haven't sentenced innocent people to death. Q. Doesn't New York have one of the best capital defenders offices in the country to protect the innocent? There's no question that New York has one of the best. However, the best lawyers can't compensate for a bad law. Q. Do you have any evidence that anyone on death row now was wrongly convicted? As far as I know, no one on death row has been wrongly convicted, but the court has found reason to believe that the process for determining that they deserve to be put to death was unfair or arbitrary. Q. How did you get involved in this issue? I had always been personally opposed to the death penalty, but that was just a hypothetical viewpoint, until 1995 when I began to suspect that my only brother, Ted, was the serial bomber known as the Unabomber. At that point I faced a terrible dilemma, where any choice I made could lead to someone's death. If I did nothing, some innocent person might die as a result, however if I turned Ted in, he could be executed. I decided to turn Ted in because I felt it was my responsibility to protect other people. It is really the same values that led me to oppose the death penalty. (source: New York Daily News) ALABAMA: Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal in capital murder case The Alabama Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of Arthur Lee Giles, who has spent more than two decades on death row. Giles was convicted of capital murder in the Nov. 10, 1978 stabbing deaths of a couple killed during a robbery at their rural Blount County home. Giles, who is on his second round of appeals through the state and federal court systems, was appealing a decision last year by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals to uphold his sentence. The Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph ruling Friday refusing to hear Giles' appeal. He was convicted in 1979 for the deaths of the Blount County couple and sentenced to death. That 1st sentence was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals and Giles was convicted again in 1982 after receiving a new trial. Giles has argued in his appeals that his rights were violated because he continued to be questioned after his arrest, even though he had told an investigator he did not want to make a statement. (source: Associatesd Press) MARYLAND: Killer's attorney explains strategy----He says he didn't call some to stand in 2000 to limit testimony against client The attorney who took the lead in representing a convicted killer at a capital sentencing hearing in 2000 testified yesterday that the decision to elicit evidence from some witnesses while not calling others to the stand was part of a strategy aimed at limiting testimony that he feared would be most harmful to his client. William Kanwisher spent nearly 3 1/2 hours explaining how he decided what testimony to present to jurors deciding whether to sentence Lawrence Michael Borchardt Sr. to life in prison or death by lethal injection for the Thanksgiving Day killings in 1998 of an elderly couple from whom he had tried to solicit money to buy drugs. Kanwisher's explanations came on the 3rd day of a Circuit Court hearing through which Borchardt's current lawyers are trying to have his death sentence overturned. They've argued that the failure of Kanwisher and co-counsel David P. Henninger to present expert testimony about the inmate's background and mental health - evidence that jurors might have considered mitigating factors - prevented Borchardt from receiving a fair sentence. "We tried very hard to make sure we put as much positive mitigation in as possible without opening the door to things that might take the jury's eye off the ball," Kanwisher testified. Looking directly at Anne Arundel Circuit Judge Pamela L. North, who will decide whether to overturn Borchardt's sentence, Kanwisher added, "I may not have done a very good job of it. It's possible. That's what you're going to have to decide." Kanwisher made no attempt to hide his displeasure at having been called by the prosecution. In a particularly testy exchange with Baltimore County prosecutor Stephen Bailey, the defense attorney acknowledged that he had spoken this week to Borchardt's current lawyers but refused to speak with prosecutors Wednesday night. Asked why he would cooperate with the lawyers accusing him of incompetence and not the prosecutors put in the position of defending him, Kanwisher responded, "The reasons are simple: I don't want Mr. Borchardt to die. I don't want to help you. I'll answer truthfully, but I'm not going to help you." Borchardt, 53, of Rosedale was convicted of fatally stabbing Joseph and Bernice Ohler. The couple had twice given money to Borchardt, a heroin addict who was going door to door claiming that his wife needed cancer treatments. He killed the couple when they told him they didn't have any more money to give. The case was moved from Baltimore County to Anne Arundel after Borchardt's lawyers requested a change of venue. Kanwisher said he decided not to call mental health experts to testify, fearing that might allow prosecutors to ask about Borchardt's "braggings" of past and future violence. Among the more harmful claims, Kanwisher acknowledged, were Borchardt's statements to detectives that he had killed before the Ohler stabbings and would kill again, even in prison. During questioning by Julie S. Dietrich, one of Borchardt's 3 attorneys, Kanwisher acknowledged that some of the testimony he was trying to preclude - including Borchardt's threats against a detention center nurse - came out anyway during the sentencing hearing. He testified that even then, he did not call as witnesses the psychiatric social worker and psychologist who might have offered evidence on Borchardt's behalf. (source: The Baltimore Sun) SOUTH CAROLINA: Who killed Kia Logan? -- Oakland school shooters alleged confessions debated The attorney for a man charged in the 1988 death of an 8-year-old Greenwood girl wants a death row inmate, who allegedly confessed to the crime, to record a videotaped deposition. Jamie Wilson received a death sentence and 175 years in prison for the murders of Tequila Thomas and Shequila Bradley, both 8, at Oakland Elementary School on Sept. 26, 1988. Wilson walked into the school with a .22-caliber pistol during lunch, opening fire and wounding seven students and 2 teachers. Four months earlier, Kia Logan, 8, disappeared from her home at Georgetown Apartments. DNA tests would later prove that a skull found in 1990 by hunters in Newberry County belonged to the child. In 2002, 14 years after Logans abduction, Charles Hampton was charged by the Greenwood County Sheriffs Department in her death. According to court documents, though, Wilson allegedly confessed at least four times to killing Logan in the years between her abduction and Hamptons arrest. Greenwood County Public Defender Charles Grose, representing Hampton, has filed a motion asking for Wilson to submit to a videotaped deposition about Logans death before he is put to death by the state. Wilsons 1st confession was allegedly a hand-written letter mailed from the Greenwood County Jail, in which he claimed he kidnapped and shot Logan before leaving her body less than a mile from a Western Auto store in Lincolnton, Ga. A 2nd admission results from a transcript of a telephone conversation between Wilson and an employee of The State newspaper in a call made after his conviction. In this statement he claims he was present when the child was killed, but said another man - a man then serving a criminal sentence for criminal sexual conduct - killed her. A third statement was in a letter to The Greenville News claiming he left her body in Newberry County, and the final statement was made March 27, 2001, to Greenwood County deputies and a State Law Enforcement Division agent. Wilson has never been charged in Logans death. Greenwood County Sheriff Dan Wideman said his office stands by its arrest of Hampton. "We're going to work as hard as we can to help the Solicitors Office get this man convicted," he said. Grose claims Hamptons statements are no more accurate than Wilsons alleged admissions. As part of his argument in favor of Wilsons deposition, he says Hampton claimed Logans body was buried, which was not the case. "I'm not familiar with the deposition request," said Wilsons attorney John H. Blume, director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project. "No one's ever contacted me, and I dont know if theres been a hearing on it." Grose said Blume has been served with a copy of the motion, filed last summer. His request for a videotaped deposition is pending. In 1996, Hampton was arrested on charges of kidnapping and child molestation charges in Newton County, Ga., charges he reportedly substantiated in statements to investigators. These charges were dismissed months later when a grand jury was presented evidence that cast doubt on his "direct involvement in these crimes," according to court records. In 2003, U.S. District Judge Matthew Perry decided that Wilson was not competent to decide whether to plead guilty but mentally ill when he waived his right to a jury trial in 1989. This ruling was overturned last year. Wilson has since asked for a psychiatric evaluation to prove that he is mentally ill and does not have the ability to "conform his conduct to the requirements of the law," according to court documents. (source: The Index-Journal)
