Death Penalty News and Statistics
MAY 9, 2008:
UTAH:
Constitutional change to streamline Utah death penalty appeals draws critics
Opponents of proposed constitutional amendments designed to streamline death penalty appeals said Thursday that the measures are too broad and would upset the balance of powers among the 3 branches of government.
The proposal could allow the Utah Legislature to eliminate the authority of judges to consider claims, after a certain time, that an inmate is innocent, Salt Lake City attorney Alan Sullivan told the Constitutional Revision Commission.
"It's important for courts to correct their mistakes," he said.
The proposal by the Utah Attorney General's Office to modify the state Constitution would allow the Legislature to set limits on post-conviction relief petitions, a type of appeal.
A two-thirds vote by state lawmakers is required to put the measure on the 2010 ballot. The Constitutional Revision Commission serves as an advisory body to the Legislature.
The changes would apply to post-conviction appeals in all criminal cases, but are aimed particularly at death penalty cases. Lawyers from the appeals division of the Utah Attorney General's Office, which proposed the revisions, argue that they strike a balance between providing inmates with a "generous" opportunity to correct serious constitutional errors in their convictions and giving crime victims finality and closure.
"We have the death penalty on the books, but no death penalty," Fred Voros said, adding that inmates delay executions for years with appeals.
And Thomas Brunker, an assistant attorney general, disputed that any legitimate claims of innocence would be blocked. He pointed out that there is a state law that allows convicted criminals to request DNA testing of old evidence that might exonerate them.
The commission scheduled a July meeting for further discussion of the proposal.
(source: Salt Lake Tribune)
WASHINGTON:
Crenshaw death penalty decision delayed
The decision on whether to pursue the death penalty against accused Spokane murderer Justin Crenshaw has been put off until another day.
Prosecutors had until Friday to inform the court whether they would be seeking the death penalty in the case. Instead, they asked for a delay on Thursday, in part so the defense could prepare a mitigation package, which is essentially a laundry list of reasons explaining why execution would not be appropriate, in the defense counsel's eyes.
Justin Crenshaw is accused of stabbing Sarah Clark and Tanner Pehl to death in a north Spokane County home on February 28th.
Early in April, prosecutors formally charged files against Crenshaw that included aggravated factors, meaning that they would have the option of pursuing the death penalty or life in prison if they so choose.
"Any time you're making that decision it's tough, for a lot of reasons, it's a long and arduous process, it's a life and death decision so it's something you have to take very, very seriously," Deputy Prosecutor Jack Driscoll said when those charges were filed.
Because the time frame to decide on whether to seek capital punishment was about to expire, a motion to extend that window of opportunity was granted.
"Every case [we] have to weigh individually and look at different factors and circumstances before you make that important decision," Driscoll said.
The 20-year-old defendant, Crenshaw, is believed to have killed 20-year-old Tyler Pehl and Mead High School student Sarah Clark late in February, possibly for reasons of jealousy.
Those close to the victims say Crenshaw killed the pair because he was jealous of Clark's developing interest in Pehl. Clark and Crenshaw had been seeing each other in the couple of weeks that the accused murderer had been in Spokane, where he'd recently moved to from Las Vegas.
Several friends and family of the victims were in court Thursday, wondering if Crenshaw might some day be put to death. Shortly after the murders occurred, members of Pehl's family hinted that they would support a decision to seek capital punishment.
"I have a lot of anger in me," Tanner's brother Matt said. "I'm not, 'Oh, forgive him'. I have a lot of anger about it. If his life needs to be taken for what was taken from us, that's completely justified."
(source: KXLY News)
USA:
Murder and the death penalty
In this last week my feelings on the death penalty have been challenged.
About a week ago, my 77-year-old sister was murdered and her 78-year-old husband was wounded as they made their 13th and last stop as Meals on Wheels volunteers. A day later a suspect was captured in Norfolk, Va. When I was a youth, I was very much pro-death penalty. 4 different levels of academia saw me write term papers on this topic.
But in recent years, I have seen the behavior of prosecutors here in Illinois (particularly in DuPage County).
They have rushed to judgment, been guilty of withholding exculpatory evidence and failed to show remorse when DNA evidence has cleared those on death row (some hours away from execution).
So I've gradually come to oppose the death penalty in most cases (the exception being for the crime of incompetence for high school and college administrators).
So now that my sweet sister has met an untimely death, has this again changed my mind? No.
The death penalty option has been abused so often by ambitious prosecutors anxious to put another notch on their belts as they prepare to run for higher office that they must be denied this punishment option—even for the obviously guilty.
John Anderson----Beach Park
(source: Letter to the Editor, Chicago Tribune)
UGANDA:
Mbarara Court Sentences Woman to Death for Murdering Husband
Mbarara High Court has sentenced a 26-year-old woman to death for murdering her husband. Jonah Tumuhairwe, a resident of Kakoni cell in Kiruhura district, killed Edgar Mwijukye on September 30, 2004.
Court heard that Tumuhairwe cut Mwijukye several times on the neck using a sharp knife. He bled to death.
Prosecution said Tumuhairwe connived with Justus Kusasira, Justus Kamiraho and Innocent Asiimwe, to murder Mwijukye. But the trio was acquitted for lack of evidence.
An uncle to the deceased, John Nabimanya, told court that Mwijukye had confided in him on 4 occasions that Tumuhairwe had threatened to kill him for marrying a 2nd wife.
Asiimwe, Tumuhairwe's secret lover, would visit the couple's house whenever Mwijukye was away at his 2nd wife's home in Kakoni trading centre.
Asiimwe said on the fateful day, he was in the house with Tumuhairwe when Mwijukye unexpectedly returned from Kakoni at around 3:00am. He (Asiimwe) later escaped from the house.
"I later heard noise, only to return and find Mwijukye lying in a pool of blood. We dumped the body in a bush."
2 days after, Tumuhairwe, accompanied by Turyakira, reported herself to Kazo Police Station, saying she killed her husband.
(source: New Vision)
INDIA:
Death To The Death Penalty
WORLD OPINION is now strongly veering round to the abolition of the death penalty. In November last, the UN General Assembly's Third Committee adopted a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty. India voted against the resolution. Is it not shameful that the land of Gautam Buddha, Lord Mahavira and Gandhi — who proclaimed, "I cannot in all conscience agree to anyone being sent to the gallows. God alone can take life because he alone gives it"— should present such a negative face against human rights that embody the right to life?
The matter is to come up before the UN General Assembly this year. India can still reclaim its position as an upholder of human rights by abolishing the death penalty.
The rationale for abolishing the death penalty are qualitatively different and were wisely expressed by former President of Chile, Eduardo Frei: "I cannot believe that to defend life and punish the person that kills, the State should in its turn kill. The death penalty is as inhuman as the crime which motivates it."
The High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, called the death penalty "a sanction that should have no place in any society that claims to value human rights and the inviolability of the person."
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon emphasised shortly after assuming office on January 11, 2007: "I believe that life is precious and must be protected and respected and that all human beings have the right to live in dignity. International law affirms these values. I recognise the growing trend in international law and in national practice towards a phasing out of the death penalty."
In General Comment No. 6 on Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights, the UN Human Rights Committee has stated that Article 6 "refers generally to abolition [of the death penalty] in terms which strongly suggest… that abolition is desirable."
Over the years, multi-nation forums have adopted four international treaties providing for its abolition: the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Right, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989; Protocols No. 6 and No. 13 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention on Human Rights), adopted by the Council of Europe in 1982 and 2002 respectively; and the Protocol to the American Convention of Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty, adopted by the General Assembly of the Organisation of American States in 1990.
So far, 133 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. Only 25 countries carried out executions in 2006. There were 1,591 recorded executions that year compared to 2,105 in 2005.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has been ratified or acceded to by 105 states, excludes the death penalty from punishments which the court is authorised to impose, even though the ICC has jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.
In 1996, the then South African President, Nelson Mandela, said, "It is not because the death sentence has been scrapped that crime has reached such unacceptable levels. Even if the death sentence is brought back, crime itself will remain as it is."
The South African Constitutional Court unanimously ruled in 1995 that the death penalty for murder violated the country's constitution.
The death penalty has been abolished since 1965 in the UK. Membership of the European Union is dependent on having no death penalty. Italy, too, has abolished it in the belief that retaining the death penalty does not automatically reduce murders.
Apart from human rights, pragmatism and practical wisdom dictates against the retention of the death penalty. People are usually silenced by the pro-capital punishment lobby that it is only given in the "rarest of rare cases", as decided by the Supreme Court of India, suggesting that since the law propounded this restriction, the number of executions has considerably reduced. Unfortunately, facts belie this, because ironically after the rarest of the rare doctrine was propounded in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed the death penalty in 40 % cases during 1980-90 whereas the figure was 37.7 % during 1970-80. For the high courts, the death sentences confirmed rose from 59 % during 1970-80 to 65 % during 1980-90.
THE VOCIFEROUS opposition to the abolition of the death penalty springs from the myth that abolition could embolden would-be murderers. But facts show otherwise. In 1945-50, the then State of Travancore (later merged in Kerala), which had no death penalty, saw 962 murders, whereas during 1950-55, when capital punishment was revived, it recorded 967 murders.
In 1997, the Attorney General of the US state of Massachusetts said, "there is not a shred of credible evidence that the death penalty lowers the murder rate. In fact, without the death penalty, the murder rate in Massachusetts is about half the national average."
A survey released in September 2000 by The New York Times found that during the previous 20 years, the homicide rate in the American states having the death penalty was 48 % to 101 % higher than in the states without the death penalty.
Whenever death penalty is used, there is a grave risk that individuals are executed for crimes that they did not commit. Prisoners have been executed despite strong doubts about their guilt. Others have been freed after re-examinations of their cases showed that they had been wrongly convicted.
In the US, 124 people condemned to death have been released since 1973 because they were found to be innocent or their convictions rested on insufficient evidence.
Expressing concern, former President APJ Abdul Kalam had urged the home ministry to review 20 such cases. There are 45 prisoners whose mercy petitions are pending, 12 since the time of his predecessor, KR Narayanan. The pending of such cases against condemned prisoners is itself an act of inhumanity.
The belief that the death penalty lowers crime is indeed a myth, as the evidence shows. It is high time we did away with it.
(source: RAJINDAR SACHAR, Retired Chief Justice, Delhi High Court Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 19, May 17, 2008)
MAY 8, 2008:
TEXAS:
Defense Motion To Rule Out Death Penalty Denied
A denied motion to rule out the death penalty as a possibility in the murder trial of Randall Wayne Mays punctuated the state’s case against the man accused of killing 2 lawmen and wounding a 3rd.
Henderson County District Attorney Donna Bennett and Texas Attorney General Prosecutor Wesley Mau completed their portion of the capital murder case against Mays Wednesday afternoon.
Mays faces either life in prison or a trip to the Texas Death Row if convicted of the May 17, 2007, killings of Henderson County Sheriff’s deputy Tony Price Ogburn, 61, and 63-year-old investigator Paul Habelt.
Both men were shot dead while responding to a domestic disturbance where shots were reportedly fired on Crawfish Ranch Road.
Lt. Kevin Harris, then a patrol deputy, was also shot and returned fire in a battle for his life.
Kevin Harris describ-ed for the jury what happened after he arrived on the scene and tried to talk Mays into giving up. "He got a different look on his face all of the sudden and he ran back in the house. I tried running after him, but he had already made it back in the house," he said.
The lieutenant ran behind a shed and found deputy Eric Ward, who had handcuffed Mays' wife Candace to keep her out of the line of fire. After talking to Ward, Kevin Harris said he went back to his vehicle and got his rifle and then made his way back to the shed.
He said he remembered hearing a shot but did not know where the gunshot had gone until he heard his brother yelling that an officer was down.
"It wasn't very long before I heard another shot and then I heard deputy David Harris (his brother) say 'Officer down! He shot Paul.'"
Fearing others might get shot, Kevin Harris said he ran from the shed and was going to start firing into the house, but he encountered Mays in the yard with a rifle.
After being hit by a bullet from Mays, he laid down on his back with his rifle on his chest and began "rapid firing" toward the suspect, but Mays kept firing.
"He had a handgun in his left hand and was firing it at me," he said.
David Harris choked back tears as he described watching both Ogburn and Habelt get shot. He would testify that after the first shot that struck Ogburn, he would not hear another shot that day.
"As soon as deputy Ogburn told me to watch myself I heard a shot being fired. The shot struck deputy Ogburn," he said.
David Harris said Ogburn fell to the ground and he tried to render aid.
"I knelt down beside him and called his name. I tried to render aid, but I couldn't," he said. "He had a massive facial injury.”
David Harris said he called officer down on the radio, but that he never heard another shot that day.
As he was getting up, he said he saw Habelt fall to the ground,
"It appeared he was struck in the head area and he fell to the ground," he said. "I did not hear that shot. At this point I was trying to reassess the situation … when I heard my brother yell out 'I'm hit! I'm hit!'"
David Harris said after Mays was in custody he checked on his brother and made sure he would be OK before he went back to Habelt and Ogburn.
"I knelt down and talked to them both one last time," he said.
Bennett asked if he saw deputy Billy Jack Valentine, who had been pinned down during the ordeal after the shooting.
"I found deputy Valentine and he was crying and sobbing and I just grabbed onto him and took him to the patrol car and comforted him," he said.
Mays' attorney, Bobby Mims, asked Kevin Harris if he felt proper protocol had been followed and the lieutenant said nothing could have been done differently.
Mims asked about rants Mays made about his brothers being killed by police and him being poisoned and dying and if Kevin Harris thought they were statements a rational person would make.
"I don't know what his state of mind was," Kevin Harris replied.
Earlier, Mims attempted to have a short interview Mays gave while being led into the Smith County Jail suppressed from the jury, but Judge Carter Tarrance said that even though he did not agree with the practice of allowing media to question suspects during "perp walks" he could find no legal reason not to allow the jury to see the tape.
As the jury was dismissed, Mims filed a motion for the jury to be given an instructive verdict to not include capital murder as an option during the guilt-innocence phase. Judge Carter denied the motion and told the parties the court would resume at 9 a.m. today.
(source: Tyler Morning Telegraph)
GEORGIA----new execution date
Warrant signed for next Georgia execution
An execution warrant was signed Thursday for death-row inmate Samuel David Crowe, who is now scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection 7 p.m. on May 22.
Crowe, 47, was condemned to die for the March 2, 1988, murder of 39-year-old Joseph V. Pala, the retail manager at Wickes Lumber Co. in Douglasville.
This would be the 2nd execution in Georgia this month. On Tuesday, William Earl Lynd was the 1st inmate executed nationwide since September, when a de facto moratorium was put in place until the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection.
Crowe, a former manager trainee at Wickes, had been experiencing financial difficulties in the days leading up to the murder. On the night of the killing, he entered the lumber company and struck up a conversation with Pala.
When Pala's back was turned, Crowe shot him. Pala tried to escape and Crowe shot at him twice more but missed. He then hit Pala with a paint can, poured paint over his face and struck his skull with a crowbar. Crowe left with $1,160 in cash.
Facing a capital prosecution, Crowe pleaded guilty to murder. But at his sentencing trial, Crowe's jury was not allowed to see his guilty plea as part of mitigation to the crime, Ann Fort, one of his lawyers, said Thursday.
Fort also insisted Crowe had no intention of committing an armed robbery on the night of the killing.
"He had no prior criminal history, no history of violence whatsoever," she said. "He was a mixed-up kid suffering terribly from a drug addiction he didn't understand. It just exploded."
Douglas County District Attorney David McDade said he plans to attend the execution. "The murder was committed March 2, 1988, and it's now May 2008," he said. "Joseph Pala's family has waited long enough for justice, and I hope they get it."
(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
MISSOURI: Prosecutor Looks into Possibility of Pursuing Death Penalty in Murder Case
Cleveland Pulliam faces 1st-degree murder charges in connection with the death of Jacqueline Farmer of Kennett. According to a probable cause affidavit, Farmer's mother discovered her daughter lying in the living room floor covered in blood in April.
"When you have murder in the 1st degree, and aggravated circumstances, the death penalty is an option," said Prosecutor Stephen Sokoloff. "At this point it's just an option."
Dunklin County Prosecutor, Stephen Sokoloff says if convicted, Pulliam could be facing the death penalty. Two factors in this case led him to consider the punishment.
"He has a history," said Sokoloff. "Also, the vile and outrageous nature of the beating and the stabbing that occurred."
Meanwhile a supreme court ruling in a case out of Kentucky has courts across the country working to get executions back on track. In that case the court decided lethal injections are a humane form of punishment. Sokoloff says that decision wasn't a factor here.
"The decision in Kentucky doesn't change the law," said Sokoloff. "It's about simply administering the punishment so there's no impact on getting to that point."
Sokoloff says he based his decision to file the necessary paper work needed should he decide to seek the death penalty based on the circumstance in this murder case only. As to his final call on whether or not to seek the death penalty for Pulliam, that will come after he discusses the issue with the victim's family and has another look at the evidence. Meanwhile, Pulliam is due to make another court appearance May 30th.
(source: KFVS News)
COLORADO: Man faces death penalty after prison slaying conviction
In Denver, a federal jury has convicted a man for his role in a prison slaying in which he was videotaped smearing an organ from the victim on his cell door.
Denver jurors will now decide whether Rudy Cabrera Sablan should get the death penalty for the 1999 killing of cellmate Joey Estrella at the federal penitentiary in Florence. The verdict was delivered Thursday afternoon.
Sablan's co-defendant and cousin, William Sablan, was convicted last year for the homicide and was sentenced to life in prison without parole after jurors decided against the death penalty.
Prosecutors say Estrella was choked into unconsciousness with headphone cords and then his throat was slit with a razor used later to disembowel him.
Jurors will begin hearing arguments Monday before deciding Sablan's sentence.
(source: Associated Press)
INDIANA: Man accused in family killings takes back death request
A man accused of killing his mother and grandparents and burying their bodies in concrete has changed his mind and decided he does not want to be executed.
Kenneth Lee Allen appeared briefly in Marion Superior Court on Thursday to reverse a request he made last month to represent himself and seek the death penalty. Allen, 32, in April had submitted a handwritten motion to a judge seeking to plead guilty and be executed.
Allen said little during his brief appearance in Marion Superior Court.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Allen. He is charged with murder, conspiracy and robbery in the slayings of his mother, Sharon Allen, 53, and grandparents, Leander Bradley, 91, and Betty Bradley, 75.
Allen also had requested the death penalty in February 2005.
Such indecision is common in death penalty cases, according to Monica Foster, one of Allen's court-appointed attorneys. She said many defendants, including Allen, suffer some form of child abuse and become "terribly depressed" and want to kill themselves.
"This sort of thing happens in capital cases all the time," she said.
Allen's change of heart also didn't surprise Marion County chief trial prosecutor David Wyser.
"Certainly he would have saved the taxpayers a lot of money if we would have been able to proceed according to his request, but I didn't expect that to happen," he said.
Police have said Allen stabbed his mother to death Dec. 30, 2004, in her Noblesville apartment after she refused to help him steal his grandparents' $200,000 nest egg. He also is accused of smothering his grandmother and beating his grandfather to death with a hammer 4 days later.
All 3 bodies were found buried in concrete in the basement of his grandparents' home on the east side of Indianapolis.
Allen's sister, Kari Allen, pleaded guilty to 3 counts of conspiracy to commit murder and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors at her brother's trial.
Wyser said he plans to use Allen's motion requesting death during the penalty phase of his trial, when he asks jurors to decide on capital punishment.
"I'm going to introduce that evidence that that's in fact what he wanted for himself," he said.
The prosecutor was asked after Thursday's hearing if he thought Allen was the perfect candidate for the death penalty.
"He's killed his mother and his grandparents, cut them up into pieces, buried them in their basement. If you're going to impose a death penalty, that's certainly an appropriate case for it," he said.
(source: Associated Press)
CALIFORNIA: Jury recommends death penalty for Gonzalez
After 3 days of deliberation, a jury recommended Thursday the death penalty to the man convicted in April of murdering off-duty Los Angeles County Deputy Maria Cecilia Rosa, 30, during a bungled robbery in March 2006.
Frank Christopher Gonzalez, 27, dressed in a tie and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt, did not show any outward emotion as the verdict was read in Judge Joan Comparet-Cassani's courtroom at the Long Beach Courthouse. When asked how they voted, each juror responded yes.
Friends of Rosa's said they were pleased with the outcome.
"This is the closest to justice you get," said one deputy, who was present in the courtroom when the verdict was read.
Grieving loved ones of Gonzalez gathered outside of the courtroom. They declined to comment, but attorney Katie Murff Trotter said they were surprised and hurt by the outcome and said it is an automatic appeal.
Gonzalez and his accomplice, Justin Ashley Flint, apparently had been riding their bicycles looking to rob someone that March 26 morning when they saw Rosa in the 2900 block of Eucalyptus Avenue.
Rosa, who was leaving her girlfriend's house to go to work, was loading things in her trunk when she was encountered by the pair and Gonzalez demanded her wallet.
Rosa reached into her trunk for her service weapon, but it jammed as she pointed it at Gonzalez.
Gonzalez fired two rounds and the 2 sped away.
Flint has already been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
During Monday's closing arguments, attorneys painted 2 pictures of Gonzalez - one whose troubled past led him inevitably to his fate and one who showed no remorse for the crimes he committed.
(source: Press-Telegram)
KENTUCKY:
An Interview on Death Row
The Kentucky State Supreme Court is going to hear a case that would send chills down anyone's spine.
A convicted murderer isn't fighting for his life. Instead he's involved in the fight for his death.
Marco Chapman wants the high court to move up his execution date.
He's from Kanawha County, but is on death row in Kentucky for raping and stabbing a young mother and killing her 2 small children.
Chapman is on death row. He's a man who wants to die sooner, rather than later.
Chapman said, "You'd have to be surely screwed up to kill a child."
With his hands held tight, and a face that showed little emotion, March Chapman talked about life and death decisions. In a controversial twist, this death row inmate isn't appealing his execution, he's fighting to make it happen faster.
He said, “Me living, their children dead. I'm ready to accept my fate."
Back in 2002, at a home in Warsaw, Kentucky, Chapman, in a drunken rage, brutally raped and stabbed a young mother Carolyn Marksberry. Then he stabbed all 3 of her children. 7 year old Chelbi Sharon and 6 year old Cody Sharon died. Carolyn and her 10 year old daughter Courtney survived.
Chapman was from Cabin Creek in West Virginia.
Within hours of the murders, he was back in Kanawha County, caught and arrested after being spotted at a convenience store.
He never denied his guilt and instead has been fighting to be put to death ever since, “I took 2 lives, they should be able to take mine."
The case is unprecedented in Kentucky. The battle is built on the argument that moving up Chapman's execution date is court assisted suicide. Chapman readily admits that he's begging for death because life in prison is not worth the wait.
Chapman said, "A life sentence here would be death. There's no life here, you're just existing and death is just something they're going to do eventually."
He says he can see clearly now and realizes the true impact of what he's done. In Marco's mind, death is the only answer, “Like I said I can't ask for forgiveness, but I'd like them to know how sorry I truly am."
He also knows that sorry won't bring back Cody and Chelbi. It can never erase the pain their mother and sister still feel today, “I'm ready to have closure on this thing and give the family closure."
Now, the high court must decide if he should be forced to live longer with what he's done, or if his mind and life can be put to rest. It’s a fight to the death that might never bring peace for anyone involved.
Other inmates have asked for voluntary executions. But Chapman's case is groundbreaking because he waived his right to a trial, sentencing by jury and is begging to be sentenced to death.
The Kentucky Supreme Court will soon rule on his request to stop all appeals and issue the death warrant.
If the court approves, Chapman could be put to death as early as late June.
(source: WSAZ News)
USA----new book
"Women and Capital Punishment, 1840-1899: Death Sentences and Executions in the United States and Canada"----By Kerry Segrave
Capital punishment is one of those political issues that always seems to stir the waters of conversation and debate, and in an election year, what better topic to address from a historical viewpoint. In “Women and Capital Punishment in America, 1840 – 1899: Death Sentences and Executions in the United States and Canada," veteran researcher and cultural analyst Kerry Segrave offers an explication of this issue focused on the treatment of women in the history of this hot button issue.
Kerry Segrave is an accomplished cultural researcher who lives in British Columbia, and has authored an expanse of books in recent years. Some of his topics of consideration thus far have included tipping, baldness, sun tanning, jukeboxes, smoking, and drive-in theaters. With depth and precision, his works shine a spotlight into the intricate details of social history.
The heat of this exploration of women’s history can be found in the intimate portraits painted of the women themselves. Beginning with a thorough introduction of the subject matter, the rest of the book is composed of portraits of offenders put together with the use of newspaper, legal, and academic source material. These portraits allow the reader understand the weight of circumstances surrounding each case.
Highlights from the case history can be found in the Van Valkenburgh case where the murder of a husband is discussed in the details of an execution. A notable moment in history occurred in the case of Hester Vaughn. Spoken for by Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton, tried in the heart of the Women's Movement, and supported by the Working Women's National Association, "friendless" Hester received due process due to the efforts and organization of female activists who paved the way for many of the women's rights initiatives since.
Of course, every historical analysis will stumble across the ironic details of life, and in the made-for-television story of Kate Sothern readers will have the pleasure of seeing how jealousy at a high society ball could lead a women into a collection of stories concerning the death penalty. The case of Sadie Hayes may serve as a reminder that many times (such as the recent events surrounding the Mumia case) police officers lose their lives while the killers fill in cells rather than their own death certificates, and the 1st woman put to death in Illinois, Maggie Tiller, provides an early example of communities of minorities coming together in public protest against the arm of the law.
Full of relevant stories, crisp accounting of legal and social history, and interesting examples of the many paths punishment may take even in its most extreme form, Segrave's latest work is a text book perfect for the student of women's studies, criminal law, or social history, and can be found via major online book sites at the touch of a button.
Segrave, Kerry. "Women and Capital Punishment in America, 1840 – 1899: Death Sentences and Executions in the United States and Canada." Jefferson, North Carolina and London, England: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers. 2008. 212pp. $39.95 Paper. ISBN: 9780786438235.
(source: Metro Spirit)
CANADA: Official made no commitment to seek clemency for death-row inmate
A Foreign Affairs official with the Canadian consulate in Denver who spent 2 years assisting this country's only death-row inmate in the United States, has acknowledged in an affidavit that Canadian diplomats "supported the commutation" of Ronald Smith's death sentence but held only "informal and hypothetical" discussions about the case with Montana officials before the Conservative government's abrupt reversal on the clemency bid last October.
The testimony from consular officer Kimberly Pittman was submitted Thursday to the Federal Court of Canada in response to a lawsuit filed last fall by Smith and four high-profile Canadian defence lawyers who are trying to force Prime Minister Stephen Harper to throw out his government's controversial new policy on the clemency issue and relaunch efforts to prevent the Alberta-born murderer's execution.
Documents filed in March by Smith's legal team described how Pittman visited Smith on Oct. 30, 2007 and assured him he had Canada's "full support" in his bid to avoid a lethal injection - just one day before the Harper government announced it would no longer seek clemency for Smith or other Canadians facing execution in "democratic" countries.
But in her affidavit, Pittman said she made no commitments to Smith or aides to Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer that Canada would make a "formal request" to seek clemency or a transfer of the prisoner to a Canadian jail.
"Mr. Smith asked about the possibility of transferring to Canada," Pittman states, "and I advised him that chances are slim at present because only 14 per cent of transfer applications have been approved this year."
The affidavit also states that Pittman's talks with Montana officials had revealed that "any possible commutation would be conditional on Mr. Smith's transfer to a Canadian prison."
The government's about-face occurred in the days following an Oct. 27 Canwest News Service story which detailed Canada's efforts to press Schweitzer to overturn Smith's death sentence "on humanitarian grounds."
By Oct. 31, that lobbying bid had been called off by the Harper government, prompting an uproar in the House of Commons. All three opposition parties condemned the policy change, a decision that also drew fire from human rights groups, the Anglican and Catholic churches of Canada and other opponents of capital punishment.
In the weeks that followed, the government softened its stance by saying it would review clemency requests on a "case-by-case basis" but that "multiple or mass murderers" were unlikely to ever win Canada's help to avoid execution.
In November, Smith and his lawyers launched their suit in the Federal Court, arguing that the federal government's sudden policy change contradicted Canadian law on the death penalty and callously betrayed Smith after years of consular support.
In another affidavit filed by the federal government on Thursday, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Smith for the 1982 murders of two Montana native men argues that Canada's interventions against Smith's death sentence would do very little to alter his fate.
"I doubt that any expression by a government at the clemency hearing would carry any more weight than the statements of the victims' families," states Thomas Esch.
He adds that after controversy arose over the Smith case last fall, he attended a meeting with the families of Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey Mad Man, the young Blackfeet Indian men killed by Smith during a drunken road trip through Montana in 1982.
"We were told by the victims' families and friends and members of the Blackfeet Tribal Council that they opposed both Mr. Smith's commutation and his transfer back to Canada," Esch testifies.
(source: Canwest News Service)
SAUDI ARABIA/TURKEY:
Silent diplomacy working to save Turk facing death penalty
Turkish diplomats have been exerting hectic efforts to save a Turkish citizen sentenced to death for blasphemy in Saudi Arabia, but also highlight the need for calmness and patience with what is proving to be a complicated legal process.
Sabri Bogday, 31, is from the southeastern city of Hatay. He is married and has a 17-month-old son. For the last 10 years he has lived in Saudi Arabia, running a barbershop in Jeddah. Bogday was arrested on March 11, 2007, after police received complaints that he had insulted Islam, including swearing at God in public. Under Saudi Arabian law, insulting God and the religion of Islam can be considered apostasy or heresy, both of which are criminal offences punishable by death. Bogday and his family say he is the victim of malicious slander.
Saudi Arabia's legal system is based on the Shariah, or Islamic law. Saudi Arabia has long practiced a harsh form of the law, under which murderers and drug smugglers may be executed, thieves lose their hands and adulterers are stoned to death.
Bogday, who is not fluent in Arabic, was sentenced to death on March 31, 2008, after a trial before a closed court in Jeddah. He is being held at Briman Prison in Jeddah.
"Unfortunately, the general tendency among judges was not to give Bogday a chance to repent. Now, we'll appeal the verdict -- which is only a primary decision -- within one month. Of course there is a possibility of approval of the court of first instance's verdict by the Appeals Court. However, this does not mean that the legal process ends then and there," Turkish Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Naci Koru told Today's Zaman over the telephone.
If the Appeals Court approves the sentence, the case will be carried to the Supreme Judicial Council and if the council approves it, the case will finally go before Saudi King Abdullah, the ambassador explained, noting that the execution cannot take place before the completion of this legal process.
Along this legal process, authorities always have the chance to suggest giving Bogday the chance to repent. Likewise, the king has the authority to pardon Bogday and can intervene in the process before the case is sent to him. "What we will do for now is work hard to calm the situation down and be respectful to Saudi Arabia's judicial system. The king is known to be closely interested in the issue," Koru said.
The undersecretary of the Turkish Embassy in Riyadh has already received permission from Saudi authorities to visit Bogday at the prison in Jeddah and he will see him on Sunday, Koru also said. "We're trying to boost Bogday's morale and colleagues from the Foreign Ministry are in constant contact with his family as well," he added. Turkish President Abdullah Gül initiated a telephone conversation with Saudi King Abdullah on Tuesday concerning Bogday's situation, the president's press office announced on Wednesday. The Saudi king told Gül, who last month wrote a letter to him on the same issue, that he has followed Bogday's situation closely since receiving the letter, the press office said in a brief statement, without elaborating further.
Last month, the London-based Amnesty International launched an urgent action campaign for Bogday, who they said was victimized by "an unfair trial." Amnesty International then highlighted that Saudi Arabia applies the death penalty for a wide range of offences, including offences with no lethal consequences, and does so following trials which invariably fall short of the most basic international standards.
"Hearings are often held in secret and defendants are permitted barely any formal legal representation. They may be convicted solely on the basis of confessions obtained under duress or deception. In many cases defendants and their families are not informed of the progress of legal proceedings against them. Prisoners sentenced to death may not be informed of the date of execution until the morning when they are taken out and beheaded. The number of executions in 2008 continues to increase rapidly. At least 50 people have been executed so far this year, 20 of whom were foreign nationals," according to Amnesty International records.
(source: Today's Zaman)
TEXAS: 2 Facing Death Penalty In Emory Family Murder
3 of 4 defendants in the triple murder of an Emory family were arraigned Wednesday afternoon in Rains County.
Charlie Wilkinson, Charles Waid, and Bobbie Johnson all pled "not guilty." They are charged in the March shooting and stabbing deaths of 37-year old Penny Caffey, and her two sons Matthew and Tyler Caffey.
Wilkinson and Waid are facing the death penalty. The Caffey's 16-year old daughter, Erin, is also facing charges in the triple murder. We could find out as early as next week if she will be tried as an adult.
The next hearing is set for June 6th.
(source: KLTV News)
SOUTH CAROLINA: Solicitor: Not seeking death penalty only way to get Easley suspect back to S.C.----Man charged in Easley homicide won’t face execution
Thirteenth Circuit Solicitor Bob Ariail said today there was "no reasonable alternative" but to abandon seeking the death penalty against a Williamston man who for two years sought amnesty in Canada after being charged in the killing of a downtown Easley pawn shop owner.
"I didn’t want to do it, I still don’t want to do it; but there isn’t a reasonable alternative," Ariail said. "The only way we could get him back was to agree not to seek the death penalty."
Roger Eugene Shephard, 23, who is charged in the June 2006 killing of 65-year-old John Bruin, this morning waived fighting extradition to South Carolina from New York, where U.S. marshals have him in custody, Ariail said.
Shephard should be back in South Carolina "shortly," he said.
Canadian authorities handed over Shephard at the Champlain, N.Y., port of entry on Tuesday after a 2-year legal battle.
Within days of Bruin’s death, Shephard had made his way across the Canadian border and was detained by Canadian authorities in Montreal.
Once in custody, Shephard sought refugee status from "cruel and unusual punishment" in the U.S related to the possibility that he could face the death penalty in South Carolina.
The Canadian government had resisted deporting him because capital punishment is illegal in Canada.
Ariail said he contacted David Wilkins, U.S. ambassador to Canada, in January to ask if there were any way Shephard could be deported without condition but was ultimately told by the Canadian government that it would grant release only if Shephard wouldn’t face the death penalty.
Wilkins, a former speaker of the state House of Representatives who is from Greenville, said he referred the solicitor to the embassy’s FBI office and "that was the extent of my involvement."
Ariail said he met with Bruin's wife, Betty, and they agreed to forego seeking the death penalty so that Shephard could be brought to trial in Pickens County.
Shephard is charged with murder, assault and battery with intent to kill and armed robbery.
In the homicide, a man is seen on surveillance video in the Action Pawn store talking with Bruin for several minutes before shooting him in the chest and leaving with guns and other items, police said.
(source: Greenville Online)
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SC prosecutor won't seek death penalty in 2006 killing
In Greenville, a South Carolina prosecutor has agreed to drop any effort to seek a death penalty for a suspect who fled to Canada after the death of a pawn shop owner in Easley.
Prosecutor Bob Ariail told The Greenville News on Wednesday there was "no reasonable alternative" in the case against 23-year-old Roger Eugene Shephard of Williamston.
Shephard is accused in the June 2006 death of 65-year-old John Bruin.
Ariail says dropping a possible death sentence was the only way to get Shephard extradited from Canada.
Canadian authorities handed over Shephard to U.S. marshals at Champlain NY on Tuesday after a 2-year legal battle. Shephard on Wednesday agreed not to fight extradition from New York.
Shephard had been detained in Montreal within days of Bruin's death.
(source: Associated Press)
KANSAS: Murder trial jury shaped by death penalty issue
After a capital murder conviction in Kansas, prosecutors must prove 1 of the following "aggravating factors" before a jury can consider the death penalty:
• Committing murder with a previous conviction of murder or aggravated battery or other crimes that caused serious physical harm
• Murdering, or creating the risk of death to, more than 1 person
• Murder for monetary gain
• Murder to avoid arrest or prosecution
• Murder in an especially heinous or cruel manner
• Murder while serving a prison sentence on a felony conviction
• Murder for hire
• Murder of a witness
[source: KSA 21-3439]
How jurors decide the death penalty is a controversial issue that has sparked debate from Kansas trial courts to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It's no wonder that potential jurors find it difficult to understand.
The most lengthy explanations at this week's jury selection for Ted Burnett's capital murder trial focus on the process of imposing the death penalty.
Burnett, charged with killing 14-year-old Chelsea Brooks, could face death if convicted. Because he is innocent in the eyes of the court, his public defenders say they're uncomfortable explaining the law.
But lawyers say they have to discuss capital punishment with jurors to know if they can be fair.
2 trial phases
Capital murder trials have 2 parts. In the 1st portion, the state must prove guilt. A unanimous verdict must be reached to avoid a mistrial.
If the jury convicts on a capital offense, the trial moves to a 2nd phase to decide if the death penalty is warranted.
In this portion, the rules change. Some rules of evidence are relaxed and a unanimous verdict is required only for a death sentence. A single juror who opposes a death sentence can yield a sentence of life in prison.
Most jurors called to court this week told lawyers they didn't know that.
"Do you think it's fair that life only takes 1 vote, while death takes all 12?" public defender Mark Manna asked one woman Wednesday.
"I think that's fair," she said.
During the penalty phase, Kansas law requires the state to give reasons a crime rises to a capital offense.
These are called aggravators -- factors "which increase the guilt or enormity of the crime or add to its injurous consequences," Judge Ben Burgess explained.
They include multiple murders or killing in particularly cruel manner. The state must prove at least 1 aggravator.
"We've got a list. We can't make them up," Deputy District Attorney Kevin O'Connor told jurors. "The fact that she's a 14-year-old girl (who was killed) is not an aggravating factor."
The defense may provide evidence -- called mitigators -- that life in prison, without parole, would be more appropriate.
"These aren't defenses: They wouldn't justify or excuse the crime," Manna said. "They might be something that just explains his behavior or his background. And mercy itself can be a mitigator."
Weighing both sides
Jurors must be able weigh the aggravators against the mitigators.
That's a tough concept. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that Kansas law, which required mitigators to "outweigh" aggravators, gave prosecutors an unfair advantage. But the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law. In both courts, a single vote decided the rulings.
In cases such as Burnett's, jurors decide how much weight to assign either set of circumstances.
"No one is going to tell you how to weigh them," O'Connor told jurors.
Some say they can't do that.
During the first 3 days of jury selection in Burnett's trial, Burgess excused 10 people who said they could never vote for the death penalty.
The judge also dismissed 3 people because they said they would vote for the death penalty without considering any mitigating evidence.
In the first 3 days of jury selection, 17 jurors passed the 1st round.
A pool of 42 is needed. From that group, lawyers on both sides can strike up to 14 for any reason -- other than those protected by law, such as race or gender -- to leave 12 jurors and 2 alternates.
Jury selection is expected to take a week or more.
(source: The Wichita Eagle)
ARKANSAS: Ark. death-row inmate challenges lethal injection plans
A death-row inmate who may be the next person scheduled to die in Arkansas after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upheld lethal injection has challenged the state's plans to carry out the death penalty under a revised protocol.
Frank Williams Jr. filed a lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court, saying state officials violated state law by adopting new regulations without giving the public notice and an opportunity to comment on proposed revisions.
Williams is seeking a court ruling that the revised Arkansas plan is invalid and should not be enforced.
Last month, the Supreme Court said in a case brought by Kentucky death-row inmates that the prisoners failed to show the state's refusal to try untested alternatives constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Scheduled executions that had been put on hold in several states, including Arkansas, were then up for reconsideration.
(source: Associated Press)
GEORGIA:
Judge Throws Out Conviction Of Death Row Inmate
A judge has ordered a new trial for a Georgia inmate who has spent 20 years on death row after being convicted of murdering a Wayne County restaurant owner, his wife and their teenage son.
Superior Court Judge Gary McCorvey ruled prosecutors withheld evidence that key witnesses had lied, changed their stories and cut deals with authorities before testifying against Larry Lee of Savannah. McCorvey's order called the trial "fatally flawed" by "prosecutorial acts and omissions."
The ruling also said Lee, 47, of Savannah had an inadequate defense at his trial, where he was represented by a lawyer who had little experience with death penalty cases.
"Not only was the state's evidence in this case 'thin,'" McCorvey wrote in his April 28 order, "but what is more devastating is that trial counsel's preparation for and performance in the penalty phase is even 'thinner,' the investigation and preparation being nonexistent."
District Attorney Stephen Kelley, who was in law school when Lee was prosecuted by his predecessor, criticized the court system for taking "entirely too long" with Lee's appeal. He noted 1 of 2 key prosecution witnesses is now dead.
"There's something wrong with a system that takes 21 years to decide if a case needs to be retried," Kelley said.
Kelley said he has asked the state attorney general to appeal the judge's ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court. He said he would hold a new trial if McCorvey's order stands.
A Wayne County jury sentenced Lee to death in 1987 for the murders of a local restaurant owner, 48-year-old Clifford Jones, his wife, 47-year-old Nina Jones, and their 14-year-old son, Jerold.
The three family members were shot to death in their rural southeast Georgia home early in the morning on April 26, 1986. They appeared to have been slain during a burglary. A money bag containing about $1,500 from their restaurant was stolen.
No physical evidence tied Lee to the crime scene. Prosecutors based their case primarily on two witnesses - Lee's sister-in-law, who said she and her husband took part in the robbery with Lee, and a jailhouse snitch who testified Lee had confessed to the murders while they were jailed together in coastal Glynn County.
David Morris, a convicted burglar, told jurors Lee threatened to kill him if he told anyone about the confession. Morris also identified a handwritten note on which he said he had scrawled Lee's threat verbatim after it was made.
But prosecutors failed to disclose to Lee's lawyer, or to the trial jury, that Morris initially told investigators Lee himself had written the note containing the threat. The judge said defense lawyers could have used Morris' lie to undercut his credibility.
Prosecutors also never disclosed that Morris had testified for them as an informant in other criminal trials, the ruling said, or that his cooperation in Lee's case won Morris a transfer from a state prison to a more comfortable county jail.
Sherry Lee, the wife of Lee's brother, agreed to testify against him after a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent told her the GBI had learned they committed the crimes.
McCorvey's ruling says Sherry Lee's initial statements to authorities differed in key respects to her testimony at Larry Lee's trial. Her prior statements were never made available to Larry Lee's lawyer, who could have used them to discredit her on cross-examination, the judge ruled.
Part of Sherry Lee's testimony was that Larry Lee and her husband, Bruce Lee, stole guns - including an antique shotgun - from Clifford Jones' home. But prosecutors, the judge wrote, never disclosed to the defense or the jury that investigators found no guns missing from the home. All firearms Jones had listed on an insurance inventory were found in his house.
Both Sherry Lee and her husband are dead. Bruce Lee was fatally shot after killing another man in a burglary before his brother's trial.
The judge also ruled Larry Lee's trial attorney, Alex Zipperer of Savannah, provided an inadequate defense. Zipperer had tried only one other death penalty case, 12 years before Lee's. He was the only attorney representing Lee even though Georgia courts routinely appoint 2 defense lawyers to capital cases.
The judge said Zipperer failed to prepare for the sentencing phase of Lee's trial. The only witness he called to persuade the jury to spare Lee's life was his sister, Lynn Grizzard. Zipperer asked her a total of 7 questions. Grizzard described Lee as "gentle" and "nonviolent," and said she'd never known him to hurt anyone.
Michael Koval, the lead attorney handling Lee's appeal, declined to comment other than to say, "The judge issued a strong and clear order."
(source: News4Jax)
OHIO: Judge, prosecutor battle at Ohio lethal injection hearing
A prosecutor accused a judge Tuesday of making arguments on behalf of 2 men challenging the state's method of executing prisoners.
Ruben Rivera and Ronald McCloud, who are accused of separate murders and could receive death sentences if convicted, are disputing the state's lethal injection process, saying it doesn't provide the quick and painless death required by Ohio law.
Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge, who intends to make a ruling before July, held a hearing Tuesday to discuss testimony from 2 anesthesiologists who took the stand last month.
When Burge began questioning language in Ohio's lethal injection statute, assistant county prosecutor Tony Cillo bristled, saying the judge was helping the American Civil Liberties Union make its case.
"The court is now making arguments for the plaintiff and that is not the court's role," said Cillo, complaining that he could not prepare for arguments that the ACLU had not raised.
"You're supposed to know all of them," Burge said.
The disagreement started over a highly technical question. Burge raised the issue of whether the words "quickly and painlessly cause death" in the statue should be applied not only to the dosage of the lethal injection drugs, but to how they are administered.
In an earlier hearing, Cillo questioned whether Burge already had formed an opinion on the death penalty, noting that the ex-defense attorney has a photo of former client James Filiaggi in his office. Filiaggi was executed last year.
"The court's role is to presume it's constitutional," Cillo said Tuesday.
"I do," Burge said.
Burge then held a long recess.
Earlier in the hearing, ACLU attorney Jeff Gamso acknowledged that Ohio's lethal injection method provides a quick and painless death if the procedure goes as intended.
"Things can go wrong, and when things go wrong there is at least the possibility that lethal injection will not be free of extraordinary pain," Gamso said.
Cillo responded: "Under any circumstance you could make an argument that something could go wrong."
Gamso countered that the state could reduce that risk if it only used the anesthetic sodium thiopental and eliminated the other 2 drugs administered — pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
Gregory Trout, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the state is always interested in improving its execution procedure but that no other state uses just sodium thiopental and that such a change would invite more legal challenges.
Last month, 1 anesthesiologist testified that Ohio's execution procedure is humane and includes enough anesthetic to knock out an average inmate for 2 hours. The other said the procedure was unfit for even dogs and cats.
Both testified that sodium thiopental would be enough to kill the inmate and that the last two drugs increase the risk of suffering.
Burge's decision could determine the fate of the state's process for executing condemned inmates, although his ruling will likely be appealed to the state Supreme Court.
The case carries even greater weight for death penalty opponents following last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that turned back a constitutional challenge to the lethal injection procedure in Kentucky. The court ruled that it didn’t constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Burge's ruling will determine whether Ohio's execution protocol is consistent with state law, not the U.S. Constitution.
Difficulties in recent years with 2 executions, in which the execution team struggled to find suitable veins in inmates' arms, brought complaints that the method is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. Ohio officials stand by the procedure.
Ohio has executed 26 inmates since it resumed putting prisoners to death in 1999.
(source: Tribune-Chronicle)
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Summit seeks execution date ---- Prosecutors file motion with Ohio Supreme Court in Richard Cooey case
Summit County prosecutors Wednesday filed papers urging the Ohio Supreme Court to set an execution date for Richard Wade Cooey, who has been on death row for 21 years.
It is unclear when the court would rule on the request. The motion comes after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the execution method used in Kentucky.
Ohio's procedure is considered similar. Cooey has sued the state claiming the procedure constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
The last person executed in the state was Christopher J. Newton on May 24, 2007.
Ohio and most other states have been under an unofficial moratorium awaiting the court ruling on lethal injection in response to the lawsuits.
Cooey, 40, is on death row for the murders of Wendy Offredo, 21, of Bath Township, and University of Akron classmate Dawn McCreery, 20, of Akron.
The 2 women were abducted, raped and murdered by Cooey and an accomplice in September 1986.
The women were returning home when Offredo's car was disabled by a rock thrown from the Stoner Street bridge over Interstate 77 in West Akron.
Cooey and Clint Dickens, who had thrown the rock, came to their aid and drove them to a pay phone, where Offredo called her mother. Cooey and Dickens were supposed to drive the women back to the disabled car, but instead abducted, robbed and raped them.
Cooey has claimed that Dickens was responsible for the murders.
Cooey was 19 and Dickens was 17. A 3-judge panel convicted Cooey of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, felonious assault and kidnapping. As a juvenile, Dickens could not be sentenced to death. He is serving a life sentence.
Summit County prosecutors Wednesday filed papers urging the Ohio Supreme Court to set an execution date for Richard Wade Cooey, who has been on death row for 21 years. <
It is unclear when the court would rule on the request. The motion comes after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the execution method used in Kentucky.
Ohio's procedure is considered similar. Cooey has sued the state claiming the procedure constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
The last person executed in the state was Christopher J. Newton on May 24, 2007.
Ohio and most other states have been under an unofficial moratorium awaiting the court ruling on lethal injection in response to the lawsuits.
Cooey, 40, is on death row for the murders of Wendy Offredo, 21, of Bath Township, and University of Akron classmate Dawn McCreery, 20, of Akron.
The 2 women were abducted, raped and murdered by Cooey and an accomplice in September 1986.
The women were returning home when Offredo's car was disabled by a rock thrown from the Stoner Street bridge over Interstate 77 in West Akron.
Cooey and Clint Dickens, who had thrown the rock, came to their aid and drove them to a pay phone, where Offredo called her mother. Cooey and Dickens were supposed to drive the women back to the disabled car, but instead abducted, robbed and raped them.
Cooey has claimed that Dickens was responsible for the murders.
Cooey was 19 and Dickens was 17. A 3-judge panel convicted Cooey of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, felonious assault and kidnapping. As a juvenile, Dickens could not be sentenced to death. He is serving a life sentence.
(source: Akron Beacon Journal)
COLORADO: Jury To Decide On Death Penalty In Murder Trial
Closing arguments are set to start Thursday in the death penalty trial of Sir Mario Owens in Arapahoe County District Court. Owens is accused of killing a key witness in another murder case.
The trial has been under a gag order and extra security was assigned because of the publicity surrounding the trial.
Owens is already serving a life sentence after his conviction in the other murder case.
Javad Marshall-Fields was supposed to testify in that case.
He and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe, were shot and killed in their care in June of 2005 at an intersection in Aurora.
Legal experts said killing a witness is considered an aggravating factor when trying to impose the death penalty. The jury will have to decide on a murder conviction and the death penalty for it to be imposed.
"It's not just beyond a reasonable doubt anymore, in terms of the actual guilt or innocence, it's beyond all doubt," said Karen Steinhauser, adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver.
Steinhauser, a former prosecutor, said don't expect the death penalty to be executed any time soon if the jury votes for that sentence.
"The attorneys who are seeking to have a sentence of death overturned are going to most likely go to every possible court," said Steinhauser.
If sentenced to death, Owens would be one of two people on Colorado's death row.
Nathan Dunlap is currently the only inmate there. He was sentenced to death in 1996 for the Chuck E. Cheese killings in Aurora in 1993.
(source: CBS News)
TENNESSEE: New trial for House a waste of money, defense lawyer says
An East Tennessee district attorney's decision to retry death row inmate Paul House is "personal" and a waste of taxpayer money, House's federal public defender says.
Stephen Kissinger says he will ask a federal judge not to give prosecutors more time to try House again for the 1985 murder of a Union County woman.
Judge Harry Mattice Jr. ruled in December that the inmate should be released or retried based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a jury should have heard testimony that might have exonerated House.
On Monday an appeal of the judge's ruling was rejected by a 3-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Union County District Attorney General William Paul Phillips has 180 days from Monday to retry House, who has been in prison for more than 20 years.
Phillips said he has enough evidence to try the case again and intends to handle the prosecution himself.
Kissinger said the trial would cost more than $100,000.
"You really have to be mystified, perplexed about that decision," he said. "It doesn't make sense. How can you justify that kind of money when you have the Supreme Court’s decision?
"This is pointless. It's become a personal issue."
Mattice scheduled a May 28 hearing to set the conditions of House's release.
Kissinger said that hearing is still on but it's unknown whether it will be held in Nashville or in East Tennessee.
House, who has multiple sclerosis and must use a wheelchair, would be released into the care of his mother at her Crossville home.
House was convicted of murder in the July 1985 slaying of Carolyn Muncey, whose bludgeoned body was body was found at the bottom of an embankment. He says he did not kill her.
In its 5-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that questions about DNA evidence from semen collected from Muncey's nightgown and underwear, along with excluded testimony from other witnesses, were strong enough to raise doubt for a jury about House's guilt.
Phillips said he plans to use some old evidence from the 1st trial, but added he has new evidence too that would be presented at a possible new trial. He didn't describe or say what that evidence is.
Phillips said if Mattice’s order does not change, he planned to start a new trial against House sometime within 180 days of the appeals court ruling.
"I would think that's a reasonable period of time and I also think we can be ready," Phillips said. "We have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. House is guilty or we would not be re-prosecuting him."
Kissinger said Wednesday he wants the judge to reconsider giving prosecutors more time to retry his client because he believes they've already had enough. He said evidence in House's case didn't stand up in the 1st trial and won't the 2nd time around either.
"They (prosecutors) shouldn't be rewarded for pursuing an appeal so clearly without merit it was decided in 3 days," he said, referring to the appeals court decision Monday.
(source: The Tennessean)
CALIFORNIA: Death penalty possible for Michael Cook----Jury rules man convicted in deaths of 2 women is not mentally retarded
A Riverside County Superior Court jury decided Wednesday that a Cathedral City man, convicted of killing 2 elderly women in a violent crime spree a decade ago, is not mentally retarded and is therefore eligible for the death penalty.
Michael Cook, 36, who was convicted last month, will begin the penalty phase of his trial May 19, officials said.
"I'm very uncomfortable with (the jury's decision)," said defense attorney John Hemmer. "I thought it was totally inappropriate, but the jury has spoken, and I can't second-guess that."
The prosecution was less vocal about Wednesday's decision.
"Because we are still in trial, we want to reserve comment until the trial is completely over," said Ingrid Wyatt, public information officer for the Riverside County District Attorney's Office.
Cook now faces the death penalty as a possible sentence for 14 counts of various offenses he committed 10 years ago during a string of arsons and burglaries 10 years ago in Cathedral City, Palm Desert and Rancho Mirage.
Anyone who is considered mentally retarded cannot be put to death. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2002 that executing mentally retarded criminals constitutes "cruel and unusual" punishment prohibited under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
A person is considered mentally retarded if he meets the clinical definition of having not only sub-average intellectual functioning, but also significant limitations in adaptive skills - such as communication, self-care and self-direction before age 18, according to the U.S. Department of State.
In April, authorities testified that from Jan. 17, 1998, to April 22, 1998, Cook had a pattern of going into mobile home parks, setting fire to trailers and burglarizing neighboring homes.
On separate occasions in 1998, 2 women were burned alive in their mobile homes, Cathedral City police Sgt. Paul Herrera has said.
(source: The Desert Sun)
GLOBAL: Against the death penalty
It is incredible that in this advanced and progressive age we are living in, the death penalty is still practised in several countries. The argument that the death penalty is needed as a deterrent has long been proven false. Take the case of Texas in the United States of America as an example. Despite the fact that the death penalty has, in past years, been regularly practised in this State, it still has a murder rate that is alarming.
The ineffectiveness of the death penalty is even recorded in historical documents. It is a fact that when petty thieves were still publicly executed by hanging in England, pickpockets used to mingle with the onlookers to steal the contents of their pockets while the crowd was engrossed in the macabre spectacle unfolding before their eyes. The horrible sight of a human being slowly strangling at the end of a rope did not deter those who would share the same fate if they were caught during their activities beneath the scaffold.
Another argument against the death penalty is that many miscarriages of justice are known to have taken place and that it can be used as a means of judicial murder. The case of Timothy Evans in England is well known. Evans was hanged in 1950 for a crime the evidence for which was supplied by John Reginald Christie who was, in turn, hanged in 1953 after it was found that he was a serial killer. The execution of deposed political leaders by kangaroo courts is also common. One can mention the execution of Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in 1961 and that of Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979.
Above all, the death penalty should be abolished everywhere because it is nothing else but an act of retribution for one's crimes. It does not give a person the chance to change his/her life and do something positive to atone for his/her crimes. As a person who has met and spoken at length with murderers on a daily basis, I have come to realize that even the person who has committed the most unspeakable crimes has a shred of humanity in him/her. We have all read about how Saddam Hussein used to save bread from his meals to feed the birds in the period of his incarceration prior to his execution. What did his execution achieve for Iraq? It was simply an act of retribution, victors’ justice, which ensured that the country would remain embroiled in violence and that people would continue being killed on a daily basis.
To be fair, there are cases where one doubts the validity of one's own arguments against the death penalty. The lowest point of my correctional education career was the day when I heard 2 convicted murderers arguing about who was the greatest criminal, giving details of their crimes to prove their point and showing no remorse at all but rather boasting about their "exploits".
Still, such cases should not blind us to the necessity of abolishing the death penalty in those countries where it is still being practised as the arguments against it far outweigh those in favour of it.
(source: Comment, Desmond Zammit Marmara', The Malta Star)
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Sikhs and the Death Penalty
It is time for every Sikh to openly proclaim his or her opposition to death penalty. Sikhs are compassionate people and in all cases we empathize with the family and friends of victims of all kinds of heinous crimes, but at the same time, we are conscious that killing someone in retribution will neither heal nor resolve the tragedy of such families. There is ample historical and legal evidence to support that the killing of one human being by another person or state is wrong and that capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime and serves only the purpose of revenge.
The Sikh ethical approach of compassion, forgiveness and scope for reformation of one's life is a prerequisite for a progressive civil society. Maharaja Ranjit Singh in his 40 year reign (1799-1839) did not use the death penalty.
During the last nearly 3 decades, Bhai Satwant Singh, Bhai Kehar Singh, Bhai Sukhdev Singh and Bhai Harjinder Singh have been executed by the Indian state unmindful of the sentiments of the Sikh people. In each case, the judgements of the respective courts, including the apex court have flouted norms of jurisprudence. The evidence against Kehar Singh would have been insufficient to send someone to a day's prison, but he was executed. Bhai Harjinder Singh and Bhai Sukhdev Singh were executed under TADA, while the legality of the law itself was under question in the Indian Supreme Court.
Pursuing the struggle for Sikh independence, three political activists - Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, Jagtar Singh Hawara and Balwant Singh are presently on the death row. The judgement against Prof. Bhullar is a travesty of norms of criminal jurisprudence. In his dissenting judgement, Justice Shah concluded that there was no evidence to convict Bhullar and that a dubious confession could not be the basis for awarding the death sentence.
The judgement against Jagtar Singh Hawara and Balwant Singh clearly indicates political pressure as there is no evidence whatsoever –direct or circumstantial to establish criminal conspiracy. Their petition for obtaining some prosecution papers is still pending in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, though death penalty has already been pronounced.
(source: World Sikh News)
IRAN----executions Iran hangs 4 for murder: report
Iran has hanged 4 men convicted of murder in Tehran's Evin prison, a newspaper report said on Thursday.
2 of those executed on Wednesday were identified as Hassan, who stabbed another man to death in 2002 and Jalal, who killed a homeowner during a robbery, the reformist Etemad Melli said.
The other two were Majid, who killed his employer over a financial dispute, and Mahdi, who was convicted of murdering a man who opposed his marrying the victim's daughter.
The hangings bring to at least 90 the number of executions in Iran so far this year, according to an AFP count.
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International reported that in 2007 Iran made more use of the death penalty than any other country apart from China, executing 317 people during the year.
The total was a sharp increase on 2006, when 177 executions were carried out, according to Amnesty International, and came amid a crackdown on criminals by police aimed at improving security in society.
Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, drug trafficking and adultery.
Human rights groups have accused Iran of making excessive use of the death penalty but Tehran insists it is an effective deterrent that is carried out only after an exhaustive judicial process.
(source: Agence France Presse)
INDIA: Death sentence for rape convict upheld
In a significant order, the Orissa High Court on Wednesday confirmed death sentence awarded to a person convicted of raping and murdering a 5-year-old girl 6 years back.
A division bench of HC comprising Justices BP Das and MM Das upheld the capital punishment on Purna Chanda Kushal given by a Sundargarh court.
On November 14, 2002, Kushal had allegdly raped and murdered a 5-year-old girl residing in Bandamunda slums of Sundargrah. The Additional Sessions Judge of Rourkela convicted Kushal of the crime and awarded him death sentence on December 3, 2004.
The order was up for HC's confirmation while Kushal too had filed an appeal challenging the lower court directive. The HC on Wednesday dismissed Kushal’s petition and upheld the lower court's order.
(source: Newsindpress)
MAY 7, 2008:
TEXAS----new execution date//volunteer
Aug. 14 execution for Texas 7 member
One of the infamous "Texas 7" convicts who escaped from a state prison more than 7 years ago and killed a Dallas-area police officer while on the lam now has an execution date.
Michael Rodriguez has been set for lethal injection Aug. 14, Kim Schaefer, a Dallas County assistant district attorney who handles capital cases, said Wednesday.
Rodriguez, 45, ordered his appeals dropped and had been asking the courts for nearly 2 years to give him a death date.
A federal judge signed off on Rodriguez's request Sept. 27, 2 days after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a Kentucky challenge to lethal injection as a means of capital punishment. That case stalled executions around the nation. But in a decision last month, the high court ruled lethal injection was not unconstitutionally cruel, clearing the way for capital punishment to resume.
An inmate in Georgia on Tuesday became the 1st to die since Texas executed convicted killer Michael Richard on Sept. 25. The 1st Texas inmate set to die now is Derrick Sonnier, scheduled for injection in Huntsville on June 3 for a double slaying in suburban Houston.
Rodriguez told a psychologist who interviewed him in preparation for a competency hearing that he "had to accept his death sentence and submit to it as payment in order to be forgiven and obtain salvation."
Rodriguez and six other inmates overpowered workers at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Connally Unit near Kenedy in South Texas on Dec. 13, 2000, took the workers' clothes, then grabbed 16 guns from the prison armory and fled in a stolen truck.
On Christmas Eve, while robbing a suburban Dallas sporting goods store, they shot Irving police Officer Aubrey Hawkins 11 times, killing him. The gang, subject of a nationwide manhunt, finally was caught a month later in Colorado.
Rodriguez's capital murder trial was moved to Franklin County, 100 miles northeast of Dallas, because of publicity. A jury there deliberated less than 90 minutes before sending Rodriguez to death row in May 2002 for his part in Hawkins' slaying. Rodriguez admitted pulling the officer from his patrol car. After they shot Hawkins, 29, the Texas 7 ran over him in their getaway car.
5 of Rodriguez's companions also were given death sentences. The 7th fugitive killed himself before he could be recaptured with his comrades in Colorado. Rodriguez would be the 1st of the group to be executed.
At the time of his escape, he was serving a life term for hiring a hit man to kill his wife, Theresa, 29, to collect her $250,000 life insurance. She was gunned down in 1992 getting out of her car outside their San Antonio home. The triggerman, Rolando Ruiz, also is on death row.
Rodriguez, who received his date Tuesday, is 1 of 2 condemned murderers from Dallas County to get execution dates this week, Shaefer said.
On Wednesday, Carlton Turner, who acknowledged fatally shooting his parents at their suburban Dallas home in 1998, was set to die July 10.
On Sept. 27, the same day a federal judge signed off on Rodriguez's execution request, Turner's attorneys raised constitutional claims about Texas lethal injection procedures and won a reprieve from the Supreme Court as Turner waited in a small cell just a few feet from the death chamber.
The reprieve came some 4 hours after he was scheduled to die and 2 hours before the death warrant would have expired.
The high court's ruling in the Kentucky case lifted his stay of execution.
Turner was 19 when authorities said he shot his father, Carlton Turner Sr., 43, and his mother, Tonya Turner, 40, several times in the head. He then bought new clothes and jewelry and continued living in the family's home in Irving. Prosecutors said Turner had dragged the bodies through the house before dumping them in the garage, then cleaned up the blood and had friends over for a party.
A foul smell led police to the bodies in the garage 3 days after the killings.
The 2 newly scheduled injections bring to at least 8 the number of condemned inmates in Texas with execution dates in the coming weeks. Last year, Texas put 26 prisoners to death, the most in the nation.
(source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
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Our Other Selves
Shooting through thick glass into the narrow box of a prison interview cubicle, John Holbrook had few options as a photographer. On Texas’ death row, the inmates’ uniforms were routinely white, the walls barren, the lighting harsh. But there were faces, body language, hands. And so he used those things to tell the story: hands clasping each other, or pressed against the glass, folded in prayer, spread across a chest. Eyes looking straight at the camera, or giving a sideways glance.
Holbrook, who also is a private investigator, is a confirmed opponent of the death penalty, and his photo essay was originally suggested by fellow anti-death penalty activists. But along the way, he said, he realized that his pictures are as much for himself and the families of the killers' victims as they are for people who'd like to abolish capital punishment — mainly because Holbrook came to the death penalty debate through hate and guilt.
In 1994 and 1995, Holbrook worked as an investigator in a capital murder trial, studying crime scene and autopsy photos of a 16-year-old's grisly death — raped and tortured, she'd been finally shot in the head, the exit wound making a ragged hole between her eyes. As he studied the pictures and learned about her, he grew to hate the 2 "animals" who’d so viciously attacked her. "I was wishing I would be the ones injecting them," he said, referring to the drug cocktail used in executions.
Holbrook wasn't working for police or prosecutors, however — he was working on the legal defense team of 1 of the defendants. And so he took the anger and revulsion and hate and tucked it inside, where it stayed for years, his own private hazardous waste dump, leaking its toxins into his psyche.
Along the way, Holbrook began taking pictures of homeless people and other social outcasts around North Texas, often depicting them with halos or in saintly poses. His work drew the attention of churches, homeless advocates, and CNN and became part of a national exhibit.
But amid the recognition, something was wrong. Holbrook had begun to notice that he was becoming fixated by various round images, like the hole in the concrete he passed on his daily run that he’d stop to stare at for long minutes. A hubcap, a drainpipe — same thing. And as he stared, he'd begin to see again the decomposing body of the murder victim, with the wound in her forehead. "I might have killed myself, it was that bad," he said.
A psychologist diagnosed Holbrook's problem as post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by the time he spent with the gruesome pictures from the young woman's murder. His photos of the homeless, the psychologist said, were an unconscious attempt by Holbrook to replace the horrible images with good ones.
Over the years that followed, Holbrook came to another realization: He not only had to replace the images in his mind, he also had to replace the hatred with something more positive.
As he worked his way through that process, Holbrook continued to take photos of homeless people. That led, last year, to an inquiry from 2 anti-death-penalty activists from Oslo, Norway, who approached him about doing similar photos of the men and women on death row in Texas. As it turned out, 1of the 2 activists had been a pen pal for the killer who had tortured and murdered the young woman in the pictures that had caused Holbrook so much anguish a decade earlier.
Negotiations on that project broke down temporarily, and Holbrook approached Fort Worth Weekly about doing the death row portraits for this paper — to put a human face on the most active death row in the country.
And so Holbrook went down the path followed by many before him: He started turning his anguish into art. Beginning in January, Holbrook made repeated trips to Livingston, where men sentenced to death in this state are housed, and to Gatesville, where the women on Texas death row are incarcerated. He has photographed only a handful of the condemned – 1 of 9 women, 10 of about 380 men. Since then, 2 of the men have moved off death row: Thomas Miller-El of Dallas dropped his appeal, which had been based on Dallas' formerly racist jury selection procedures, in return for a life sentence. LaRoyce Smith, not pictured here, was granted a new trial.
Holbrook's subjects range from a man convicted of beating 2 women to death with a skillet to Darlie Routier, the glamorous Rowlett housewife convicted of fatally stabbing her 2 sons, to Travis Runnels, a young man who, already serving a long sentence for aggravated robbery, graduated to death row by knifing a prison factory supervisor. They also include Randolph Greer who, though only 18 when he was arrested in Houston, was also an accused serial rapist, described by police as a remorseless psychopath. Tony Ford is another subject, convicted largely on the basis of one witness who has since recanted and another whose identification of Ford is suspect due to the inmate's eerily close resemblance to the man that even police have heard was the real killer. And then there's Nelson Gongora, a longtime violent Fort Worth gang leader with a ruthless reputation, who shot his victim in full view of several witnesses; he asked Holbrook to send copies of his picture to his mother.
"I have deliberately chosen to photograph those who are very obviously guilty of the crimes they are convicted of and those who are probably innocent as well," Holbrook said. "If you feel compelled to figure out which is which, please do so."
For the most part, Holbrook is not an apologist for the inmates. "Most of them are guilty, and most of them are lying," he said. But that doesn't change what he sees as his mission.
The ultimate conclusion he came to, Holbrook said, is that, for families of the dead and for collateral-damage victims like him, "The only way we can truly stop suffering is to love and forgive those who have caused the suffering." He wants viewers to see the common human link between the killers and jailhouse preachers and themselves. "The ultimate question we are trying to answer when we look at these condemned human beings is, 'Am I capable of that?' And the answer is yes," he said, "given the same life experiences they have had. … They are our other selves."
If that all sounds mystical and churchy, Holbrook is decidedly the 1st but not the 2nd. He believes in God but has no use for organized religion.
And so Holbrook also realizes — and doesn't care — that many of the inmates agreed to be photographed because they're grasping at any straw that might save their lives: If they look meek and reverent, maybe someone will help with their appeal or join the fight against the death penalty in time to keep the needle away from them.
The inmates had different reactions to Holbrook and his camera. Ford, for instance, wanted to be photographed while engaging in prayer. Routier flirted. When he took Greer’s picture, Holbrook said, "It was as if I was not there. He used the brief photo session to escape into some kind of fantasy world. He posed like he was the subject of some kind of exotic fashion shoot."
Holbrook said he found that Miller-El — arrested following a shoot-out with police, after killing 1 man and leaving another paralyzed by his wounds – has, over the decades, become one of the most beloved people on the death row unit, respected by guards and inmates.
The 43-year-old photographer believes in the "spiritual transformations" that inmates such as Miller-El appear to have undergone. "Would they have made these transformations if not for the fact that they were about to be killed?" Holbrook asks himself, and he has no answer.
Holbrook was most affected by his session with Ford, whom the photographer said "has the best innocence claim of anyone I have photographed." That causes Holbrook great anxiety. After that trip, he said, "I woke up at 3 a.m. and had a panic attack."
But the "reality of the death penalty finally set in," Holbrook said, after his visit with Runnels, who committed his murder behind bars. "I was taken by the absurdity of wasting such a perfect physical example of a human being" — and by knowing what Runnels did to end up where he is.
Holbrook hasn't talked to the victims' families, but he doesn't expect them to accept his view. It took him a long time to come to it, after all, and he personally has lost no one to a murderer except, almost, himself, and a girl he never met in life.
He intends to keep taking death row pictures, if he can. And the Oslo group and others are again working on plans for the photo exhibit to tour Europe, where opposition to the death penalty is much stronger than in this country. The portraits will also be shown around the United States.
The man whose defense Holbrook was working on back in 1994 got a long prison term. His accomplice was sentenced to death and executed in April 2007, the photographer said, "about 5 days before my son was born." Holbrook still aches for the "beautiful human being" who was the victim in that case, and still get echoes of the psychological stress he went through back then. But Holbrook said he's learned the mechanism for defeating those demons.
Forgiveness, he said, "works like magic."
The Murder Victims
Fort Worth Weekly was unable to obtain pictures of most of the victims of the murders for which the inmates in the portraits were convicted. In some cases, local newspapers or government agencies declined to allow photos to be copied.
Here are the victims and their circumstances:
• Houston grocer Kenneth Kwan, 43, was killed in 1991 when several men overpowered him and a security guard as Kwan returned from a bank carrying cash. George McFarland was convicted in his death.
• The stabbing murders of Devon, 6, and Damon Routier, 5, in their Rowlett home in 1996 became an infamous case. Darlie Routier claimed that an intruder had killed her sons, but many suspicious circumstances — such as finding that the knife used to cut a window screen had been returned to its place in the kitchen — led police to charge her. She was convicted in the death of Damon and not tried in Devon's murder.
• Walter Chmiel, 47, was slain in 1991 by a robber who took money and 25 weapons from Chmiel's gun store in the Bellaire enclave in Houston. Randolph Greer, convicted of the murder, was identified by 3 women as their attacker and was a suspect in violent crimes in North Carolina.
• Armando Murillo, 18, of El Paso was shot to death in 1991 by 2 men who broke into his mother's home. His mother, Myra Conception Murillo, and her 2 daughters were also shot but survived. Tony Ford was convicted in Armando's death.
• Delfino Sierra, 36, brought his family from Dallas to Fort Worth in 2001 to attend a quiceañera. When he left the party to get some air, witnesses said, Nelson Gongora shot him in the head.
• Douglas Walker and Donald Ray Hall were working as clerks in an Irving hotel in 1985 when a robber bound and gagged both men and shot them. Walker died. Hall, permanently paralyzed, survived and identified Thomas Miller-El as the attacker.
• James Mosqueda, 27, and his girlfriend, Amy Kitchen, 22, were found slain in their North Dallas home in 2000. Ivan Cantu, Mosqueda's cousin, was charged in both deaths and tried and convicted for killing Mosqueda.
• Stanley A. Wiley, 38, was working as a supervisor in an state prison shoe factory in Amarillo in 2003 when he was attacked by an inmate. Numerous witnesses identified Travis Runnels as the man who slashed the supervisor's throat. Wiley died in a local hospital 4 hours later.
(source: Fort Worth Weekly)
MISSOURI:
Pro-Con: Should the death penalty be expanded to include people who rape children? YES
A Louisiana law on child rape is before the U.S. Supreme Court The question before the Supreme Court is whether the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment lets a state execute child rapists and, if so, whether Louisiana's capital-rape law is narrowly tailored to pass constitutional muster. The question is not whether a victim or a victim’s family wants the perpetrator to die or to spend the rest of his life in jail. Nor is the question whether such laws create more victims.
Those are public policy questions best decided by elected officials, not unelected judges. The Louisiana legislature, in its wisdom, decided to extend the death penalty to monsters that rape helpless little girls.
But the Supreme Court has established a murky precedent whereby a death-penalty law must be weighed against "evolving standards of decency." The court also ruled that the death penalty was excessive for the rape of an adult, but not for all rapes. So the high court has an opportunity here to clean up some cloudy jurisprudence.
(source: Opinion, Ben Boychuk, RedBlueAmerica.com, Kansas City Star)
TEXAS:
Renteria resentenced to death
A jury sentenced David Renteria to death this morning in the 2001 abduction and slaying of 5-year-old Alexandra Flores.
After more than a day of deliberation, the jury unanimously decided that Renteria posed a continuing threat to society and there were no mitigating circumstances to spare his life.
"His death is not going to bring Alexandra back, but we'll be glad he's not going to hurt another child again," Perla Sanchez, Alexandra's aunt, said after the sentence was read.
Renteria was convicted of capital murder in 2003 and sentenced to death.
An appeals court later upheld the conviction but threw out the sentence because the original jury might have been left with the impression that Renteria did not express remorse.
The jury had been sequestered since the trial began April 22.
(source: El Paso Times)
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Renteria Given The Death Penalty
A jury has sentenced convicted killer David Renteria to the death penalty for the murder of Alejandra Flores.
The sentence came down just before 10 a.m. at the El Paso County Courthouse. Jurors took about 20 minutes this morning to decide on the death penalty.
Renteria was granted another sentencing trial after his original death sentence was overturned by the board of appeals on a technicality which involved Renteria's written express of remorse.
(source: KDBC News)
USA: The Death Penalty Returns
Roughly 15 death row prisoners are scheduled to be put to death between now and October, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. This flood of executions is the result of the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld the constitutionality of a troubling form of lethal injection. The next few months, as states put their machinery of death into overdrive, are an ideal time for the nation to rethink its commitment to capital punishment.
Last month, the Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's method of lethal injection. Although there was convincing evidence that the three drugs that Kentucky injects can cause excruciating pain and that there are not proper safeguards to avoid needless suffering, the court ruled that it does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
After the court accepted the case last fall, many states halted executions. Now, the Death Penalty Information Center projects that by the end of the year, there could be 50 to 60 executions, which would make the upcoming months one of the busiest in years on America’s death rows. A disproportionate share of these will no doubt occur in Texas, which last year carried out more than 60 % of the nation’s executions.
These scheduled executions come at a time when many Americans are, rightly, turning away from capital punishment. We believe that the taking of a life by the state is in all cases wrong, but it is particularly so with the deeply flawed system that exists today. Many defendants lack adequate legal representation at their trials, race distorts who is sentenced to death for what crimes and juries are "death qualified" — jurors with moral objections to the death penalty are removed. As the recent rash of DNA exonerations has shown, judges and juries too often sentence innocent people to death.
In the Kentucky case, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a separate opinion in which he enumerated the many problems with the application of the death penalty and said that he decided that it is inherently unconstitutional. He also expressed his hope that the case would generate debate not just about lethal injection but about "the justification for the death penalty itself." With executioners gearing up across the country to start putting prisoners to death, state legislatures, governors, judges and ordinary Americans should start that debate.
(source: Editorial, New York Times)
*******************
Pending executions in the United States
Georgia executed a convicted murderer on Tuesday, the first person to be put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court ended a de facto moratorium on capital punishment last month.
The execution is the first of a series of pending executions that were put on hold. Following is a list of those due to take place in May and June.
May 27 - Kevin Green (Virginia) - Convicted of capital murder and robbery after robbing a convenience store in 1998.
June 3 - Derrick Sonnier (Texas) - Convicted for the 1991 rape and murder of a woman and the death by stabbing of her son in a Houston suburb.
June 10 - Percy Walton (Virginia) - Pleaded guilty to 4 counts of capital murder. All of the victims were neighbors. Has been on death row since 1997.
June 17 - Terry Lyn Short (Oklahoma) - Sentenced to death in 1995 for throwing a homemade bomb into an Oklahoma City apartment building, resulting in 1 death.
June 17 - Charles Hood (Texas) - Convicted of murdering 2 people in 1989 in a Dallas suburb.
June 25 - Robert Yarbrough - (Virginia) - Convicted of killing a convenience store owner during a robbery in 1997.
[sources: Death Penalty Resource Community and Death Penalty Information Center]
[MY NOTE---Walter Berry has a serious execution date on May 21...Mississippi]
(source: Reuters)
************************************
More executions not the answer
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that lethal injection was legal and could resume. States immediately rushed to begin killing convicted murderers. Georgia was first in line. Georgia executed convicted killer William Earl Lynd at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
Good, many will say.
But something else happened last Tuesday, 3 days before the Supreme Court ruling. James Woodward walked free. He was convicted of killing his girlfriend in 1981. 27 years of his life was gone. His innocence was finally proven. At least he's still alive.
Just last Friday, the state of North Carolina dropped all charges against Levon Jones. He was sent free after spending 13 years on death row.
According to the latest count from the Death Penalty Information Center, 129 people have been convicted, sentenced to die and then released from death row with evidence of their innocence.
That's just since 1973. Of those 129, 5 have been in Alabama. How many more were innocent and put to death? The stakes are too high for mistakes to be made or prejudice, power or personal incomes to play a role.
Not everyone can hire a "Dream Team" like O.J. Simpson. Simpson walked free with the propensity of evidence against him. Others have been sent to their death with much less evidence against them. Although the American criminal justice system may very well be the best system in the history of the world, it is, like all other man-made and human-operated instruments, far from perfect.
Yet we, as a nation continue to kill in the name of justice, something that is extremely rare among industrialized nations. One thing we share with Iran is a willingness from our governments to kill criminal citizens.
There are lots of arguments both pro and con. Some rest on religious beliefs. Others are based upon the simple yet powerful desire for revenge against society's worst.
Those who cry for vengeance often do so pointing toward Bible verses that they believe justify the death penalty, while they fail to recognize the Bible also states "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord." Others will say, "An eye for an eye." But Jesus reminded us in John 8:7, “he without sin should cast the first stone." Then, there is the entire issue of whether or not we as a society value the sanctity of all life.
There is no empirical evidence showing that the death penalty is an actual deterrent to crime. All of those same arguments have been debated ad nauseum. But before you cheer on the death penalty, ask yourself: Do you trust your government to pave the right roads, tax equitably or always do the right thing? If not, then how can you trust your government to kill the right people?
We make lethal injection the desired method of execution because we believe it's more clinical and seemingly less violent. It is easier for us to accept and still think of the act as civilized. Each time a new method of death is introduced, the courts go through the same exercises of determining whether this method or that method is cruel and unusual according to strict legal definitions. The issue isn't whether the method is cruel and unusual. The issue is how many men and women will be killed wrongfully, or needlessly when life without parole would do just as good at protecting society.
Those who take comfort or rejoice in the news our states have resumed capital punishment should pause and ask themselves if this is the moral and just course of action. We hold firmly for many reasons that it is not.
For countless monsters, the argument can truly be made for the death sentence. There have been scores of horrible people that have done horrible things.. But what are we seeking other than vengeance by eliminating that life? And doesn't that put us, as a society, down on their level?
(source: Opinion, Joe McAdory, Auburn-Opelika (Ala.) News)
******************************************
PACE President calls on the US to abide by its international obligation to review cases of death row prisoners denied consular access
Lluís Maria de Puig, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), made the following statement today:
"I would like to express my dismay at yesterday's announcement of a recent date for the execution of José Ernesto Medellin, the Mexican on death row in Texas. Mr Medellin says that he was never given
prompt access to consular officials, as required by international law. Mr Medellin's execution would be wrong morally, but it would also show a clear disregard for international law and a lack of respect
for the UN's highest judicial body, which has ruled that the United States breached its international obligations in this case and others and ordered it to review them.
I call on the US authorities to abide by their international treaty obligations, and on Congress to intervene if necessary to ensure this takes place. I also invite them to review the cases of Mr Medellin
and 50 other Mexicans on death row who did not receive prompt consular access, as is their right, and as ordered by the International Court of Justice.
I also deplore the execution yesterday of William Earl Lynd, ending a 7-month national suspension of executions following the Supreme Court's ruling that lethal injection is legal. However it is done,
the death penalty is wrong, and my hope is that one day it will cease in the United States too.
(source: PACE)
********************************
What next for the death penalty?
What happened
Georgia executed William Earl Lynd, who murdered his live-in girlfriend 2 decades ago, Tuesday night, ending a 7-month moratorium on the death penalty in the U.S. The Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay an hour before Lynd, 53, was put to death. The court last month cleared the way for executions to resume after upholding the constitutionality of lethal injections.
What the commentators said
This is only the beginning of a "flood of executions," as states prepare to execute roughly 15 death row prisoners between now and October, said The New York Times in an editorial. "The next few months, as states put their machinery of death into overdrive, are an ideal time for the nation to rethink its commitment to capital punishment." The Supreme Court made this possible by ruling that Kentucky's method of lethal injection did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment—despite "convincing evidence that the three drugs that Kentucky injects can cause excruciating pain." The bigger question is whether the death penalty can ever be justified.
That's an easy one to answer. Of course it is, said Adam T. Yoshida in The Shotgun Blog of Canada's Western Standard. The death penalty "isn't merely about the offender and the victim—it is the recognition that there exist absolute and unforgivable offenses which are not merely against human law, but against natural law as well." In fact, the real tragedy is that we don't have enough "confidence" in "our collective morality" to impose the death penalty for more offenses, such as the case of Josef Fritzl, who has been charged with keeping his own daughter as a sex slave in his basement in Austria.
As long as we as a nation are going to continue putting people to death, said anti-death-penalty lawyer Billy Sothern in The Nation online, "we must be mindful of the fact that extinguishing the life of a healthy person who wants to live cannot be done without violence. Whether Lynd went "kicking and screaming to the gallows in a public square," or died "quietly, without any expression of pain as he succumbs to the poison flowing unseen in his bloodstream—he has not died peacefully." And we should acknowledge that—"no matter the manner of execution”—nobody we kill ever will.
(source: Opinion, The Week Daily)
MISSOURI:
Death penalty to be sought in slaying of girl, 9
Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty for 2 men charged in the rape and murder of a 9-year-old southwest Missouri girl.
Barry County prosecutor Johnnie Cox filed notice with the court Monday, saying that he plans to seek the death penalty for Rowan Ford's stepfather, David Spears, and Chris Collings, a friend of Spears.
Both men have pleaded not guilty to 1st-degree murder, forcible rape and statutory rape in the girl's November death.
Because the state will pursue the death penalty, both Spears and Collings will be appointed new public defenders. Spears' current public defender, Michael King, declined to comment Tuesday and said the case hadn't yet been reassigned.
Ford disappeared from her home in the Newton County village of Stella while her mother was working a night shift. An intensive weeklong search ended when her body was found in a cave about 10 miles south in neighboring McDonald County.
Both Spears and Collings have confessed to rape and murder, according to prosecutors and court filings.
In Monday's filing, Cox said that the slaying was "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman," involving torture or depravity of mind.
The next court hearing in the case is scheduled for May 20.
(source: News-Leader)
*****************
Pro-Con: Should the death penalty be expanded to include people who rape children? NO
The Missouri Legislature is considering a bill, SB 1194, which would allow the death penalty for individuals who commit acts of forcible rape or sodomy of children.
On the surface, this seems to be a logical response to the most heinous of acts perpetrated upon children, but further analysis will bring us to a very different conclusion.
For a child to disclose abuse is nothing short of an act of heroism. Adding the death penalty as a punishment for this crime would diminish the rate at which it is reported.
There are many other ways to help these kids besides making them the conduit for someone's execution. This only would add to the guilt and trauma that these kids already face.
Let's do the right thing now — not by passing this misguided legislation but by working together to support victims and using the laws we have in place to hold perpetrators accountable.
(source: Opinion, Tammy Gwaltney, the Southeast Missouri Network Against Sexual Violence;
Kansas City Star)
CALIFORNIA: A death sentence voided----The Adam Miranda case shows that the California death penalty costs too much in time, money and justice.
If a respected entertainment lawyer had not decided 20 years ago to devote a substantial chunk of his life and work to helping a California death row inmate -- for free -- Adam Miranda would be dead by now. A document that could well have reduced Miranda's sentence had it not purposely or accidentally been kept from defense lawyers never would have come to light. Miranda's most recent petition for habeas corpus likely would have been rejected, just like the ones in 1987, 1989 and 1993.
But George R. Hedges stood by Miranda for two decades and happened upon evidence in the file of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office that a different man stabbed a drug dealer to death in 1980. On Monday, that changed everything, as the state Supreme Court threw out Miranda's death sentence and ordered a new penalty trial.
Miranda had an attorney whose firm was willing to donate millions of dollars worth of time to his case. Most of the 669 people on San Quentin's death row aren't nearly as lucky. If they have lawyers at all, they're usually harried, well-meaning professionals who do the best they can with the limited resources the state gives them to pursue their appeals. Earlier this year, one defense lawyer told the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice that, in a single death-penalty case, he typically must review 100 boxes of files and explore 40 areas in which things may have gone wrong -- but must tell his clients that "maybe I can only do 7 of them" because there isn't enough money to do the rest.
Confronted with the enormous cost of the death penalty in California, its supporters argue that it would be cheaper if the process were sped up. Yet Miranda's case shows how important those seemingly endless appeals can be.
Miranda is not a sympathetic symbol for abolishing the death penalty. Jurors were presented with a videotape at trial that showed him killing an Eagle Rock convenience store clerk; having committed such a brutal crime, he should never again walk free. But his sentence -- death, and not life without parole -- was based in part on another killing. The letter found in the prosecutor's file, but never shared with the defense as required by law and thus never considered by the sentencing jury, contained evidence of another man's admission to that crime.
Other death row prisoners are entitled to the same chance Hedges won for Miranda, but they won't get it. California's death penalty costs too much -- in time and money, but mostly in its potential for injustice -- to be sustained.
(source: Editorial, Los Angeles Times)
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Yolo jury votes for death penalty for CHP officer's killer
In a hushed courtroom Tuesday afternoon, Yolo County jurors recommended the death penalty for Brendt Volarvich in the murder of California Highway Patrol Officer Andy Stevens on a rural road near Woodland more than 2 years ago.
The 22-year-old Volarvich, wearing a dark suit and sitting beside his lawyers, nodded his head as the clerk read the verdict.
There was little show of emotion among the spectators in the crowded courtroom.
Before the reading, Judge Stephen L. Mock warned the audience that there should be no audible comments. After his clerk read the verdict, Mock polled the jurors, then thanked them for their service and excused them. He asked Volarvich if he agreed to postpone his sentencing until June 12.
"I guess," Volarvich said. "Yes, Your Honor."
Mock has the power to set aside the jury's verdict – the first death penalty recommended by a Yolo County jury since the early 1990s – and to sentence Volarvich to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jurors deliberated about 5 hours before reaching their unanimous verdict.
After closing arguments in the penalty phase of the trial Monday, they met for about an hour, then returned Tuesday morning to continue their deliberations.
Word came that they had reached a verdict about 2 p.m. It was read 2 hours later.
Last month, the same jurors found Volarvich guilty of 1st-degree murder with special circumstances for shooting Stevens in the face during a traffic stop on County Road 96 on the clear autumn afternoon of Nov. 17, 2005.
Stevens, 37, died almost instantly. Photographs exhibited during the trial showed his crumpled body lying in a pool of blood along the roadway.
A single bullet from a .357 Magnum revolver had pierced his sunglasses and ripped through his brain.
Prosecutors had argued that Volarvich, a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, murdered Stevens because he did not want to return to jail.
A second defendant, Gregory Zielesch, 50, of Woodland, also was convicted of 1st-degree murder and conspiracy.
Jurors found he had given Volarvich the gun used to kill Stevens as part of a murder plot against another man, Doug Shamberger, who was involved with Zielesch's estranged wife.
Zielesch faces the possibility of life in prison when he is sentenced May 21.
After Tuesday's verdict, jurors were escorted from the courtroom by Yolo County sheriff's deputies and left the building without comment.
Lawyers in the case – District Attorney Jeff Reisig, former District Attorney David Henderson, and defense lawyers Clyde Blackmon and Fred Dawson – remain bound by a judge's gag order.
Volarvich's mother and other family members, who attended much of the trial, were not in the courtroom for the verdict.
Outside the courthouse, Volarvich's younger brother sat weeping on the steps of the nearby county administration building. When approached by reporters, he walked away.
Shortly after the verdict, law enforcement officers and members of Stevens' family gathered in the county building's atrium for a news conference.
Michelle Stevens, the officer's widow, thanked her family and friends for their support, and the prosecutors, judge and jurors for their work on the case. With tears in her eyes, she thanked God "for strength."
Andy Stevens' mother, Pat Stevens, also thanked prosecutors Reisig and Henderson. "They've shown us courage and dedication and hard work and patience," she said.
She said God had supported her family during the ordeal. "His hands have held us and secured us through this long and devastating time," she said.
Stevens' fellow CHP officers had shown the family "nothing but courage and love," she said.
She said citizens should show their gratitude to law enforcement officers. "If you see one, go up to them and tell them you appreciate their hard work," she said. "I wish I told my son that more."
CHP Officer Robert Lagomarsino was a friend of Andy Stevens. He was with Stevens when he met his wife, had lunch with him the day of his death, and was among the first officers at the murder scene. Stevens, he said, was "just a caring, nice person. He didn't have a mean bone in his body."
But, Lagomarsino said, he believed Stevens would have been satisfied with Tuesday's verdict. "Justice was something he knew had to be served," he said.
(source: Sacramento Bee)
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Former death row inmate leads capital punishment talk
After 5 years on death row, Greg Wilhoit was exonerated.
"For some reason, if we cannot lethal inject you, we'll electrocute you. If the power goes out, we'll hang you, and if the rope breaks, my God, we'll take you out behind the jail and shoot you," a judge told him during his sentencing, he said.
Wilhoit was put on death row for the murder of his wife after being found guilty by a jury of his peers.
He was one of the speakers at the anti-death-penalty event Tuesday in the Student Union's Ohlone room.
Tim Cordell, a senior justice studies major, said he supports the death penalty.
"I think that death as an alternative punishment for certain criteria fits," Cordell said. "I think it's a valid punishment for valid crimes."
Other students couldn't decide.
"I don't really have an opinion on it," said Dave Panlilio, a senior pictorial arts major. "I'm in the middle."
Several students disagreed with the death penalty.
"Killing people is bad," said Trisha Vasquez, a sophomore hospitality management major, "especially when you don't know if they're guilty."
"I don't want to play God," said Anthony Tsai, a senior kinesiology major.
During the event, Wilhoit said he wanted the death sentence.
"I wasn't going to give the state of Oklahoma the satisfaction of hearing me, my family or anyone I know beg for my life," he said.
Wilhoit made the crowd laugh during his story.
"On death row you don't get out your cell under any circumstances," he joked. "Handcuffs. Handcuffs and belly chains. You've got to walk around like this. It's called the penitentiary shuffle."
During his first 3 years on death row, Wilhoit said he supported capital punishment until his friend on death row was executed.
"One of the gentlemen would unwittingly prove to be the catalyst in my transformation from someone who was adamantly pro-death penalty," Wilhoit said, "into an individual who feels that capital punishment is inappropriate under any circumstances."
Veronica Luna, a senior social work and sociology double major and member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, also spoke at the event.
"There is no right way to do the wrong thing," said Luna, whose uncle is on death row.
Irene Rodriguez, a member of Families to Amend the Three Strikes Law, has a son who is serving 25 years to life for nonviolent crimes.
"We have to do what is right to correct this law," Rodriguez said.
She said the group gathered signatures to get the amendment on the ballot this year, but was not successful. The group may try again in 2010, Rodriguez said.
"As long as I have breath in my body," she said, "I will continue to fight for my son."
(source: San Jose State Spartan Daily)
ARKANSAS: Fort Smith Murderer Granted Stay Of Execution
James Aaron Miller, who was scheduled to be executed Wednesday for murdering his girlfriend and her 2 young children, has been granted a stay of execution while the case is appealed.
In April, a jury convicted Miller on three counts of capital murder.
Miller was arrested in 2006 at the apartment of his girlfriend, Bridgette Barr. Inside the apartment, police found Barr's body, along with the bodies of her small children, Sydney and Garrett.
(source: KHBS News)
OHIO: Prosecutor wants execution date for Cooey
A prosecutor has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to set an execution date for a man who raped and murdered 2 University of Akron students in 1986.
Richard Cooey's execution has been repeatedly delayed by legal challenges and last month he lost what might have been his final appeal.
Cooey claimed in a 2004 lawsuit that the 3-drug cocktail of chemicals used to put criminals to death in Ohio violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that he had missed a deadline to file the suit.
Summit County prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh says with no pending appeals the state Supreme Court should set an execution date.
(source: Associated Press)
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Burge's death penalty hearings wrap up
Earlier this year, ACLU attorney Jeff Gamso said he hadn't gone looking for "nice ways to kill people," but he may have found one that’s humane enough to consider.
Gamso, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio’s legal director, conceded Tuesday that evidence gathered during hearings a county judge is holding to review lethal injection might offer a solution.
"There is no nice way to kill people, but I think the evidence in this case is that a single megadose of a barbiturate, properly administered, would provide a painless death," Gamso said after the most recent hearing Tuesday.
Gamso is one of several attorneys representing accused killers Ruben Rivera and Ronald McCloud, who are challenging the legality and constitutionality of Ohio’s lethal injection process in an unprecedented hearing before county Common Pleas Judge James Burge. Both men could face execution if convicted of separate murders in Lorain.
Burge said he hasn’t decided how he will rule, but he ordered Gamso to provide a written argument detailing how the current 3-drug cocktail used by Ohio and other states in their lethal injection processes violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and the quick and painless requirement of Ohio law.
He also wants Gamso to explain what the state could do to change the process to make it more humane.
2 anesthesiologists testified last month that the lethal injection process — a sedative, a drug to paralyze the condemned inmate and a drug to stop the heart — currently used by the state is a humane death if the drugs are properly administered.
Gamso said there's no way to guarantee that.
"There is at least the possibility that lethal injection certainly will not be painless," he said, later pointing out that in at least 2 executions conducted in Ohio — those of Joe Clark and Christopher Newton — there were significant problems.
Assistant County Prosecutor Tony Cillo disagreed.
"I don't believe there's been a botched execution in Ohio," he said.
The anesthesiologists also said that the sedative alone would be enough to kill an inmate without the added risk of the other 2 drugs.
Greg Trout, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said after the hearing that the state is always willing to listen to criticism and suggestions for improving the process. But he also doesn't believe using only 1 drug would end the fight over lethal injection or the death penalty.
"We've always been amenable to improvements if they offer substantial improvement, but we have to be skeptical of the never-ending pursuit of perfection through litigation," he said.
But Trout also called using only a sedative an "untested method" that has never been used in an execution and that could bring its own problems.
Tuesday's hearing ranged from a debate over the grammar of an Ohio statute that requires the drugs used in executions be "of sufficient dosage to quickly and painlessly cause death" to accusations by Cillo that Burge was helping Rivera and McCloud by asking questions.
"How is the state supposed to get notice what arguments it's supposed to be defending if the court is coming up with the arguments from the bench?" Cillo demanded of Burge.
"Well, you're supposed to know all of them," Burge replied.
Burge left the bench shortly after the exchange, in which Cillo brought up a 1997 drug case when Burge, while still a defense attorney, refused to tell him about a motion he planned to make at the end of the trial.
That trial ended with a 9-year prison sentence for Burge's then-client, Devon Wilkerson.
Burge's past as a defense attorney was called into question by Cillo at a previous hearing, when he complained about the judge keeping a photo in his office of another former client, James Filiaggi, who was executed last year for the 1994 murder of his wife.
Burge's controversial decision to review the lethal injection process lost much of its steam after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lethal injection in a Kentucky case earlier this year. The judge said Tuesday that he is conducting the hearings with the belief that the death penalty and lethal injection are both constitutional.
Burge said he expects to make a decision on the question of lethal injection by July, but there will likely by an appeal.
(source: The Chronicle-Telegram)
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Killer spared death penalty
A Butler County jury recommended Tuesday night that convicted killer Harvey Johnson Jr. serve life in prison without possibility of parole for strangling his girlfriend, Kiva Gazaway.
It was a crime that shocked suburban Liberty Township, where Gazaway and Johnson lived. Johnson dodged the death penalty for killing the 38-year-old mother of 2 and dumping her body in a Blue Ash ravine in April 2007.
In a bizarre tape-recorded confession that was played at trial last week, Johnson, 33, admitted he strangled Gazaway. But he insisted she asked him to kill her and that he discussed with her what method of killing she preferred, while he had her restrained with duct tape.
Gazaway's daughter, Jazmin, said she was satisfied with the verdict because it means that Johnson will never see the light of day as a free man again, "just like my momma will never see the light of day again."
Jazmin, 19, of Colerain Township, said she was conflicted over what would be a suitable punishment for J