Month: April 2012

SOUTH DAKOTA – Death penalty delay looms

april, 17, source : http://www.argusleader.com

A federal judge’s ruling in March that the Food and Drug Administration allowed unapproved tranquilizing drugs into the country might delay an execution in South Dakota. But it is not likely to ultimately imperil the death penalty here or in 33 other states.

South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley acknowledged the planned September execution of Rodney Berget might be postponed as the state and federal government work their way through the ramifications of U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s ruling regarding the drug sodium thiopental.

Berget was sentenced to death after he and two other inmates were convicted of killing prison guard Ron Johnson during an escape attempt last year at the South Dakota State Penitentiary.

South Dakota is among the states that administer thiopental as a tranquilizer in a series of lethal drugs that also paralyze the lungs and stop the heart. However, U.S. drug companies stopped making thiopental several years ago, leaving an Italian company as the only source for the drug.

The Italian government this year barred the thiopental made there from being used in executions, so American states that use the drug are forced to rely on their existing stockpiles. Now, though, the FDA, is being forced to go after those state stockpiles.

In a federal lawsuit brought by death penalty opponents, Leon ruled the FDA disregarded its responsibility to ensure the safety of imported drugs when it allowed Italian thiopental to be brought into this country.

In response to that, the FDA sent South Dakota a letter April 6 telling it “to make arrangements for the return to the FDA of any foreign-manufactured thiopental in its possession.”

Jackley has refused. He sent a letter back the following day saying the state’s thiopental already has cleared customs and been independently tested to ensure it was pure and adequately potent. He invited the FDA to work with the state on further testing if it has concerns about the thiopental in South Dakota’s hands.

But Jackley is walking a careful middle ground. While acknowledging the FDA’s authority to oversee drugs, he is not ceding the state’s right to have a death penalty.

“The state’s position is we have a duty to carry out a judge’s sentence and to serve justice on behalf of a victim’s family. We would hope the federal agencies appreciate that position and work with us to ensure that carrying out the courts’ sentences is done in a constitutional manner,” Jackley said.

While Berget’s scheduled execution probably could be postponed while the drug issue plays out, the May 13 planned execution of Eric Robert, Berget’s accomplice, already has been pushed back by a state Supreme Court review of his mandatory appeal.

Other inmates on the state’s death row, Donald Moeller, convicted in 1992 of rape and murder, and Charles Rhines, also convicted of murder in 1992, have appeals ongoing and no execution dates have been set for them, according to Jackley.

In the short term, states probably can get around the thiopental issue by resorting to other drugs.

“Twelve states that I am aware of have switched to pentobarbital,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Jackley notes South Dakota’s death penalty statute is written to give the state wide latitude in the drugs it uses to carry out executions. But Dieter and Joan Fisher, a federal defense lawyer in Sacramento, Calif., who founded a pioneering death penalty defense unit in Idaho, suggest the same problem with access in the case of thiopental ultimately could arise with pentobar bital.

Like thiopental, it now is manufactured only overseas.

“This does underscore the fact the U.S. is dependent on overseas for certain drugs. That’s a larger problem,” Dieter said.

“Things are changing so quickly on us it’s hard to keep up with state corrections departments,” Fisher said of the ability of states to use new execution drugs and thereby evade defense attorney arguments that the drugs are not being appropriately regulated by the FDA.

However, while she admits the current furor over thiopental is merely “a speed bump” in blocking executions, she differs with Jackley on the larger issue. Death penalty foes and defense lawyers might find challenges over execution drugs a fertile field for lawsuits, said Fisher.

“I suspect there is the potential for more litigation than the attorney general would like,” she said.

US – Science lacking on death penalty deterrent

april19, 2012 source :http://www.sbs.com.au

Scientific research to date provides  no useful conclusion on whether the death penalty reduces or boosts the murder rate, said US report. 

Scientific research to date provides no useful conclusion on whether the death penalty reduces or boosts the murder rate, said a report by the US National Academy of Sciences on Wednesday.

A committee of scientists reviewed research done over the past 35 years and found it was “not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” said the report.

“Consequently, claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgments.”

The report was issued by the NAS’s National Research Council, which convened a Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty to look at available evidence on how the death penalty may affect murder rates.

A previous report by the NRC in 1978 found that “available studies provide no useful evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment.”

In the decades since that report, “a considerable number” of studies have attempted to judge how well it works, or does not, and have reached “widely varying conclusions,” the latest report said.

“Fundamental flaws in the research we reviewed make it of no use in answering the question of whether the death penalty affects homicide rates,” said Daniel Nagin, professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of the committee that wrote the report.

“We recognise that this conclusion may be controversial to some, but no one is well-served by un supportable claims about the effect of the death penalty, regardless of whether the claim is that the death penalty deters homicides, has no effect on homicide rates or actually increases homicides.”

Until now, a key flaw in the research has been the failure to account for how punishments such as life in prison without the possibility of parole may affect homicide rates.

Also, a number of assumptions have hobbled previous studies, particularly by assuming that potential murderers actually consider the risk of execution and respond accordingly.

Instead, researchers going forward must perform more rigorous studies that assess how potential criminals view the death penalty and its likely effect on their actions, the report said.

Better methods for future research include collecting data that consider both capital and non-capital punishments for murder and doing studies on how potential murderers perceive a range of punishments in homicide cases, it said.

Just 15 percent of people who have received the death sentence since 1976 have been executed, “and a large fraction of death sentences are reversed,” added the report.

The members did not examine the moral arguments for or against capital punishment, or the costs involved.

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GEORGIA – Daniel Greene’s Execution – COMMUTED

april 17, 2012 source : http://www.13wmaz.com

Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles stayed the execution of former Taylor County H.S. football star Daniel Greene up to 90 days “to allow for additional time to examine the substance of claims offered by Greene’s representatives” at a clemency hearing on Tuesday.

Greene was scheduled to be executed Thursday night.

A news release said the parole board may lift the stay at any time and grant clemency — commuting the death sentence to life or life without parole — or deny clemency.

Greene was convicted of fatally stabbing his former classmate Bernard Walker, 20, during a 1991 convenience-store robbery in Taylor County. A store clerk was also stabbed but survived.

Greene confessed to police, but later said he didn’t remember committing the crime. He said an acquaintance had given him a cigarette earlier that day that may have been laced with a mind-altering drug.

Greene was convicted of malice murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault at trial in December 1992.

NORTH CAROLINA – Guilty But Innocent – Henry Alford

april, 17, 2012 source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com

The recent flurry of news stories involving inmates claiming innocence but accepting guilty pleas in exchange for release from prison warrants some discussion. The particular plea bargain is known as an “Alford plea” and originated in the United States Supreme Court case of North Carolina v. Alford in 1970. The Supreme Court upheld the plea agreement entered by the trial court, despite defendant’s protests of innocence, and determined that since defendant was adequately advised of the plea arrangement by his lawyer and entered the plea voluntary, the plea bargain would stand. The underlying facts of the case are relevant to this discussion.

Henry Alford had been indicted on a charge of first-degree murder in 1963. Evidence in the case included testimony from witnesses that Alford had said after the death of the victim that he had killed the individual. Court testimony showed Alford and the victim argued at the victim’s house. Alford left the house, and afterwards the victim received a fatal gunshot woundwhen he opened the door responding to a knock.

Alford was faced with the possibility of capital punishment if convicted by a jury trial. The death penalty was required pursuant to North Carolinalaw at the time if two conditions in the case were satisfied. The defendant had to have pleaded not guilty, and the jury had to decide not to recommend a life sentence (this is not the law today). Had Alford pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, he would have avoided the death penalty and been sentenced to life in prison. The defendant did not want to admit guilt. Alford pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and said he was doing so to avoid a death sentence if he had been convicted of first-degree murder after attempting to contest that charge. Alford was sentenced to 30 years in prison, after the trial judge in the case accepted the plea bargain and ruled that the defendant had been adequately apprised by his lawyer.

Alford filed an appeal requesting a new trial arguing he was forced into a guilty plea because he was afraid of receiving a death sentence. The Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled that the defendant had voluntarily entered the guilty plea, with knowledge of what that meant. Following this ruling, Alford petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, which upheld the initial ruling, and subsequently to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit which ruled that Alford’s plea was not voluntary, because it was made under fear of the death penalty. “I just pleaded guilty because they said if I didn’t, they would gas me for it,” wrote Alford in one of his appeals.

The defendant appealed to the US Supreme Court with Justice Byron White writing for the majority. In a 6 to 3 decision, the Court held that for the plea agreement to be accepted, the defendant must have been advised by a competent lawyer who was able to inform the individual that his best decision in the case would be to enter a guilty plea. The Court ruled that the defendant can enter such a plea “when he concludes that his interests require a guilty plea and the record strongly indicates guilt.” The Court only allowed the guilty plea with a simultaneous protestation of innocence as there was enough evidence to show that the prosecution had a strong case for a conviction, and the defendant was entering such a plea to avoid this possible sentencing. The Court went on to note that even if the defendant could have shown that he would not have entered a guilty plea “but for” the rationale of receiving a lesser sentence, the plea itself would not have been ruled invalid. As a factual basis existed that could have supported Alford’s conviction, the Supreme Court held that his guilty plea was sustainable while the defendant himself still maintained that he was not guilty.

full article : click here 

OHIO – Mark Wiles – execution April 18 – last hours EXECUTED 10:42 a.m

6am. source : http://www.sanduskyregister.com

Mark Wiles, 49, arrived at the Lucasville facility Tuesday morning, prisons spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said.

The execution scheduled for Wednesday would end an unofficial six-month moratorium on the death penalty while the state and a federal judge wrangled over Ohio’s lethal injection procedures.

Records show Wiles was caught during a burglary by Mark Klima, the straight-A son of the family for whom Wiles had been a farmhand. Wiles stabbed Klima repeatedly with a kitchen knife until he stopped moving, the knife left buried in his victim’s back.

For his special meal Tuesday night, Wiles requested a large pizza with pepperoni and extra cheese, hot sauce, a garden salad with ranch dressing, a large bag of Cheetos, a whole cheesecake, fresh strawberries, vanilla wafers and Sprite, Smith said.

 Mark Wiles spent his last night talking on the phone, listening to the radio and eating pizza and cheesecake in his cell at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

He was emotional at times in the hours before his scheduled execution, crying with his sister and brother-in-law during morning cell-front visits.

“Inmate Wiles has been respectful and compliant with staff,” said JoEllen Smith, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. “He did have a few brief moments where he became emotional upon his arrival, but his overall demeanor has been the same, which has been respectful, cooperative and compliant with our staff.”

Throughout the night, Wiles talked on the phone with a friend and a nephew.

“Throughout the course of the night, the inmate did not sleep,” Smith said.

Wiles showered, declined the standard prison-issue breakfast and began cell-front visits at around 7 a.m., including saying the rosary with his spiritual adviser.

Wiles , was executed at 10:42 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville. It was Ohio’s first execution in five months because of a legal battle about the state’s lethal-injection procedures.

Wiles, who looked nervous and haggard after entering the death chamber, reportedly had spent a sleepless night.

As he lay on the gurney, a prison staff member removed his glasses at his request, so that he could read his last statement from a piece of paper held in front of his face.

“The love and support of my family has sustained and supported me throughout the years,” he said. “I love you all.”Since this needs to happen today, I hope my dying brings some solace and closure to the Klima family and their loved ones.”The state of Ohio should not be in the business of killing its citizens.”May God bless us all that fall short.”

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FLORIDA – Zimmerman’s Attorney Wants Judge Out, Records Sealed

The attorney for George Zimmerman filed a motion late Monday asking the court to recuse the judge in the case over a possible conflict of interest.

Mark O’Mara, Zimmerman’s attorney, requested that Seminole Circuit Judge Jessica Recksiedler be removed after she revealed that her husband works with Mark NeJame, a CNN legal analyst. Last week, after O’Mara agreed to take Zimmerman as a client, NeJame revealed that he had been approached by Zimmerman—the 28-year-old neighbourhood watchman accused of second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin—about representing him. NeJame declined, but suggested five lawyers, including O’Mara, to Zimmerman, reports The Cutline.

On Friday, Recksiedler said she would consider stepping aside.

Meanwhile, several news organizations—including CNN, USA Today and the Miami Herald—petitioned the court to reverse an order sealing records in the case.

O’Mara told CNN Monday he wants them sealed to prevent the steady flow of leaks that have already marred the case.

“It’s an overall philosophy of trying to keep the information flow concentrated within the court system,” O’Mara said. “It’s much better handled there. And, again, if information like this, even a police report with names on it, gets out, then my concern is that they’re going to be spoken to. They’re going to be questioned. There’s going to be four or five different statements from this one witness, let’s say, and then we have to sift through all of that to try and get to what is the truth.”

O’Mara said he’s also concerned about the safety of the witnesses.

US – Convicted defendants left uninformed of forensic flaws found by Justice Dept.

april 17, 2012 source : http://www.washingtonpost.com

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.

The case of a Maryland man serving a life sentence for a 1981 double killing is another in which federal and local law enforcement officials knew of forensic problems but never told the defendant. Attorneys for the man, John Norman Huffington, say they learned of potentially exculpatory Justice Department findings from The Washington Post. They are seeking a new trial.

Justice Department officials said that they met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific errors, that they alerted prosecutors and were not required to inform defendants directly.

The review was performed by a task force created during an inspector general’s investigation of misconduct at the FBI crime lab in the 1990s. The inquiry took nine years, ending in 2004, records show, but the findings were never made public.

In the discipline of hair and fiber analysis, only the work of FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone was questioned. Even though Justice Department and FBI officials knew that the discipline had weaknesses and that the lab lacked protocols — and learned that examiners’ “matches” were often wrong — they kept their reviews limited to Malone.

But two cases in D.C. Superior Court show the inadequacy of the government’s response.

Santae A. Tribble, now 51, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1978, and Kirk L. Odom, now 49, was convicted of a sexual assault in 1981.

Key evidence at each of their trials came from separate FBI experts — not Malone — who swore that their scientific analysis proved with near certainty that Tribble’s and Odom’s hair was at the respective crime scenes.

But DNA testing this year on the hair and on other old evidence virtually eliminates Tribble as a suspect and completely clears Odom. Both men have completed their sentences and are on lifelong parole. They are now seeking exoneration in the courts in the hopes of getting on with their lives.

read full article : click here

US – Lethal Injection As the Death Penalty’s Last Stand

april 16,2012 source :http://www.huffingtonpost.com David A. Love *Witness to innocence*

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America? All of it might come down to a basic issue of supply.

So, what do you do if you are a hangman who runs out of rope? To put it in more conventional terms, suppose you are a state that executes people by lethal injection, but you’re running out of the lethal chemicals used to put people down like animals.

Perhaps you’d do what some states have done and buy your chemicals on the black market, so to speak.

In March, Judge Richard J. Leon, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued an order andopinion banning the importation of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic and the first of a three-chemical cocktail administered to a condemned inmate. Once the inmate is unconscious, he or she is injected with pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the person, and potassium chloride, which causes death through cardiac arrest.

According to the judge, it was disappointing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broke the law by allowing shipments of the drug from foreign countries, unapproved for the purpose of executions. Without FDA approval, according to the judge, the sodium thiopental would fail to put the inmate to sleep, causing “conscious suffocation, pain, and cardiac arrest.”

Judge Leon ordered the FDA to notify state corrections departments that they must surrender the drug to the FDA.

The drug is only available overseas, as the only U.S. manufacturer recently ceased production last year amid controversy over its use. Moreover, the European Union recently announcedrestrictions on export of the drug. But with sodium thiopental unavailable, the most logical replacement is pentobarbital. This replacement drug, which is a more expensive alternative, has been used by 12 states to put 47 people to death since 2010, according to the Death Penalty information Center, and is widely used to put down animals. In addition, the chemical is used to treat insomnia and as a seizure treatment for epilepsy.

Manufacturers of pentobarbital, including Danish manufacturer Lundbeck, Inc., have made it known to various states that they do not want the drug used for executions. States such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas apparently have stockpiled pentobarbital and say they have enough supply for this year’s executions.

Texas apparently bought $50,000 worth last year and wants to block information on its stockpile, and the state has accused the anti-death penalty group Reprieve of “‘intimidation and commercial harassment’ of manufacturers of medical drugs used in lethal injections.” Arizonahas had its lethal injection protocols challenged, as inmates have sued the state for giving the state’s corrections director too much discretion. Meanwhile, Ohio just resumed executions after a federally-imposed six-month moratorium because prison officials were not following proper procedures. And Alabama stayed an execution in March after the condemned inmate argued that Pentobarbital does not completely sedate and amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

With both domestic and international public pressure on the purveyors of death, it seems they’re feeling the heat, as well they should. Willing executioners are in short supply, and former executioners have seen enough to know they want no part of it. Further, they have likely killed innocent people. Many doctors are unwilling to break their Hippocratic oath to do no harm, or are forbidden to do so.

Used to extinguish 1,100 lives in 35 states — some of them most certainly innocent — lethal injection is the prominent form of capital punishment in the U.S. Marketed as the clean, humane form of capital punishment, lethal injection was billed as the friendly, painless type of execution. But we should ask, how harmless can you really make a lynching?

If lethal injection falls out of favor, either through a dwindling supply of the poisonous cocktail of death, lack of public support or a court ruling, what do the states do after that? Do they return to the hangman’s noose? That seems unlikely, reminds us too much of the strange fruit hanging from the trees that Billie Holiday used to sing about.

What about the electric chair, which has been known to cook people alive? Or the gas chamber, like the Nazis used to do?

Then there’s the firing squad. Better yet, how about stoning, or drawing and quartering, which is really old school?

Here’s a better idea. Just get rid of the death penalty for good. America is the only Western nation that executed people last year. And the U.S. is in the top five of nations that execute, putting us in league with China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen. We’ll never get it right with the death penalty because executions are so wrong.

No matter how the state kills a person, you can’t wipe the blood from your hands.

David A. Love is the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, a national nonprofit organization that empowers exonerated death row prisoners and their family members to become effective leaders in the movement to abolish the death penalty.

FLORIDA – Death row inmate cites conspiracy, wants new lawyer

april 17, 2012 source : http://www.palmbeachpost.com

After 32 years, convicted murderer Paul Scott finally got the chance Monday to tell a judge about the powers that he says have conspired to keep him on death row.

The 55-year-old, who was sentenced to death for the 1978 bludgeoning death of Boca Raton florist James Alessi, was given the rare opportunity to leave the state’s most secure prison to appear in court to explain why he wanted a new attorney. Strapped in leg-irons with handcuffs tightly binding his wrists, he insisted he was innocent.

“I did not kill Mr. Alessi. I did not help kill Mr. Alessi. I was not there when Mr. Alessi was killed,” Scott said as four supporters looked on, weeping. “Where is justice in this state? I’ve got 32 years for a murder I didn’t do.”

Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Richard Oftedal tried to keep Scott from rehashing one of the bloodiest crimes in county history. He tried to keep him from detailing his contention that co-defendant, Richard Kondian, delivered the fatal blows.

But an emotional Scott insisted that former Gov. Jeb Bush cut a deal with those who were trying to prove his innocence. “If I continued to pursue appeals, I was going to be executed,” he said.

The deal, he said, has prevented his current attorney, Stephen Finta, from vigorously defending him. “I believe this man to be an honorable attorney, but I feel he became afraid,” Scott said.

Finta declined to say whether the alleged deal made him timid. But, in a 2010 letter to the now-defunct Florida Commission on Capital Cases, Finta wrote: “I was told by an attorney in West Palm Beach, Mark Wilensky, that there was an agreement with the state to not press for another death warrant if the defendant’s counsel did not try to reopen the liability phase of the case.”

Reached later, Wilensky declined comment.

Instead of addressing Scott’s allegations, Finta told Oftedal that Scott refuses his advice. With an IQ of 69 and a host of psychological ills, Scott could try to block his execution by arguing that the state can’t kill the disabled. Scott refuses.

Longtime supporters from a Pennsylvania church attended the hearing and said Scott’s death sentence is unjust.

Jane Bunch, said both men killed her brother. Reached after the hearing, she said her parents accepted Kondian’s plea because he was 18 and had no criminal record. Scott, 22, was on parole for a California murder.

“They hurt my brother. They tortured my brother and it was planned,” Bunch said. “He’s a murderer. He should be executed.”

Oftedal said he soon would rule on whether Scott will get a new attorney.

 

TAMPA – Oscar Ray Bolin back in court

april 16, 2012 source : http://www.myfoxtampabay.com

 It has been 26 years since three young women were murdered in Tampa.

Investigators say Stephanie Collins, Teri Matthews and Natalie “Blanche” Holley were each confronted and attacked by Oscar Ray Bolin.

The former truck driver is now 50 years old, about the same age as two of his victims would have been.

But Bolin is back in a Hillsborough County courtroom, on trial for the 10th time in the murders of the three women.

A jury has convicted him nine times, but he’s been retried trhee times each in the Matthews and Collins cases.

He’s being retried now for the 4th time in the Holley case. The trials were previously overturned for a variety of reasons — basically, mistakes that were found in the trials.

Kim Seace, a former prosecutor and now a defense attorney in Tampa, says it is unusual.

“It’s unusual for it to be overturned that many times, but you have to remember when it’s a death penalty case, it’s held to a very high level of scrutiny at the appellate level. So they are going to scrutinize absolutely everything that took place,” Seace said.

During jury selection on Monday, out of a pool of 70 potential jurors, only 12 were dismissed for having prior knowledge of the case or of Bolin.

But because it was 26 years ago, most of the jurors have no recollection.

Bolin is currently serving two death sentences for Stephanie Collins and Teri Matthews, both of which have been upheld so far.

Kim Seace says the prosecutors may be going for a 3rd death sentence for a few different reasons.

“It’s something they would consult the victim’s family, and take their wishes into account. I think that would be a decision by each state attorney that is prosecuting him. And you don’t want to run the risk something is going to get overturned and you’re not going to have a death sentence in place on him,” Seace said.