february 9, 2014
People often ask me how to write Inmates. How to contact them.
This is a serious step, all Inmates are not sentenced to death, life, some have short sentences or long sentences. I would recommend a serious website, you will see all those women and men, their profile, and why they are in prison.
You can read the “conditions” and they will explain you some important things you need to know before writing
WriteAPrisoner.com click here
February 7, 2014 (cbs)
The South Dade man convicted of killing Jimmy Ryce in 1995 has filed an appeal with the United States Supreme Court to stay his execution, which is currently scheduled for next Wednesday.
Juan Carlos Chavez has been on death row since his conviction in 1998.
The Ryce family declined to comment on the appeal Friday, but Don and Ted Ryce sat down for interviews with CBS4 News earlier in the week ahead of the pending execution.
“I just want it to be over. I want to get it behind us,” Don Ryce said.
Now there is a chance the day Done Ryce has waited almost 19 years for will be delayed.
“There is a reasonable possibility that the Supreme Court would consider a stay in this instance,” Miami-based appeals attorney Richard Klugh said Friday night.
Klugh is not connected to the case, but is familiar with the history and the letter of the law.
“It could take days, it could take a matter of weeks. But most likely the Supreme Court will try to move expeditiously,” he said.
Chavez was convicted in 1998 of the kidnap, rape and murder of 9-year-old Jimmy Ryce.
The farm hand told police he dismembered the boy’s body, put the parts in planters, and then filled them with concrete.
Jimmy’s family held out hope he’d be found alive. Posters with his pictured were plastered all over South Florida.
After Chavez’s arrest, confession and conviction, they waited patiently for justice to be served.
Jimmy’s mother and sister would not live to see the day.
“This person, Juan Carlos Chavez, who’s been on death row for so long, he’s outlived my mother, Claudine. He’s outlived my sister,” Jimmy’s brother Ted said. “Now… Now, it’s time.”
Chavez’s attorneys argue the lethal cocktail administered to death row inmates violates the U.S. Constitution, saying it amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment.”
It’s a punishment Don Ryce thinks is well-deserved, even though it won’t bring his little boy back.
“I hate the word closure because what it implies is that there’s an end and everything is okay,” Ryce said. “And that’ll never happen.”
If the execution moves ahead as planned on Wednesday, Don and Ted Ryce said they plan to be in the viewing gallery at the state prison in Starke.
february 7, 2014 (latimes)
A man who raped and murdered a pregnant woman in her Costa Mesa home a quarter of a century ago was sentenced to death Friday.
Jason Michael Balcom strangled and stabbed 22-year-old Malinda Gibbons in the chest on July 18, 1988.
Her husband, Kent Gibbons, found his wife dead in their apartment, bound and gagged with his neckties. Police said she had been sexually assaulted.
At the time of the crime, Balcom, then 18, was living with his mother and aunt in a Costa Mesa motel less than a mile away from the apartment. He had been released from juvenile hall just weeks before the murder.
Investigators cracked the cold case more than a decade later when DNA evidence linked Balcom, now 43, to the crime.
Balcom’s DNA was entered into a nationwide database in 2004 after he was convicted of rape in Michigan, where he and his mother moved after the murder.
He was serving a 50-year prison term when Orange County prosecutors extradited him to stand trial.
In 2012, an Orange County jury convicted Balcom of first-degree murder with sentencing enhancements for murder during commission of sodomy, rape, robbery and burglary. But jurors deadlocked on whether to recommend the death penalty.
A second jury recommended the death penalty last year, a decision that was affirmed in Superior Court on Friday.
Film Synopsis: Rodney Reed was convicted of raping and killing 19 year-old Stacey Stites in May of 1998 and sentenced to death. Many observers felt Reed’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice, and that the evidence points to another killer — Stites’ fiancé and Giddings, TX police officer Jimmy Fennell Jr. This documentary explores the evidence involved in the case and the context of the trial that led to Reed’s death sentence.
This independently produced documentary premiered at the SXSW 2006 Film Festival in Austin, TX and has since played extensively throughout the U.S. at festivals and universities.
FACT UPDATE: In 2008, Officer Fennell pled guilty to kidnapping and improper sexual activity with a person in custody and sentenced to 10 years in Jail. In 2012, former Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo made dramatic ‘clarifications’ of his original testimony, including proffering that there was no evidence that Reed’s semen found on the victim “was placed there in any other fashion other than consensually”. In Fall 2012, Reed’s Federal Appeal was denied. In November 2013, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the final point of relief prior to setting an execution date, agreed to hear oral arguments from Reed’s defense. The hearing is set for Dec. 4, 2013.
Directors/Producers: Ryan Polomski and Frank Bustoz
WHAT HAPPENS 24 HOURS BEFORE AN EXECUTION ?
february 7, 2014
(CNN) — Two men behind bars for more than half their lives over a triple murder walked free this week after DNA evidence tore holes in their convictions.
Antonio Yarbough and Sharrif Wilson were teenagers when prison doors clanked shut behind them.
Now, in their late 30s, they can hardly believe they’re out.
What does freedom feel like? “I’m still going through it right now,” Yarbough said Friday.”I haven’t slept yet. I’ve been up for two days now. I have no words for it right now.”
Nearly 22 years of hard time
Imagine more than two decades in a maximum security prison. Add to that the fact that you’re accused of killing your mother, your sister and your cousin.
As if that’s not enough, you were the one who discovered their lifeless, bloodied bodies when you opened the door to your home one night.
If it’s hard to imagine what that’s like, Yarbough will tell you.
After years in Attica’s maximum security prison among New York’s toughest criminals, he left its high, gray walls behind him Thursday.
“It was a nightmare,” Yarbough told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an exclusive interview. “Twenty-one years and seven months was more like 42 years and seven months, when you know you’re in prison for something you didn’t do.”
After reviewing DNA evidence, District Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson said the previous convictions for the 1992 murders in Brooklyn would most likely not stand up in court again and agreed the two men should be freed.
“Anybody looking at this evidence with an open mind would see that there is no chance in the world that Tony murdered his mother and these two little girls,” his lawyer Zachary Margulis-Ohuma said.
And that goes beyond the DNA evidence alone. Margulis-Ohuma was convinced Yarbough was innocent years before.
At least one false confession detectives coerced out of a scared teenage boy over 20 years ago led to the convictions.
A night out
After a night of partying, Yarbough, 18 at the time, and Wilson, 15, went home to Coney Island. Wilson was staying with friends, they said.
When Yarbough got home, he opened the door to find his mother, sister and a close family friend lying stabbed and strangled to death. The two girls were partially undressed.
Police came.
“I was asked to come down to the precinct,” he said. Officers said they wanted him to tell them who might have killed his family, he said.
“Before you know it, I had this photograph shoved in my face, and I was being threatened and slapped around, and they wanted me to sign a false confession. And I wouldn’t,” Yarbough said.
Police also took in Wilson and questioned him separately from Yarbough. But he got similar treatment, he said.
“I was scared, afraid; I was lied to, manipulated into believing that I was going to go home, if I do tell … what they said happened.” Wilson said.
Faced with a life behind bars, the young boy cooperated for the promise of lighter treatment.
Life in prison
The two were convicted in separate trials. Yarbough was sentenced to 75 years to life. Wilson got a lower sentence of nine years to life.
They sat behind bars for about 12 years, then something important arrived by mail.
“Out of the blue, I got a letter from his (Yarbough’s) aunt,” Wilson said. “And she asked me, did we really do it. And I had to tell the truth.”
He wrote back to her: “I was wrong for turning on him, but I was scared and pressured into it.” We’re innocent, he told her.
“For many years I felt horrible that I had to do that and that I actually did it knowing that we weren’t guilty for a crime we didn’t commit,” Wilson said.
“I still feel horrible now,” he said, sitting next to Yarbough.
Wilson’s letter led lawyer Margulis-Ohuma and the district attorney Thompson to review their cases in 2010 — five years after he sent it.
Wrongful convictions
Thompson came into office in January with promises to restore justice to the wrongfully convicted. This case is part of a review of Brooklyn killings from the 1980s and early 1990s.
Then, last year, the right shred of evidence came along in the form of a DNA sample from a rape-murder committed in 1999.
It matched DNA found under the fingernails of Yarbough’s mother, indicating that the same killer probably committed both crimes. In 1999, Yarbough and Wilson were in prison and couldn’t have committed the second murder.
Margulis-Ohuma called Yarbough in prison to tell him that he was going to be free.
“When I heard about it, I was extremely overwhelmed,” Yarbough said. “I was happy.”
And the DNA was not the only thing that matched. The m.o. was the same, Yarbough said. The victim was stabbed and strangled.
“Hope had finally started to sink in,” he said.
Free at last
Wilson and Yarbough had not seen each other for more than two decades, when they met in court Thursday.
Wilson approached the man he had testified against. “I just wanted to apologize to him for all I put him through, all I went through.”
Yarbough is still in pain over it, but he faults someone other than Wilson.
“I know what they did to him, because I know what they did to me,” he said.
As to finding his relatives’ killer decades later, Yarbough said, “It’s in God’s hand’s now.” He teared up.
Both men celebrated freedom by fulfilling some longings they had for two decades.
Wilson filled his mouth with a hot slice of New York pizza.
Yarbough filled his lungs with New York air.
CLAIM YOUR INNOCENCE 