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Memorial For The Youngest Teen Executed

July 13, 2015

Alcolu, SC (WLTX)- On Saturday the young boy, executed without a fair trial was honored with a memorial.

George Stinney Jr. was 14-years-old when he was electrocuted in the connection of the death of two young white girls in Alcolu.

George Stinney Jr. was convicted of killing 11-year-old Betty Binnicker and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames in Alcolu. Three months after his trial he was executed in the electric chair.

His name was cleared last year after almost 70 years. Now the family seeks closure.

The memorial was organized by ‘A New Day’ or A.N.D.

“It was three families touched by this death, we were hurt and so were the two little girls families” says Irene Lawson-Hill the second cousin to George Stinney Jr.

She along with about 20 other family members were at the memorial. She says she’s happy to see new things added to the stone because it keeps his memory alive.

“They added this face, the picture wasn’t there. They had the execution date, they had his name and birthday” says Lawson-Hill. “I hope that no other kid in America, no matter what state they live in will not through this again. That there will be physical evidence before they execute another person”.

To fully heal, she says their family needs a public apology.

“We know we have to forgive the state for what happened, we can’t bring him back from what happened. But we feel that an apology would help mend our hearts to let us know that the state is behind us, that they didn’t just ignore this case” she says.

At the memorial, students from Ridge View High School sang the National Anthem. This group dedicated a full school project to his memory in 2013.

“His conviction was mostly due to racial profiling and because of his race so we feel that keeping his memory alive is kind of like showing south Carolina has made a mistake and that these mistakes are still being made and we have to realize them and go back and look at how people are convicted and profiled” says Kiana Sweatt a student at Ridge View.

A global view of America’s relationship with capital punishment

China. Iran. Saudi Arabia. Iraq. The United States of America.
What you just read is, according to Amnesty International, a list of the countries that executed the largest numbers of prisoners in 2014.
While the U.S. Supreme Court was making huge news last month with its decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, it also issued a ruling on another hot-button issue: capital punishment. The question before the court was a narrow one, whether Oklahoma’s lethal injection procedure constituted cruel and unusual punishment. By a 5-4 vote, the court said no.
But the opinions released June 28 reflected a bitter controversy within the court about capital punishment that coincides with polling indicating a decline in support for it among Americans.
The arguments for and against capital punishment (the mistakes, the question of deterrence, unequal application, etc.) are well established.
But the Amnesty report released earlier this year helps put that controversy into a global context. Simply put, the United States is part of a relatively small minority of countries – 22 in 2014 – that still impose capital punishment. And it’s fair to say that many Americans wouldn’t normally choose the company the U.S. is keeping on that list. For a number of years now, the United States has been the only country in the Americas to execute anyone at all.
The office of the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, says 160 U.N. members have either abolished capital punishment or are not executing anyone. And Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says, “The death penalty has no place in the 21st century.” The European Union makes abolishing capital punishment a precondition for membership.
Amnesty, which keeps careful numbers on capital cases globally, acknowledges that in many countries, the figures are not public and it is hard to know how many people actually were executed. That is certainly true of China, which executes far more people than any other country. Amnesty thinks there were several thousand executions there last year, but China considers the figure a state secret. There were at least 289 in Iran, 90 in Saudi Arabia, 61 in Iraq and 35 in the U.S.
The next 5 were Sudan (at least 23), Yemen (22), Egypt (15), Somalia (14) and Jordan (11). Also not very inspiring company.
While the number of known executions worldwide fell last year, substantially more people were actually sentenced to death, Amnesty says. That’s mostly due to large numbers in Nigeria and Egypt. Nigeria is battling the Boko Haram extremist group, and Egypt has been conducting mass trials of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had formed the previously government. But death sentences and executions are not the same thing.
Just because you’ve banned or suspended capital punishment doesn’t mean your country is a paragon of virtue, of course. And in those that do conduct executions, not all cases are equally clear. Few Americans would probably go along with the decision of Iranian authorities last year to execute a woman who stabbed a man during a sexual assault.
It’s also worth comparing the death sentence Dzhokar Tsarnaev received last month for the Boston Marathon bombings, which killed 3 people, with the sentence Norway imposed on right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik for a much deadlier act of terrorism – a bombing and shooting spree that killed 77 people in 2011.
Breivik famously complained about bad video games in the prison where he is serving 21 years. If that term seems incredibly light by U.S. standards, it can be extended indefinitely if authorities determine that he still poses a threat to society.
Then, there was Indonesia’s decision to execute drug offenders in response to what its new president says is a “national emergency” of drug abuse. 8 – Nigerian, Brazilian and Australian citizens, as well as one Indonesian – were shot by a firing squad in late April despite international appeals to spare their lives.
President Joko Widodo’s decision to go ahead with executions in drug cases appears politically popular with Indonesians.
But overall, capital punishment seems to be one of those issues where public attitudes don’t necessarily influence government policy.
Take these numbers from Russia. Russia suspended executions in the 1990s. However, a large majority still favored imposing capital punishment for a variety of offensives (The numbers are a few years old now, but are unlikely to have changed a great deal). The biggest percentage favored permitting execution in cases of sexual offenses against teenagers. Only about a quarter of those polled were in favor of keeping the moratorium or banning capital punishment altogether.
Then, there’s Britain, which hasn’t executed anyone for more than 1/2 a century – since 1964.
Still, Amnesty International said, polls indicated that as recently as 5 years ago, a bare majority – 51 % – favored the use of capital punishment. By last year, that figure had fallen to 45 %.
July 10, 2015

 

TEXAS – UPCOMING EXECUTION JULY 16 – Clifton Williams at 6 p.m EXECUTION HALTED !

JULY 16. 2015

The Texas Court of Appeals has halted the execution of a death row inmate just hours before he was set to be killed.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The Texas Court of Appeals has halted the execution of death row inmate Clifton Lamar Williams on Thursday just hours before he was set to be killed.

“This is a subsequent application for a writ of habeas corpus filed pursuant to the provisions of Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 11.071 § 5 and a motion for a stay of execution,” the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas order read on Thursday.

The Court of Appeals said that it approved William’s appeal application, which is now returned to a trial court for a review on its merits before a final decision is determined.

In a brief order, the court agreed to return the case to the trial court in Tyler to review an appeal from Williams’ attorneys. They want to examine whether incorrect FBI statistics regarding DNA probabilities in population estimates cited by witnesses could have affected the outcome of Williams’ trial.

“We need time to look at this,” said Seth Kretzer, one of Williams’ lawyers. “No way we can investigate this in five hours.

“It requires some time, and the CCA saw that.”

 

July 10, 2015

East Texan Clifton Williams heads to the gurney next Thursday, July 16, after nine years spent on death row for the murder of Cecelia Schneider.

Williams, 31, was 21 years old at the time of Schneider’s murder, July 9, 2005. Court records show that he broke into the 93-year-old’s Tyler home, stabbed, strangled, and beat her, then laid her body on her bed and set her bed on fire. He left Schneider’s house with her car and her purse, which contained $40. He argued at trial that his friend, Jamarist Paxton, forced him to break into the house with him, and coerced him into cutting his hand so as to leave his DNA on-scene. But police weren’t able to find any evidence that would substantiate Williams’ claims about accomplices, and Paxton denied involvement. In Oct. 2006, Williams was found guilty of capital murder (in addition to a number of other offenses) and sentenced to death.

Williams’ attorneys have argued in state and federal petitions for relief (as well as a petition for a Certificate of Appealability) that Williams suffers from a wide range of mental illnesses, including paranoid schizophrenia, with which he was diagnosed when he was 20. They have tried to argue that his mother suffered from mental illness, and that Williams had trouble functioning from an early age. They also claim Williams was the victim of incompetent counsel, as attorneys at trial failed both to establish Williams as the victim of mental illness and to mitigate his standing as a future danger to society. Most notably, his petitions for relief note, trial counsel erred by stating their intent to establish mental illness before Williams received a court-ordered psych exam, giving prosecutors the ability to refute counsel’s claims without any established medical standing.

Last September, attorneys Seth Kretzer and James Volberding presented Williams’ case to the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes that the Justices would hear Williams’ mental illness claims. Specifically, records note, they wanted to prove that one ruling – ex parte Briseño, which lays out three basic conditions to determine competence – blocks Williams from arguing mental retardation on the basis ofAtkins v. Virginia (which placed a categorical ban on executing the mentally ill, and was previously rejected by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals). The Supreme Court denied that petition in early April, however, without comment or explanation. Williams’ attorneys do not plan to file any last-minute appeals.

Williams will be the 10th Texan executed this year, and 528th since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1976. However, his execution coincides with emerging reports that indicate the number of Texans being sent to death row has now significantly decreased. In fact, jurors around the state have yet to sentence anyone to death in 2015. The last person to receive such a sentence was former Kauf­man County attorney Eric Williams (no relation), who shot and killed Chief Assistant District AttorneyMark Hasse on Jan. 31, 2013, before killing County D.A. Michael McLelland and his wife Cynthia two months later. He was sentenced to death last Dec­em­ber. It’s the first time in more than 20 years that the state has made it to July without issuing a new death sentence.

Execution Watch with Ray Hill
can be heard on KPFT 90.1 FM,
in Galveston at 89.5 and Livingston at 90.3,
as well as on the net here
from 6:00 PM CT to 7:00 PM CT
on any day Texas executes a prisoner.

Obama to become first sitting president to visit a prison

July 10. 2015

President Obama will become the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, part of a push he plans next week for reforming the criminal justice system.

UPCOMING EXECUTIONS 2015, UPDATE

UPDATE JULY 10, 205

Month State Inmate
July
14 MO David Zink EXECUTED 7.41 PM
15 OH Alva Cambell, Jr. – STAYED*
15 OH Warren K. Henness – STAYED
16 TX Clifton Williams  STAYED
August
12 TX Daniel Lopez  executed
18 TN David Miller – STAYED
26 TX Bernardo Tercero
September
2 TX Joe Garza
16 OK Richard Glossip
17 OH Angelo Fears – STAYED*
17 OH William Montgomery – STAYED^
October
6 TN Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman – STAYED
6 TX Juan Garcia
7 OK Benjamin Cole
11 TX Gilmar Guevara
14 TX Licho Escamilla
28 OK John Grant
28 TX Christopher Wilkins
November
17 OH Cleveland R. Jackson – STAYED*
17 OH Robert Van Hook – STAYED^
17 TN Nicholas Sutton – STAYED

Oklahoma sets execution dates for inmates who lost Supreme Court case

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) – An Oklahoma court on Wednesday set execution dates for three inmates who lost a battle to have the U.S. Supreme Court put their capital punishment on hold because of problems they claimed with the state’s lethal injection mix.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals set Sept. 16 for the execution of Richard Glossip, Oct. 7 for Benjamin Cole and Oct. 28 for John Grant, a court clerk said.
Glossip arranged for his employer to be beaten to death. Cole killed his 9-month-old daughter. Grant stabbed a correctional worker to death.
The attorney general had asked the court to resume executions as soon as August.
The state suspended all executions after the troubled April 2014 lethal injection of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett.
He could be seen twisting on the gurney after death chamber staff failed to place the intravenous line properly. The execution was called off but he died about 45 minutes after it started because of lethal injection chemicals that had accumulated in his tissue.
Lawyers for the three inmates facing execution argued that a drug in the state’s lethal injection mix, a sedative named midazolam, cannot achieve the level of unconsciousness required for surgery, making it unsuitable for executions.
On June 29, the Supreme Court found the drug did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a ruling that provoked a caustic debate among the justices about the death penalty in America.
Florida, which has used the drug in 11 lethal injections, had placed a hold on executions while the case was before the court. It plans to resume executions soon.
The drug is also used in Ohio and Arizona, which do not have any executions currently planned for the rest of the year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which monitors U.S. capital punishment.
Source: Reuters, July 8, 2015

 

How a President Hillary Clinton could help end the death penalty

Thursday, July 9, 2015

On the last day of this year’s Supreme Court term, the court handed down Glossip v. Gloss, ruling 5-4 that Oklahoma’s death penalty protocols were constitutional, despite the significant risk that the state’s experimental lethal injection procedures would result in death by torture.
Glossip is likely to be remembered for more than the specific holding of the case, however. In addition to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent taking apart the majority’s logic on the narrow issue at stake, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a separate dissent concluded: “I believe it highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment.” Breyer’s dissent is important, leading some to even conclude that the Supreme Court might actually rule that way in the near future. But this probably won’t happen unless a Democratic president replaces one of the Republican-appointed justices on the court, which is another reason the Supreme Court will be a top issue in the 2016 presidential race.
A majority of the Supreme Court has never held that the death penalty is categorically unconstitutional – indeed, there have never been more than 2 justices at any one time who supported this view. In the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court suspended executions, but 3 of the 5 justices in the majority held that the death penalty would be constitutional if applied fairly. Only 2 justices – William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall – held that the death penalty was always unconstitutional, a position they held for the rest of their tenures.
2 other justices, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, wrote opinions shortly before their retirement suggesting that the death penalty might be unconstitutional. But otherwise every justice has supported the compromise the court reached in 1976: The death penalty is constitutional if applied in a more fair and rational manner.
It is possible that Breyer’s opinion will be seen as a fraying of this compromise and a crucial step towards a ruling that the death penalty is unconstitutional. But if so, it is likely to be a process that plays out over a fairly long period.
At Slate, Robert J. Smith gives the most optimistic reading of Breyer’s dissent from the perspective of death penalty opponents, suggesting that there might be 5 votes on the current court to abolish the death penalty.
His argument is superficially persuasive. Justice Anthony Kennedy has been the swing vote to hold the death penalty unconstitutional for some offenses and offenders: those with mental disabilities, felons under 18, and people convicted of the sexual assault of children. It’s true, Smith acknowledges, that this collectively represents a small fraction of people sentenced to death. But on gay and lesbian rights, Kennedy started out by authoring some modest, incremental opinions – such as those striking down rarely enforced anti-sodomy laws – and proceeded to a landmark opinion creating a national right to same-sex marriage. Particularly with public opinion trending against the death penalty, why wouldn’t Kennedy write the death penalty equivalent of Obergefell v. Hodges?
The comparison, though, fails to withstand scrutiny. The crucial difference is that on LBGT rights, Kennedy batted 1.000. He never rejected an important claim that came to a vote on the merits. On the death penalty, conversely, Kennedy has hardly been a consistent friend to abolitionists. He joined, for example, a notorious opinion by former Chief Justice William Rehnquist holding that new evidence of actual innocence did not entitle someone convicted of a capital crime to federal habeas corpus relief. He has voted to uphold the constitutionality of victim impact statements, which lead to harsher punishments; death sentences where the mitigating and aggravating factors found by a jury were equally balanced; and another state’s lethal injection protocol.
Admittedly, some of these opinions are 2 decades old, and Kennedy might have changed his mind about the fundamental constitutionality of the death penalty. (Stevens, after all, was 1 of the 3 justices who authored the joint opinion announcing the 1976 compromise.) But Glossip itself provides powerful evidence against this possibility. Among other things, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion represents a sort of obscene gesture to death penalty opponents: “If you use legal methods to prevent states from carrying out a particular form of execution, it therefore has the right to carry out less humane ones.”
This is nothing less than a justification for torture. It is very hard to imagine someone who opposes the death penalty in principle joining this opinion, which is exactly what Kennedy did.
It is thus vanishingly unlikely that this court will hold the death penalty unconstitutional. The interesting question is what might happen should a justice nominated by a Democrat become the median vote of the court. In a recent paper, the University of Maryland legal scholar Mark Graber suggests that we are about to see a much more polarized Supreme Court that, rather than hewing towards centrist opinions, swings well to the left or right depending on who has the fifth vote.
The death penalty is one area where this may be most evident. Unless popular opinion shifts strongly in favor of the death penalty, Breyer’s opinion may very well reflect the default position of Democratic nominees, even the most conservative ones. If President Hillary Clinton can replace one of the Republican nominees on the court, we could ultimately see a decision declaring that the death penalty violates the Eight Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments
But there’s a dark side to the polarized court from the perspective of death penalty opponents. If President Scott Walker or Marco Rubio replaces Justice Ginsbug and/or Breyer, states might aggressively expand the death penalty to encompass homicides committed by minors or the sexual assault of children – and these laws would likely be upheld.
Breyer’s dissent does not reflect a court that is going to rule the death penalty unconstitutional in the short term. But it does suggest that it is a medium-term possibility – and that the stakes of future presidential elections are about to get even higher, with control of the median vote of the Supreme Court accruing a greater policy impact than it’s ever had.
Source: theweek.com, July 8, 2015

 

U.S. appeals court stays Ohio death row inmate’s potential execution

A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday granted an Ohio death row inmate’s request to stay his potential execution, saying lower courts failed to properly weigh his intellectual abilities.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati said in its opinion that Ohio state courts incorrectly applied the law with regard to whether Andre Williams was intellectually disabled. It sent the case back to the district court to reconsider Williams’ argument that he was ineligible for the death penalty because of his low mental capabilities.
“We note that clearly established federal law … requires courts to consider all relevant evidence bearing on an individual’s intellectual functioning,” Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote in the ruling.
In 1989, Williams, now 48, was convicted and given the death penalty for the aggravated murder of George Melnick, 65, and the attempted rape and attempted murder of Katherine Melnick, also 65.
Williams appealed his death sentence, but an Ohio county court and the state’s 11th District Court of Appeals ruled against Williams’ right to an evidentiary hearing in the matter.
His attorneys argued that records showed Williams at the age of 15 had a “social age of 9” and an IQ of 67, which met the criteria for the U.S. Supreme Court’s standard of intellectual disability.
State attorneys countered Williams’ adult IQ was 75, based on a test administered in prison. That was within a five-point margin of error of the lowest score possible for allowing the death penalty.
Moore admonished the lower court for relying on intelligence tests that are imprecise and said the childhood IQ score “was directly relevant to the obviously extremely important issue of whether Williams should live or die based on his intellectual functioning.”
There is no date scheduled for Williams’ execution and a district judge has stayed all executions in the state until 2016 so Ohio can procure the drugs needed in the lethal injection.
Source: Reuters, July 7, 2015

 

Florida: Executions Back on Track after High Court Ruling

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the drug midazolam is acceptable for use in lethal injections. 4 Oklahoma convicts had challenged the drugs use, and Florida courts stopped executions here pending the outcome. As Mike Vasilinda tells us, the ruling is now likely to open the door to dozens of executions in Florida.
The High Court ruling is 127 pages long, but its essence can be found in the 1st sentence. “Because Capital punishment is constitutional, there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out” wrote the majority.
The ruling is a set back for anti death penalty advocates in Florida. Sheila Meenan represents Citizens Against the Death Penalty and while disappointed, remains hopeful.
“I do’t think there’s going to be an end to the death penalty anytime soon, but I do believe and am extremely hopeful, and it won’t be too long from now when the US Supreme Court is going to say that the death penalty is against the constitution” says Meehan.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote one of two blistering dissents.
“She really talked about how this drug, midazolam, could even be the equivalent of the chemical of burning at the stake. She used very strong language along those lines and as I say, 3 others concurred with her in that dissent” says Meehan.
Quadruple murderer Jerry Correll’s execution was stopped in February. It could soon be back on. Jerry Correll’s execution would set a record of 22 for one governor in modern times. A list prepared by the Florida Supreme court identified more than 100 inmates who have exhausted their appeals. Meehan says the decision opens the door to multiple warrants.
“Now that this decision is out, there is really nothing to stop Governor Scott from signing lots of death warrants. We’ve got lots of people, more than 400 people on Florida’s death row” says Meehan.
The Florida Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for an interview
This afternoon’s death row count was actually 396. And late this afternoon, Attorney General Pam Bondi asked the Florida Supreme Court to lift the Stay of Execution for Jerry Correll. Once lifted, the door is open for Governor Rick Scott to sign his and other death warrants.

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

We ask the Federal Government of the United States to abolish the federal death penalty. While we recognize the rights of states to determine within their borders the limits of punishment, the United States remains one of increasingly few nations who endorse this archaic practice AS a nation. Recently botched lethal injections caused torturous, cruel and unusual deaths for a number of those so sentenced. This sort of problem is not the first in the history of the DP’s institution. Public support for the sentence is currently at an all time low. Fewer states are allowing this sentence than ever in the his. Innocent people have been killed and such situations are cruel and blatantly unconstitutional. This would be an admirable first step to correctional reform.Please set this needed example.

Published Date: Jul 02, 2015
petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-federal-death-penalty