Death Sentence

Katrina evacuee on Texas death row gets life term – Roosevelt Smith Jr.

November 7, 2012 http://www.chron.com

DALLAS  — A Louisiana man’s death sentence in Texas has been reduced to life in prison without parole in the killing of a woman who helped him when he relocated after Hurricane Katrina.

Attorneys for 50-year-old Roosevelt Smith Jr. contended he’s mentally impaired and ineligible for execution under Supreme Court guidelines.

A state-appointed psychologist determined Smith was impaired. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday agreed.

Smith, who was from Napoleonville, La., was condemned for beating and strangling 77-year-old Betty Blair in October 2005 at her home in Pasadena, just east of Houston. She’d been helping evacuees at a church and hired Smith and others to do odd jobs. He earlier had several burglary convictions and prison stints in Louisiana

TEXAS – ‘We got him,’ murder victim’s father says after Cummings gets death sentence

November 8, 2012 http://www.wacotrib.com

While Rickey Donnell Cummings was on his way to death row, one of the fathers of his murder victims was headed to the cemetery to tell his son “we got him.”

Jurors in Waco’s 19th State District Court deliberated about 3 1/2 hours Wednesday before returning a death sentence for Cummings in the 2011 ambush-style slayings of two men at an East Waco apartment complex.

Cummings’ defense attorneys had hoped to spare him the death sentence, telling jurors that the death penalty should be reserved for the worst of the worst.

Rickey Cummings flashes the peace sign while leaving Waco’s 19th State District Court, where he was sentenced Wednesday to death for a March 2011 double-murder at a Waco apartment complex.
Rickey Cummings flashes a peace sign after being sentenced to death in Waco’s 19th State District Court.
Rod Aydelotte / Waco Tribune-Herald

Prosecutors countered that the 23-year-old alleged Bloods gang member’s “callous, blood-thirsty” actions, plus an escalating spiral of violence, make him an ideal candidate for execution.

As Cummings was led from court, he smiled at his family members and told them he loved them and to keep their heads up. They said they loved him, too. He flashed a peace sign on his way to jail.

Cummings was convicted of capital murder Friday in the March 2011 shooting deaths of Tyus Sneed, 17, and Keenan Hubert, 20, as they sat in the back seat of a car at the Lakewood Villas apartment complex, 1601 Spring St.

Demontrae Majors, 22, and Marion Bible, 23, who were in the front seat of the car, were wounded but managed to flee to the safety of a nearby apartment.

Surrounded by family members and smiling occasionally, Robert Sneed, Tyus Sneed’s father, remained emotional, as he has been throughout the trial.

“It’s over,” he said. “We got him, we got him, we got him. Now, it’s time to go to Tyus’ grave and tell him we got him.”

Sneed said at least one of his family members was present each day of the 12-day trial.

“My son was innocent,” he said. “It’s not been two years. He’s had two birthdays already. He would be 19. Happy birthday, son.”

The soft-spoken Sneed told Cummings, “May God have mercy on your soul” in his victim-impact statement after the sentence was read.

Hubert’s father, Artemus Matthews, had a different, anger-laced message for Cummings, whom he called a coward in his courtroom statement.

“I hope they kill you over and over and over,” Matthews said, taking note of Cummings’ tattoos. “You must like needles. They’ve got one waiting for you down there. . . . You’re going to come home in a body bag.”

Prosecutors say tattoos on Cummings’ back are associated with the Bloods street gang, and a defense prison expert testified Tuesday that Cummings would be identified as a Bloods member when he got to prison because of the numerous gang-related markings.

Cummings and his family members denied he was in a gang, saying the tattoos represent his home in East Waco.

Cummings’ testimony

Cummings testified during the first phase of the trial that he was dealing drugs several blocks away when the shootings occurred.

He said he was spotted at the complex because he rushed there after hearing a description of the car involved and feared it was his brother’s car.

After the trial, several of the victims’ family members said Cummings’ case should be a life lesson for those considering joining a gang.

“There will be no wanna-be Rickey Cummings after the lethal injection,” said Tyus Sneed’s aunt, Boreshio Jackson.

McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna, who tried the case with assistants Michael Jarrett and Greg Davis, praised the prosecutors, investigators and staff for “helping bring justice for these victims and their families.”

“We are extremely pleased with the jury’s verdict and careful consideration they gave this case,” Reyna said. “Also, we are pleased that we were able to achieve justice for the families of Tyus Sneed and Keenan Hubert as well as Marion Bible and Deontrae Majors.

“Rickey Cummings’ pattern of escalating violence and brutality were choices that he made. This jury’s verdict sends a strong message that violence in McLennan County will be met with firm justice and the utmost consequences.”

For Davis, a seasoned prosecutor who formerly worked in Collin County, Cummings marks the 20th capital murder defendant he has put on death row. He told jurors in closing statements that Cummings has a “wicked, corrupt and callous mind.”

“He is not like us,” Davis said. “He is wicked and beyond redemption. He is a man without excuses and he is here because of his own actions.”

Before the jury went out to deliberate, Davis told them, “May God guide you and may he give you the courage to do what needs to be done.”

Hunt said after the trial he was disappointed and a little surprised by the death sentence because he thought the state had not met its burden in proving that Cummings deserves to die.

Jury’s decision

In arriving at its decision, jurors answered three special issues: that Cummings would be violent in the future; that he caused the deaths or intended to kill or anticipated that a life would be taken; and that there was not sufficient mitigating evidence to warrant a sentence other than death.

The jury also had the option of sending Cummings to prison for life with no chance for parole.

Court officials and a host of courthouse deputies made jurors inaccessible after the trial. One juror reached at home by phone declined comment, and two others did not return messages.

Cummings’ mother, Elma Richards, said her family will contact the Innocence Project because they think he is not guilty. She also denied her son is a gang member.

“My baby is innocent. He did not do this,” she said.

She said Cummings is staying strong for his family during the ordeal, while they remain supportive of him.

“He came in with a smile, and he walked up out of here with a smile,” she said.

Cummings’ younger brother, Darvis Cummings, Albert Love and Kennedy Hardway also are charged in the shooting deaths.

Reyna has announced his office also will seek the death penalty against Love, but no trial date is set.

Hubert and Sneed each were shot eight times, and the car they were in had at least 20 bullet holes in it, including rounds from an AK-47-style assault rifle.

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Lawsuit has potential to stay all executions in Pennsylvania

NOVEMBER 4, 2012 http://www.pennlive.com

It’s been more than a decade since Pennsylvania executed an inmate on death row. Although another execution is scheduled for Thursday, it’s possible the execution will not happen and that the chamber at Rockview State Prison will remain empty for some time to come.

There’s a little-known 6-year-old federal class action lawsuit — Chester v Beard — that has the potential to stay all executions in Pennsylvania until it is resolved.

04michael.jpgHUBERT MICHAEL

The suit challenges the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s execution protocol; the “class” in the action is composed of all inmates on death row, and there’s a hearing in the case Monday morning.

The immediate relevance is the pending execution of Hubert Michael, whose lawyers have asked the judge for a stay.

Michael is on death row for the July 12, 1993, murder of 16-year-old Trista Eng near Dillsburg in York County.

Michael, who was living in a boarding house in Lemoyne at the time, picked up Eng as she walked to work at the Dillsburg Hardee’s on Route 15. He drove her to a remote area of State Game Lands 242 and shot her three times with a .44 magnum — twice in the chest and once in the head.

When Michael subsequently pleaded guilty to the murder, he said he had been frustrated with women due to an unrelated rape charge in Lancaster County.

His attorneys recently asked a federal judge to reopen his appeals proceedings, citing serious mental health issues as the reason for Michael having repeatedly changed his mind on whether or not he wanted the appeal to proceed.

There’s a hearing on that later this week.

But the separate class action suit, in which his attorneys have also filed a motion for a stay, has the potential to affect all executions in Pennyslvania.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that death by lethal injection is not — in and of itself — unconstitutional, but the ruling left open the possibility that individual state protocols for lethal injection could be challenged on constitutional grounds.

At issue is the fact that two of the three drugs used in the procedure can cause excruciating pain if the first drug — a fast-acting barbiturate — is an insufficient dose or improperly administered. What’s more, the second drug paralyzes the person, so he would not be able to communicate the fact he’s in excruciating pain. For this reason several states have banned use of the second drug when euthanizing animals.

In an oft-cited concurring opinion in the 2008 decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “It is unseemly — to say the least — that Kentucky may well kill [inmates] using a drug that it would not permit to be used on their pets.”

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court — including Stevens — ruled that Kentucky’s protocol passed constitutional muster.

Among the issues raised in the Pennsylvania case is the source of drugs to be used in the execution.

Certain drug manufacturers have banned the use of their product in executions, and lawyers for the prisoners argue that if black market or diluted drugs are used, the procedure could be unconstitutional.

The Department of Corrections argues that revealing the source of the drugs could result in the source refusing to sell them the drugs.

Two federal judges have ruled that the source of the drugs is pertinent and ordered DOC to reveal the information, but in doing so, both judges recognized DOC’s concern and ordered the information to be kept confidential. DOC refused.

Last week, Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel, on the advice of lawyers from the Attorney General’s office, refused to divulge the source of the drugs desipte the federal court orders.

Today’s hearing now includes a request for sanctions against Wetzel and DOC for “clear, flagrant and deliberate” violation of federal court orders.

With the parties in the case still fighting over discovery, it’s possible there might be no final resolution soon.

Experts in death penalty law say execution stays could be likely as long as the case is open.

Marc Bookman of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation said the judge in the Pennsylvania case — Yvette Kane — “is a thorough judge who wants to do it properly.”

He noted that, “Lethal injection litigation has stayed executions in other states.”

Michael’s death warrant is the only one signed by Gov. Tom Corbett that has not been stayed for some other reason.

If Kane grants a stay, and if Chester v Beard continues its path through federal court, it could render any future death warrants moot until the case is settled.

When asked about that, Janet Kelley in the governor’s press office said, “The governor took an oath to uphold the law, and the law in Pennsylvania includes signing execution warrants.”

Death row inmate Jason Sharp, convicted in 1999 Madison County slaying, to get new case review

NOVEMBER 1, 2012 http://blog.al.com

The Alabama Supreme Court wants the state’s criminal appeals court to take another look at the case of Jason Sharp, who is on death row after being convicted of the 1999 rape and murder of Tracy Morris.

The case took years to go to trial before Sharp was convicted in 2006.

The appeals process has bounced back and forth from various Alabama courts since Sharp’s lawyers alleged prosecutors improperly struck black would-be jurors from the jury pool.

jason sharp.JPGJason Sharp is led from Judge Laura Hamilton’s courtroom by Madison County Sheriff deputies from left, Sgt. Emmanuel Simmons, E.T. Burrows and Avery Miller after being sentenced to the death penalty Thursday Sept. 14, 2006 for the murder of Tracy Morris. (The Huntsville Times/Robin Conn)Brian Lawson | blawson@al.com

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors must have race-neutral reasons for striking jurors. Both Sharp and Morris are white.

The state’s high court today denied a request by the State of Alabama to reconsider its order from last month, directing the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals to allow Sharp’s attorneys and the state to file new briefs on the issue of whether Sharp received a fair trial.

The dispute centers the complaint by Sharp’s attorneys that the prosecution improperly struck all but two of 13 potential jurors who were African American. The defense struck the other two black potential jurors.

In December 2009, the Alabama Supreme Court overturned the conviction andordered a hearing before Circuit Judge Laura Hamilton, who presided over Sharp’s trial. The court required prosecutors to spell out their reasons for striking black jurors. If the prosecution, led by Madison County District Attorney Rob Broussard failed to persuade the trial court that the juror strikes were proper, Sharp would be entitled to a new trial.

The hearing was held and Hamilton ruled in June 2010 that prosecutors did not discriminate in picking a jury. The prosecution had argued a number of the black potential jurors said they opposed or would be reluctant to impose the death penalty, or didn’t appear to have the professional or social “sophistication” to comprehend technical DNA evidence.

Broussard said he struck twice as many white potential jurors based on the DNA issue and has insisted there was no discrimination in the Sharp case.

The sophistication argument was ridiculed by the defense for appearing to suggest the jurors weren’t intelligent enough. And in one instance, a woman with a bachelor’s degree from Alabama A&M University was excluded, the defense argued, but two white jurors with no college education did make the jury.

The case took another turn in February 2011, when the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the prosecution had discriminated against the black members of the jury pool and said Sharp was entitled to a new trial.

But in February of this year, the same court, though with a slightly different make-up,reversed its decision from the previous year and said prosecutors did not discriminate.

That ruling was appealed by Sharp’s lawyers to the Alabama Supreme Court. The court ruled Oct. 18, that the lower court must let the two sides provide briefs to the appeals court on the issue of whether Hamilton’s ruling was correct that the prosecution did not discriminate against members of the jury pool.

FLORIDA – Jacksonville man faces death penalty again after getting life in first murder case. DeShawn Leon Green

Octobre 30, 2012 http://m.jacksonville.com

For the second time, the state is attempting to put DeShawn Leon Green on Death Row.

Tuesday the state began prosecuting Green, 28, in the murder of Robert Lee Kearney and the attempted murder of Katherine George. The two were both victims of a drive-by shooting outside Jacksonville’s Confederate Point Apartments in March 2009.

Police said Kearney, 24, and George, then 20, were outside the apartments when a vehicle pulled up and more than a dozen shots were fired from a rifle. Prosecutors are arguing that Green fired those shots with a AR-15 assault rifle he’d nicknamed “Baby.”

Assistant State Attorney Richard Mantei said Green shot the two because friends of his had been shot at earlier in the night by Kearney, and Green was out for revenge.

“The defendant in this case pulled the trigger at least 13 times,” Mantei said to the jury. “He was there to settle a score.”

But defense attorney Francis Shea argued that the real shooters blamed Green and pointed the finger at Bruce Brice Jr., the man police believe Kearney fired a gun at earlier in the night but didn’t wound.

When police questioned Brice and another witness, they didn’t mention Green at all. It wasn’t until months later that they fingered Green as the culprit, Shea said.

“Mr. Brice had everything at risk,” Shea said. “While Mr. Green had no motive.”

Green was previously convicted in the August 2009 shooting of Willie Golden, 28, in a home on West 26th Street. The prosecution withdrew seeking the death penalty because the jury said premeditation wasn’t proven.

Prosecutors said Green killed Golden in retaliation of a drive-by shooting on a drug house that Green ran just two streets over from the shooting.

Green also faces a third trial for the murder of Bryan Clemons, 23, who was gunned down with an assault rifle in April 2009 as he sat in a chair in a home on West 13th Street.

The Clemons killing was the result of an ongoing dispute between two groups of men from Green’s Grand Park neighborhood and the nearby Flag Street area.

The dispute began in November 2008 when the two groups fought over a drink thrown at a nightclub. The next day, Clemons’ brother, Jerry, was slain in a drive-by shooting at West 14th and Canal streets.

Green is also eligible for the death penalty in the killing of Clemons.

TEXAS – Execution – Donnie Lee Roberts – 31/10/2012 – EXECUTED 6.39 p.m

“I’m really sorry. I never meant to cause you all so much pain,” Roberts said to Bowen’s father, who was seated in a chair close to a glass window in the death chamber viewing area. “I hope you can go on with your life.

“I loved your daughter. I hope to God he lets me see her in heaven so I can apologize to her and see her and tell her.”

Roberts also asked two of his friends who watched through another window to tell his own daughter he loved her.

He repeated that he was sorry and took several deep breaths as the lethal dose of pentobarbital began taking effect. He snored briefly before slipping into unconsciousness, and was pronounced dead 23 minutes later.

Last Meal: Same shit salad being fed to every other thug on the row that day

October 30, 2012  http://www.beaumontenterprise.com

This handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety shows Donnie Roberts. Roberts, a Louisiana parole violator, is set to die Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, for killing his girlfriend Vicki Bowen at her home in Lake Livingston, Texas, in October 2003. Photo: Texas Department Of Public Safety / AP

HUNTSVILLE, Texas  — Donnie Lee Roberts, convicted in his girlfriend’s 2003 slaying, was taken from his death row cell Wednesday and moved to the Texas prison where executions are carried out, one of the final steps before his scheduled lethal injection.

After the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Roberts’ case earlier this week, no additional appeals were filed to try to block his execution, which will be the 12th this year in the nation’s most active capital punishment state.

Roberts, now 41, is being put to death for fatally shooting Vicki Bowen and taking items from her East Texas home to sell or trade to support his drug habit. At the time of his arrest for the October 2003 killing, Roberts had violated his probation for a robbery conviction in Louisiana by fleeing to Texas after dropping out of a drug treatment program.

Authorities said he apparently met Bowen, 44, a dental assistant, at a bar and moved in with her at her home on Lake Livingston, about 75 miles northeast of Houston. Their relationship soured because Roberts wasn’t working and was abusing drugs and alcohol, investigators said, and he shot Bowen after she refused his demand for money.

Roberts was arrested at a suspected crack house in Livingston when a truck missing from Bowen’s home was spotted there the same day Bowen’s body was discovered.

“He was cooperative and confessed several times,” District Attorney Lee Hon said. “He was saying he wanted the death penalty.”

Roberts told authorities he made several trips from the house where Bowen was shot, collecting property that he took into town to sell and trade for crack.

He also surprised detectives by confessing to the shotgun death of a man a decade earlier in Natchitoches Parish, La. Louisiana authorities initially believed the victim, Al Crow, had died of asphyxiation in a fire at the camper trailer where he was living but reopened the case following Roberts’ disclosure, found shotgun pellets and determined it was a homicide.

Roberts was charged with murder but not tried for Crow’s death.

Stephen Taylor, one of Roberts’ lawyers at his Texas capital murder trial, said the confessions complicated his trial defense.

“It’s almost like somebody saying he was a serial killer, that he’s killed before and he killed again,” Taylor said. “It’s one thing to say you have the right to remain silent. Use it!

“It’s always sad for someone to lose his life, especially for something so stupid.”

Bowen didn’t show up for work on Oct. 16, 2003, and a co-worker who went to check on her found her body wrapped in a blanket and lying in a pool of blood. A medical examiner determined Bowen was killed with two gunshots to her head.

Roberts took the witness stand and tried to blame Bowen for the gunfire, saying he was acting in self-defense by grabbing a .22-caliber rifle after seeing her reach down inside a couch to locate a pistol that was kept there.

“The jury obviously disagreed,” Hon said.

Evidence at trial showed Roberts had a record for battery while being held in jail in Fulton County, Ga., that he’d threatened his wife to give him money for drugs, and that he demanded a single-person cell in Polk County when he was jailed for Bowen’s murder or there would be another killing.

His robbery conviction in Louisiana was for a Mother’s Day 2001 convenience store holdup in Baton Rouge, La., where the knife-wielding Roberts threatened to slice the throat of the female clerk.

“He was a bad dude, pretty violent,” Hon said.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice Polunsky Unit, where the state’s male death row is housed, has been Roberts’ home since his capital murder conviction in 2004. The unit is just outside Livingston and not far from where Bowen was killed.

On Wednesday, Roberts was moved about 45 miles west to the Huntsville Unit prison, where he is to be executed.

Three more Texas prisoners are set to die in November, including one next week.

TEXAS – Death Row inmate didn’t commit murders, witnesses say – Lester Leroy Bower,

October 29,2012 http://www.star-telegram.com

SHERMAN — In a day of dramatic testimony Monday, two women implicated a gang of drug dealers in the 1983 slaughter of four men in a Grayson County airplane hangar.

After 29 years on Texas’ Death Row for the crimes, Lester Leroy Bower, who was a chemical salesman living in Arlington when he was arrested, hopes their accounts will help him win his freedom, or at least a new trial.

One of the women, identified in court as Witness No. 1, said her boyfriend told her that he participated in the killings on the October night they happened.

“He said he and his friends had gone there for a drug deal,” the witness said. “It didn’t go right and they had to kill some people.”

The boyfriend was identified in court as Lynn. Others in the gang were identified as Bear, Ches and Rocky, part of a methamphetamine ring operating in southern Oklahoma at the time, she said.

Several days after the killings, the woman testified, she heard Lynn and Ches discussing it.

“Ches was laughing, telling Lynn, ‘Did you see the guy’s face when you shot him in the head?'” the witness testified. “Lynn said, ‘I had to shoot him. He was running for the door.'”

The witness, who said she was the mother of a slaying victim, said she went to Bower’s defense lawyers in 1989 after learning that Bower had been convicted and faced the death penalty.

“As the mother of a homicide victim, I know how important it is to make the right person pay for what they did,” the witness testified. “I don’t believe Mr. Bower is that person.”

Bower’s lawyers have filed an appeal with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, arguing that new evidence points to the innocence of their 64-year-old client, the fourth-oldest man on Death Row. The appellate court ordered state District Judge Jim Fallon to hold this week’s hearing in Sherman, in part to build a record of testimony that can be used later in a decision on Bower’s fate.

Bower, a graying man dressed in orange prison coveralls, also testified Monday, the first day of the hearing.

The condemned man, who did not take the stand at his 1984 trial, denied killing the men but said his own lies contributed to his conviction. Bower admitted lying repeatedly to investigators to try to steer clear of the case, and to his wife, fearing that she would have been upset by his secret purchase of an ultralight aircraft.

Bower said he bought the aircraft from the victims shortly before they died.

“This is my doing,” Bower said Monday. “I’m responsible for my actions, my trying to stay out of this and lying to authorities. Lying to my wife, that’s probably where this started.”

Monday was the first time the testimony of Bower and other defense witnesses had been heard in state court. When Bower was sentenced to die, state law specified that new evidence could not be presented unless it had been discovered within 30 days of the conviction. That law has changed.

Some time after this week’s hearing, Fallon is expected to issue a ruling that could suggest upholding the conviction, recommend that Bower be released, or recommend a new trial. Ultimately, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will decide the case.

Grayson County prosecutors have vigorously contested alternate theories presented by the defense, saying Bower was convicted on the basis of strong circumstantial evidence. That included Bowers’ repeated lies to FBI agents and that he was known to have owned a firearm and exotic ammunition similar to that used in the crimes. Additionally, parts of the ultralight aircraft were discovered in his home.

The victims — Bob Tate, Philip Good, Jerry Mack Brown and Ronald Mayes — were found shot to death in a hangar five miles from Sherman, the Grayson County seat.

During Monday’s hearing, friends and relatives of the victims sat on one side of the crowded courtroom, supporters of Bower on the other. Robbie Dutton, Brown’s widow, listened from the first row, just behind the prosecution table.

“Just rehashing, you know,” she said of her feelings after Monday’s testimony concluded. “We’re not wanting him to be punished for something he didn’t do, but the evidence presented in 1984 was so damning.”

Nothing she heard Monday changed her belief in Bower’s guilt, she said.

“It’s hard to hear all of this again,” Dutton said.

Witness No. 1 testified that she was told of the killings hours after they occurred, while she and Lynn drove through Sherman.

“When he told me about all this, it was like my whole world shifted at that point,” she said. “It was like I just stepped into a TV movie.”

She also described her boyfriend’s behavior in the days after the killings.

“He would have a hard time sleeping,” she said. “He would have nightmares. He would be up pacing. He said he could see the man’s eyes he shot and he could hear the noise reverberating off the tin building.”

The second witness, identified as Witness No. 5, said she was the wife of Bear, who died of cancer five years ago. She testified that several times she heard her husband and the other men talk about a shooting in an airplane hangar in which four men were killed.

“I believe they committed the crime, yes,” she said.

Grayson County prosecutor Kerye Ashmore attacked the credibility of both women, citing their heavy drug use at the time of the slayings, and in the case of Witness No. 1, a felony conviction for forgery.

Bower also faces what likely will be a vigorous cross-examination as the hearing resumes today.

On Monday, Bower described meeting the men in the hangar and paying $3,000 cash as a down payment for the ultralight. But he hid his purchase.

“I was concerned how my wife would react,” Bower said. “I was quite sure she would not have approved.”

He said he was stunned and frightened when he heard of the slaughter a few days after it happened. The following January, FBI agents tracked Bower down through telephone records of his calls to one of the victims. When questioned, he said, he admitted inquiring about the aircraft but did not say he had visited the crime scene.

“Once I headed down the proverbial bad path, I kept on going,” Bower said. “I told them the same lie.”

 

Steven Lawayne Nelson Sentenced To Death Penalty For Murder Of Texas Pastor Clint Dobson

Steven Lawayne Nelson http://www.huffingtonpost.com

FORT WORTH, Texas — The Rev. Clint Dobson was sitting in his church office writing a sermon when a convicted felon began scouring the neighborhood for a car to steal.

The felon honed in on the church, where investigators say he suffocated the young pastor and severely beat his secretary before fleeing in one of their cars.

New details of Steven Lawayne Nelson’s past – offenses that led up to what prosecutors called his most heinous crime – were revealed during a week-long hearing to decide Nelson’s fate following his conviction last week of killing Dobson. On Tuesday, jurors chose the death penalty.

“It is hard for me to fathom that you did what you did for a car and a laptop and a phone,” Dobson’s father-in-law, Phillip Rozeman, said in a statement after the sentencing. “The world is going to miss a leader. It’s sad to know all the people that won’t be helped because Clint is not here.”

Nelson suffocated Dobson, leaving him dead on the floor with a bag over his head and lying near his severely beaten secretary. Nelson had driven away in the secretary’s car, then later sold Dobson’s laptop and bought some items at a mall using the victims’ credit cards.

Jurors had the option of sentencing Nelson to life in prison without parole. For a death sentence, jurors had to unanimously agree that Nelson posed a danger to society, that he intended to kill and that there were no mitigating circumstances to diminish his culpability.

The 25-year-old Nelson showed no reaction as his sentence was read. He was later heard yelling after he was taken to a holding cell, where he broke a sprinkler head, causing flooding in the courtroom shortly after most people had left.

Three days before the murder, Nelson had been released from a court-ordered anger-management program, part of a deal with Dallas County prosecutors after he was arrested for aggravated assault on his girlfriend. He earlier had served time behind bars for a two-year sentence for theft, and spent much of his teen years in juvenile facilities after committing various crimes.

Dobson had taken a considerably different life path. The 28-year-old had done missionary work and had big plans for NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, about 15 miles west of Dallas. The young minister was known by friends and relatives as a generous, helpful person who also had a fun-loving side.

His widow, Laura Dobson, said she will continue to be her husband’s voice and “be a reminder that good will always triumph evil.”

“I refuse to let you get the best of me,” she told Nelson in a victim impact statement after the sentence. “You have wrecked so many lives … that nobody will want to remember you after this.”

Nelson had denied killing the minister, blaming two friends for the crime. He said he stayed outside and only came into the church to steal a laptop. He admitted stepping around Dobson and the secretary on the floor to get the laptop, but said they were still alive when he was there.

Blood from both victims was found on a pair of Nelson’s shoes, and studs from his belt were found at the church, according to testimony. Prosecutor Bob Gill said Nelson’s violence didn’t stop as he awaited his murder trial, and that he fatally strangling an inmate with a blanket. Nelson hasn’t been charged in that death.

“Now you know why the state decided to seek the death penalty,” Gill told jurors. “That’s all that can be done here. It could not be more clear.”

Defense attorneys asked jurors to spare Nelson’s life, saying his mother neglected him, his father abused him and he was prescribed medication for attention deficit disorder. But Nelson never got the help he needed, even after he set his mother’s bed on fire when he was 3, and never learned how to get along with others and not hurt people.

Referring to Nelson’s childhood, defense attorney Bill Ray said the initial decisions “that put him on a track for permanent derailment were beyond his control, and if that’s not a mitigating factor, I don’t know what is.”

FLORIDA – mentally ill death row inmate gets stay of execution – FERGUSON

october 21,2012 http://www.globalpost.com

John Errol Ferguson will add another week to the 34 years he has been on death row in Florida. The convicted mass killer was granted a stay of execution by a federal judge on Saturday. 

Defense attorneys have argued for decades that Ferguson is mentally ill and that putting him to death would be “cruel and unusual punishment”.

He execution was originally scheduled for Tuesday

“The issues raised merit full, reflective consideration,” the court said when US. District Judge Daniel T. K. Hurley granted the motion for a stay.

Ferguson’s attorneys told AP that the court will hear three hours of arguments on his habeas corpus petition on Friday. His lawyers are arguing that Ferguson is unfairly on death row because the court used an old and outdated definition of competency.

They contend that Ferguson is insane and that a 2007 US Supreme Court ruling prohibits the state from executing him, reports AP. 

“In order for the state to execute him, Mr. Ferguson must have a rational understanding of the reason for, and effect of, his execution,” Chris Handman, an attorney for Ferguson, told AP in an emailed statement.

“A man who thinks he is the immortal Prince of God and who believes he is incarcerated because of a Communist plot quite clearly has no rational understanding of the effect of his looming execution and the reason for it.”

Ferguson was convicted of the July 1977 murders of six people during a home-invasion robbery, reports the Miami Herald.  He was convicted separately of posing as a police officer and murdering two teenagers in January 1978.

Ferguson has had a long history with mental illness and crime. In 1971, he was declared psychotic and incompetent by a court-appointed doctor years before his first murder, reports the Tampa Bay Tribune.

“He is completely paranoid. A schizophrenic,” Handman, whose law firm, Hogan Lovells, has represented Ferguson pro bono for more than 30 years, told the Miami Herald.

“When you meet him, he is deeply suspicious of your motives. He has a very tenuous grasp on reality.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOUTH DAKOTA – Death penalty called incentive for Robert

 October 20,2012 http://www.argusleader.com

The lawyer for a man executed this week says the death penalty created an incentive for his client to murder corrections officer Ronald “R.J.” Johnson.

Mark Kadi, who represented 50-year-old Eric Robert in the capital case, wrote a letter to the Argus Leader saying his client devised an escape plan that involved murder to ensure a death sentence in the event his escape failed.

“The availability of the death penalty encouraged rather than discouraged Robert to commit this crime,” Kadi wrote. “I know this because Eric told me so.”

After the murder in April 2011, Robert quickly pleaded guilty and insisted the judge issue a death penalty, then strongly objected to a mandatory Supreme Court review, which delayed his execution. He wrote a letter to Attorney General Marty Jackley earlier this month encouraging revisions to state law to guarantee a speedy death for a death row inmate who was not fighting it.

Jackley, who prosecuted the case, rejects the notion that Johnson’s murder was anything but a failed, “poorly executed” escape attempt.

He also said the death penalty will protect corrections officers from an inmate who had promised to kill again.

Robert was executed by lethal injection Monday.

Kadi: Failed overdose before escape try

Kadi, who watched the execution, said in his letter that Robert felt “hopeless” behind bars, and that the inmate had attempted suicide by drug overdose before the escape attempt with fellow inmate Rodney Berget.

Robert was serving an 80-year sentence for kidnapping and failed to secure a sentence reduction.

“Robert viewed a life sentence as being identical to a death sentence with the exception that the latter had a set date. Robert believed he needed to get out, one way or the other,” Kadi wrote.

Kadi’s letter says Robert had time to read the state’s death penalty statute and understood that killing a law enforcement officer in an act of escape would satisfy several of the aggravating factors that would justify an escape attempt.

Johnson was not afforded the additional protection the Legislature hoped to provide when adding those provisions to its death penalty statutes, Kadi wrote.

 Read the letter From Eric Robert to Attorney General Marty Jackley

Read the letter From Eric Robert’s Attorney, Mark Kadi

These factors, intended to be a shield, now served to target those the law protects in accordance with their important service to the public,” Kadi said. “The Legislature never intended these factors to be used in such a manner.”

Escape was only goal, Jackley says

Jackley rejects the notion that Robert and Berget’s crime was a suicidal act. Both men had escape histories, he said, and he contends escape alone was the goal.

“All the evidence in the case points to this being a poorly planned, poorly executed escape attempt,” Jackley said.

The attorney general also took issue with the notion that the death penalty does not provide a deterrent, particularly in Robert’s case. Robert said he would kill again if he weren’t executed.

“I can’t say if the death penalty will deter others from committing crimes in the future, but it deterred Eric Robert from committing any other crimes,” Jackley said.

Removing danger to prison staff

Future dangerousness framed key portions of Jackley’s argument for a death sentence in both Robert and Berget’s pre-sentence hearings. Berget also was sentenced to death for the crime.

Associate Warden Troy Ponto testified at Berget’s hearing that inmates segregated from the rest of the population can pose dangers during their daily interactions with officers.

Maximum security inmates are guarded by three officers any time their door is open.

“When we bring out inmates out of their cell, whether it be for a walk-through for medical, inmates have attempted to head-butt staff, punching them, kicking them,” Ponto said.

“We have good policies in place, but there is a risk when we take some of these guys out.”

Certain situations present further potential for violence. An inmate on a hunger strike would require additional interaction with medical staff, for example.

Robert and Berget both went on a hunger strike at the Minnehaha County Jail in the months after the murder of Johnson.

Ponto also said inmates are evaluated every 90 days to determine whether they should stay in segregation.

Johnson’s murder prompted a tightening of security measures at the prison. Lynette Johnson, Ron Johnson’s widow, said after Robert’s execution Monday night that “more needs to be done” to protect the officers at the penitentiary.

Speedy executions such as Robert’s rare

Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the idea of an inmate committing a crime to earn a death sentence is highly unusual but not unheard of.

“Some believe that (serial killer) Ted Bundy deliberately went to Florida and committed murders because that was the state that was most likely to execute him,” Dieter said. “He was offered a plea bargain sparing his life, but he turned it down.”

Gary Gilmore, the first person executed following the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, volunteered for execution and was hanged three months from his sentence.

Robert’s explicit statement about his wish to die makes the case stand out, Dieter said.

The speed of Robert’s execution stands out as well. Of the 32 executions in the U.S. this year, Robert’s is the only one that happened within a year of the sentence. The next-shortest delay was six years.

The average wait time so far is 17 years.

Robert’s body was claimed by his family, Department of Corrections spokesman Michael Winder said.