Alabama

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.

ALABAMA – Court won’t hear Ala. death row appeal – Bobby Baker Jr

October 1, 2012 http://www.wgme.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court won’t hear an appeal from a convicted murderer who kidnapped and fatally shot his estranged wife in 1994.

The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Bobby Baker Jr., who is on death row in Alabama. He was accused of kidnapping and shooting Tracy Baker four times while she sat in the back seat of his car in April 1994.

He has had his death sentence overturned once by the courts before being sentenced to death for a second time. Baker wanted the Supreme Court to rule on whether the aggravating circumstances that were used to decide to seek the death penalty were unconstitutionally vague.

ALABAMA – Trial begins on isolation of HIV-positive inmates

September 26, 2012 http://www.corrections.com

MONTGOMERY, ALA. — Alabama prisons continue to isolate inmates who have tested positive for HIV even though the virus is no longer the death sentence it once was considered, an attorney for HIV-positive prison inmates said Monday.

ACLU attorney Margaret Winter asked U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson Monday to end a longstanding Alabama prisons policy of isolating inmates who have tested positive for HIV.

Thompson is hearing testimony in a trial of a lawsuit brought by HIV-positive inmates challenging the Alabama prisons policy of keeping HIV-positive inmates separate from the remainder of the prison population. Alabama and South Carolina are the only states that continue to do so.

Attorney Bill Lunsford, representing Alabama prisons, said the HIV-positive prisoners are kept together in dormitories at Limestone Correctional Facility in north Alabama and at Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka. But he said the inmates can participate in most of the programs available to other inmates.

Lunsford and Winter made the remarks in opening statements in a trial of a federal lawsuit challenging the Alabama prisons’ HIV policy. The trial is expected to last about a month.

The ACLU claims the policy is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Winter said in her opening statement that the policy keeps HIV-positive inmates from participating in some programs to help in their rehabilitation.

But Lunsford said the only thing the HIV-positive inmates are prohibited from doing is working in the prison kitchen. Winter, however, said the HIV-positive inmates often can’t get the same work-release jobs as other inmates, particularly food service jobs.

The trial’s first witness was Frederick Altice of Yale University, who described himself as an expert in the incarceration of HIV-positive inmates.

He described the prison system’s policy of isolating HIV-positive inmates as a mistake, particularly for inmates who are just learning that they are HIV-positive. He said some people still have the same reaction to HIV they had in past years, when it was considered more deadly.

“They think, ‘Am I never going to be able to see my children?’ or ‘Am I going to die?'” Altice said. “Being alone is not a good place for them to be.”

Lunsford repeatedly questioned Altice’s credentials, particularly when it comes to understanding how the Alabama prison policy works.

The trial continues Tuesday morning.

ALABAMA – Amy Bishop sought the death penalty

September 26, 2012 http://bostonglobe.com

Amy Bishop, a Massachusetts native, is accused of killing her brother in Braintree in 1986.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — A former college professor who killed three people and wounded three others during a faculty meeting wanted to go to death row and had to be convinced by her parents to accept a plea deal that spared her life, her lawyer said Tuesday.

Amy Bishop, 47, did not want to live among other ­inmates because she was terrified of being sexually abused in Alabama’s lone prison for women, defense attorney Roy Miller told the Associated Press.

‘‘She wanted to die,’’ he said. Bishop did not want to ‘‘live in a chicken coop the rest of her life,’’ he said.

A judge sentenced Bishop, a Harvard University-educated biologist, to life without parole Monday after jurors convicted her during an abbreviated ­trial.

She had pleaded guilty earlier this month, but state law ­required a trial because she ­admitted to a capital murder charge.

Authorities have said that Bishop opened fire during a University of Alabama biology department meeting Feb. 12, 2010, in Huntsville, ­because she had been denied tenure.

Bishop, who has been held without bond in the Madison County jail since the shootings, could be transferred to Julia Tutwiler, the women’s prison, at any time.

Bishop met at the jail Tuesday with a defense attorney representing her on a murder charge in her native Massachusetts, where she is accused of killing her brother with a shotgun blast in their home in Braintree in 1986.

Authorities initially ruled the shooting accidental, based partly on claims by Bishop’s mother, who said her daughter did not mean to kill Seth ­Bishop, 18 at the time.

Authorities in Massachusetts said they would make a decision later this week on whether to pursue the case.

District Attorney Rob Broussard of Madison County said a prosecutor from Massachusetts phoned him last week to ask about Bishop’s plea.

‘‘He wanted verification from me on the guilty plea and that life without [parole] really means life,’’ Broussard said. ‘‘It does.’’

A spokesman for Norfolk District Attorney Michael ­Morrissey in Massachusetts ­declined to comment.

Miller said Bishop would probably never face trial in Massachusetts because ­Alabama is unlikely to send her there.

‘‘Based on my experience, I don’t foresee her ever going up there to face that,’’ he said. ‘‘Practically speaking, it would be a disaster if she escaped or something happened.’’

Bishop accepted a plea deal in Alabama only after talking with her mother and father, Miller said. ‘‘She was never ­inclined to plead guilty to life without parole,’’ he said.

Bishop attempted suicide once in the county lockup by cutting her wrists, authorities said.

The Justice Department is reviewing allegations of rape, sexual assault, and harassment by male guards at Tutwiler prison after a legal aid group filed a complaint in May.

The Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative said it based the assertions on interviews with more than 50 women at the maximum-security prison, north of Montgomery.

Prison system spokesman Brian Corbett said Bishop would probably spend about a month in a cell by herself ­before moving into the prison’s general population.

‘‘I’m sure that every inmate entering the system has their own set of unique fears,’’ ­Corbett said in an e-mail. ‘‘I cannot address hers on an individual basis.’’

Bishop could have been sentenced to death by lethal injection if she had gone to trial and been convicted of capital murder, but none of the victims were pushing for a death sentence and some actively ­opposed it, Broussard said.

‘‘The settlement was a just outcome,’’ he said.

ALABAMA – Henderson gets death penalty for killing deputy

September 20, 2012 http://www.ledger-enquirer.com

Judge Jacob A. Walker III sentenced Gregory Lance Henderson to death Thursday for the 2009 murder of a Lee County sheriff’s deputy, overriding a jury’s recommendation in a capital case for the second time in as many years.

Henderson, a Bibb City native, was convicted last year of running over and killing Deputy James W. Anderson during an attempted traffic stop. Jurors, in a 9-3 vote, recommended Henderson be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Alabama judges have the final say in capital cases, and Walker had been urged by law enforcement officials to send Henderson to death row. Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones had testified that Henderson deserved the “severest punishment” for his actions, and Attorney General Luther Strange had attended a hearing this summer in which Henderson was expected to be sentenced.

“Nothing can bring James back, but I believe there is a degree of closure provided to his loved ones and the law enforcement community in light of the court’s decision today,” Jones said Thursday. “We should never tolerate the deliberate killing of a law officer while performing their sworn duty. The punishment should fit the crime — this sentence does just that.”

Defense attorney Jeremy W. Armstrong of Phenix City cited a number of mitigating circumstances in Henderson’s background and said Walker had “ignored what the jurors thought was best for their community.”

“We had jurors here who were under enormous pressure by the law enforcement community to impose the death penalty, and they sat through all the testimony and chose that the best form of punishment was life without parole,” Armstrong said. “The death penalty, in my opinion, is for the worst of the worst. In this situation, I just think we had some pretty good mitigating things to support life without parole and not override.”

The sentence came nearly three years to the day after the fatal traffic stop off Lee Road 240. Anderson had been trying to pull Henderson over for a switched tag violation when he began evading him.

The deputy had stepped out of his vehicle and ordered Henderson to stop when he struck him with his Honda Civic. Witnesses said Henderson floored the accelerator, crushing Anderson, who was unable to breathe as he was pinned between the car and the ground.

“It is the state’s position that the only remorse by this defendant was remorse that he was caught and that he failed at his attempt to avoid apprehension on an outstanding warrant for parole violation,” Assistant District Attorney Kisha A. Abercrombie argued in court filings.

Henderson maintained he was high on methamphetamine and marijuana, and that Anderson’s death was an accident. Armstrong pointed to Henderson’s troubled upbringing and his borderline intellectual ability in asking Walker to affirm the jury’s recommendation.

In imposing the death sentence, Walker said Henderson sought to influence a witness from jail, and cited recordings of jailhouse telephone calls Henderson made that, according to prosecutors, pointed to a lack of remorse. Walker is expected to write a more detailed sentencing order explaining the reasons for the override.

Armstrong said he was disappointed in the outcome, but not surprised. Walker overrode a unanimous life without parole recommendation in March 2011 when he sentenced Courtney Lockhart to death for the murder of Auburn University student Lauren Burk.

 

ALABAMA – Prison chaplain questions death penalty value

June 14, 2012 Source : http://www.al.com

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — In 1981, Philip Workman walked into a Wendy’s restaurant in Memphis, brandished a gun, and had the employees hand him the money out of the cash drawer.
Cornered moments later by police officers in a corner of the parking lot, Workman fired the gun. A police officer fell.

In 2007, Workman was executed for that homicide.

Trouble is, says the Rev. Joseph Ingle, who will speak in Huntsville Tuesday, Workman’s gun is not the one that killed that police officer.

The officer, according to forensic evidence analyzed after Workman’s ‘82 trial, was killed by the kind of bullet that is in police pistols, not Workman’s. The officer, in short, appears to have been killed by another officer’s shot.

Ingle’s latest book, “The Inferno: A Southern Morality Tale,” chronicles what happened between that moment in the parking lot and Workman’s execution by lethal injection 26 years later.

“It was pretty much a nightmare,” Ingle said this week from his home office in Nashville. “If you ever think the issue of capital punishment and our criminal justice system aren’t politically fraught, you need to take another look. It is beyond appalling.”

Ingle himself never had taken a look until his senior year in seminary. That’s when, to satisfy a requirement, he began volunteering in a jail in Harlem for 20 hours a week for a year.

“Meeting those men just changed my life,” Ingle said.

It also changed his ministry. Rather than take a United Church of Christcongregation, Ingle chose to become a self-supporting prison chaplain. He volunteers in Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville. From 1974 until 1983, he was the executive director of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, a multi-state organization that sought to abolish the death penalty.

Abolishing the penalty makes sense not only to avoid executing people for crimes they didn’t commit, but also in simple dollars and cents.

“Nationally, there is a move away from capital punishment,” Ingle said, “but you don’t see that in the South. Since 1977, more than 93 percent of the executions in the U.S. have been in the South.”

And patterns for those executions follow disturbingly familiar paths of racial discrimination.

“If you kill a white person, you are 11 times more likely to die for that crime than if you kill a black person,” Ingle said. “And it’s even worse if you’re a black person and you kill a white person. Then you are 22 times more likely to die.”

Ingle said that the current mood in the U.S. of distrusting government should extend to this issue.

“Think about it,” Ingle said. “We don’t trust the state with our taxes, and we’re going to trust the state to say who lives or dies?”

 

ALABAMA – Mental retardation finding may save convicted Jefferson County murderer from death sentence

June 8, 2012 Source : http://blog.al.com

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — A Jefferson County murderer who served more than four years on Death Row then won a new trial and was reconvicted, may avoid a second death sentence after a state expert found he was mentally retarded, a hearing revealed today.

Esaw Jackson, 33, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for a shooting the year earlier in Ensley that killed a woman and a teenager and wounded the mother’s two teen children.

A Jefferson County jury also convicted him of capital murder in 2011, and recommended a sentence of death in a 10-2 vote.

Pre-sentence testing ordered by Circuit Judge Stephen Wallace, the judge in the current trial, determined Jackson had an IQ of 56, well below the normal legal threshold for mental retardation, which is a 70 IQ.

The U.S. Supreme Court has banned executing mentally retarded murderers.

In today’s hearing, prosecutor Mike Anderson asked for more time to obtain and examine Jackson’s school records for evidence of mental retardation, another indicator courts use to determine if the death penalty should be barred.

Wallace set a July 13 hearing, and said he wants to set the final sentencing after Anderson reports back.

If the assessment holds that Jackson is mentally retarded, “the sentence would have to be life without parole,” said one of Jackson’s lawyer, Erskine Mathis.

Judges in capital cases are not bound by the jury’s sentencing recommendation, but in most cases Alabama judges have overridden the jury’s recommendation of life without parole and imposed death instead.

Fewer than 10 percent of the judicial overrides have resulted in the lesser capital sentence, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery.

Jackson was 27 when he fired a rifle at least 15 times into a car stopped at a traffic light on 19th Street and Avenue V. Killed were Pamela Montgomery, 42, and Milton Poole III, 16. Montgomery’s children, Shaniece Montgomery, then 19, and Denaris Montgomery, then 17, were wounded.

The jury in Jackson’s original trial also recommended death in a 10-2 vote, and then-Circuit Judge Gloria Bahakel sentenced him to death. The Alabama Supreme Court overturned his convictionand sentence in 2011, citing improper testimony in the 2007 trial.

Four years after watching his mother and best friend die, Denaris Montgomery committed a murder himself, and now is serving a 21-year prison term.

ALABAMA MAN FREED FROM DEATH ROW AFTER PROVING PROSECUTOR ILLEGALLY BARRED AFRICAN AMERICANS FROM JURY SERVICE

May 29, 2012 Source : http://www.eji.org

On May 18, 2012, Victor Stephens was taken off death row after 25 years and resentenced to life in prison. The result came after the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on October 6, 2011, found that the Hale County prosecutor who tried the case illegally discriminated against African Americans during jury selection.

Victor Stephens is African American. During his capital trial, the prosecution illegally used 21 of its 23 peremptory strikes to remove eligible African Americans from serving on his jury. The defense objected, arguing that the prosecutor’s strikes and the prosecutor’s notes made during trial revealed racially biased jury selection in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

The law requires prosecutors to give reasons for strikes if the judge suspects there is racial discrimination during jury selection. In his notes, the prosecutor wrote “need reason to strike” next to two black jurors but no white jurors, for whom the prosecutor instead wrote actual reasons, such as “hard of hearing.”

The defense argued that the fact that the State “need[ed a] reason to strike” two black jurors, while it did not “need [a] reason to strike” any white jurors, is direct evidence that the State first decided to strike these black jurors and then searched for a pretextual and facially race-neutral reason to give the court.

These notations, together with other evidence in the record, comprise overwhelming evidence proving the State illegally discriminated against African Americans in jury selection, the defense contended.

The federal court agreed, pointing out that the State’s purported reasons for excluding African Americans were not supported by the record and, in some cases, were contradicted by the jurors’ responses during jury selection.

The court further found the fact that the State had a chance to ask jurors about any discrepancies but did not suggests the prosecutor’s explanation was a sham and a pretext for discrimination. “[Unless he had an ulterior reason for keeping [a potential juror] off the jury,” the federal court reasoned, “this court would expect that the prosecutor would have cleared up any misunderstanding by asking further questions.”

In contrast, the prosecutor did ask white potential jurors follow-up questions and did not strike white potential jurors who shared the same “reasons” as black jurors who were struck.

Concluding that the prosecutor illegally excluded black potential jurors based on their race, the federal court vacated Mr. Stephens’s conviction and sentence, granting him a new trial. The State settled the case without a new trial and, on May 18, Mr. Stephens was re-sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

A recent report by EJI found that racially biased use of peremptory strikes and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection remains widespread, particularly in serious criminal cases and capital cases. Hundreds of people of color called for jury service have been illegally excluded from juries after prosecutors asserted pretextual reasons to justify their removal.

ALABAMA – Expense and execution – Death-penalty cost issue resurges as state struggles

May 30, 2012 Source : http://www.timesdaily.com

As many states look for ways to reduce spending, a battle is brewing between supporters and opponents of the death penalty.

Opponents contend states could save millions of dollars by abolishing the death penalty. Proponents argue the death penalty is needed to punish defendants convicted of heinous homicides, even when it means decades of paying attorneys to argue the merits of a death sentence and for housing an inmate, such as former Sheffield resident Tommy Arthur.

Assistant Attorney General Clay Crenshaw, chief of Alabama’s death penalty litigators, said he is unsure how much the state has spent attempting to carry out Arthur’s execution, which was first ordered in 1983.

“It’s been so long, I’m not sure if anyone knows how much the state has spent keeping Tommy Arthur on death row all these years,” Crenshaw said.

Arthur, 70, has been on death row for 29 years for the 1982 murder-for-hire killing of Muscle Shoals resident Troy Wicker. His conviction was overturned twice on technicalities. The state Supreme Court has set an execution date for Arthur five times only to have it halted when defense attorneys raised legal issues, most recently in March when they objected to Alabama’s use of the drug pentobarbital in executions.

Arthur continues to maintain his innocence.

Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said the agency does not keep tabs on the amount of money spent on legal fees for death row inmates, only the cost of housing them, which is now about $43 per day. He said the department does not separate the cost of housing inmates on death row from the expense of keeping them in other areas of a prison.

Alabama has 101 men and four women on death row. The average age of the death row inmates is 41 and they have been there an average of 11 years and 7 months, Corbett said.

Richard Deiter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, said states typically do not keep track of the amount of money spent on a single inmate from the time they are sentenced to death until an execution takes place.

“There’s probably not anyone in Alabama who knows exactly how much money has been spent keeping Mr. Arthur on death row, but there is no doubt it has been very expensive,” Deiter said. “All states need to take a serious look at how much they are spending on death penalty cases and decide if it is money well spent.”

Crime victims groups and death penalty proponents contend the cost of capital punishment is offset by the value it provides in deterring homicides and punishing criminals convicted of the most heinous murders.

Deiter contends the money spent on executions should be used to prevent crime.

“The death penalty is not a deterrent to crime,” Deiter said. “Some of the states with the highest number of executions also have the highest homicide rates. Studies have shown it can cost more than $30 million to carry out an execution. Only one in 10 death penalty cases results in an execution and when you combine the legal fees for the appeals of all of those defendants, it makes that one execution very costly. That money could be better spent on hiring more police officers, installing better lighting in high-crime areas, providing education aimed at preventing crime and doing other things to make sure crimes do not happen.”

Miriam Shehane, executive director of Montgomery-based Victims of Crime and Leniency, disagrees.

“I don’t care how much it costs to execute someone, we need the death penalty,” she said. “The death penalty opponents want to argue that it is cruel and unusual punishment. My daughter was abducted, then raped for hours and shot repeatedly. Was that not cruel and unusual punishment? The punishment needs to fit the crimes and for some murders, the death penalty is the only appropriate punishment.”

Shehane’s daughter Quenette was kidnapped and killed in Birmingham in 1976.

Three men were convicted of her murder. One was executed, another was sentenced to life in prison without parole and the other sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

Lauderdale Circuit Court Judge Mike Jones said he never considers the potential cost of incarceration and future legal expenses when deciding if a defendant convicted of capital murder should be sentenced to death. He said that decision is based on the jury’s recommendation and the circumstances of the homicide.

Economics

When a defendant is convicted of capital murder in Alabama, the jury then hears additional evidence before recommending the death penalty or life in prison without parole as punishment. The judge is not obligated to follow the recommendation when imposing the punishment.

“We don’t need to put someone to death because it’s cheaper than keeping them in prison for the rest of their life,” she said. “At the same time, we shouldn’t not put someone to death because it might be more expensive than keeping them in prison. You don’t make a life or death decision based on economics.”

Jones has imposed the death penalty twice.

He sentenced David Dewayne Riley Jr. to death in 2007 for the 2005 shooting death of Florence package store clerk Scott Michael Kirtley. He sentenced Riley, 27, to death again in 2011 after the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his first conviction on a technicality. The jury at both trials recommended that Riley receive the death sentence for the execution-style shooting.

Jones said the possible cost of sending Riley to death row never crossed his mind before carrying out the recommendation of the juries.

“The Alabama Legislature may someday decide we can no longer afford to send people to death row,” Jones said. “That’s a decision they would have to make and until they do, I am going to continue to carry out the recommendations of juries who say someone deserves the death penalty when the circumstances of a murder warrant sending a defendant to death row.”

Political battle

Shehane said the Legislature will face a tough battle from her organization and other capital punishment proponents if it ever attempts to abolish the death penalty in Alabama as a way to save money.

Deiter said with the cost of defending death sentences in the appeals process and even the expense of purchasing the drugs used in executions increasing, some states might have to replace capital punishment with a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the hope of parole as a way to punish defendants convicted of the most brutal homicides.

“All states with the death penalty (will have) to decide if it is worth the expense when they are having to cut back in so many other areas, including courts and police,” Deiter said.

For Alabama, Shehane said, the money spent sending defendants convicted of capital murder to death row and carrying out their execution is worth the expense.

SENTENCED TO DEATH

Top 10 states for number of inmates on death row as of Jan. 1:

  • California 703
  • Florida 402
  • Texas 312
  • Pennsylvania 211
  • Alabama 202
  • North Carolina 166
  • Ohio 151
  • Arizona 153
  • Georgia 99
  • Louisiana 89

Source: Death Penalty Information Center

RISING COST OF HOUSING PRISONERS

Daily inmate maintenance costs in Alabama

  • 2000 $25.47
  • 2002 $26.07
  • 2004 $27,92
  • 2006 $36.67
  • 2008 $41.47
  • 2010 $42.30

Source: Alabama Department of Corrections

DEATH PENALTY STATES

Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming.
Source: Death Penalty Information Center

NUMBER OF EXECUTIONS BY STATE SINCE 1976

State Total 2011 2012
Texas 482 14 5
Virginia 109 1 0
Oklahoma 99 2 3
Florida 73 2 2
Missouri 68 1 0
Alabama 55 6 0
Georgia 52 4 0
Ohio 47 5 1
North Carolina 43 0 0
South Carolina 43 1 0

Source: Death Penalty Information Center

ALABAMA- Appeals court upholds pair of death sentences

May 26, 2012 Source : http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com

An Alabama appeals court on Friday denied the appeals of two death row inmates, one from Montgomery County and the other from Jefferson County.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the death sentence of 33-year-old Shonelle Andre Jackson in the 1997 slaying of Lefrick Moore during a carjacking in Montgomery.

Jackson was accused of shooting Moore after a traffic accident, and then two other men took Moore’s car.

In his appeal, Jackson claimed misconduct by jurors. The appeal cited one juror whom Jackson’s appeal claimed did not inform the court during jury selection that he owned two guns.

Jackson also cited that another juror did not say during jury selection that she had several friends in the Montgomery Police Department.

Jackson also said in his appeal that the trial judge erred in overturning the jury’s sentencing recommendation that Jackson be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He also claimed that his attorney was ineffective in one phase of his trial.

The appellate court also upheld the death sentence given to 42-year-old Willie B. Smith III. Smith was convicted of the October 1991 slaying of Sharma Ruth Johnson, who was abducted while waiting to use a Birmingham ATM machine. She was later shot execution-style in a cemetery.

The court rejected Smith’s claims on appeal, including that he shouldn’t be executed because he is intellectually disabled and that his lawyers provided ineffective assistance at trial.

Both Smith and Jackson are on their second round of appeals.