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CALIFORNIA : Death sentence upheld for Montebello woman who murdered her husband – Angelina Rodriguez

february 20, 2014(latimes)

Angelina Rodriguez during her 2004 sentencing for murder. Her death sentence was upheld Thursday by the California Supreme CourtSAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court unanimously upheld the death penalty Thursday for a Montebello woman convicted of murdering her husband for life insurance and implicated in the choking death years earlier of her baby daughter.

 

Angelina Rodriguez fatally poisoned her husband, a special education teacher, by serving him drinks laced with oleander and antifreeze in 2000, a few months after persuading him to take out joint life insurance policies, the court said.

It was her second attempt, according to the ruling written by Justice Ming W. Chin.  She had previously tried to kill him by loosening natural gas valves in their garage, the court said.

Rodriguez had married Jose Francisco Rodriguez several months before his death.

During her murder trial, the prosecution also presented evidence implicating her in the 1993 death of her 13-month-old daughter, Alicia. Rodriguez was married to another man at the time.

The baby died after choking on the rubber nipple of a pacifier. Two months earlier, Rodriguez had taken out a $50,000 life insurance policy on the baby—without her then-husband’s knowledge—and made herself the beneficiary, the court said.

Rodriguez and Alicia’s father also sued the manufacturer of the pacifier, which had been recalled based on five consumer complaints that it had broken apart. The company paid a $710,000 settlement.

While behind bars for the murder of her husband, Rodriguez  tried to dissuade a witness from testifying against her, the court said. The jury convicted of her interfering with the witness but failed to reach a verdict on a charge that she tried to have the witness murdered.

In challenging her conviction and sentence, Rodriguez argued, among other things, that the jury should not have been told she killed her daughter.  Rodriguez was not charged or convicted in connection with the death, but law enforcement reexamined it after the poisoning of her husband.

The court said the jury was entitled to hear about the child’s death during the penalty phase of deliberations.

“There was ample evidence that defendant murdered her daughter,” Chin wrote.

Karen Kelly, who is representing Rodriguez on appeal, said she would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision.

California supreme court /opinion : click to read, pdf file

TEXAS – Fast food worker gets death penalty in fatal robbery

february 20, 2014

A Harris County jury on Thursday sentenced a former fast food employee to death in the 2009 robbery and fatal shooting of the restaurant manager.

George Curry, 47, was found guilty earlier this week of shooting Edward Virappen, 19, the manager of a Popeyes Chicken restaurant in the 15100 block of FM 529.

Jurors deliberated about 10 hours before deciding punishment.

Curry is the first person to be sent to death row this year by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors sought the death sentence only once last year.

The Ghost of Herbert Smulls Haunts Missouri’s Death Penalty Plans

february 21, 2014 (theatlantic)

It has been only 21 days since Missouri began to execute convicted murderer Herbert Smulls some 13 minutes before the justices of the United States Supreme Court denied his final request for  stay. And it is fair to say that the past three weeks in the state’s history of capital punishment have been marked by an unusual degree of chaos, especially for those Missouri officials who acted so hastily in the days leading up to Smulls’ death. A state that made the choice to take the offensive on the death penalty now finds itself on the defensive in virtually every way.

Whereas state officials once rushed toward executions—three in the past three months, each of which raised serious constitutional questions—now there is grave doubt about whether an execution scheduled for next Wednesday, or the one after that for that matter, will take place at all. Whereas state officials once boasted that they had a legal right to execute men even while federal judges were contemplating their stay requests now there are humble words of contrition from state lawyers toward an awakened and angry judiciary.

Now we know that the Chief Judge of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, are aware there are problems with how Missouri is executing these men. Now there are fresh new questions about the drug(s) to be used to accomplish this goal. Now there are concerns about the accuracy of the statements made by state officials in defending their extraordinary conduct. Herbert Smulls may be dead and gone but his case and his cause continue to hang over this state like a ghost.

The Supreme Court Wants Answers

Missouri’s problems started almost immediately after Smulls was executed on January 29. On January 30, the Associated Press published a story titled: “Lawyers: Mo. Moving Too Quickly on Executions” in which it was disclosed, for the first time to a national audience, that state officials were executing prisoners before their appeals were exhausted. On February 1, we posted a piece here at The Atlantic titled: “Missouri Executed This Man While His Appeals Was Pending in Court,” in which we published emails from Smulls’ attorneys to Missouri officials showing that the state was aware that Smulls’ appeal was pending at the Supreme Court at the very moment he was being injected with lethal drugs.

Clearly, the justices in Washington were paying close attention to what Missouri had done (killed Smulls) and not done (waited for the justices to tell them they could). On February 3, five days after Smulls’ execution, the Clerk of the Court wrote to Missouri officials directing them to file a second response to a petition for certiorari that had been filed on behalf of Smulls and several other death row inmates (who are still alive). The request demonstrated, at the least, that the Court did not consider Smulls’ final appeal to be frivolous. Here is the link to that letter. Missouri’s response is due March 5. I am curious to know whether state officials reveal any regret for the timing of the Smulls’ execution.

A Roiling Hearing

One week after Missouri received that letter from the Supreme Court, state officials appeared at a legislative hearing to discuss and defend Missouri’s execution protocols. David Hansen, a state assistant attorney general, spoke at length about the Smulls’ execution. There was no stay in effect at the time of the condemned man’s execution, Hansen told lawmakers, and the controversy over premature executions was caused not by overzealous state officials but rather by “death row attorneys” who, he said, “have developed a legitimate and very deliberate strategy to ensure that there is always a stay motion pending during the course of the [death] warrant which is a de facto repeal of the death penalty.”

Here is the link to much of Hansen’s testimony. It was confident. It was defiant. And in several material respects, it was inaccurate. For example, Hansen quoted James Liebman, the distinguished professor at Columbia Law School, for the proposition that what Missouri has been doing is also being done in other states. But Liebman did not say that and was so dismayed by the misuse of his words that he submitted a letter late Tuesday night to Missouri’s lawmakers seeking to clarify the record. Here is the link to Liebman’s letter. And here is the essence of his position on the inappropriateness of Missouri’s current execution protocol:

I pointed out that the Supreme Court has occasionally issued orders in capital cases saying it will no longer entertain papers from a particular capital prisoner, having found that previous papers filed were frivolous. I pointed out that, if Missouri believed that this same point had been reached in Mr. Smulls’ case—a conclusion that Mr. Smulls and his attorneys strongly disputed—it would not be appropriate for one adversary to resolve that matter unilaterally over the objection of the other.

Instead, Mr. Hansen’s office should have formally asked the Supreme Court to deny Mr. Smulls’ pending papers and to refuse to accept further papers from him, thus allowing the state to proceed with an execution without fear that the legal basis for that solemn and irreversible action was in doubt. Only then would the crucial contested matter of law and fact have been resolved, not unilaterally by one party to the dispute, but by the decision of a neutral court of law.

This was not the only problem with Hansen’s testimony. Joseph W. Luby, an attorney for Smulls and other death row inmates in the state, also felt compelled to write a letter to Missouri lawmakers seeking to correct the record that Hansen had created. Not only had Hansen mischaracterized the procedural posture of the three cases in which Missouri had executed inmates before their appeals were exhausted, Luby wrote, but state officials were engaged in a pattern and practice of not even responding to opposing counsel in the final hours and minutes before executions. Here is the link to Luby’s letter. He didn’t say it but I will: This is inappropriate and perhaps unethical conduct by of state lawyers.

Another Federal Judge Calls Out Missouri

Two days after that hearing, on February 12, the Chief Judge of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, William Jay Riley, who repeatedly had voted against Smulls, interrupted oral argument in an unrelated death penalty case to tell a lawyer for the State Attorney’s General office that the federal appeals panel did not in any event appreciate Missouri officials executing men before the courts had concluded their judicial review. Specifically, Chief Judge Riley said:

I might just tell you this. I’ll probably regret saying this later, but I think it was the execution of Nicklasson, but the State of Missouri executed somebody which they probably had the right to do, right in the middle of our petition for rehearing voting. And I just wanted you to take back the word that… some of the members of the Court did not appreciate that. That we were right in the middle of that…

And I think you have probably heard that some people have written on it. But we were moving as fast as we can and, as Chief Judge, I was pushing to get everything done in time. But I think you need to be a little more patient.

The “Nicklasson execution” to which the Chief Judge referred, took place on December 12 and it prompted from 8th U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kermit Bye a remarkable dissent. “I feel obliged to say something,’ Judge Bye wrote at the time, “because I am alarmed that Missouri proceeded with its execution of Allen Nicklasson before this court had even finished voting on Nicklasson’s request for a stay.” He continued:

In my near fourteen years on the bench, this is the first time I can recall this happening. By proceeding with Nicklasson’s execution before our court had completed voting on his petition for rehearing en banc, Missouri violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the long litany of cases warning Missouri to stay executions while federal review of an inmate’s constitutional challenge is still pending.”

Here are the links to Judge Bye’s first and second dissents in these premature execution cases.

The Drug Supplier Bags Out

Seven days after Chief Judge Riley’s admonition, this past Monday, came the next bad thing to happen to Missouri officials in their quest to expedite the implementation of the death penalty in their state.  Under legal pressure from death row inmate Michael Taylor, the compounding pharmacy that was poised to supply the drug (pentobarbital) the state wanted to use to execute him next week backed out of its commitment to provide the drug. The Apothecary Shoppe, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, announced that it would not give the Missouri Department of Corrections the pentobarbital it had compounded and that it had not previously given state officials the drug for Taylor’s execution.

Missouri immediately reacted to this unexpected news by declaring that it would be able to proceed anyway with Taylor’s execution, now scheduled for the 26th, without materially changing its lethal injection protocols. Late Wednesday, state officials informed Taylor’s lawyers that they have obtained pentobarbital from another, unidentified supplier. “There is no reason to believe that the execution will not, like previous Missouri executions using pentobarbital, be rapid and painless,” state attorneys wrote in a motion filed with a federal trial judge in Missouri opposing a stay request by Taylor. Here is the link to Missouri’s filing.

A New Challenge to Missouri’s Lethal Injection Rules

The confusion over precisely how Missouri intends to execute Taylor generated on Tuesday another big headache for state officials– a substantial new request for a stay of execution in Taylor’s case. Here is the link to that motion and here is how defense attorneys summarize their argument:

Missouri has identified no lawful means of executing Taylor next week. Any pentobarbital Missouri previously acquired is now expired. Though Missouri has indicated it has midazolam and hydromorphone, its execution protocol does not permit administration of those drugs; even if it did, Taylor would warrant a stay because those drugs have already inflicted unconstitutional pain and suffering in an execution and the states using them have thus temporarily halted executions.

In any event, switching the protocol or the pentobartibal supplier now – a week before the scheduled execution – would violate Taylor’s right to due process of law.

Taylor’s lawyers made those arguments before they learned that Missouri had reportedly acquired a new supply of pentobarbital. State lawyers would say only in their court filing Wednesday that “Missouri has now arranged with a pharmacy, that is not the pharmacy Taylor threatened and sued, to supply pentobarbital for Taylor’s execution.” In their response Thursday, the link to which may be found here, Taylor’s lawyers wrote this:

Utterly nothing is known about this pharmacy. Has it been cited for
violating federal and state laws more or less often than the previous pharmacy? Does it also send its drugs, to be tested for purity and sterility, to a laboratory that approved a batch of tainted steroids that killed over 60 people? For that matter, does the pharmacy test its drugs at all?

If Missouri has its way, it will not tell Taylor anything more about the drug officials seek to use to execute him next week. It will argue that the conduct of its officials should be presumed to be lawful, and proper, and designed to respect the constitutional rights of the condemned. A few weeks ago, we know, the federal courts were willing to accept these arguments and to allow these dubious executions to proceed. Now I’m not so sure. No matter what the trial judge decides on Taylor’s stay request, this dispute is going first to the 8th Circuit and then to the Supreme Court. Will those appellate judges be motivated to remind Missouri who gets the final say on executions in this nation?

 

Jodi Arias biography

Synopsis

Born in 1980 in Salinas, California, Jodi Arias made headlines when she was charged with murdering her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander, in 2008. Alexander’s body was found in the shower of his Mesa, Arizona, apartment by friends on June 9, 2008, five days after he was brutally murdered—he had been shot in the head and stabbed 27 times, and his throat had been slit from ear to ear. Testimony in Arias’s trial began in January 2013. Four months later, after spending 18 days on the witness stand, Arias was found guilty of first-degree murder.

Meeting Travis Alexander

Convicted killer Jodi Ann Arias was born on July 9, 1980, in Salinas, California. In the summer of 2008, Arias made national headlines when she was charged with murdering her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander, a 30-year-old insurance salesman and Riverside native. Arias and Alexander had met at a conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2006, while he was living in Arizona and she was a resident of Palm Desert, California. By the following year, they were in a commited relationship. After only five months as a couple, however, the two went their separate ways in late June 2007.

Murder Investigation Begins

On June 9, 2008, Travis Alexander’s body was found in a pool of blood in the shower of his Mesa, Arizona, apartment by friends who had become increasingly worried about his whereabouts after not being able to contact him for several days. Almost immediately after entering the residence, the young men began taking in the heinous crime scene. In the bathroom, Alexander’s corpse displayed a number of inflictions: a gunshot wound to the head, 27 stab wounds, and a deeply and widely slit throat. Investigators later determined that the murder had occurred five days before his body was found, on June 4, 2008.

Arias quickly became the focus of the sensational case. She was charged with Alexander’s murder on July 9, 2008, and was arrested soon after. Initially, Arias denied any involvement in his death. Then, after investigators found her DNA mixed with Alexander’s blood at the crime scene, she changed her story: She claimed that she and her ex had been attacked by two masked intruders. After killing Alexander, the criminals decided to let her live, she told police, adding that she chose not to alert police at the time because she feared the intruders might seek revenge. At trial, she would revise her story for the third time.

Trial

Testimony in Arias’s trial began in early January 2013. The following month, the alleged killer took the witness stand, where she would remain for 18 consecutive days. Already infamously known for her different accounts of Alexander’s murder over the past several years, Arias testified that she had killed her ex in an impassioned act of self-defense. She stated that Alexander had frequently abused her, and that she killed him after he came at her in a fit of rage when she dropped his camera. She also claimed to have suffered memory loss as the result of emotional trauma she had experienced during the incident.Lying isn’t typically something I just do,” Arias stated during the trial. “The lies I’ve told in this case can be tied directly back to either protecting Travis’ reputation or my involvement in his death … because I was very ashamed.”

Whether she truly had difficulty remembering details of that day in 2008 or was simply having trouble keeping her story straight—or it was something else altogether—Arias’s testimony was wrought with inconsistency and confusion, piecemealed, and ultimately botched.

Jurors reached a unanimous decision in the case on May 8, 2013: Jodi Arias was found guilty of first-degree murder. Five jurors found her guilty of premeditated murder, zero found her guilty of felony murder, and seven found her guilty of both premeditated and felony murder. The verdict sparked elation among Travis Alexander’s family members as well as the general public. Arias now awaits sentencing, which could mean the death penalty. Should she receive capital punishment for her murder conviction, Arias would become only the third female death-row inmate in Arizona history.

Conviction

Jurors reached a unanimous decision in the case on May 8, 2013: Jodi Arias was found guilty of first-degree murder. Five jurors found her guilty of premeditated murder, zero found her guilty of felony murder, and seven found her guilty of both premeditated and felony murder. The verdict sparked elation among Travis Alexander’s family members as well as the general public. Arias now awaits sentencing, which could mean the death penalty. Should she receive capital punishment for her murder conviction, Arias would become only the third female death-row inmate in Arizona history.

RELATED ARTICLES : click here

Jodi Arias Jail Interview 05-21-13

Jodi Arias FULL INTERVIEW  post-verdict 05-08-13

NORTH CAROLINA -Bernard Lamp receives death penalty for 2008 Iredell murder

february 19, 2014 (iredell)

Two weeks to the day after he was convicted of first-degree murder, Bernard Lamp was sentenced to death Wednesday for killing Bonnie Lou Irvine nearly six years ago.

The same jury that convicted him Feb. 5 deliberated a little more than four hours over two days before recommending the death penalty in Iredell County Superior Court.

Although it is called a recommendation, Judge Ed Wilson is required to accept the jury’s recommendation and, after asking each juror if that was his or her recommendation, he pronounced the sentence on Lamp.

Prior to the sentencing, Wilson asked Lamp if he had anything to say. He made no comment and left the defense table as the jury was exiting the courtroom.

The death sentence will be automatically sent to the N.C. Court of Appeals for review. That is standard in all death sentences.

It is likely to be several years before the death sentence will be carried out. The last execution in North Carolina was in 2006. There are currently more than 150 inmates on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh.

Lamp showed no reaction as Wilson read the jury’s recommendation. One of his attorneys, David Freedman, rested his head on his hand, as he had been doing since the jury knocked on the jury room door and indicated a recommendation had been reached.

Irvine’s sister, Debbie Powers, who was the first witness in the guilt phase and who has been in court for most of the trial, showed no reaction.

Wilson complimented Powers and her two brothers, who also attended much of the trial, for their support.

“You’ve done your sister proud,” he said.

District Attorney Sarah Kirkman and Assistant District Attorney Carrie Nitzu hugged Powers after court was recessed.

Kirkman said she was satisfied with the jury’s decision.

“Ms. Nitzu and I respect the jury’s decision, and our thoughts and prayers are with the victim’s family at this time,” she said. One of Lamp’s two defense attorneys, Vince Rabil, walked over and shook hands with the prosecution.

The sentencing phase brought to an end a case that began in mid-March 2008 when Lamp was arrested driving Irvine’s Volvo near Troutman. Irvine had been reported missing on March 8 but was last seen by her roommate at their Cornelius home on Feb. 28.

That’s the day, according to trial testimony, that she met Lamp in person after contacting him two weeks earlier via a Craigslist ad placed by him.

Her body was found the day after Lamp was arrested. She was buried in the backyard of a home on Weathers Creek Road that belonged to a friend of Lamp’s. She had been beaten and strangled, either one of which could have caused her death, according to expert testimony.

This was the first case in Iredell County in which a jury recommended the death penalty since 2010 when Andrew Ramseur received the death penalty for killing two people at a Statesville convenience store during a robbery in 2007.

Judge orders new sanity evaluation for accused Colorado movie theater shooter

february 20, 2014

(CNN) — A judge has ordered that accused Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes undergo an additional sanity examination, saying there was good cause to believe previous testing was “incomplete and inadequate,” according to a ruling issued Wednesday.

Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos Samour Jr. ordered Holmes to undergo an independent exam by the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo by early March, and the report must be filed by July 14.

Samour further ruled the new examiner may not take into account any mitigating factors that are identified in the state’s death penalty statutes.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Holmes, who is accused of opening fire in a packed movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a July 2012 midnight showing of the latest Batman installment, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Authorities have said Holmes was dressed head to toe in protective gear.

Holmes allegedly threw tear-gas canisters in the theater and then opened fire on the patrons, according to witnesses. Police say he used several weapons, including an AR-15 rifle, before fleeing the theater.

Outside the theater, the shooter was apprehended, identifying himself to police as “The Joker,” one of Batman’s archenemies.

Holmes faces 166 charges in the rampage that left 12 people dead and dozens more wounded.

Holmes was a neuroscience doctoral student at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus until the month before the attack; prosecutors have argued that he began plotting his attack while still enrolled.

The defense, meanwhile, appears to be focused not so much on what Holmes allegedly did that night but his mental state then and earlier.

A psychiatrist who treated him had warned campus police at the University of Colorado how dangerous he was, prompting them to deactivate his college ID to prevent him from passing through any locked doors, according to court documents.

(Source: CNN)

CALIFORNIA – Fresno serial killer dies as Sacramento inmate – WILBUR JENNINGS

February 12. 2014

An inmate of the Sacramento County Main Jail who died at a hospital Tuesday morning has been identified as a serial killer, officials said.

Wilbur Jennings was 73 years old. His death doesn’t appear suspicious in nature, according to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.

Jennings was convicted and sentenced to death in the 1980s for a long list of crimes, including rape, robbery and murder.

His four female victims were from the Fresno area. Jennings spent much of his time at San Quentin State Prison on death row.

He appealed the death penalty in 1991.

In 2005, Jennings was transferred to Sacramento County to stand trial on the 1981 rape and murder of Debra Chandler.

At the time of his death, the case still had not had a preliminary hearing, the Sacramento district attorney indicated, because it involved evidence from the Fresno case that was tied up on appeals in the federal court.

Then in 2008, DNA evidence tied Jennings to yet another rape and murder of a fifth Fresno woman killed in 1983.

Despite the death penalty and the new pending murder cases against Jennings, it was his terminal illness that killed him.

The Sheriff’s Department will conduct a thorough inmate-death investigation in accordance with the department procedures and state laws.

Jennings has a long medical history. He died about 10:30 a.m. Monday.

Woman’s Serial Killer Claims Can’t Be Verified: Investigators – MIRANDA BARBOUR 19 -YEAR- OLD

Authorities have expressed doubt and skepticism over the claims of a teenager who told the Daily Item, a small newspaper in Sunbury, Pa., that she had been killing people since she was 13 as part of a satanic cult.

“As of this date, there has been no verification of any of the information that has been the subject of media coverage regarding prior acts of the defendant, Miranda Barbour,” Anthony Rosini, the district attorney of Northumberland County, said in a statement today to ABCNews.com.

Any information about alleged crimes “committed in other jurisdictions has been or will be forwarded to the appropriate law enforcement agencies and the FBI for investigation,” he said.

In a jailhouse interview with a reporter from the Daily Item, Barbour, 19, said that she went on a cross-country satanic killing spree that claimed at least 22 victims, according to the newspaper.

The claim, if true, would make her a rare female serial killer.

Barbour is charged along with her husband of three weeks of murdering Troy LaFerrara, a Pennsylvania man she met on Craigslist. She claimed that she had solicited LaFerrara for sex on Craigslist in November. Authorities said Barbour and husband Elytte Barbour stabbed LaFerrara to death while in her car.

The suspect told the newspaper she had killed what she calls “bad people” from Alaska to North Carolina. Police in Alaska, California, North Carolina and Texas have been called to check out Barbour’s story, authorities said. The FBI said it “will offer any assistance requested in the case.”

Noelle Talley, spokeswoman for the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation, told ABCNews.com that authorities were in touch with their counterparts in Pennsylvania and will “remain in contact with them to determine if there is any credible information related to any unsolved homicide in North Carolina.”

Bill James, a baseball writer and statistician who analyzed prolific murderers in the book, “Popular Crime,” told ABCNews.com that authorities have every reason to be skeptical of Barbour’s claims.

“I don’t think there has ever been a 19-year-old that killed 22 people. I don’t think that has ever happened in the country,” he said.

Still, James said authorities are right to follow up on Barbour’s claims to the newspaper.

“You have to assume you could be dealing with a killer until proven otherwise,” he said. “A lot of times you never know the truth.”

Despite her confession to the newspaper, a lawyer for Barbour entered a not-guilty plea at her arraignment.

ABCNews.com was not able to immediately reach Barbour’s family members or her public defender.

february 15, 2014

Nineteen-year-old satanist Miranda Barbour admits to killing Troy LaFerrara of Port Trevorton. In a prison interview Friday night, she said that she considered sparing his life until he said the wrong thing. She also said LaFerrara was one of dozens of such victims she killed in the past six years.

Barbour, with her husband, Elytte Barbour, 22, of Selinsgrove, has been charged by Sunbury police in the Nov. 11 fatal knifing of LaFerrara. She requested an interview that was recorded by the Northumberland County Prison on Friday night.

While she offered scant details of her participation in slayings in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California, city police confirmed Saturday they had been working, prior to her revelations Friday night, with investigators from other states and the FBI about Miranda Barbour’s possible connection to other killings. The majority of her murders, she said, took place in Alaska.

City police on Saturday would not comment on the status of those investigations.

At 22 victims, “I stopped counting”

Asked Friday night how many people she had killed, Miranda Barbour said through a jailhouse phone: “When I hit 22, I stopped counting.”

She wants to plead guilty to LaFerrara’s murder, and said she is ready to speak with police about her other victims.

“I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them,” she said.

LaFerrara, Miranda Barbour said, was Elytte’s first victim.

The 42-year-old Port Trevorton resident was killed on the Barbours’ three-week wedding anniversary.

“I remember everything,” Miranda Barbour said. “It is like watching a movie.”

She said she agreed to sex for $100 with LaFerrara, whom she met through a Craigslist ad. The two met in the parking lot of the Susquehanna Valley Mall in Hummels Wharf, and drove nearly six miles to Sunbury.

At one point, she planned to let LaFerrara out of her Honda CRV.

“He said the wrong things,” she said. “And then things got out of control. I can tell you he was not supposed to be stabbed. My husband was just supposed to strangle him.”

Time to “get it out”

According to court documents, Miranda Barbour knifed LaFerrara 20 times as Elytte Barbour sprang from the floor of the back seat to strap a cord around LaFerrara’s neck.

As she said upon her arrest, Miranda Barbour on Friday night repeated that LaFerrara tried to grope her, but she said it was his words that set her off.

“I lied to him and told him I just turned 16,” she said.

“He told me that it was OK. If he would have said no, that he wasn’t going to go through with the  arrangement, I would have let him go.”

Miranda Barbour said she doesn’t care whether people believe her, that she wanted to tell her story to The Daily Item because she wanted to come clean and stop living a lie. She said she felt no remorse for her victims and said she killed only “bad people,” a belief she traced through a troubled childhood.

She said she was sexually molested at age 4 and was introduced to murder at 13, literally in the hands of a man who led her to satanism — beliefs that she said she held at the time of the LaFerrara homicide.

“I feel it is time to get all of this out,” she said. “I don’t care if people believe me. I just want to get it out.”

Suspect: I joined satanic cult

Miranda said when she was 4, she was sexually molested by a relative.

Elizabeth Dean, Miranda’s mother, confirmed Saturday that her sister’s husband was later arrested and charged with sexual abuse of a minor and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

“It was bad,” Dean said. “I never let (her) stay anywhere except for my sister’s house, and I was devastated when I found out.”

Nine years later, Miranda joined a satanic cult in Alaska. Soon after, Miranda said, she had her first experience in murder.

Barbour said she went with the leader of the satanic cult to meet a man who owed the cult leader money.

“It was in an alley and he (the cult leader) shot him,” she said, declining to identify the cult leader.

“Then he said to me that it was my turn to shoot him. I hate guns. I don’t use guns. I couldn’t do it, so he came behind me and he took his hands and put them on top of mine and we pulled the trigger. And then from there I just continued to kill.”

While in the satanic cult, Miranda became pregnant. The cult did not want her to have the baby, so, she said, members tied her to a bed, gave her drugs and she had an “in-house abortion.”

However, her mother on Saturday said that when Miranda told her about the abortion, she took her daughter to a doctor who said there were no signs of an ended pregnancy.

Miranda said she spent the next three years in Alaska, continuing in the satanic cult and participating in several murders.

“I wasn’t always there (mentally),” she said, adding that she had begun to use drugs. “I knew something was bad inside me and the satanic beliefs brought it out. I embraced it.”

During those three years, Miranda said she became pregnant again.

“And I moved to North Carolina,” she said. “I wanted to start over and forget everything I did.”

She left Alaska as a high-ranking official in the satanic world, leaving the father of her second pregnancy, a man named Forest, the No. 2 leader in their cult, who was murdered.

Ready to talk to police

Although Miranda would not say who else may have been involved in the alleged murders, she said all police have to do is talk to her because she is ready to speak.

“I would lure these people in,” she said. “I studied them. I learned them and even became their friend. I did this to people who did bad things and didn’t deserve to be here anymore.”

Sunbury police Chief Steve Mazzeo said authorities are aware of Miranda’s claims of murders, are taking them very seriously, and are also aware of Friday night’s interview. Prison officials have been cooperating with his department, Mazzeo said.

“We are reviewing the recording of The Daily Item interview and I will not confirm or deny anything at this point,” he said.

“I will however say that through investigations by lead officer Travis Bremigen he has been in contact with several other states and is working with law enforcement from various cities and towns.

“From information we gathered and from information gathered from her interview we are seriously concerned and have been in contact with the proper authorities.”

During the interview, Miranda was asked that, given her small stature, how people would believe she would be capable of murder.

“Looks,” she said, “can be deceiving.”

Asked why she pleaded not guilty to the LaFerrara murder, she simply said: “I didn’t want to.”

“When I was at my arraignment and the judge asked me how do I plead, I was ready to say guilty and my attorney (chief public defender Ed Greco) grabbed the microphone and said not guilty.”

Miranda Barbour said she has not spoken with her husband since the day she was arrested, but saw The Daily Item photo of Elytte Barbour’s new teardrop tattoo that he displayed at his most recent court appearance.

Husband “proud of what he did”

Elytte Barbour is being held in Columbia County Jail.

“He is proud of what he did,” she said. “I will always love him.”

Miranda said she has no regrets for any of her alleged crimes.

“I have none,” she said.

“I know I will never see my husband again and I have accepted that. I know I wanted to talk about all this because I know I had a 20-year window where I would possibly get out of jail and I don’t want that to happen. If I were to be released, I would do this again.

“By no means is this a way to glorify it or get attention. I’m telling you because it is time for me to be honest and I feel I need to be honest.”

Louisiana: To cut heat threat, air-conditioning proposed for Angola’s death row

february 18,2014

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The state corrections department said Monday the only way it can lower heat levels on Louisiana’s death row to a federal judge’s requirements is by installing air conditioning.

U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson ruled in December that death row gets so hot it violates U.S. constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

He demanded a plan that will cool the cells at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola so the heat index never goes above 88 degrees, a plan that state prison officials filed Monday with the court.

Windows and fans are currently the primary sources of ventilation on death row, which was built in 2006.

The heat remediation proposal submitted by the Department of Corrections and the Angola prison would involve buying air conditioning units and a climate monitoring system for the cells.

“The heat and humidity sensors will transmit their readings to the building’s existing Johnson Control energy management system every 15 minutes. The system is capable of producing graphs showing temperature/humidity conditions over any time period,” James Hilburn, a lawyer for the state, wrote in a document filed with the plan.

The 22-page plan, devised by an outside engineering consultant, didn’t include a price tag. Estimates during the trial ranged from $550,000 to as much as $2 million to install air conditioning on the death row tiers.

Jackson said he wouldn’t consider cost as a factor in his review of the plan.

Lawyers for condemned killers Elzie Ball, Nathaniel Code and James Magee argued the heat could worsen the men’s health conditions, which include high blood pressure and other ailments.

Prison officials said the conditions might be uncomfortable during the hottest summer months, but they are safe. They said the inmates have access to medical care and none of the three plaintiffs have ever been diagnosed with adverse heat reactions.

In his December ruling, Jackson said the heat data collected by a court-ordered contractor in July and August showed that inmates housed in the death row cell tiers are subjected to temperatures and heat indices that are in the National Weather Service’s `caution,’ `extreme caution,’ and `danger’ zones. He said state prison officials must change those conditions.

The corrections department is appealing Jackson’s ruling, but wasn’t able to postpone filing the cooling plan. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals refused last week to order a stay in the case, saying it was premature.

But the appeals court cautioned Jackson about requiring the Angola penitentiary to make the changes it will propose in its plan while the appeal was pending.

Jackson traveled to Angola, 60 miles north of Baton Rouge, to check out the cell blocks for himself before issuing his ruling.

The federal judge also is considering ordering sanctions against attorneys for the state, questioning whether they “conducted themselves with honesty and candor” during the court proceedings and trial last year. A hearing on that issue is set for March 12.
(Source: AP)

Europe’s moral stand has U.S. states running out of execution drugs, complicating capital punishment

February 19, 2014

BRUSSELS (AP) — There’s one big reason the United States has a dearth of execution drugs so acute that some states are considering solutions such as firing squads and gas chambers: Europe won’t allow the drugs to be exported because of its fierce hostility to capital punishment.

The phenomenon started nine years ago when the EU banned the export of products used for execution, citing its goal to be the “leading institutional actor and largest donor to the fight against the death penalty.” But beefed up European rules mean the results are being most strongly felt in the United States now, with shortages becoming chronic and gruesome executions making headlines.

In Ohio last month, Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die after a previously untested mix of chemicals began flowing into his body, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney. On Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson’s last words were: “I feel my whole body burning.”

The dilemma again grabbed national attention this week when an Oklahoma pharmacy agreed Monday to refrain from supplying an execution drug to the Missouri Department of Corrections for an upcoming lethal injection. Death row inmate Michael Taylor’s had argued in a lawsuit that recent executions involving the drug pentobarbital would likely cause “inhumane pain” — and, ahead of a hearing set for Tuesday, The Apothecary Shoppe said it would not provide the drug.

EU nations are notorious for disagreeing on just about everything when it comes to common policy, but they all strongly — and proudly — agree on one thing: abolishing capital punishment.

Europe saw totalitarian regimes abuse the death penalty as recently as the 20th century, and public opinion across the bloc is therefore staunchly opposed to it.The EU’s uncompromising stance has set off a cat-and-mouse game, with U.S. corrections departments devising new ways to carry out lethal injections only to hit updated export restrictions within months.

“Our political task is to push for an abolition of the death penalty, not facilitate its procedure,” said Barba Lochbihler, chairwoman of the European Parliament’s subcommittee on human rights.

Europe’s tough stance has caused U.S. states to start experimenting with new drug mixtures, even though convicts’ lawyers and activists argue they increase the risk of painful prolonged death and may violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In an upcoming execution in Louisiana, the state is set to follow Ohio’s example in using the untested drug cocktail used in McGuire’s execution. It changed its execution protocol last week to use Ohio’s two-drug combination because it could no longer procure pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.

The execution was scheduled for February, but was stayed pending a federal judge’s examination in April regarding whether the state can proceed with the plan to execute Christopher Sepulvado, convicted in the 1992 killing of his 6-year-old stepson.

In 2010, Louisiana switched from the established three-drug protocol to a one-drug pentobarbital lethal injection, but eventually that drug also became unavailable because of European pressure.“The lethal injection that they are using now in certain states has never been tested, verified, let alone been approved for executions,” said Maya Foa of Reprieve, a London-based charity fighting the death penalty. “This amounts to using humans as guinea pigs. No doctor would ever do that.”

Ohio prosecutors counter that condemned inmates are not entitled to a pain-free execution under the Constitution.

Even if the effect of the two drugs used by Ohio “presents some inherent risk of discomfort, that does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment,” Christopher Conomy, an assistant Ohio attorney general, argued in court documents last month.

The U.S. execution dilemma goes back to 2005, when the EU restricted exports of goods “for the purpose of capital punishment or for the purpose of torture.” That ban includes items such as electric chairs and lethal injection systems.

The drug shortage then started biting in 2010 when Hospira Inc., the sole U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, a sedative that is part of the normal three-drug mixture, stopped production. A few months later, Hospira dropped plans to produce it in Italy because the government there asked for guarantees that it would never be used in executions.

States in 2011 switched to pentobarbital, but Denmark-based Lundbeck Inc., the drug’s only U.S.-licensed maker, faced a public backlash and quickly said it would put the medication off-limits for capital punishment through a tightly controlled distribution system.Fearing for their reputation, the companies never wanted to see their drugs used in executions.

As U.S. authorities started looking for other sources, Britain went ahead and restricted exports of sodium thiopental and other drugs at the end of 2010.

“This move underlines this government’s … moral opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances,” Business Secretary Vince Cable said then.

Germany’s government also urged pharmaceutical companies to stop exports, and the country’s three firms selling sodium thiopental promised not to sell to U.S. prison authorities.

The EU then updated its export regulation in late 2011 to ban the sale of eight drugs — including pentobarbital and sodium thiopental — if the purpose is to use them in lethal injections.

That produced a flurry of action in the United States. In May 2012 Missouri announced it would switch to using the anesthetic propofol, infamous for its role in Michael Jackson’s overdose death. But propofol, too, was manufactured in Europe, by Germany’s Fresenius Kabi.Missouri’s plan prompted an outcry across Europe and the EU threatened to restrict propofol exports. That in turn provoked a medical outcry in the U.S. because propofol is used in about 95 percent of surgical procedures requiring an anesthetic, according to the American Society of Anesthesiologists.

Pharmaceutical companies around the globe have been loath to see their drugs used in executions because the market is tiny and promises close to no financial gain, while potentially exposing them to costly bad PR.

In the United States, there is a variety of reason no U.S. manufacturer will supply execution drugs, from the desire to avoid lawsuits to the makers’ own opposition to the use of such drugs in capital punishment.

Fresenius Kabi, whose slogan is “caring for life,” swiftly moved to introduce a stringent distribution control to prevent sales to U.S. prisons. Another manufacturer, Germany’s B. Braun, immediately followed suit.

In October 2012 Missouri Governor Jay Nixon expressed indignation, saying state and federal court systems, not European politicians, should decide death penalty policy. Still, a month later he backtracked and halted what was to have been the first U.S. execution using propofol.Missouri and other states have since also resorted to custom-made batches of drugs, while refusing to divulge which pharmacy produced them — as in the case being heard Tuesday.

The secrecy has led to new lawsuits, not least after safety concerns over such drugs arose in 2012 after contaminated injections from a Massachusetts facility caused a meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people and sickened hundreds.

An attorney for McGuire’s family supported the European position.

“I think it’s right for the (pharmaceutical) companies to draw a line when people are using the drugs for the wrong purposes,” said Jon Paul Rion.

In principle, there are a number of painkillers, sedatives and paralyzing agents that can kill if administered in high doses. But switching drugs will invite new lawsuits and could involve drawn-out bureaucratic or legislative delays — in addition to doubts about how quickly and mercifully these drugs can kill.

“Such botched executions go some way to debunking the myth that lethal injection is a humane way to kill someone,” said Reprieve’s Foa.

When Europeans criticize the U.S., they frequently cite the inequality of health care and the continued use of capital punishment.

Europe has seen autocratic or totalitarian regimes corrupting justice throughout the 20th century with people being executed for political reasons or without fair trial, resulting in strong opposition to the death penalty after World War II. Western Germany forbade capital punishment after the war, just as Italy did. France, which gave the world the word guillotine, decapitated only a few people after WW II amid increasing public opposition.

“There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed,” French Literature Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus wrote in 1957 in an influential essay.

France’s last execution now dates back almost 40 years. In Eastern Europe, the death penalty was abolished after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An international AP poll in 2007 found that about 70 percent of those surveyed in the U.S. favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. In Germany, Italy and Spain only about 30 percent did so.

Overall, experts say Europe’s judicial system is more oriented toward rehabilitation, not punishment. That is also reflected in drastically lower incarceration rates: Across the EU, about 130 people per 100,000 inhabitants are behind bars compared to 920 in the U.S, according to EU and U.S. Justice Department figures.

The death penalty has been abolished or suspended in all developed economies, except for the U.S. and Japan. Execution rankings have routinely shown the U.S. in the unusual company of China, Iran, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.Vietnam has faced a similar dilemma to the United States, finding it difficult to import execution drugs from Europe since it switched from firing squads to lethal injection in 2011 on humanitarian grounds.

The anti-capital punishment camp has also gained ground in the U.S.

The number of U.S. executions has declined in recent years — from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year. Some states have abolished the death penalty, and those that carry on find executions increasingly difficult to conduct because of the drug scarcity and doubts about how well they work.

Public support for capital punishment also appears to be retreating. Last year, 60 percent of Americans polled said they favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, the lowest level measured since 1972, according to Gallup.

To counter the drug shortages lawmakers in some death penalty states — Missouri, Virginia and Wyoming — are now considering bringing back execution methods such as firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

There are still about 3,000 inmates on death row.

AP writers Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.