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TEXAS : Why Not Test The DNA?

May 1 Source : http://tal9000.tumblr.com

People always hold out DNA evidence as the magic bullet that will solve our criminal justice woes; though it’s not actually available in most cases, we can — when we do have it — scientifically determine the guilty from the innocent.

But not if we don’t test it.

Tomorrow, the State of Texas plans to execute Anthony Bartee for the 1996 murder of his friend David Cook in San Antonio.  Bartee has consistently maintained that although he was present at the house, he did not kill Cook.

Bartee was originally scheduled to be executed on February 28, 2012, even though DNA evidence collected at the crime scene had not been tested as ordered on at least two occasions by District Judge Mary Román. He received a reprieve on February 23, 2012 when Judge Román withdrew the execution warrant so that additional DNA testing could be conducted on strands of hair found in the hands of the victim, David Cook.  She also ordered the forensic lab to provide a detailed and comprehensive report to the court with an analysis of the results. Yet, before the testing occurred, Judge Román inexplicably set another execution date, for May 2, 2012.

According to Bartee’s attorneys, DNA testing was just conducted and indicated that hairs that were tested found in Cook’s hands belonged to Cook.  The jury never heard this evidence – and in fact wasn’t told about the hairs at all – which might have undermined the prosecution’s theory of the case that a violent struggle had ensued between Cook and his killer. Still, Judge Román entered the findings as unfavorable, opining that this evidence would not have made a difference in the outcome of the trial, had it been available to the jury. Under Article 64.05 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Bartee’s attorneys have the right to appeal the unfavorable findings. The fast-approaching execution date significantly impedes this right to due process, however.

In addition, there is still more evidence that has not been tested for DNA, including cigarette butts and at least three drinking glasses found at the crime scene. In 2010, the court ordered that all items that had not been tested be tested, but these items still have not been tested.

If the state is so certain that Bartee is guilty based on circumstantial evidence, what’s the harm in waiting a little while to finish testing all of the available DNA evidence? If the state turns out to be right, Bartee will almost certainly be executed in a couple of months; if the state turns out to be wrong, an innocent man is saved. Given those stakes, and the near-universal abhorrence of executing innocent people, it seems pretty clear what to do.

A petition is here. Please consider signing and passing it along.

DALLAS COUNTY : Exonerates Two More Men, 30 Years After the Crime They Didn’t Commit

April 30 source : http://blogs.dallasobserver.com

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This morning, two men stood in the same courtroom where they were convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to life in prison for a rape and shooting that happened almost 30 years ago. This time, both were smiling, as they were one step closer to exiting the criminal justice hell that consumed the last three decades of their lives.

Raymond Jackson and James Curtis Williams donned suits and were surrounded by friends, family and fellow exonerees, as Judge Susan Hawk, with her declaration of relief from conviction based on actual innocence, granted them entrance into the ever-expanding brotherhood of Dallas County exonerees. This morning’s double exoneration hearing comes just weeks after the exoneration of three men for one crime.

With dozens of men having come before them and about 10 sitting behind them in the audience, it’s clear that systematic flaws that have lead to so many wrongful convictions. Under District Attorney Craig Watkins, Dallas County has been famously proactive in freeing the wrongfully convicted. But what’s less readily apparent is how deep the problem runs.

“I know for a fact” there are other innocent men in prison, Williams said to the crowd gathered after the hearing. “You will not get the proper representation if you are poor,” he added. “A lot of them had to cop out to cases that they knew they was innocent on because they didn’t want to face the jury.”

He and Jackson never backed down. Both had been released on parole in the past two years. “We knew in our heart and we thank God,” Williams said.

Judge Hawk couldn’t find words strong enough for a suitable apology for what the men had faced.

“To say I’m sorry is not enough,” Hawk told the men. “I hope that you have full and happy lives.” The full courtroom cheered after the judge shook their hands. This was Hawk’s fourth exoneration hearing in her nine years on the bench, she said. All four cases were originally heard in the same 291st district courtroom in front of Judge Gerry Meier.

Former public defender Michelle Moore worked with Watkins’ Conviction Integrity Unit from its 2007 creation until last year. When she left her position, Julie Doucet took over. Moore said Jackson’s and Williams’ cases were initially rejected, until the Conviction Integrity Unit revisited them sometime around 2007 during an intense review of hundreds of cases.

“There was a lot of arguing about this one,” Moore says. “Finally, we found some evidence to test.” The biological evidence not only determined the innocence of Jackson and Williams, but it also revealed two men believed to be the actual perpetrators, both in prison for other crimes. Marion Sayles and Frederick Anderson have since been indicted for attempted capital murder.

As has become tradition on exoneration mornings, District Attorney Watkins addressed the courtroom when the hearing was over. “We are doing something wrong with our criminal justice system and we need to fix it,” Watkins said. He addressed the two men, adding, “I am sorry the criminal justice system was not working for you.”

Jackson wasn’t mad, only thankful. “I hold no grudge against the victim. I’m just thankful that they had DNA and they kept ours,” he said.

But accountability in this case, as in many similar cases, is tough to nail down.

“I think the real thing was just getting you convicted, and they didn’t care whether you was innocent or not,” Jackson said. If a jury sees a distraught victim and she identifies the men in court as having done the crime, Williams said, it’s pretty tough to convince a jury otherwise. He added that the jurors in their cases were all white.

“Back then the system was different,” Jackson said. And while the system “back then” put him in prison, he’s sure glad the system now cleared his name. Williams had a different explination: “See, this is a miracle.”

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OKLAHOMA – Green Country Family Waits Decades For Justice

TULSA, Oklahoma  april 24 source : http://www.newson6.com

For the next 20 years, Debbie and her mother drove to the prison twice a year to oppose parole for both men.

Watch the video news: click here 

Clayton’s daughter and her mother

 

 

 

A Green Country family has waited nearly four decades for justice. Michael Selsor was given a death sentence for murdering Clayton Chandler in 1975. Selsor’s execution is next week.

Chandler’s family has been fighting for 37 years for this execution, waiting while Selsor had years of appeals and a second trial. Now that clemency has been denied, they’re finally allowed to tell their story.

On September 15th, 1975, Clayton Chandler was getting ready to close the U-Tote-M convenience store, along with worker Ina Morris, when Michael Selsor and Richard Dodson came in to rob it.

They later told police they agreed ahead of time: leave no witnesses.

“He had a choice,” daughter Debbie Huggins said. “He did not have to kill Dad; he did not have to pull the trigger.”

After getting around $500 from the register, Selsor shot Clayton six times; he died on the floor. Dodson shot Morris in the head, neck and shoulder, but she survived. The two men were later arrested in California.

At the first trial, a jury found Selsor guilty and sentenced him to die. But the next year, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional and seven years after that, Selsor was up for parole.

“We thought our nightmare in hell was losing Dad, little did we know what was in store for us,” Debbie said.

For the next 20 years, Debbie and her mother drove to the prison twice a year to oppose parole for both men.

“Every year you went before the parole board,” Debbie said. “It took you back to the night he died, gut wrenching, the fear, the trauma, the feelings, they all come forward.”

Selsor’s many appeals paid off and he was granted a new trial 20 years after his first, but that jury also found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

More Than 36 years after Clayton Chandler was gunned down, Selsor is scheduled to die.

“No remorse, no I’m sorry, nothing but hate,” Debbie said.

Debbie says she and her mother were not driven to fight all these years out of a sense of revenge, only by the desire to get justice for the man they loved and lost.

“My dad did not have a choice,” Debbie said. “He’s gone. Michael Selsor should pay the same price.”

Both Selsor and Dodson had records when arrested for murdering Clayton. Plus, Selsor told police they’d committed four robberies before the one they weren’t arrested for. In previous robberies, they stabbed the clerk and shot another with a shotgun.

Selsor’s execution is next Tuesday.

CONNECTICUT – Conn. death penalty repeal to stir challenges

april 28 source : http://www.lohud.com

HARTFORD, Conn. (WTW) — The repeal of capital punishment in Connecticut came too late for Richard Roszkowski, whose death penalty trial is set this year for killing three people in Bridgeport.

The case will be closely watched as a possible test of the new law that is supposed to apply only to future crimes.

The repeal measure signed into law Wednesday by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy preserves the death penalty for the 11 inmates on Connecticut’s death row and for pending cases like Roszkowski’s. With challenges expected from defense lawyers in those cases, Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane and Chief Public Defender Susan Storey say state courts likely will decide whether the prospective repeal violates the rights of death row inmates and people with pending capital felony cases.

“There are very strong arguments that certainly will be made that any future executions would be unconstitutional,” Kane said.

A new argument raised by the repeal, legal experts say, is whether it violates the constitutional right to equal protection by differently treating two groups of people — those who committed capital crimes before the repeal and those who committed such crimes afterward.

It’s not clear if Roszkowski’s public defenders will use the repeal law to challenge the state’s attempts to put him on death row. Michael Courtney, supervisor of the public defenders’ capital defense unit, declined to comment on Roszkowski’s case, but said officials in his office will meet soon to discuss the potential effects of the new law.

“Ultimately that issue may well be appropriate to litigate,” Courtney said.

The state has about a dozen pending capital felony cases, although the death penalty is not being sought in all of them. Another case that may challenge the repeal is an appeal by nearly all the state’s death row inmates who allege the death penalty is arbitrary and racially biased. That case is set to go to trial in June.

Roszkowski, 47, a former Trumbull resident, was convicted of capital felony and murder in 2009 and sentenced to lethal injection for gunning down a man, woman and 9-year-old girl on a Bridgeport street on Sept. 7, 2006. But the trial judge later threw out the death sentence because of a mistake in the jury instructions and ordered a new penalty phase, which is set to begin with jury selection in June.

Prosecutors said Roszkowski killed ex-girlfriend Holly Flannery, 39, her daughter Kylie and his former roommate Thomas Gaudet, 38. Witnesses testified at trial that Roszkowski stalked Flannery after she broke off their relationship and falsely believed Gaudet was having an affair with her.

Opinions in the legal community are mixed as to whether the repeal will have any impact on current death row inmates and pending capital felony cases.

In testimony submitted to the legislature’s Judiciary Committee in March, the Quinnipiac University School of Law Civil Justice Clinic said repealing the death penalty for future murders would have no effect on current or past cases. The clinic noted that the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in November, and that New Mexico’s 2009 death penalty repeal for future crimes was upheld last year by that state’s Supreme Court — which is the only court in the country to have directly addressed the issue.

But Storey, the chief public defender, told the Judiciary Committee in March that a prospective repeal was certain to raise legitimate constitutional issues.

“A prospective appeal would be an important advance, but leaving existing death sentences in place would not fully implement the policy goals of repealing the death penalty,” Storey testified.

Opponents of the repeal law have said they’re worried that death row inmates could successfully argue to have their sentences commuted to life in prison. That was an argument of Dr. William Petit, the only survivor of a 2007 home invasion in which two paroled burglars killed his wife and two daughters. The two killers are now on death row.

William Dunlap, a professor at the Quinnipiac University School of Law, said defense lawyers in death penalty cases will certainly raise issues related to the repeal, but he doesn’t believe they will be successful. He said equal protection violations occur when groups of people are treated differently for no good reason, but the change of the state’s capital felony law provides a good reason.

“When the (pre-repeal) crimes were committed, those people knew or certainly had reason to know that Connecticut had the death penalty,” Dunlap said.

Connecticut is the 17th state to repeal capital punishment, and the fifth in five years. In the past five decades, the state has executed only one person, serial killer Michael Ross in 2005, who pushed for his death sentence to be carried out.

DALLAS – 2 men to be exonerated in Dallas sex assault case

april 27 source : http://www.chron.com

Two men convicted of raping a woman outside a Dallas bar almost 30 years ago will be declared innocent after DNA testing implicated two other men in the attack, authorities said Friday.

James Curtis Williams and Raymond Jackson received life sentences for the November 1983 assault but were recently released on parole.

They will be formally declared innocent in Dallas County court Monday morning. The two other men,Frederick Anderson and Marion Doll Sayles, will be charged with attempted capital murder, authorities said.

Dallas County has now exonerated 32 people since 2001, most during the tenure of District Attorney Craig Watkins. Almost all of those exonerations have involved faulty eyewitness identifications.

Authorities say the woman was forced into a vehicle at gunpoint and later sexually assaulted by two men. She was then shot and left for dead in a field.

Williams and Jackson had been implicated in another sexual assault case and were placed in a photo lineup for this one, said Russell Wilson, the prosecutor in charge of Dallas County’s conviction integrity unit. The victim picked them out of the lineup.

The Associated Press does not name victims of sexual assault.

DNA collected from the woman’s clothing and a rape kit exam was preserved and later tested. Tests linked the DNA to Anderson and Sayles.

After they were convicted, Williams and Jackson pleaded guilty in the other sexual assault case and received shorter sentences that have since expired, authorities said. The men didn’t challenge their convictions in that case and will still have to register as sex offenders because of that crime, said Julie Doucet, an attorney in the Dallas County public defender’s office.

“They’re extremely happy to finally be cleared of this crime,” she said.

Williams, now 54, will no longer be on parole after Monday. Jackson, 67, will for a robbery committed in 1970, Doucet said.

The charges to be brought against Anderson, 52, and Sayles, 55, are rare. Despite the high number of exonerations in Dallas County, only three people have been prosecuted in cases where someone was wrongfully convicted, said Jamille Bradfield, a spokeswoman for the Dallas County district attorney.

In this case, prosecutors are charging Anderson and Sayles with attempted capital murder because that crime doesn’t carry a statute of limitations, Wilson said.

Anderson is being held in the Dallas County jail, and a bench warrant has been issued for Sayles, Wilson said. Neither man had an attorney listed in online jail records.

MONTANA – Ronald Smith makes his final bid to escape execution

April 27 source : http://www.ottawacitizen.com

 

Albertan Ronald Smith is the only Canadian on death row in the U.S. He has finally exhausted his legal appeals to avoid execution for the 1982 murders of two men, but is seeking executive clemency. Ronald  Smith  is the only Canadian on death row in U.S

It happened along the highway that cuts through a picturesque mountain pass in northwest Montana, not far from the Canada-U.S. border south of Lethbridge, Alta., in a roadside stand of trees located almost exactly on the Continental Divide.

The place where 24-year-old Albertan Ronald Smith murdered two young Montana men in August 1982 was, looking back over nearly 30 years, a portentous setting: Smith’s cold-blooded killing of Blackfeet Indian cousins Thomas Running Rabbit, 20, and Harvey Mad Man, 23 — whose fatal mistake was kindly offering a lift to the drunk and drugged-up Canadian hitchhiker and his two friends from Red Deer, Alta. — has underscored North America’s deep continental divide over capital punishment, which is still in use throughout much of the United States but was abolished in Canada in 1976.

Now 54, Smith is the only Canadian on death row in the U.S. He has finally exhausted his legal appeals to avoid execution for his horrific crimes, but is seeking executive clemency — and a new sentence of life imprisonment — at a Montana parole board hearing to be held on Wednesday in Deer Lodge, a city in the Rocky Mountain foothills where the state’s maximum-security prison is situated.

The three-member parole panel — which will make its recommendation to Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who ultimately decides Smith’s fate — will hear arguments from state justice officials, members of the victims’ families and others who believe Smith should, as originally sentenced three decades ago, be put to death by lethal injection in the prison’s execution chamber.

“This is the first time that we get to, as a family, sit in the judicial system to face the guy that murdered our boys,” Gabe Grant, uncle to both Running Rabbit and Mad Man, told Postmedia News this week. “We intend to go down there (to Deer Lodge) and be strong. We intend to be adamantly and unitedly joined in denying his clemency.”

The 62-year-old Grant, a housing administrator with the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Mont., said he will speak at the clemency hearing to describe how his nephews’ deaths were “devastating” for members of their large extended family and led to the “early deaths” of his two sisters — the mothers of Mad Man and Running Rabbit.

“It drove them to break down. They were seemingly normal people back then. But when this happened, it completely devastated their lives,” he recalled.

“We used to do all kinds of family things — the sisters and brothers. Our mother was the hub of our family, Cecile, and when this happened, it put a screeching halt to family activities because of the impact of what happened. We eventually recovered to a certain point, but never to the fullest extent of the good times that were enjoyed prior to that.”

Montana state attorneys will lean heavily on the family’s anguish in arguing to parole officials that Smith does not deserve clemency.

The Alberta-born killer “remorselessly took the lives” of two cousins, Montana’s justice department states in its written submission to the clemency panel, obtained this week by Postmedia News.

Running Rabbit and Mad Man “were loved by countless family members and friends,” the document states, noting how the victims’ “loved ones have suffered the pain and agony of their deaths for over a quarter of a century, a pain that never ends. They can never be replaced.”

Smith confessed to the gunshot murders of the two men. And he initially asked for the death penalty before changing his mind and launching what became a decades-long legal struggle to avoid execution for a crime he claimed was carried out in a haze of drug- and alcohol-fuelled “foolishness.”

Smith’s legal team — including Montana-based defence attorney Greg Jackson and Texas human rights lawyer Don Vernay — will argue that the Canadian inmate is a model prisoner and a transformed human being, a man so filled with regret and remorse over his murderous actions 30 years ago that the state should give Smith what he so brutally denied Mad Man and Running Rabbit: a chance to keep living.

“We would never, ever question the horrendous nature of the crime and the horrendous impact it had on the community,” Jackson said Friday. But echoing several points made in the 19-page clemency application he filed on Smith’s behalf in January, Jackson highlighted the “tremendous growth and rehabilitation” and “exemplary behaviour” the Canadian inmate has exhibited during his incarceration, as well as “the remorse and repentance” he has shown.

“He’s a changed man,” the lawyer said.

Others will address the hearing, possibly Smith’s daughter and sister — both of whom recently told Postmedia News that they’ve nurtured close relationships with Smith despite his long incarceration — as well as advocates on both sides of what has become a lively death-penalty debate in Montana and the broader United States.

But conspicuously silent during the proceedings will be the Canadian government, which recently — and only reluctantly — sent a letter to Montana officials seeking clemency for Smith.

The letter, signed by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, stated that while the Canadian government “does not sympathize with violent crime,” it is seeking clemency for Smith “on humanitarian grounds.”

Baird’s letter also noted that the government’s backing of the clemency bid “should not be construed as reflecting a judgment on Mr. Smith’s conduct,” and stipulated that his department was, in fact, “ordered” by the Federal Court of Canada in 2009 “to support Mr. Smith’s case for clemency.”

In effect, the Conservative government has made clear that if its court-forced request to spare Smith’s life is ignored by Montana officials, it won’t be terribly miffed.

“Ultimately, decisions regarding Mr. Smith’s case lie with the relevant U.S. authorities,” a Foreign Affairs spokesperson told Postmedia News earlier this month. “Mr. Smith pleaded guilty and was subsequently convicted of murdering two people. These were admitted crimes.”

Jackson called the Canadian government’s grudging, quasi-backing of Smith “a tremendous disappointment,” adding: “The statement they’ve made (in the letter) is the statement we’re stuck with.”

Opposition critics have condemned the government’s lukewarm efforts in support of Smith’s clemency bid as a “deplorable” indication of the Conservative party’s ambiguous stance on capital punishment and as a “cynical” strategy that could, in fact, “sink” Smith’s petition to avoid execution.

Nevertheless, obtaining even Canada’s nominal endorsement for the clemency initiative was a significant achievement for Smith’s legal team after the Conservative government’s previous decision, in October 2007, to halt diplomatic efforts to prevent Smith’s execution.

That move was prompted by a Postmedia News story that detailed fresh efforts by Canadian diplomats to convince Schweitzer to commute Smith’s sentence and transfer him to a prison in Canada.

At the time, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his government’s decision to abandon Smith was driven by concerns that lobbying for the killer’s life would “send the wrong signal” to Canadians about violent crime.

“We have no desire to open the debate on capital punishment here in Canada — and likewise, we have no desire to participate in the debate on capital punishment in the United States,” Harper stated at the time. “The reality of this particular case is that were we to intervene, it would very quickly become a question of whether we are prepared to repatriate a double-murderer to Canada. In light of this government’s strong initiatives on tackling violent crime, I think that would sent the wrong signal to the Canadian population.”

But the Federal Court ruling in a lawsuit later launched by Smith’s legal team said the government’s withdrawal of support for clemency was “unlawful.” The decision compelled Canadian officials to restart talks with Montana — and eventually forced Baird’s hand in the December letter that officially, if not insistently, asked the state not to put Smith to death.

Grant acknowledged that critics of capital punishment have a point when they say innocent people are sometimes executed in the United States.

“It’s not that in this case,” he said. “Ronald Smith, right from the get-go, said ‘I did it.’ He boasted about it. He jumped up and down and said, ‘Take me — give me the death penalty.’ So it’s not a case of executing somebody innocent.

“He was not remorseful then. I don’t believe he’s ever been.”

Thomas Kemp Execution sparks Debate Over Single-Drug Lethal Injection

april 26, source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com

A Kentucky judge ordered state officials to consider using a single drug to carry out executions instead of a series of three drugs used by many states where the death penalty is legal.

The judge’s ruling on Wednesday was handed down on the same day that a controversy erupted over the execution of a man in Arizona using a single drug.

Thomas Kemp was put to death in Arizona on Wednesday using the single drug pentobarbital. His lawyer Tim Gabrielsen, who witnessed the execution, said after Kemp had been put to death that the inmate began to “shake violently” after the drug was injected.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Gabrielsen said he was concerned that his client might have suffered cruel and unusual pain before he died. A corrections official who also witnessed the execution disputed Gabrielsen’s account.

A handful of the 33 states where capital punishment is legal use a single drug. In addition to Arizona, they are South Dakota, Idaho, Ohio and Washington.

In a ruling issued on Wednesday in Frankfort, Kentucky, Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd gave state officials 90 days to decide whether to adopt rules for carrying out executions with a single drug. Without such action, Shepherd said he would move toward a trial on a lawsuit against the state of Kentucky brought by six inmates on death row.

The judge also gave the state the same period to adopt regulations to guard against executing mentally ill or insane prisoners. The inmates argued that the three-drug execution method violates their Eighth Amendment constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

In the three-drug series, pentobarbital or another sedative is administered to put the inmate to sleep before two other drugs are given to paralyze the person and stop the heart.

Death row inmates in several states have challenged this procedure in courts, arguing that if the sedative is not administered properly, the inmate could be subject to cruel and unusual pain before death when the other drugs are injected.

Inmates have argued it would be more humane to inject a massive dose of the sedative to kill the inmate and eliminate the other drugs.

Judge Shepherd said a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the three-drug method was partly based on the fact that no states were then using a single-drug method and there were no studies that showed it would be an equally effective method.

“Thus, the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the three-drug protocol was contingent on the absence of any proven alternative method of lethal injection,” Shepherd wrote in his ruling.

But the judge said since then, the five states have approved using a single barbiturate-only procedure and that at least 18 people have been executed in that manner.

The Kentucky ruling, along with actions by a handful of states to switch to single-drug executions, is “giving momentum to the argument that this is a more humane, safer protocol,” said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

Dieter said a consensus could be building toward a one-drug method as opposed to the three-drug protocol.

A spokeswoman for Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway said on Thursday he would not comment on the ruling until it is reviewed by state officials including the Department of Corrections. Governor Steve Beshear also noted the ruling was under review but declined further comment.

Kentucky last carried out an execution in 2008. The state has executed only three people since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976.

FLORIDA – Advocates keep swinging for Fla. death row inmate – Tommy Zeigler

april 22 source : http://articles.boston.com

In 35 years on Florida’s death row, Tommy Zeigler’s cries of innocence have swayed a former newspaper editor, the daughter of a police chief who helped put him behind bars and an assortment of others who have come to believe that he didn’t commit one of the state’s most notorious mass slayings of the 1970s.

A reporter wrote a book about him called “Fatal Flaw,’’ and national TV programs — including “Unsolved Mysteries’’ — turned a skeptical eye on the evidence. His many supporters now range from a former sheriff’s deputy who helped investigate the slayings to celebrity civil rights activist Bianca Jagger. A private investigator believes in the 66-year-old Zeigler’s innocence so strongly that she picked up his case last year and has worked on it almost full time for free.

On April 11, Zeigler’s longtime lawyers tried again to get the appeals courts to re-examine his case. A new motion claims evidence turned up recently by the investigator pokes more holes in the case against Zeigler and creates enough new reasonable doubt to tip the scales in favor of a new trial. The document claims prosecutors lied and withheld information from Zeigler’s lawyers — including the existence of a key witness.

Prosecutors then and now have portrayed Zeigler as a calculating monster who slaughtered his wife, her parents and another man in the family furniture store on Christmas Eve 1975 to collect insurance money.

Of Florida’s 399 condemned prisoners, only 11 have been on death row longer than Zeigler. Having already survived two death warrants, he can’t help but wonder how soon his time will come now that the state’s death chamber is humming again. Four men have been executed in the past seven months under Gov. Rick Scott — the latest on April 12. Two of them had been there three decades or more. Zeigler knew them well; they were as close to friends as anyone gets in “P-Dorm’’ at Union Correctional Institution.

“When I left on July 16, 1976, and came to death row, my lawyers told me not to bother to unpack, they’d have me out in six months,’’ Zeigler said in an interview at the prison recently. “It’s been a long six months.’

From the beginning, it wasn’t just his defense team that doubted William Thomas Zeigler Jr. was capable of committing the awful crimes.

At 30 he had more than a million dollars in assets thanks to his family’s furniture store, and was a well-liked and prominent figure in the small town of Winter Garden, just west of Orlando. He and his wife Eunice lived in a nice house not far from the store, doted on their many Persian cats and seemed to get along just fine. He’d never been arrested.

That’s why it is still so hard for many to believe that he was responsible for the bloody, confusing scene at the W.T. Zeigler Furniture store on Dec. 24, 1975. Prosecutors say it happened like this: Zeigler lured Eunice to the store to kill her, and her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards, got in the way. A fruit picker Zeigler knew named Charlie Mays was killed, too. Then Zeigler shot himself in the stomach to make it appear as if they’d been the victims of a robbery. He staged it all so he could collect on a $500,000 life insurance policy he took out on his wife just months before. All the victims were shot.

Neither side disputes that Zeigler, at 9:20 that night, called the house of a municipal judge who was hosting a Christmas party with many prominent people in attendance and reported that he’d been shot at the store.

The story Zeigler told that night is the same story he tells today. He says he went to the store to do some last minute Christmas deliveries. Unbeknownst to him, his wife and in-laws, who had come to look at a recliner that was to be her father’s Christmas present, were already dead in various places in the store when he arrived. After finding the lights shut off at the breaker box, he was hit over the head and beaten by two men. He lost his glasses but managed to find and fire one of the guns he kept in the store. He believes Mays — who had cash from the store stuffed in his pocket — was one of the attackers and was killed in the gunfight. Zeigler says that when he came to after being knocked out, he was the only one left alive in the store. Whoever else attacked him had fled.

Zeigler had a reputation in town for sticking up for minorities and migrants who worked picking fruit in the area. He and others believe he was attacked and then framed in a law-enforcement conspiracy because he was about to uncover corruption involving high-ranking local officials, including a loansharking operation that preyed on the migrant workers.

Zeigler was found guilty on July 2, 1976, amid allegations of juror misconduct. One of the jurors, now dead, said in media interviews after the trial that she believed Zeigler was innocent and that she was harassed and coerced into voting guilty by other jurors who wanted to finish up in time for the nation’s Bicentennial celebration two days later. The jury then voted to recommend a life sentence for Zeigler, but the judge — in an exceedingly rare move in Florida — overruled the panel and sentenced him to death.

full article : click here 

TEXAS – One Slated, One Stayed

april 26 source : http://www.austinchronicle.com

On the eve of the state’s 482nd execution since reinstatement of the death penalty, a federal court on April 24 issued a stay for Beunka Adams, who was slated to be executed tonight. Adams was convicted of the robbery and murder of Kenneth Wayne Vandever in 2002. Adams and co-defendant Richard Cobb were convicted of robbing a Rusk convenience store and then kidnapping Vandever and two female clerks. The pair then reportedly drove the three to a field, sexually assaulted one of the women and shot all three; the women survived, but Vandever did not. Adams has lamented his involvement in the robbery – “Due to financial burdans [sic], confusion, and drug abuse … I ended up getting into something I deeply regret,” he wrote in 2004 – but has also written online that he was not the triggerman. Adams alleges that although Cobb confessed to shooting the trio, that information was suppressed during his trial. Both men were given the death penalty. Cobb is still on death row. A federal judge in Texarkana stayed Adams’ execution reportedly in order to give the court an opportunity to consider whether Adams received ineffective assistance of counsel during the early stages of his appeal.

Also scheduled to die, on May 2, is Anthony Bartee, even though advocates say further DNA testing is needed in his case. Bartee was slated to be executed earlier this year, but he was given a reprieve so that never-before-tested DNA evidence could be analyzed. He was sentenced to die for the 1996 murder in San Antonio of his friend David Cook. According to the state, Bartee shot the 37-year-old in the head and neck and then fled the scene on Cook’s motorcycle. Reportedly Bartee has maintained his innocence; he was with Cook at the time of the crime but was not the doer. His previous date with death was cancelled so that hairs found clutched in Cook’s hand could be tested; now, however, the Texas Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty reports that although that testing is not yet completed, state District Judge Mary Román has issued a new death warrant for next week.

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VIRGINIA – lawyers: Executions are illegal practice of medicine

april 24, source : http://thedailyrecord.com

Virginia executioners who inject condemned inmates with lethal doses of drugs are illegally practicing medicine, pharmacy and anesthesiology without licenses, two Alexandria lawyers claim in a complaint filed Tuesday.

Attorneys Meghan Shapiro and Christopher Leibig asked the Richmond Circuit Court for an injunction halting the allegedly unauthorized practices.

The complaint says corrections officers are not checking to ensure that prisoners are properly anesthetized and unconscious before administering two lethal drugs: one that causes asphyxiation and another that stops the heart “with excruciating pain that has been likened to the feeling of having one’s veins set on fire.”

Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said prison officials had not seen the complaint and would not comment on pending litigation.

“I’m just trying to hold the Department of Corrections accountable,” Shapiro said in a telephone interview. “I don’t believe they should be able to operate outside the law.”

The complaint names the department’s director, its pharmacy supervisor and unnamed execution team leaders as defendants. By law, the executioners’ names are secret. But Shapiro said depositions of unnamed witnesses and other discovery materials in federal lawsuits show that the drugs, available only by prescription, are not being administered by licensed medical professionals.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment, said lethal injection has been challenged around the country on various grounds. California and Maryland have put executions on hold because of lethal injection issues.

However, Dieter said he is aware of no other challenge that has claimed executioners are violating medical licensing laws and regulations.

“In almost all cases, there are lethal injection challenges accompanying appeals as these executions get close,” Dieter said.

No executions are scheduled at this time in Virginia, which has executed more people than any state except Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Dieter said the federal government and all 34 death penalty states use lethal injection, although some have other methods available as backup. In Virginia, condemned inmates are allowed to choose between injection and electrocution. If they decline to choose, they get the injection.

The administration of those intravenous drugs by unlicensed personnel has been problematic, according to the complaint filed by Shapiro and Leibig.

“They have no idea what they’re doing,” Shapiro said in a written statement.

The lawyers claim that along with failing to determine whether a prisoner is unconscious before administering the lethal drugs, Virginia’s executioners have administered recalled drugs, misused a drug for general anesthesia and made mistakes in paperwork documenting the handling and administration of chemicals.

Execution teams also have spent substantial time during training sessions planning barbecues, picnics and other events, the filing says.

Stephen A. Northup, executive director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said Virginians “should be concerned, if not shocked” by the allegations.

No hearing date has been set.

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