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OKLAHOMA – Michael Selsor – Board denies clemency

Source : Oklahoma Attorney general

OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board today voted 4 to1 to deny clemency for Tulsa County death row inmate Michael Bascum Selsor, Attorney General Scott Pruitt said.

Michael Bascum Selsor, 57, is scheduled to be executed May 1, for the first-degree murder of Clayton Chandler, 55, on Sept. 15, 1975. The U.S. Supreme Court denied Selsor’s final appeal on Feb. 21.

According to the autopsy report, Chandler died after suffering six gunshot wounds. The victim was killed during a robbery of a Tulsa convenience store where he worked. 

Selsor and his accomplice Eugene Dodson, 71, robbed the store and shot two employees. Chandler was killed, and the other employee, Ina Morris, 20, survived after being shot multiple times by Dodson.

In 1976, Selsor was tried by a jury and sentenced to death. He also received life imprisonment for shooting with the intent to kill Ina Morris. Later that year, Oklahoma’s death penalty was ruled unconstitutional by the U. S. Supreme Court, and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals adjusted Selsor’s sentence to life imprisonment. In 1996, the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Selsor’s conviction. During a retrial in 1998, Selsor was again convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.

Dodson was acquitted for the murder of Chandler. However, he was convicted of robbery and shooting with intent to kill Morris after a former felony conviction. Dodson was sentenced to 50 years for armed robbery, and 199 years for shooting with intent to kill.

April 16, 2012, source : http://www.postcrescent.com

— An Oklahoma death row inmate’s plea for clemency was rejected Monday by the state Pardon and Parole, which voted 4-1 against commuting the inmate’s death penalty to life in prison without parole.

Michael Bascum Selsor, 56, apologized to family members of 55-year-old Clayton Chandler, the Tulsa convenience store clerk he was twice convicted of killing during a robbery 37 years ago, and reminded board members he had confessed to the crime.

“I didn’t pass the blame, I shared the shame,” he said during a brief appearance before the board via teleconference from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

“Is it too late to say I’m sorry?” Selsor said. “I am truly sorry for the suffering and damage I have caused.”

Selsor said he knows he will die in prison and believes he could be a mentor and friend to young inmates facing lengthy sentences.

“I’ll try to be an example for the young guys,” Selsor said.

But Chandler’s daughters urged the board to not interfere with the death penalty a Tulsa County jury gave Selsor in 1998. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection on May 1.

“I think it’s time to put this to rest,” said Debbie Huggins, who fought back tears as she and her sister, Cathy Durham, remembered their father and asked board members to deny Selsor’s request for clemency.

“When we were growing up, our dad was our best friend,” Huggins said.

“I was his little girl,” Durham said. She said her father’s death had denied him an opportunity to walk her down the aisle at her wedding and get to know his grandchildren.

Huggins said Selsor made a conscious choice when he entered the convenience store where her father worked and repeatedly shot him with a .22-caliber pistol on Sept. 15, 1975. Prosecutors say Chandler suffered eight bullet wounds.

“My daddy had no choice,” Huggins said.

After the women’s presentation, board Vice-Chairperson Marc Dreyer said he was sorry for their loss. Chandler’s widow, Anne Chandler, attended the clemency hearing but did not address the board.

Selsor’s attorney, Robert Nance, invoked Christian religious beliefs and cited biblical scriptures as he urged board members to commute Selsor’s death penalty.

“God can use those who have done evil to accomplish good,” Nance said. “Grace as I understand it is an unmerited gift from God. God does that because he loves us.”

Assistant Attorney General Robert Whittaker reminded board members that while Oklahoma law allows them to extend mercy, it also requires them to uphold lawful convictions and court judgments.

“The Pardon and Parole Board is not church,” Whittaker said.

Selsor was originally sentenced to death following a 1976 trial, but the U.S. Supreme Court later invalidated Oklahoma’s death penalty statute. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals modified Selsor’s sentence to life in prison.

But Selsor initiated a new round of appeals challenging his conviction and in April 1996, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Selsor’s murder conviction as well as two other related convictions.

Selsor was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death a second time following a retrial. The same jury recommended Selsor serve a life term as an accessory to the shooting of Chandler’s co-worker, Ina Louise Morris, who survived multiple wounds inflicted by a co-defendant, Richard Eugene Dodson. In addition, the jury imposed a 20-year term for armed robbery.

Selsor and Dodson were arrested in Santa Barbara, Calif., a week after Chandler’s slaying. At the 1976 trial, a Santa Barbara police detective testified that Selsor admitted shooting Chandler during the robbery.

Dodson, now 71, was convicted of robbery and shooting with intent to kill and is serving a prison sentence of 50 to 199 years in prison.

CLEMENCY SCHEDULE

Meeting Notice Confirmation 

Name: Date: Time: Location: City, State: DOC #
Michael Bascum Selsor 04/16/2012 12:30pm Hillside Community Corrections Center

3300 Martin Luther King Ave.Oklahoma City, OK91854

read the case :  click here 

FLORIDA – Death Row Inmate’s Best Lawyer Was Himself

april 16, 2012 

WASHINGTON — Albert Holland Jr., a death row inmate in Florida, has no legal training and seems to be suffering from a mental illness — “perhaps a disorder involving paranoia or delusional thoughts,” a federal judge wrote recently.

Albert Holland Jr. won a new trial in a capital case.

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But he turns out to be a pretty good lawyer. Two years ago, in allowing Mr. Holland a fresh chance to make his case after his court-appointed lawyer blew a crucial deadline, the Supreme Court praised Mr. Holland’s legal acumen. Indeed, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote, Mr. Holland  had a better understanding of the complicated time limits for challenging death sentences in federal court than his lawyer had.

Mr. Holland made good use of the opportunity the Supreme Court gave him. A couple of weeks ago, he won a decision granting him a new trial. In the process, he opened a window on the astoundingly spotty quality of court-appointed counsel in capital cases.

The lawyer whose work the justices had considered was the least of it; he had merely been unresponsive and incompetent. Mr. Holland’s earlier lawyers had failed him in much more colorful ways.

Consider Kenneth Delegal, who was assigned to defend Mr. Holland at a 1996 retrial on charges that he killed a Pompano Beach police officer in 1990. Mr. Delegal was removed from the case after being sent to a mental health facility. Later, the two men would see each other at the Broward County jail, where Mr. Delegal was held on drug and domestic violence charges.

The next lawyer, James Lewis, was a friend of Mr. Delegal’s and had shared office space with him. When Mr. Delegal went to court after his removal from Mr. Holland’s case, seeking to be paid about $40,000 for his work on it, the new lawyer testified on behalf of the old one, saying the fees had been “reasonable and necessary.”

Mr. Delegal died of a drug overdose about a month after the fee hearing, and a local paper asked his former colleague Mr. Lewis about his troubles. “I heard some rumors,” Mr. Lewis said, “but I chose not to know.”

This series of lawyers, Judge Patricia A. Seitz of Federal District Court in Miami wrote this month, “does assist in understanding why someone, perhaps predisposed to paranoia due to a mental disturbance, may have wanted self-representation over court-appointed counsel.”

In granting Mr. Holland a new trial, Judge Seitz ruled that a state judge had violated Mr. Holland’s rights under the Sixth Amendment by refusing to let him represent himself.

At the 1996 retrial, which, like the first trial, ended in a murder conviction and a death sentence, Mr. Holland asked to represent himself at least 10 times, saying he did not trust Mr. Lewis and could in any event do a better job.

Judge Charles M. Greene of the state circuit court in Fort Lauderdale denied the requests, saying Mr. Holland did not have “any specific legal training.” That is not the constitutional standard; indeed, the Supreme Court has said that “technical legal knowledge” is not required.

The relevant questions, Judge Seitz wrote, were whether Mr. Holland understood that he had a right to a court-appointed lawyer and whether he was mentally competent to decide to waive that right.

When Mr. Holland was allowed to address the court, he seemed to make sense. He said, for instance, that Mr. Lewis “denied me effective assistance of counsel because his loyalty was impaired.”

Mr. Holland also told the court that his legal research indicated that his indictment on a charge of attempted felony murder was flawed because there was no such crime in Florida. (“It is noteworthy,” Judge Seitz wrote, that “this statement had a factual basis.” Indeed, the Florida Supreme Court had said as much in 1995 in an unrelated case.)

At other times, Mr. Holland exhibited a certain flair, though it was perhaps not to everyone’s taste.

“From what I have seen in the evidence,” he told Judge Greene, “Ray Charles could come in here and represent himself, and Stevie Wonder, so I don’t need much legal training to do all that.”

Judge Greene acknowledged that Mr. Holland had “voiced concerns and issues in a most eloquent manner” and had expressed himself in a “very coherent and organized manner.”

When it came time to sentence Mr. Holland to death, Judge Greene said he gave little weight to Mr. Holland’s history of mental illness, though he had twice been found not guilty by reason of insanity for robberies in Washington and had been involuntarily hospitalized in the 1980s for four years.

As proof that Mr. Holland was no longer mentally ill, Judge Greene praised him as an able advocate who had “correctly argued case law and factual issues to the court.” His legal skills, then, were proof that he was fit to be executed — but not good enough that he be allowed to defend himself.

These days, Mr. Holland is represented by Todd G. Scher, a Miami Beach lawyer who won in the Supreme Court and persuaded Judge Seitz to order a new trial. A spokesman for the Florida attorney general’s office said prosecutors would ask Judge Seitz to reconsider her ruling.

Mr. Scher said he did not know who would represent Mr. Holland at a retrial. For now, he said, what was clear was that a federal judge had found “a blatant Sixth Amendment violation.”

“It shows that he was right,” Mr. Scher said of his client. “He had concerns about his prior series of lawyer, and his concerns turned out to be valid.”

US – Estimates of Time Spent in Capital and Non-Capital Murder Cases

A Statistical Analysis of Survey Data from Clark County Defense Attorneys
Terance D. Miethe, PhD.
Department of Criminal Justice
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
February 21, 2012

I. Introduction
A survey was designed to provide average estimates of the time spent at various stages of criminal processing for the defense of capital and non-capital murder cases. Defense attorneys were asked to use their personal experiences over the past three years to estimate the number of hours they spent in pretrial, trial, penalty, and post-conviction activities in a “typical” capital and non-capital murder case. Separate questions were asked about their experiences as “lead attorney” and “second chair” in these typical cases. A total of 22 defense attorneys completed the survey. The largest group of survey respondents were attorneys within the Public Defender’s office (n=10), followed by the Special Public Defender’s office (n=9) and the Office of Assigned Counsel (n=3). To provide some context for the time estimates provided by these defense attorneys, this survey data was also supplemented with general case processing information on a sample of 138 murder cases sentenced in District Court between 2009 and 2011. The Clark County Court’s electronic record system was used to identify these murder cases and to construct summary statistics on case processing (e.g., average time between court filing and sentencing; number of total meetings with parties present, number of orders and motions filed). These court statistics were analyzed separately for each major type of sentence (i.e., yearly maximum sentences, life with possibility of parole, life without possibility of parole, and death sentences). For the survey data included in this report, the median score (i.e., the middle score of a distribution) is used as the average estimate of time spent at each stage of criminal processing. The median is the most appropriate measure for these analyses because (1) it minimizes the impact of extreme ratings and (2) the distribution of time estimates across respondents is not normally distributed. Under these conditions, the median, rather than the mean, is the appropriate summary measure of central tendency.

read the full report : click here

Chicago – Rare legal settlements demand officers pay too

April 15, 2012 source :http://www.chicagotribune.com

To settle a wrongful-conviction lawsuit against the Chicago police, the city recently agreed to pay Harold Hill $1.25 million.

What never became public was that, to reach the settlement late last year, two detectives in the case that sent Hill to prison for 12 years for a rape and murder he insisted he did not commit agreed to contribute, too. It was not much next to the total settlement — $7,500 each — yet it apparently meant something to Hill.

The city of Chicago, like other municipalities, pays judgments and settlements when the conduct of police officers goes wrong. But in rare cases, said attorneys on both sides of the issue, people who were wronged demand money from the officers, too. It is an effort to balance the scales, a way to make the perpetrator of the pain experience something of what the purported victim went through, even if it is a nominal amount.

“It’s an expression of how a plaintiff feels about a case and wanting punishment to flow directly to the police officers,” said attorney Terry Ekl, who has sued police officers but is not involved in this case. “But very rarely does that actually translate into someone going after the police officer’s personal assets.”

That is important to victims, experts said, because in most cases the settlement check is written by a faceless municipality or its insurance company. There is no sense for victims that justice has been achieved; rather, it seems the perpetrators have escaped punishment.

Michael Seng, a professor at The John Marshall Law School, said making the officer pay also serves as a deterrent to other officers.

“It stings. It hurts them. It takes some money out of the bank,” Seng said. “It sets an example for other officers.”

The officers may agree to pay in a settlement because they see going to trial as too much of a risk. If a jury assesses punitive damages above what are called compensatory damages — the damages to compensate plaintiffs for their loss — officers must pay those punitive damages out of their own pocket. And punitive damages can run into millions of dollars; municipalities cannot pay them for their employees.

Such settlements are so unusual that attorney Flint Taylor, a noted civil rights lawyer in Chicago who has sued the Police Department many times, said he had never had a case where the police officers paid money as part of a lawsuit settlement. He said that was, in large part, because the city’s Law Department and the lawyers it hires from private practice to defend these lawsuits work hard to protect officers.

“If the city turned around and agreed to have the cops pay, too,” Taylor said, “then they might not be able to settle their cases.”

Of course, it also is because municipalities such as the city of Chicago have deep pockets. Police officers often are of modest means, so going after their assets might not achieve much, and certainly not as much as a plaintiff in a lawsuit would be able to get from a municipality.

“Most of the folks who have been victimized care more about the accountability,” said Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago‘s law school. “They want an acknowledgment that the police did them wrong or hurt them. That’s why some of these settlements are for such small amounts.”

Roderick Drew, spokesman for the city’s Law Department, agreed that such settlements are rare. He said city attorneys consider the demands from plaintiffs on a case-by-case basis. In this case, he said, Hill and his attorneys insisted that the officers pay out of their own pockets.

The two veteran detectives, identified in court documents as Kenneth Boudreau and John Halloran, had until last week to pay Hill.

Boudreau declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement. Halloran could not be reached.

Neither detective admitted wrongdoing in the settlement.

“It’s the symbolism that makes it attractive to a plaintiff,” said Russell Ainsworth, who represented Hill but because of the confidentiality agreement also could not discuss details of the case. “To get money from the officer who wronged them means something to some people.”

Ainsworth said the firm he works at, Loevy & Loevy, sees trying to make officers pay from their own pocket as “a policy position.”

“It’s what we believe in. It’s an attempt at restorative justice,” said Ainsworth, who called such settlements extremely rare at the firm. “It really has an intrinsic value that goes above and beyond the dollar amount, having a police officer writing a check out of his own account. There’s a feeling of justice there for the client, and that’s important. It’s also an extra psychological piece to help make the client satisfied.”

Taylor said he liked the idea of making police officers pay to settle lawsuits and, like Seng, said it could have some deterrent effect.

“The cop should somehow be held responsible,” Taylor said. “As a principle, I agree with that.”

That was what Shaun Meesak believed. Meesak and two friends had come out of a North Side bar early one morning in January 2007, got in their car and started to drive home when they said another car ran a stop sign and almost struck their car. One of his friends yelled and made an obscene gesture, which prompted the men in the car to approach them. As it turned out, those men were plainclothes police officers.

Meesak and his friends said the officers beat them, choked Meesak after he had been handcuffed, then charged them with various crimes. Meesak and his friends pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct out of fear that, if they went to trial, they would end up with a jail sentence.

The three men as well a fourth friend at the scene filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging the officers had violated their rights by beating them and bringing false charges against them. When the city settled the lawsuit in 2009 for $225,000, the agreement called for the police officers to chip in, too. Each of the five officers named in the lawsuit agreed to pay $1,250 to each of the four plaintiffs, meaning each officer paid $5,000 out of his own pocket.

“It makes them accountable essentially,” said Meesak, who is 32 and works in the construction equipment industry. “I don’t know how much damage it does to their pocketbook or their savings account, but it holds them accountable for their actions. It’s not just the city paying.”

Meesak said he would have liked an apology but knew he was not going to get one. His work sometimes takes him into the city, and that makes him anxious, though not as much as it used to. He said an admission of wrongdoing and an apology would have lessened the impact of what happened.

But the settlement agreements in the Hill and Meesak cases, as well as in others, make clear that there is no admission of wrongdoing.

Hill was one of three men arrested in the 1990 murder of Kathy Morgan. It was a problematic case from the very beginning.

Hill, Dan Young Jr. and Peter Williams were charged with the murder of Morgan, whose body was found in an abandoned building on the South Side. Close to 18 months later, Hill was arrested on an unrelated robbery charge. During questioning, he confessed to the murder and implicated Young and Williams. In time, Young and Williams also confessed and implicated the other two.

Williams later realized he was in Cook County Jail on a drug charge when the killing took place. Although the charges against Williams were dropped, prosecutors took the other two to trial and won convictions. The charges against Hill and Young were dropped in February 2005 after DNA tests cleared them.

As for Hill, he will not be able to spend his money in the outside world — at least not for some time. After he was cleared of the Morgan murder and released from prison, he was arrested on unrelated armed robbery charges and was convicted. He is serving a 27-year prison sentence.

More Evidence Against the Death Penalty

april 12, 2012 source : http://www.nytimes.com

Connecticut is poised to become the 17th state without the death penalty and the fifth in five years to abolish it. Gov. Dannel Malloy is expected to sign the repeal bill approved by the Legislature in recent days.

Connecticut is part of a growing movement against capital punishment, with repeal measures now proposed in California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky and Washington. Other states like Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania are reviewing their death penalty laws.

This shift comes at a time when new analyses of capital punishment show gross injustice in its application and enormous costs in continuing to impose it. In Connecticut, a powerful, comprehensive study provided evidence that state death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime.

In California, two former death penalty proponents — a prosecutor who drafted the 1978 ballot initiative that expanded the state’s death penalty and a leading supporter of the 1978 law — are now championing a new ballot measure to repeal the penalty. They point to a study showing that, since 1978, California has spent roughly $4 billion on the death penalty to carry out 13 executions. “The cost of our system of capital punishment is so enormous that any benefit that could be obtained from it — and I now think there’s very little or zero benefit — is so dollar-wasteful that it serves no effective purpose,” Donald Heller, the drafter of the 1978 measure, said recently.

Decades of research show that racial bias pervades death penalty cases. Minority defendants with white victims are much more likely to be sentenced to death than others;35 percent of those executed nationally since 1976 were black, though blacks currently make up 12.6 percent of the population. The problem of inadequate counsel permeates the system, with many indigent defendants sentenced to death after major blunders by court-assigned lawyers. And a horrific number of innocent people have ended up on death row: 17 convicts with death sentences have been exonerated with DNA evidence since 1993, 123 with other evidence since 1973.

Any careful evaluation leads to what the American Law Institute concluded after a reviewof decades of executions: the system cannot be fixed. It is practically impossible to rid the legal process of biases driven by race, class and politics. The growing number of states reconsidering this barbaric system is a welcome sign. Capital punishment, by overwhelming evidence, should be abolished throughout the United States.

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OHIO – Ex-death row inmate from Scotland admits to threat

april 13, 2012 source :http://www.foxnews.com

A Scotsman released from prison four years ago after spending two decades on Ohio’s death row could be sent back to prison after he pleaded guilty Friday to threatening a judge who prosecuted his original case.

Ken Richey pleaded guilty to a felony retaliation charge and now faces up to three years in prison. He’ll be sentenced May 7.

Richey agreed to plead guilty in exchange for prosecutors dropping a charge that he violated a protection order when he called the Putnam County courthouse in Ottawa this past New Year’s Eve.

Investigators said Richey was at his home in Tupelo, Miss., when he left the threatening message for county judge Randall Basinger, warning that he was coming to get him.

Richey was on death row for 21 years after being convicted of setting a fire that killed a 2-year-old girl in 1986. He denied any involvement and became well-known in Britain, where there is no death penalty, as he fought for his release. Among his supporters were several members of the British Parliament and Pope John Paul II.

Following years of appeals, a federal court determined his lawyers mishandled the case, and his conviction was overturned. Putnam County prosecutors initially planned to retry him, but Richey was released in 2008 under a deal that required him to plead no contest to attempted involuntary manslaughter. He also was ordered to stay away from the northwest Ohio county and anyone involved in the case, including Basinger.

Richey, though, carried a lifetime of bitterness over his conviction, his friends said.

He returned to Scotland in 2008, and later came back to the U.S. where he was arrested in Minnesota in 2010 and charged with assaulting his 24-year-old son. Prosecutors have said Richey was still wanted on a warrant out of Minnesota.

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ARIZONA – Death penalty upheld in Ariz. teen’s killing

april 13, 2012 source :http://www.trivalleycentral.com

The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the conviction and death sentence of a man found guilty of fatally bludgeoning his 14-year-old niece whose semi-nude body was found while her mother was in the hospital.

Brad Lee Nelson of Golden Valley had appealed his sentence to the court, arguing that he didn’t have an impartial trial jury, that the killing wasn’t premeditated and that putting him to death would be cruel and unusual punishment.

The 41-year-old was convicted of first-degree murder in the June 2006 killing of 14-year-old Amber Graff.

Records show that Nelson was watching Graff and her 13-year-old brother Wade at a hotel in Kingman in western Arizona while their mother was in the hospital being treated for Crohn’s disease.

Prosecutors say that Nelson walked from the hotel to a Kmart, bought a rubber mallet, came back and hit Amber in the head with it multiple times as Wade slept.

Prosecutors say that after hitting her with the mallet, Nelson covered up her body and soon after spent the morning with Wade going to a couple of stores and hanging out by the pool. When they returned to the hotel room, Nelson told Amber to wake up and pulled the covers from her.

Her body was blue and naked from the waist down, her forehead was covered in blood, and blood and foam were coming out of her mouth. Semen later found on her groin area matched Nelson, although there was no evidence that Amber was raped.

The rubber mallet was found in a bloody black sock under the bed.

Amber’s stepfather later gave investigators a letter from Nelson to Amber that proclaimed his love for her and promised to never hurt her.

Defense attorneys had argued that Nelson didn’t mean to kill the girl while the prosecution argued that his trip to Kmart to buy the mallet and his efforts to cover up the crime proved it was premeditated murder.

Prosecutors also theorized at trial that Nelson came on to Amber and she denied him, provoking him enough to kill her.

“It was pretty clear it was sexually motivated,” Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith, who prosecuted the case against Nelson, said Thursday. “I don’t see anything accidental about any of it.”

In their ruling Thursday, the Arizona Supreme Court rejected multiple arguments from Nelson’s attorney that sought to have his death sentence overturned, including that the jury’s finding that Nelson was eligible for the death penalty because Amber was under the age of 15 is “arbitrary and capricious.”

Under Arizona law, a number of so-called aggravating factors make someone convicted of first-degree murder eligible to be executed, including that the murder victim is under the age of 15. Amber was two months away from turning 15 when she was killed.

Nelson’s attorney, David Goldberg, argued that the state doesn’t have a compelling or rational basis to execute someone who kills a child who is 14 years and 10 months old as opposed to someone who has turned 15.

The court ruled that the Arizona Legislature set the age at 15 after determining that the young are especially vulnerable, should be afforded more protection and that murders of the sort should carry more severe punishments.

S.D. Supreme Court denies Eric Robert’s request for quick execution in guard’s murder

april 12, 2012 source : http://www.argusleader.com

The South Dakota Supreme Court has denied a death row inmate’s request for a quick execution.

Eric Robert, 49, filed a motion to vacate with the court earlier this year after the justices stayed his May execution. The court issued the stay in order to complete the sentence review mandated by South Dakota law in all death penalty cases.

Robert was sentenced to die by lethal injection in October for the murder of corrections officer Ron “R.J.” Johnson, which took place one year ago today.

Robert’s lawyers argued that the Supreme Court did not have the authority to stay an execution where no appeal has been filed. The inmate has not appealed his sentence or asked for clemency from Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

The high court rejected the notion that it doesn’t have the statutory authority to stay a sentence. The justices ruled unanimously that a sentence review is required, and that a stay can be issued as a part of that process.

“While it is true that this proceeding was not initiated by Robert filing a notice of appeal, it is an exercise of this court’s appellate jurisdiction to review the decision of a lower court – a proceeding upon appeal,” Chief Justice David Gilbertson wrote.

Robert and another inmate, 49-year-old Rodney Berget, attacked Johnson from behind with a metal pipe at the South Dakota State Penitentiary’s prison industries building. Johnson, who was filling in for an ill co-worker on his 63rd birthday, was the lone officer on duty that morning.

After beating him to death, Robert put on Johnson’s uniform and Berget climbed into a box atop a wheeled cart.

The inmates were captured as Robert tried to wheel the cart through the prison’s west gate.

Both men have been sentenced to die for the murder.

A third inmate, 47-year-old Michael Nordman, was given a life sentence for his role in the crime. Nordman, who worked in the prison industries building, traded the plastic wrap and pipe for a prison knife.

A dedication ceremony is planned in Sioux Falls today for the prison’s staff training center, which will be renamed in Johnson’s honor.

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Letter from Tom Elliot

april 12, source : http://www.tcpalm.com

Letter: Time to stop Gore‘s appeals, just as he stopped his victims’ appeals for their lives

With very heavy hearts, my family has seen this whole process of trials, appeals, stays, new trials and on and on and on with faith in God and the justice system. It’s taken 28 years for this process to play itself out.

The pain, torture, cruelty and punishment David Gore imposed on his innocent victims warrants death. When I see with my eyes the total destruction of life David Gore has caused to his victims and their families, it warrants death.

While very pleased with the recent opinion of the Florida Supreme Court, it’s just another slap in the face from Gore to think his efforts are not exhausted due to the ability to go to the federal courts. His victims were afforded absolutely nothing but death. Their pleas for life, relief, pardon and help were heard by no one but him. He was judge and jury of their fate. He denied them.

I pray the federal courts will do the same to him. He’s been fighting for his life longer than most of his victims even lived. It’s been long enough.

Tom Elliott is the nephew of Carl Elliott, whose daughter, Lynn, was one of David Gore’s victims.

 

Charges expected against George Zimmerman in Trayvon Martin shooting death

zimmerman charged with second- degree murder and his in custody

april 11 source : http://www.wxyz.com

AP) – A law enforcement official says that charges are being filed in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

The official with knowledge of the investigation says a prosecutor will announce charges against George Zimmerman on Wednesday at 6:00 p.m.

live on CBS news at 6.00 p.m ET watch here

Zimmerman’s arrest is also expected soon.

The official didn’t know the charge and spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to release the information.

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