alabama
Alabama executes Andrew Lacke
ATMORE, Alabama – Andrew Lackey was executed by lethal injection at Holman Correctional Facility Thursday evening for the 2005 murder of an 80-year-old World War II veteran he was trying to rob.
Lackey was pronounced dead at 6:25 p.m.
Four of Lackey’s family members, including his mother, father, brother and aunt, were in attendance.
A jury convicted Lackey, 29, of the Halloween night murder in 2005 of Charles Newman, 80, at Newman’s Limestone County home. Lackey beat, shot and stabbed Newman. Authorities say he was seeking money.
Lackey became the first inmate executed in Alabama since Christopher T. Johnson of Escambia County received a lethal injection Oct. 20, 2011.
A Limestone County jury convicted Lackey in 2008. He had dropped all appeals and asked for his execution to be scheduled.
Lackey, wearing glasses and with trim, dark hair, was already strapped to a gurney when a curtain opened at 6 p.m. to allow witnesses to see him. He looked around briefly, then laid his head on the pillow.
Holman Warden Gary Hetzell read the execution order and asked Lackey if he had anything to say.
“No sir, I don’t,” Lackey replied.
Lackey’s mother, father, brother and aunt witnessed the execution in silence, his mother and father holding hands. The four had visited Lackey earlier today, Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said.
A man and two women witnessed the execution on behalf of the victim’s family. The Department of Corrections did not have their names.
Shortly after Lackey declined to make a statement, Holman Chaplain Chris Summers approached the gurney, touched Lackey’s hand and spoke to him. Lackey nodded and Summers knelt to pray.
The drugs seemed to to take effect within a couple of minutes. Lackey’s chest and abdomen convulsed slightly for several minutes. That was followed by what appeared to be several minutes of shallow breathing. He remained still and quiet for several minutes until a corrections officer closed the curtain at 6:15 p.m.
Source: Al.com, July 25, 2013
Four of Lackey’s family members, including his mother, father, brother and aunt, were in attendance.
A man and two women witnessed the execution on behalf of the victim’s family. The Department of Corrections did not have their names.
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1st Alabama. execution since 2011 set for Thursday
July 20, 2013
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama’s second execution in almost two years is scheduled for Thursday at Holman Prison in Atmore.
Court records show that 30-year-old Andrew Lackey asked the state to set his execution date, and has not taken action to stop it.
Lackey is scheduled to die by lethal injection at Holman Prison in Atmore for the beating and shooting death of 80-year-old Charles Newman during a 2005 Halloween night robbery at Newnan’s home in Limestone County. Lackey is to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday.
Lackey would be the first inmate executed in Alabama since Christopher T. Johnson of Escambia County received a lethal injection Oct. 20, 2011. He was the sixth inmate executed in 2011.
The state’s executions have been slowed partly because of a legal dispute over the drugs used in executions.
Lackey’s execution was set after he wrote a letter to the Alabama Supreme Court saying that he had “an odd request.”
“Please set me an execution date. I do not wish to pursue any further appeals for my death sentence,” Lackey said in the letter to the justices, according to court records. Lackey said he would not file any further appeals.
Court records show Lackey has taken no action to stop the execution.
In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Richard Anderson, Lackey says, “I do not know what else I can do. Will you please help me get an execution date.”
Court records show that Newman made an emergency phone call to the Athens Police Department on Halloween night 2005 in which he could be heard saying, “Don’t do that,” ”Leave me alone” and “What do you want.”
The police operator then heard the apparent assailant repeatedly ask, “Where’s the vault?” according to the records.
Bryan Stevenson, an attorney with the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, said both the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and the trial court have ruled that the state can go ahead with Lackey’s execution.
Stevenson said he and other attorneys opposed to Lackey being executed and “have argued that he is mentally ill.”
“Our point is that he needs to be examined,” Stevenson said.
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US – UPCOMING EXECUTIONS JULY
| July | ||
| 10 | TX | Rigoberto Avila Execution moved 2014 |
| 16 | TX | John Quintanilla EXECUTED |
| 18 | TX | Vaughn Ross Executed |
| 25 | AL | Andrew Lackey |
| 31 | TX | Douglas Feldman |
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Death row inmate Jason Sharp, convicted in 1999 Madison County slaying, to get new case review
NOVEMBER 1, 2012 http://blog.al.com
The Alabama Supreme Court wants the state’s criminal appeals court to take another look at the case of Jason Sharp, who is on death row after being convicted of the 1999 rape and murder of Tracy Morris.
The case took years to go to trial before Sharp was convicted in 2006.
The appeals process has bounced back and forth from various Alabama courts since Sharp’s lawyers alleged prosecutors improperly struck black would-be jurors from the jury pool.
Jason Sharp is led from Judge Laura Hamilton’s courtroom by Madison County Sheriff deputies from left, Sgt. Emmanuel Simmons, E.T. Burrows and Avery Miller after being sentenced to the death penalty Thursday Sept. 14, 2006 for the murder of Tracy Morris. (The Huntsville Times/Robin Conn)Brian Lawson | blawson@al.comThe U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors must have race-neutral reasons for striking jurors. Both Sharp and Morris are white.
The state’s high court today denied a request by the State of Alabama to reconsider its order from last month, directing the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals to allow Sharp’s attorneys and the state to file new briefs on the issue of whether Sharp received a fair trial.
The dispute centers the complaint by Sharp’s attorneys that the prosecution improperly struck all but two of 13 potential jurors who were African American. The defense struck the other two black potential jurors.
In December 2009, the Alabama Supreme Court overturned the conviction andordered a hearing before Circuit Judge Laura Hamilton, who presided over Sharp’s trial. The court required prosecutors to spell out their reasons for striking black jurors. If the prosecution, led by Madison County District Attorney Rob Broussard failed to persuade the trial court that the juror strikes were proper, Sharp would be entitled to a new trial.
The hearing was held and Hamilton ruled in June 2010 that prosecutors did not discriminate in picking a jury. The prosecution had argued a number of the black potential jurors said they opposed or would be reluctant to impose the death penalty, or didn’t appear to have the professional or social “sophistication” to comprehend technical DNA evidence.
Broussard said he struck twice as many white potential jurors based on the DNA issue and has insisted there was no discrimination in the Sharp case.
The sophistication argument was ridiculed by the defense for appearing to suggest the jurors weren’t intelligent enough. And in one instance, a woman with a bachelor’s degree from Alabama A&M University was excluded, the defense argued, but two white jurors with no college education did make the jury.
The case took another turn in February 2011, when the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the prosecution had discriminated against the black members of the jury pool and said Sharp was entitled to a new trial.
But in February of this year, the same court, though with a slightly different make-up,reversed its decision from the previous year and said prosecutors did not discriminate.
That ruling was appealed by Sharp’s lawyers to the Alabama Supreme Court. The court ruled Oct. 18, that the lower court must let the two sides provide briefs to the appeals court on the issue of whether Hamilton’s ruling was correct that the prosecution did not discriminate against members of the jury pool.
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ALABAMA – Court won’t hear Ala. death row appeal – Bobby Baker Jr
October 1, 2012 http://www.wgme.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court won’t hear an appeal from a convicted murderer who kidnapped and fatally shot his estranged wife in 1994.
The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Bobby Baker Jr., who is on death row in Alabama. He was accused of kidnapping and shooting Tracy Baker four times while she sat in the back seat of his car in April 1994.
He has had his death sentence overturned once by the courts before being sentenced to death for a second time. Baker wanted the Supreme Court to rule on whether the aggravating circumstances that were used to decide to seek the death penalty were unconstitutionally vague.
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ALABAMA – Trial begins on isolation of HIV-positive inmates
September 26, 2012 http://www.corrections.com
MONTGOMERY, ALA. — Alabama prisons continue to isolate inmates who have tested positive for HIV even though the virus is no longer the death sentence it once was considered, an attorney for HIV-positive prison inmates said Monday.
ACLU attorney Margaret Winter asked U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson Monday to end a longstanding Alabama prisons policy of isolating inmates who have tested positive for HIV.
Thompson is hearing testimony in a trial of a lawsuit brought by HIV-positive inmates challenging the Alabama prisons policy of keeping HIV-positive inmates separate from the remainder of the prison population. Alabama and South Carolina are the only states that continue to do so.
Attorney Bill Lunsford, representing Alabama prisons, said the HIV-positive prisoners are kept together in dormitories at Limestone Correctional Facility in north Alabama and at Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka. But he said the inmates can participate in most of the programs available to other inmates.
Lunsford and Winter made the remarks in opening statements in a trial of a federal lawsuit challenging the Alabama prisons’ HIV policy. The trial is expected to last about a month.
The ACLU claims the policy is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Winter said in her opening statement that the policy keeps HIV-positive inmates from participating in some programs to help in their rehabilitation.
But Lunsford said the only thing the HIV-positive inmates are prohibited from doing is working in the prison kitchen. Winter, however, said the HIV-positive inmates often can’t get the same work-release jobs as other inmates, particularly food service jobs.
The trial’s first witness was Frederick Altice of Yale University, who described himself as an expert in the incarceration of HIV-positive inmates.
He described the prison system’s policy of isolating HIV-positive inmates as a mistake, particularly for inmates who are just learning that they are HIV-positive. He said some people still have the same reaction to HIV they had in past years, when it was considered more deadly.
“They think, ‘Am I never going to be able to see my children?’ or ‘Am I going to die?'” Altice said. “Being alone is not a good place for them to be.”
Lunsford repeatedly questioned Altice’s credentials, particularly when it comes to understanding how the Alabama prison policy works.
The trial continues Tuesday morning.
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ALABAMA – Amy Bishop sought the death penalty
September 26, 2012 http://bostonglobe.com
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — A former college professor who killed three people and wounded three others during a faculty meeting wanted to go to death row and had to be convinced by her parents to accept a plea deal that spared her life, her lawyer said Tuesday.
Amy Bishop, 47, did not want to live among other inmates because she was terrified of being sexually abused in Alabama’s lone prison for women, defense attorney Roy Miller told the Associated Press.
‘‘She wanted to die,’’ he said. Bishop did not want to ‘‘live in a chicken coop the rest of her life,’’ he said.
A judge sentenced Bishop, a Harvard University-educated biologist, to life without parole Monday after jurors convicted her during an abbreviated trial.
She had pleaded guilty earlier this month, but state law required a trial because she admitted to a capital murder charge.
Authorities have said that Bishop opened fire during a University of Alabama biology department meeting Feb. 12, 2010, in Huntsville, because she had been denied tenure.
Bishop, who has been held without bond in the Madison County jail since the shootings, could be transferred to Julia Tutwiler, the women’s prison, at any time.
Bishop met at the jail Tuesday with a defense attorney representing her on a murder charge in her native Massachusetts, where she is accused of killing her brother with a shotgun blast in their home in Braintree in 1986.
Authorities initially ruled the shooting accidental, based partly on claims by Bishop’s mother, who said her daughter did not mean to kill Seth Bishop, 18 at the time.
Authorities in Massachusetts said they would make a decision later this week on whether to pursue the case.
District Attorney Rob Broussard of Madison County said a prosecutor from Massachusetts phoned him last week to ask about Bishop’s plea.
‘‘He wanted verification from me on the guilty plea and that life without [parole] really means life,’’ Broussard said. ‘‘It does.’’
A spokesman for Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey in Massachusetts declined to comment.
Miller said Bishop would probably never face trial in Massachusetts because Alabama is unlikely to send her there.
‘‘Based on my experience, I don’t foresee her ever going up there to face that,’’ he said. ‘‘Practically speaking, it would be a disaster if she escaped or something happened.’’
Bishop accepted a plea deal in Alabama only after talking with her mother and father, Miller said. ‘‘She was never inclined to plead guilty to life without parole,’’ he said.
Bishop attempted suicide once in the county lockup by cutting her wrists, authorities said.
The Justice Department is reviewing allegations of rape, sexual assault, and harassment by male guards at Tutwiler prison after a legal aid group filed a complaint in May.
The Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative said it based the assertions on interviews with more than 50 women at the maximum-security prison, north of Montgomery.
Prison system spokesman Brian Corbett said Bishop would probably spend about a month in a cell by herself before moving into the prison’s general population.
‘‘I’m sure that every inmate entering the system has their own set of unique fears,’’ Corbett said in an e-mail. ‘‘I cannot address hers on an individual basis.’’
Bishop could have been sentenced to death by lethal injection if she had gone to trial and been convicted of capital murder, but none of the victims were pushing for a death sentence and some actively opposed it, Broussard said.
‘‘The settlement was a just outcome,’’ he said.
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ALABAMA – Prison chaplain questions death penalty value
June 14, 2012 Source : http://www.al.com
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — In 1981, Philip Workman walked into a Wendy’s restaurant in Memphis, brandished a gun, and had the employees hand him the money out of the cash drawer.
Cornered moments later by police officers in a corner of the parking lot, Workman fired the gun. A police officer fell.
Cornered moments later by police officers in a corner of the parking lot, Workman fired the gun. A police officer fell.
In 2007, Workman was executed for that homicide.
Trouble is, says the Rev. Joseph Ingle, who will speak in Huntsville Tuesday, Workman’s gun is not the one that killed that police officer.
The officer, according to forensic evidence analyzed after Workman’s ‘82 trial, was killed by the kind of bullet that is in police pistols, not Workman’s. The officer, in short, appears to have been killed by another officer’s shot.
Ingle’s latest book, “The Inferno: A Southern Morality Tale,” chronicles what happened between that moment in the parking lot and Workman’s execution by lethal injection 26 years later.
“It was pretty much a nightmare,” Ingle said this week from his home office in Nashville. “If you ever think the issue of capital punishment and our criminal justice system aren’t politically fraught, you need to take another look. It is beyond appalling.”
Ingle himself never had taken a look until his senior year in seminary. That’s when, to satisfy a requirement, he began volunteering in a jail in Harlem for 20 hours a week for a year.
“Meeting those men just changed my life,” Ingle said.
It also changed his ministry. Rather than take a United Church of Christcongregation, Ingle chose to become a self-supporting prison chaplain. He volunteers in Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville. From 1974 until 1983, he was the executive director of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, a multi-state organization that sought to abolish the death penalty.
Abolishing the penalty makes sense not only to avoid executing people for crimes they didn’t commit, but also in simple dollars and cents.
“Nationally, there is a move away from capital punishment,” Ingle said, “but you don’t see that in the South. Since 1977, more than 93 percent of the executions in the U.S. have been in the South.”
And patterns for those executions follow disturbingly familiar paths of racial discrimination.
“If you kill a white person, you are 11 times more likely to die for that crime than if you kill a black person,” Ingle said. “And it’s even worse if you’re a black person and you kill a white person. Then you are 22 times more likely to die.”
Ingle said that the current mood in the U.S. of distrusting government should extend to this issue.
“Think about it,” Ingle said. “We don’t trust the state with our taxes, and we’re going to trust the state to say who lives or dies?”
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ALABAMA – Mental retardation finding may save convicted Jefferson County murderer from death sentence
June 8, 2012 Source : http://blog.al.com
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — A Jefferson County murderer who served more than four years on Death Row then won a new trial and was reconvicted, may avoid a second death sentence after a state expert found he was mentally retarded, a hearing revealed today.
Esaw Jackson, 33, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for a shooting the year earlier in Ensley that killed a woman and a teenager and wounded the mother’s two teen children.
A Jefferson County jury also convicted him of capital murder in 2011, and recommended a sentence of death in a 10-2 vote.
Pre-sentence testing ordered by Circuit Judge Stephen Wallace, the judge in the current trial, determined Jackson had an IQ of 56, well below the normal legal threshold for mental retardation, which is a 70 IQ.
The U.S. Supreme Court has banned executing mentally retarded murderers.
In today’s hearing, prosecutor Mike Anderson asked for more time to obtain and examine Jackson’s school records for evidence of mental retardation, another indicator courts use to determine if the death penalty should be barred.
Wallace set a July 13 hearing, and said he wants to set the final sentencing after Anderson reports back.
If the assessment holds that Jackson is mentally retarded, “the sentence would have to be life without parole,” said one of Jackson’s lawyer, Erskine Mathis.
Judges in capital cases are not bound by the jury’s sentencing recommendation, but in most cases Alabama judges have overridden the jury’s recommendation of life without parole and imposed death instead.
Fewer than 10 percent of the judicial overrides have resulted in the lesser capital sentence, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery.
Jackson was 27 when he fired a rifle at least 15 times into a car stopped at a traffic light on 19th Street and Avenue V. Killed were Pamela Montgomery, 42, and Milton Poole III, 16. Montgomery’s children, Shaniece Montgomery, then 19, and Denaris Montgomery, then 17, were wounded.
The jury in Jackson’s original trial also recommended death in a 10-2 vote, and then-Circuit Judge Gloria Bahakel sentenced him to death. The Alabama Supreme Court overturned his convictionand sentence in 2011, citing improper testimony in the 2007 trial.
Four years after watching his mother and best friend die, Denaris Montgomery committed a murder himself, and now is serving a 21-year prison term.
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