death row

Inmate who threatened Texas senator using smuggled phone renews death wish in letter to AP – RICHARD TABLER

October 13, 2012 http://www.therepublic.com/

HOUSTON — Four years after his threatening calls from a smuggled cell phone prompted an unprecedented lockdown of the entire Texas prison system, death row inmate Richard Tabler is chafing at 24-hour video surveillance in his cell, a ban on nearly all visitors and his unsuccessful efforts to waive his appeals and expedite his execution.

The convicted killer recently sent a handwritten letter to The Associated Press blaming his “idiotic” cell phone use for his isolation and the court’s refusal to comply with his request for a speedy execution.

“It’s no longer about justice,” Tabler wrote in the four-page letter received this month by the AP.

“The only reason I’m still here … is because of the political bull crap surrounding the cell phone situation.”

Tabler, 33, who has been on death row for five years, gained notoriety in October 2008 when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice disclosed he had used a cell phone smuggled into his prison to repeatedly call, among others, a Texas lawmaker.

He has asked the court on multiple occasions to waive his appeal and schedule an execution for killing two people in 2004, but a judge last year denied the request. His lawyers are also opposed Tabler’s efforts and have raised questions over whether he is competent to make such a decision.

“He and I reached an understanding a long time ago that I wasn’t going to help him to die but I wouldn’t stand in his way, so to speak,” said lawyer David Schulman, who’s long been involved in Tabler’s case and visits the inmate. “All we’ve done is challenge his competency and go through the writ process. … It’s not a pleasant situation for anybody involved. Certainly none of his lawyers are having a good time.”

While illegal cell phones have plagued prisons nationwide, it was Tabler’s brazen, threatening calls to state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate panel that oversees the prison agency, that gave the inmate instant notoriety. Those calls were among more than 2,800 traced to Tabler’s phone, which apparently got passed around to other inmates on his death row wing at the Polunsky Unit outside Livingston in East Texas.

Texas prison officials locked down more than 150,000 inmates statewide — some of them confined to their cells for weeks — while officers swept the state’s more than 100 prisons to seize hundreds of items of contraband, including cell phones and items related to them.

Since then Tabler has received round-the-clock monitoring on a prison wing normally reserved for inmates with execution dates, while his visitors are restricted to his spiritual adviser and lawyers.

Prison officials defend their treatment of Tabler, noting his troubled history behind bars.

“This offender presents a security risk because of his numerous disciplinary infractions, including obtaining contraband,” prison agency spokesman Jason Clark said. “The housing area is not exclusively for offenders on death watch and can be utilized by the agency to monitor those who attempt to break the rules or harm themselves.”

Tabler’s prison record includes at least two instances where he’s tried kill himself.

His restrictions also prohibit him from visits with reporters.

“That makes you wonder what they don’t want me telling the media,” Tabler wrote.

Tabler repeatedly has asked his appeals be dropped and he be put to death for gunning down Mohammed-Amine Rahmouni, 28, and Haitham Zayed, 25, in 2004 in a remote area of Killeen in Central Texas. Evidence showed Rahmouni was manager of a strip club who banned Tabler from his place. Zayed was a friend of Rahmouni. Tabler also has acknowledged killing two dancers from the club, was charged with their slayings but hasn’t been tried.

“Please understand that I’ve never questioned my death sentence, as I’ve admitted/confessed to my crime,” Tabler wrote. “I’m guilty, no question about it.

“I’m no saint … but at least I’m man enough to take responsibility and not lie about it.”

Last year, a federal judge conducted a hearing on Tabler’s motion seeking execution, ultimately ruling Tabler’s belief his family was in danger if he didn’t go through with the punishment made the request involuntary. Earlier this year, Tabler wrote the judge again seeking execution, but his lawyer and state attorneys opposed the request and the judge agreed with them and denied Tabler. The nature of the family threats is unclear.

Tabler’s case is on appeal at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals with a newly assigned lawyer who’s obtained a time extension to mid-December to get familiar with the case. The appeal rejected by a federal judge in Waco raised questions over whether Tabler is mentally ill and incompetent to decide whether to volunteer for execution and challenged issues from his 2007 trial.

“He lives under pretty harsh conditions at the prison … and his conditions are more onerous than other people,” said Marcy Widder, his court-appointed attorney. “It has some connection to the cell phone mess.”

Schulman said he believes the courts are being careful with Tabler’s requests to die.

“Think of the situation,” Schulman said. “In one hand he’s telling them I want to die. On the other hand, he’s telling them they’re making my life miserable.”

There’s no real argument for the death penalty by James Varney “opinion”

October 13, 2012 http://www.nola.com/

Three stories — or, more accurately, two stories and a column — have led to thoughts about that ever contentious issue, the death penalty.

The first was a justice corkscrew at Tulane and Broad detailed by reporter John Simerman, a tale of shifting heroes and villains. In it, a rapist was briefly represented by the Innocence Project, a prominent arm of the anti-death penalty movement that has a strong case — namely, not every person on death row is guilty. Yet for reasons I can’t fully understand, I don’t find that reason to dispose of the death penalty. In part, this view may be colored by the Innocence Project’s paladin, Gary Scheck, who proclaims DNA evidence infallible. Which it may be, unless the blood of two murder victims is splattered all over O.J. Simpson’s car and house, in which case the DNA was planted or contaminated, as Scheck argued while springing The Juice.

I could have sworn O.J. did it, but that’s what high-priced defense lawyers do, I suppose, and it’s true Scheck’s work elsewhere has freed some innocent men from a living hell on death row.

In fact, the column in question is just that sort of case. Damon Thibodeaux was sent to Angola’s death row for raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl under the Huey P. Long Bridge in 1996. Problem was, Thibodeaux didn’t do the crime and the Innocence Project helped prove it. Consequently, Thibodeaux was freed last month, and Denny LeBoeuf, formerly of the Death Penalty Resource Center in New Orleans, penned an op-ed about it for The Times-Picayune.

Thibodeaux’s case hinged on a bogus confession, a thing LeBoeuf pointed out talented law enforcement officers constantly guard against. Yet here we have a man — not guilty — dreading the lethal needles the state planned to plunge into his veins. He has escaped the jaws of death, which is all to the good, and whether one finds that alone reason to halt executions, there is no gainsaying the argument in favor of them is now diminished.

Thibodeaux can’t be made whole any more than the family of the girl who was killed, but does the death penalty’s existence mean similar tragedies won’t be visited on others? Here we turn to the death penalty’s supposed deterrent properties.

And here we turn to the other recent story, reporter Claire Galofaro’s magisterial three-part tale of the men accused of gunning down two St. John the Baptist Parish sheriff’s deputies and wounding two more. These alleged warped souls floated across the landscape from Nebraska to Louisiana like modern Charles Starkweathers, apparently willing, even eager, to kill.

Was the death penalty any sort of deterrent to these seething misfits? Has the fear of the death penalty — a sentence quite real in New Orleans and Louisiana — in any way crimped the appalling violence that sends so many New Orleanians to an early grave?

Well, it may have — that’s a hard one to gauge — but if it has, the impact has been marginal at best. The argument in favor of execution shrinks again.

So we appear to have but one plank left in favor of executions: the succor it may provide crime victims’ survivors. Here most of us, thankfully, are at sea because thus far we’ve been spared that nightmare.

That’s always seemed one of the best arguments in favor of execution while simultaneously the most disquieting. Where does the state — why does the state — become an instrument of retribution? There are Biblical passages supporting the death penalty as a legal recourse, but are these life and death matters not better left in God’s hands? Doesn’t the death penalty then skirt dangerously close to revenge killing, a thing civilized society should shun?

I don’t presume to speak for victims’ families, but years of covering capital cases and witnessing two executions at Angola have shown me that seeking a death for a death is not uniform among them. The quality of their mercy is an awesome, humbling thing, and one it seems to me should be embraced.

So what do we have: Guilty? Not always. Deterrent? Unlikely. Morally? Dubious. LeBoeuf is correct: the death penalty should be abolished.

••••••••

James Varney can be reached at jvarney@nola.com.

 

TEXAS – Green gets stay 2 days before execution EXECUTED 10:45 p.m

October 9, 2012 http://www.news-journal.com/

Two days before his scheduled execution, a Montgomery man on Texas’ Death Row for the 2000 abduction, rape and strangulation murder of a 12-year-old Dobbin girl received a stay because he wasn’t given due process to prove he is mentally incompetent for execution, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Judge Nancy Atlas, in the Southern District of Texas, ruled that Jonathan Marcus Green, 44, who was convicted in 2002 for the murder of Christina LeAnn Neal, did not receive a fair opportunity to demonstrate that he is incompetent, “and thus the State of Texas denied him due process.”

But the Texas Attorney General’s Office plans to file a motion today asking the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate the stay.

Green is schizophrenic and “is not malingering,” said his appellate attorney, James Rytting.

“He is mentally ill … and he’s only gotten worse after being stuck in administrative segregation,” Rytting said.

In her written opinion, Atlas notes that 221st state District Court Judge Lisa Michalk, who denied Green a stay two days before he was to be executed on June 30, 2010, applied incorrect legal standards by seeking to determine if there was a change in Green’s mental capacity since his imprisonment in 2002.

“The correct question was whether Green was presently competent, regardless of his comparative mental capacity between 2002 and 2010,” Atlas wrote.

Green understood that he was convicted of killing Christina and was to be executed for that crime, the basis for Michalk’s finding that he understood why he was being executed, Atlas wrote.

But Green believed he was to be executed as a result of “spiritual warfare” between demons and God, Atlas found, and Michalk prevented Green from presenting relevant evidence, denied Green due process.

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ARIZONA – Supreme Court to take up Arizona death-row case; competence at issue, ERNEST GONZALES

OCTOBER 8, 2012 http://www.azfamily.com/

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is slated to hear Arizona’s argument against a court-ordered delay in the execution of a convicted murderer.

Ernest Gonzales killed Darrel Wagner in 1990. He was sentenced to death in April 1992. While on death row, however, Gonzales,went insane  becoming unable to communicate with the lawyers handling his appeals in federal court. It’s the insanity that prompted an appeals court to issue  an indefinite stay of execution.

On Tuesday, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne will go before the Supreme Court and try to convince them to lift that stay.

While Horne says the existing court record should be considered in the appeal, Gonzales’ defense attorneys say his entitlement to effective legal counsel requires the 48-year-old to be mentally competent, which he is not.

Gonzales was 25 and had already served time when he stabbed Wagner to death in the course of burglarizing his home. He also stabbed Wagner’s wife, badly wounding her.

According to court documents, Gonzales showed signs of mental impairment, as well as violent tendencies, while in prison the first time. In 1990, after nearly 10 years on death row, the symptoms of mental illness reportedly became more serious.

While psychiatrists have determined that Gonzales is  psychotic, he has never been declared incompetent in court.

For years, lawyers have fought over the issue of Gonzales‘ competence and its relevance. While the state has insisted Gonzales‘ appeal is “record-based,” the defense has countered that Gonzales’ input is necessary considering the number of attorney involved in the case over the past 22 years.

Even as Horne makes Arizona’s argument, the justices will also hear a similar case out of Ohio.

It’s not clear when the Supreme Court might issue its ruling.

Arizona’s most recent execution was in early August. Daniel Wayne Cook was put to death for strangling two people two death in 1987. It was the state’s fifth execution of 2012, just two shy of the record seven executions in 1999.

If Arizona puts seven inmates to death this year, it could become the second-busiest death-penalty state after Texas.

TEXAS – Man Condemned For Wife, Child’s Death Loses Appeal – GARY GREEN

October 5, 2012 http://houston.cbslocal.com

HOUSTON  — The conviction and death sentence of a Dallas man for fatally stabbing his estranged wife and drowning her 6-year-old daughter in a bathtub have been upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Gary Green was sent to death row two years ago for the September 2009 slayings of Lovetta Armstead and her daughter, Jazzmen, at their home. Armstead was stabbed more than 25 times. One other child, a boy, was stabbed in the stomach. He survived.

Attorneys for the 41-year-old Green raised 46 points of error from his trial, including challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence against him, his confession and jury selection. The court this week rejected all of the claims.

Green could still pursue appeals in federal court. He does not have an execution date.

PENNSYLVANIA- Inmate could still be executed even though death penalty was thrown out – Terrance Williams

october3,2012 http://www.pennlive.com

Clock is still ticking on Terrance Williams’ execution

Although convicted murderer Terrance “Terry” Williams was granted a stay of execution last week by a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge who ruled that recently unearthed evidence shows the prosecution coached its main witness and withheld relevant information at trial, the execution could still go forward if the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturns the stay.

terrance williams 2012 cropTerrance Williams

Chief Justice Ronald Castille, who was Philadelphia District Attorney at the time of the trial and who personally signed the death penalty certification for Williams, refused to recuse himself from considering the request from current Philly DA Seth Williams to overturn the stay.

One of Williams’ defense attorneys is in a car heading west out of Philadelphia toward Rockview, where the execution could take place — just in case.
The Department of Corrections has put previously approved witnesses to the execution on notice to be ready if the court overturns the stay.
A DOC spokeswoman would not comment on whether or not Williams has been transported from the prison in Greene County to Rockview, where the state’s execution chamber is housed, citing security concerns.
The Supreme Court has ordered an end to a flurry of last-minute filings and responses from the prosecution and the defense.
A ruling is expected soon.
Defense attorneys are double-checking an emergency filing to the US Supreme Court they plan to file if the stay is overturned.
Members of the Board of Pardons remain in the wings, having taken an application for clemency “under advisement.” They are the penultimate bulwark to the death chamber; a unanimous vote for clemency sends the decision to the governor, who would then have the final say whether or not the execution would proceed.

October 2, 2012 

Lawyers of a Pennsylvania inmate on death row still fear he could be executed even though his death sentence has been thrown out. 

Terrance Williams could still be executed if the State Supreme Court reverses the decision before midnight tomorrow. Williams is on death row for killing two men when he was a teenager. He claimed that both men had sexually abused him.

A judge found evidence to support the claims and halted Williams’ execution.

Prosecutors have appealed the judges decision to the State Supreme Court.

NU students investigating shaken-baby cases

October 3, 2012 http://www.sacbee.com

CHICAGO — Students in a Northwestern University program that gained national fame for investigations that helped free wrongfully convicted prison inmates – including some who were on Death Row – have a new cause. They are now investigating cases in which caregivers were convicted in what are called shaken-baby syndrome cases.

In a news release, the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern says the students will look at two Chicago-area cases.

This is the first time the project has looked into shaken-baby syndrome cases. The project’s director,Alec Klein, says the decision to take a look was made because science has evolved and some assumptions about the cause of death in such cases are being challenged.

The project has also compiled a national data base and is reviewing about 1,400 other cases.

 

SOUTH CALIFORNIA – Death Row inmate’s conviction overturned – Armenia Cudjo

September 30, 2012 http://www.sfgate.com

A federal appeals court overturned the conviction and death sentence of a Southern California man in the 1986 battering death of a female neighbor because the jury wasn’t told that the defendant’s brother had admitted the killing to a cellmate.

Armenia Cudjo, now 54, was convicted of robbing and murdering Amelia Prokuda, whose partially clad body was found in her apartment in the desert community of Littlerock (Los Angeles County). A bloodstained hammer was found nearby.

Cudjo said he had been at the victim’s home that day and had sex with her but didn’t kill her. He said the killer was his brother Gregory, who more closely resembled a description of the intruder by the victim’s 5-year-old son. Gregory Cudjo told police his brother had confessed the murder to him.

Armenia Cudjo’s lawyer tried to present testimony by John Culver, who said Gregory Cudjo had admitted the killing in a cell at the sheriff’s office, but the trial judge barred the testimony. The state Supreme Court said the testimony should have been allowed but ruled 5-2 in 1993 that it wouldn’t have mattered because Culver had little credibility and the prosecution’s case was strong.

But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 on Friday that the trial judge had violated Cudjo’s right to present a defense. The ruling entitles him to a new trial.

Cudjo’s public defender obtained a sworn statement from Gregory Cudjo in 2008 acknowledging that he had made the admission to Culver, though he didn’t say whether he was telling the truth.

“After 26 years on Death Row, Armenia is glad to have a chance to get his life back,” the lawyer, John Littrell, said Friday.

MISSISSIPPI – Death row inmate back for 2nd appeal – Howard Dean Goodin

September 30, 2012 http://www.clarionledger.com

Howard Goodin

Death row inmate Howard Dean Goodin is headed back to the Mississippi Supreme Court for a second round of arguments on claims that he is mentally disabled and shouldn’t be executed.

Oral arguments are scheduled for Tuesday in Jackson.

Goodin is appealing an adverse 2010 ruling from Newton County Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon, who found Goodin mentally competent and denied his motion for a new trial.

The Supreme Court granted Goodin a hearing in 2009 on claims of mental disability and ineffective work by his case lawyer.

Those post-conviction claims were initially dismissed by Gordon in 2007. In such claims, an inmate argues he has found new evidence — or a possible constitutional issue — that could persuade a court to order a new trial.

Goodin was convicted of capital murder in 1999 in the death of a Union, Miss., shopkeeper.

What prompted the Supreme Court to order a mental disability hearing for Goodin was his claim that his former attorney failed to call for testimony any of the psychiatrists who had diagnosed Goodin as schizophrenic, and that the attorney failed to present records showing the diagnosis of schizophrenia to the trial court.

Goodin also claimed records attesting to his poor academic performance and inability to hold a job should have been introduced.

He claimed his due-process rights were violated because the trial judge ruled on the competency petition without evidence of schizophrenia and low intelligence being introduced.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2009 a hearing was necessary because Gordon, the trial judge, through no fault of this own, wasn’t presented with the evidence needed to decide the mental disability issue.

The legal work of Goodin’s former attorney, Robert Ryan, had been called into question before. Attorneys for Mississippi death row inmate Dale Leo Bishop claimed Ryan — former head of a state agency responsible for representing indigent death row inmates on appeal — suppressed evidence of a bipolar disorder and intentionally sabotaged the case.

Bishop was executed in 2008 after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up his final three appeals.

At Goodin’s trial, records show a surveillance tape played in court depicted Goodin entering Rigdon Enterprises in Union on Nov. 5, 1998. He is seen on the tape stealing money from the cash register as well as taking a VCR and videotape.

The tape also showed 64-year-old Willis Rigdon raising his hands as he was led at gunpoint from the store and forced into his pickup truck.

Rigdon was shot with a pistol after a short trip down a nearby dirt road. He was dumped in a ditch and died later at a hospital.

Louisiana death-row inmate Damon Thibodeaux exonerated with DNA evidence

 

september 28, 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com

NEW ORLEANS — A Louisiana death-row inmate convicted of the rape and murder of his 14-year-old step-cousin in 1996 on Friday became the 300th person exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence in the United States — and the 18th death-row inmate saved from execution by DNA.

Damon Thibodeaux, now 38, confessed to the brutal attack on his cousin after a nine-hour interrogation in 1996 by detectives from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office. He recanted a few hours later and has maintained since that his confession was coerced. Despite his recantation, Thibodeaux was indicted four days after his arrest. In 1997, a jury found him guilty of murder and rape, largely on the basis of his confession. He was sentenced to death.

Thibodeaux walked out of the death-row unit of Louisiana’s Angola prison farm on a rainy Friday afternoon, free for the first time after 15 years, during which he was kept in solitary confinement 23 hours per day.

In an interview minutes after he left the prison, Thibodeaux said he struggled to control his emotions during the years he waited for exoneration.

“For the first couple of years, it takes a lot of getting used to. Sometimes, it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen. You think, they’re going to kill you and just accept it,” he said. “But as things started to accumulate, you start, you know, gaining hope.”

He said the detectives who questioned him in 1996 took advantage of his exhaustion and fed him details of the crime to include in his confession.

“They look for vulnerable points where they can manipulate you, and if you’re sleep-deprived or panicked, or you’re on something or drunk, it makes it that much easier to accomplish what they want to accomplish,” Thibodeaux said. “At that point, I was tired. I was hungry. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I was willing to tell them anything they wanted me to tell them if it would get me out of that interrogation room.”

Thibodeaux said that he hoped his case could help lead police agencies to be more careful not to induce false confessions.

The detectives involved in Thibodeaux’s interrogation could not be reached Friday. Earlier, a spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on the agency’s handling of the case and said the investigators would not be made available.

Thibodeaux’s exoneration came after an unusual five-year joint reinvestigation of the case by the office of Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick, which brought the charges, and a team of defense lawyers and investigators, including the New York-based Innocence Project.

During the reexamination of the case, during which Thibodeaux put his formal appeals on hold, investigators concluded that his confession was riddled with glaring errors, such as the manner and time of death and the identification of the murder weapon, and did not match the crime scene and other evidence. Most remarkable, the investigation found that the sexual assault to which Thibodeaux also confessed — making him eligible under Louisiana law for the death penalty — never occurred.

“The 300th exoneration is an extraordinary event, and it couldn’t be more fitting that it’s an innocent man on death row who gave a false confession,” said Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project and one of the lawyers who worked on the case. “People have a very hard time with the concept that an innocent person could confess to a crime that they didn’t commit. But it happens a lot. It’s the ultimate risk that an innocent man could be executed.”

New DNA testing conducted during the inquiry on the clothing worn by Thibodeaux on the night of the murder and virtually every other piece of evidence collected by police established no links to the crime — so the absence of DNA became a powerful element of evidence itself. A DNA profile was also obtained from a tiny sample of blood on a piece of the wire used to strangle the victim. It did not match Thibodeaux.

The reinvestigation totaled more than $500,000, a cost shared by the defense and prosecution, according to lawyers involved in the case.

The dismissal of Thibodeaux’s case comes amid a flurry of such exonerations across the country and at a time when doubts about the reliability of American courts in determining guilt and innocence appear to be growing.

Early this week, John Edward Smith was released from a Los Angeles jail nearly two decades after being wrongly imprisoned for a 1993 gang-related drive-by shooting. Prosecutors in Chicago moved to dismiss murder charges against Alprentiss Nash in August, 17 years after he was convicted of a murder that new DNA analysis indicates he did not commit. In Texas last month, David Lee Wiggins was released after DNA testing cleared him of a rape conviction for which he had served 24 years.

In July, a D.C. judge declared Kirk L. Odom innocent of a 1981 rape and robbery for which he had served more than 22 years in prison. The same week, the Justice Department and FBI announced they would reexamine thousands of cases after The Washington Post reported widespread problems in its forensic examination of hair fibers over several decades. That came on the heels of a conclusion by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan that five people convicted in the 1995 murder of a taxi driver and imprisoned since are innocent.