Jury

Jury decides gang member should be executed for killing 4 people – Charles Ray Smith

June 10 2013, Los Angeles Times

Gang member sentenced to death

 

Jurors decided Monday that a gang member should be executed for the slaying of four people, including a 10-year-old boy gunned down from close range as he rode his bicycle along a quiet South Los Angeles street.

Charles Ray Smith, 44, stared straight ahead and showed no emotion as the verdict was read in a downtown courtroom.

Smith was convicted during a previous trial of taking part in two deadly shootings in 2006, including one that became known as the “49th Street Massacre” in which two men wielding AK-47s opened fire on children and adults enjoying a Friday summer afternoon.

Sergio Marcial Sr., whose son and brother were among those killed, said the trials in the case had taken an emotional toll on him and his family. He said one of the most painful moments during the legal proceedings was seeing an autopsy photograph of his slain son.

His oldest son, who was 12 at the time, was seriously wounded in the attack and had to repeatedly recount his ordeal in court.

“I’m glad that we can move on and not worry about going and hearing how my son got killed — and my brother and my neighbor,” Marcial said. “I’m glad that it’s over.”

Defense attorney James Cooper said he and his colleague, James Bisnow, knew the case would be difficult given the age of the victims and the fact that none had any gang ties. Bisnow noted that his client has gone through four trials, including one in which a jury deadlocked on whether Smith was guilty and two more that could not decide if he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.

“It was an unprecedented fourth trial, which is extremely costly to the taxpayer and was unjustified in view of the mitigating evidence,” Bisnow said.

The brutality of the 49th Street killings shocked a city long used to gang violence. The shooting was one of several high-profile gang crimes that stoked fears among some of a possible race war. Witnesses described the gunmen as black; the victims were Latino.

But prosecutors have argued that race had little to do with the killings and that Smith and another man, Ryan T. Moore, mistook the victims for rival gang members in a tit-for-tat feud over turf, drugs and pride. Moore was convicted during a separate trial and sentenced to death.

Smith’s attorneys urged the jury last week to spare their client, arguing that there was a lingering doubt that he was involved in the killings. They said jurors should also consider a variety of disorders from which Smith suffers, including post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by his upbringing. They said his afflictions warped Smith’s view of the world, impaired his logic and made him react impulsively.

Smith, they said, was raised by parents who were heavy drinkers when he was a child and who were addicted to crack cocaine when he was a teenager. All four of his brothers ended up in jail or prison, the attorneys told jurors during closing arguments.

The lawyers also noted that many of Smith’s relatives testified that he was a loving father who encouraged his children to do well in school.

But Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Amy Ashvanian described Smith in court as a gang shot-caller who showed no remorse for his crimes. She said Smith told an associate after the 49th Street shooting: “If they’re old enough to shoot, they’re old enough to get shot.”

Smith’s killings, Ashvanian said, began in March 2006 after an incident in which a rival gang member in a green sedan shot at one of Smith’s friends. In response, Smith used an AK-47 to shoot Bani Hinojosa, 27, in the back. Hinojosa, a construction worker who had been sitting in his green sedan, was bringing milk home to his wife and daughters. He had no gang ties and had nothing to do with the earlier shooting involving Smith’s friend.

The victims of the 49th Street shooting on June 30, 2006, were David Marcial, 10; his uncle, Larry Marcial, 22; and Luis Cervantes, a 17-year-old neighbor. David’s brother, Sergio Marcial Jr., was seriously wounded. He and David had been riding their bicycles on the sidewalk outside their home.

Maribel Marcial, David’s aunt and Larry’s sister, said she and her family would have accepted a verdict of life in prison for Smith but were gratified by the jury’s decision.

“It is the beginning of healing for all my family,” she said after the verdict. “We’re all going to die. But in this matter, he’s going to pay for what he did. He’s going to know the reason that he is dying.”

Steven Lawayne Nelson Sentenced To Death Penalty For Murder Of Texas Pastor Clint Dobson

Steven Lawayne Nelson http://www.huffingtonpost.com

FORT WORTH, Texas — The Rev. Clint Dobson was sitting in his church office writing a sermon when a convicted felon began scouring the neighborhood for a car to steal.

The felon honed in on the church, where investigators say he suffocated the young pastor and severely beat his secretary before fleeing in one of their cars.

New details of Steven Lawayne Nelson’s past – offenses that led up to what prosecutors called his most heinous crime – were revealed during a week-long hearing to decide Nelson’s fate following his conviction last week of killing Dobson. On Tuesday, jurors chose the death penalty.

“It is hard for me to fathom that you did what you did for a car and a laptop and a phone,” Dobson’s father-in-law, Phillip Rozeman, said in a statement after the sentencing. “The world is going to miss a leader. It’s sad to know all the people that won’t be helped because Clint is not here.”

Nelson suffocated Dobson, leaving him dead on the floor with a bag over his head and lying near his severely beaten secretary. Nelson had driven away in the secretary’s car, then later sold Dobson’s laptop and bought some items at a mall using the victims’ credit cards.

Jurors had the option of sentencing Nelson to life in prison without parole. For a death sentence, jurors had to unanimously agree that Nelson posed a danger to society, that he intended to kill and that there were no mitigating circumstances to diminish his culpability.

The 25-year-old Nelson showed no reaction as his sentence was read. He was later heard yelling after he was taken to a holding cell, where he broke a sprinkler head, causing flooding in the courtroom shortly after most people had left.

Three days before the murder, Nelson had been released from a court-ordered anger-management program, part of a deal with Dallas County prosecutors after he was arrested for aggravated assault on his girlfriend. He earlier had served time behind bars for a two-year sentence for theft, and spent much of his teen years in juvenile facilities after committing various crimes.

Dobson had taken a considerably different life path. The 28-year-old had done missionary work and had big plans for NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, about 15 miles west of Dallas. The young minister was known by friends and relatives as a generous, helpful person who also had a fun-loving side.

His widow, Laura Dobson, said she will continue to be her husband’s voice and “be a reminder that good will always triumph evil.”

“I refuse to let you get the best of me,” she told Nelson in a victim impact statement after the sentence. “You have wrecked so many lives … that nobody will want to remember you after this.”

Nelson had denied killing the minister, blaming two friends for the crime. He said he stayed outside and only came into the church to steal a laptop. He admitted stepping around Dobson and the secretary on the floor to get the laptop, but said they were still alive when he was there.

Blood from both victims was found on a pair of Nelson’s shoes, and studs from his belt were found at the church, according to testimony. Prosecutor Bob Gill said Nelson’s violence didn’t stop as he awaited his murder trial, and that he fatally strangling an inmate with a blanket. Nelson hasn’t been charged in that death.

“Now you know why the state decided to seek the death penalty,” Gill told jurors. “That’s all that can be done here. It could not be more clear.”

Defense attorneys asked jurors to spare Nelson’s life, saying his mother neglected him, his father abused him and he was prescribed medication for attention deficit disorder. But Nelson never got the help he needed, even after he set his mother’s bed on fire when he was 3, and never learned how to get along with others and not hurt people.

Referring to Nelson’s childhood, defense attorney Bill Ray said the initial decisions “that put him on a track for permanent derailment were beyond his control, and if that’s not a mitigating factor, I don’t know what is.”

PENNSYLVANIA – Johnson sentenced to death in murder of wildlife conservation officer

October 9,  2012 http://www.examiner.com

An Adams County man has been sentenced to death for the murder of a law enforcement officer, Thursday, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The death penalty verdict carries an automatic appeal. Earlier in the week, Christopher L. Johnson, 29, of Carroll Valley, was found guilty of first degree murder in the Nov. 11, 2010 shooting death of Pennsylvania Wildlife Conservation Officer David L. Grove, 31, a Waynesboro native. The case against Johnson was heard by a 12-member jury composed of Lancaster County residents, who were chosen for the trial that was held in Adams County Court. The change of venire was granted due to pretrial publicity. That jury deliberated for about 30 minutes.

The penalty phase of trial began Tuesday afternoon and ended Thursday night when the jurors returned their recommendation for the death penalty. To find the death penalty was warranted, the jurors had to determine that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstances. One of those circumstances was Johnson’s previous felony conviction.

Throughout the trial, which began the previous week, the prosecution painted a detailed picture of the shootout that led to Grove’s death. Officer Grove stopped a pickup truck, operated by Johnson, on Schriver Road, near Red Rock Road, in Freedom Township, Adams County. Grove was investigating a deer poaching incident., in connection with a poaching incident. Johnson had told police he fired at Grove because he did not want to go back to prison for illegally possessing a .45 caliber handgun when he was stopped.

At 10:32 p.m., that night, Officer Grove notified county dispatch that he had spotted a vehicle that was illegally using a spotlight to see deer. He also reported to county that he heard shots. Officer Grove pulled the pickup truck occupied by Johnson and another man and ordered them out of the vehicle. Grove then ordered Johnson to come to him.

Johnson was also wounded during the ensuing gun battle. On his way for treatment at York Hospital, Johnson told a state trooper who was accompanying him that he had been carrying the gun in his waistband. He said that when Officer Grove attempted to handcuff him, he drew the pistol and the shooting began. Officer Grove was shot four times.

A bullet fired by Officer Grove hit Johnson in the hip. Johnson fled the scene but was arrested and taken into custody the next day. A total of 15 shell casings fire from Johnson’s weapon were recovered at the scene. The fact that Johnson had to reload the pistol was another aggravating factor the jury considered in rendering its decision. Officer Grove fired 10 shots, from his .357-caliber Glock revolver.

The jury also found Johnson guilty of weapons offenses and game-law violations. That was another of the aggravating factors reviewed by the jury.

Grove can also appeal the conviction. Johnson has been committed to the State Correctional Institute at Rockview. Before a death sentence warrant can be signed by the governor, all of Grove’s appeals must be exhausted.

FLORIDA – Death penalty deliberations begin for convicted murderer – JOEL LEBRON

OCTOBER 5,2012 http://www.local10.com

The jury began deliberating whether they will recommend the death penalty for Joel Lebron, who was convicted last week in the 2002 kidnap, rape, and murder of Ana Maria Angel.

Last week, the same jury found Lebron guilty of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, sexual battery and sexual battery with a firearm.

Closing arguments started earlier in the day.

“There’s nothing wrong with this man. This man knew what he was doing,” said prosecutor Reid Rubin. “He knew how he was doing it. He enjoyed it. He enjoyed it so much he had an orgasm.”

State law outlines aggravators that make the death penalty apply and prosecutors are focusing on six of them.

“There is what’s called ‘heinous, atrocious and cruel.’ He did it because he thought she could identify him,” said Rubin.

Since Wednesday, the defense has been presenting mitigating factors to the jury, hoping jurors will consider any effects on Lebron from a childhood in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood, and a childhood car crash.

“Nothing that the state attorney just told you compels you in any way, shape, or form to recommend the death penalty,” said Rafael Rodriguez, Lebron’s attorney. “By your verdict, you have guaranteed that Joel Lebron will stay in prison for the rest of his life.”

The jury’s recommendation doesn’t have to be unanimous. Jurors began deliberating about noon.

According to investigators, Angel was 18-years-old in the spring of 2002 when she was out celebrating an anniversary with Nelson Portobanco, her boyfriend at the time, on South Beach when five people kidnapped them and forced them into their truck at gunpoint.

As they rode north to Orlando where the defendants came from, Angel was repeatedly raped and Nelson was beaten, said prosecutors. Police said Portobanco was eventually thrown out of the truck along I-95 and left for dead.

The five are accused of killing Angel execution-style at the side of I-95 near Boca Raton to keep her from identifying them. Police said Lebron, now 33, was the gunman.

Prior to Lebron’s conviction, three of the five defendants had already been convicted. Two were sentenced to life in prison; one is awaiting a second sentencing hearing because his death penalty sentence was overturned.

ALABAMA MAN FREED FROM DEATH ROW AFTER PROVING PROSECUTOR ILLEGALLY BARRED AFRICAN AMERICANS FROM JURY SERVICE

May 29, 2012 Source : http://www.eji.org

On May 18, 2012, Victor Stephens was taken off death row after 25 years and resentenced to life in prison. The result came after the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on October 6, 2011, found that the Hale County prosecutor who tried the case illegally discriminated against African Americans during jury selection.

Victor Stephens is African American. During his capital trial, the prosecution illegally used 21 of its 23 peremptory strikes to remove eligible African Americans from serving on his jury. The defense objected, arguing that the prosecutor’s strikes and the prosecutor’s notes made during trial revealed racially biased jury selection in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

The law requires prosecutors to give reasons for strikes if the judge suspects there is racial discrimination during jury selection. In his notes, the prosecutor wrote “need reason to strike” next to two black jurors but no white jurors, for whom the prosecutor instead wrote actual reasons, such as “hard of hearing.”

The defense argued that the fact that the State “need[ed a] reason to strike” two black jurors, while it did not “need [a] reason to strike” any white jurors, is direct evidence that the State first decided to strike these black jurors and then searched for a pretextual and facially race-neutral reason to give the court.

These notations, together with other evidence in the record, comprise overwhelming evidence proving the State illegally discriminated against African Americans in jury selection, the defense contended.

The federal court agreed, pointing out that the State’s purported reasons for excluding African Americans were not supported by the record and, in some cases, were contradicted by the jurors’ responses during jury selection.

The court further found the fact that the State had a chance to ask jurors about any discrepancies but did not suggests the prosecutor’s explanation was a sham and a pretext for discrimination. “[Unless he had an ulterior reason for keeping [a potential juror] off the jury,” the federal court reasoned, “this court would expect that the prosecutor would have cleared up any misunderstanding by asking further questions.”

In contrast, the prosecutor did ask white potential jurors follow-up questions and did not strike white potential jurors who shared the same “reasons” as black jurors who were struck.

Concluding that the prosecutor illegally excluded black potential jurors based on their race, the federal court vacated Mr. Stephens’s conviction and sentence, granting him a new trial. The State settled the case without a new trial and, on May 18, Mr. Stephens was re-sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

A recent report by EJI found that racially biased use of peremptory strikes and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection remains widespread, particularly in serious criminal cases and capital cases. Hundreds of people of color called for jury service have been illegally excluded from juries after prosecutors asserted pretextual reasons to justify their removal.

DELAWARE : Jury recommends death penalty for Cooke

may 3,2012 source : http://www.newarkpostonline.com

A New Castle County Superior Court jury recommended Thursday, in a vote of 11 – 1, that James Cooke receive a death sentence for the May 2005 rape and murder of University of Delaware student Lindsay Bonistall in her off-campus apartment in Newark.

Cooke’s first conviction and sentence, in 2007, were thrown out by the Delaware Supreme Court in 2009 because his public defenders argued that he was guilty but mentally ill, despite the fact that Cooke repeatedly claimed his innocence.

Newark’s fire chief discovered the lifeless body of Bonistall, a University of Delaware junior, in the bathtub of her Towne Court apartment on May 1, 2005 while responding to a report of possible arson. Graffiti written on the apartment’s walls included racially charged words like “KKK” and “White power.” An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled and raped.

Cooke, now 41, who lived about a block away from Bonistall’s apartment complex, was also tried and convicted of two nearby burglaries of two young women in the days leading up to Bonistall’s killing.

Judge Charles Toliver will make the final ruling on whether Cooke will receive life or death. No date has been set for that ruling. Delaware law requires judges to give “great weight” to the jury’s recommendation.

Lindsey Bonistall’s mom : ‘This the end of difficult time’ 

watch the video : click here 

NORTH CAROLINA – Judge Blocks Death Sentence Under Law on Race Disparity

april 20, 2012 source : http://www.nytimes.com

Marcus Reymond Robinson

Concluding that racial bias played a significant factor in the sentencing of a man to death here 18 years ago, a judge on Friday ordered that the convict’s sentence be reduced to life in prison without parole, the first such decision under North Carolina’s controversial Racial Justice Act.

Reading a summary of his ruling from the bench, Judge Gregory A. Weeks of Cumberland County Superior Court said that “race was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise peremptory challenges during jury selection by prosecutors” when the inmate, Marcus Reymond Robinson, was being tried.

The disparity was strong enough, the judge said, “as to support an inference of intentional discrimination.”

From the jury box where they sat, the relatives of the man Mr. Robinson killed, Erik Tornblom, watched in disappointed silence. Mr. Robinson, wearing all white, was seated with his lawyers, his head lowered as the judge read his ruling.

The state said it would appeal.

The landmark ruling is expected to be the first of many under the law, which allows defendants and death row inmates to present evidence, including statistical patterns, that race played a major role in their being sentenced to death.

Over the course of the hearing, lawyers for Mr. Robinson presented the findings of a study by Michigan State University researchers showing that prosecutors used peremptory challenges to remove blacks from juries more than twice as often as they used such challenges against whites. The study, which Judge Weeks called valid and reliable, found that disparity existed statewide, and to an even greater degree here in Cumberland County and in Mr. Robinson’s trial in particular.

Prosecutors, who have fiercely opposed the law since it was passed in 2009, criticized the Michigan State researchers’ methodology, but, more pointedly, they said that jury selection was a “complex discretionary system,” with thousands of possible reasons to remove a potential juror. To assume that race was the motive behind many of these decisions, prosecutors said, was not only wrong, but offensive.

“They do not have evidence of purposeful discrimination,” Rob Thompson, an assistant district attorney in Cumberland County, said in his closing arguments. “They do not have some secret society of prosecutors maniacally plotting to remove people from juries. They do not have any of that because there is no such evidence. It doesn’t exist. They have numbers.”

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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