[Deathpenalty]death penalty news----FLA., USA, ILL., OKLA.

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 23


FLORIDA:

AILEEN THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER -- FILM REVIEW


Documentary from Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill that traces the
tragic, farcical life of America's most renowned contemporary murderess to
its brutal conclusion

In 1992, British documentary maker Nick Broomfield made Aileen Wuornos:
The Selling Of A Serial Killer. The film was an insightful, justifiably
judgemental record of how those around prostitute-turned-murderess Wuornos
- who had been convicted of killing seven men, but always pleaded
self-defence - had tried to sell her story to Hollywood.

Broomfield indicted members of the Florida state police department,
Wuornos' Born Again Christian mother, and even her haphazard hippy lawyer.
With Aileen: The Life And Death Of A Serial Killer he returns to this most
potent of subjects. While he returns to threads set up in the first film
(it's pointed out that a case of the corrupt Florida cops was never
pursued), here Broomfield aims even higher - indicting the whole US legal
system for not just failing Wuornos, but for also insisting upon capital
punishment. As he says in voiceover, with typical sincerity cum naivety:
"It's been proven that the death penalty is absolutely no deterrent.
States without the death penalty, in fact, have lower murder rates." He
also points out: "The violence of taking life remains the same whether it
is legally sanctioned or not. It introduces murder into our vocabulary of
behaviour."

Such material makes for a powerful, provocative film, and even though
Broomfield typically places himself centre stage, the film is noticeably
less concerned with the filmmaker as star. Broomfield and
co-director/cinematographer Joan Churchill visit Wuornos on Death Row and
also attend further court cases. Broomfield is even subpoenaed himself to
appear as a witness at an appeal.

Wuornos, an articulate and intelligent woman in the earlier film, has been
tangibly broken by her experiences, not just by the punishment of prison,
but by the travails of the legal system and most significantly by the
wait. After receiving multiple death sentences ("How many times you gotta
kill me?!"), she has subsequently had to hang around for it to be carried
out - a cruel and unusual torment if ever there was one. To hasten her end
she suddenly announces that her murders had in fact been in cold blood,
not self-defence ("I'm so fuckin' mad - I gotta wait for my execution. I
want to go there tomorrow and get off. I'm so fucking angry."). She,
however, quietly refutes this in interview with Broomfield when she
seemingly believes the camera and recording equipment to be turned off
("Was it self-defence?" "Yes, but I can't say that.")

Although the film doesn't deny Wuornos' guilt, it does investigate the
formation of her personality, and how she ended up living a lifestyle that
led her to be becoming a murderer. Her abusive background in Troy,
Michigan, involved violence, probable incest, a virtual pariah status
after giving birth at 13 and subsequent homelessness and prostitution.
This is most patently not a heartless psychopath who is intelligently
manipulating the filmmaker, but the product of a failed community and,
subsequently, legal system. "You sabotaged my life, society!" Aileen
shouts in her final interview. The way Broomfield presents the story, it's
hard to argue with her. Most sickening of all, however, is the final
gesture of Florida Governor Jed Bush, whose pet psychiatrists deem Wuornos
mentally fit (a requisite of execution), despite her moments of abject
paranoia and delusion (which take the form of rambles informed by
religion, counter-culture and sci-fi). She was executed on 9 October 2002
in Florida.

Broomfield and Churchill's film is inevitably manipulative: documentary
has a voice, an agenda and a narrative like any other type of
storytelling. But the characters and facts here rise above any
contrivance. As an anti-death penalty tract, this is so much more valid
and hard-hitting than fictional liberal dramas like The Life Of David
Gale.

(source: Channel 4 (UK)

*************************

{NOTE----Danish national faces death penalty]


Denmark Watching Weston Man's Murder Trial ----Dispute Over Death Penalty
Expected If Man Is Convicted


A South Florida murder trial is getting international attention because
the defendant could face the death penalty and the country in which he
maintains citizenship considers it barbaric.

Maxwell McCord, who maintains dual citizenship in Denmark and the United
States, is accused of killing his wife.

Prosecutors say Maxwell McCord -- who has dual citizenship in the United
States and Denmark - beat and strangled his wife to death.

Police said that McCord told them he and his wife, high school teacher
Marie Noguera, were shopping at the mall. He said she forgot her purse,
and went back to their Weston home and he later took a cab. He said when
he got home, he found her murdered.

Investigators said McCord's story started to unravel when they found
surveillance tapes that showed McCord driving out of the development when
he was supposed to have been on his way to the mall with his wife.

The case is getting international attention as the government of Denmark
is expected to voice its disapproval of the death penalty.

Niles Tradsfeldt, a reporter from Denmark, said, "I feel about 95 % the
population and the Parliament are against death penalty - I feel he is
Danish as well as American, and if he is found guilty and if he sentenced
to death, I'm sure there's going to be some political pressure to contact
the American government to try and save his life."

The jury is currently being selected. The trial itself is expected to take
six to eight weeks to complete. For now, it's not clear if McCord will
take the witness stand in his own defense.

One focus of the prosecution is expected to be his wife's life insurance
policy.

(source: Local10.com.)






USA:

Activist Angela Davis Urges Examination of "New Racisms" at Vanderbilt
Lecture


Racism is not static. The racism we encountered in the civil rights era is
not the same racism we encounter today. Now most people recognize it is
not acceptable to explicitly support white supremacy, that is not to say
they do not support it implicitly. The point I want to make is that just
because the law no longer provides for the overt expression of racism does
not mean that racism is not a major factor in our contemporary lives.

I remember in the 60's I was visiting my family in Birmingham. At that
time Birmingham was still the most segregated city in the South. Now I
went to hear Dr. King who was expected to talk about civil rights, but
instead he talked about Vietnam. The point of his lecture was that the
struggle for civil rights is integrally related to the struggle to end
war.

I mention this because there is an urgent context to the current
situation. It seems that precisely those institutions which claim to be
making the world safe for democracy are those institutions which are
waging war and violence around the world.

Now this is black history month and I was recalling the way we celebrated
it in the past when it was called "negro history week." At the elementary
school I attended we were expected to do projects for this week. I
remember pulling out all the Ebony and Jet magazines to see who I wanted
to include. I mention this story because I might suggest that we want to
think about who is important, and who we might want to include. People
such as Mae Jensen, the first black women astronaut, and Shirley Chisholm,
the first black female congressperson. She is the reason we celebrate MLK
day. Of course there is Thurogood Marshall, the 1st black supreme court
justice.

I say all of this to note that there are some firsts that I have more
difficulty celebrating. There was a time when we believed that a success
for one was a success for the entire community. This is why we celebrated
firsts. The purpose of black history month is not so much to recite
history and figures and dates, but rather to reflect on the knowledge we
have acquired, so that we all might know the meaning of freedom and
democracy.

I am not suggesting that other groups cannot celebrate the likes of
Condaleeza Rice, but I think the NAACP made a terrible mistake in its
recent honoring of her. The progressive and radical inheritance of black
history has not been claimed by all African Americans. As Dr King showed
us so many years ago, the modes of domination are linked on the most
obvious levels, but there are other connections.

I would like us to think about the connections in the past that have
helped us contest anti-black racism. You see racism is not static. The
racism we encountered in the civil rights era is not the same racism we
encounter today. No longer are there explicit references to race in the
law. I can remember a time when there were laws prohibiting any relations
between blacks and whites except economic. Now most people recognize it is
not acceptable to explicitly support white supremacy, that is not to say
they do not support it implicitly. The point I want to make is that just
because the law no longer provides for the overt expression of racism does
not mean that racism is not a major factor in our contemporary lives.

The racism that resides in the material structure of our society may be
even more dangerous than old fashioned racism. Race still determines who
gets to go to prison and who doesn't. Of the 2 million people currently in
prison, 70% are people of color. The military, too, bears the mark of
racism, and not in the sense that Colin Powell, another first, means when
he calls the military the most democratic institution in this country.

I am talking about race structuring institution. So many men and women of
color and poor people rely on the military as their only hope for an
education. These are the obvious ways racism tends to hide in the
structures of society. According to the law, everyone in prison has had
due process. The problem is the law is unable to apprehend the difference
that race makes and so conspires to send people of color to the worst
places our society creates.

As black people we have become accustomed to the status of the most
oppressed. We need to do something about this. We might even go so far as
to be offended if someone else claims that status from us. We need to
include discussion of sexual orientation in our discussion of civil
rights. The topic of gay marriage has created all this controversy, while
failing to critique the institution of the family itself. African-American
cultural traditions do not necessarily represent a nuclear family, which
is based on male supremacy. Marriage is an economic arrangement in this
culture, based on property relationships.

The terrain of racism is very different today. It is hugley infected by
ideologies of the war against terror. We must look at how anti-arab, anti-
muslim racism is being reconstructed by our culture. I want to reflect on
Abu Ghraib, that infamous American torture prison camp. Why is it that we
are able to forget the impact of those images. It seems to me those images
are the visual example of these new racisms. These people are basically
forgotten.

We live in an environment populated by images and oftentimes we cannot
distinguish between the images and the social reality we inhabit. We
assume the power of the visual expresses the truth of the image. Meanings
are not self evident. There are interpretive frameworks. What were the
dominant interpretations of the Abu Ghraib photos? It seems to me one of
the dominant questions was does this depict torture? Was it systematic?
The major discussion around these photos was to try to explain American
democracy. The human content of these images was erased. We think of these
people as faceless Iraqis who don't have names. This reminds me of
lynchings and the photos of lynchings. What we have is the materialization
of an ideologically constructed enemy. Not to mention the pornography of
the images and the role white women play in this construction.

Race and racism are mutable. The civil rights movement was great, it was
important, but it can't provide a permanent context in which we can refer
to the present and the future. Globalization is a new context. I want us
to think about the extent to which black folks have been invited to
participate in these new racisms. That figure of the terrorist gets
associated with historical racisms. I would like to urge us all not to
accept the easy answer, but to think more deeply.

Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, argued the Geneva Convention is
outdated. What we have learned from the Bush administration is that there
are connections - connections between the soldiers who perpetrated abuses
in Abu Ghraib and the roles they played in their previous lives as prison
guards. Women undergo strip searches and cavity searches routinely in this
country. This is about sexual assault. There is a connection between these
everyday tortures and those spectacular tortures. We have someone like
Gonzales, who is Bush attorney general, who was his counsel as governor of
Texas, who suggested that every case of state sponsored murder go forward,
including of the mentally retarded, in an administration that oversaw the
most executions of an state in US history.

People do not want to be associated with the US anymore, with this drive
for empire. Even those of us who are progressive still think the US is
better. We are in for a rude awakening. In Europe the US is persona non
grata. The death penalty is one of the reasons. People in Europe ask us
how could we elect George W. Bush. If we replace the words "freedom and
democracy" with "capitalism" then we can understand more clearly what the
Bush administration is about.

We have been encouraged to forget about the gross violations of human
rights that happen when democracy is "exported." This is really about the
juggernaut of privatization. Across the golbe there are people standing up
for a better future. Concerned people who are not afraid to dream about a
better world. A non-exploitative world is possible, if we are linked by
solidarity and mutuality and respect, in the spirit of so many people's
lives that we remember in black history month. They all worked and we all
should work to reach the conditions of radical social transformation.

(source: Tennessee Independent Media Center)






ILLINOIS:

Assessing life and death


It's tempting to assume that once a piece of legislation passes, it
miraculously goes into effect, playing out exactly as intended and the
world is better for it.

Tempting, yes. Realistic, no. When the Illinois legislature passed reforms
to the death penalty system in 2003, the sponsors knew that. They had the
foresight to create a committee that would monitor the changes and report
annually to the General Assembly on progress and pitfalls.

That made enormous sense, given that the purpose of the moratorium on
executions is to provide time to fix a woefully flawed criminal justice
system. It will be instructive to learn how well the efforts, such as
videotaping police interrogations and changing eyewitness lineup
procedures, are playing out.

The group charged with monitoring the death penalty reforms met for the
first time last week. Its members are quickly realizing that the scope of
their job, as described by law, is whisper thin. So thin, they're starting
to question whether the panel will serve any useful purpose.

"If you really want to have a meaningful death penalty reform study
committee, which is what this is, it should be broadened," said former
U.S. Atty. Thomas Sullivan, chairman of the committee. As it stands, the
panel is limited to looking only at those reforms put in place by the
legislature in 2003.

That excludes any evaluation of legislation and Supreme Court rule changes
put in place prior to the 2003 reforms, such as efforts to address the
problems of inadequate defense counsel. That excludes various
recommendations that former Gov. George Ryan's Commission on Capital
Punishment directed to police departments and the courts.

Sen. John Cullerton, chief sponsor of the most sweeping package of
reforms, called the narrow language "probably just an oversight" and said
he would help rectify the situation. Sen. Kirk Dillard, who sits on the
panel, also agreed that the committee's scope should be broadened.

It would take a simple piece of legislation to make the panel's work
authoritative and comprehensive. Gov. Rod Blagojevich has said he would
support such a measure. While legislative leaders are at it, they should
provide a small budget to help panel members with data collection,
research and travel expenses.

Many of the reforms passed in 2003 haven't gone into full effect, so it's
hard to gauge just how much the system has improved. There's plenty of
anecdotal evidence suggesting Illinois still has a long way to go before
moral certainty in capital prosecutions is restored.

Illinois decision-makers now know an awful lot about how badly the death
penalty has been administered in this state. They will need far more than
anecdotal evidence to assess whether there has been progress on that
score.

(source: Editorial, Chicago Tribune)






OKLAHOMA:

2 New Execution Dates Requested


Attorney General Drew Edmondson has requested execution dates for 2 men
convicted in separate murders in Oklahoma County.

Edmondson has asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to set
execution dates within 60 days for 48-year-old Garry Thomas Allen and
39-year-old George James Miller Junior.

Edmondson said he made the requests after the US Supreme Court denied the
defendants' final appeals.

Allen was convicted of the November 21st, 1986, murder of Lawanna Gail
Titsworth. Titsworth, the mother of Allen's 2 sons, was shot to death as
she attempted to pick them up at a day care center in Oklahoma City.
Miller was convicted of the September 17th, 1994, murder of Gary Kent
Dodd. Dodd was working as the night auditor at an Oklahoma City hotel when
Miller stabbed him repeatedly, beat him with hedge shears and a paint can
and poured muriatic acid down his throat.

Edmondson says his office had examined the cases to determine if DNA
testing would be useful and found that it would have no relevance in
determining the defendants' innocence.

***************************

Prosecutors Argue For Death In Eizember Sentencing


Creek County prosecutors are arguing today for the death penalty for
convicted killer Scott Eizember.

Eizember was convicted yesterday in Canadian County District Court of
1st-degree murder in the beating death of A-J Cantrell and of 2nd-degree
murder for the shooting death of Cantrell's wife, Patsy.

Assistant District Attorney Mike Loeffler told jurors today the killing of
A-J Cantrell was heinous, atrocious and cruel as the 76-year-old man was
beaten with a shotgun after seeing his 70-year-old wife shot.

The jury that convicted him will recommend whether he be given the death
penalty or life in prison for A-J Cantrell's murder. The jury has
recommended a 150-year-prison sentence for the murder of Patsy Cantrell.

Defense attorneys say Eizember's life should be spared in part of a
difficult childhood that included the deaths of his mother and stepmother.

Eizember eluded police for 37 days after killing the Cantrells until he
was found in the food bank of a Depew church. He took a church volunteer's
car that he abandoned near Waldron, Arkansas, where he allegedly kidnapped
an Arkansas doctor and his wife and forced them to drive him to Texas.

He was arrested outside Lufkin, Texas, after the doctor shot and wounded
him with a gun his wife kept in their van.

(source for both: Associated Press)