[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ARIZ., NEV., GA.

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 26



ARIZONA----new execution date

Death sentence given to killer----Warrant comes same day as U.S. high
court agrees to weigh lethal injections


Despite pending arguments over lethal injection in the U.S. Supreme Court,
the Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a death warrant for a 2-time
murderer who strangled a man to death in Phoenix in 1989.

Jeffrey Timothy Landrigan,43, is scheduled to be executed on Nov. 1 for
the murder of Chester Dean Dyer. It will be the 2nd execution this year
after a 7-year lapse. Robert Comer was executed by lethal injection on May
22.

Landrigan, like Comer, may choose to die in the gas chamber or by lethal
injection.

According to court documents and press accounts, Landrigan killed Dyer on
Dec. 13, 1989 after an afternoon of sex and drinking. Dyer, 42, was found
strangled and stabbed in his apartment, with a deck of pornographic
playing cards strewn across the bed where his body lay and the ace of
hearts propped on his back. Police were able to track Landrigan from
fingerprints and a bloody footprint left at the apartment.

Landrigan had already been sentenced to death once for killing a boyhood
friend in Oklahoma. But that sentence was overturned on appeal, and
Landrigan signed a plea agreement that gave him 40 years in prison. Then
he escaped from prison and found his way to Phoenix where, according to
court records, he supported himself by "robbing."

Landrigan's Arizona death warrant came on the same day that the U.S.
Supreme Court agreed to hear the cases of 2 Kentucky death row inmates who
claim that death by lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual
punishment and is therefore forbidden under the U.S. Constitution. The
justices will likely hear the issue in January.

"It would be unfair to execute Mr. Landrigan while this issue remains
unresolved," said Landrigan's attorney, Dale Baich. "We hope the attorney
general recognizes this uncertainty and asks the state Supreme Court to
stay the execution."

Baich, a federal public defender, also filed a case in federal court on
Sept. 14, challenging the state's method of administering lethal injection
on behalf of seven other Arizona death row inmates. The suit alleges that
the chemicals that paralyze the body and stop the heart could cause
insufferable pain if the initially administered anesthesia wears off too
soon.

(source : Arizona Republic)

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

Nov. 1 execution date set for 1-time escapee


An Arizona death-row inmate has an execution date.

A death warrant issued by the state Supreme Court sets a Nov. 1 execution
for Jeffrey Landrigan, who can choose to die either by injection or the
gas chamber.

Landrigan escaped from an Oklahoma prison in 1989, where he was serving
prison terms for a 1982 murder and a 1986 prison stabbing. After a night
of drinking beer in Phoenix a month later, Landrigan killed Chester Dyer
by stabbing him and strangling him with an electrical cord.

The U.S. Supreme Court in May reversed a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
decision granting Landrigan a hearing on his claim that his lawyer didn't
do enough to fend off the death sentence.

(source: Tucson Citizen)






NEVADA----new and impending execution date

Oct. 15 date set for Nevada execution


Nevada prison officials have scheduled Oct. 15 for the execution of
William Castillo, sentenced to death for beating a retired Las Vegas
teacher to death with a tire iron.

Planning for the lethal injection, which Castillo isn't trying to stop,
will proceed despite the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Tuesday to consider
whether lethal injections violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and
unusual punishment. The high court's review involves two death row inmates
in Kentucky.

"We're not going to delay anything based on the Supreme Court hearing the
Kentucky case," Nevada Corrections Director Howard Skolnik said. "There's
no reason for us to do that. Mr. Castillo has requested that we go ahead,
and we are going to honor his request."

Castillo, 35, was sentenced to die for the 1995 killing of Isabelle
Berndt, 86, after working on a roofing job at her home and finding a
hidden house key. He and a woman companion returned, burglarized the home
and murdered Berndt.

Castillo set the home on fire to destroy evidence, but he later admitted
the murder to a co-worker and confessed to police. His companion in the
burglary and murder was Michelle Platou, 28, now serving a life term with
the possibility of parole for first-degree murder.

In an appeal rejected by the state Supreme Court in 2004, Castillo's
attorneys argued he may have been the victim of abuse while growing up,
adding that his father spent time in prison and his mother had been a
prostitute.

Castillo's juvenile record includes runaways, emotional instability,
attempted murder, arson, larceny, threats to life, destruction of county
property and possessing an unregistered firearm.

By the time he was eight, Castillo had drowned his grandmother's dog,
killed birds by smashing them against rocks, tried drugs and had been
caught while trying to burn down a Las Vegas casino, according to court
records.

Prosecutors said he went through every corrections and rehabilitation
program Nevada had to offer by age 13 - including 5 stays at the youth
reformatory in Elko.

As an adult, he served 14 months in prison for a burglary and then did
another 2 years for a purse-snatching incident prior to Berndt's murder.

If he's executed, Castillo will be the 13th man to get the death sentence
in Nevada since the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for capital
punishment to resume in 1976. All but one of the previous 12, Richard
Moran, had refused to file appeals that could have stopped their
executions.

Moran, executed in 1996 for 2 killings in a Las Vegas bar while on a drug
and alcohol binge, didn't oppose legal efforts to keep him alive - but
said he was ready to die.

The last man to be executed in the state was Daryl Linnie Mack, who
received a lethal injection in April 2006. Mack was convicted of the rape
and murder of a Reno woman.

(source: Associated Press)

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

Oct. 15 date set for Nevada execution


Nevada prison officials have scheduled Oct. 15 for the execution of
William Castillo, sentenced to death for beating a retired Las Vegas
teacher to death with a tire iron.

Planning for the lethal injection, which Castillo isn't trying to stop,
will proceed despite the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Tuesday to consider
whether lethal injections violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and
unusual punishment. The high court's review involves 2 death row inmates
in Kentucky.

"We're not going to delay anything based on the Supreme Court hearing the
Kentucky case," Nevada Corrections Director Howard Skolnik said. "There's
no reason for us to do that. Mr. Castillo has requested that we go ahead,
and we are going to honor his request."

Castillo, 35, was sentenced to die for the 1995 killing of Isabelle
Berndt, 86, after working on a roofing job at her home and finding a
hidden house key. He and a woman companion returned, burglarized the home
and murdered Berndt.

Castillo set the home on fire to destroy evidence, but he later admitted
the murder to a co-worker and confessed to police. His companion in the
burglary and murder was Michelle Platou, 28, now serving a life term with
the possibility of parole for 1st-degree murder.

In an appeal rejected by the state Supreme Court in 2004, Castillo's
attorneys argued he may have been the victim of abuse while growing up,
adding that his father spent time in prison and his mother had been a
prostitute.

Castillo's juvenile record includes runaways, emotional instability,
attempted murder, arson, larceny, threats to life, destruction of county
property and possessing an unregistered firearm.

By the time he was eight, Castillo had drowned his grandmother's dog,
killed birds by smashing them against rocks, tried drugs and had been
caught while trying to burn down a Las Vegas casino, according to court
records.

Prosecutors said he went through every corrections and rehabilitation
program Nevada had to offer by age 13 - including 5 stays at the youth
reformatory in Elko.

As an adult, he served 14 months in prison for a burglary and then did
another 2 years for a purse-snatching incident prior to Berndt's murder.

If he's executed, Castillo will be the 13th man to get the death sentence
in Nevada since the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for capital
punishment to resume in 1976. All but one of the previous 12, Richard
Moran, had refused to file appeals that could have stopped their
executions.

Moran, executed in 1996 for 2 killings in a Las Vegas bar while on a drug
and alcohol binge, didn't oppose legal efforts to keep him alive - but
said he was ready to die.

The last man to be executed in the state was Daryl Linnie Mack, who
received a lethal injection in April 2006. Mack was convicted of the rape
and murder of a Reno woman.

(source: Las Vegas Sun)

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

Execution date set for Clark County killer


A date of Oct. 15 has been set for the execution of death row inmate
William Castillo.

Castillo, 35, was convicted in 1996 in Clark County for the murder of
retired school teacher Isabelle Berndt.

Bernt, 86, was beaten to death in her home by Castillo with a tire iron.
The motive for the killing was robbery, according to prosecutors.

Castilo set the home on fire to destroy evidence, but later admitted the
murder to a co-worker and confessed to police.

Castillo was convicted of 1st-degree murder with the use of a deadly
weapon and sentenced to death. He was also convicted of arson, burglary
and robbery.

(source: Nevada Appeal)






GEORGIA:

High court botched death reviews----In justifying death sentences,
Georgia's Supreme Court has repeatedly cited overturned cases.

 Is the process fixable?

 Faulty death reviews by the numbers

Georgia's highest court has mishandled a critical step in overseeing the
death penalty, undermining a promise of evenhanded justice made 30 years
ago, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.

By law, the state Supreme Court must make sure every death sentence is in
line with punishment in similar cases and throw out sentences that are
disproportionately severe. Typically, the court's proportionality review
cites a dozen or more comparable sentences for similar crimes.

The newspaper's analysis shows the court's reviews have been perfunctory
and often inaccurate. Since 1982, 19 % of cases cited by the court to
justify death sentences had already been thrown out on appeal. Another 17
% were reversed after the reviews cited them.

Murder charges were dropped altogether in a few of the reversed cases. In
another case, Robert Lewis Wallace won a new trial and was acquitted by a
2nd jury that heard testimony the gun fired accidentally. The state
Supreme Court cited Wallace's death sentence 5 times after he was freed.

"That's unbelievable," Wallace's lawyer, Samuel "Chip" Atkins of Augusta,
said of the Supreme Court's citations. "It just sounds like incompetence
to me."

Even lawyers who specialize in capital cases  and finding new issues to
litigate  have overlooked the mistakes in the court's proportionality
reviews.

"Death penalty lawyers get so caught up in the most recent constitutional
challenge  the hot issue of the day  sometimes they miss what's staring
them right in the face," Atlanta defense lawyer Jack Martin said. "And we
all just assumed that the Supreme Court was doing the right thing, wasn't
being so sloppy."

Leah Ward Sears, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, expressed
concern over the newspaper's findings.

"No member of this court would defend a flawed proportionality review,"
Sears said in a statement. "As such, we have and are taking steps to
improve the process on our end."

Sears declined to specify those improvements but said the court would take
"a very long, hard look" at its use of overturned cases.

The court's ultimate inquiry in a death case is whether the facts of a
particular crime are heinous enough to warrant execution, the chief
justice said.

The court's faulty reviews cited 23 death sentences that the justices had
set aside themselves or had upheld a lower court's decision to do so. In
all, the reviews cited 76 overturned sentences.

The flawed reviews include some for inmates whose executions could be
scheduled soon, including Jack Alderman of Chatham County, convicted of
killing his wife with another man's help for the insurance proceeds.

In 1985, the state Supreme Court cited 20 similar cases to justify
Alderman's death sentence. But the Journal-Constitution found 10 of them
had already been overturned. Seven other cited sentences have been
overturned since then.

Reviews flawed

When Georgia asked the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold its new death penalty
law in 1976, the state's attorneys pledged the statute's proportionality
review would weed out arbitrary and capricious sentences.

"The search for disproportionality in the sentence is meant to ensure
fairness when the case is compared to other, similar cases," then-Attorney
General Arthur Bolton wrote in the state's legal brief.

>From 1974 through 1981, the court threw out death sentences for the
nonfatal crimes of armed robbery, rape and kidnapping with bodily injury.
In each case, the court ruled execution would be disproportionate to less
severe sentences imposed for those crimes.

The Journal-Constitution examined 159 death penalty rulings by the state
Supreme Court since 1982. Eighty percent cited at least one overturned
case; in more than 1/3 of the decisions, at least 25 percent of the cited
sentences had been overturned.

Another 16 rulings contained citations that were reversed afterward. Only
14 rulings cited no reversed cases, the newspaper found.

The justices defended the practice in 2000, ruling overturned cases could
be cited if the grounds for reversal did not involve a jury's
consideration of the evidence.

But the Journal-Constitution found that four dozen cases cited by the
court had been reversed because of major problems that could have
influenced the jury's decision: evidentiary issues, prosecutorial
misconduct, confusing or inadequate jury instructions by the judge, or
bungling by defense attorneys.

"The court thought it was doing a decent job at it," said former Chief
Justice Harold Clarke, who served on the state Supreme Court from 1979 to
1994. "But after reflecting on it, maybe we were not doing all the things
that could have been done."

Norman Fletcher, who retired in 2005 after 4 years as chief justice, said
the justices relied too much on clerks and were unaware the cases had been
overturned.

"We did not do a good job on proportionality," he said. "I believe the
problem was we were unable to gather all the necessary data and didn't
have the resources necessary to formulate a proper analysis."

The problem peaked in 1991, the Journal-Constitution found. That year, the
court upheld nine death sentences; more than a third of the "similar"
sentences cited in those rulings had been overturned.

Graphic on Hall's case

Few cases illustrate the sloppiness of the reviews better than Dennis
Charles Hall's.

The court cited 20 death sentences to justify death for Hall. But it did
not note that 16 of them had been thrown out. Of those, 15 defendants were
later given life sentences, including 3 who were later released on parole.

Some sentences had been overturned because defense lawyers had not
investigated the case or presented mitigating evidence, judges gave
inadequate jury instructions or prosecutors made improper comments to the
jury. One death sentence was thrown out because the jury never knew that
the victim, the defendant's husband, was an abusive drunk who had
previously beaten his wife and knocked out her teeth.

In 1990, Hall killed his 10-year-old son during a struggle with his wife
over a shotgun in Barrow County. An abusive parent whose blood-alcohol
content was five times the legal threshold, Hall grew angry when Adrian
would not stop playing with a remote-controlled toy tractor while Hall was
watching TV.

Justice Robert Benham dissented when the court affirmed Hall's death
sentence. The 20 "similar" cases, he argued, were far more aggravated than
Hall's in that they involved mutilation, sexual abuse or prolonged
torture.

Hall's case, while abhorrent, was "only an angry domestic confrontation
ending in a fatal shooting," Benham wrote.

Hall's conviction was overturned 7 years later when a judge ruled his
attorney did a poor job. The jurors had never learned that the gun was
defective and could have discharged accidentally. They had been told Hall
had locked his family outside in 10-degree weather weeks before the
killing. If Hall's lawyer had checked, he would have found it was 52
degrees that day.

Hall was re-sentenced to life in prison. But his prior death sentence,
riddled with errors, would show up again.

In 2001, the Georgia Supreme Court cited Hall's initial death sentence to
justify the one imposed on Cobb County child killer Virgil Presnell.

"It shows the lack of any meaningful review," said Tom Dunn, executive
director of the Georgia Appellate Practice and Educational Resource
Center, which handles death-row appeals.

"They're using cases that were reversed for substantive reasons to
indicate another death sentence is proportional," Dunn said. "How can you
use an inappropriate death sentence to do that? It doesn't make any
sense."

because a crucial witness perjured himself. Defendant Howard Jones was set
free because prosecutors lost key evidence and could not retry the case.

Yet the Supreme Court has cited Jones' sentence 20 times since then to
justify other death sentences.

PATH TO THE DEATH PENALTY

Prosecutors sought death in about 1/4 of eligible cases from 1995-2004,
but resolved most of those with a plea bargain for a sentence other than
death.

 2,328 total murder convictions from 1995-2004

 1,315 total cases eligible for the death penalty

 344 cases in which the death penalty was sought

 127 total death penalty cases going to trial

 57* total death sentences

 Georgia juries sent 4.3 percent of eligible murderers to death row.

*Includes 8 cases that were overturned and the defendants not resentenced
to death.

Court officials could not explain how Jones' reversal was overlooked. Nor
would they disclose how the court tracks appeals.

Traditionally, a clerk appointed by the chief justice has done its
proportionality research. The clerk, who has other duties regarding
capital cases before the court, must be an attorney.

Death sentences can be overturned by: the trial judge, the Georgia Supreme
Court, a state court judge during a habeas corpus appeal, the federal
courts or the U.S. Supreme Court.

Curtis French, a former death penalty clerk for the state Supreme Court in
the 1980s and early 1990s, expressed surprise that the court's decisions
cited so many overturned cases.

French said he would not have included a case in the review if he had
known it had been overturned. "But there's no automatic notification by
one court to the Georgia Supreme Court that relief was granted," he said.

The state Attorney General's Office knows when a death sentence is
overturned or a new trial granted because it litigates death penalty
appeals. The office notifies the state prison system and the local
prosecutor.

Tracking appeals is often called "shepardizing," derived from Shepard's
Citations, a legal resource that has kept up with court cases since 1873.

The Journal-Constitution's analysis used Shepard's to determine the
outcomes of some death sentence appeals. The newspaper supplemented that
information with rulings retrieved from county courthouses and the
LexisNexis legal database, and with case histories initially compiled
decades ago by a volunteer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a proportionality review is
unnecessary if a state's law does not require it. A number of states later
repealed their proportionality reviews, but Georgia did not.

Other states have struggled with proportionality reviews.

The North Carolina Supreme Court overturned a case on proportionality
grounds in 2002, throwing out a death sentence for a woman who plotted her
husband's murder.

Florida law does not require a review but its Supreme Court conducts one
anyway. In May, the court found a death sentence disproportionate for a
condemned killer with a long history of mental illness.

In July, the Florida court vacated Christopher Jones' death sentence for a
2001 killing during a robbery. Finding no evidence of premeditation or
intention to eliminate a witness, the court said the sentence was
disproportionate to similar cases.

Entitled to 'meaningful review'

Defense lawyers, who aggressively litigate many issues in capital appeals,
have rarely challenged the state Supreme Court's review for citing
overturned cases.

Seven years ago, lawyers for Troy Anthony Davis, a Savannah man sentenced
to death for killing a police officer, challenged his proportionality
review. The appeal noted that four of the 6 sentences cited in Davis'
review in 1993 were overturned either before or after the Davis decision.

Justice Carol Hunstein wrote the ruling that rejected Davis' challenge.
The proportionality review is concerned with the way juries reacted to the
evidence in similar cases, she wrote, and it is "irrelevant" if those
decisions were reversed for reasons unrelated to the juries'
deliberations.

Hunstein declined comment for this article.

But the Journal-Constitution found the court's proportionality reviews
have cited dozens of "similar" sentences that were overturned for reasons
concerning evidence and jurors' assessment of the evidence. They include
cases in which:

The prosecution failed to prove an aggravating circumstance, a required
element of a death sentence.

A defendant's lawyers didn't show the jury their client had saved two
people's lives in the years before the murder.

A defendant's lead lawyer slept through parts of the trial. The defense
team did not even know the key witness could not identify the defendant.

Other sentences cited by the court to justify death penalties had been
overturned because the racial composition of the jury pool did not reflect
the community. One case was thrown out because the district attorney
excluded blacks and women from the jury pool.

Sears, the chief justice, acknowledged that cases cited in the court's
proportionality reviews may have been reversed.

"When this court cites older cases, it is primarily interested in what
evidence the juries in those older cases actually heard at the time that
led them to impose the death sentence, not what evidence those juries
should have heard," she said in a prepared statement.

Tim Floyd, a Mercer University law professor, said the court should
conduct new reviews for condemned prisoners whose proportionality reviews
cited a substantial number of overturned cases.

"They are entitled to a meaningful review  but not the way the court has
been doing it," Floyd said. "A meaningful proportionality review is
essential under the Georgia statute."

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

Is the review process fixable?----Citing overturned cases only part of
problem, critics say


Critics charge the Georgia Supreme Court's proportionality review would
still be useless if the court stopped citing overturned cases.

Defense lawyers have repeatedly complained the state's highest court
conducts a narrow review that cannot determine whether a death sentence is
truly out of line when compared to other similar cases. But the court has
refused to expand its review.

After Georgia reinstated capital punishment in 1973, the court conducted a
far more extensive review of death sentences, comparing them with similar
cases in which killers received life in prison. Through 1981, the court
reversed 10 death sentences on proportionality grounds.

But with rare exceptions, the court more than 20 years ago dropped life
sentences from its pool of comparison cases. The court has not thrown out
a death sentence on proportionality grounds since 1981.

By excluding life sentences, critics say, the court cannot know when a
death sentence is out of line.

For a husband who kills his wife in a fit of rage, for example, the
court's review looks for similar cases that also received a death
sentence. But the court would not know how often juries imposed life
sentences in such cases or how many times prosecutors had not sought death
at all.

"It's simply not meaningful because the court never looks to see whether
there are similar or worse cases in which death was not given," said Amy
Donnella, a Pennsylvania lawyer who litigates death cases in Georgia.

Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears said the court must rule whether the facts
of a particular murder warrant the death penalty. If they do, she said in
a statement, it does not matter whether other murderers whose crimes were
equally severe escaped the death penalty.

Georgia's statute does not require comparing a death sentence with others
that received life. It says the court must determine whether a death
sentence "is excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in
similar cases, considering both the crime and the defendant."

In January 2006, an American Bar Association team of former judges and
prosecutors, law professors and defense lawyers described Georgia's
proportionality review as "cursory" with "limited value."

The team said Georgia should compare death sentences with a much larger
pool of cases, including those in which death was never pursued. Until it
does, the review is "incapable of discovering potentially serious
disparities," the report said.

Rome attorney Norman Fletcher, who served 15 years on the court, said he
became concerned as chief justice about inequities in seeking the death
penalty.

"Some [crimes] were so awful and the DAs didn't seek it," he said. "Some
that got death sentences shouldn't have been there."

Fletcher said a clerk helped him look for a better way to conduct reviews.
But they could not come up with a reliable process to distinguish more
aggravated murders from less heinous ones, he said.

"There was no single person on the court with staff or time to actually
ferret out every possibility and come up with a new formula that would
help to weed out the cases that shouldn't proceed as death penalty," he
said.

Fletcher expressed his frustration in a 2002 opinion, in which he
acknowledged the court did not know whether its review cited a large or
small percentage of factually similar cases.

"Perhaps," Fletcher concluded, "the process for determining whether a
sentence is disproportionate can be improved and, if so, then it should be
done."

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

Faulty death reviews by the numbers


Since 1982, the Georgia Supreme Court has issued 159 rulings that upheld
death sentences by citing other sentences as comparable.

An analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found 129 of those
rulings, or 80 %, cited death sentences that had previously been
overturned. Only 30 rulings did not cite already-reversed cases.

The newspaper found:

Almost 19 % of the cases cited had already been overturned on appeal.
Another 17 % were overturned after the court cited them.

- In 55 decisions, at least one-fourth of the sentences cited had been
overturned.

- 23 sentences were cited in the reviews after the court itself had
overturned them or noted another court's decision to do so.

- 1 death sentence imposed against Jessie Pulliam but overturned in 1979,
was cited 37 times after it was reversed.

Overall, the court mistakenly cited 76 death sentences that had been
overturned. The most common reasons for the reversals:

- 24 cases ineffective defense lawyers

- 21 cases improper jury instructions by judge

- 20 cases jury did not hear critical evidence

- 5 cases jury heard evidence that should have been excluded

- 10 cases improper jury selection or jury pool

- 9 cases improper statements by prosecutor

(source for all: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

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

Humphreys Could Receive Death Penalty For Real Estate Murders


The penalty phase in the Stacey Ian Humphreys murder trial starts
Wednesday in Brunswick, Ga.

A jury convicted Humphreys of murder Tuesday in the 2003 slayings of 2
Cobb County real estate agents.

Humphreys faces the death penalty for killing Cyndi Williams, 33, and Lori
Brown, 21, after robbing them at their Powder Springs sales office on Nov.
3, 2003. Both women were found stripped naked and shot in the back of the
head.

The jury of 10 women and 2 men spent about 4 1/2 hours deliberating
Tuesday before reaching a verdict.

(source: CBS News)