[Deathpenalty] [SPAM] death penalty news----TEXAS, ARIZ., CALIF., N.C.

[Rick Halperin]

April 24



TEXAS:

Texas Death Row Inmate Wins Reprieve Days Before Execution


Death row inmate Beunka Adams, 29, who was scheduled to receive a lethal 
injection this week for killing an East Texas man after robbing a convenience 
store, won a reprieve Monday from a federal judge.

Adams was scheduled to die just after 6 p.m. Thursday in Huntsville for the 
September 2002 slaying of Kenneth Vandever, 37, outside of Rusk.

Vandever and 2 women who worked at the store were abducted during the robbery.

1 of the women was raped, and then all 3 were shot.

The women survived, but Vandever died.

Adams’ lawyers convinced U.S. District Judge Michael Schneider in Texarkana 
that the execution should be delayed until the courts review allegations that 
Adams had poor legal help in the early stages of his appeals.

It's unclear if the Texas Attorney General's office would or could appeal 
Monday's ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Adams in October 2011.

The robbery happened on Sept. 2, 2002.

Authorities say Adams and his co-defendant Richard Cobb, who’s also on death 
row, entered the store wearing masks and demanded money.

Cobb, authorities say, was armed with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Vandever was the only customer in the store at the time.

Adams ordered him and the 2 women, who both worked at the business, to the 
front of the store and then demanded cash from the register. After getting the 
money, he demanded keys to a car that was parked in front of the business and 
one of the women, who borrowed the vehicle to get the work, complied.

The 3 victims were forced into the car and Adams drove toward Alto, eventually 
pulling into a field, authorities said.

Adams, Cobb and the 3 victims got out and Adams ordered one of the women and 
Vandever to get into the trunk.

Then he led the other woman away and raped her, authorities said.

Later Adams and Cobb ordered the 3 victims to kneel on the ground.

A short time later the women heard 1 shot, and then a 2nd, authorities said.

A few moments later, the women said they heard Vandever cry out, “They shot 
me.”

A 3rd shot struck one of the women in the shoulder and the other, who tried to 
play dead, was injured when the shotgun was fired net to her face.

The 2 women ran after Adams and Cobb left.

Officers found Vandever dead of a shotgun wound to the chest.

(source: KWTX News)






ARIZONA----impending execution

Arizona execution nears for Tom Kemp in 1992 killing


Tom Kemp, who faces execution Wednesday, went to death row for kidnapping and 
murdering a college student near Marana in 1992.

He was, and remains, a hard case. At his sentencing, he said his only regret 
was not killing an accomplice who turned him in. Kemp did admit to "a deep and 
abiding sense of remorse," he said, that his friendship kept him from killing 
the accomplice.

But he had no remorse for killing Hector Juarez, whose naked body he left in 
the desert near Marana.

At his sentencing, Kemp noted that Juarez was not an American citizen and he 
offered up a diatribe against Mexican immigrants that made it clear he had no 
intention of seeking mercy for the killing, telling the court, "I spit on the 
law and all those who serve it."

Kemp's attorney at the time argued that Kemp had a personality disorder that 
made him perceive everyone else as dishonest and opportunistic, and therefore 
moved him to do anything he could to get something for himself.

He still refuses to ask for mercy. He chose not to appear before the Arizona 
Board of Executive Clemency earlier this month.

In a handwritten note, he said, "I, Thomas Kemp, state that I decline to seek 
executive clemency due to the futility of that process. In light of the board's 
history of consistently denying requests for commutations, my impression is 
that a hearing in my case would be nothing short of a dog and pony show."

There's very little in the record about Kemp, 63. He was born in California in 
1948, lived near Chico and was the youngest of five children. He deserted from 
the U.S. Army in 1968 and served time in prison for robbery. He worked as a 
maintenance man in a trailer park near Tucson, where he lived with his mother.

In July 1992, Kemp and a friend named Jeffrey Logan bought a gun. Logan and 
Kemp had met in a California prison, from which Logan recently had escaped.

Juarez was a 25-year-old community-college student. On July 11, 1992, he waited 
for his girlfriend to come home to their apartment from her job at a local 
shopping mall, and then he took her car at 11:15 p.m. to pick up something to 
eat. When he didn't return by midnight, the girlfriend went to the 
apartment-complex parking lot and found the car unlocked. It still smelled like 
fast food, but Juarez was gone. His body was found July 25, 1992, near the 
Silver Bell Mine northwest of Tucson. He had 2 bullets in his head and was 
wearing nothing but his shoes and socks.

Kemp and Logan were already gone. They'd apparently forced Juarez to withdraw 
$200 from his bank account, and after they killed him, they tried 
unsuccessfully to withdraw more. They drove to Flagstaff, where they repainted 
Kemp's truck and sold it for $650 on July 15.

But they needed another vehicle for their getaway, so they carjacked a couple 
and forced them to drive to Durango, Colo. There, in a hotel room, Kemp forced 
the man to disrobe and sexually assaulted him. The couple escaped and contacted 
police in Kansas. Logan was arrested in Denver and led Tucson police to 
Juarez's body in the desert. Kemp was arrested in a homeless shelter in Tucson.

While in jail in Pima County, Kemp effectively confessed to killing Juarez when 
he told 2 corrections officers that he was afraid of being housed with Mexican 
prisoners because he had killed a Mexican.

Logan received a sentence of life in prison, which he is serving in Arizona 
under a different name.

Kemp was convicted of 1st-degree murder, armed robbery and kidnapping in June 
1993. He was sentenced to death a month later. That sentence will be carried 
out Wednesday.

(source: Arizona Republic)






CALIFORNIA:

Californians to vote on abolishing death penalty


California voters will soon get a chance to decide whether to replace the death 
penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A measure to abolish capital punishment in California qualified for the 
November ballot on Monday, Secretary of State Debra Bowen said.

If it passes, the 725 California inmates now on Death Row will have their 
sentences converted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It 
would also make life without parole the harshest penalty prosecutors can seek.

Backers of the measure say abolishing the death penalty will save the state 
millions of dollars through layoffs of prosecutors and defense attorneys who 
handle death penalty cases, as well as savings from not having to maintain the 
nation's largest death row at San Quentin State Prison.

Those savings, supporters argue, can be used to help unsolved crimes. If the 
measure passes, $100 million in purported savings from abolishing the death 
penalty would be used over three years to investigate unsolved murders and 
rapes.

The measure is dubbed the "Savings, Accountability, and Full Enforcement for 
California Act," also known as the SAFE California Act. It's the fifth measure 
to qualify for the November ballot, the secretary of state announced Monday. 
Supporters collected more than the 504,760 valid signatures needed to place the 
measure on the ballot.

"Our system is broken, expensive and it always will carry the grave risk of a 
mistake," said Jeanne Woodford, the former warden of San Quentin who is now an 
anti-death penalty advocate and an official supporter of the measure.

The measure will also require most inmates sentenced to life without parole to 
find jobs within prisons. Most death row inmates do not hold prison jobs for 
security reasons.

Though California is one of 35 states that authorize the death penalty, the 
state hasn't put anyone to death since 2006. A federal judge that year halted 
executions until prison officials built a new death chamber at San Quentin, 
developed new lethal injection protocols and made other improvements to 
delivering the lethal 3-drug combination.

A separate state lawsuit is challenging the way the California Department of 
Corrections and Rehabilitation developed the new protocols. A judge in Marin 
County earlier this year ordered the CDCR to redraft its lethal injection 
protocols, further delaying executions.

Since California reinstated the death penalty in 1978, the state has executed 
13 inmates. A 2009 study conducted by a senior federal judge and law school 
professor concluded that the state was spending about $184 million a year to 
maintain Death Row and the death penalty system.

Supporters of the proposition, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are 
portraying it as a cost-savings measure in a time of political austerity. They 
count several prominent conservatives and prosecutors — including the author of 
the 1978 measure adopting the death penalty — as supporters and argue that too 
few executions have been carried out at too great a cost.

"My conclusion is that he law is totally ineffective," said Gil Garcetti, a 
former Los Angeles County district attorney. "Most inmates are going to die of 
natural causes, not executions."

Garcetti, who served as district attorney from 1992 to 2000, said he changed 
his mind after publication of the 2009 study, which was published by Judge 
Arthur Alarcon of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and law professor Paula 
Mitchell.

Opponents of the measure, such as former Sacramento U.S Attorney McGregor 
Scott, argue that lawyers filing "frivolous appeals" are the problem, not the 
death penalty law.

"On behalf of crime victims and their loved ones who have suffered at the hands 
of California's most violent criminals, we are disappointed that the ACLU and 
their allies would seek to score political points in their continued efforts to 
override the will of the people and repeal the death penalty," said Scott, who 
is chairman of the Californians for Justice and Public Safety, a coalition of 
law enforcement officials, crime victims and others formed to oppose the 
measure.

The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, meanwhile, remains one the biggest 
backers of the death penalty in the state and opposes the latest attempt to 
abolish it in California. The foundation and its supports argue that federal 
judges are gumming up the process with endless delays and reversals of state 
Supreme Court rulings upholding individual death sentences.

The foundation on Thursday filed a lawsuit seeking the immediate resumption of 
executions in California. The foundation's lawsuit, filed directly with the 
state Court of Appeal, argues that since the three-drug method has been the 
subject of so much litigation — and the source of the execution delays — a 
one-drug method of lethal injection like Ohio uses can be substituted 
immediately.

(source: Fox News)






NORTH CAROLINA:

N.C. Ruling Is a Step Toward Honesty About Death Penalty’s Racism ---- A N.C. 
judge ordered that a death-row inmate’s sentence be reduced to life in prison. 
David R. Dow says it's about time we talked about capital punishment's history 
of racism.


A quarter century after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racism in the 
application of the death penalty doesn’t matter, we’re finally beginning to 
have an honest discussion about how we justify legally killing people.

On Apr. 20, a judge in North Carolina relied on a new state law to order that a 
death-row inmate’s sentence be reduced to life in prison, after finding that 
his trial had been so irreversibly tainted by racism that executing him would 
violate the Constitution.

I want to pause here to recognize the momentousness of this ruling: A judge in 
an Southern active death-penalty state just upheld the rule of law, even though 
it meant sparing the life of a convicted murderer.

To be clear, there was no question about the man’s guilt.

21 years ago, Marcus Robinson shot and killed 17-year-old Erik Tornblom. He 
stole Tornblom’s car and took $27 from his wallet. But Superior Court Judge 
Gregory Weeks concluded that despite Robinson’s horrendous crime, there was no 
doubt that racism infected the state’s criminal-justice system—specifically, 
that prosecutors intentionally kept blacks off of capital juries—and that this 
same racism presumptively infected Robinson’s trial too. He ruled that even 
abhorrent crimes do not nullify the Constitution’s guarantee of racial 
equality.

Weeks’s ruling—the 1st invocation of the new Racial Justice Act—was the 1st 
step in repairing the damage done by one of the Supreme Court’s most notorious 
holdings: McCleskey v. Kemp, decided 25 years ago this month.

In that case, lawyers for Warren McCleskey—who had been sentenced to death for 
killing Atlanta police officer Frank Schlatt—proved that black defendants are 
statistically more likely than whites to face the death penalty, and that 
murderers whose victims are white are more likely to face death than killers 
whose victims are black. In numerous contexts—for instance, allegations of 
employment discrimination, charges of bias in university admissions, and claims 
of police misconduct—parties can use general statistics to prevail, even in the 
absence of specific wrongdoing in their case. But in a 5-4 vote, the justices 
in McCleskey swatted it all away, carving out an exception for death-penalty 
cases.

Even overwhelming statistical evidence, they said, does not prove racism 
infected a particular trial. The court might as well have said that just 
because the KKK is a racist organization doesn’t prove that the murder of 
Emmett Till was racially motivated. The ruling was the legal equivalent of 
sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, “I can’t hear you!”

There were a few honest reactions one might have to the fact that the 
death-penalty system in America is deeply racist. You could say that we should 
punish whites more harshly, rather than blacks less severely. Or you could say 
people who commit murder forfeit their right to invoke legal niceties. The 
McCleskey court chose neither of these routes; instead it effectively said, So 
what? Racism doesn’t matter.

This was all the more galling since, to those of us in the death-penalty- 
defense business, none of what the McCleskey case brought to light was news. 
Study after study has shown that race often plays a role in death-penalty 
trials, in multiple ways: prosecutors are more inclined to seek a death 
sentence where the defendant is black, or where the victim is white. And, as 
Judge Weeks found in North Carolina, prosecutors routinely remove people of 
color from juries, leaving black defendants to be judged by juries that are 
overwhelmingly white. (In Texas, which carries out the overwhelming majority of 
executions in the country, the Dallas district attorney’s office was still 
using a manual in the 1980s instructing prosecutors to eliminate certain jurors 
based on their race.)

By holding that statistical evidence couldn’t establish the presence of racism, 
the McCleskey court effectively insulated racist practices, since prosecutors 
rarely send emails announcing their racist motivations (although sometimes, 
astonishingly, they do 
(http://www.statesman.com/ffoia/content/ffoia/districtattorneys/harris/031408_rosenthal.html#021508) 
).

North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act serves as a corrective to McCleskey by 
permitting death-row inmates to prevail even in the absence of a smoking gun. 
They can use statistical evidence to show the pervasive influence of race, and 
that demonstration carries with it a presumption that race infected their trial 
as well. In Robinson’s case, lawyers relied on a new study that examined 173 
death-penalty trials in North Carolina (PDF 
(http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/jss_revised_report_with_appendix_29_sept_2011.pdf) 
) and concluded that prosecutors strike blacks jurors at twice the rate they 
strike whites.

(Remarkably, the only 2 states to have taken steps to overturn the deplorable 
decision in McCleskey, Kentucky and North Carolina, are members of the old 
Confederacy.)

An optimistic take is that this could be the start of a new conversation about 
race and the death penalty in America.

Ever since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the 
practice’s supporters and opponents have engaged in what amounts to a 
three-decade therapy session, where all the scaffolding of rationalization has 
been stripped away, and what is left is human emotion.

You want to argue the death penalty deters crime? The day before Weeks’s ruling 
in North Carolina, the prestigious National Research Council issued a report 
concluding that after countless academic studies, there remains no evidence one 
way or the other for the death penalty’s deterrent effect.

The McCleskey ruling was the legal equivalent of sticking your fingers in your 
ears and saying, “I can’t hear you!”

You want to argue the death penalty is a good way to spend our money? In 
California 4 billion dollars has been spent on capital punishment 
(http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/california-cost-study-2011) … to execute 13 
people. The cost of keeping those 13 in prison for the rest of their lives 
would have added up to around one half of one percent of that amount. (This is 
assuming a cost of $50,000 per inmate, which is on the high side, for 50 years, 
which is also on the high side (http://www.cjpc.org/doc_doc_stats.htm) .)

There are still politicians who remain willing to break the bank to execute a 
few murderers, but it’s getting harder and harder to be fiscally irresponsible, 
and when California gives up on lethal injection because its costs are 
extravagant, the impact will be cataclysmic. The same California politicians 
who pushed for reinstatement of the death penalty 30 years ago have now changed 
sides 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/opinion/more-evidence-against-the-death-penalty.html) 
.

Now that we have indisputable proof, once again, of embedded racism, capital 
punishment can no longer be dressed up in intellectual garb. Death- penalty 
supporters and opponents are therefore divided by a single fault line: the 
so-called retributive rationale, the simple belief that someone who kills 
should be killed.

So how will this debate turn out? We don’t yet know, but it won’t end anytime 
soon: At least 150 people are waiting to have their cases reviewed under the 
new law. But we do know that, thanks to one North Carolina court, we’ll at 
least begin talking more honestly.

(source: David Dow, The Daily Beast)