[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----DEL., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 6



DELAWARE----impending execution

Mercy sought as Delaware execution nears: Robert Gattis

UA: 5/12 Index: AMR 51/002/2012 USA Date: 6 January 2012

URGENT ACTION

Mercy sought as delaware execution nears -- Robert Gattis is scheduled to be 
executed in the US state of Delaware on 20 January for a murder committed in 
1990. Aged 27 at the time of the crime, he is now 49 a fter spending almost 20 
years on death row . He is seeking commutation of his death sentence.

Shirley Slay, aged 27, was shot dead in her apartment at around midnight on 
9/10 May 1990. Robert Gattis, with whom she had had a six-year relationship, 
turned himself into the police the following day and was charged with the 
murder. At the 1992 trial, the jurors convicted him of first-degree murder and 
decided by 10 votes to two that he should be executed. The judge sentenced 
Robert Gattis to death on 29 October 1992, ruling that “after balancing all of 
the circumstances, both aggravating and mitigating, mercy is not warranted in 
this case”.

2 decades later, a clemency petition to the state Board of Pardons seeks 
commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility 
of parole. It argues that the jury and the trial judge had heard little of 
Robert Gattis’s “horrific past”, namely that he had suffered “extreme and 
sustained sexual, physical abuse throughout his childhood – abuse, experts have 
concluded, that was ‘catastrophic’ to his development”. A forensic psychologist 
who has reviewed Robert Gattis’s background of abuse, neglect, abandonment, 
poverty and deprivation, and his history of self-harm and suicide attempts, has 
assessed him as suffering from, among other things, Post-Traumatic Stress 
Disorder and Major Depressive Order, linked to his severe childhood abuse.

This information was only revealed after 2006, after Robert Gattis’s ordinary 
appeals had been exhausted. In 2009, his lawyers filed a motion in federal 
court seeking an order authorizing consideration of a second habeas corpus 
petition based on the new information. The lawyer who had represented Robert 
Gattis for over a decade in state and federal appeals said that he was “frankly 
shocked” to learn of the level of abuse. He admitted his failure to “thoroughly 
investigate, uncover and present the information”, and that his close 
professional and personal ties to one of the trial lawyers had “in all 
probability affected the level of scrutiny I brought to bear on his performance 
in representing Mr Gattis.” The Court of Appeals denied the motion, ruling that 
the information could have been discovered earlier through “due diligence”.

According to the clemency petition, Robert Gattis has “consistently expressed 
remorse” for the crime and shown a “sustained commitment to rehabilitation”, 
including through his positive influence on younger inmates and his 
relationship with his two sons. An expert on male victims of abuse has said 
that “His current adjustment provides a glimpse of the person Robert could have 
been, if only appropriate interventions had been available to him when he was 
young”. Four former prison officers who knew Robert Gattis are supporting 
clemency. Governor Jack Markell can grant a temporary reprieve, but cannot 
commute the death sentence without such a recommendation from the Board of 
Pardons. The Board is holding a hearing on 9 January, and is expected to make 
its decision soon after.

Please write immediately in your own language:

Expressing concern that the judge and jury never heard compelling evidence 
about Robert Gattis’s background;

Calling on the Board of Pardons to recommend that Governor Jack Markell grant 
clemency to Robert Gattis.

PLEASE SEND APPEALS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, AND B EFORE 20 JANUARY 2012 :

Delaware Board of Pardons

Fax: + 1 302 739 3811

Email: pardons at state.de.us

Salutation: Dear Members of the Board

Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date.

URGENT ACTION

Additional Information

Under Delaware law, “extreme emotional distress” is a recognized defence to 
capital murder. In 2009, the lawyers who had uncovered the history of abuse in 
Robert Gattis’s childhood and adolescence presented this information to the 
trial lawyers and the mental health experts they had consulted before the 
trial. One of the experts said that if he been aware of Gattis’s life history, 
“I would have concluded that Mr Gattis was likely under the influence of 
extreme emotional distress at the time of the offense”. Another of the experts 
similarly stated that the new information demonstrated that “Mr Gattis’s 
formative years were characterized by extreme sexual, physical and emotional 
abuse, in addition to poverty, neglect and abandonment… Mr Gattis’s background 
and consequent emotional and mental deficits support a mental health defense to 
first-degree capital murder (extreme emotional disturbance)”. A third expert 
wrote that if he had been provided with the information about Robert Gattis’s 
background, he would have looked for evidence of whether the defendant was 
“under the influence of extreme emotional distress at the time of his offense, 
as both a guilt phase and penalty phase defense”.

In a statement signed on 13 April 2009, the trial lawyer who had been 
responsible for investigating Robert Gattis’s background said that “these new 
materials reveal that Mr Gattis’s life was far more traumatic and chaotic than 
I previously realized”, and that if he could try the case again, he would 
develop and present the “compelling defense” of “extreme emotional distress”. 
He added that at the time the lawyers had not had “any formal training on how 
to defend a capital defendant”, and that he now recognized that “the manner in 
which we handled capital cases at the time of Mr Gattis’s trial was 
inadequate”. The lawyer who had represented Robert Gattis for more than 10 
years during the appeal process admitted that he was “frankly shocked to learn 
of the poverty, abuse, dysfunction, sexual improprieties and trauma suffered by 
my client”. He said it put the case in “an entirely different light”, light 
that was “stunning in its scope and profound in regard to missed opportunities 
at his trial and in his post-conviction proceedings.”

The death penalty in the USA is marked by arbitrariness, discrimination and 
error. The USA appears gradually to be turning against this punishment. There 
were 43 executions in the USA in 2011, compared to 46 in 2010 and 52 in 2009. A 
more marked decline can be seen in the annual death sentencing total which has 
fallen by about two-thirds since the mid-1990s. In 2011, the number of death 
sentences passed during the year fell below 100 for the first time since 
executions resumed in 1977, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

While international human rights law, including article 6 of the International 
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), recognizes that some countries 
retain the death penalty, this acknowledgment of present reality should not be 
invoked "to delay or to prevent the abolition of capital punishment", in the 
words of article 6.6 of the ICCPR. The USA ratified the ICCPR nearly 20 years 
ago. The UN Human Rights Committee, the expert body established under the ICCPR 
to monitor the treaty’s implementation, has said that article 6 "refers 
generally to abolition in terms which strongly suggest that abolition is 
desirable. The Committee concludes that all measures of abolition should be 
considered as progress in the enjoyment of the right to life". Today 139 
countries are abolitionist in law or practice.

Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases, regardless of the 
crime, the offender or the method of execution. There have been 1278 executions 
in the USA since judicial killing resumed there in 1977, including 15 in 
Delaware. There are 18 people under sentence of death in Delaware – all men. 11 
of these inmates, including Robert Gattis, are black. There has been one 
execution in the USA so far in 2012, carried out in Oklahoma on the evening of 
5 January.

(source: Amnesty International)






USA:

Continued Majority Support for Death Penalty ---- More Concern among Opponents 
about Wrongful Convictions


Overview

Public opinion about the death penalty has changed only modestly in recent 
years, but there continues to be far less support for the death penalty than 
there was in the mid-1990s.

A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew 
Forum on Religion & Public Life, conducted Nov. 9-14, 2011, among 2,001 adults, 
finds that 62% favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder while 31% 
are opposed. That is generally in line with polling on the death penalty over 
the past several years.

During the mid-1990s, when the Pew Research Center first surveyed on this 
issue, support for the death penalty was at a historic high point. In 1996, 78% 
favored capital punishment for people convicted of murder. Support for the 
death penalty subsequently declined, falling to 66% in 2001 and 62% in late 
2005. Since then, support has mostly remained in the low-to-mid-60s, though it 
dipped slightly (to 58%) in October 2011.

When Gallup first asked about the death penalty in 1936, 59% registered support 
for the policy. This fell to an all-time low of 42% in 1966, which was the only 
time over the course of 75 years in which there was more opposition (47%) than 
support. Gallup’s trend showed that support for the death penalty grew again 
over the course of the 1970s and 1980s and peaked in the mid-1990s

More Concern about Wrongful Convictions

When asked why they oppose the death penalty, 27% of opponents say it is wrong 
or immoral to kill someone, while an identical percentage (27%) cite concerns 
about flaws in the justice system and the possibility that innocent people 
could be put to death.

In a Gallup survey 20 years ago, when just 18% opposed the death penalty, a 
much higher percentage of death penalty opponents (41%) cited moral 
considerations and there were far fewer mentions of problems with the justice 
system or wrongful executions (11%).

The majority of Americans who support the death penalty today offer largely the 
same reasons that supporters gave 20 years ago. Roughly half (53%) say the 
punishment fits the crime or that it is what murderers deserve. A smaller share 
raises concerns about the costs of keeping murderers in prison for life (15%). 
Relatively few death penalty supporters cite deterrence (6%) or keeping 
murderers from committing more crimes (5%) in explaining their position.

Racial and Partisan Differences over the Death Penalty

The death penalty continues to draw much more support from whites (68%) than 
from African Americans (40%). Among Hispanics, 52% favor the death penalty for 
people convicted of murder while 42% are opposed.

Large majorities of conservative Republicans (84%) and moderate and liberal 
Republicans (73%) support the death penalty, as do 64% of independents. Among 
Democrats, conservatives and moderates favor the death penalty by 55% to 37% 
while liberals oppose it by about the same margin (54% to 40%).

Majorities of major religious groups, except for black Protestants, favor the 
death penalty for people convicted of murder. Roughly three-quarters of white 
evangelical Protestants (77%) and white mainline Protestants (73%) support the 
death penalty. Somewhat fewer white Catholics (61%), Hispanic Catholics (57%) 
and the religiously unaffiliated (57%) favor capital punishment for convicted 
murderers.

About the Survey

The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted Nov. 
9-14, 2011, among a national sample of 2,001 adults, 18 years of age or older, 
living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (1,200 respondents 
were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 801 were interviewed on a cell 
phone, including 397 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted 
by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton 
Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell 
phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey 
Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. 
Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the 
youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample 
were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an 
adult 18 years of age or older. For detailed information about our survey 
methodology, see http://people-press.org/methodology/

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative 
technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin and 
nativity, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2010 
Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample also is weighted to match 
current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell 
phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2010 National 
Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact 
that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability 
of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within 
the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take 
into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the sample 
sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% 
level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon 
request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording 
and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias 
into the findings of opinion polls.

(source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press)