[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----GA., FLA., MO., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 10


GEORGIA:

Georgia's Merciless Push to Kill ---- Injustice in Robert Wayne Holsey's Case


Even by the abysmal standards of lawyering that defendants in capital trials 
regularly endure, Robert Wayne Holsey's case stands out.

In 1997, Mr. Holsey was convicted and sentenced to death for killing a Georgia 
sheriff's deputy named Will Robinson, who had pulled him over for robbing a 
convenience store. Despite evidence that Mr. Holsey was intellectually disabled 
- which should have barred him from execution under the United States Supreme 
Court's earlier rulings - his lawyer neglected to make that argument at trial. 
Mr. Holsey was executed on Tuesday evening after the Supreme Court declined to 
stay his execution.

The evidence of Mr. Holsey's mental deficits included an I.Q. test score of 70 
when he was 15. In school, his intellectual functioning did not move past a 
4th-grade level. But under Georgia law, a defendant is required to prove his 
intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt - the strictest standard in 
the country and one unmoored from scientific reality.

Mr. Holsey's new lawyers challenged Georgia's standard under a Supreme Court 
decision issued in May that reaffirmed and clarified its 2002 ban on executing 
intellectually disabled people. Laws that do not provide a fair chance to prove 
intellectual disability, the court wrote, "deny the basic dignity the 
Constitution protects." The justices should have stayed Mr. Holsey's death 
sentence on that ground alone. The egregious failures of his trial lawyer, Andy 
Prince, added to the injustice.

During the trial, Mr. Prince, a lifelong alcoholic, was drinking a quart of 
vodka a day. He was also facing his own criminal investigation for stealing 
more than $100,000 in client funds. Before the trial was over, he was arrested 
and charged with brandishing a gun, threatening to shoot his black neighbors 
and yelling racial slurs at them. (Mr. Prince is white, and Mr. Holsey is 
black.)

Mr. Prince, who was disbarred and sent to prison for theft of funds, later 
said, "I shouldn't have been representing anybody in any case."

Georgia, like other "death belt" states, will go to great lengths to execute 
the people it has sentenced to death. It is hard to understand how the Supreme 
Court, which spoke so clearly on the unconstitutionality of executing 
intellectually disabled people, could stand aside and allow Mr. Holsey to die.

(source: Editorial, New York Times)

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

Central Georgians Protest Holsey execution in Macon


A small group of protesters gathered outside the Macon-Bibb Government Complex 
Tuesday night protesting the scheduled execution of Robert Wayne Holsey.

He's the man convicted of killing Baldwin County sheriff's deputy Will Robinson 
in 1995 and sentenced to die for that crime in 1997.

The group appeared mostly silent and told 13WMAZ's Karli Barnett they 
maintained that silence to allow for prayer. They bore signs that read 'Thou 
shalt not kill' and 'Execute Justice, Not People'. Some of them represented a 
group called Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

At different times they formed prayer circles, joining hands to pray for Holsey 
and others sentenced to die by lethal injection.

(source: WMAZ news)






FLORIDA:

State Seeks Death Penalty vs. Dr. Adam Frasch


Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty against a doctor accused of 
killing his wife at their Golden Eagle home.

Adam Frasch was indicted last month in the death of his estranged wife Samira 
Frasch.

She was found dead in the swimming pool in February 2014 and he was found later 
that same day with the couple's 2 children in Panama City.

Prosecutors have filed paperwork saying they intend to seek the death penalty.

Frasch's attorney, Clyde Taylor, says it's a move to put "pressure on the 
defense" and calls it ironic because a sitting judge would not sign off on an 
arrest warrant.

Prosecutors had no comment on the filing.

Frasch is slated to be in court next week.

(source: WCTV news)






MISSOURI----execution

Missouri executes prisoner over hammer murder ---- Paul Goodwin, 48, receives 
state's 10th lethal injection this year despite last-minute appeals to supreme 
court


A Missouri inmate has been executed for fatally beating a 63-year-old woman 
with a hammer in 1998, a record 10th lethal injection of 2014 for the state. It 
now matches Texas for the highest number of executions in the US this year.

Paul Goodwin, 48, sexually assaulted Joan Crotts in St Louis County, pushed her 
down a flight of stairs and beat her on the head with a hammer. Goodwin was a 
former neighbour who felt Crotts played a role in getting him kicked out of a 
boarding house.

Goodwin's execution began at 1:17am, delayed more than an hour after it was 
scheduled because supreme court appeals continued into the early morning. He 
was pronounced dead at 1:25 am He declined to make a final statement.

Efforts to spare Goodwin's life centred on his low IQ and claims that executing 
him would violate a supreme court ruling prohibiting the death penalty for the 
mentally disabled. His lawyer, Jennifer Herndon, said Goodwin had an IQ of 73, 
and some tests suggested it was even lower.

Goodwin's sister, Mary Mifflin, wrote in a statement that the death penalty "is 
not a just punishment for his crime - an act that occurred out of passion, not 
premeditation, by a man with the mental capabilities of a child, not an adult".

But Goodwin's fate was sealed when Missouri's governor, Jay Nixon, denied a 
clemency request and the supreme court turned down legal appeals - 1 on the 
mental competency question and one concerning Missouri's use of an execution 
drug purchased from an unidentified compounding pharmacy.

6 people attended the execution on Goodwin's behalf, including his mother and 
two sisters. 10 of Crotts's relatives attended, all wearing purple, her 
favorite colour.

Her son Robert Becker recalled his mother as, "a pleasantly ornery Germany 
woman". That stubbornness was evident in her final hours, he said, when she 
stayed alive long enough to provide information to police that helped lead to 
the killer.

Another son, Kent Becker, said the execution "cannot erase the memory of having 
to clean up your mother's murder scene".

Missouri's 10th execution of 2014 surpasses the state's previous high of 9 in 
1999. Neither Missouri nor Texas has another execution scheduled this year. 
Texas, Missouri and Florida combined carried out 28 of the 34 executions in the 
US this year.

Goodwin received special education as a child but still failed several grades, 
Mifflin wrote. He relied on relatives or his girlfriend to help with buying 
groceries or paying bills, she said. When his girlfriend died, Goodwin turned 
to alcohol, which was a factor in his attack on Crotts, Mifflin wrote.

Crotts's daughter, Debbie Decker, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch that Goodwin 
deserved no mercy. "I've been sitting back waiting for this to happen," Decker 
said of the execution. "I'm hoping all these bad memories will go away."

Missouri has scheduled 1 execution each month since November 2013. 2 were 
halted by court action, but 12 were carried out over the past 14 months.

Goodwin becomes the 10th condemned inmate to be put to death in Missouri this 
year and the 80th overall since the state resumed capital punishment in 1989. 
Only Texas (518), Oklahoma (111), Virginia (110), and Florida (89) have 
executed more inmates since the death penalty was re-legalized in the USA on 
July 2, 1976.

Goodwin becomes the 35th and final inmate to be executed this year in the USA 
and the 1394th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977. 
It is the fewest executions in the country since 1994, when 31 inmates were put 
to death.

(sources: The Guardian & Rick Halperin)






CALIFORNIA:

End death penalty or charade of delays


Why even seek the death penalty when it hasn't been implemented in California 
in nearly a decade and when Democrats who rule the state allow it to linger in 
perpetual limbo?

Jan Scully, the outgoing district attorney for Sacramento, answered the 
question without a hint of cynicism on Tuesday - quite a feat considering how 
cynical people on both sides of this issue have become.

Some death penalty supporters have come to believe that death penalty cases 
just waste taxpayer money because legal obstacles have prevented anyone from 
being put to death in California since Clarence Ray Allen was executed by 
lethal injection on Jan. 17, 2006.

Yet there was Scully, and her counterpart from Placer County, announcing they 
would seek the death penalty for Luis Enriquez Monroy Bracamontes, the Mexican 
national accused of killing 2 law enforcement officers in a terrifying late 
October crime spree that gripped the region.

"The death penalty is still in force in California. It's still the will of the 
voters, and by not following this law we disrespect the will of the voters," 
Scully said.

It's true. California should either abolish the death penalty or abolish the 
legal charade of endless delays. State prisons house about 750 people sentenced 
to death, but only 13 inmates have been executed since 1978.

That fight could be returning to the ballot box in 2016. But before it does, 
consider points that death penalty opponents are loath to admit. In California, 
death penalty convictions are rarely overturned, Scully said.

In Scully's 20 years as Sacramento County's DA, prosecutions by her office have 
sent just 10 men to death row. "If you look at the cases where the death 
penalty has been found, they stand out," Scully said. "They are very rare."

Bracamontes is accused of carrying out a shooting and carjacking spree that 
terrorized residents from Sacramento to Auburn and resulted in the deaths of 2 
peace officers. The facts of the case have not been presented in court, but 
what is publicly known is chilling enough. What's the right thing to do?

Life without the possibility of parole is often offered as a more humane 
alternative, but some disagree. The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news 
organization, recently reported that solitary confinement - the alternative to 
death penalty employed in some states - is hardly humane.

"Some people condemned to solitary have chosen a swift and certain death over a 
life of daily torture. Data suggests that as many as half of all prison 
suicides take place in some form of isolation," according to a Marshall Project 
commentary piece published by the Huffington Post recently.

There is no safe moral distance from this issue, even though we try to pretend 
there is. Some crimes and criminals are just different. Sometimes the 
punishment fits the crime.

(source: Opinion, Marcus Breton; Sacramento Bee)

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

Accused Deputy Killer Certainly Meets Death Penalty Criteria, Attorney Says


Luis Enrique Monroy Brocamontes gripped his cell bars Tuesday as prosecutors 
announced they will seek the death penalty against him.

Brocamontes, known previously as Marcelo Marquez, is accused of of killing 2 
sheriff's deputies, injuring a 3rd and shooting and injuring another man during 
a multi-county rampage on Oct. 24.

Defense attorneys formally asked the prosecution to reconsider, but the chances 
of that are slim, according to the man who wrote the California death penalty 
initiative and put it on the ballot in 1978.

"(Brocamontes) meets every single criteria for a special circumstance and 
execution," former U.S. Attorney Don Heller said. He designed his death penalty 
initiative with a long list of special circumstances needed to qualify someone 
for death row.

1 of those qualifications is if the murder victim is a peace officer.

"It was an attempt to offer police officers maybe 1 chance out of a thousand, 
the opportunity to avoid someone killing them," Heller told FOX40.

The district attorney's office released a statement today, which reads:

"Input from the victim's families was solicited, received, and considered 
during the decision making process. Both offices independently concluded that 
the death penalty is the appropriate penalty in this instance."

But Heller says it's a tough situation.

California taxpayers forked over around $4 billion in the last few decades to 
execute just 13 people.

"It was my hope he would resist," Heller said. "They would just blow him away 
and save tax payers millions of dollars.

(source: Fox News)






USA:

Americans' Support for Death Penalty Drops, Remains Strong


When executions are carried out at the prison facility in Huntsville, Texas, 
death penalty opponents are usually on hand to protest.

Texas carries out more executions than any other state - 16 last year. And 
polls show most Texans support the punishment.

One is self-described death penalty advocate Dudley Sharp, who argues that 
executions ensure killers do not kill again and deter others from doing so.

"The evidence that the death penalty deters no one does not exist," he said. 
"The evidence that the death penalty deters some people is overwhelming."

Sharp said most families of murder victims want proportional justice, but they 
find no joy in an execution.

"All of this is in the context of losing an innocent life to an unjust murder, 
so none of it is good," he said.

Houston attorney Pat Monks opposes the death penalty, contending that it's 
carried out within a flawed judicial system.

"It assumes that the system is perfect in one instance, maybe just in one 
instance, and it is not," he said.

Monks cites cases in which new evidence has led to the release of prisoners on 
death row. He calls capital punishment an archaic practice that the United 
States inherited from a country that has now abandoned it.

"It is from England, the common law system in which the king owns all of us, we 
are all subject to the king, and so the state," he said. "It is their case 
[judges and prosecutors], as opposed to our case."

In early December, an appeals court issued a stay in the planned execution of 
convicted murderer Scott Panetti, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. 
Houston attorney Kathryn Kase of the Texas Defenders Service, who represents 
Panetti, says the nationwide attention this case has received is encouraging.

"What we see in the stay is this emerging awareness in the United States that 
we don't want to execute people with serious mental illness," she said.

The state of Texas contends Panetti meets its standard of competence. But Kase 
says executing such a delusional person does not serve the purpose most people 
associate with the death penalty.

"We are supposed to be reserving the death penalty for the worst of the worst," 
she said. "The problem is that when we get into choosing who that is, we are 
not consistent."

Surveys show that younger respondents tend to favor life imprisonment for 
murderers over the death penalty and that fewer than half of all respondents 
favor executing the mentally ill.

(source: Voice of America News)

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

Tsarnaev trial: Let's not relive the Marathon bombings

On Jan. 5, we are set to relive the Boston Marathon bombing when Dzhokhar 
Tsarnaev's trial begins. For months after that, a cast of thousands - lawyers, 
court officials, jurors, police officers, survivors, evidence technicians, and 
an army of photographers and reporters - will gather at the federal courthouse 
in South Boston to recreate those days in April 2013. Prosecutors will show 
photos and videos of the bleeding, dazed victims. The wounded survivors at the 
finish line and the brave families of the 4 who died that week - 2 young women, 
an 8-year-old boy, and an MIT police officer - will be asked to re-experience 
the trauma that they (and we) can never forget. And round-the-clock news 
reporting will rekindle the emotions the event engendered.

But the fact is, it is not inevitable: There need not be a trial at all.

According to press accounts, this case is likely to be mainly about the penalty 
phase, the hearing that would follow conviction, if any, when jurors will be 
asked whether Tsarnaev should be sentenced to death or to life in prison 
without the chance of parole. At that stage, attention necessarily rotates away 
from accusations against Tsarnaev and the suffering of his victims to 
Tsarnaev's life: on his background, his upbringing, the influence of his older 
brother, Tamerlan - whatever "mitigating factors," as the law calls them, that 
his lawyers will argue should spare him from the death sentence. Tsarnaev's 
lawyers are duty-bound to bring every kind of mitigation before the jury; the 
judge is bound by law to let them do so; but should the survivors and the 
families of those who were murdered have to suffer through it?

If Tsarnaev is convicted of the crimes charged, he will die in prison. The only 
real issue is where and when. He can go to federal death row, where lawyers 
will bring appeals and post-conviction motions for years, where only three 
defendants have ever been executed, and where, as a prisoner slated for 
execution, he will continue to occupy the attention of the public, the judicial 
system, and extremists. Or he can be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in 
isolation, never to be heard from again, in a supermax cell in a maximum 
security federal prison built especially for those prisoners who are deemed the 
most dangerous, as has been the case with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, 9/11 
conspirator Zacharias Moussaoui, and Richard Reid, the shoebomber.

Usually it doesn't take a months-long trial and millions of tax dollars to make 
that choice. In most death penalty cases, the federal government agrees to 
accept a guilty plea, and the defendant, on advice of counsel, agrees to waive 
his right to a trial, accept responsibility for his crimes, and agrees to be 
sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole.


Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's attorneys want extra juror challenges, a motion opposed by 
prosecutors.

When that happens, the government presents in public a detailed description of 
the evidence it has gathered against the defendant as part of a guilty plea 
proceeding - but that process takes place in a day, not months. The case then 
goes to court for a final sentencing hearing, but this hearing is not like an 
ordinary trial or a contested penalty phase following conviction for a death 
penalty-eligible crime. The only voices heard are likely to be those of every 
survivor and every family member of a murdered son or daughter who wants to 
speak. Each can speak to the judge, to the public, and - if he or she chooses - 
directly to the defendant, who has no choice but to sit there and listen. The 
final hearing belongs to the survivors, not the lawyers - and certainly not to 
the defendant. There are no more battles between lawyers over technicalities, 
no fights over what evidence should stay hidden, and no appeals afterwards. No 
struggles between those of us who support the death penalty and those who 
oppose it. Everything is simple and final.

Why can't the Boston Marathon bombing trial be like that?

It takes both sides - the government and the defense - to agree. The defendant 
has to agree to plead guilty, and the government has to agree to accept a 
sentence of life imprisonment without parole, like it did with the Unabomber, 
the Olympic Park bomber, and many others who committed acts of violence in 
which people were killed and injured.

This community's response to the Marathon attacks set an example of courage and 
unity for the nation and the world. Now we're reaching the last chapter. That 
chapter doesn't have to be one of bitterness, division, and re-traumatization. 
This is our city, as David Ortiz said in the 1st Red Sox game after the 
bombing, and what happens over the next several months will have a deep and 
abiding impact on all of us. Wouldn't it be better if the Justice Department 
and Tsarnaev's defense attorneys got past the legal technicalities and found 
common ground? Let's write a last chapter that guarantees just punishment for 
Tsarnaev while putting the victims and the community at the center of the legal 
system's concerns.

(source: Opinion, Nancy Gertner, Michael B. Keating and Martin F. Murphy; 
Boston Globe)

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

Christian Groups Join New Coalition to Mobilize 90 Million Americans Against 
the Death Penalty


The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty announced on Tuesday the 
launch of a new coalition uniting human rights organizations, religious groups, 
and pro-liberty advocacy groups to pressure state governments to put an end to 
capital punishment.

The coalition, which has up to 15 national partnering organizations, is named 
the "90 Million Strong" campaign, which signifies the 33 % of Americans, 
according to Gallup polls, who say they oppose the death penalty.

With only 28 states and the District of Columbia not currently using the death 
penalty, and seven states carrying out the death penalty in 2014, the coalition 
aims to fully mobilize the "90 million" Americans to lobby state-by-state to 
get the other states that still actively use the death penalty to halt what 
they claim are "unfair" and immoral practices.

Included in joining the coalition as national partners are various faith-based 
groups such as the Christian social justice organization Sojourners, Catholic 
Mobilizing Network and the General Board of Church & Society of The United 
Methodist Church.

Speaking at the press conference announcing the coalition's launch, Jim Wallis, 
the president and founder of Sojourners, said that opposition to the death 
penalty is not a political stance, but rather a stance of Christian morality 
that can easily cross political boundaries.

Although many think of the conservative right as supporters of capital 
punishment, Wallis believes that many conservative Christians are starting to 
signify their opposition to death penalty because capital punishment conflicts 
with the Biblical teachings.

"The status quo is unacceptable and people of faith are joining together - 
across theological and political boundaries - in opposing the death penalty 
because it violates the most sacred of our commitments to the life that God has 
created," Wallis asserted. "I am having conversations all the time with 
religious conservatives around the country, who are joining up with liberal 
groups like this and are saying 'this has to end. This is no longer a political 
issue, this is for us, a moral issue and a Biblical issue."

Wallis continued by saying that society's implementation of the death penalty 
is often flawed, racially biased and does nothing to protect vulnerable people 
accused of a crime. Wallis quoted scripture by saying that a society's 
righteousness is based on how it treats its most vulnerable people.

"The single most important factor to who goes on death row is race. We can't 
accept that anymore. People who are intellectually disabled, indigent, are the 
ones on death row. This is wrong in terms of the poor and the vulnerable," 
Wallis said. "Death penalty does not put the worse crimes on trial, its 
vulnerable people."

With over 149 death row inmates since 1976 having been exonerated from their 
crime before they were able to be executed, Wallis said he wonders how many 
innocent people were wrongfully executed because of the mere existence of the 
death penalty.

"Only God knows how many people have been killed by the state wrongfully and 
they tend to be the most vulnerable," Wallis said.

Also speaking at the press conference was Norman Reimer, executive director of 
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who said the American 
criminal justice system is filled with human imperfection and no court should 
have the right to issue a death sentence based off of the results from 
courtroom.

"The practice of government sponsored execution has no place in any civilized 
criminal justice system. No one knows better than criminal defense lawyers that 
the criminal justice system is fallible," Reimer asserted. "It is rife with 
human error at every stage, and it perpetuates racial and ethnic disparity. We 
simply cannot allow such a system to engage in the taking of human life."

Although 141 countries around the world have abolished the death penalty, 
America is not one of them despite considering itself as a golden standard of 
how government should respect individuals human rights.

"It is shameful that the United States holds itself out as a leader in human 
rights while still carrying out the cruel, inhuman and degrading practice of 
sentencing prisoners to death," Amnesty International USA Executive Director 
Steven Hawkins said in a statement. "Over a third of the states have done away 
with the death penalty. It is time for the rest of the country to follow suit."

Other organizations that have joined the coalition include the National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Union for Reform Judiasm, 
Alliance For Justice and the Center For Constitutional Rights.

(source: Christian Post)