[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----CONN., ALA., IND., KAN.

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 23




CONNECTICUT:

60 years of death-penalty opposition


Friday, June 19, 1953 was the day I became an opponent of the death penalty. 
Just before sundown, out of "respect" for the Jewish Sabbath, Julius and Ethel 
Rosenberg were executed at New York's Sing Sing prison for the crime of 
conspiracy to commit espionage - not espionage itself, but conspiracy to commit 
espionage. However, it was their refusal to name other conspirators that paved 
the way for their death sentences. The prosecution had used possible death 
sentences as leverage. Staunch, misguided communists that they were, the 
Rosenbergs called their bluff and orphaned their children.

Julius Rosenberg was indisputably guilty; Ethel's involvement is less clear. 
David Greenglass, Ethel's brother, was convicted of the same crime and received 
a 10-year sentence because he named others, including his sister. Harry Gold 
and Morton Sobell, also convicted, received lengthy prison terms.

The disparity in sentences was a flagrant injustice Presidents Harry S. Truman 
and Dwight D. Eisenhower chose not to redress. Suffice it to say defendants 
should not be put to death for refusing to implicate others in their crimes.

By way of justification, the Rosenbergs were made to look responsible for the 
wave of post-war communist aggression, from the descent of the Iron Curtain to 
the invasion of South Korea. Never mind that compared to the damage caused by 
Klaus Fuchs, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and other Soviet spies, 
the Rosenbergs were dabblers. Their case merely is one example among thousands 
of the uneven, inconsistent manner in which the death penalty has been meted 
out in this country.

Additionally, I have long speculated the Rosenbergs fate was influenced not 
only by the post-war Red Scare, but by the effect of their arrest and 
conviction upon American Jewry.

The sense of shock, betrayal and anger in Jewish communities was widespread, as 
was concern about an uptick in anti-Semitism. I have often wondered how the 
Rosenbergs might have fared had their judge and prosecutor been something other 
than Jewish. Could it have been that prosecutor Irving Saypol and Judge Irving 
Kaufman, spurred on by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel, the equally 
infamous Roy Cohn, wished to leave no doubt about the patriotism of American 
Jews, and vented their wrath by sending Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their 
deaths?

With the forgoing in mind, I am pleased with the Connecticut Supreme Court's 
decision declaring the death penalty to be contrary to the state constitution's 
prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments. Predictably, there are many who 
feel otherwise, citing among other things, the legislature's clearly stated 
intent to exclude those currently on death row from its abolition of the death 
penalty. However, given the legislature's abolition of the death penalty, it 
seems utterly logical to conclude that thereafter, any execution in Connecticut 
would become an "unusual punishment" prohibited by the state constitution.

Moreover, in a previous failed attempt to abolish the death penalty, it was 
clear many legislators were influenced by a desire to see the murderers of the 
Petit family receive the death penalty. This smacked of trial by legislature.

While I welcome the demise of the death penalty, my feelings are uncomfortably 
mixed about the 11 men on Connecticut's death row whose lives have been spared. 
As criminals go, they are the worst of the worst, so much so that there really 
is no punishment commensurate with their crimes. The murders of the Petit 
family and Julia Ashe are among the most diabolical crimes ever committed in 
this state, and their perpetrators should remain imprisoned until their dying 
breaths, along with their now former death-row cellmates.

Some claim a life sentence with no possibility of parole is cruel and inhumane; 
others raise the matter of doing mercy as well as justice. As one who believes 
in the prudent societal exercise of mercy, are not food, shelter, medical care, 
recreation and educational opportunity more merciful than that accorded the 
victims of these unspeakable crimes? And should mercy eclipse justice? 
Releasing the perpetrators of the most monstrous, calculated murders is a gross 
injustice to the victims and their families.

As for releasing the "rehabilitated" among the worst of the worst, it's no 
secret our prisons do not have a stellar reputation for rehabilitation.

The 11 men to be released from Connecticut's death row have given adequate 
notice they are deadly menaces to society. Let them be declared rehabilitated 
and fit for re-entry into our communities the day their victims are 
rehabilitated. Such is the meaning of life imprisonment with no possibility of 
parole.

(source: Rocco M. Pugliese; Republican American)






ALABAMA:

An eye-opening view of the justice system


"Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption" by Bryan Stevenson is the true 
story of the author's fight for justice, starting as an intern at the Southern 
Prisoners Defense Committee at 23 years of age in 1983 and rising to executive 
director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which he founded to defend those most 
desperate in need.

The book reads like a novel, but it's even more gripping because Stevenson is 
describing real cases, real people and real injustices.

He begins his story with his first visit to a death-row inmate, where his boss 
at the SPDC told him to deliver one message: "You will not be killed in the 
next year." What happened on this trip led him to finish his internship 
committed to helping the death-row prisoners he had met that month. He states: 
"I went back to law school with an intense desire to understand the laws and 
doctrines that sanctioned the death penalty and extreme punishments."

It led him to realize that his whole life, he had questioned how and why some 
people were treated unfairly, and he could work this belief into his career.

Besides telling his story throughout the book, Stevenson also explains what he 
thinks is wrong with our justice system, and he makes a strong case. From 
wasting money to innocent men spending years in prison to children being tried 
as adults and incarcerated for their lifetime, Stevenson not only writes about 
these issues, but he also works to fix a broken system.

He also tells the story of a late 1980s case involving Walter McMillian, a 
black man on death row in Alabama who insisted he did not commit the crime he 
was convicted of.

An 18-year-old white girl from a good family had been killed, and police could 
not find the murderer. At the same time, McMillian was facing some legal 
troubles of his own because of an extra-marital affair he had with a white 
woman, Kelly, who was going through a divorce.

The ex-husband was out for revenge, and Kelly fell into all sorts of trouble, 
getting involved with a criminal who eventually accused McMillian of murdering 
this 18-year-old girl. The police wanted to solve the case, so they arrested 
McMillian.

Because McMillian was black in Alabama, he found himself on death row. When he 
met Stevenson, he claimed he was innocent. Stevenson looked into the case and 
discovered this was indeed true - McMillian had been at a fish fry during the 
time of the murder.

After Stevenson took the case and fought to get him off of death row, 
McMillian's conviction was overturned by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals 
in 1993, and he was released in March 2003 after spending 6 years on death row.

The book is full of different cases Stevenson has worked on and laws that he 
has tirelessly struggled to change. It is inspirational but also an eye-opener 
to the American justice system. In the end, he states, "Walter made me 
understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to 
treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and 
innocent."

This book is about race and socioeconomic level in the courts, and it is full 
of examples of Stevenson's statement.

Stevenson invites interested readers who want to work with or support volunteer 
programs that serve incarcerated or newly released people or seek reform of 
criminal-justice policy to visit his organization's website, eji.org.

(source: Margo Dill, News-Gazette)






INDIANA:

Freedom, Finally, After a Life in Prison


When she was 15 years old, Paula Cooper and 3 high school classmates in Gary, 
Indiana, decided to cut school and steal some money to play games at a local 
arcade. They drank some cheap wine, smoked some pot and walked to the nearby 
home of a 78-year-old Bible teacher, Ruth Pelke. They figured she might have a 
jar of money somewhere.

The teenagers cajoled their way inside by telling Ms. Pelke that they were 
interested in Bible lessons. Once there, 1 of them hit her with a vase. Ms. 
Cooper stabbed Ms. Pelke 33 times with a butcher knife.

The others stood watch, joined in the slaying or searched for cash. They left 
with $10 and took a joy ride in Ms. Pelke's old Plymouth.

3 girls received long prison sentences. Ms. Cooper pleaded guilty to murder and 
in 1986 was sentenced to die in the electric chair, becoming the youngest 
death-row inmate in Indiana history.

What followed was extraordinary. Bill Pelke, the Bible teacher's grandson, 
forgave Ms. Cooper for killing his beloved grandmother, who never would have 
wanted an execution, he said. Mr. Pelke started a sweeping campaign to spare 
Ms. Cooper's life, wrote to her faithfully and visited her behind bars.

"She told me how truly sorry she was for what she'd done," said Mr. Pelke, who 
is the president of Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing, an 
anti-death-penalty group he co-founded.

More than 2 million people, most of them in Europe, signed petitions on behalf 
of Ms. Cooper; protesters in Italy began a Paula Cooper crusade, complete with 
T-shirts bearing her mug shot. The pope made a plea for clemency.

In 1989, Indiana's Supreme Court commuted Ms. Cooper's sentence to 60 years in 
prison. She earned a bachelor's degree, trained assistance dogs for the 
disabled, tutored inmates and ran the prison kitchen. In June 2013, after 
spending her adult life as inmate No. 864800, she walked out of prison, 
released decades early because of her good behavior.

She didn't know how to use the Internet. She constantly got lost; in prison, 
there's no need to learn directions because someone always tells you where to 
go. "I didn't know how to use an A.T.M. card - anything," she said.

She nevertheless got a job cooking hamburgers at Five Guys and soon became a 
manager. She got engaged and moved into an apartment with her fiance. She won 
her dream job as a legal assistant in the Indiana federal community defender's 
office, led by her longtime friend and defense attorney, Monica Foster, the 
chief federal defender.

"You've got to have hope," Ms. Cooper told me. "If you give it up, you're never 
going to make it."

On May 26, some 2 years after her release, Ms. Cooper committed suicide. She 
would have turned 46 this month.

I was one of the few journalists to talk to Ms. Cooper post-prison and was the 
last to speak with her, in a call a month before her death.

I'd been planning a trip to Indianapolis to finally meet her for a story about 
teenagers on death row who transformed themselves. If anyone was proof that 
redemption was possible, it was Ms. Cooper.

She asked me to wait a little. "My life is quiet right now, and that's how I 
like it. Once people find out who I am, they all have an opinion about me 
because of what I did. They start seeing me as a monster."

Ms. Cooper had been severely depressed since childhood, her older sister, 
Rhonda LaBroi, told me. Ms. LaBroi begged her to get counseling, but after all 
the time in prison, Ms. Cooper couldn't trust anyone. Ms. LaBroi said that in a 
suicide note, her sister said that "she wanted to tell people suffering from 
mental illness not to go down that road, not to commit suicide, to reach out 
any way they could."

Ms. Cooper's history was daunting. Her mother tried to commit suicide and kill 
Ms. Cooper and Ms. LaBroi when they were young. She put the girls in the car 
with her and ran the engine in a closed garage. Ms. Cooper's father, Herman, 
now deceased, issued daily beatings, often with an extension cord, Ms. LaBroi 
said.

School officials, police and social workers wouldn't intervene. "We begged them 
to help and they never did," she told me.

In prison, the torment continued. At the Indiana Women's Prison, her 1st home, 
"some of the guards lived to make us miserable," Ms. Cooper said. In her 20s 
she spent 3 straight years in solitary confinement, heaping new scars on top of 
old. Leading causes of criminality are chronic trauma, neglect or abuse, said 
Ms. Foster, a public defender for 3 decades. "The prison system does absolutely 
nothing to respond to that."

"Paula showed the incredible possibilities in people," Ms. Foster said. "She'd 
been put down, put down, put down, sentenced to death, did 28 years, and she 
came out and did great - she turned everything around. In the end it wasn't 
enough, because no one gave her the help she deserved."

"It's a complete tragedy," Ms. Foster told me after her death.

Mental health care in prison is mostly a pill in a paper cup. Ms. Cooper 
herself was briefly on antidepressants, she told her sister. No one mandated 
follow-up treatment for "re-entry," an apt term considering how much it must 
feel like dropping from outer space. "Nobody helps because people don't see us 
as human beings," Ms. Cooper said.

Basic reforms could have made the difference for her, and putting them in place 
could help hundreds of thousands of other offenders, according to everyone from 
judges and psychiatrists to advocates. This isn't about pampering. The reforms 
would cut costs by reducing recidivism.

We need to provide mental health assessments; adequate counseling and treatment 
programs; rehabilitation; and appropriate medication, as opposed to just 
sedatives. We should make outpatient treatment a condition of parole, and 
expand the use of specialized mental health "re-entry courts," which offer 
intensive guidance and support.

Whatever demons Ms. Cooper fought with, she hid them well. "She's thriving," 
Ms. Foster told me a month before Ms. Cooper's death. "She's full of joy."

She learned to shop for food, and drive (badly). She was the cheerful, patient 
voice on the phone for terrified and lonely law office clients. She spoke at 2 
colleges to "give back to the community." She tried everything she could to 
help a mentally ill homeless man in her neighborhood.

But she felt mentally ill herself, she told her sister, who said: "Bill Pelke 
forgave her, but she couldn't forgive herself. She said she felt like she 
didn't deserve to live."

There are lots of Paula Coopers in the country. Prisons release more than 
650,000 inmates every year. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, some 
70 % of incarcerated women in state prisons suffer from mental health problems.

Ms. Cooper needed help to survive her despair over the crime. Her sister said 
she thought about it every day. When her victim's grandson visited her in 
prison, he forgave her, and hugged her. "You've taken a burden off me," she 
told him. In the end, there were too many others to lift.

(source: Amy Linn is a journalist who received a 2015 Alicia Patterson 
Foundation fellowship to write about teenagers who were on death row----New 
York Times)






KANSAS:

Opening statements to begin Monday in capital murder trial for Frazier Glenn 
Cross


8 women and 9 men were selected Friday to serve on the 12-person jury with 5 
alternates. The alternates will not be identified until the case is ready to be 
deliberated. They were selected from a pool of 200 in a week-long 
jury-selection process.

The trial is expected to last 3 to 4 weeks.

The 74-year-old Aurora, MO, white supremacist is accused of killing 3 people 
last year at 2 Jewish sites in Johnson County.

Though he has pleaded not guilty, Cross has admitted that he went to the Jewish 
Community Center of Greater Kansas City and Village Shalom retirement home with 
the plan to kill Jews since he is dying from a lung disease. He wound up 
killing 3 Christians.

He is accused of killing William Lewis Corporon, 69, and his 14-year-old 
grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, at the Jewish Community Center in Overland 
Park, and Terri LaManno, 53, at the nearby Village Shalom retirement center on 
April 13, 2014.

Cross, who uses a wheelchair to get around, suffers from chronic emphysema and 
has oxygen tanks nearby during court proceedings. He told police soon after his 
arrest that he wanted to kill Jews before he dies because they were squeezing 
out the white race.

Cross, also known as Glenn Miller, is a Vietnam War veteran who founded the 
Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in his native North Carolina and later the 
White Patriot Party. He ran for the U.S. House in 2006 and the U.S. Senate in 
2010 in Missouri, each time espousing a white-power platform.

He fired his attorneys in May so he could speak on his own behalf. If 
convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Several times last week during the jury selection process, Cross challenged the 
patriotism of would-be jurors and quizzed them about their views on the 
government and media.

With no legal background and a stated disdain for government, Cross was 
admonished during earlier hearings for loudly interrupting Johnson County 
District Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan and making disparaging remarks toward members 
of the court.

Last week, Cross remained subdued, even as Ryan upheld prosecutors' occasional 
objections about Cross' line of questioning or reaction to answers given by 
would-be jurors.

Cross has challenged the patriotism of some would-be jurors and asked others if 
they simply had better things to do than sit through a trial that could span up 
to a month. He also quizzed them on whether they support a single world 
government; whether the U.S. was fighting wars in the Middle East to protect 
its own interests or Israel's; and whether the mainstream media is 
"controlled."

Ryan ruled last month that Cross will not be allowed to use a "compelling 
necessity" defense to justify the killings.

His former attorneys remain as stand-by counsel in case Cross is removed from 
the courtroom. Concerned about how he might behave during the trial, 
prosecutors this week filed a memorandum of law addressing the court's right to 
remove a disruptive defendant and deny Cross the right to defend himself.

When Cross fired his attorneys, Ryan cautioned him about the amount of work 
necessary to defend a capital murder case.

Last week, Cross acknowledged that he had not read thousands of pages of 
discovery he had received from prosecutors, nor did he know how to write and 
submit proposed jury instructions. Stand-by attorney Mark Manna told the judge 
he had given Cross guidelines on how to do them and was hesitant to do more in 
his current capacity.

(source: kctv5.com)