[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ALA., OKLA., NEB., CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 28



ALABAMA:

Charge against Columbiana man in death of girlfriend changed to capital murder


A Columbiana man now faces the possibility of a death penalty if convicted in 
the July death of his girlfriend.

The Shelby County District Attorney's Office late Thursday filed a document in 
court stating it had dismissed a murder charge against Demarcus Lamar Means 
after it had served him with a new warrant for capital murder in the death of 
18-year-old Haleigh Green. The new charge carries the possibility of a death 
sentence if convicted.

The new capital murder charge against Means was based on "the facts at issue" 
in the case, according to the court filing by Shelby County District Attorney 
Jill Lee and Assistant District Attorney Roger Hepburn.

Means, 19, was captured by U.S. Marshals in Los Angeles on July 21 after an 
arrest warrant was issued in Green's death.

Green was last seen by family members on July 6 in the Columbiana area. Her 
body was found 5 days later when the sheriff's office spotted her red Ford 
Mustang in a heavily wooded area off County Road 315 near Columbiana. Searchers 
found her body nearby. She had been shot.

Green had recently graduated Shelby County High School and was a student at 
Lawson State Community College. Shelby County residents had rallied around 
Green's family after her disappearance and death. Hundreds attended a vigil one 
week after her body was found.

Means was to have had a preliminary hearing before Shelby County Circuit Judge 
Dan Reeves on Wednesday but that was delayed after prosecutors decided to 
upgrade the charge against him to capital murder. Means' attorney, Victor 
Revill, had declined comment Wednesday.

Reeves late Thursday also issued an order stating that because the capital 
murder charge against Means carries the possibility of the death penalty, if 
convicted, prosecutors must maintain an open file for the purpose of discovery 
by defense attorneys and preserve the rough field notes of law enforcement 
officers involved in the investigation.

Means was transferred Wednesday to the St. Clair County Jail and is being held 
without bond on the new charge, court records show.

Prior to the new charge Means had been held on $500,000 bond and Revill had 
filed a motion seeking a reduction in the bond amount.

The bond reduction motion states that Means had voluntarily talked to law 
enforcement officers twice before he fled "due to numerous death threats" he 
and his family had received by phone, Facebook and Instagram. The motion 
included affidavits from Means' mother, aunt, and 2 cousins about the threats.

When Means left town a warrant for his arrest also had not yet been filed, the 
motion states.

The motion stated that Means graduated from Valleydale Christian Academy, with 
at least a 3.0 grade point average, in May of 2014 and had attended the Laurus 
Technical Institute until February 2015 when that school was shut down.

(source: al.com)






OKLAHOMA----impending execution

High court won't rehear death penalty case


The Supreme Court refused Friday to reconsider the death-row appeals of 3 
Oklahoma prisoners whose pending executions by lethal injection were upheld by 
the justices in June.

Without comment, the court denied a petition filed by the prisoners' lawyers 
that would have turned the case into one testing the overall constitutionality 
of the death penalty.

The justices ruled 5-4 on June 29 that Oklahoma can use the sedative midazolam 
as part of a 3-drug lethal injection protocol, despite contentions that it may 
not render prisoners completely unconscious and incapable of feeling pain. The 
court's majority said the inmates failed to suggest any better alternative.

Supreme Court refuses to ban controversial method of execution

But the decision included a sweeping dissent from Justices Stephen Breyer and 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg that questioned whether capital punishment is no longer 
constitutional. The 2 liberal justices cited scores of death-row exonerations, 
racial and geographic disparities, decades-long delays between sentencing and 
executions and a trend away from capital punishment in courts and states.

Breyer, who wrote the dissent, urged the court to hear a case in the near 
future on whether the death penalty violates the Constitution's prohibition 
against cruel and unusual punishment. The court ruled that way in 1972, 
resulting in a 4-year moratorium on executions, but reversed itself in 1976.

"It would be appropriate for the court to use this case to address the 
constitutionality of the death penalty, because the outcome will turn not on 
facts specific to any single litigant, but on circumstances common to the 
administration of the death penalty," attorneys for death-row inmates Richard 
Glossip, John Grant and Benjamin Cole said.

A similar effort was mounted in early July by Missouri prisoner David Zink, but 
the Supreme Court refused to delay his execution, and he was put to death July 
14. Barring a last-minute reprieve, Glossip is scheduled to die Sept. 16, with 
Grant and Cole to follow later this year.

A more likely candidate for the Supreme Court to consider whether the death 
penalty is constitutional will come before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 
9th Circuit on Monday. In that case, a federal district judge already has 
declared California's death penalty unconstitutional because of long delays, 
inadequate funding for defense lawyers, and the lack of a lethal injection 
protocol.

The June Supreme Court case concerned the specific drug used by Oklahoma and 
some other states to sedate prisoners before lethal drugs are administered. 
While Florida has used midazolam with apparent success, three executions in 
Arizona, Ohio and Oklahoma resulted in condemned prisoners gasping and writhing 
on their gurneys.

The high court's 5-member conservative majority ruled that states may continue 
to uses midazolam because the defendants could not suggest an alternative - a 
burden that the court's 4 liberal members criticized in a dissent written by 
Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

(source: USA Today)






NEBRASKA:

Nebraska group says it can stop death penalty repeal


An organization campaigning to reinstate Nebraska's death penalty after 
lawmakers repealed it in May said Wednesday it has collected more than enough 
signatures to suspend the law before it goes into effect and place it before 
voters in 2016.

Nebraskans for the Death Penalty, which was heavily financed by Republican Gov. 
Pete Ricketts and his family, said it had gathered 166,692 signatures from all 
93 of the state's counties. Nebraska's unicameral Legislature had voted to 
repeal capital punishment over the objection of Ricketts, becoming the 1st 
traditionally conservative state to do so in 42 years.

The pro-death penalty group needed roughly 57,000 valid signatures from 
registered voters to force a statewide referendum, and double that number to 
immediately halt the death penalty repeal going into effect. They appear to 
have exceeded the 10 % of registered voters hurdle needed to block repeal 
pending a November 2016 ballot measure on the issue.

"Nebraskans sent a strong message about crime and punishment in our state by 
signing this petition in extraordinary numbers," said state treasurer and 
former attorney general Don Stenberg, a co-chair of the petition drive.

The announcement came just before the repeal law was set to go into effect on 
Sunday, but the signatures still need to be verified. The petitions now go to 
the Nebraska secretary of state's office, which will forward them to counties 
to verify the signatures in a process that will take about 40 days.

Republican Attorney General Doug Peterson, who supports the death penalty, said 
in a statement that the signatures are "presumptively valid" until determined 
otherwise. Stenberg said no one will know the exact number of valid signatures 
for at least a month, but the state constitution makes clear that petitions go 
into effect on the day they're submitted.

Even if the law is suspended, Nebraska currently has no way to execute any of 
the 10 men on death row because its lacks 2 of the 3 required lethal injection 
drugs and has struggled to obtain them legally. The state paid $54,400 in May 
to order the drugs from a broker in India, but federal authorities have said 
they can't be legally imported.

Nebraska lawmakers voted by the narrowest possible margin, 30-19, to override 
Ricketts' veto. Ricketts assailed the Legislature as out of touch with the 
wishes of most residents. The repeal vote was helped by an unusual coalition of 
conservative state senators and more traditional death penalty opponents who 
had fought unsuccessfully for decades to eliminate the punishment. Some 
conservatives said they opposed it for religious and moral reasons, while 
others cast it as an inefficient government program that wastes tax money.

"What the Nebraska Legislature did is going to have an effect," said Robert 
Dunham, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information 
Center, whose group takes no stance on the death penalty but often criticizes 
how it's administered. "The message that conservative legislators can reach 
across the aisle with moderate and liberal legislators - that message is still 
there and still resonates."

Nebraska hasn't executed an inmate since 1997, and has never done so using the 
state's current 3-drug lethal injection protocol.

The state was the 19th to abolish capital punishment, as has the District of 
Columbia, while the death penalty is legal in 31 states and for some federal 
crimes. The number of executions in the United States has gradually declined in 
recent years and only a handful of states led by Texas regularly put inmates to 
death.

The announcement of the number of signatures caps an 82-day petition drive 
backed by Ricketts and his father, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts. The 
governor had given $200,000 to Nebraskans for the Death Penalty as of the last 
filing deadline on July 31, while his father had donated $100,000. The group 
raised a total of more than $652,000 from 40 individual donors and seven groups 
classified as businesses, political action committees and other entities.

The largest donation in July came from the conservative, Washington-based 
Judicial Crisis Network, which gave $200,000. Nebraskans for the Death Penalty 
relied on a combination of paid and volunteer petition circulators, and was 
aided by an Arizona-based strategist who specializes in ballot campaigns.

(source: Associated Press)






CALIFORNIA:

Death penalty in California is a charade


On Monday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments on the 
constitutionality of California's death penalty in the case of Jones v. Davis. 
This is the case from last year in which U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney 
ruled that the state's death penalty system is unconstitutional.

"The dysfunctional administration of California's death penalty system has 
resulted, and will continue to result, in an inordinate and unpredictable 
period of delay preceding [any] actual execution," Carney wrote in his ruling. 
"As for the random few for whom execution does become a reality, they will have 
languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no 
retributive or deterrent purpose."

Broken beyond repair, "such a system is unconstitutional."

Unfortunately, California Attorney General Kamala Harris appealed that ruling.

California has the largest and most expensive death row in the nation, yet 
inmates are more likely to die of old age or suicide than be executed.

Since 1978, California has spent more than $4 billion on death penalty costs 
and executed only 13 people, according to a recent study. By 2030, when the 
population of San Quentin's death row is projected to reach 1,000, the tab for 
maintaining the death penalty will reach $9 billion.

Judge Carney found that death-row inmates and their advocates are not to blame 
for the delays. The system is so backlogged that hundreds of direct appeals are 
pending before the California Supreme Court right now, and there are far more 
cases than there are attorneys qualified and willing to defend them.

And these are just the mandatory appeals, not opportunities to introduce new 
evidence that might prove someone innocent. Those appeals might not happen 
until a decade or longer after a trial.

60 % of California death penalty cases are overturned once they get into 
federal court due to serious errors in their original trials. There is no end 
in sight.

I have repeatedly tried to fix this problem. In 2011, I introduced Senate Bill 
490 to replace the system with life imprisonment without the possibility of 
parole. That would have saved the state close to a billion dollars by this 
point, without releasing any of the inmates.

Like other legislative efforts to reform the death penalty system, including 
study commissions, increasing funding levels, reducing the number of death 
sentences and other common-sense changes, that bill stalled. Nothing has 
happened.

Since 2011, public support for the death penalty in California has declined 
sharply. The Field Poll, which tracks voter attitudes, found that as of 2014 
support for the death penalty had reached a 50-year low and that it has dropped 
as much in the last 3 years as it had in the previous 30. It's no surprise: By 
keeping this failed policy for a handful of people, we're not being tough on 
crime; we're just being tough on the taxpayer.

How many more students could we send to college on full scholarship? How many 
crumbling roads and bridges could be rebuilt? Investing in just about anything 
else would have been wiser.

The federal courts must act because California has not been able to fix this 
problem. Joined by Sen. Mark Leno and former Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, I 
submitted an amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit asking the court to affirm Judge 
Carney's decision that the state's death penalty system is unconstitutional.

It's time to end this charade.

(source: Commentary; State Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Oakland) is chair of both the 
Senate Public Safety Committee and the Budget Subcommittee on Corrections, 
Public Safety and the Judiciary----Mercury News)