[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, N.Y., PENN., FLA.

[Rick Halperin]

July 30



TEXAS:

Living without the death penalty in Texas


Texas has gone nearly 7 months into 2015 without imposing the death penalty. In 
some cases, juries declined to send another convicted killer to Texas' death 
row, opting instead to put them behind bars for life.

It's part of a trend of the death penalty falling out of favor not only with 
juries but also with prosecutors who seek it - even in Texas, the nation's 
death penalty leader, where a record 49 death sentences were handed down in 
1994.

The numbers show, according to former veteran District Attorney Tim Cole, that 
applying the death penalty is no longer the go-to or indispensable tool that 
prosecutors once regarded it.

"We're proving as a state that we can live without the death penalty," says 
Cole, who had a reputation as a no-holds-barred lawman through four terms as DA 
for Archer, Clay and Montague counties.

Now a Fort Worth defense attorney, Cole was keynote speaker at this year's 
annual meeting of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. In a guest 
column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram last week, he stated, "Texas should 
join the 19 U.S. states where the death penalty has been abolished."

Cole elaborated in a follow-up interview with this newspaper, which has been 
calling for an end to the death penalty since 2007.

Cole said his rationale is not rooted in moral objections to taking a life. 
Rather, he said, years of seeing the justice system's deep flaws and the 
arbitrariness of capital punishment caused him to take his stand.

"If you could show me a perfect system, I'll give you the death penalty," Cole 
said.

But error-free and evenhanded it's not and will never be. We agree with Cole: A 
system that allows the possibility of fatal error cannot be defended. The 
growing list of wrongfully convicted men in Texas appears to be making a 
difference in the jury room.

Further, Cole has seen from the inside how community and financial pressure 
bear on a DA's decision to seek one punishment vs. another. That means, he 
said, that a similar crime could mean the death penalty in one county but a 
prison sentence a few miles away in another jurisdiction. It comes down to the 
call of a single elected official whose annual budget may or may not bear the 
expense of a murder trial.

Cole does not foresee a day that state lawmakers will abolish the death penalty 
in Texas, but he said they should at least clean up the system. For example, 
prosecutors should be barred from making deals for the testimony of jailhouse 
snitches to secure an execution, Cole said. It's a ghastly practice at the 
center of many notorious Texas murder cases that have unraveled.

In the meantime, Cole said he looks forward to a permanent decline in use of 
the death penalty. We hope so. It appears that routinely sending dozens of 
defendants to death row each year is a thing of the past. That's a bright spot 
in a state that once justified its liberal - and, sometimes, reckless - use of 
capital punishment.

Ex-DA on death penalty

>From an interview with former District Attorney Tim Cole:

"If you can show me a perfect system, I'll give you the death penalty. But you 
can't. You can't show me a system that's so perfect that you could show me we'd 
never execute an innocent person."

"I don't think our Legislature will ever vote it out. I don't think they'll 
abolish it. I think at some point it will kind of wither away, and the Supreme 
Court may say, one of these days, it violates the Eighth Amendment."

"There are probably a lot of people who have already been executed where those 
cases would not be death penalty cases these days."

"It's become more acceptable for a district attorney not to seek death."

(source: Editorial, Dallas Morning News)






NEW YORK:

The Wrong Man----The Story of the Only NYPD Officer Ever Sentenced to Death - 
100 Years Ago Today


A century ago today, Charles Becker became the first and only NYPD officer to 
be executed on death row. But was the cop framed for a famous gangland murder?

When it came to scandal, the Tammany leader Big Tim Sullivan said, New York was 
a 9-day town. But in the case of the murder of his friend Herman "Beansie" 
Rosenthal, a gangster and gambling house proprietor, Sullivan's adage proved 
spectacularly untrue. Charles Becker, an NYPD lieutenant, was 1 of 5 men 
convicted of the murder, and he remains the only New York City police officer 
sent to the electric chair. Though the case was sensational and the conviction 
a travesty, Becker is little remembered today, and defended less. Both failures 
are all the more disgraceful because the prosecution was undertaken for a noble 
cause, that of political reform in general and police reform in particular.

As with any criminal trial that is transformed into social allegory, the cause 
trumped the case; facts that contradicted it were held not as false but as 
heretical, demanding suppression instead of debate. Later generations seeking 
lessons from the past are likelier to dwell on episodes of clear-cut triumph or 
transgression. Who wants to commemorate a battle without heroes?

In most tellings of the city's political history, the struggle between Tammany 
Hall and Reform is recounted in nearly Manichean terms. The gangsterism and 
graft of Tammany sometimes reached a stupendous scale, but the machine also 
represented the largest part of New York City, with all its immigrant energy, 
and its legacy includes the New Deal. For what it was worth, its lack of 
affectation was commensurate with its lack of principle, as when Alexander 
"Clubber" Williams, a police inspector, replied when asked why he failed to 
close the brothels in his district: "Because they were kind of fashionable at 
the time." In Tammany's case, a sense of humor was a not-quite-saving grace, 
but it pointed to the pragmatism that accounted for its durability and many 
decencies. By contrast, Jacob Riis lamented that every reform movement - a term 
broad enough to encompass opponents of 80-hour workweeks and naughty postcards 
- ought to be assigned an official humorist, to save them from conceit and 
worse.

The late 19th century New York Times index shows more coverage of the topic of 
"Police Abuses" than "Politics" as a whole. In a sense, crime in the city has 
always been covered more like sports than news, as an intensely personal and 
symbolic contest. And if it seems like the rival teams of cops and crooks have 
gotten together to fix the game, the reaction of the fans can be truly fanatic. 
As Andy Logan, who wrote the definitive history of the Becker case, observed, 
"Sweat shops, child labor, yellow dog contracts, the political and industrial 
exploitation of the vast new immigration ... the open purchase of political 
office, gross corruption involving municipal contracts ... All these civic 
evils were properly deplored from time to time, but there were intervals when 
it seemed that the most hideous sin of all in the minds of Americans ... was 
the greasing of the palms of city policemen by prostitutes, gamblers, and 
small-time local criminals."

In the Republican campaigns against Tammany, charges of police grafting were 
both pretextual and true, guaranteed to command headlines and periodically 
occasion a Republican or Fusion win at the polls. Reformers tended to be middle 
to upper-middle class, Protestant and Republican, and the subjects of reform 
were those who were not. Around the turn of the century, there were a series of 
investigations by the legislature and eminent citizens - the Lexow Committee, 
the Mazet Committee, the Committee of 9. John D. Rockefeller led a grand jury 
on the "white slave trade" in 1909. The press followed mostly because the copy 
could be wonderful - as when Reverend Parkhurst went undercover to play 
leapfrog with naked can-can dancers - and the more destructive graft of 
Tammany, in the awarding of municipal contracts, was too dull to sustain public 
interest.

Becker was perfectly cast as a bad cop, arrogant, brutal and greedy. He was the 
protege of Clubber Williams, and modeled himself after his mentor in his 
physicality - both in his courage and the free use of his nightstick - and the 
vigor with which he fattened his assets and his arrest record. Once, he saved a 
man from drowning; another time, he locked up a woman for asking him for 
directions. A fellow cop remarked that Becker would lock up his own grandmother 
if it would make him look good downtown. When he was 1 of 3 lieutenants who ran 
gambling squads, it was known that only one of them would make captain, and so 
Becker stepped up both his raids and his payoffs.

At the time, raids were sometimes carried out to settle a personal or political 
score, but for the most part, they were conducted as an elaborate dance between 
the police, the politicians, and the gambling establishment. Enforcement 
occurred more or less by appointment, so that the criminal justice system could 
show that it was taking action with the minimum inconvenience to criminals: 
"stiffs" were provided for arrest, in cases designed to fall apart long before 
trial. Becker pushed things, however, seeking to make a name for himself with 
heavy hands and grasping ones. A Hearst reporter warned him of a plot to frame 
him, not long after his appointment to the squad. Becker had even employed a 
press agent to keep his name in the papers. It would soon be unnecessary.

Herman Rosenthal's pursuit of the media also led to his undoing. As Big Tim was 
fond of saying, "God and the people hate a chesty man," and Rosenthal redefined 
chestiness. He had been prosperous and well-connected until 1909, when the 
Legislature forbade racetrack betting, then his chief source of income. As his 
operations suffered, he decided to make the new reforms work for him by 
refusing to pay off a $5000 bet, welshing all the way up to the Court of 
Appeals, which held in his favor. When his fellow gamblers tried to prevail on 
him to honor the debt, loaning him money themselves, he stiffed them as well. 
At that point, anonymous letters began to find their way to the desks of Police 
Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo and District Attorney Charles Whitman, who 
ordered raids on his gambling houses until only one remained.

Later that night, Rosenthal went to the Hotel Metropole, an establishment thick 
with hoodlums, including men who had tried to kill him before and whom he had 
tried to kill as well.

Rosenthal then began to publicly denounce police corruption, which lost him 
whatever chance remained to regain a business-like footing with colleagues on 
both sides of the law. He waged war against the NYPD, under the table and over 
it, boasting that his connections were such that he would have any cop who 
interfered with him transferred, and, for a time, his relationship with the 
declining Big Tim meant that the threat wasn't an idle one. He attempted to 
swear out warrants against a captain and inspector who raided his 
establishments. Overall, the fight had a small-time and vaguely farcical 
quality - when a policeman was posted to his last premise, Rosenthal locked the 
poor man inside - though the joke was wearing dangerously thin.

Rosenthal was steadily losing money, friends, and political cover, even after 
his claim that Becker was his silent partner received sensational treatment by 
a reporter named Herbert Bayard Swope at the World, 1 of the 2 papers in New 
York which inspired the phrase "yellow journalism." The day after the story 
appeared, DA Whitman agreed to meet with Rosenthal, but the gambler's charges 
failed to impress him. Later that night, Rosenthal went to the Hotel Metropole, 
an establishment thick with hoodlums, including men who had tried to kill him 
before and whom he had tried to kill as well. He seemed to revel in the 
attention, until an associate asked him to step outside, where he was gunned 
down in what may have been the 1st drive-by shooting in gangland history.

The killers were a picturesque lot: the gunmen were Whitey Lewis, Lefty Louis, 
Dago Frank, and Gyp the Blood, who preferred bombs to guns "because I likes to 
hear da noise," and they were hired by a number of Rosenthal's former 
associates, led by the utterly hairless Bald Jack Rose. The murder was a 
predictable and routine matter of internal underworld discipline. No one was 
particularly surprised, though Commissioner Waldo exclaimed, "Ye Gods!" when he 
heard, realizing that the timing was awkward. Mayor Gaynor's reaction was more 
typical, remarking, "Got him, did they?" The previously underwhelmed Whitman 
now broadcast through Swope that the death was "a challenge to our very 
civilization."

The reactions of the 3 officials were wholly in character. Waldo was a clueless 
but amiable gentleman amateur, whom the patrolmen thought well of because he'd 
redesigned their greatcoats so the pockets were larger. Once, when he received 
an anonymous complaint about Becker's grafting, he forwarded it to him for 
investigation. (Becker returned the letter, stating that it was inappropriate 
for him to pursue the matter.) Gaynor, who was known as "the most cantankerous 
man ever to sit in City Hall," had a temper that worsened when a deranged city 
employee shot him in the neck. Gaynor was the kind of figure that made Tammany 
difficult to pigeonhole; he was the candidate the machine put forward during a 
period of scandal, to show its best face, but his presence in the organization 
showed that there were men of probity among their ranks, who could rise and 
sometimes rule. His performance as mayor was widely admired, and reformers 
warmed to him, as did the press, which loved his habit of quoting Epictetus and 
Homer, when Tammany epigrams were more in the vein of Sullivan on chesty men. 
Gaynor and Whitman detested each other, though both liked Commissioner Waldo.

Theodore Roosevelt once said of Charles Whitman, "The truth is not in him." 
Socially and politically ambitious, Whitman was a low-level Republican 
functionary whose 1st career break was winning the presidency of the Board of 
Magistrates after other factions deadlocked over their preferred candidates. 
After his election as district attorney, he stopped at a bar one night and 
noticed, upon finishing his drink, that the time was 23 minutes after the legal 
one a.m. closing. When he brought up his concern with the bartender, he was 
told not to worry, that the police wouldn't bother them. Whitman then proceeded 
on a sort of investigative pub-crawl, visiting several more saloons before 
going to a precinct to demand the arrest of all who had provided him 
hospitality. His sobriety and sense were both questioned, but his wishes were 
carried out, and subsequent outings were conducted with the press in tow so 
that the exploits of the "crusading D.A." received suitable fanfare.

>From that time, Whitman developed a relationship with Swope, whose career in 
journalism, in the early years, bore a closer resemblance to that of P.T. 
Barnum than Edward R. Murrow: He was a political ringmaster and an impresario 
of public spectacle. In exchange for exclusives, Swope made Whitman exactly the 
kind of hero he wanted to be - not only a fearless crimefighter, but one who 
would cut short a Newport vacation with the Vanderbilts to get the job done. 
Swope claimed, credibly, to dictate the D.A.'s press releases. His love of 
gambling led to his own underworld intimacies, particularly with Arnold 
Rothstein, who was later immortalized in The Great Gatsby as Meyer Wolfsheim, 
"the man who fixed the 1919 World Series." Swope was the best man at 
Rothstein's wedding, and frequently borrowed money from him. As it happened, 
Becker raided one of Rothstein's establishments in the months before the 
killing. With his Rosenthal story, Swope had a production that languished 
during rehearsals - even Whitman had to be bullied into a tepid expression of 
interest - until the murder gave him a Broadway smash.

Becker himself was well-acquainted with controversy, after a conflict with the 
novelist Stephen Crane in 1896. Crane's The Red Badge of Courage had been 
published the year before, and the now-famous author had begun work on sketches 
of low life in the Tenderloin, in the vein of his earlier Maggie: A Girl of the 
Streets. It was also reported that Crane was writing about the police, not 
sympathetically, and his encounter with Becker would not improve his view. At 2 
in the morning, Crane was walking with 2 women he had picked up when he met a 
3rd, named Dora Clark, before being suddenly set upon by Becker, then a young 
patrolman, who announced that all 3 women were under arrest for prostitution. 
Crane saved one woman by insisting that she was his wife; in the end, Becker 
took only Clark in. Crane appeared in court with Clark to testify on her 
behalf. That he had written a favorable profile of the magistrate in the days 
before the hearing doubtless assisted in the swift dismissal of the charges. 
The reaction from police inspired Crane to leave the city to cover the Spanish 
American War. In reality, the incident wasn't simply ugly but complicatedly so: 
Dora Clark was a prostitute, and she'd been feuding with the local precinct 
since she'd spurned the advances of a somewhat dark-skinned patrolman named 
Rosenberg because she believed he was black, telling him, "How dare you speak 
to a decent white woman!"

If nothing else, the incident lends a measure of irony to the ethnic politics 
of the Rosenthal murder. Jewish leaders took issue with Mayor Gaynor's 
denunciation of the "lawless foreigners" who were the principals in the case 
(all were Jewish, excepting Dago Frank, of course) and Swope flatly 
manufactured anti-Semitic statements which he attributed to Becker, a 
Protestant of German descent, in order to fan the flames. The cultural casting 
of the scandal, in which Jewish gangsters and Irish cops and ward-heelers were 
turning a great city into a cesspool of corruption, were essential to its 
fascination in the hinterlands and abroad.

The story was national and international news, to a degree that is difficult to 
imagine today. For the foreign press, New York City was America, and it was 
often the only city that other regional papers covered on a regular basis. Laws 
were passed in Washington, but life, in its most vivid and meaningful form, 
took place in New York. (New Yorkers didn't disagree - at the turn of the 
century, a Tammany leader denied a young associate appointment to the position 
of county clerk in Manhattan, saying, "He's a good boy, but that job requires 
brains and experience. He'll have to be satisfied with going to Congress.") 
Even so, the reaction from otherwise sober parties was decidedly unhinged. One 
western paper editorialized that, in spite of its opposition to the death 
penalty, "In this case we would not raise the slightest protest if Becker and 
his gunmen were sent heavenward ... New York State has our permission to 
assemble the entire police force of New York and, in the presence of officers 
and men, blow Becker and his band of cutthroats to Jericho." Locally, the 
coverage was no less relentless or ridiculous - in Swope's paper, the Rosenthal 
murder was a crisis "infinitely worse than the one that confronted the nation 
at Gettysburg," and it made the front page 136 days out of 186.

Becker's connection to Rosenthal was indeed tantalizing. While he was preparing 
a libel suit in response to Rosenthal's claim that they were business partners, 
he had a longstanding relationship with Bald Jack Rose, as fellow players in 
the vice game. Becker was driving through midtown at the time of the murder, 
and when he arrived home, reporters called to tell him about it. He then drove 
back downtown to the crime scene, an act that was portrayed as the gloating of 
a shameless killer. But the case against him simply wasn't there: it was a 
"murder by proxy, twice removed," as Logan puts it, in which Becker's interests 
and the overwhelming weight of the evidence showed him to be innocent of the 
charges against him, perhaps for the 1st time in his career. Becker came to 
believe that Rose may well have told Rosenthal that he was a silent partner in 
his business. Because Rosenthal had made so many complaints about so many cops 
over the years, Becker would have been among the few who might have considered 
offering protection. When Becker raided his house, wrecking it and arresting 
his nephew, Rosenthal's last story ignored all the other officers and officials 
with whom he'd been warring. Why Becker would wreck an establishment that he 
owned, and why he'd invest with a man who'd been losing money and fighting cops 
for years, were questions that were barely asked, let alone answered.

Whitman was untroubled by the gaps in his story. Bald Jack Rose and several 
other conspirators were jailed in the Tombs until their testimony jibed with 
his theory. The lower floors of the Tombs were ankle-deep in water, and the 
cells measured 7 by 3 1/2 feet; they were without plumbing and virtually 
without ventilation, during a summer when the temperature was regularly in the 
90s. These immediate discomforts paled before the prospect of the electric 
chair at Sing Sing, however, and when Whitman offered Rose and 2 other admitted 
killers outright freedom in exchange for testimony against Becker, there was 
little hesitation on their part. Other witnesses for the prosecution were paid 
generously, while witnesses for the defense were intimidated and worse; one 
reporter who provided an alibi for Becker was fired by his paper soon after.

Whitman requested that the governor call an extraordinary session of the State 
Supreme Court to hear the cases, and he was further obliged when Judge John 
Goff was assigned. Goff had been chief counsel for the Lexow Committee, which 
had elicited Clubber Williams' memorable statement regarding the fashionability 
of brothels. For Williams to attend the trial every day was a gesture more 
impressive for its loyalty than its strategy. Becker's pregnant wife, Helen, 
was not permitted to sit in view of the jury. Goff granted virtually all of the 
prosecution's motions and denied those of the defense, seating a close friend 
of the prosecutor's as a juror. He ordered the trial to begin one week after 
the arraignment. In record-breaking heat, he ordered the fans shut off, the 
windows closed, the shades drawn, and permitted 15 minutes for lunch. He 
charged the jury as a prosecutor, repeating Whitman???s allegations as facts. 
The trial lasted just over 2 weeks, deliberations only a few hours.

Becker's pregnant wife, Helen, was not permitted to sit in view of the jury.

When Becker was convicted, public acclaim for Whitman was vast; he was 
discussed as a candidate for mayor, governor, even president. Becker underwent 
a less public transformation: on death row at Sing Sing, he became a quiet 
leader and counselor of other inmates, and won the respect of the warden. He 
converted to Catholicism. He maintained his innocence of the murder, but made 
little pretense about the other aspects of his career, and refused any 
overtures to implicate others in exchange for leniency. His wife lost her baby 
in childbirth, but the moment of public sympathy was brief when it was reported 
that the doctor had told her during delivery that he could save either her or 
the child, and she chose to live. In one paper, she was likened to Lady 
Macbeth.

Helen Becker was, in fact, a figure of almost implausible decency and 
forbearance, a schoolteacher devoted to "backward pupils," who bore her 
embarrassment of misfortunes with great grace: "My husband was under sentence 
of death. I had lost my baby, our money was gone, my housekeeper had killed 
herself, my mother had died, my dog Bum had bitten a man and been shot, my pet 
canary bird had died. Then I thought: 'Well, anyway, I'm not blind.' The very 
next morning I woke up with a sore eye. That struck me as funny, and I wrote it 
to Charley in my next letter. I am glad I have a sense of humor. I think it has 
often saved me from suffering and it has made me see amusing things to put in 
my letters to my husband."

When the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial, in a scathing and lengthy 
decision, there was widespread outrage, and muttered warnings to Whitman that 
his political viability was contingent on a conviction. Many of his own 
prosecutors were disgusted with him, and it was joked around the office that 
Whitman was lucky that he didn't have to submit the case to a jury of his own 
staff. At the new trial, Judge Samuel Seabury was more decorous than Goff had 
been, but no less biased in his rulings. Becker was again found guilty. By the 
time the appeals were filed, Seabury had been appointed to the Court of 
Appeals, and though he recused himself from the case, his new colleagues did 
not reverse him. A Democratic bill to ban capital punishment was not introduced 
for fear it might save Becker. Becker's last hope was for the commutation of 
his death sentence, but Whitman had realized his ambition to become governor 
then, and he would have sole discretion on any plea for clemency. On the eve of 
the execution, Whitman lashed out again, proclaiming Becker's guilt and 
strongly suggesting that he'd killed his 1st wife, though she'd died of 
tuberculosis. When Helen Becker went to the governor to plead for her husband's 
life, she found him too drunk to stand, unable to comprehend her.

As he was led to the chamber, Becker said, rather cryptically, "I am sacrificed 
for my friends." All reports related that he faced death unflinchingly, aside 
from those of Swope, who portrayed him in a state of panic. Becker did receive 
a stay of execution of a momentary and grisly sort, when he survived his first 
2 rides in the electric chair. His body spasmed wildly, and a jet of flame 
leapt from his temple, but when the current was shut off, the examining doctor 
found that his heart was beating. His funeral at the church of St. Nicholas of 
Tolentine in the Bronx was well-attended, mostly by police, and it was 
described by the Times as a "scandalous spectacle." Indignation surged when 
Helen Becker put a plaque on her husband's grave, in Woodlawn Cemetery, that 
read:

CHARLES BECKER MURDERED JULY 30, 1915

BY GOVERNOR WHITMAN

There were calls for her to be fired from her job as a schoolteacher, but the 
moment passed. The police removed the plaque several weeks later.

Helen Becker never married again, and lived quietly until the 1960's. Clubber 
Williams died in 1917, and he was buried near Becker in Woodlawn. In Whitman's 
campaign for reelection in 1918, he would become as ardent a Prohibitionist as 
he had been a drinker, but he was defeated by Tammany's man, Al Smith, who 
served 4 terms of lasting distinction and went on to become the 1st Catholic to 
run for president as the candidate of a major party. Herbert Bayard Swope would 
go on to win 3 Pulitzer Prizes for reporting. In the city, a new system was 
organized so that the police role as conduit between the politicians and the 
gangsters was much reduced. Cops like Becker were replaced by 1 man, Swope's 
great friend, Arnold Rothstein, who became organized crime's 1st great 
modernizer.

Proponents of reform saw the Becker execution as a great act of purification. 
Opponents might not have minded it so much, either, seeing it as an opportunity 
to get back to business for another generation. Big Tim Sullivan might have 
been wrong in his 9-day estimate for the shelf life of a scandal, but it's hard 
to argue with his larger point about the fickle and fleeting nature of public 
concern, whether we forget from ordinary distraction or willful amnesia. He was 
committed to a sanatorium in 1912, the year Rosenthal was killed, suffering 
delusions as a result of tertiary syphilis. He wandered away the next year, and 
was hit by a train.

(source: The Daily Beast)






PENNSYLVANIA:

Death row inmate Smyrnes claims isolation cruel and unusual punishment in 
Westmoreland County case


Convicted killer Ricky Smyrnes wants a job.

But with a long waiting list for the few employment opportunities for inmates, 
Smyrnes sits in his small cell on death row at the State Correctional 
Institution in Greene County for 23 hours a day with little to do, according to 
his lawyers.

Smyrnes' "alone time," along with the continued moratorium on the death penalty 
ordered earlier this year by Gov. Tom Wolf, constitutes cruel and unusual 
punishment, his lawyers said.

Smyrnes' defense team on Wednesday asked that an expert be appointed to help 
make their case that the ringleader in the 2010 torture slaying of Jennifer 
Daugherty should have his death sentence overturned.

"Experts ... have written extensively and litigated issues concerning solitary 
confinement ... all resulting in courts finding that such indefinite periods in 
solitary confinement are cruel and unusual as they inflict mental suffering 
upon individuals," said defense lawyers Brian Aston and Jim Fox.

Westmoreland County Judge Rita Hathaway ordered that a hearing be conducted on 
the defense's request to hire an expert witness. A hearing date hasn't been 
set.

Smyrnes, 29, formerly of Irwin, was condemned to death following a jury trial 
in 2013 where he was convicted of 1st-degree murder. Daugherty, 30, of Mt. 
Pleasant, was mentally challenged.

Prosecutors said Smyrnes led a group of 6 Greensburg roommates who held 
Daugherty captive for 2 days. They humiliated, abused, beat, tortured and 
eventually stabbed her to death. Her body, wrapped in Christmas lights and 
garland, was stuffed into a trash can and left under a truck parked in a 
snow-covered school parking lot.

Witnesses said Smyrnes was one of two men who stabbed Daugherty and led "family 
meetings" in which a vote was taken to kill their captive.

District Attorney John Peck said the death penalty is the proper sentence for 
Smyrnes and questioned the discomfort of his living conditions.

"Certainly he must prefer being on death row rather than having the death 
penalty imposed upon him," Peck said. "Clearly this was one of the worst 
homicide cases we've had in Westmoreland County, at least in my career."

(source: triblive.com)

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

Death penalty hardly tough on crime


2 positives arise from the death-penalty confrontation among Gov. Wolf, 
District Attorney Seth Williams, and Attorney General Kathleen Kane ("Wolf 
calls on court to uphold his moratorium on death penalty," July 22). It keeps 
capital punishment under the spotlight, and it also makes it clear that many 
Democrats differ little from Republicans in important areas.

Williams, Kane, and other tough-on-crime officials of either party seem to have 
given no consideration to the words of George Bernard Shaw: "It is the deed 
that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not 
opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind."

In addition, capital punishment inevitably kills some innocents; wastes vast 
fortunes of public revenues; likely prevents no homicidally inclined people 
from committing murder; and unjustly punishes utterly innocent families and 
friends of the condemned, a punishment that lasts long after the execution.

|John Jonik, Philadelphia,

(source: Letter to the Editor, philly.com)






FLORIDA:

Is Florida's death penalty system constitutional?


DEATH SENTENCES

Florida's policy at issue

Millions of dollars are about to be wasted on the 8 death trials scheduled for 
this fall in Duval County. It is likely these cases will be overturned by a 
U.S. Supreme Court case that will not be decided until the summer of 2016.

The Hurst vs. Florida case challenges Florida's death sentencing rule that 
allows for a simple majority, a 7-5 jury vote, to sentence someone to death. 
This is the lowest threshold in the U.S. for a death sentence.

In the few states that use the death penalty, nearly all require a 12-0 jury 
decision to sentence someone to death. Most experts agree Florida cases with 
less than 12-0 jury are at risk of being overturned by Hurst vs. Florida.

If overturned, the retrials of these 8 Duval County defendants will cost 
Florida taxpayers several million dollars more than the $51 million already 
spent each year in pursuit of death sentences.

It does not have to be this way. Courts throughout Florida are granting stays 
or continuances on death sentencing hearings and death trials until after the 
U.S. Supreme Court rules in June 2016.

At the very least, we should demand the courts and state attorney wait until we 
know if Florida has an illegal sentencing policy.

It is reckless and wasteful and above all cruel to make the victims' families 
endure a 2nd trial that forces them to relive the worst moments of their lives 
again.

Another reasonable option is a sentence of life without parole for these 
defendants. A life sentence delivers swift justice, keeps the dangerous person 
locked up forever, gives victims closure and costs Florida $51 million less per 
year than death cases.

Durie Burns, Orange Park

(source: Letter to the Editor, Florida Times-Union)