[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, N.C., GA., KAN., NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 23




TEXAS:

Letters from Death Row: The Biology of Trauma----New studies show that trauma 
biologically alters the brains of young boys in ways that affect their adult 
behavior.



Of the 41 inmates who responded to an informal Observer survey, 22 of them (54 
%) reported have violent or abusive childhoods. An additional 9 inmates (22 %) 
described their childhoods as "hard," or said they had some sort of dominant 
negative issue.

This is the 4th, and final, story in a series.

***

Juan Ramirez grew up in poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, in a neighborhood 
infested with drug-and gang-related violence. By the age of 10 he'd started 
smoking marijuana and using inhalants. Within a couple of years he'd moved on 
to cocaine. By his middle teens he was drinking alcohol and smoking weed daily. 
A game he and his friends used to play in the Valley, called WAWA, involved 
spraying paint into a bag, sealing the lip around their mouths, and inhaling 
the fumes to get high.

Ramirez is the middle of 5 children and, according to court documents, his 
mother and father were alcoholics who disciplined their kids by whipping them 
with belts, clothes hangers, shoes - even tree branches. The severity of those 
beatings depended on the parents' moods. Consequently, Ramirez spent most of 
his time playing outside in the street.

Inevitably, perhaps, he dropped out of school, became a drug addict and spent 
time in Texas Youth Commission facilities for juvenile offenders. But it was a 
single incident in 2003 that sealed his fate. One night in early January, 11 
masked men burst into a small house in Hidalgo County to steal marijuana. By 
the time they left, 6 members of a rival drug gang in the house were dead. 
Ramirez was just 20 years old and the youngest of those the police said were 
responsible. Although he wasn't identified as the gunman, under Texas' law of 
parties, prosecutors successfully sought the death penalty.

For the uninitiated, the law of parties holds that if a person "solicits, 
encourages, directs, aids, or attempts to aid the other person to commit the 
offense," then he or she is criminally responsible for the conduct of the other 
person. Of course the law can be applied inconsistently - and it often is.

This is Ramirez's 11th year on death row, housed at the notorious Polunsky Unit 
in the rural East Texas town of Livingston. And his is one of numerous stories 
of childhood abuse and violence that condemned inmates have told the Observer 
as part of an informal yet wide-ranging survey of the men waiting for Texas to 
exercise the most brutal manifestation of its power.

Last year, I sent a questionnaire to each of the 292 inmates on Texas' death 
row. It was designed to elicit information often missed in narratives about the 
death penalty: the effect that solitary confinement has on them; whether they 
had found religion in prison; and what sort of childhoods they had. I wanted to 
see if any patterns emerged.

41 inmates responded. Ramirez was among 22 inmates (54 %) who reported having 
violent or abusive childhoods. An additional nine inmates (22 %) described 
their childhoods as "hard," or said they had some sort of dominant negative 
issue - whether it was growing up in poverty and/or in a crime-filled 
neighborhood or that they endured the potentially debilitating experience of 
having a parent walk out on them. This is the final story in a series based on 
information obtained from those responses. 3 others, which explore what books 
the inmates read, the effects of solitary confinement, and how religion factors 
into their lives, ran previously on the Observer website.

This is not an attempt to retry those cases or to mitigate the harm these men 
caused. But too often, defense attorneys lack the resources to launch in-depth 
investigations into the backgrounds of those facing capital convictions. And to 
quote the Death Penalty Information Center, "Almost all defendants in capital 
cases cannot afford their own attorneys. In many cases, the appointed attorneys 
are overworked, underpaid, or lacking the trial experience required for death 
penalty cases." The center cites a Dallas Morning News examination of 461 
capital cases that found nearly 1 in 4 inmates was represented at trial or on 
appeal by court-appointed attorneys who had been disciplined for professional 
misconduct. Additionally, an investigation by the Texas Defender Service found 
death row inmates "faced a 1-in-3 chance of being executed without having the 
case properly investigated by a competent attorney."

It's also important to acknowledge that the stories of inmates' childhoods that 
have emerged from the Observer's survey are told in the inmates' own words. 
When possible, they have been corroborated with court documents or 
contextualized by news reports.

The responses in our correspondence offer new evidence that supports findings 
from studies that show a correlation between childhood trauma and the potential 
for future violent offending. As Texas leads the nation's death penalty states 
in executions, the letters also act as important reminders that it's time we 
ask what this says about the fractured minds of those we execute and rethink 
the extent of our moral culpability.

At his trial, prosecutors said Ramirez was a member of a Rio Grande Valley gang 
known as the Tri-City Bombers. But of the 11 alleged perpetrators of what 
became known as the Edinburg Massacre, only 2 received a death sentence. 
Another, Robert Garza, was executed in 2013 for an unrelated offense. That same 
year, the alleged ringleader of the gang, Jeffrey Juarez, known as "Dragon," 
got 20 years for drug conspiracy and trafficking but escaped prosecution for 
the killings in Edinburg due to lack of witnesses. Likewise, Reymundo Sauceda, 
who prosecutors said approved the homicides, had the capital murder indictment 
against him dismissed. The others in the gang either received prison terms or 
remain fugitives from the law.

In a letter to the Observer, Ramirez wrote, "I come from the poorest region of 
the nation, from a poor household. I pretty much had all the strikes against me 
before I had a choice of my own."

In their paper "The Cycle of Violence," published by the American Psychological 
Association, David Lisak and Sara Beszterczey, researchers at the University of 
Massachusetts Boston, looked at the life histories of 43 men on death row. They 
discovered that all of them reported having been neglected as children, that an 
astonishing 94 % had been physically abused, 59 % sexually abused, and 83 % had 
witnessed violence in adolescence.

Another study, "Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Criminality," published 
in 2013 in The (Kaiser) Permanente Journal, surveyed 151 offenders and compared 
their answers with a "normative sample" of the population. The researchers 
found that the offender group reported nearly 4 times as many adverse events in 
childhood as the control group.

"The presence of pathological family interactions in the histories of capital 
murderers is consistent with an extensive body of research demonstrating the 
role of disrupted attachment and disturbed family relationships in the etiology 
of violence."

Many, if not most, condemned men were abandoned by their fathers, lived in 
foster care, or were abused or neglected, according to Mark Cunningham and Mark 
Vigen, who 13 years ago conducted a critical review of the literature on death 
row inmates for the journal Behavioral Sciences & the Law. This observation, 
they wrote, is supported by the findings of 7 of the clinical studies they 
looked at. "The presence of pathological family interactions in the histories 
of capital murderers is consistent with an extensive body of research 
demonstrating the role of disrupted attachment and disturbed family 
relationships in the etiology of violence," they wrote. In the United Kingdom 
(which doesn't have the death penalty), Gwyneth Boswell, a professor at the 
University of East Anglia, has spent 22 years conducting research into why 
young people become violent, and she has identified that trauma experiences in 
childhood are key features. 2 of her studies suggest a high prevalence of abuse 
and traumatic loss in young offenders' lives. In one study, Boswell examined 
the files of 200 young offenders and discovered 72 % had experienced some kind 
of abuse - be it emotional, sexual, ritual, or a combination. And 57 % had 
experienced the death or loss of contact of a parent. The total number of young 
offenders who had experienced abuse and/or loss was 91 %. "Unresolved trauma," 
Boswell wrote, "is likely to manifest itself in some way at a later date. Many 
children become depressed, disturbed, violent or all 3, girls tending to 
internalize and boys to externalize their responses."

Reading through the stories contained in the questionnaires that the inmates 
returned, you are confronted with a litany of childhood horror. There's Eugene 
Broxton, sent to an orphanage before being cared for by an older sister whose 
partner then beat him. Broxton was sentenced to death in 1992 after breaking 
into a hotel room, tying up, robbing and shooting a couple that was staying 
there. The woman died; her husband survived. In response to Broxton's defense 
counsel's argument in mitigation concerning his home life, the state said, "his 
sister, his half-sister, his half-brother got the same kind of discipline. And 
they didn't turn out to be mass murderers." Willie Trottie - who was executed 
in September - wrote that he had an abusive and violent mother who beat him and 
his siblings with extension cords until they bled. "I was abandoned at a hotel 
in Houston, placed in foster homes, was beaten there, and I ran away from all 
of them only to be returned to [the homes] to be abused again," he wrote. "I 
was about 7 or 8 years old."

Trottie was convicted of the 1993 shooting deaths of his ex-girlfriend, Barbara 
Canada, and her brother Titus. Prosecutors said he had threatened to kill 
Barbara if she didn't come back to him. Trottie admitted shooting the pair but 
said it was in self-defense after Titus Canada shot him first. (Trottie was 
arrested after driving himself to the hospital with gunshot wounds.)

In an appeal to the Supreme Court, Trottie's lawyers argued that attorneys 
representing him at his original trial failed to produce sufficient testimony 
about Trottie's abusive childhood. Maurie Levin, an attorney with vast 
experience defending capital cases, and who represented Trottie in his 
litigation concerning the lethal injection protocol, told me that all of her 
clients survived miserable childhoods rampant with sexual, physical and 
emotional abuse. "They were impoverished, often entirely outside the social 
safety net. ... How much does it affect later behavior? Every current study 
says it does - developmentally, neurologically, you name it - and our clients' 
stories bear that out."

Jeff Wood, who was convicted under the law of parties for being an accomplice 
to the murder of a convenience store clerk in Kerrville in the mid-1990s, wrote 
that his father used to hit him with a razor strap so badly that Child 
Protective Services was called. During the punishment phase of his trial, Wood 
instructed his attorneys not to call any witnesses, and so evidence of his 
abusive childhood was never presented.

Clinton Young, who faces execution for his part in a double murder in the 
course of a carjacking, wrote that he grew up with an abusive father and an 
emotionally abusive stepfather. "My dad beat me with a 2x4 and [kicked me with] 
steel toe-capped boots. My step dad focused on making sure I feared him and 
that I knew my real father didn't care about me - and that I wouldn't amount 
to, in his words, 'a hill of rabbit shit in life.'"

Anibal Canales strangled his cellmate in 1997 and was sentenced to death 3 
years later. "I think it would take way too much paper to try and talk about my 
childhood," he wrote in response to the Observer's questionnaire. "I grew up in 
a house that was both violent and abusive. My father was a deeply violent man 
[who] abused me and my family regularly. My mother was an alcoholic and abusive 
also. I lived in a jungle, and I learned to hide myself in the foliage that was 
my life - and hide deep. It wasn't until late in life that I was able to talk 
about that part of my life."

In his findings at Canales' Fifth Circuit appeal, the judge conceded that "by 
[his] trial counsel's own admission [he] did not hire a mitigation specialist, 
interview family members or others who knew him growing up, or 'collect any 
records or any historical data on his life.'" During Canales' sentencing, the 
only mitigation presented by his attorney was that he was "a gifted artist" and 
"a peacemaker in prison."

The 5th Circuit added that if Canales' trial attorneys had conducted a 
mitigation investigation, "they would have discovered an extensive history of 
physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. Canales's mother was an alcoholic 
who neglected her children, and his father was violent, angry, and irrational. 
After Canales's parents separated, his mother married a man who was physically 
abusive, beating Canales with a belt and fist and forcing him to strip naked 
prior to these beatings. Canales's step-father sexually abused his sister, and 
Canales attempted, in vain, to protect her. The family lived in poor housing, 
infested with flea[s] and lice and located in 'gang central.' Canales's 
grandparents were also physically and verbally abusive. Eventually, Canales's 
mother left him with his father. The beatings then resumed, and Canales's 
father would beat him 'until his father got tired.' This led Canales to abuse 
drugs and alcohol, 'hook up with the wrong people,' and begin committing 
crimes. He lived in half-way houses for part of his teenage years. Canales's 
sister stated that the death of Canales's mother affected Canales severely and 
that he 'went off the deep end' after she passed away."

Thomas Whitaker wrote that his childhood was emotionally derelict, with no 
friends or peers and no connection to his family. In December 2003, a couple of 
weeks before Christmas, Whitaker and his family returned to their Houston home 
after dinner. Inside the house, a masked gunman shot and killed Whitaker's 
brother, Kevin, and his mother, Tricia, before wounding his father, Kent, and 
Whitaker himself. Although it looked like a robbery, police eventually arrested 
Whitaker. He later confessed to hiring the gunman to kill his family because of 
what prosecutors termed an "irrational hate."

And there's Jedidiah Murphy, whose parents abandoned him at 5, forcing him to 
live out his childhood in a series of foster homes. "I could not tell you all 
of it were you to have all day," he wrote. "It was violent and it did not help 
me in life at all. I don't blame all my life's ills on my childhood but I never 
had a shot with the way that I grew up. I learned the wrong way right off the 
bat, and hell it took forever to see what I was doing was wrong. By that time I 
was lost to alcoholism like my father and his father and so on."

As if an abusive childhood weren't bad enough, Hector Medina, another death row 
inmate who responded to the questionnaire, spent his in a country torn apart by 
a bitter civil war.

Medina, who has been on death row for 6 years, was born in El Salvador in 1979, 
1 of 8 children. The family lived in poverty in a house made of sticks held 
together with mud and plaster, with no electricity. The only source of water 
was 45 minutes away on foot. The civil war between the militaryled government 
and a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups began 6 months after Medina was 
born and lasted until he was 12.

In an affidavit from Selena Sermeno, a clinical psychologist who looked into 
Medina's social history for his appeal hearings, she quotes his brother, Jose 
Reynaldo, who explained to her what the siblings went through as children: "The 
Medina children wondered nightly, before falling asleep, if a grenade or bomb 
would fall on their house, killing them and their parents as they watched the 
lights of small mortars pass overhead in the darkness."

According to Medina, when they heard gunfire and grenades they'd hide under the 
family's mud stove - the only place in the house he felt safe. When he was 11 
he went alone to a nearby river to catch fish and was raped by a member of 1 of 
the guerilla armies while another stood watch. Later, Medina was forced to 
watch his father wrap a neighbor's dead body in a blanket after he was caught 
in the crossfire of battle. Inevitably, according to the affidavit, Medina 
exhibited signs of traumatic stress.

After migrating to the U.S., he found work, eventually naturalized as a 
citizen, settled down and had 2 children. But when his girlfriend left him in 
March 2007, Medina borrowed a friend's gun and a box of bullets and 2 days 
later used the weapon to shoot each of their kids - Javier, 3, and Diana, 8 
months - in their necks and heads. He then walked into the front yard and shot 
himself in the neck, but survived.

Sermeno, who specializes in the impact of political and social violence on 
moral development, and is an expert in the ramifications of sociopolitical 
violence on Salvadoran youth particularly, wrote that it was her opinion that 
violent and traumatic childhood experiences prevented Medina from developing 
the social and emotional foundations for dealing with life's most difficult 
challenges - such as the intense emotional pain that comes from a sense of 
betrayal, in his case the experience of his girlfriend walking out on him.

A few years ago I conducted some research on the death penalty for the Dart 
Center, an organization set up to help journalists who cover trauma and 
violence. Steven Teich, a forensic psychiatrist who has worked in the field for 
more than 40 years and who has studied death row populations, told me that in 
his experience, when there has been some kind of violent physical action, it's 
highly probable that some kind of serious trauma had occurred in the 
individual's childhood, usually before the age of 8. "And this gets translated 
through non-verbal language in the actions they are charged with," he said.

Teich told me that if defense attorneys are going to raise issues regarding 
mental health or the inmate's state of mind at the time of the murder, it's 
important that they look into their history and go right back to that traumatic 
event. "There are a lot of people who are tried where they do have mental 
issues, but these are never recognized and not really examined," he said.

This is my 12th year as a journalist who covers the death penalty, but since my 
very 1st visit to the Polunsky Unit back in 2003, it's been all-too apparent 
that the people I've interviewed share a common story: one of poverty; violent 
households, violent communities; and lack of opportunities in early life that 
can help steer us along the right course. For more than a decade I've thought 
about this correlation. So, in sending out that questionnaire, I anticipated 
some responses alluding to it, but I didn't expect the volume of physical and 
emotional abuse relayed in those letters.

Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, founder and chairman emeritus of the Dart Center 
and a pioneer in the study of trauma, isn't surprised. "We knew intuitively 
that if you treat a child badly there's a much higher risk for a bad outcome in 
adulthood," he told me by phone from his home in Michigan. But it's only 
relatively recently that this insight has been studied - and confirmed - by 
academics.

According to Ochberg, in order to be healthy, rational adults, we require in 
childhood a reasonable amount of self-esteem and to feel loved, but a great 
percentage of the human population doesn't ever get to enjoy that trust, 
confidence, love or health, and in fact receives exactly the opposite: neglect, 
abuse and bad examples of how to treat other people. Like any mammal, Ochberg 
said, we require our biology to respond appropriately to threat - it 
establishes our essential fight-or-flight mechanism - but we shouldn't feel 
threatened all the time. For many death row inmates, though, it's that system 
that's been profoundly damaged.

"These early adverse situations reduce the resilience of human biology and they 
change us in very fundamental ways. Our brains are altered. And that's what 
this research is bearing out."

Ochberg said it's not simply learned behavior. "There are a lot of people 
exposed to a great deal of violence and vengeance every day and they don't 
behave in this violent, destructive, criminal way," he said. "It's also clear 
that not all criminality is the product of childhood abuse. But these early 
adverse situations reduce the resilience of human biology and they change us in 
very fundamental ways. Our brains are altered. And that's what this research is 
bearing out."

Most stories about the death penalty begin with the moment of violence - that 
one, often unplanned and unforeseen episode that changed everything.

These stories - in newspapers, magazines and in documentary film - discuss the 
minutiae of the crime, perhaps relay some element of repentance on behalf of 
the convicted inmate, and often include interviews with the victim's family. 
But what most of these narratives lack is an attempt to establish what went 
before by taking us back even further into the life of the condemned, before he 
committed any crime, to that incubation period that molded him - to the trauma. 
And often that's the key to unlocking the "why" in these stories.

Just last year, Jeffery Prevost, a 54-year-old auto mechanic, was condemned to 
die by lethal injection for brutally torturing and killing his former 
girlfriend and her son after she had broken up with him. Prevost's defense 
attorney, Allen Tanner, told the court that his client had had traumatic 
relationships with women that could be traced back to the time his sister 
choked to death - an incident that caused his mother to spend the remainder of 
her life in and out of mental hospitals. What's more, Tanner said, his client 
had a daughter who was born with a birth defect and died before the age of 2. 
But it didn't sway the jury.

One of the more high-profile cases where childhood trauma has been raised (too 
late, unfortunately) in mitigating the crime is that of Johnny Frank Garrett, 
executed in 1992 for the brutal rape and murder of a nun 11 years earlier - a 
crime he committed when he was 17. As Amnesty International notes, the 
execution went ahead despite Garrett's history of childhood abuse and severe 
mental illness.

According to Amnesty, Garrett was raped by his stepfather, introduced to 
alcohol and various drugs by family members when he was 10, and forced to 
perform sexual acts in pornographic films from the age of 14 at the behest of 
his stepfather, who also hired him out to other men for sex. He was regularly 
beaten, and once placed on the burner of a stove, resulting in severe scarring, 
according to Amnesty. The organization says none of this information was made 
available to the jury at his trial. Though he received a 30-day reprieve from 
then-Gov. Ann Richards after Pope John Paul II appealed for clemency, Garrett 
was ultimately executed after Texas' Board of Pardons and Paroles voted not to 
commute his sentence.

Clearly not everyone who experiences a violent or abusive childhood goes on to 
commit heinous crimes. But what is glaringly apparent is that most of those who 
find themselves in prison for violent crimes have had some kind of trauma in 
childhood or adolescence.

Clearly not everyone who experiences a violent or abusive childhood goes on to 
commit heinous crimes. But what is glaringly apparent is that most of those who 
find themselves in prison for violent crimes have had some kind of trauma in 
childhood or adolescence. So what should we do with that information?

Ochberg once acted as an expert witness to save the life of a man on trial for 
multiple murders. "And it turned out he was not only a product of childhood 
abuse, including sexual abuse, but was a product of abuse in the state hospital 
to which he was sent as well," Ochberg told me. "When he was 14 his mother 
couldn't take care of him and so she sent him to a state hospital in Indiana, 
and it was there that one of the employees sexually abused him."

Ochberg obtained records detailing the abuse, and when he was examined he made 
the compelling point that, although we try to maintain safety within our 
institutions, sometimes we fail. "And we can't then execute the product of our 
failures when we have a responsibility to care for those people," Ochberg said. 
That man was spared the death penalty.

In a way, Ochberg told me, we're all complicit in having developed these 
systems that let our own people down. And that's the bottom line, really. If we 
fail to catch these men (and women) in a safety net when they're at their most 
vulnerable - people such as Juan Ramirez, who endured beating after beating by 
his mother and father with belts, clothes hangers and shoes - then we shouldn't 
be surprised when that violence cycles back around. But we must acknowledge the 
fact that we have chosen to dispose of these broken souls rather than try to 
fix them.

(source: Alex Hannaford writes about the death penalty, crime, prisons, 
religion and human interest issues----The Texas Observer)








NORTH CAROLINA:

New report alleges death penalty overused in North Carolina



At least 56 people who faced capital murder charges in North Carolina since 
1989 were either acquitted or had their cases dismissed by prosecutors before 
going to trial because the evidence against them was insufficient to convict.

That is a finding in a report published Monday by the Center for Death Penalty 
Litigation, a Durham-based nonprofit organization whose lawyers represent 
death-row inmates. It also does legal training, research and other activities 
related to the death penalty.

5 of the cases were Cumberland County homicides.

The center argues that these cases show that there are serious flaws in the 
state's criminal justice system and that the death penalty needs to be 
abolished in North Carolina.

"People are being charged capitally based on the thinnest of evidence," Ken 
Rose, the senior staff lawyer for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, said 
in a statement issued with the report. "Prosecutors are using the threat of the 
death penalty to persuade people to plead guilty. If we keep using the death 
penalty like this, North Carolina will sentence more innocent people to death."

Rose's latter comment refers to people sentenced to death who later were found 
to have been wrongly convicted.

Death penalty cases cost significantly more to prosecute and defend than 
non-capital cases, the report says. It estimates these cases boosted taxpayer 
expense just for the defense side of the cases by nearly $2.4 million.

Cumberland County District Attorney Billy West and officers with the N.C. 
Conference of District Attorneys were unavailable to comment on the report and 
its findings because they are attending a meeting in Pinehurst through 
Wednesday.

Even though the defendants were ultimately determined to be not guilty, the 
murder charges upended their lives, the report says. They often ended up 
destitute and some became homeless.

The cases include:

A Pitt County woman who spent three years in jail charged with her mother's 
murder after a state lab mixed up DNA samples from the crime scene, wrongly 
leading police to conclude they had physical evidence that she was there. After 
that finding, the case was tried non-capitally, and the jury found her not 
guilty.

A Cleveland County man jailed for 17 months in a stabbing death based on a 
statement from a paid informant and another from a jailhouse informant. The 
charge was ultimately dropped.

A Columbus County woman charged with murdering her 17-month-old son after he 
died in a house fire. Arson investigators used scientific methods, which were 
once accepted but later found to be unreliable, to conclude that the fire was 
set. Further investigation found the fire likely was caused by faulty wiring. 
The charges were dropped.

The report says the flawed cases generally had inaccurate or untruthful 
witnesses, false confessions, misconduct by police or prosecutors, tainted or 
flawed evidence, or "tunnel vision" on the part of investigators and 
prosecutors.

In instances of tunnel vision, the report says, investigators and prosecutors 
focused so intently on a particular suspect that they discounted or refused to 
consider evidence that they were mistaken, the report says. For example, the 
report cites the case of a man accused of murdering his girlfriend in Gaston 
County even though his cell phone records suggested he was in his home an hour 
away from her when she was killed.

The Gaston County man was found not guilty at trial, but by then he had lost 
his business and declared bankruptcy. His home was foreclosed after his trial.

The report shows that North Carolina needs reform in its criminal justice 
system, said former N.C. Supreme Court Associate Justice Bob Orr.

"If we're going to have capital punishment in North Carolina, then you want a 
system that operates as fairly and as impartially and as accurately as 
possible," Orr said. "And the report certainly raises a number of questions 
about whether that's been the case in the past."

Orr said that in his time as a Supreme Court associate justice, he was struck 
at how inconsistently prosecutors throughout the state chose to seek the death 
penalty.

He thinks it would be better to have an independent panel review potential 
death penalty cases to decide whether they should be prosecuted capitally, he 
said.

(source: Fayetteville Observer)

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

STUDY: NC Prosecutors Have A History Of Pursuing Death Penalty In NC Without 
Enough Evidence



North Carolina prosecutors have sought the death penalty against about 2 people 
per year since 1989 without enough evidence to prove their guilt, according to 
the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. The advocacy group opposes the death 
penalty and helped represent former death row inmate Henry McCollum, who was 
recently exonerated after 30 years in jail.

Executive director Gretchen Engel says stories like McCollum's trouble people 
who want to believe that false imprisonment is a problem of the past. The new 
report disproves that notion even for those who are never convicted, Engel 
says.

"It's been persistent, consistent. And it's the same kinds of problems that we 
see in exonerations: reliance on paid snitches, unreliable junk science, 
coerced confessions," she said. "All the things that we see in exonerations are 
what we see in these cases."

North Carolina spent nearly $2.4 million in defense costs to pursue failed 
capital cases over the last 25 years, according to the report. The North 
Carolina Conference of District Attorneys declined to comment, saying 
representatives have not had time to properly review the cases in the report.

(source: WUNC.org)








GEORGIA:

Death penalty sought in alleged Craigslist killing of Runion couple



Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for a Telfair County man accused of 
killing an Atlanta-area husband and wife he allegedly lured to south Georgia 
after the husband posted a Craigslist ad seeking a vintage Ford Mustang.

Ronnie Adrian "Jay" Towns, 28, was jailed Jan. 26, charged with robbing and 
killing Marietta retirees June Runion, 66, and her husband, Elrey "Bud" Runion, 
69, who had ridden down from Cobb County a few days earlier.

On Monday, prosecutors filed their notice to seek the death penalty, citing 4 
aggravating circumstances, factors the state must prove for Towns to be 
executed.

Aside from the broad, commonly used terminology in capital punishment cases 
that the alleged killer's act "was outrageously or wantonly vile," they also 
contend that Towns killed the pair while stealing from them.

The bodies of the slain couple were found the same day Towns was arrested. The 
2 were shot in the head and hidden along a dirt road near the Telfair farm 
where Towns' parents live. The property lies east of U.S. 441 between Abbeville 
and Hazlehurst, roughly 75 miles southeast of Macon.

On Jan. 22, the Runions had apparently gone to meet someone about buying a 1966 
Ford Mustang near the Ocmulgee River hamlet of Jacksonville, where Towns was 
raised.

The day he was arrested, the Runions' 2003 GMC Envoy was found sunk in a pond 
not far from where their bodies turned up.

News that prosecutors were seeking death for his client didn't come as a 
surprise to Towns' attorney, Franklin J. Hogue of Macon.

"I've known from the beginning of this case ... that the death penalty was in 
play as a possibility," Hogue said.

The couple's slaying drew international attention early on, largely because of 
its apparent link to the prominent online classified advertising site 
Craigslist.

Bud Runion had posted a Craigslist ad saying he was interested in buying a 1966 
Ford Mustang. Authorities believe Towns fooled him into thinking such a car was 
for sale.

Prosecutors have said that in January, days before the killings, Towns was 
fired from his job at a tree-removal company and was desperate for cash.

At an April hearing where Towns was denied bond, a prosecutor said Towns not 
only shot and killed the Runions, but he had also tried to trick other 
potential victims into thinking he was selling things they'd posted want ads 
for on Craigslist.

Prosecutor Joshua Powell said at that hearing that Towns bought a "burner" 
cellphone and was in touch with people -- the Runions among them -- who were 
looking to buy merchandise, including antique cars.

"Jay Towns had a personal cellphone," Powell said, "but instead decided to buy 
this 2nd telephone to contact the Runions."

Powell said Towns was "in contact with multiple other individuals concerning 
(them) coming to Telfair County -- the same address that was given to the 
Runions -- to look at other vehicles."

Towns' arraignment, originally set for June 25, won't happen until after a 
so-called first proceeding, the initial step in a death penalty prosecution, 
which won't likely come for a month or so.

(source: Macon Telegraph)






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

Columbus man again faces death in brutal murders of wife, stepdaughter



A Columbus man who in a drug-fueled rampage in 1995 raped and fatally stabbed 
his stepdaughter before smashing his wife's skull with a baseball bat again is 
facing death by lethal injection.

Chief Superior Court Judge Bemon McBride reinstated the death sentence for 
Johnnie Alfred Worsley on Monday, 3 years after Judge John Allen vacated the 
sentence and ordered a new penalty phase for Worsley's trial.

Allen first said he would vacate the sentence on March 14, 2012, and issued the 
order in writing the following Aug. 28. Prosecutors appealed a few days later, 
on Sept. 4.

The Georgia Supreme Court overturned Allen's ruling on July 1, 2013, sending 
the case back to Muscogee Superior Court. On March 19 of this year the district 
attorney moved to reinstate Worsley's death penalty, prompting his hearing 
Monday.

Worsley now is represented by the Georgia Capital Defenders Office, which said 
it again will appeal Worsley's conviction and sentence.

Worsley's crime was particularly brutal, and he did not deny the 2 murders.

According to the state Supreme Court's review of the case. Worsley married wife 
Flora Worsley in 1984, but they separated 4 years later because of his cocaine 
addiction. They started talking again in 1993, and in January 1995 he moved 
back in with her and her daughter, Yameika Bell.

But his addiction persisted, and he became increasingly hostile. In late 
February 1995, his wife said she'd leave him if he kept using coke, and he said 
he'd kill her if she tried.

The following March 6, Bell noticed money missing from her purse and blamed 
Johnnie Worsley, who denied taking it, but gave her some back. About 2 a.m. the 
next day, he got a butcher knife from the kitchen, went into Bell's bedroom, 
raped and stabbed her. She was 17.

Investigators said they found her naked under a pile of comforters on the bed, 
her feet on the floor, her legs spread and her underwear at her feet. She had 9 
stab wounds and 11 slashes to her neck, and 9 stab wounds to her chest and 
upper abdomen. Foam around Bell's mouth showed she was still breathing when 
Worsley stabbed her, authorities said.

Worsley left the house to buy crack cocaine, then came back and smoked it. At 8 
a.m., his wife came home after working a late shift, and he crushed her skull 
with a "full-force swing" of a baseball bat and stabbed her in the neck. 
Authorities later found her on the bedroom floor, also lying under a comforter.

Relatives became worried when Flora Worsley didn't call her mother that morning 
like she usually did. Instead Johnnie Worsley called her and asked her 
forgiveness "for what I have done." Police summoned to the Worsley residence 
saw nothing suspicious, but did not go inside.

The next day, a friend entered and found the bodies amid rooms splattered with 
blood. That same day, Johnnie Worsley drove his Oldsmobile Cutlass to a Phenix 
City car dealership and took a blue Geo Metro for a test drive. He did not 
return, and left a note in the Cutlass in part saying, "I now must go to hell 
and pay for what I am."

He drove the Geo to a church in Twiggs County, where he met a deacon and asked 
forgiveness for killing 2 people. The deacon called the sheriff, who later saw 
the Geo on Interstate 16 and tried to stop it. For 4 miles the suspect led a 
chase at up to 95 mph before he finally gave up.

His trial began Nov. 12, 1998, and ended the following Nov. 14, when the jury 
found him guilty and recommended the death penalty. Johnnie Worsley had pleaded 
guilty but mentally ill.

During his trial, defense attorneys called to the stand a psychologist who said 
the defendant suffered from a sustained depression, came from an abusive and 
dysfunctional home, had an IQ of 78, read at a 4th-grade level and had a 
7th-grade grasp of math. The psychologist also said Johnnie Worsley likely 
suffered from brain damage.

Allen in his review of the case found the defense failed to properly convey 
such mitigating circumstances to the jury as it pondered the death penalty, and 
neglected to object when the victims??? family said he deserved the death 
penalty, which is considered improper in victim-impact statements.

The state Supreme Court said the family's remarks during the sentencing hearing 
made minimal references to the death penalty, and the crime was so obviously 
heinous that their comments hardly mattered. The defense sufficiently reminded 
jurors of the psychologist's testimony regarding the defendant's diminished 
mental capacity, the court ruled.

Allen also had said the defense failed to call Johnnie Worsley's family to 
testify to his hardships, but the Supreme Court decided that was a reasonable 
tactic, as his relatives could have contradicted what the psychologist said, 
damaging the defense.

(source: ledger-enquirer.com)

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

Ga. Supreme Court stops jury selection in Athens death penalty case



The Georgia Supreme Court has stopped jury selection in the death penalty trial 
of admitted cop killer Jamie Hood to allow time for the justices to consider 
issues over the decision to choose jurors from Elbert County who would hear the 
case in Athens.

Judge Patrick Haggard had approved Hood's request for a change in venue because 
of publicity around the 2011 shooting death of Athens-Clarke County police 
officer Elmer "Buddy" Christian and the wounding of officer Tony Howard. 
Haggard decided jurors would be selected from Elbert County, 2 counties over 
and on the South Carolina line. Once seated they would be brought to Athens to 
sequestered for the duration of the case.

Hood, who is representing himself, asked for the change in venue. The 
prosecution, however, asked the Georgia Supreme Court to step in after the 
district attorney asked at least 3 times that Haggard reconsider his choice of 
Elbert County because they had been unable to find people who did not already 
have strong opinions on the case.

The Monday order said the high court was issuing the temporary stay of jury 
selection so it could consider the prosecution's motion to reverse Haggard's 
decision. District Attorney also wants the high court to review Haggard's 
decision to add to the jury pool that was initially called as well as 
"unconstitutional gag orders," including 1 prohibiting the media from reporting 
on jury selection proceedings and one prohibiting reporting on the reasons 
District Attorney Ken Mauldin wanted the judge to reconsider his choice of 
Elbert County.

(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)








KANSAS:

Death penalty a tricky proposition



A Kansas capital murder case involving a white supremacist who is dying of 
emphysema poses some unusual challenges for a district attorney pursuing the 
death penalty for the 1st time.

Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe has twice rejected offers from 
Frazier Glenn Miller's attorneys to have Miller plead guilty to killing 3 
people at 2 Jewish community centers last year in exchange for taking the death 
penalty off the table.

Howe says he believes Miller's alleged crimes deserve the most severe 
punishment.

Kansas hasn't executed anyone in 50 years, however, and there's virtually no 
chance the 74-year-old will be the next.

Critics say Howe's insistence appears to be aimed solely at scoring political 
points, with taxpayers picking up the tab.

"No death sentence they impose on this guy is ever going to be carried out. He 
was terminally ill and that's why he did this in the first place," said Sean 
O'Brien, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who has defended 
dozens of death penalty cases since 1983.

Miller does not deny gunning down Dr. William Lewis Corporon, 69; his 
14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood; and 53-year-old Terri LaManno at 
2 Jewish centers in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, on April 
13, 2014.

He said he felt it was his duty to kill Jewish people before he died; he didn't 
know all 3 were Christians. And last week, Miller submitted a motion for 
acquittal in which he called the shootings justified.

Still, the Aurora, Missouri, man has pleaded not guilty and has insisted on his 
constitutional right to a speedy trial, which is to begin Aug. 17.

Since the state is seeking the death penalty, it's unclear whether he would be 
allowed to plead guilty because of Kansas' ban on assisted suicide.

Several states have laws forbidding a defendant from pleading guilty when a 
death sentence is a possibility, and it's also not allowed under the federal 
Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Kansas has no law addressing that specific issue.

"Yes, there is a question of whether pleading guilty and getting the death 
sentence violates suicide laws," said John Blume, a Cornell Law School 
professor who is director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project.

"But why does that matter? Despite the language differences, the end result is 
the same."

Miller's attorneys, who were ordered by the judge to remain as standby counsel 
after Miller fired them last month, have repeatedly said an August trial date 
does not give them time to build a competent defense.

Johnson County District Judge Kelly Ryan has issued a gag order barring 
attorneys from discussing the case, which Howe cited in declining to comment.

Howe, a Republican, was first elected as district attorney in the state's most 
populous county in 2008, then ran unopposed in 2012 and hasn't announced his 
intentions for 2016.

Both of his predecessors also served as Kansas attorney general, but Howe 
hasn't publicly expressed an interest in that position.

One of Howe's counterparts in Missouri, Platte County prosecutor Eric Zahnd, 
said elected prosecutors either reflect the values of their communities or they 
don't get re-elected.

But they don't take death penalty decisions lightly, he said, nor make them for 
political gain.

"Some murders are so terrible that they cry out for capital punishment," he 
said.

Miller told the Associated Press last month that his respiratory condition is 
getting worse and he's undergoing 6 breathing treatments a day.

"I've thought about killing myself in here, but I can't figure out how to do 
it," said Miller, who added that he'd plead guilty, even with the death penalty 
a possibility, as long as he gets a chance to justify his actions before the 
court at sentencing.

As for pursuing a death sentence against someone unlikely to survive long 
enough to go through the mandatory appeals process, Zahnd said: "If we knew a 
murder defendant had cancer with a life expectancy of just 6 months, would that 
make a 1-year sentence appropriate? I think not."

(source: Associated Press)








NEBRASKA:

Group unveils ads aimed at death penalty petition drive



A group that opposes Nebraska's death penalty petition drive has released 2 
television ads urging voters not to sign a petition that seeks to put the issue 
on the 2016 ballot.

Nebraskans for Public Safety posted the ads on social media on Monday and said 
they will run on television starting Tuesday.

The ads feature Nebraska voters Martha Brown, Timorree Adams Klinger and state 
Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln, a conservative who led the repeal effort in the 
Legislature this year.

Danielle Conrad, a spokeswoman for the group, says the death penalty is broken 
and should left in the past. Nebraska last executed an inmate in 1997.

The ads can be viewed online at http://bit.ly/1SDB1wL.

The group Nebraskans for the Death Penalty has until Aug. 27 to gather 
signatures.

(source: KETV news)








USA:

Aurora theater shooting trial strategies focus on head vs. heart----Defense 
poised to begin its case in Aurora theater shooting trial



There were days when police officers wept on the witness stand and days when 
autopsy photographs lingered before jurors, but the toughest days so far in the 
Aurora movie theater shooting trial were those when seats disappeared from a 
row in the courtroom gallery.

Those were the days when room had to be made for someone in a wheelchair. They 
were the days when the people hurt the most in the shooting came to testify.

When prosecutors rested their case Friday after calling their 222nd witness, a 
wheelchair-bound Ashley Moser, it tied a bow in a thread they wove throughout 
their portion of the trial. Even amid technical testimony about psychiatric 
diagnoses and credit card purchases, prosecutors held their case together with 
emotion.

The goal was as blunt as the evidence presented. Prosecutors - who fought to 
show a crime scene video taken before the dead had been removed from the 
theater and asked survivors to pound their hands onto the witness stand to 
demonstrate the cadence of the gunfire - wanted jurors not just to learn about 
the shooting but to feel it.

That stands in contrast to defense attorneys, who, when beginning their portion 
of the trial Thursday, will ask jurors to take a far more intellectual approach 
in assessing the case. They have indicated they will call at least 2 mental 
health experts, who will probably eschew emotional testimony and instead make 
scholarly arguments about James Holmes' psychiatric state at the time of the 
shooting.

Heart versus head

After 2 months of trial, this is the philosophical battle underlying the 
courtroom fight over sanity versus insanity and guilt versus innocence. It's 
heart versus head.

"The defense will want to reframe it as that central question of mental 
status," said Ken Broda-Bahm, a litigation consultant in Denver with the firm 
Persuasion Strategies.

Aurora theater shooting trial

But social science research suggests jurors may have a difficult time seeing 
past what prosecutors showed them.

Vivid images and traumatic stories stick in the mind more than dry analysis. 
And a growing number of studies show that emotional evidence changes the way 
jurors decide cases.

A 2006 study that used college students as mock jurors in a hypothetical 
criminal trial found that those students who were shown graphic images and 
heard dramatic testimony voted for conviction at a rate more than 3 times 
higher than students who didn't see photos or hear gruesome testimony. That 
matched with previous studies showing that disturbing images - such as autopsy 
photos - can sway jurors to be more punitive, especially if the images are in 
color.

Research on human decisionmaking suggests a reason: When people are angry about 
something, they tend to think in starker terms when assigning blame. Initial 
judgments harden in confidence. Stereotypes can take hold. One review of the 
research puts it this way: There is less "effortful cognitive processing of 
information."

Lawrence White, a Beloit College professor of psychology and legal studies who 
is an expert on the topic, said the studies "lead to a tentative conclusion 
that the strong emotions elicited by gruesome photographs and victims' stories 
can interfere with a juror's ability to consider other kinds of evidence in a 
rational, deliberate manner."

Denver-based trial consultant Jessica Brylo put it more succinctly.

"It creates a mental shortcut," she said.

The Aurora theater shooting trial presents jurors with a thicket of complex 
information. Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors 
are seeking the death penalty. Jurors are required to make nuanced decisions 
about mental health and legal standards of intent.

That's why legal experts such as Brylo said prosecutors gave jurors emotional 
guideposts to follow. Only a handful of the case's 34 days of testimony went by 
without a shooting survivor taking the witness stand.

Prosecutors started their case by calling Katie Medley, whose husband, Caleb, 
was paralyzed in the attack and who gave birth to the couple's 1st child only 
days later in the same hospital where Caleb was undergoing yet another 
life-saving surgery.

Prosecutors closed Friday by calling Moser, who, in addition to her own 
injuries, lost her unborn child in the shooting and whose 6-year-old daughter, 
Veronica, was killed.

In the weeks between, they presented their more rational testimony - from 
forensic experts describing fingerprint analysis and ballistic comparison 
testing, from retailers detailing firearm and ammunition purchases that Holmes 
made and from 2 independent psychiatrists who evaluated Holmes and found him 
sane at the time of the attack, which left 12 people dead and 70 wounded. But 
prosecutors argued throughout the case that their more emotional evidence was 
just as relevant.

"They are presenting what they believe is the most direct evidence of what 
happened," said Samuel Pillsbury, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los 
Angeles.

Defense attorneys won't entirely abstain from making emotional arguments, 
either. They acknowledged the shooting's tragedy during opening statements, 
and, if Holmes is convicted and faces a death-penalty sentencing phase, they 
will probably call people such as his parents to humanize him.

But they have also frequently asked Judge Carlos Samour Jr. to limit the 
prosecution's emotional presentation, saying it could bias the jury. During 
opening statements, defense attorney Daniel King sought to immunize the jury 
from emotional bias, telling them to expect a barrage of graphic photos and 
traumatic stories.

"And when you hear that evidence," he told jurors, "understand that it's not 
being contested and ask why it is being presented."

Emotional evidence

Samour has curtailed some emotional evidence, and he has repeatedly told jurors 
they cannot base decisions on sympathy for the victims. Brylo said that creates 
a risk the prosecution's strategy could backfire. If jurors feel the 
prosecution is trying to manipulate their emotions, they could turn off to the 
rest of the arguments, as well.

Others say there is reason to think jurors can balance their emotions with more 
intellectual analysis. Broda-Bahm pointed to brain-imaging studies that suggest 
the mind is able to switch easily between processing emotional and rational 
thoughts, but it just can't process both at the same time.

Meanwhile, White said even if emotions have an impact individually, jurors 
don't make decisions alone. They have to work together, forming what Broda-Bahm 
called "a sense of temporary identity" in the job before them.

If only a couple of jurors encourage the rest to restrain their emotions, the 
impact of months' worth of the testimony could be dulled.

"A few deliberate thinkers," White said, "can induce the whole group to think 
deliberately."

(source: Denver Post)