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

[Rick Halperin]

June 27



OHIO:

Judge rules Shawn Ford meets criteria for death penalty eligibility in couple's 
slaying



A Summit County judge has ruled that convicted murderer Shawn Eric Ford Jr. 
failed to prove that his claims of mental disability should spare him from 
facing capital punishment.

Ford, 20, was convicted of multiple counts of aggravated murder in October, 
along with an array of death penalty specifications, in the April 2013 
bludgeoning deaths of prominent area attorney, Jeffrey Schobert, and his wife 
Margaret at their home in the Portage Lakes area of New Franklin.

The 18-page written ruling, which resolved Ford's intellectual disability claim 
on the state level, was released Thursday by Summit County Common Pleas Judge 
Tom Parker after 2 days of court hearings earlier this month in which the 
defense and prosecution presented psychological evidence of Ford's mental 
abilities since childhood.

Parker's decision now sets the stage for Ford's sentencing hearing Monday 
morning.

The judge has 2 options. He can accept the jury's previous recommendation that 
Ford should be put to death for his crimes, or order him to spend the rest of 
his life in a state penitentiary.

Ford's lawyers had argued that his low IQ barred him from receiving a death 
sentence. Their position was based on a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that 
executing an intellectually disabled defendant is constitutionally prohibited 
as cruel and unusual punishment.

Ford killed the Schoberts inside the master bedroom of their home - attacking 
both in a late-night ambush, prosecutors said - after they kept him from seeing 
their daughter, Chelsea Schobert, in the hospital.

She had suffered head injuries in an alleged attack by Ford, her former 
boyfriend, only days before the New Franklin slayings.

Parker's ruling, which could send Ford to death row, was based on his mental 
health records, the history of similar cases and the testimony of 3 
psychological experts - 1 for the defense, 1 for prosecutors and a 3rd 
appointed by the court.

All of the evidence from the 2 days of court hearings, Parker wrote, was 
consistent. "None of the 3 experts was of the opinion that Mr. Ford has ever 
been intellectually disabled within the standards recognized by the American 
Psychiatric Association, the American Association on Intellectual and 
Developmental Disabilities," or under a similar Ohio criminal case, Parker 
said.

Testimony by the defense's own expert, Dr. James Karpawich, a clinical 
psychologist from Hudson, undoubtedly carried considerable weight in Parker's 
decision.

In cross-examining Karpawich about Ford's many documented evaluations, Summit 
Assistant Prosecutor Brian LoPrinzi asserted that: "At no time anywhere in any 
of those documents or in any of those records, not one of those people in any 
of those agencies has ever indicated Mr. Ford or diagnosed Mr. Ford as being 
intellectually disabled or mentally retarded."

Karpawich said that assertion was correct.

Citing the court's gag order, Ford defense counsel Jonathan T. Sinn declined to 
comment on Parker???s ruling.

Parker has allowed for victim impact statements at Monday???s sentencing 
hearing from family members and close friends of the Schoberts.

(source: ohio.com)

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

Judge rules man mentally fit for execution in couple's death



A northeast Ohio judge has ruled that a man convicted of beating his 
girlfriend's parents to death with a sledgehammer is mentally fit for 
execution.

Summit County Judge Tom Parker ruled Thursday that 20-year-old Shawn Ford Jr.'s 
intellectual ability is above the standard that bars executions. Northeast Ohio 
Media Group reports (http://bit.ly/1FE2k0D) Parker will decide Monday whether 
to accept a jury's recommendation that Ford be put on death row or sentence him 
to prison.

Defense attorneys had argued that Ford's low IQ prevented him from receiving 
the death penalty.

Ford was convicted in October of aggravated murder in the 2013 deaths of 
Margaret and Jeffrey Schobert of New Franklin.

Prosecutors say Ford killed the Schoberts in their home near Akron because they 
kept him from seeing their daughter.

(source: Associated Press)








NEBRASKA:

Pete and Joe Ricketts have contributed $200,000 to pro-death penalty group



Gov. Pete Ricketts and his father, T.D. Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, have 
contributed a total of $200,000 of the $244,000 raised so far by a group 
seeking a referendum to retain Nebraska???s death penalty.

Nebraskans for the Death Penalty released some preliminary figures Friday on 
contributions and expenditures, ahead of a Tuesday deadline to report its 
financials to the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission.

Chris Peterson, a spokesman for the referendum group, said that while the 
organization is grateful for the support from the governor and his father, more 
donations are needed. "We're hoping that more Nebraskans step forward and lend 
a hand to help save the death penalty," Peterson said.

The preliminary figures showed that Nebraskans for the Death Penalty spent 
$217,537 so far this month, with $192,129 of it paid to an Arizona firm that 
has hired dozens of paid petition circulators.

Peterson, a former spokesman for Republican Gov. Mike Johanns, was paid $5,000 
for his work this month, with $7,000 paid to Jessica Moenning, a political 
consultant on the private payroll of Gov. Ricketts. She is helping manage the 
Nebraskans for the Death Penalty campaign.

Pete and Joe Ricketts have been generous donors to political campaigns in the 
past and were among 12 donors who gave more than $250 each to the referendum. 2 
other large donors were Omaha business executive Michael Cassling, who gave 
$25,000, and the Omaha Police Union, which contributed $10,000.

The release comes a week after an anti-death penalty coalition called 
Nebraskans for Public Safety reported receiving a $400,000 donation from a 
Massachusetts-based social justice group called Proteus Action League.

The pro-death penalty group formed after the Nebraska Legislature overrode a 
veto last month by the Republican governor to repeal capital punishment.

The group faces an Aug. 27 deadline to gather at least 57,500 valid signatures 
of registered voters to force a referendum on the issue during the 2016 general 
election.

If the group can gather 115,000 signatures, it would place the repeal law on 
hold until the referendum is held.

The group has projected that it might have to spend $900,000 or more to get the 
issue on the ballot.

A similar amount of money was spent in 2014 to qualify an initiative to raise 
the state's minimum wage.

Peterson said that even though the governor and his father have given more than 
80 % of the funds raised so far, the group has widespread support.

He said the group would have paid circulators at several events across the 
state this weekend, including Old Settlers Day in North Bend and the Diller 
Picnic in Diller.

(source: Omaha World-Herald)

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

Death penalty referendum campaign gearing up



Supporters of capital punishment are on the streets gathering signatures for a 
referendum to keep the death penalty on the books, after the Nebraska 
Legislature voted to repeal it. What could be long campaign on the issue is now 
well underway.

On a busy weekday morning outside the Lancaster County motor vehicle office in 
Lincoln, petition circulator Jennifer Dormer called out as Evelyn Johnson and 
her husband Dayle left the office. "Are you folks registered voters in the 
state of Nebraska? Are you interested in signing the petition to get the death 
penalty put on the ballot?" Dormer asked.

"Yes," declared Evelyn Johnson, enthusiastically. Asked later why, she said 
repealing the death penalty let murderer's escape justice. "I think that if 
they take a life, they should lose their life," she said. "It's not right."

As Dormer continued asking people to sign, some said they were too busy, or 
weren't registered voters. Others, like Andrew Frazier of Lincoln, said no. 
Asked later why, Frazier said the death penalty reflects society's failure to 
help rehabilitate people. "It's morally, ethically wrong and it doesn't 
represent us as people of this state," he said.

Nebraska voters may have the final word. If death penalty supporters collect 
about 57,000 valid signatures by Aug. 27, the issue will be on the November, 
2016 ballot. If they get 114,000 signatures, that would keep the old death 
penalty law on the books until voters decide the issue.

That means death penalty supporters have to shoot for collecting about 2,000 
signatures a day. Chris Peterson, spokesman for Nebraskans for the Death 
Penalty, said that involves a lot of work. "These sorts of things take a while 
to ramp up. The 1st day that you start collecting signatures you're not 
collecting 2,000 signatures a day, I can assure you that," he said.

But Peterson said as the campaign goes on, it will involve more volunteers, as 
well as paid circulators who show they can do a good job. And of course, that 
takes money. "We're planning on needing maybe a million dollars to make sure we 
can circulate enough petitions, gather enough signatures, by our Aug. 27 
deadline," he said.

Peterson said he is taking a cue from last year's successful initiative 
campaign for a minimum wage increase. That campaign reported spending about 
$833,000 during the signature-gathering phase.

On the other side, a coalition of death penalty opponents is asking people not 
to sign the petitions. Nebraskans for Public Safety is also planning to use 
both volunteers and people who are paid to make their case. The group recently 
announced it has received $400,000 from a foundation in Massachusetts.

Sen. Jeremy Nordquist of Omaha is a death penalty opponent and led last year's 
minimum wage campaign. Nordquist says it is hard getting people to work on 
political issues. "You also need to be very aggressive in getting people to 
sign the petitions with their signature because they're just not as engaged. 
And a lot of people just shy away from anything that looks like political 
debate or political discourse," he said.

That may become harder to do. Nordquist says opponents of the petition drive 
will try to persuade people not to sign. Nebraskans for the Death Penalty's 
Chris Peterson says he expects an effort to suppress voters' rights. "We expect 
that the opposition here will be well-funded and they'll employ any variety of 
tactics to try and prevent Nebraskans from being able to vote on this issue," 
he said.

Petition drive opponents say they will be using their free speech rights. 
Nordquist, though, said those opponents will be doing more than trying to 
persuade people not to sign. "I think that they'll push as civilly and 
respectfully as possible - try to present a counterargument at the site. But 
also I think they're going to spend a lot of time tracking to make sure that 
things are done right," he said.

If not, that could lead to legal challenges - another potential step in the 
journey Nebraskans may take on this issue for the next year and a half.

(source: KVNO news)

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

Death penalty referendum campaign raises nearly $244,000



The Nebraskans for the Death Penalty campaign raised nearly $244,000 in its 1st 
reporting period, with most of the money coming from Gov. Pete Ricketts and his 
father.

Ricketts and his father, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, each contributed 
$100,000 to the ballot drive that could put the death penalty question to 
voters. An expense report released Friday says the campaign spent more than 
$217,500 in the reporting period, leaving it with roughly $26,300 in cash on 
hand.

The campaign was launched after Nebraska lawmakers abolished the death penalty 
over the governor's veto.

Nebraskans for the Death Penalty says it has paid roughly $192,000 to Lincoln 
Strategy Group, an Arizona-based consultant that is using paid circulators to 
gather signatures.

A group opposing the referendum announced a $400,000 donation last week.

(source: Associated Press)








OKLAHOMA:

As lethal injection decision draws near, inmate says state silencing him



It now appears Monday will be decision day for Oklahoma on the final official 
day of the Supreme Court's session. One of the final cases the court has to 
rule on is the case concerning constitutional questions surrounding Oklahoma's 
controversial execution drugs.

As the state awaits a ruling, the next inmate scheduled to die says Oklahoma is 
changing the rules to keep him quiet.

In November 2014, Fox 25 was granted an interview with Richard Glossip. It was 
a rare on camera opportunity to talk about the case that sent him to death row 
and his thoughts on the state's controversial execution procedures. However, 
when Fox 25 requested another interview as the issue surrounding executions 
became international news, the Department of Corrections told us to wait on the 
Supreme Court hearing. After that hearing, we requested again and were told the 
Department of Corrections would allow no further interviews on death row.

"I think that because of the press I've got, and because I am an innocent man 
on death row in Oklahoma and they are trying to execute me, they are going out 
of their way, in my opinion, to stop me from speaking out," Glossip told Fox 25 
over the phone.

Glossip is still allowed use of the phone to talk to the press, but those phone 
calls are not free and make money. Glossip says he is glad to talk over the 
phone, but wants people to be able to see him the same way they see Oklahoma's 
political leaders speak out in favor of the death penalty and his impending 
execution. "It just surprises me why Oklahoma is going so far out of their way 
to shut me up."

According to the Department of Corrections policy, media interviews have to be 
approved by the director, but inmates can choose who they talk to. In Glossip's 
case, he had narrowed his list of on-camera interviews to small number of 
outlets because of the overwhelming number of requests he ahd received. Glossip 
said the number of requests was the 1st reason the prison gave him as to why 
they were denying further on-camera interviews. Glossip only began seeking 
media attention late last year as the date of his execution drew near. He says 
his silence was on the advice of his attorneys and his belief that his case 
would be overturned before his death sentence was carried out.

"I've always claimed my innocence for 18 years, I just didn't speak out this 
hard until now, because, like I said I trusted a justice system that let me 
down." Glossip is the only inmate on Oklahoma's death row who did not commit 
murder. He was found guilty of 1st-degree murder for the planning of the murder 
of Barry Van Treese. The key witness against him was Justin Sneed, the man who 
beat Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. Prosecutors spared the murderer 
in exchange for his testimony against Glossip.

Besides denying all requests for in-person media interviews, Glossip also said 
the prison at McAlester has also changed its visitation policy and is denying 
special visits. He was supposed to receive a visit from a reporter with a 
national news outlet who has befriended him over the last few months. That 
visit was denied according to Glossip.

The DOC denied our multiple requests for interviews on their recent decisions 
regarding media access or visitations.

(source: okcfox.com)








CALIFORNIA:

CSUF researcher uncovers subconscious bias among jurors



Cal State Fullerton Associate Professor of Psychology Russ Espinoza, researched 
whether the theory of "aversive racism" plays a role in death penalty decisions 
-- and found the answer is "yes."

"Aversive racism" is thought to be a phenomenon in which people believe they 
harbor no prejudice toward minorities, when in fact they have a subconscious 
bias, Espinoza said.

"When jurors can find other reasons besides race to place blame, such as low 
socioeconomic status, they will tend to be more punitive toward minority 
defendants and feel that they are not being prejudicial," he said in explaining 
the theory.

"My past research has shown that the race or ethnicity of the defendant alone 
is not sufficient for jurors to demonstrate bias," he said in explaining the 
origins of the study. "This begs the question, how is it that African Americans 
and Latinos are found guilty more often and given more punitive sentences, such 
as the death penalty, than European Americans for committing similar crimes?"

Espinoza said he first gained interest in the topic of prejudice in the legal 
system during high school, when he was suspended from the basketball team after 
being falsely accused of breaking and entering into a hall.

"I was in class one day and the vice principal comes and pulls me out and the 
sheriff's are there," Espinoza said. "I was being accused of breaking into this 
hall."

He said that nearly 2 weeks after being accused, the real culprit was found. A 
passion for researching injustice had been ignited. He has spent some two 
decades studying the subject.

Espinoza earned his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Cal State Northridge in 
1998.

In 2000, he became CSU Northridge alumni for the 2nd time, graduating with a 
Master's degree in Counseling. 5 years later, Espinoza earned his PhD in 
Psychology and Law from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he worked 
with professors researching jury decisions in the courtroom.

Espinoza and research partner, Cynthia Willis-Esqueda, professor of psychology 
and ethnic studies at Nebraska, Lincoln, spent a year analyzing whether African 
Americans and Latinos are more likely than whites to receive the death penalty 
for similar crimes.

The death penalty study took place at a Santa Ana courthouse and involved 
jurors from the local jury duty pool.

"We had them read through kind of a fictitious trial transcript," said 
Espinoza, "And we manipulated things like race of the defendant, socioeconomic 
status."

The median age of the mock jurors was roughly 38.

Compared to a group of students in their 20s, the older jury pool was harsher 
in its sentencing, he said.

"We found that the mock jurors with the average of age 38 tended to throw the 
book at minorities," he said.

The results reinforced what Espinoza had hypothesized: If jurors could find 
factors besides race to find the defendant guilty, they would then have a more 
punitive attitude towards minorities and feel as if they are not being 
prejudicial.

The study found that African Americans and Latinos with a low socioeconomic 
status and weak mitigating factors were more likely to receive the death 
penalty.

Espinoza said it is important to educate jurors about these biases in order to 
prevent unfair decisions.

(source: Orange County Register)








USA:

No Capital in Capital Punishment



The false charade that has been blowing in the wind atop flagpoles across the 
south has finally worn threadbare allowing the light of the ugly truth to be 
seen. Looking back, I am chilled and astounded over how long the lies have been 
allowed, how easily the masses have been duped and how systematically history 
was altered, bleached, sanitized, and pressed smooth.

It was back in 1964 that President Lyndon Baines Johnson predicted Democrats 
would lose the south after his visionary and correct civil rights legislation 
became law. Despite the electoral and political consequences for Democrats, LBJ 
wrestled and arm-twisted his magnanimous legislative agenda into the fabric of 
American Constitutional Law. He saw it as the right thing to do at the right 
moment. He was undeterred. Immediately following this official legal end to the 
century old Civil War oppressive, racist and illegal way of life, the 
Confederate Flag was hoisted back into prominence, and symbolically waved in 
sulking defiance across the south.

This is a fact and this is why and when America witnessed the second coming of 
the Confederacy. White supremacist folks have cleverly been wolves in sheepskin 
providing cover for their real agenda, until the inevitability happened. A 
Dylann Roof, one of their own homegrown kids filtered the hate paranoid 
narrative thru his unhinged angst with action. It was the perfect storm bred in 
a culture of racial hate armed with guns proudly stalking in shadows created 
under the honor of a flag.

With the recent despicable tragic slaughter in the Charleston, South Carolina 
church hopefully comes a "check-mate" moment that can lift the white sheet 
called "proud traditions" to reveal the stained ugly truth of racism. Myths 
that get socialized and ingrained in the social psyche are tenacious, but they 
are not invincible.

Perhaps now another myth can be overturned. There is little capital worth 
fighting over to keep the Confederate Flag flying above the Capitol of South 
Carolina. Now is the moment folks at the Capitol can accept there is no capital 
in capital punishment. While all eyes are focused, and the nation's outrage has 
coalesced around sweeping aside the symbols of the treasonous rebel south, this 
other tradition against humanity and the modern state clings thru myth. Seeking 
the death penalty for Dylann Roof would not be utilitarian, noble, nor serve 
society. South carolina's institution of capital punishment, along with other 
southern states, is an old tradition much of the country abandoned. Capital 
punishment was a facade built and sustained as fresh paint on clean wood while 
riddled with dry rot. Capital punishment is shamed with the same institutional 
racism. There is no capital left in capital punishment. The timing could not be 
better to throw out the baby and the bath water. The message from the violated 
congregation that survives the Dylann Roof massacre is one of forgiveness, love 
and inspiration for a more humane future.

Let's put an end to violence and killing, including sponsorship of terror, 
whether it comes in the form of an official state seal that legalizes killing, 
or as way of promoting ideological hate which gives cover to the unstable, 
unhinged and disenfranchised to kill.

(source: Allen Schmertzler, Huffington Post)

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

No humane death penalty for Boston bomber



Re "No such thing as humane death penalty" (Speak Out, June 3):

I do not want a humane death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar 
Tsarnaev. I just want him to die in the same timely manner of 30 days or less 
as did Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The procedure is not relevant. The less publicity the better. Better to forget 
him than to forget the victims.

There is nothing humane about humanity.

Bob Richards

Anniston

(source: Letter to the Editor, Anniston (Ala.) Star)

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

The Death of the Death Penalty----Why the era of capital punishment is ending



The case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev absorbed Americans as no death-penalty drama has 
in years. The saga of his crime and punishment began with the shocking 
bloodbath at the 2013 Boston Marathon, continued through the televised manhunt 
that paralyzed a major city and culminated in the death sentence handed down by 
a federal jury on May 15 after a 2-phase trial.

Justice was done, in the opinion of 70% of those surveyed for a Washington 
Post-ABC News poll in April. Support for capital punishment has sagged in 
recent years, but it remains strong in a situation like this, where the offense 
is so outrageous, the process so open, the defense so robust and guilt beyond 
dispute.

Even so, Tsarnaev is in no danger of imminent death. He is 1 of more than 60 
federal prisoners under sentence of execution in a country where only 3 federal 
death sentences have been carried out in the past half-century. A dozen years 
have passed since the last one.

The situation is similar in state courts and prisons. Despite extraordinary 
efforts by the courts and enormous expense to taxpayers, the modern death 
penalty remains slow, costly and uncertain. For the overwhelming majority of 
condemned prisoners, the final step - that last short march with the strap-down 
team - will never be taken. The relative few who are killed continue to be 
selected by a mostly random cull. Tsarnaev aside, the tide is turning on 
capital punishment in the U.S., as previously supportive judges, lawmakers and 
politicians come out against it.

Change is not coming quickly or easily. Americans have stuck with grim 
determination to the idea of the ultimate penalty even as other Western 
democracies have turned against it. On this issue, our peer group is not 
Britain and France; it's Iran and China. Most U.S. states authorize the death 
penalty, although few of them actually use it. We value tolerance and ??? 
diversity - but certain outrages we will not put up with. Maybe it's the 
teenage terrorist who plants a bomb near an 8-year-old boy. Maybe it's a failed 
neuroscientist who turns a Colorado movie theater into an abattoir. We like to 
think we know them when we see them. Half a century of inconclusive legal 
wrangling over the process for choosing the worst of the worst says otherwise.

On May 27, the conservative Nebraska state legislature abolished the death 
penalty in that state despite a veto attempt by Governor Pete Ricketts. A 
parallel bill passed the Delaware state senate in March and picked up the 
endorsement of Governor Jack Markell, formerly a supporter of the ultimate 
sanction. Only a single vote in a House committee kept the bill bottled up, and 
supporters vowed to keep pressing the issue.

In February, Markell's neighboring governor, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, declared 
an open-ended moratorium on executions. That officially idles the fifth largest 
death row in America. The largest, in California, is also at a standstill while 
a federal appeals court weighs the question of whether long delays and 
infrequent executions render the penalty unconstitutional.

Even in Texas, which leads the nation in executions since 1976 (when the U.S. 
Supreme Court approved the practice after a brief moratorium), the wheels are 
coming off the bandwagon. From a peak of 40 executions in 2000, the Lone Star 
State put 10 prisoners to death last year and 7 so far in 2015. According to 
the state's Department of Corrections, the number of new death sentences 
imposed by Texas courts this year is precisely zero. There, as elsewhere, 
prosecutors, judges and jurors are concluding that the modern death penalty is 
a failed experiment.

The shift is more pragmatic than moral, as Americans realize that our balky 
system of state-sanctioned killing simply isn't fixable. As a leader of the 
Georgia Republican Party, attorney David J. Burge, recently put it, "Capital 
punishment runs counter to core conservative principles of life, fiscal 
responsibility and limited government. The reality is that capital punishment 
is nothing more than an expensive, wasteful and risky government program.

This unmistakable trend dates back to the turn of the century. The number of 
inmates put to death in 2014 was the fewest in 20 years, while the number of 
new death sentences imposed by U.S. courts - 72 - was the fewest in modern 
American history, according to data collected by the Death Penalty Information 
Center. Only 1 state, Missouri, has accelerated its rate of executions during 
that period, but even in the Show Me State, the number of new sentences has 
plunged.

32 states allow capital punishment for the most heinous crimes. And yet in most 
of the country, the penalty is now hollow. Since the start of 2014, all but 2 
of the nation's 49 executions have been carried out by just 5 states: Texas, 
Missouri, Florida, Oklahoma and Georgia.

For the 1st time in the nearly 30 years that I have been studying and writing 
about the death penalty, the end of this troubled system is creeping into view.

And I'll give you 5 reasons why.

Reason 1: Despite decades of effort, we're not getting better at it. In Arizona 
on July 23, prison officials needed nearly 2 hours to complete the execution of 
double murderer Joseph Wood. That was not an aberration. In April 2014, 
Oklahoma authorities spent some 40 minutes trying to kill Clayton Lockett 
before he finally died of a heart attack. Our long search for the perfect mode 
of killing - quiet, tidy and superficially humane - has brought us to this: 
rooms full of witnesses shifting miserably in their seats as unconscious men 
writhe and snort and gasp while strapped to gurneys.

Lethal injection was intended to be a superior alternative to electrocution, 
gassing or hanging, all of which are known to go wrong in gruesome ways. But 
when pharmaceutical companies began refusing to provide their drugs for deadly 
use and stories of botched injections became commonplace, the same legal qualms 
that had turned courts against the earlier methods were raised about lethal 
injections.

Alex Kozinski, the conservative chief judge of the federal Ninth Circuit Court 
of Appeals, recently wrote that Americans must either give up on capital 
punishment or embrace its difficult, brutal nature. Rather than pretend that 
execution is a sort of medical procedure involving heart monitors and IV lines 
- a charade that actual medical professionals refuse to be part of - we should 
use firing squads or the guillotine. (Utah, which abandoned execution by firing 
squad in 2004, restored the option in April. No other U.S. jurisdiction has 
used rifles for an execution in more than 50 years.)

"Of course, it does raise the question of whether we are really comfortable 
with having a death penalty that literally sheds blood," Kozinski allowed in an 
interview with the Los Angeles Times. "The thing about the drugs is that it's a 
mask."

The legal machinery of capital punishment - the endless process of appeals and 
reviews - is equally miserable to ponder.

Consider this: Last year, Florida executed Askari Muhammad, a man known as 
Thomas Knight when he was sent to death row in 1975 after kidnapping, robbing 
and murdering a couple from Miami Beach. 5 years later he stabbed a prison 
guard to death with a sharpened spoon.

To detail all the reasons it took nearly 39 years to execute Knight/Muhammad 
would require a chapter of a book, not a paragraph of an essay. Suffice it to 
say, a legal system that requires half a lifetime to conclude the case of a 
proven lethal recidivist is not a well-functioning operation.

Nor is that case unusual. In Florida alone, 3 other men who arrived on death 
row in 1975 are still there, marking their 40-year anniversaries - part of a 
total death-row population in that state of 394. (In those 40 years, Florida 
has carried out 90 executions. At that rate, the Sunshine State would need 
about 175 years to clear out its death row.)

Of the 14 inmates executed so far this year in the U.S., 5 spent from 20 to 30 
years on death row, 5 more languished from 15 to 19 years, and not one spent 
less than a decade awaiting execution. On May 24, Nebraska death-row inmate 
Michael Ryan died of cancer, nearly 30 years after he was sentenced to be 
executed by the state.

State and federal courts are so backlogged with capital cases that they can 
never catch up. Roughly 1/2 of California's 750 condemned inmates have not even 
begun their appeals because they are waiting for the state's underfunded 
defense bureaucracy to give them a lawyer.

Moving faster creates its own problems. The risks involved in trying to speed 
executions are apparent in the growing list of innocent and likely innocent 
death-row prisoners set free - more than 150 since 1975. In Ohio, Wiley 
Bridgeman walked free 39 years after he was sentenced to death when the key 
witness at his trial - a 12-year-old boy at the time - admitted that he 
invented his story to try to help the police. In general, scientific advances 
have undermined confidence in the reliability of eyewitness testimony and 
exposed flaws in the use of hair and fiber evidence. DNA analysis, meanwhile, 
has offered concrete proof that the criminal justice system can go disastrously 
wrong, even in major felony cases. In North Carolina last year, 2 men sentenced 
to death as teenagers were released after DNA evidence proved they weren't 
guilty. The exoneration came after 30 years in prison.

Incompetent investigators, using discredited science, sent 2 men to death row 
in Texas for alleged arson murders. One of them, Ernest Willis, was freed in 
2004 after his attorneys commissioned a review by an expert in fire science, 
who concluded that neither blaze was caused by the suspects.

But the findings came too late for the other man, Cameron Todd Willingham, who 
was executed that same year. In this instance, and perhaps in others, Texas may 
have killed an innocent man.

Reason 2: The crime rate has plunged.

Public support for capital punishment ebbs and flows. During the low-crime 
years of the late 1950s and early '60s, surveys by Gallup charted a fairly 
steady drop in support - down to a nadir of 42%. That trend contributed to the 
brief abolition of the death penalty by order of the Supreme Court in 1972. But 
by then, a new crime wave was building, and states rushed to restore capital 
punishment by passing laws meant to eliminate arbitrary results and racial 
discrimination. After the Supreme Court approved the modern penalty in 1976, 
support for the death penalty skyrocketed in lockstep with the murder rate. By 
the time New York City recorded more than 2,200 murders in the single year of 
1990, 4 of 5 Americans were pro-death-penalty, according to Gallup.

Now crime rates have fallen back to levels unseen since the placid early 1960s. 
In New York City alone, there are roughly 1,900 fewer murders per year now 
compared with the goriest days of the early 1990s. Although pockets of violence 
remain in cities, the vast majority of Americans are much safer today than a 
generation ago.

Gallup has measured the result: support for capital punishment has hovered in 
recent years at just above 60%, lower than at any time since 1972. It???s a big 
number, but not as big as before. Shifting public opinion makes it easier for 
judges and legislators to train a skeptical eye on a dysfunctional system of 
punishment. Former Virginia attorney general Mark Earley supported the death 
penalty while presiding over the execution of 36 inmates from 1989 to 2001. In 
March he published an essay calling for an end to capital punishment. He had 
"come to the conclusion that the death penalty is based on a false utopian 
premise. That false premise is that we have had, do have, and will have 100% 
accuracy in death penalty convictions and executions."

The reduced political pressure has made it possible for 6 states to abolish the 
death penalty since 2007; Nebraska makes it 7. In a number of other state 
capitals, the energy is also moving in that direction. New Hampshire's 
legislature came within a single vote of abolition in 2014, while governors of 
Washington, Oregon and Colorado have indicated that they will not allow 
executions.

Reason 3. Dwindling Justifications.

The death penalty has been made to serve three kinds of purposes. One was 
highly practical. For most of American history, governments did not have secure 
prisons in which violent criminals could be safely housed for long periods of 
time. A town or county jail was suitable for short stays only, and the state 
prison wasn't much better. There was little alternative to killing prisoners 
who could not be set free.

That has changed. Improvements in staffing and technology have given us 
so-called supermax facilities where life-without-parole sentences can be served 
in relative safety. The fact that this alternative to capital punishment is now 
a practical possibility has fed the shift in public opinion, for most people 
realize that being locked in a solitary cell forever is a terrible punishment. 
Indeed, some argue it is a fate worse than death. Whatever deterrent capital 
punishment provides can likely be matched by the threat of permanent lockup.

The 2nd historical purpose has been discredited by time: the death penalty was 
a powerful tool of white supremacy. The antebellum South was haunted by the 
possibility of slave uprisings; capital punishment was used to tamp down 
resistance. You can see it in the early Virginia law that made it a capital 
offense for slaves to administer medicine - it might be poison! Or the early 
Georgia statute that invoked the death penalty if a slave struck his master 
hard enough to leave a bruise.

The late Watt Espy, an eccentric Alabaman whose passion for this topic produced 
the most complete record ever made of executions in the U.S., documented nearly 
15,000 sanctioned killings from 1608 to 1972. The racial disparity is 
arresting. In a mostly white America, significantly more blacks than whites 
were put to death. Whites were almost never executed for crimes - even murder - 
involving black victims. But blacks were so frequently executed for sexual 
assault that newspapers could report that a prisoner was hanged or electrocuted 
"for the usual crime" and everyone would know what that meant.

Some analysts still find vestiges of racial bias in the modern system, but the 
overt racism of the old order is now plainly unconstitutional. If there is a 
bias propping up today???s death penalty, it is one of class rather than race. 
The best defense lawyers cost a lot of money. As a favorite saying on death row 
goes: Those without the capital get the punishment.

This leaves only the question of justice, which is a visceral and compelling 
force. It's the force that has kept the death penalty going as long as it has. 
Capital punishment is an expression of the principle that certain extreme 
boundaries cannot be crossed - that some crimes are so terrible that death is 
the only punishment sufficient to balance the scales. It shows how seriously we 
take our laws and the moral traditions underlying them.

Anti-death-penalty thinkers have tried to knock down this idea for hundreds of 
years. Perhaps you've seen the bumper sticker that goes, "Why do we kill people 
who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?" But they haven't had 
much success in winning the philosophical battle. Momentum is moving away from 
the death penalty not because it offends the sense of justice but because it is 
a system that costs too much and delivers too little.

Which brings us to ...

Reason 4. Governments are going broke.

Across the country, governments are wrestling with tight budgets, which are 
likely to get tighter. Aging populations mean a rising demand for health care 
and retirement benefits. When more is spent to meet those commitments, less is 
available for everything else.

The American death-penalty system is so slow, inconsistent and inefficient that 
it costs far more than the life-without-parole alternative. This fact may 
puzzle many Americans. But think of it this way: as the country recently saw in 
the Tsarnaev case, a death sentence involves not 1 trial but 2. The 1st 
procedure decides guilt or innocence, and the 2nd weighs the proper punishment. 
This doubly burdensome process is followed by strict appellate review that 
consumes hundreds if not thousands of billable hours on the part of lawyers, 
clerks, investigators and judges. Compared with the cost of a complicated 
lawsuit, the cost of incarceration is minimal.

When I examined the cost of Florida's death penalty many years ago, I concluded 
that seeing a death sentence through to execution costs at least 6 times as 
much as a life sentence. A more recent study by a federal commission pegged the 
difference in the costs of the trials at 8 times as much. Duke University 
professor Philip J. Cook studied North Carolina's system and concluded that the 
Tar Heel State could save $11 million per year by abolishing the death penalty. 
California's system incurs excess costs estimated at some $200 million per 
year. From Kansas to Maryland, Tennessee to Pennsylvania, studies have all 
reached similar conclusions.

Rising pressure to cut wasteful spending will cause more and more legislators 
and law-enforcement officials to look hard at these findings - especially in a 
climate of low crime rates and secure prisons. It's happening even in Texas, 
where Liberty County prosecutor Stephen Taylor told a reporter last year that 
cost is a factor in deciding whether to pursue the death penalty. "You have to 
be very responsible in selecting where you want to spend your money," he said. 
And if Texas has reached that point, imagine what is going through the minds of 
governors, lawmakers and prosecutors in states that rarely see an execution - 
which is the vast majority.

As more states consider joining Nebraska in abolishing capital punishment, they 
may create a momentum that will, in time, sway the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reason 5. The Justices.

Few issues have caused the U.S. Supreme Court more pain over the past 
half-century than the death penalty. The subject is never far from the court's 
docket. This year's biggest capital case involves the possible risks in a 
lethal-injection formula. And yet the many opinions issued since 1972 form such 
a tangled thicket that the late Justice Harry Blackmun ultimately dismissed the 
entire enterprise as "tinker[ing] with the machinery of death." Several other 
Justices have turned against the process after leaving the court, including 2 
of the 3 architects of the system, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens.

Amid the confusion, one principle has remained clear: death is different. The 
main reason the court abolished the old death penalty was that there were no 
standards for deciding who would live or die. Even among murderers, the chance 
of being executed was as random as being struck by lightning, as Justice Potter 
Stewart observed. The modern death penalty was designed to guide prosecutors, 
judges and juries toward the criminals most deserving of death.

But after four decades of tinkering, capital punishment is still a matter of 
occasional lightning bolts. And judges are taking notice. Last July, a federal 
judge in Southern California - a Republican appointee named Cormac J. Carney - 
issued an explosive ruling that the death penalty in America's largest state 
has become unconstitutionally random. History is on his side.

In 1972, when the Supreme Court found the death penalty to be "arbitrary and 
capricious," there were about 600 prisoners condemned to die in the U.S., and 
fewer than 100 had been executed in the previous 10 years. Today in California, 
the numbers are far worse: 750 death-row inmates, three executions in the past 
10 years. "For the rest, 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 their actual execution," 
Carney argued. "Indeed, for most, systemic delay has made their execution so 
unlikely that the death sentence carefully and deliberately imposed by the jury 
has been transformed into one no rational jury or legislature could ever 
impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death."

Such a sentence, the judge concluded, violates the Eighth Amendment ban on 
cruel and unusual punishments.

It is a long way from one district judge's ruling to a decision by the Supreme 
Court. But Carney's reasoning follows a path already blazed in dissenting 
opinions by Justice Stevens when he was still a member of the high court and 
Justice Stephen Breyer. They too have noticed that a system that produces these 
bizarre and unpredictable results makes a mockery of the legal system at a cost 
of billions of dollars.

Carney's decision is currently under review by the Ninth Circuit Court of 
Appeals. It is 1 more sign that the end of this failed experiment is beginning 
to emerge. 1 by 1, states will abandon their rarely used death penalty. At the 
same time, other judges will follow Carney's lead. Here's Judge Tom Price of 
the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals - a red-state Republican member of what is 
probably the toughest court in the land when it comes to the death penalty: 
"Having spent the last 40 years as a judge for the state of Texas, of which the 
last 18 years have been as a judge on this court, I have given a substantial 
amount of consideration to the propriety of the death penalty as a form of 
punishment for those who commit capital murder, and I now believe that it 
should be abolished."

Actions of the legislatures, lower-court judges and governors can all be read 
by the Supreme Court as signs of "evolving standards of decency" in society, a 
doctrine dating from 1958 that has been used by the court to ban executions of 
juveniles, mentally retarded inmates and rapists who did not kill their 
victims. No step or statement is decisive in itself. But when 5 or more of the 
Justices decide the time has come to put an end to this fiasco, they will use 
these signs of "evolving standards" as their justification to end capital 
punishment for good.

Critics complain that the idea of "evolving standards" is a mere pretense to 
wrap personal preferences in a scarf of constitutional law. But more than half 
a century after the concept was coined, "evolving standards" is deeply woven 
into Supreme Court tradition. The Justices all know that the modern death 
penalty is a failure. When they finally decide to get rid of it, "evolving 
standards" is how they will do it.

The facts are irrefutable, and the logic is clear. Exhausted by so many years 
of trying to prop up this broken system, the court will one day throw in the 
towel.

(source: David Von Drehle, a TIME editor-at-large, is the author of Among the 
Lowest of the Dead, an award-winning history of the modern death penalty)

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

UN human rights experts urge U.S. moratorium on death penalty



United Nations human rights experts appealed to the United States on Friday to 
impose a moratorium on the death penalty for federal crimes, including the 
sentence imposed on the Boston Marathon bomber, with a view to abolishing the 
practice.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 21, was moved on Thursday to a U.S. penitentiary in 
Florence, Colorado, home to the so-called "Supermax" unit that houses high-risk 
prisoners.

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev apologized for the deadly 2013 attack 
at a hearing to formally sentence him to death. Rough Cut (no reporter 
narration).

The ethnic Chechen was transferred a day after a federal judge in Boston, 
Massachusetts, sentenced him to death by lethal injection for killing 4 people 
and injuring 264 in the April 2013 bombing and its aftermath with his late 
older brother.

"This decision contradicts the trends towards abolishing the death penalty in 
the country in law and practice," U.N. special rapporteur on executions 
Christof Heyns and U.N. torture investigator Juan Mendez said in a joint 
statement.

Tsarnaev's acts fall within the definition of "most serious crimes" to which 
the United Nations says the death penalty - if imposed at all - should be 
restricted.

More than 3/4 of countries worldwide have abolished the death penalty in law or 
in practice, the experts said.

There is "no proof" that the death penalty has a deterrent effect and many 
executions have resulted in "degrading spectacles," they added.

"Especially if imposed for crimes motivated by ideological or religious 
considerations, this form of punishment plays into the hands of those who treat 
life as dispensable and encourage rather than discourage them," their statement 
said.

Massachusetts abolished capital punishment for state crimes in 1984, it noted.

"The decision of a federal jury to impose the death penalty for a crime 
committed in Massachusetts, where the death penalty has been abolished for 
decades, illustrates how out of place this form of punishment is," the U.N. 
experts said.

Under international law a nation is accountable for all of its jurisdictions, 
according to Heyns and Mendez. "And there are concrete steps that the Federal 
Government could take, including a moratorium on the death penalty for federal 
crimes."

Mendez accused the United States in March of stalling on his requests to visit 
its prisons, where 80,000 people are in solitary confinement, and to interview 
inmates on his terms.

He has sought for more than 2 years to enter U.S. prisons, including 
maximum-security facilities, specifically ADX in Colorado where inmates include 
Oklahoma City bomber accomplice Terry Nichols, underwear bomber Umar Farouk 
Abdulmutallab and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

U.S. human rights ambassador Keith Harper told a news briefing on June 11 that 
talks were "ongoing" with Mendez regarding a "robust and effective" visit.

Harper, asked whether he expected the visit to take place this year, said: "We 
hope it will, yes."

(source: Reuters)