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

[Rick Halperin]

May 20



NEBRASKA:

Nebraska set to repeal death penalty after legislature overcomes veto threat 
----State set to become 1st conservative state to abolish death penalty in 42 
years after lawmakers throw enough support behind bill to void governor's veto



Nebraska lawmakers gave final approval on Wednesday to a bill abolishing the 
death penalty statewide - and with enough votes to override a promised veto 
from Republican governor Pete Ricketts.

The vote was 32 to 15 in Nebraska's unicameral legislature.

If that vote holds in a veto override, Nebraska would become the 1st 
conservative state to repeal the death penalty since North Dakota in 1973.

The Nebraska vote is notable in the national debate over capital punishment 
because it was bolstered by conservatives who oppose the death penalty for 
religious reasons and say it is a waste of taxpayer money.

Nebraska hasn't executed a prisoner since 1997, and some lawmakers have argued 
that constant legal challenges will prevent the state from doing so again.

Ricketts, a death penalty supporter, has vowed to veto the bill. Ricketts 
announced last week that the state has bought new lethal injection drugs to 
resume executions.

Ricketts, who is serving his 1st year in office, argued in his weekly column on 
Tuesday that the state's inability to carry out executions was a "management 
problem" that he is committed to fixing.

Maryland was the last state to end capital punishment, in 2013. 3 other 
moderate to liberal states have done so in recent years: New Mexico in 2009, 
Illinois in 2011, and Connecticut in 2012. The death penalty is legal in 32 
states, including Nebraska.

Independent senator Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who sponsored the Nebraska 
legislation, has fought for 4 decades to end capital punishment in the state.

Nebraska lawmakers passed a death penalty repeal bill once before, in 1979, but 
it was vetoed by then-governor Charles Thone.

(source: The Guardian)

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

Nebraska Poised to Abolish Death Penalty, Would Be First State Since 2013



Nebraska lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill abolishing the death 
penalty, with enough votes to override a promised veto from Republican Gov. 
Pete Ricketts.

The 32-15 vote was bolstered by conservative senators who oppose capital 
punishment for fiscal, religious and pragmatic reasons.

If that vote holds in a veto override, Nebraska would become the 1st 
conservative state to repeal the death penalty since 1973.

Nebraska hasn't executed a prisoner since 1997, and some lawmakers have argued 
that constant legal challenges will prevent the state from doing so again.

Ricketts has vowed a veto, and announced last week that the state has bought 
new lethal injection drugs to resume executions.

Maryland was the last state to abolish capital punishment, in 2013. 32 states 
have death penalty laws.

(source: NBC news)

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

Nebraska Death Penalty Repealed: Legislature Votes To Abolish Capital 
Punishment, Governor Vows To Veto



The Nebraska legislature voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to abolish the death 
penalty in the state. Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican who supports the death 
penalty, has promised to veto the measure, although lawmakers' 32 - 15 vote in 
its favor would be sufficient to override that, KETV reported.

The approval came less than a week after Ricketts announced that state 
officials had bought supplies of the 3 drugs necessary for lethal injections. 
Throughout the United States, the death penalty has come under fire in recent 
months after a series of botched executions in 2014. States have also struggled 
to secure supplies of drugs needed to carry out lethal injections, due to a 
boycott by Europe on exporting such drugs to correctional facilities in the 
United States.

No prisoner on death row has been executed in Nebraska since 1997, and since 
1973, only 4 executions have taken place in the state, the Associated Press 
reported. The most recent state to ban capital punishment was Maryland in 2013.

(source: International Business Times)








NEVADA:

Lawmakers approve money for new execution chamber in Ely



Nevada lawmakers have given the green light to spending about $860,000 on a new 
execution chamber at the remote Ely State Prison.

A joint Assembly and Senate budget committee voted Wednesday to approve the 
construction project. A subcommittee was split earlier this week on the matter.

The state's existing death chamber at the shuttered Nevada State Prison in 
Carson City is not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. 
State officials have said for about four years that they wouldn't be able to 
carry out an execution there.

Executions remain rare in Nevada, which has only carried out the death penalty 
12 times since 1977.

Department of Corrections officials say there are about 80 inmates on Nevada's 
death row, but the state hasn't executed anyone since 2006.

(source: Associated Press)








CALIFORNIA:

Charles Manson's chaplain speaks out amid national death row debate



American Christians were once strongly in favor of capital punishment, but now 
they find themselves increasingly conflicted. After a judge sentenced Dzhokhar 
Tsarnaev to death for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings, religious 
leaders in the city found themselves on both sides of the issue. Lawmakers in 
Nebraska are considering a bill to ban the death penalty there, which would 
make it the 1st conservative state to do so in four decades. And Christian 
leaders such as Jay Sekulow and Pat Robertson have provided support for 
movements like Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.

In such a moment, Reverend Earl Smith has decided to speak out. When Smith 
became chaplain of San Quentin in 1983, he was the youngest ever hired by the 
state of California. While there, he played chess with Charles Mansion, 
negotiated truces between gangs, and witnessed many executions. In 2000, he was 
named National Correctional Chaplain of the Year and now serves as chaplain of 
the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors. Here we discuss his views on 
justice, America's correctional system, and his new book, Death Row Chaplain: 
Unbelievable True Stories from America's Most Notorious Prison.

RNS: Describe what day-to-day life is like for death row inmates at San 
Quentin. Would you consider it humane?

ES: Each day on death row is different, yet each day is the same. Your lunch is 
served with your breakfast. Most days are spent watching television, sleeping 
or reading. Exercise is an option on certain days. Religious services are 
offered once a week on a rotating basis. The only area that actually has a 
chapel is East Block, which accommodates 24 inmates. Communication from cell to 
cell is done through yelling or an inmate mail system called a "kite" on a 
"fish line". In only 1 of the 3 areas in San Quentin housing condemned inmates, 
inmates are allowed some opportunities to mingle during various parts of the 
day.

RNS: Tell us about your relationship with Charles Manson? What was your 
assessment of his spiritual state?

ES: After each conversation I had with Charles Manson, I went away in awe of 
his ability to capture a moment and claim it as his. Charles Manson was exactly 
what he sought to be. Charles wanted people to see him, hear his name and fear 
him. The problem is that Charles is a little person who sees his height in 
terms of emotional and psychological dominance. Psychological warfare was his 
means of survival. He once told me, "this is my world, and I decide when you do 
what you do. The trees, the stars, the grass they all belong to me". Charles 
was interested in the manipulation of people for the sole purpose of seeing if 
he could manipulate them.

RNS: You witnessed 12 executions. Describe briefly what it feels like to see 
that kind of thing?

ES: To see a man strapped into a chair or on a gurney is actually a small part 
of the execution process. After the condemned man dies, the process of the 
execution lingers. The staff that walks the inmate into the chamber, the 
official witnesses, the victim's family members and the inmate's family members 
all are assembled in the same room. The administrative staff member assigned to 
the task of implementing the protocol has to disassociate themselves from the 
notion of death. The focus is turned to a person who is asked if he has any 
last words. People have asked me if lethal injection is more humane. My answer 
is capital punishment, via hanging, gas, firing squad, electrocution, 
guillotine all get the same result ... death. Seeing an execution is seeing 
death. You can never forget what you see.

RNS: Since humans are created in God's image with inherent dignity, I don't 
think humans should be able to legally execute other humans like this. What do 
you think?

ES: Sin is sin, and he that is without sin should be required to cast the first 
stone. If there is no one available, then perhaps we should come up with an 
alternative. God does not make mistakes, so the flaws witnessed in the process 
of the gruesome crimes which result in sentences of capital punishment are 
those of an infested society, not of a God who pronounced all creation "good". 
A reference point for the argument of support for capital punishment is found 
in the mandate to support the laws of the land. I believe there are just and 
unjust laws. Is capital punishment one such unjust law? I truly do not know. 
What I know is that the only deterrent is to the person executed. Murders still 
take place on the day of an execution, so clearly the focus has not presented a 
time of pause.

RNS: How have your experiences on death row changed your thinking about the 
death penalty, if at all?

ES: As a chaplain, my job is to represent hope. In the execution process, hope 
meets reality; you have to focus on the true hope of eternal life. The word 
"closure" doesn't belong in the dialog about capital punishment. Before I 
arrived at San Quentin, I was not sure what I thought about the death penalty. 
I would listen to the play-by-play of an execution as a young boy. That 
experience left me thinking that when you do enough wrong, people will get 
tired of you and perhaps execute you. After arriving at San Quentin and having 
men on my death row caseload be released into free society, my thought has 
never moved beyond what if one of those guys had been executed. The reality 
that death is final and the system can be flawed is where I arrived as a result 
of working there.

(source: Religion News Service)








USA:

Why Is It So Easy for States to Execute the Mentally Ill?



Long before he committed a vicious triple murder in Houston at the age of 19, 
Derrick Charles had shown signs of serious mental problems. Raised amid 
crippling poverty, domestic abuse, alcoholism and neglect, he watched his 
schizophrenic mother stab his abusive stepfather. He suffered from tactile and 
auditory hallucinations, and by the time he was 13, had been hospitalized twice 
for mental illness. While in juvenile prison for nonviolent offenses, he said 
he was hearing voices and asked for medication. The request was denied.

Then, in July 2002, while high on marijuana laced with PCP, Charles beat and 
strangled his 15-year-old girlfriend, Myeshia Bennett, and her 77-year-old 
grandfather, Obie, then beat, strangled, and sexually assaulted Bennett's 
mother, Brenda. He confessed to police, saying he didn't know why he'd done it.

None of Charles's lengthy and troubling history was investigated by his defense 
attorneys or presented at trial. Unaware of his documented mental illness - 
among mitigating evidence that would lessen his culpability for the crime - the 
Texas jury sentenced Charles to die.

Charles was executed last week, on May 12, at the age of 32. His death by 
lethal injection went largely undiscussed, despite the compelling evidence of 
his mental illness. Yet it is far from clear that his execution was a legal one 
- whether Charles was so mentally ill that he was in fact incompetent to die at 
the hands of the state.

The Charles case is not unique. It follows closely on the heels of other 
questionable executions of prisoners with mental problems. In January, the 
first execution of the year was Georgia's killing of Andrew Brannan, a 
decorated Vietnam veteran who had been diagnosed with severe mental illness 
prior to his killing a deputy sheriff during a traffic stop in 1998. And in 
March, Missouri executed Cecil Clayton, a man who was missing 20 % of his 
brain's frontal lobe - the brain's center for impulse control, problem solving 
and social behavior.

There is no outright ban on executing the mentally ill. While the U.S. Supreme 
Court has barred the execution of the intellectually disabled and of juveniles, 
populations it deems so vulnerable that their execution would constitute cruel 
and unusual punishment, there has been no such determination when it comes to 
people with mental illness. Rather, the court has said only that the "insane" 
may not face execution, leaving the measure of insanity up to to the states. In 
2007, the Supreme Court ruled that in order for a prisoner to be considered 
competent for execution, he or she must have a rational understanding of the 
state's reason for killing him or her.

This notion of "competency" is the sole measure for defining what role mental 
illness might have played in the commission of a crime - from arrest through 
conviction and to execution. When it comes to determining whether a mentally 
ill person should be spared the death penalty, the standard is extremely loose 
and subject to nonscientific criteria that vary from state to state. What's 
more, in Texas, there is no right for a condemned, and likely ill, prisoner to 
even obtain the necessary resources to argue that he or she is too mentally ill 
to be executed. In the months leading up to Charles's execution, state and 
federal courts declined to appoint counsel or to fund an evaluation of Charles' 
mental health - a step necessary to raise a claim that he was incompetent and 
could not be executed. A state court judge told lawyers with the nonprofit 
Texas Defender Service that in order to be appointed and funded to represent 
Charles on an incompetency claim, they would have to show that Charles was 
currently incompetent. But in order to do that, the lawyers argued, they would 
need to be appointed and funded. "It's this total bizarre, Catch-22-land," said 
Kate Black, a TDS lawyer who worked on Charles's case.

In the end, despite Charles's history, no court intervened to determine whether 
he was legally sane enough to die. Instead, they cleared the way for his 
execution.

The number of mentally ill people on death row is unknown, in part because it 
is a prison population not often studied. But there is no question that mental 
illness is a pervasive problem throughout the criminal justice system. Texas's 
Harris County jail, where defendants from Houston and surrounding areas are 
detained, is the state's single largest mental health care provider. 
Nationally, more than 50 % of all jail and prison inmates suffer from mental 
health problems, a 2006 federal study found.

More than 20 % of Texas's death row prisoners reportedly have mental illness, 
although that number seems low to Black. "I don't have any clients on death row 
who don't suffer from some significant mental illness or mental impairment," 
she said.

Exacerbating the problem is that death rows are incredibly isolated places: In 
Texas, prisoners are housed individually in 6-by-10-foot cells for 23 hours 
each day, conditions that are similar to those in most death penalty states. 
(In Idaho, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, prisoners spend a 
full 24 hours a day in their individual, solid-door cells.) For those who are 
already mentally ill, solitary confinement often makes prisoners' illnesses 
worse, said Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and professor at Berkeley's Wright 
Institute. For those who aren't already ill, the punishing isolation often 
leads to mental deterioration.

It is precisely this cyclical nature of mental illness that can make 
determining "competency" so difficult, particularly in the absence of 
consistent and effective mental health care, which can be hard to come by in 
prison. The piecemeal, if not lax, standard for determining who is too ill to 
die (or even too ill to face questioning by police, stand trial, or to 
represent themselves at trial) is troubling to both mental health experts and 
to lawyers who regularly handle death penalty cases.

"When we do a competency exam, it's always competency to do such-and-such," 
said Kupers. "And there are standards that are different. For instance, there 
is a standard for competency to stand trial; it's spelled out legally. Then 
there's another issue: if an individual wants to stand trial and act as their 
own attorney, then we have another level of competency," he continued. "Well, 
the lowest standard there is is the standard to be executed - it's just, 
basically, minimal."

The ban on executing juveniles, those who committed their crimes prior to 
turning 18, is absolute. So is the ban on executing the intellectually 
disabled. The lack of a bright-line rule for determining who is too ill to die 
has resulted in a mishmash of expections that regularly lead to troubling 
results.

(It should be noted that while the ban on executing the intellectually disabled 
is absolute, that doesn't mean standards developed by various states are 
uniformly robust, or even constitutional. For example, 13 years after the high 
court's ruling, Texas has yet to enact a statute that would impose a 
predictable structure for determining mental retardation, and instead continues 
to use criteria developed by the state's highest criminal court, known 
anecdotally as the Lennie Standard - a set of criteria for determining 
disability predicated on the mental abilities of fictional character Lennie 
Small from John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men.)

It is hard to know exactly how many death row inmates with serious mental 
illness have been executed, though Death Penalty Focus, an abolitionist group, 
reports that more than 60 mentally ill or retarded inmates have been executed 
since 1983.

Texas has a particularly questionable record: Under Gov. Rick Perry in 2004, 
the state executed Kelsey Patterson - a documented schizophrenic who believed 
he'd been granted a permanent stay of execution by Satan himself - despite a 
rare recommendation from the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute 
his sentence. Currently, the state remains unconvinced that Andre Thomas is too 
ill to die, even though Thomas clawed out both of his eyeballs, eating one of 
them, while incarcerated.

Today, Texas continues to fight for the right to execute Scott Panetti, even 
though it was in his case that the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that an inmate 
must have some rational understanding of the underlying basis for his or her 
execution. Indeed, Panetti's case exemplifies the relative ease with which the 
competency threshold can be breached. Panetti, who murdered his in-laws in 
1992, is schizophrenic. Nonetheless, he was deemed competent to act as his own 
defense counsel at trial, where he dressed in a purple cowboy outfit and sought 
to subpoena Jesus Christ and Anne Bancroft (among nearly 200 others) to testify 
for his defense. Panetti has long said he believes that the state seeks to 
execute him for preaching "the gospel of the Lord King." The state has argued 
that Panetti is merely malingering.

Crucially, as TDS attorney Burke Butler notes, Panetti's case only made it to 
the Supreme Court because he had appointed counsel and the resources needed to 
raise his claim. In Charles's case, while TDS lawyers had been appointed to 
handle his federal appeals and clemency bid, no lawyer had been appointed to 
look into his competency. Because a claim of incompetency cannot be raised 
until execution is imminent, it wasn't until the months leading up to his 
execution that his appointed lawyers could even argue he should not be put to 
death on the basis of his mental illness. At that point, the newest information 
lawyers had regarding Charles's mental state was roughly a decade old.

Lawyers for Charles sought court-appointment to investigate competency, as well 
as resources to conduct a full psychiatric assessment. But their requests were 
denied. According to Butler, the courts "essentially" said that "in order to be 
entitled to be appointed counsel and [a] neuropsychological evaluation, we need 
... to present evidence that could not be obtained without being appointed 
counsel and [given] a neuropsychological evaluation." She called the 
circumstances "tragic," as well as highlighting a "big constitutional gap." The 
Supreme Court says incompetent prisoners can't be executed, but "at the same 
time, apparently courts are not providing incompetent defendants the resources 
they need to show their incompetency, even in very compelling cases, like Mr. 
Charles's."

In the absence of a lower threshold to allow prisoners like Charles an 
opportunity to mount an incompetency claim, Black and Butler suggest, the 
Supreme Court should simply ban execution of the severely mentally ill. "And 
that's kind of the argument we've been making in these cases," says Black, 
"which is, listen, the same rationale that you used in [banning execution of 
the intellectually disabled] - which is that there's no deterrent effect for 
someone who doesn't understand it, these people are at risk for having terrible 
counsel and of not being able to help counsel - all those things are also true 
about the mentally ill."

(source: firstlook.org)