[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, GA., MO., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 3



TEXAS:

Jury convicts man of capital murder in triple slaying


Johnathan "J-Boi" Sanchez did not react Tuesday as he was convicted of capital 
murder.

Eyewitnesses, the murder weapon and blood on his clothes combined to put the 
27-year-old in the middle of a Copperfield-area massacre 2 years ago.

Wearing a blue pull-over sweater and high-collared shirt that hid gang tattoos 
on his neck, Sanchez gazed down as state District Judge Mark Ellis read the 
decision handed down by the jury after deliberating five hours over 2 days.

On Wednesday, jurors will return to court to begin hearing a week of evidence 
in the punishment phase of Harris County's first death penalty trial this year.

Sanchez was convicted of killing three people and wounding two others on the 
afternoon of Nov. 20, 2013

The jury deliberated about 4 hours Monday after hearing closing arguments in 
the grisly triple slaying. They returned Tuesday to deliberate for another hour 
before reaching a decision.

Prosecutors have said Sanchez, allegedly a member of the 59 Piru street gang 
and affiliated with the Houstone Tango Blast, was taking hallucinogens and 
threatening violence in the days before the shooting.

Prosecutors Traci Bennett and Lisa Collins did not comment after the verdict.

Sanchez went an acquaintance's apartment and opened firing, killing Yosselyn 
Alfaro, who was celebrating her 21st birthday and Daniel Munoz and Veronica 
Hernandez, both 17.

2 survivors were rushed by Life Flight helicopter ambulance to the hospital 
after telling authorities Sanchez shot them, investigators said. They still 
have not fully recovered from their wounds.

Defense attorneys Skip Cornelius and Rudy Duarte said they were disappointed 
but did not comment further.

Jurors had been sequestered Monday night while deliberating the guilt or 
innocence. Sequestration is rare in the hundreds of trials that take place 
every year in Harris County, but it is not unusual for jurors in death penalty 
cases to spend the night in a downtown hotel if their deliberations stretch 
into the evening.

(source: Houston Chronicle)






GEORGIA----new execution date

Execution date set for Marcus Ray Johnson for 1994 Albany murder


Georgia has scheduled the execution of Marcus Ray Johnson for Nov. 19, making 
him the 1st to be put to death since Kellie Gissendaner was executed Sept. 30 
and the 1st of 7 men who have exhausted their regular appeals and are eligible 
to be executed.

Johnson, now 50, was sentenced to die for the murder of Angela Sizemore, a 
woman he had met at an Albany nightclub. The morning after they were last seen 
together, March 24, 1994, her battered and bloody body was found in her 
Suburban parked behind an apartment complex. Johnson told police Sizemore 
became angry because he did not want to "snuggle" after sex so he punched her 
in the face. He told police he remembers walking away after he punched her but 
nothing more until he woke up in his front yard as the sun came up.

Investigators said Sizemore was stabbed or cut 41 times and she had bruises and 
marks from being struck and dragged.

At least 6 other men are eligible for execution and their dates should be set 
over the next few months.

(source: Atlanta Journal Constitution)






MISSOURI----impending execution

Man with IQ of 63 set to become Missouri's 7th execution this year ---- An 
appeal claims execution drugs could cause violent and painful seizures for 
Ernest Lee Johnson, who had a most of a benign brain tumor removed in 2008

Ernest Lee Johnson is scheduled to die on Tuesday for the 1994 killing of 3 
convenience store workers in Missouri.

He would be the 26th person executed in the US this year and the 7th in 
Missouri. Only Texas, with 12, has performed more executions.

Johnson, 55, had most, but not all, of a benign brain tumor removed in 2008, 
and a recent MRI revealed up to 20% of his brain tissue was also removed. An 
appeal to the US supreme court claims the brain tumor and damage, combined with 
the execution drug, could cause a violent and painful seizure upon injection. A 
2nd appeal, to the Missouri supreme court, claims Johnson's life should be 
spared because he is mentally disabled.

The Missouri attorney general's office says both claims are without merit.

Johnson was convicted of 3 counts of 1st-degree murder for killing 46-year-old 
Mary Bratcher, 57-year-old Mable Scruggs and 58-year-old Fred Jones during a 
closing-time robbery of a Casey's General Store in Columbia on 12 February 
1994. Johnson wanted money to buy drugs, authorities said.

All 3 workers were beaten to death with a claw hammer, but Bratcher was also 
stabbed at least 10 times with a screwdriver and Jones was shot in the face. 
Johnson hid the bodies in a cooler.

He was arrested after police found a bank bag, stolen money and store receipts 
at Johnson's home.

Johnson grew up in a troubled home and his attorney, Jeremy Weis, said his IQ 
was measured at 63 while still in elementary school.

He was already on death row in 2001 when the US supreme court ruled that 
executing the mentally handicapped was unconstitutionally cruel and a new 
sentencing hearing was ordered. Johnson was again sentenced to death in 2003. 
The Missouri supreme court tossed that sentence, too, forcing another 
sentencing hearing. In 2006, Johnson was sentenced to death for a 3rd time.

The brain tumor was removed in an operation in 2008. While benign, doctors 
could not remove the entire tumor. Weis said the combination of the remaining 
tumor and the fact that Johnson lost about one-fifth of his brain has left him 
prone to seizures and with difficulty walking.

Missouri's execution drug is a form of pentobarbital believed to be 
manufactured by a compounding pharmacy - the state won't say where it gets it. 
Weis cites a medical review by Dr Joel Zivot, who found "significant brain 
damage and defects", according to court filings.

"Mr Johnson faces a significant medical risk for a serious seizure as the 
direct result of the combination of the Missouri lethal injection protocol and 
Mr. Johnson's permanent and disabling neurologic disease," Zivot wrote.

Court filings by the attorney general's office note that Missouri has carried 
out 18 "rapid and painless" executions since it went to the 1-drug method in 
November 2013.

(source: The Guardian)






USA:

Death Penalty Opponents Split Over Taking Issue to Supreme Court


In the long legal struggle against the death penalty, the future has in some 
ways never looked brighter.

In a passionate dissent in June, Justice Stephen G. Breyer invited a major 
challenge to the constitutionality of capital punishment. This fall, Justice 
Antonin Scalia all but predicted that the court???s more liberal justices would 
strike down the death penalty.

But lawyers and activists opposed to the death penalty, acutely conscious of 
what is at stake, are bitterly divided about how to proceed. Some say it is 
imperative to bring a major case to the court as soon as practicable. Others 
worry that haste may result in a losing decision that could entrench capital 
punishment for years.

"If you don't go now, there's a real possibility you have blood on your hands," 
said Robert J. Smith, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston 
Institute. His scholarship was cited in Justice Breyer's dissent from a 
decision upholding the use of an execution drug that 3 death row inmates argued 
risked causing excruciating pain.

But others are wary. "There are reasons to be cautious about pushing the court 
to a decision too early," said Jordan M. Steiker, a law professor at the 
University of Texas.

The divide is partly generational. Many veteran litigators have suffered 
stinging setbacks in the Supreme Court, and they favor an incremental strategy. 
They would continue to chip away at the death penalty in the courts, seek 
state-by-state abolition and try to move public opinion.

Some younger lawyers and activists urge a bolder course: to ask the Supreme 
Court to end capital punishment nationwide right away.

Though Justice Breyer's dissent was joined only by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 
the more aggressive advocates are confident they can persuade 5 justices to do 
away with a punishment explicitly contemplated in the Fifth and 14th 
Amendments, which call for grand juries in federal cases involving "a capital 
or other infamous crime" and say that no person may be deprived "of life, 
liberty or property, without due process of law." That means picking up the 
votes of not only the rest of the court's liberal wing - Justices Sonia 
Sotomayor and Elena Kagan - but also, crucially, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Evan J. Mandery, the author of "A Wild Justice," a history of the last major 
challenges to the death penalty in the 1970s, said there were good arguments on 
both sides of whether to mount such an effort.

"It's a very complicated gamble," he said. "The fear is that if you push and 
you lose, you could end up worse off."

All concerned agree that much has changed since the Supreme Court reinstated 
the death penalty in 1976, 4 years after it had effectively struck it down. 
Last year, only 7 states carried out executions. 19 states and the District of 
Columbia have abolished the death penalty entirely, seven of them in the last 
decade.

Governors and courts have imposed moratoriums in others, and the number of 
death sentences and executions continues to drop. The Supreme Court itself has 
barred the execution of juvenile offenders, people with intellectual 
disabilities and those convicted of crimes against individuals other than 
murder in the last decade.

The more cautious, step-by-step approach would ask the court to further narrow 
the availability of the death penalty by, for instance, forbidding the 
execution of mentally ill people and of accomplices who did not kill anyone. 
The more assertive one would introduce a broad case aimed at the death penalty 
itself.

Both sides look to history for instruction, but they draw different lessons.

Justice Breyer, for his part, has told friends that his dissent was partly 
inspired by a similar one a half-century before. The earlier dissent, by 
Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, helped create the modern movement for the abolition 
of the death penalty and led to a 4-year moratorium on executions.

The 1963 dissent, in Rudolph v. Alabama, was drafted by a law clerk, Alan M. 
Dershowitz, who would go on to become a law professor at Harvard and a 
prominent litigator. A young Stephen G. Breyer began his own clerkship with 
Justice Goldberg the year after.

Collecting data on national and international practice, Justice Goldberg's 
dissent urged the court to hear a case on whether the death penalty for rape 
violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"The goal was to ask litigators to start raising challenges to the death 
penalty," Professor Dershowitz said. "It was an invitation to litigation. It 
was not a common tactic back then, and we were much criticized for it."

The dissent spurred the creation of capital litigation projects at the NAACP 
Legal Defense and Educational Fund and at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Justice Breyer's dissent was far more elaborate. It was 46 pages long, included 
charts and maps, and set out in detail the argument that the death penalty 
violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

Professor Dershowitz said he was delighted that another former clerk of Justice 
Goldberg's was carrying on his old boss's project.

"The goal in both cases is to encourage the court to play a more active role 
and to encourage litigants," he said.

But opinions vary about the correct reading of the aftermath of the Goldberg 
dissent. Some veteran opponents of the death penalty noted that it took nine 
years of methodical litigation after the 1963 dissent before the Supreme Court 
effectively struck down the death penalty in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia. Even 
then, they said, the effort in the end yielded only a relatively brief 
moratorium.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 
which has long played a central role in the fight against the death penalty, 
chose her words carefully in response to questions about her group's current 
strategy.

"There is something undoubtedly powerful in having a Supreme Court justice lay 
out the brief for the unconstitutionality of the death penalty and to issue the 
challenge," she said. But it is Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and not Justice 
Breyer, she said, whose vote will be crucial.

Litigators who work in cases in states committed to the death penalty said they 
were not counting on a general reprieve from the Supreme Court.

"The Breyer dissent was a dissent that 2 justices signed," said David R. Dow, a 
law professor at the University of Houston and the founder of the Texas 
Innocence Network.

"I don't get too excited about 2 justices," he added. "The Breyer dissent means 
so little in terms of the imminent demise of the death penalty that I wouldn't 
spend any time on it."

On the other side of the debate is the Eighth Amendment Project, a new group 
seeking prompt action.

"We certainly have a feeling we're getting close," said Henderson Hill, the 
group's executive director. "We're getting warm."

He said he understood why some were skeptical. "Lawyers are by their nature 
cautious," he said. "When you???ve been part of the killing fields of Texas, 
you have to concentrate on your clients and you don't have the luxury of 
thinking, 'What if?'"

Mr. Hill said one case from Texas might serve as the right vehicle to mount a 
broad challenge. It concerns Julius Murphy, who was convicted of robbing and 
killing a stranded motorist. Among his lawyers is Neal K. Katyal, a prominent 
Supreme Court litigator and a former law clerk to Justice Breyer.

"After Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion," Mr. Katyal said, "the time to test 
his views in the crucible of argument before the full court has come."

In a brief to Texas's highest court for criminal matters, Mr. Katyal's law firm 
devoted a substantial passage to a direct attack on the death penalty, echoing 
the themes in Justice Breyer's dissent. Should the Texas court rule against Mr. 
Murphy, an appeal to the Supreme Court seems inevitable.

In the meantime, the Eighth Amendment Project is hard at work identifying other 
cases that could serve as vehicles to end the death penalty, ideally ones 
involving impulsive crimes, intellectual disability and claims of innocence. 
Among cases the group hopes to avoid are ones arising from killings of police 
officers, murders for hire and torture.

Whatever the eventual case, the group wants to have dozens of 
friend-of-the-court briefs ready for filing.

Professor Dershowitz said a vigorous litigation strategy was the right 
approach.

"Justice Breyer would not have written this dissent if he did not think this 
was a good time to bring cases to the attention of the court," he said. "Now 
it's up to litigants to figure out the right case."

(source: New York Times)

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

If we're committing a crime to punish a crime, should we be doing it at all?


Drugs commonly used for lethal injection in death penalty cases have 
increasingly become as scarce as the incarceration itself, leading a number of 
states to form contracts with illegal venders to obtain the magical serum of 
death.

Since the introduction of the death penalty in 1976, the U.S. has executed a 
total of 1,419 people, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. 
According to the Arizona Republic at first states used propofol, but after 
Michael Jackson???s death the company temporarily took the drug off the market 
- thiopental went on the rise.

According to the Guardian, thiopental has been around for nearly 77 years, and 
although it predates the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, according to the 
Arizona Republic, thiopental is a fairly safe anesthetic.

"Sodium thiopental is an intravenous drug used (in the past) to induce or start 
anesthesia, which then, generally, continued with gas anesthesia once an airway 
was established," said Stuart Hameroff, the UA director of the Center for 
Consciousness Studies and emeritus professor of Anesthesiology. "Thiopental (in 
sufficient dosage) renders the patient unconscious. They are not aware. They 
'go to sleep' and lose consciousness for the duration of the drug effect," he 
said.

As death row grew in size so did the demand for drugs to carry out the deed, 
and once propofol disappeared states burned through the nation's supply of 
thiopental. Executioners ran completely out of luck since the drug isn't 
manufactured in the U.S., according to the Arizona Republic.

The only producer of thiopental, Hospira, was forced to shut down U.S. 
production and move to Italy as the only way to keep its license to 
manufacture, according to the Guardian.

States are unable to obtain thiopental overseas either because of the European 
Union ban on the exportation of drugs used for capital punishment, according to 
The Atlantic and the Arizona Republic. According to the Republic, however, the 
U.S. has been illegally importing such drugs since 2010.

States that continue to attempt to obtain thiopental include Nebraska, 
Tennessee, California, Texas and Arizona, according to the Death Penalty 
Information Center.

Shortages have left states illegally importing this drug largely from a 
manufacturer and distributor by the name of Chris Harris. With zero 
pharmaceutical background, Harris runs his cartel silently out of a rented 
office space in India, restricting contact with his own employees to mostly 
email.

On July 25, shipments of the drug were stopped by the FDA at Phoenix Sky Harbor 
Airport and confiscated, according to the Associated Press. The Arizona 
Department of Corrections purchased 1,000 vials of thiopental at $25 a piece, 
adding up to nearly $27,000 with shipping costs according to the Arizona 
Republic.

That's money that could easily help fund government projects for rehab centers 
or mental disorder research or public safety - but nope, Arizona said screw 
that, let's just kill already imprisoned criminals instead of trying to help or 
stop more.

Sometimes states without such hefty sums of money lying around instead turn to 
mixing experimental drugs together in hopes the concoction will result in a 
swift painless death. This has been far from the reality.

According to the Arizona Republic, during July 2014, Joseph Rudolph Wood was 
injected with the controversial mix of drugs that Oklahoma had previously 
attempted but failed; it took Wood 2 hours to die.

As of October 2015 only 31 states still allow the death penalty, and the rate 
of incarcerations has dropped significantly since its peaking days in 1999. The 
total number sentenced to death that year was 279, and in 2014 that number was 
73, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Killing is never the answer; ask any elementary school student that question. 
Not only are the kids right, but the facts also agree.

According to a study by the National Research Council, 88 % of experts agreed 
that executions do not lower homicide rates.

The shortage of lethal drugs shouldn't be taken as an opportunity to try and 
create new ones or buy ourselves into a grave, but a chance to end the death 
penalty once and for all.

Whether it's propofol or thiopental, both drugs are humane ways to end a 
prisoner's life, but if an entire continent is prepared to drop the all 
charges, then perhaps it's time America puts down the needle.

(source: The Daily Wildcat)