[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----GA., KY., TENN., ARK., NEV., CALIF., WASH., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 5



GEORGIA----impending execution

Clemency hearing set for Georgia death row inmate


The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has set a clemency hearing for a death 
row inmate who's sentenced to die later this month.

The clemency hearing for Marcus Ray Johnson is set for 9 a.m. on Nov. 18. 
Johnson is set for execution at 7 p.m. on Nov. 19.

Johnson was convicted in April 1998 in the March 1994 rape and murder of Angela 
Sizemore.

Prosecutors say Johnson met Sizemore at a club and the 2 were spotted kissing 
and drinking heavily and were seen leaving together. Sizemore's body was found 
the next day and prosecutors say eyewitnesses placed Johnson near where her 
body was found.

Defense attorneys have argued there are inconsistencies in the evidence 
presented at Johnson's trial that raise doubts about his guilt.

(source: Associated Press)






KENTUCKY:

Time to abolish Kentucky's death penalty


Unjust. Unfair. Costly. Dehumanizing.

These concerns reflect the reality of the administration of the death penalty. 
As such, they lead to the same inevitable conclusion: It is time to abolish 
capital punishment in Kentucky.

It has been 4 years since an American Bar Association-sponsored assessment of 
the use of the death penalty in Kentucky resulted in a report that revealed 
serious problems related to fairness and accuracy. These included an error rate 
of more than 60 %, meaning a majority of death sentences were overturned on 
appeal; caseloads far exceeding the national average for public defenders 
handling capital cases; inadequate protections against death sentences for 
defendants with mental disabilities; and no uniform standards on eyewitness 
identifications.

These and other findings of the review by a team of Kentucky attorneys, former 
judges and law school professors were so numerous and troubling that the report 
recommended suspending all executions until the issues were addressed. But that 
hasn't happened. In fact, there have been no significant changes in the death 
penalty law since the report was issued.

That means the families of murder victims must continue to live with 
uncertainty and the hardships inherent in our criminal justice system.

As an accompanying column by Ben Griffith points out, his brother's murder led 
to long decades of waiting for the system to work through appeals - forcing his 
family to relive the horror of their loss. "Is it any wonder that a 2012 study 
conducted on the well-being of homicide survivors found that those who lived in 
a state where the ultimate penalty was life without parole fared much better 
than those with the death penalty?" he writes.

The absence of change in Kentucky's death penalty law also means the state 
continues to incur costs that exceed the resources that would be required if 
life without parole were the maximum penalty possible.

Another article in this series by state Rep. David Floyd provides more detail.

"It's counterintuitive, but taxpayers spend far more on our system of capital 
punishment than we would if the death penalty were not an option. Every study 
undertaken in the United States concludes that our death penalty system is far 
more costly than a system in which the maximum sentence is life without the 
possibility of parole."

The additional costs accrue through expenditures by county jails and state 
prisons and the lengthy appeals process.

"The vast majority of those who remain in prison under a death sentence just 
die in prison," Rep. Floyd writes. "We're spending huge sums of tax dollars on 
a system of death, but what we are getting is de facto life without parole."

These realities of families' anguish and wasted public resources provide strong 
arguments for abolishing the death penalty - an action that 19 states and the 
District of Columbia have taken through the years. Nebraska is the most recent 
with its legislature voting for abolition in May 2015.

Opposition to the death penalty also is a point of agreement among people with 
different, and often contradictory, political points of view on other matters. 
Marc Hyden of the national group Conservatives Concerned about the Death 
Penalty shares information in an accompanying column about the recent inaugural 
meeting of that organization in northern Kentucky.

"For pro-life conservatives who subscribe to the notion that the government 
shouldn't wrongly execute Americans and innocent lives should be safeguarded, 
the death penalty has become an untenable program. ... Kentucky's own track 
record is tainted by mistakes. ... The death penalty in Kentucky and elsewhere 
poses an undeniable hazard to innocent life."

Finally, on a personal note, my opposition to the death penalty developed as a 
result of my role in administering it 5 times. At the time, I was director of 
the Georgia Department of Corrections, overseeing the executions in the maximum 
security prison where I had previously served as warden.

I oppose the death penalty for the reasons articulated by my fellow writers and 
because I believe it is illogical for the state to teach citizens not to kill 
by killing. I also am acutely aware of the heavy toll capital punishment exacts 
from the individuals who have to carry out the sanction. As I have written 
before, corrections officials are expected to commit the most premeditated 
murder imaginable.

Unjust. Unfair. Costly. Dehumanizing. Kentucky must not wait any longer to join 
19 other states and abolish the death penalty.

(source: Allen Ault recently retired as Dean of the College of Justice & Safety 
at Eastern Kentucky University. During his career, he served as Director of 
Corrections for 5 governors in 3 states----The Courier-Journal)






TENNESSEE:

Poor audio recording causing problems in 2 death penalty cases in Carter County


Unlike several other high-profile murder cases in the region in the past 
several years, 2 unrelated capital murder cases in Carter County appeared to be 
on schedule and on track, until the audio recordings of the preliminary 
hearings in Sessions Court were heard. Now, both cases could possibly be sent 
back to General Sessions Court for another round of preliminary hearings.

The recordings of the preliminary hearings were of such poor quality that the 
court reporter was not able to make transcripts of the proceedings in the 
preliminary hearings for Anthony Joseph Lacy, accused in the murder of Danny 
Ray Vance on July 4, 2014, and for Eric James Azotea, accused in the murders of 
Arthur Gibson Jr. and Amber Terrell on Jan. 7, 2015.

Both attorney Steve Finney, lead defense counsel for Azotea, and James Bowman, 
attorney for Lacy, filed motions calling for the cases to be sent back to 
Sessions Court for a repeat of the preliminary hearings.

Both lawyers cited Rule 5.1 (a)(3) of the Tennessee Rules of Criminal 
Procedure, which reads in part: "Where the recording is no longer available or 
is substantially inaudible, the trial court shall order a new preliminary 
hearing upon motion of the defendant."

Assistant District Attorney Dennis Brooks said the discs may be enhanced to 
amplify the voices and remove some of the background noise on the recordings.

Judge Stacy Street took the request for new preliminary hearings under 
advisement, but ordered that the recordings for both of the defendants should 
be enhanced before making a final decision.

There was 1 other recording made of the Lacy case, but it was made by Special 
Agent Brian Fraley of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Fraley had placed 
his personal hand-held recorder on the rostrum and was able to capture the 
entire proceeding.

During Wednesday's motion hearing, Assistant Public Defender Melanie Sellers 
said Fraley was encouraged to record the preliminary hearing because the 
Session Court's "recording system was so bad." Sessions Court Judge Keith 
Bowers was reached after court and said he was aware that Fraley was recording 
the hearing as a backup.

Sellers also told the court that she had not been notified of the hearing on 
the court recordings. She said she just happened to be in the courtroom and 
found out about it by happenstance. Sellers is defending Demetrice Cordell, who 
is a codefendant with Lacy but is not facing the death penalty.

"Nobody intended to keep you away from the party," Street told Sellers. He then 
added Sellers to the list of parties who are to receive enhanced copies of the 
Sessions Court recordings and Fraley's backup recording.

Bowers said the county is addressing the recording problem in his court. He 
said the County Commission has designated funds to buy a superior recording 
system that is identical to the one already being used in Criminal Court. 
Bowers said the Commission also approved funding to improve the amplification 
of the testimony in both Sessions and Criminal Courts.

Bowers said the purchase of the equipment for Sessions Court is awaiting a 
decision on whether the recording system must be bid out or whether the price 
offered to the state can be used to buy the equipment. Bowers said a 
determination must be made because Sessions Court is operated by the county, 
while Criminal Court is operated by the state.

In the meantime, Bowers has purchased his court's own hand-held recorder as a 
backup and also purchased more and better microphones.

Although he was not present at Wednesday's hearing, attorney Lanny Norris 
agreed that the Sessions Court's recording system must be improved. Not just an 
improvement in the sound quality, Norris said, but also in the indexing. Norris 
said he had requested a recording of a preliminary hearing for a client who is 
facing a DUI charge. Norris said each disc has multiple days of court 
proceedings on it without any indexing.

He said it will take hours for him to sort through the disc until he finds the 
testimony of a Highway Patrolman. The only way to find the testimony was to 
have copies of the court dockets and catch the name when someone was called 
forward, then determine the day that name appeared on a docket.

Norris said defendants "have a fundamental right to review previous testimony 
in their case."

(source: Johnson City Press)






ARKANSAS:

Death Penalty Debate On University Of Arkansas Campus


The Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies at the University of 
Arkansas School of Law is hosting a debate panel on the death penalty on 
Thursday, November 5, at 12:00 p.m

The panel will include Ben Jones, a campaign strategist for Equal Justice USA 
and the former Executive Director of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the 
Death Penalty, as a death penalty opponent. Making the case for the death 
penalty will be Professor William Otis from the Georgetown University Law 
Center, a former special counsel to President George H.W. Bush. Professor 
Laurent Sacharoff of the University of Arkansas School of Law will serve as the 
moderator for the panel.

"This issue is particularly relevant in Arkansas in light of a recent legal 
challenge that has placed 8 scheduled executions on hold, due to concerns over 
lethal injection drugs and secrecy surrounding them," said Traci Huesing, 
Federalist Society Chapter President. "It is a timely debate for both the 
public and policymakers in Arkansas."

The debate will take at 12:00 P.M on Thursday, November 5, in Waterman Hall 
Room 240 at the University of Arkansas's Robert A. Leflar Law Center. The event 
is open to the public.

(source: nwohomepage.com)



NEVADA----new death sentence

Jury: Death penalty for man guilty in Vegas Strip fireball


A jury decided Wednesday that a 29-year-old self-styled pimp should be 
sentenced to death for killing 3 people by opening fire into a moving vehicle 
after a dispute at a hip-hop event at a posh Las Vegas Strip resort.

Ammar Asim Faruq Harris was not in the courtroom when relatives and friends of 
the victims sobbed and shouted after the verdict was read Wednesday in Clark 
County District Court.

The jury deliberated 2 hours after a 2-day penalty hearing that Harris chose 
not to attend. The same jury took less than 20 minutes Oct. 26 to find Harris 
guilty of 1st-degree murder, attempted murder and weapon charges in the 
February 2013 vehicle-to-vehicle shooting that sparked a fireball crash.

Clark County District Court Judge Kathleen Delaney has set Jan. 4 as the date 
for a formal sentencing hearing.

The death sentence will automatically be appealed to the state Supreme Court. 
It won't change Harris' housing, because he's already held at Ely State Prison, 
the state's most secure facility and home of death row.

Harris is already housed at Ely State Prison - serving 16 years to life for 
raping and robbing an 18-year-old woman in Las Vegas in 2010, although the case 
is being appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court. He is serving an additional 5 
years after pleading guilty this year to masterminding a scheme to smuggle 
items into prison.

Harris didn't testify during his trial, which began with jury selection Oct. 
12.

A psychiatrist testified in his defense in the guilt phase, and a forensic 
psychologist was the only witness on his behalf in the penalty phase.

The psychologist, Shera Bradley, told the jury on Tuesday that Harris grew up 
fatherless, that his mother didn't enroll him in school, and that he was 
neglected and sexually abused while living in poverty in the New York area. He 
was arrested at 17 with a stolen gun in a stolen car in South Carolina and sent 
to prison after violating probation.

Prosecutor David Stanton undercut Bradley's conclusion that Harris might 
benefit from a controlled prison environment without access to drugs, alcohol 
or weapons. He presented records detailing Harris' disciplinary trouble in 
prison in South Carolina, and he pointedly noted that the Nevada smuggling 
scheme involved cellphones, chicken wings, alcohol and methamphetamine.

Stanton also played for the jury a recording of a jail telephone call following 
his arrest in Los Angeles in which Harris apparently tries to get girlfriend 
Yenesis Alfonso to hire an armed assault team for $20,000 to spring him from 
custody when he was transferred to Las Vegas in March 2013. Police reported 
taking precautions at the time, but never reported an escape attempt.

No one disputed during the weeklong trial that Harris was the shooter in the 
pre-dawn scene Feb. 21, 2013.

Prosecutor Pamela Weckerly cast him as so ego-driven that a "sense of insult" 
exchanging angry words with a man in the valet area at the Aria resort was 
enough to spark the murderous rampage that left cars spun-out, crashed and 
burning at the busiest intersection in Las Vegas.

Video recorded Harris' black Range Rover driving jockey for position with a 
Maserati in a tire-squealing chase between stoplights on neon-lit Las Vegas 
Boulevard, and the sound of gunshots from the SUV before the sports car 
accelerated through a red light and slammed into a taxi that ignited in flames 
in front of the Caesars Palace and Flamingo resorts.

Aspiring rapper Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr. was mortally wounded in the Maserati. 
A passenger, Freddy Walters, was wounded. Cab driver Michael Boldon and 
passenger Sandra Sutton-Wasmund of Maple Valley, Washington, perished in the 
flaming taxi.

At least 5 other vehicles were damaged in chain-reaction crashes.

Separate cameras caught the Range Rover speeding away in the night.

Police found no gun in the wrecked Maserati, and no bullet holes in the Range 
Rover. But Harris' lawyers, Thomas Ericsson and Robert Langford, maintained the 
shooting was self-defense.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Norton Roitman, testified that if Harris was under the 
influence of alcohol and the club drug ecstasy, he might have also been 
hyper-vigilant and prone to "fight-or-flight" responses after having been 
wounded in a shooting in Miami in December 2014.

A firm link between Harris and Cherry was not made. But both projected online 
personas big on bravado and bragging about riches.

Harris, who lived in Atlanta and Miami, posted pictures of a Bentley and an 
Aston Martin, and mug shots from prior arrests. He was shown in a video wearing 
a red baseball cap and crisp white shirt with flashy sunglasses tucked in the 
collar, fanning money and bragging that his house was full of women who paid 
him.

He talked about having a $1,000 bikini contest during a birthday party he 
planned for himself aboard a boat on the Atlantic Ocean.

Cherry, 27, who used name Kenny Clutch during a little-noticed music video 
career, bragged that he paid $120,000 for the Maserati and showed scenes of 
hotels along the Strip in one online post titled "Stay Schemin."

"1 mistake change lives all in 1 night," he rapped.

The shooting, crashes and fire happened about a block from a vehicle-to-vehicle 
shooting in September 1996 that left rapper Tupac Shakur dead in a luxury 
sedan. That shooting has never been solved.

(source: Associated Press)






CALIFORNIA:

'Western Bandit' Captured; Accused of Killing 2 and Wounding 6 in Alleged 
California Spree


Los Angeles cops have arrested a man dubbed the "Western Bandit" who is accused 
of killing two people and robbing or assaulting 33 others in a nearly 4-year 
alleged crime spree.

"He's been terrorizing the streets, putting the public at risk and we're glad 
that we ... have him in custody," Los Angeles Police Department media relations 
officer Arreon Jefferson tells PEOPLE. "That way, the citizens of LA can be at 
peace and rest assured that the community is safer."

Police allege that from November 2011 to December 2014, Patrick Watkins, 51, 
rode up to his victims on his bicycle and either demanded cash or opened fire, 
according to a statement obtained by PEOPLE.

In some cases, he would allegedly approach victims on foot and rob them or 
shoot them. 2 were killed and 6 were wounded, police say.

Watkins is charged with the "special circumstance" murders of Nathan Vickers in 
2011 and Larise Smith in 2014, which makes him eligible for the death penalty, 
police say.

He faces a total of 53 charges, including murder and attempted murder along 
with assault, robbery and shooting, according to court documents obtained by 
PEOPLE.

"We've been looking for this individual ever since the crime spree started in 
2011," Jefferson says.

Watkins was arrested on Thursday at his home. SWAT officers moved into the 
2-story apartment complex and Watkins surrendered, the Los Angeles Times 
reports.

Police said months would pass between the alleged attacks, causing police to 
question Watkins' whereabouts, the Times reports. But investigators eventually 
linked the 51-year-old to the alleged series of crimes using DNA evidence 
collected during a prior arrest as well as the ballistics of the handgun he 
allegedly used.

Neighbors of Watkins described the 51-year-old as a generous man who played the 
bass and drums, and would often have jam sessions with the other tenants, the 
Times reports.

However, at a press conference on Monday, Mayor Eric Garcetti said, "In some 
ways just calling him a bandit doesn't begin to capture the fear and the 
actions of this man who is a cold-blooded killer," per ABC.

The case remains under investigation by the LAPD and prosecutors will decide 
later whether to seek the death penalty.

It is unclear whether Watkins has entered a plea.

(source: people.com)






WASHINGTON:

Prosecutor: Accused killer stomped Orting mom to death


Charges against a man accused of killing an Orting mother have been upgraded to 
1st degree murder after an autopsy found evidence to support the more severe 
charge.

Jonathan Daniel Harris, 29, is accused of killing 28-year-old Nicole White 
sometime on or after June 6 and dumping her body in a ravine near Joint Base 
Lewis-McChord.

Court documents say Harris killed White after they went on a date. The 2 were 
seen at the Jeepers Bar and Grill in Spanaway by witnesses. A woman who 
identified herself as the victim's sister says the two previously had several 
dates in the company of other people, but the last date was the 1st one White 
and Harris had by themselves.

Harris was arrested after investigators used his cell phone records and an 
ignition interlock device on his truck that takes a picture. Investigators used 
a picture the device took when Harris blew into the device to track down the 
location where White's body was found 2 weeks after the 2 were last seen.

Harris was originally charged with 2nd degree murder, but charges were amended 
Wednesday because an analysis by a forensic anthropologist determined White was 
brutally beaten to death, Pierce County prosecutor Mark Lindquist said.

The forensic anthropologist determined White had severe facial, chest and arm 
fractures, and the injuries are consistent with being stomped.

"What we read today -- he treated her like an insect," Amy Ancira, White's 
friend, said after Harris' arraignment Wednesday.

In the hallway outside the courtroom, White's uncle called the news of the 
amended charge, "awesome."

"He's ain't never getting out; we're finally going to get justice for her," 
said Tom Jones. "Things we found out today from the medical examiner just makes 
you sick. (Harris) is just a savage. He does not deserve to live."

Jones said he hopes prosecutors will now seek the death penalty.

"(But) if we don't get the death penalty, that's OK," Jones said. "He ain't 
never getting out to hurt somebody else."

Harris remains jailed on $2 million bond. His next court appearance is 
scheduled for Dec. 10 with a jury trial scheduled to begin on April 21.

(source: KOMO news)


USA:

Death penalty inherently lets government kill innocent Americans


In my experience, drinking with a nun is not an ordinary occurrence, but, 2 
weeks ago, I had the honor of sharing a bit of whiskey on the rocks with an 
extraordinary woman of fatih, Sister Helen Prejean, as she wound down from 
another evening of agitating against the death penalty.

Sister Helen is widely known for her book "Dead Man Walking," an 
autobiographical account of her emotionally wrenching work as a spiritual 
advisor to death row inmates - a story that was made into a movie of the same 
name starring Susan Sarandon as the justice-seeking nun. As a leading advocate 
for the abolition of capital punishment in the United States, Prejean was in 
Los Angeles for the opening of "Windows on Death Row: Art from Inside and 
Outside the Prison Walls" at the University of Southern California's Annenberg 
School for Communication and Journalism. The works on display include paintings 
and drawings by death row inmates, as well as cartoons from top editorial 
cartoonists (including one I drew for The Times).

In her remarks at the opening of the exhibit on Oct. 22, she gave a boost to a 
measure that is likely to be on the ballot next year that would ban the death 
penalty in California. If Californians choose to do away with executions, she 
said, it will be a big step toward elimination of capital punishment throughout 
the country, given that the 746 death row inmates held in California prisons 
comprise a quarter of all the people sentenced to death in the United States.

A key part of Prejean's message is that, contrary to popular belief, the death 
penalty in America is not reserved only for "the worst of the worst." There is 
a wide disparity in how the ultimate punishment is applied. Rich murderers who 
can afford good lawyers rarely, if ever, end up on death row. In some 
jurisdictions, cops who do shoddy investigations, prosecutors interested only 
in notching up another victory, callous judges and inferior juries play a 
decisive role in who gets a death sentence. Those who do are generally poor, 
undereducated and disproportionately non-white. Most disturbing of all, a 
shocking number of them are wrongly accused, wrongly convicted and, sometimes, 
wrongly executed by the state.

Joining Prejean onstage was Ndume Olatushani, a soft-spoken, middle-aged man 
whose lovely painting of African faces is the highlight of the exhibit. 
Olatushani did not start out as an artist, but he had 28 years to hone his 
skills with paint and brush - the 28 years he spent on Tennessee's death row 
waiting to be killed for a murder he did not commit. Prejean calls herself "the 
storyteller," but Olatushani, she said, is the real "witness" to the 
recklessness of a justice system that claims the right to say who should live 
and who should die.

Thanks to the advent of DNA testing, the number of exonerations for the wrongly 
convicted for a variety of crimes, including murder, has skyrocketed. The 
Innocence Project has freed 325 people who ended up in prison because of 
eyewitness misidentification, poor forensics, false confessions or false 
testimony.

That is just the tip of a very big and very cold iceberg, though. Informed 
estimates indicate many more thousands of innocent men and women languish in 
prison cells because DNA tests are not applicable in every case or because they 
lack a champion who will battle for them against indifferent government 
officials.

Since 1973, 156 Americans who were condemned to die have been exonerated and 
freed. Since 1976, 1,419 have been executed. There is no reason to think that 
there were not at least a few, and more likely many, innocent people among 
those 1,419.

As a Roman Catholic nun, Prejean's activism is fully in line with the church 
teaching that all lives are sacred and redeemable and that, therefore, no 
government has the right to put any person to death, regardless of their crime. 
Though I did not tell Sister Helen, I must confess I have had a hard time 
reaching that same belief in unlimited mercy. Some murderers are so monstrous 
that it is hard to feel their obliteration is not justified. If there truly 
were a guarantee that only the very worst of the worst would end up on death 
row, I might not object.

But our justice system is not built that way. It is deeply, humanly flawed and 
there is no way to make it perfect. As conservative opponents of the death 
penalty like to say, why would anyone who thinks government screws up most 
things think it can get capital punishment right?

There are many strong arguments, both liberal and conservative, against 
executions. The tipping point for me is the fact that innocent people do end up 
on death row and do end up dead at the hands of the state. Of all the evils in 
the world, that is among the worst. It should not ever happen in a nation that 
claims to be the champion of life and liberty.

(source: David Horsey, Los Angeles Times)

***********

Death Penalty Drugs Teach Us About Scientific Progress and the Free 
Market----For the pharmaceutical companies that could produce lethal drugs, the 
ethical and legal hurdles just aren't worth it.


In October, confusion about lethal injection drugs bought Richard Glossip 37 
more days to live. The accused murderer's execution was postponed on day-of, 
just hours after Oklahoma's Department of Corrections discovered it had 
received the wrong chemical. The mix-up was the latest complication in the 
long, tortured, intravenous trip of death penalty drugs. As pharmaceutical 
companies increasingly refuse to sell them, scarcity reigns despite demand.

Dut drug suppliers are getting out of the death game. In 2011, the 
pharmaceutical company Hospira announced it was ceasing production of the drug 
sodium thiopental, a commonly used anesthetic used to knock out condemned 
inmates before administration of lethal drugs, after months of pressure from 
activists protesting the death penalty. Though the company was the country's 
only manufacturer of sodium thiopental, ending production was a wise PR move 
and didn???t hurt much, at least financially. Sales of the anesthetic only made 
up 0.25 % of Hospira's total drug revenue.

Supply usually rises to meet demand, but, so far, enterprising drugmakers 
haven't swooped in to meet executione's needs, at least not in the U.S. Not 
that this is surprising: Doing so presents P.R. challenges and, as Hospir's 
president pointed out, invites lawsuits against both the facility and its 
employees. In some states, officials have attempted to buy sodium thiopental 
from overseas manufacturers only to be thwarted by the FDA, which refuses to 
approve the drugs. Others have had to make do with what was available.

At the time sodium thiopental production ceased, there were 3,261 inmates on 
death row, leaving little time for death-bent officials to mix up new 
cocktails. In some cases, they were forced to break with the agreed-upon method 
of using multiple chemicals, using a single drug instead. Individual doses of 
pentobarbital - a derivative of a horse-euthanizing drug - have been used 
successfully, but its use is still being debated. Just today, the Supreme Court 
delayed the execution of Missouri convict Ernest Lee Johnson after his 
attorneys argued that pentobarbital caused enough to pain to count as a 
violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The sedative midazolam has also been used as a substitute in lethal drug 
cocktails, but, like pentobarbital, it has the potential to cause needless 
suffering. It was blamed for the botched execution of Dennis McGuire in 2014, 
in which he remained alive for 15 minutes after it was administered with a 
second drug. Ditto Oklahoma's Clayton Lockett, who, after receiving the drug 
cocktail, convulsed for 45 minutes before he finally died.

A group of Oklahoma inmates brought their concerns about midazolam to the 
Supreme Court this year, only to be overruled. While dissenting judges like 
Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed that the drug was essentially "the chemical 
equivalent of being burned at the stake," its supporters, like Justice Samuel 
Alito, didn't think the inmates made a compelling enough case.

But a sharp observation that Alito made during that hearing points at the 
bigger issue. The risk of additional pain, he said, was at least in part due to 
activists' success in convincing pharmaceutical companies to stop selling 
lethal injection drugs to executioners. He's not wrong. Most of the approved 
"ethical" drugs are no longer available, and nobody's making or finding any new 
ones. Still, pharmacists and scientists simply don't want to get involved.

Glossip's execution has been rescheduled for this Friday, though the Oklahoma 
Department of Corrections hasn't been able to explain what led to the confusion 
between potassium chloride and a related but unapproved chemical known as 
potassium acetate. Whether the substitution was actually due to an shortage or 
to a genuine error ("I still don't know why we had potassium acetate," a DoC 
spokesperson told Time) remains to be seen.

What is clear is that pharmaceutical companies aren't going to budge, forcing 
the frustrated states that still stand by the death penalty to rethink the 
lethal injection method altogether. Utah, for one, has brought back the firing 
squad, and Oklahoma has made asphyxiation with nitrogen gas its official 
back-up method. In light of the ongoing death penalty drug clusterfuck, 5 
states have ushered in bills calling for a repeal of the policy, but 31 still 
stubbornly stand by tradition. Ultimately - and ironically - it's the ethics of 
death that make capital punishment so complicated.

Taking a life, for better or worse, is the easy part.

(source: Yasmin Tayag is a writer and former biologist living in New York 
City----inverse.com)

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

This Is How Prosecutors (Still) Keep Black People Off Juries


The exclusion of black people from juries is a hot topic this week, as the 
United States Supreme Court considers the case of Timothy Foster, a black man 
charged with murdering an elderly white woman in Georgia some 3 decades ago. 
Foster was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury after 
prosecution lawyers used their so-called peremptory strikes to disqualify the 
blacks in the pool, citing "race-neutral" reasons.

Up until this point in the case, the courts had accepted those alternative 
rationales. But the prosecutors' notes from jury selection, which were finally 
revealed thanks to a Public Records Act request, suggest a deliberate exclusion 
strategy. On the list of prospective jurors, the black names were circled, 
highlighted in green, and marked with a "B." They were also ranked, an 
investigator for the prosecution noted in an affidavit, in case "it comes down 
to having to pick one of the black jurors." Ouch. (Yesterday, Mother Jones 
reporter Stephanie Mencimer tracked down one of those rejected jurors, who 
recalled prosecutors the treating her "like I was a criminal.")

"Isn't this as clear a Batson violation as this court is likely to see?" asked 
Justice Elena Kagan.

"We have an arsenal of smoking guns," Foster's lawyer, the famed capital 
defender Stephen Bright, told the high court during Monday's oral arguments. 
Several justices seemed to agree. "Isn't this as clear a Batson violation as 
this court is likely to see?" asked Justice Elena Kagan.

She was referring to the 1986 case of Batson vs. Kentucky, in which the Supreme 
Court explicitly prohibited the striking of jurors based on ethnicity. But the 
legal profession has long looked the other way as prosecutors come to court 
armed with what, in the Foster case, was described as a "laundry list" of 
alternative explanations for a juror's removal. Things like, "Oh, this juror is 
about the defendant's age," or "They grew up in the same part of the city."

Among other things, Foster's lead prosecutor noted that several of the 
prospective black jurors he dismissed hadn't made sufficient eye contact when 
he questioned them. In any case, it's not hard to invent reasonable-sounding 
explanations for striking a juror, and therein lies the problem. Only when you 
run the numbers does the racist intent comes into sharp focus.

"I knew I would vote for the death penalty because that's what that n----- 
deserved."

For a little context, it's helpful to look at portions of Marc Bookman's recent 
essay about Kenneth Fults, another Georgia death row inmate. One of the jurors 
in that case, a white man, later made the following statement under oath: "That 
nigger got just what should have happened. Once he pled guilty, I knew I would 
vote for the death penalty because that's what that nigger deserved." The white 
lawyer assigned to defend Fults also used the N-word with abandon. But none of 
this was enough to convince skeptical courts to grant Fults a resentencing. In 
his essay, Bookman explains how the legal system is rigged against black 
defendants, and why, without an arsenal of smoking guns, arguing racial 
discrimination is usually a losing game:

Consider one of the most famous examples, the 1987 Supreme Court case of 
McCleskey v. Kemp, in which lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced 
to death for killing a white police officer, presented statistics from more 
than 2,000 Georgia murder cases. The data demonstrated a clear bias against 
black defendants whose victims were white: When both killer and victim were 
black, only 1 % of the cases resulted in a death sentence. When the killer was 
black and the victim white, 22 % were sentenced to death - more than 7 times 
the rate for when the races were reversed.

Prosecutors sought execution for black defendants in 70 % of murder cases with 
a white victim, but only 15 % with a black victim.

It wasn't just jurors who were biased. Prosecutors sought the death penalty for 
black defendants in 70 % of murder cases when the victim was white, but only 15 
% when the victim was black.

The Supreme Court was less than impressed with all of this. Justice Lewis 
Powell, in a 5-4 majority opinion he would later call his greatest regret on 
the bench, wrote that McCleskey could not prove that "the decisionmakers in his 
case acted with discriminatory purpose." In short, evidence of systemic racial 
bias had no relevance in individual cases ...

Georgia executed McCleskey in 1991, but the McCleskey rationale - which the New 
York Times labeled the "impossible burden" of proving that racial animus 
motivated any particular prosecutor, judge, or jury - has been used by dozens 
of courts to reject statistical claims of discrimination in capital cases, even 
though today's numbers are not much better.

Bookman goes on to detail the sordid history of jury stacking:

The phrase "legal lynching" first appeared in the New York Times during the 
infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys trials, in which 9 black youths were charged with 
raping 2 white women in Alabama. Their lack of counsel, coupled with the 
explicit exclusion of black jurors, led the Supreme Court to intercede twice 
and reverse convictions.

It's hard to read those opinions today without feeling a sense of horror. 
Within 2 weeks of the alleged crime, 8 of the 9 young men had been sentenced to 
death in three separate trials by the same jury. Although there was no shortage 
of black men in Scottsboro County who were legally eligible to serve on juries, 
there was no record of any of them ever serving on one. Perhaps most 
remarkably, none of the defendants had a lawyer appointed to represent him 
until the morning of trial. In 2013, more than 80 years after the arrests, the 
Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles posthumously pardoned the three Scottsboro 
Boys whose convictions still stood.

"Question them at length," said one Philly prosecutor, referring to people of 
color. "Mark something down that you can articulate at a later time."

We have not come nearly as far from these outrages as you might think. People 
of color are still dramatically underrepresented (PDF) on juries and grand 
juries, even though excluding people based on race is illegal and undermines 
"public confidence in our system of justice," as the Supreme Court put it in 
1986. Prospective black jurors are routinely dismissed at higher rates than 
whites. The law simply requires some rationale other than skin color.

"Question them at length," a prominent Philadelphia prosecutor suggested to his 
proteges after the Supreme Court banned race as a reason for striking jurors. 
"Mark something down that you can articulate at a later time." For instance, a 
lawyer might say, "Well, the woman had a kid about the same age as the 
defendant, and I thought she'd be sympathetic to him."

In 2005, a former prosecutor in Texas revealed that her superiors had 
instructed her that if she wanted to strike a black juror, she should falsely 
claim she'd seen the person sleeping. This was just a dressed-up version of the 
Dallas prosecution training manual from 1963, which directed assistant district 
attorneys to "not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any 
minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated."

The 1969 edition of the manual, used into the 1980s, promoted a more subtle 
brand of stereotyping, noting that it was "not advisable to select potential 
jurors with multiple gold chains around their necks." But it hardly mattered: 
Overt, covert, or in between - the result was the same.

A North Carolina court found that prosecutors were striking blacks at twice the 
rate of other jurors. The probability of that being a fluke, experts testified, 
was less than 1 in 10 trillion.

Virtually every state with a death penalty has dealt with accusations that 
black jurors have been improperly kept off juries. During the 1992 death 
penalty trial of a defendant named George Williams, for example, a California 
prosecutor dismissed the first five black women in the jury box. "Sometimes you 
get a feel for a person," he explained, "that you just know that they can't 
impose it based upon the nature of the way that they say something." The judge 
went even further, noting that "black women are very reluctant to impose the 
death penalty; they find it very difficult." In 2013, the California Supreme 
Court ruled that these jury strikes were not race-based, and deemed the judge's 
statement "isolated." Williams remains on death row.

After North Carolina passed its Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that let inmates 
challenge death sentences based on racial bias, a state court determined that 
prosecutors were dismissing black jurors at twice the rate of other jurors. The 
probability of this being a race-neutral fluke, according to 2 professors from 
Michigan State University, was less than 1 in 10 trillion; even the state's 
expert agreed that the disparity was statistically significant. Based on these 
numbers, the court vacated the death sentences of 3 inmates and resentenced 
each to life without parole. 6 months later, the state legislature repealed the 
Racial Justice Act.

Finally, in an earlier essay on the case of Andre Thomas, a death row inmate 
with a long and bizarre history of mental illness, Bookman described yet 
another ploy to keep black people off Texas juries:

It's called the "shuffle." The pool of potential jurors, known as a venire, are 
seated in a room, and with no information other than what the jurors look like, 
either side can request that they be shuffled - reseated in a different order.

After the 'shuffle" - which proceeded without any objection by the defense - 
there were no blacks in the first 5 rows.

The order of the venire, it turns out, is crucial to the jury's final makeup. 
That's because each juror is questioned in turn, and if lawyers from either 
side want to exercise their right to disqualify someone, they have to do it 
then and there. If it looks like one side is striking a juror based on race - 
which is not allowed - the other side can mount a challenge. Hence the shuffle: 
At Andre's trial, there were initially 6 African Americans seated in the first 
2 rows. After the shuffle - which proceeded without any objection by the 
defense - there were no blacks in the first 5 rows. Ultimately, 2 black jurors 
were questioned and dismissed. When all was said and done, the entire jury - 
not to mention the judge and all of the lawyers - was white.

Smoking guns, people. Smoking guns.

(source: Michael Mechanic, Mother Jones)

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

Bill O'Reilly praised Singapore for hanging drug offenders


On Tuesday night, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly revealed that he might be cool with 
hanging drug traffickers.

Seriously. Here is the exchange, from a segment posted by Media Matters about 
the release of 6,000 federal drug offenders:

Bill O'Reilly: I'll remind you, in Singapore they have no [drug] problem. Why? 
They hang them. They hang them.

Jessica Tarlov: Okay, but we're obviously not suggesting that as the answer to 
-

Bill O'Reilly: I don't know. I mean, look, Singapore at one time had the most 
pernicious opium problem you could possibly have, it destroyed their entire 
society. So they said, you know what, we're not going to have this anymore. And 
that's what they did. Bingo, no drug problem.

It's the "I don't know" that really sets this apart. O'Reilly had a chance to 
clarify that he doesn't want the US to hang drug offenders. Instead, he seemed 
unsure - even supportive - of the idea.

Beyond the civil rights implications of having the government execute 
nonviolent offenders, there's no evidence that a tougher approach to drugs 
would work in the US.

Tough anti-drug policies have already failed

Over the past several decades, the US has been fighting an international war on 
drugs with the explicit goal of going after drug manufacturers and traffickers 
to eliminate the world's supply of illegal drugs. The idea was that if you 
eliminate the supply, and bring up drug prices as a result, drugs will become 
inaccessible to would-be users and abusers. So the country imposed very 
stringent penalties for drug traffickers, which can sometimes add up to decades 
in prison.

Yet in all that time, the price of illicit drugs has plummeted - with the 
exception of marijuana, which was never very expensive. That suggests stringent 
anti-drug efforts aren't working: If they worked at reducing the supply of 
drugs, we would expect to see an increase in drug prices - but we've actually 
seen the opposite.

Moreover, the death penalty doesn't appear to reduce crime. A February 2015 
review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice found no evidence that 
the death penalty had an impact on crime in the 1990s and 2000s, and it 
concluded that the studies that suggested there was a deterrent effect were 
methodologically weak. And most criminologists said in a 2009 survey that the 
death penalty doesn't deter murder.

So O'Reilly's comment is not just morally questionable; it's also not backed by 
the evidence we have on the death penalty and war on drugs.

(source: vox.com)