[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., N.C., GA., FLA., ALA., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 20



TEXAS:

Man charged with 6 counts of capital murder in East Texas campsite killings


A man was charged with 6 counts of capital murder Thursday in the killing of a 
family at an East Texas campsite.

William Mitchell Hudson, who remained jailed on a $2.5 million bond, is accused 
of shooting 2 of the victims at a travel camper and dumping the other 4 bodies 
in a pond near his property.

The warrants were issued by the Anderson County district attorney's office 
after preliminary autopsy results showed all 6 victims died by homicide. The 
autopsies identified the dead as Carl Johnson, 76; Hannah Johnson, 40; Kade 
Johnson, 6; Thomas Kamp, 46; Nathan Kamp, 23; and Austin Kamp, 21. No other 
details from the autopsies would be released, Sheriff Greg Taylor said.

According to a previous warrant, the 33-year-old suspect was drinking with the 
group Saturday when he accompanied four of them into surrounding woods. The 
warrant says the lone survivor, Cynthia Johnson, heard gunshots before Hudson 
returned alone to the campsite, chased her husband and daughter into a travel 
camper and shot them.

No motive has been released.

"There are no adequate words to truly describe this horrific and senseless act. 
6 members of 2 different yet joined families are gone," District Attorney 
Allyson Mitchell said in a statement issued Thursday afternoon. "Our hearts 
grieve for the Johnson and Kamp families and we will use all our resources to 
prosecute Hudson to the fullest extent of the law."

Capital murder in Texas is punishable by either death by lethal injection or 
life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. No decision has been made 
on whether the death penalty will be sought.

Hudson's attorney, Stephen Evans of Palestine, declined to comment. After-hours 
messages seeking more information from the district attorney's office were not 
returned Thursday.

(source: Associated Press)






PENNSYLVANIA:

Death penalty can be sought for Ross murder retrial


The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has cleared the way to seek the death penalty 
against Paul Aaron Ross of the Hollidaysburg area, who is awaiting a new trial 
in the death of a 26-year-old woman at Canoe Creek State Park more than 11 
years ago.

(source: Altoona Mirror)






NORTH CAROLINA:

Racial discrimination remains plague on criminal justice system


One of the fundamental promises of the American criminal justice system is that 
ordinary citizens have the power to help decide how justice is handed down. But 
the truth is, we have never fully extended this power to African Americans.

The U.S. Supreme Court underscored that truth this month, when it heard 
arguments in Foster v. Chatman, a Georgia case in which jury selection notes 
reveal that prosecutors purposely excluded every potential black juror and that 
they ranked the African Americans in case "it comes down to having to pick one 
of the black jurors."

If the court rules for the defendant in Foster, its decision will force courts 
across the country to stop ignoring clear evidence that African Americans have 
been systematically denied the right to serve on juries across the country. 
Here in North Carolina, we should watch this case closely.

In the investigation of cases tried under N.C. Racial Justice Act, we found 
evidence even stronger than that which drew the Supreme Court's attention this 
month. The prosecutor's handwritten notes in a Cumberland County capital case 
labeled jurors with terms like "blk wino" and "blk, high drug neighborhood." 
Another juror was deemed "ok" because she was from a "respectable blk family."

RJA defendants also discovered that their prosecutors attended a training 
seminar, sponsored by the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, where they 
were given a cheat sheet of "race-neutral" excuses they could use to justify 
excluding African-American citizens from jury service.

To top it off, a comprehensive statewide study of more than 150 capital cases 
from 1990-2010 found that prosecutors dismissed qualified African-American 
jurors at more than double the rate of white jurors. The disparity was even 
more pronounced when the defendant was African American.

Despite this clear evidence, North Carolina has hardly begun to remedy the 
problem.

The courts' record

In the 30 years since it became illegal to strike a juror based on race, the 
North Carolina appellate courts have heard more than 100 cases where 
prosecutors were accused of intentionally excluding jurors of color. These 
courts ruled there was evidence of discrimination against African-American 
jurors in only 1, a case where the prosecutor failed to provide any explanation 
for his strikes."

The courts' record was so troubling that the General Assembly enacted the 
Racial Justice Act, a law that forced the courts to consider statistical 
evidence of racial disparities in jury selection and charging and sentencing. 
The hope was that RJA would finally force our courts to root out racial 
injustice, a major factor in wrongful convictions. (8 of the 9 innocent men who 
have been sent to death row in North Carolina are black.)

Following 2 evidentiary hearings under the RJA, the court found "powerful" 
evidence that prosecutors "regularly took race into account in capital jury 
selection and discriminated against African-American citizens." The defendants 
involved in these hearings were resentenced to life without parole. Sadly, only 
these 4 of the state's nearly 150 death row inmates had their RJA claims heard 
before the legislature repealed the law. Now, the state Supreme Court is 
mulling whether to overturn the lower court's finding of pervasive race 
discrimination in those 4 cases.

Sometimes it feels as if no amount of evidence will force our state to change. 
But watching the arguments this month in the U.S. Supreme Court, I find reason 
to hope.

Hope that North Carolina will not sweep this problem under the rug forever. 
Hope that we will finally see that denying African Americans the right to serve 
on juries not only violates their rights, but makes wrongful convictions more 
likely and undermines the integrity of our system as a whole. Hope that we will 
one day truly live up to our creed: Equal Justice Under Law.

(source: Opinion; Gretchen Engel is the executive director of the Durham-based 
Center for Death Penalty Litigation. N.C. Policy Watch is a project of the N.C. 
Justice Center----News & Observer)






GEORGIA:

Georgia carried out what is likely the last execution of 2015 after Supreme 
Court denied appeals


The last execution currently scheduled to take place in the United States this 
year was carried out Thursday evening when Georgia executed a man convicted of 
raping and murdering a woman in 1994.

As the execution approached, attorneys for Marcus Johnson had petitioned the 
U.S. Supreme Court for a reprieve and continued to argue that he is innocent. 
However, the justices denied these requests on Thursday.

Johnson was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the Georgia 
Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson at 7 p.m., but the execution 
was delayed for a little more than 3 hours due to the appeals.

He was sentenced to death for killing Angela Sizemore. In March 1994, Johnson 
and Sizemore met at a bar in Albany, Ga., and left together. Her body was found 
several hours later, having been brutally beaten and sexually assaulted, 
according to a summary of the case released by the office of Sam Olens, the 
Georgia attorney general. 4 years later, Johnson was convicted and sentenced.

In a filing to the Supreme Court, Johnson's attorneys argue that his 
"conviction for murder is based on fundamentally inaccurate and unreliable 
evidence."

Johnson told police he had sex with Sizemore in a nearby vacant lot before 
punching her in the nose "when she became clingy," his petition states, but he 
said she was alive when he left.

His attorneys argue that no physical evidence has linked him to the murder. 
They say that as a result, the case relied upon eyewitnesses who identified 
Johnson as being in the area shortly before Sizemore's body was found, even 
though studies have shown that eyewitness testimony is unreliable.

A filing from Olens, on behalf of the state, insists that the people who say 
they saw Johnson leaving the area were reliable and dismisses his other claims 
in arguing for the justices to reject the request to stay the execution.

The Supreme Court rejected the request without explanation or any recorded 
dissents Thursday night, but Johnson's lawyers quickly filed another appeal and 
Georgia officials also asked the justices to dismiss it. Shortly after 9 p.m., 
the justices denied the 2nd appeal, also without explanation or any recorded 
dissents.

On Wednesday, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected Johnson's 
request for clemency. In Georgia, only the parole board can commute a death 
sentence or change it to life in prison or life without parole.

"The duty of the Board of Pardons and Paroles is to act as a fail-safe to 
prevent miscarriages of justice such as the execution of persons whom the 
evidence shows may be innocent," Brian Kammer, an attorney for Johnson, said in 
a statement. "The board failed egregiously in this respect, and as a result the 
state of Georgia is about to execute an innocent man."

Johnson's execution will likely be the country's last one in 2015. On Wednesday 
evening, Texas carried out its last scheduled execution of the year, putting 
Raphael Holiday, 36, to death for killing 3 children by burning their home down 
in 2000. In his last statement, Holliday thanked his "supporters and loved 
ones."

Georgia has carried out 4 executions already in 2015, trailing only Texas and 
Missouri for the most so far this year. However, the total number of executions 
this year is the lowest in nearly a quarter of a century, something that occurs 
as states like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, Florida and others have scheduled and 
postponed or scrapped executions due to court challenges, an ongoing drug 
shortage and other issues.

The last inmate executed in Georgia before Johnson was Kelly Gissendaner, who 
was put to death in September after the state twice tried to execute her and 
had to cancel its plans (first due to a winter storm, then because of "cloudy" 
lethal injection drugs). Gissendaner was 1 of 3 inmates executed during a brief 
window that saw states schedule 6 lethal injections, though half of those were 
ultimately not carried out.

If no other executions are scheduled before the end of the year, Georgia will 
have carried out the 1st and last executions of 2015, as the state executed 
Andrew Brannan in January.

(source: Washington Post)






FLORIDA:

Man faces death penalty for killing daughter, girl's mother


A central Florida man has been convicted of killing his 3-year-old daughter and 
her mother.

The Lakeland Ledger (http://goo.gl/D3WwNh ) reports that a Polk County jury 
found 37-year-old Lester Ross guilty Thursday of 1st-degree murder and 
aggravated manslaughter. He faces life in prison or the death penalty.

Authorities discovered the bodies of Ross' daughter, MaSarah Ross, and the 
girl's mother, Ronkeya Holmes, buried in a Winter Haven grove in December 2010. 
Ross was arrested about 2 years later, following an intense investigation.

Ross' ex-wife, Sharon Evans, testified that she drove Ross to bury the bodies 
in 2009 because she feared her husband would kill her if she talked to police.

(source: Associated Press)






ALABAMA:

The 5 women on Alabama's death row have this in common The 5 women facing 
execution by the state of Alabama all have 1 thing in common -- they were 
convicted of killing their child or someone else's child.

Women make up less than 3 % of the 188 inmates facing the death penalty in the 
state, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Lisa Graham, currently held at the Russell County Jail, will soon join 4 other 
women at the female death row at Tutwiler Prison. The 183 condemned men are 
housed at Holman and Donaldson Prisons.

Graham was sentenced to die Wednesday for paying a family friend to kill her 
21-year-old daughter Stephanie Shae Graham in July 2007. Despite the fact 
Graham has an IQ of 77, a judge upheld a jury's recommendation of death, the 
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported.

Here are the 4 other women on death row in Alabama:

--Patricia Blackmon, convicted in the May 1999 capital murder of her 2-year-old 
adopted daughter, Dominiqua Bryant. The child's body sustained numerous 
injuries, including a fractured skull, and was stomped with such force that an 
imprint from a shoe was left on her chest.

--Tierra Gobble, convicted in the death of her 4-month-old son Phoenix Jordan 
''Cody'' Parrish in 2004. The child suffered a fractured skull, 5 broken ribs, 
broken wrists and numerous bruises. An autopsy showed he died from head trauma 
consistent with child abuse.

--Christie Michelle Scott, convicted of setting a house fire that killed her 
6-year-old son Mason Scott in order to collect life insurance in 2008.

--Heather Leavell-Keaton, convicted of murdering her common law husband's 
3-year-old son Chase DeBlase in 2010. Prosecutors allege that Leavell-Keaton 
cooked anti-freeze into the children's food.

Alabama has not executed a woman since 2002, when Lynda Lyon Block was put to 
death for killing Opelika police officer Roger Motley. Block's execution marked 
the last time Alabama used its electric chair. The state switched to lethal 
injection after her execution.

Since 1927, when Alabama switched from hanging to electrocution, the state has 
executed only 4 women. Records are not available for executions prior to that 
year.

Block was the 1st woman executed in Alabama since 1957. Rhonda Bell Martin was 
executed after she confessed in 1956 to poisoning her mother, 2 husbands, and 3 
of her children.

Earle Dennison in 1953 became the 1st white woman to die in Alabama's electric 
chair after poisoning her 2 nieces for insurance money.

The 1st woman to die in Alabama's electric chair, Silena Gilmore, said she shot 
a waiter as he begged for mercy because she was drunk. "Crime does not pay," 
she said before her 1930 execution.

More than 2 years have passed since Alabama executed an inmate.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June approved the use of the lethal injection drug 
combination that Alabama and other states use to kill the condemned, but it is 
not clear when executions will re-start in the state and which death row inmate 
will be 1st.

AL.com has joined with other news organizations around the nation in "The Next 
to Die," a project to track the upcoming executions of death row inmates.

Led by The Marshall Project, a non-profit, non-partisan journalism group that 
covers the criminal justice system, "The Next to Die" is currently set up to 
track execution dates in 10 states.

(source: al.com)






CALIFORNIA:

3 murder suspects deny guilt in Fairfax and San Francisco shootings


3 young itinerants charged with murdering a Fairfax hiker and a San Francisco 
tourist entered pleas of not guilty Thursday, 6 weeks after their arrest in 
Oregon.

The defendants - Morrison Haze Lampley, 23, Sean Michael Angold, 24, and Lila 
Scott Alligood, 18 - appeared in court for the 4th time before Judge Kelly 
Simmons, who has been postponing their arraignment while initial legal 
representation was arranged.

Simmons set May 9 as the date for the preliminary hearing, the proceeding at 
which she will decide whether there is sufficient evidence to hold the 
defendants for trial.

All 3 could face the death penalty. Lampley is being represented by the Marin 
County Public Defender's Office, while Angold and Alligood have been assigned 
to court-appointed attorneys.

The body of the 1st victim, Audrey Carey, 23, was found Oct. 3 in San 
Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Carey, a resident of Quebec, was on a backpacking 
trip to the United States when she was killed.

The killers stole Carey's tent, a sleeping bag, a passport, airline tickets, 
camping equipment and a tarp, according to prosecution filings.

The alleged murder weapon, a Smith and Wesson handgun, was stolen from a car in 
the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco, police said.

2 days later, the 2nd victim, 67-year-old Steve Carter, was shot to death while 
walking his dog on a trail off Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in the Loma Alta 
Preserve near Fairfax. The dog, a Doberman Pinscher named Coco, was shot and 
survived.

The suspects then allegedly stole Carter's car and headed north. They were 
arrested in Portland on Oct. 7 with the stolen car, Carey's stolen property and 
the stolen gun allegedly used in the crime spree, authorities said.

The defendants are charged with 1st-degree murder with the special 
circumstances of lying in wait and committing murder during a robbery. The 
special circumstances mean the defendants could be eligible for the death 
penalty if convicted, but prosecutors could instead seek life in prison without 
the possibility of parole.

The defendants are also charged with robbery, vehicle theft, possession of a 
stolen vehicle, animal cruelty and being in possession of property stolen from 
both victims.

Lampley, the alleged gunman in both deaths, faces additional charges of 
possessing a stolen gun and being a convicted felon with a gun. Prosecutors say 
he was convicted of possession of a stolen vehicle last May in San Diego 
County.

The defendants are being prosecuted in Marin Superior Court for both the 
Fairfax and the San Francisco homicides.

Carter, a yoga and Tantra instructor, was living in San Geronimo with his wife 
Lokita. The couple, who had previously lived in Lake County and Costa Rica, 
moved to Marin so she could receive breast cancer treatments.

(source: marinij.com)






USA:

Sotomayor Says Congress Should Not Tell Judges How to Review Cases


The framers of the Constitution should have barred Congress from telling judges 
how to review certain types of cases, such as challenges brought under the 
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said 
this week.

"I probably would have told the framers that Congress could not specify our 
standards of review," Sotomayor said in a conversation with law students at the 
University of Richmond School of Law. "I personally think judicial independence 
is compromised when Congress decides with detail what the standards should be - 
[the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act] is one of them."

Cases under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, or AEDPA, 
generally come to the U.S. Supreme Court as habeas petitions from prisoners 
challenging their sentences or convictions. Sotomayor had been asked by a 
student what structural changes she would make in the high court or what more 
she would have liked the framers to say about the court in the Constitution.

Because of AEDPA's standard of review, she said, "We are now in a place where a 
clearly constitutional wrong or one that's clear enough will still be upheld 
because AEDPA tells us if it's not 'unreasonably' wrong, it's OK. Try 
explaining that to someone in jail or try explaining that to the founding 
fathers who might have had a very different view of what justice is about."

Roaming through the audience, as has become Sotomayor's style, the justice 
fielded a wide range of questions from students on Nov. 17 following a brief 
conversation with Dean Wendy Perdue. The "roaming" style, Sotomayor said, was a 
reflection of her innate restlessness. Being a restless child, she said, her 
family called her "aji," meaning "hot pepper."

Sotomayor called her failure to do a judicial clerkship a "professional 
mistake," and she strongly urged the law students to clerk for a judge.

"Clerking will substitute for anywhere from 5 to 10 years of legal experience," 
she told them. "You will see more styles of advocacy than you can see in 
private practice. You'll see what advocates do and figure out what works best 
and doesn't work. And you'll get exposed to every facet of legal practice. I 
thought it meant just going to work in a library and I didn't want to do that."

A clerkship, she added, is a "human exposure to learning." And, she said, most 
clerks become part of their judge's family "and that mentorship lasts a 
lifetime."

Her other mistake was a "life mistake," she said. "It took me too long to 
realize that really being open to people, letting them into you life and into 
your feelings, is a positive thing. I spent too many years of my life being 
closed off from my pain and my fears of pain." Once you open yourself to 
people, they reciprocate by being more open to you, she said.

Sotomayor's prior jobs as a district attorney and a federal trial judge, she 
said, prepared her best for her position on the high court. "The ability to 
understand how facts should be developed and how arguments can flow from the 
creation of facts and influence doctrinal outcome are what make a really great 
lawyer," she said.

Sotomayor also recounted the period during her Senate confirmation hearings 
when she thought about withdrawing. "There were many who said I wasn't 
intelligent enough, smart enough to be on the court," she recalled. "It was 
very, very painful to me. I had spent a lifetime of legal work, making 
colleagues on the Second Circuit, and all of a sudden things I thought people 
thought of me were proven wrong by some. I talked to a dear friend and said, 
'Is it worth getting to the court with a diminished reputation?'"

Her friend was angry with her. "She said: 'This is not about you. This about my 
daughter. She's 8 years old and there's no Hispanic in high position of power 
in the United States of America. Your presence there will give her and many 
other children of similar backgrounds the possibility of hope. Yeah, you feel 
bad. Get over it.'" And Sotomayor did.

Sotomayor said she considers the late Constance Baker Motley, a federal judge 
and civil rights lawyer, a role model who, one day, said to her: "To those whom 
blessings are given, you have an obligation to give back."

(source: National Law Journal)

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

Adjusting IQ Scores so More Minorities Are Eligible for the Death Penalty


In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that executing an 
intellectually disabled (formerly called mentally retarded) individual violates 
the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Since then, a number 
of experts have come forward with the following claim: IQ tests, used as a 
component of assessing intellectual disability for Atkins purposes, are biased 
against minorities, whose scores should accordingly be upwardly adjusted for a 
more accurate picture of their intelligence. Some state prosecutors and courts, 
moreover, have been friendly audiences to this line of argument. In this 
column, I will consider the argument along with how it ought to fare in the 
U.S. Supreme Court.

The Atkins Case

The Supreme Court in Atkins determined that executing an intellectually 
disabled person is unconstitutional, in part because of the disproportionality 
between the ultimate punishment and the necessarily diminished culpability of 
an intellectually disabled defendant. In the years following Atkins, the Court 
had occasion, in Hall v. Florida, to flesh out the meaning of intellectual 
disability and to clarify that it includes more than a simple IQ score. 
Nonetheless, IQ scores remain an important component of intellectual disability 
assessment, both clinically and for Atkins purposes.

An excellent article by Robert Sanger calls attention to a particular sort of 
challenge to IQ scores that has developed in the Atkins context. This challenge 
or critique provides that African Americans, Latinos, and Latinas are disserved 
by IQ tests, as life experiences of deprivation, for instance, produce 
artificially low scores on such tests, relative to the test-takers' true 
ability. In some contexts, this critique could help minorities applying for 
jobs and educational opportunities. Here, however, the proposal is to give 
minority defendants a "bump up" on their IQ scores so that they qualify to be 
executed.

My 1st reaction, upon considering this phenomenon, was to imagine a story in 
The Onion (a satirical online magazine) titled "Ku Klux Klan Acknowledges 
Racial Bias in IQ Tests; Seeks to Remedy By Executing More Minorities." In the 
"What Do You Think?" section of The Onion, one African American's reaction 
could be, "Finally, the Klan recognizes that standardized IQ tests are unfair 
to us. And if I'm not good enough for Harvard, at least I might be good enough 
for death row; it's a 1st step." Jonathan Swift might have had fun with this 
very different kind of "modest proposal."

These arguments, however, are not jokes and must therefore be taken seriously, 
notwithstanding their vulnerability to satire. According to Sanger, the highest 
courts of several states, including Alabama, have allowed the proposed racial 
IQ adjustments. So what is wrong with this practice?

Race Discrimination

The 1st thing wrong with racially adjusting minority IQ scores upward for 
execution purposes is that it constitutes blatant and invidious race 
discrimination against minority individuals. It basically says that a person 
with an IQ test score of X will live if he is white but (potentially) die if he 
is black. And this result is not simply a matter of observed disparate impact 
but of intentional practice in the courtroom.

Sanger does an admirable job of arguing that racially adjusting IQ scores is a 
scientifically unsupported and invalid project. The correct comparison for an 
individual IQ, he contends, is the larger community's IQs.

But even if there is some validity to discounting or elevating IQ test scores 
based on race, one needs to ask when such a move is constitutionally - not just 
scientifically - valid. And Sanger addresses this issue thoroughly as well, 
explaining that race-based adjustments are subject to - and handily fail - 
strict scrutiny, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

For our limited purposes here, retaining a healthy skepticism toward the 
Supreme Court's stingy attitude toward race-based assistance to minorities, 
consider that upwardly adjusting minority test scores sounds like a form of 
state-sponsored affirmative action, something to which the Supreme Court has 
arguably been too hostile. Generally, affirmative action at its best is aimed 
at either rectifying specific racial injustices or at fostering a needed 
diversity in such venues as educational environments.

Neither of these justifications has any purchase in the death penalty context. 
We do nothing to rectify past racial injustices by rendering more minority 
defendants eligible for execution. Indeed, we arguably do just the opposite, 
given the existing overrepresentation of minorities within the criminal justice 
system and the complex history of discrimination within the death penalty 
itself.

On the diversity front, there is no need for racial diversity on death row that 
we would foster by permitting the execution of minority defendants who would 
otherwise qualify as intellectually disabled. It is indeed bizarre to suggest 
that we might "enrich" the environment of death row by adding racial diversity, 
and I cannot imagine anyone even articulating this argument with a straight 
face.

The Supreme Court has made clear, in Atkins and Hall, that executing the 
intellectually disabled is constitutionally unacceptable and that care must be 
taken to avoid the risk of such executions, such as by attending to the 
imprecision of IQ tests and the standard error of measurement (SEM). If it were 
not truly happening, we could find funny the notion of admitting minority 
candidates to execution "under the wire" despite their disqualifying IQ scores. 
But because it is actually going on, the Supreme Court must step in and for 
once display a completely well-founded opposition to a benighted form of 
affirmative action, one that would give minority candidates with prima facie 
intellectual disability a "leg up" to a lethal injection.

(source: Sherry F. ColbSherry F. Colb, a Justia columnist, is Professor of Law 
and Charles Evans Hughes Scholar at Cornell Law School----verdict.justia.com)

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

Ex-CIA director: Snowden should be 'hanged' for Paris


A former CIA director says leaker Edward Snowden should be convicted of treason 
and given the death penalty in the wake of the terrorist attack on Paris.

"It's still a capital crime, and I would give him the death sentence, and I 
would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he's dead, rather than merely 
electrocuted," James Woolsey told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Thursday.

Woolsey said Snowden, who divulged classified in 2013, is partly responsible 
for the terrorist attack in France last week that left at least 120 dead and 
hundreds injured.

"I think the blood of a lot of these French young people is on his hands," he 
said.

Woolsey, who served as the head of the CIA from 1993 to 1995, said the Snowden 
leak was "substantial."

"They turned loose not only material about some procedural aspects of 
something, they turned loose, for example, some substantial material about the 
Mexican intelligence service and law enforcement working together against human 
trafficking," he said.

Woolsey wondered if Snowden were "pro-pimp."

Current CIA Director John Brennan has recently echoed his predecessor's 
sentiments, arguing that Snowden's disclosures make it harder for intelligence 
officials to track terror plots.

"I think any unauthorized disclosures made by individuals that have dishonored 
the oath of office, that they have raised their hand and attested to, 
undermines this nation's security," Brennan said about Snowden at the Overseas 
Security Advisory Council's annual meeting on Wednesday.

Snowden fled the country after stealing classified information and disclosing 
the extent of U.S. surveillance programs. He currently resides in Russia, where 
he has been granted temporary asylum.

(source: thehill.com)