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

[Rick Halperin]

April 16



OHIO:

Death penalty still possible for Youngstown triple murder suspect


The death remains a possibility in the case of 48-year-old Robert Seman, who is 
accused of raping a 10-year-old girl then setting a fire to kill her and her 
grandparents.

Judge Maureen Sweeney denied the motion to remove the death penalty on Friday, 
2 days after Attorney Thomas Zena filed the request.

Seman is charged with the murders of 10-year-old Corinne Gump, 63-year-old 
William Schmidt and 61-year-old Judith Smith.

The bodies of all 3 victims were found inside the Schmidt's burning Powers Way 
home on March 30, 2015 just hours before Seman was scheduled to go on trial for 
raping the girl.

The indictment charges Seman with 10 counts of aggravated murder, 3 counts of 
burglary and 3 counts of arson.

A pre-trial is scheduled for May 4 in common pleas court.

(source: WFMJ news)






TENNESSEE:

Severe mental illness should rule out death penalty


The state of Texas recently executed Adam Ward, a man with a long history of 
severe mental illness. Tennessee has also pursued the death penalty for 
individuals like Ward. Occasionally, these individuals are executed. Other 
times, the cases are litigated for decades, ending in a sentence less than 
death, but not before putting victims' families through a process that delays 
legal finality and costs taxpayers millions.

Take the Tennessee case of Richard Taylor, convicted in 1981 for joyriding and 
robbery. While incarcerated, Taylor killed corrections officer Ronald Moore 
after prison officials stopped giving Taylor his anti-psychotic medication. He 
was sentenced to death.

In 2003, Taylor was granted a new trial but allowed to represent himself, 
calling no witnesses and introducing no evidence. The jury sentenced Taylor to 
death again. After his conviction and death sentence were reversed again in 
2008, Taylor received a life sentence - 27 years after his 1st capital trial.

Though most individuals with severe mental illness are not violent - they are 
more likely to become crime victims than perpetrators - a lack of access to 
treatment can lead to delusions, disassociation and sometimes violence. And in 
Tennessee today, there is simply not enough access to treatment.

The result is that law enforcement has become increasingly responsible for 
these individuals. In a 2014 column in the Tennessean, Davidson County Mental 
Health Court Judge Daniel Eisenstein wrote:

"Mental health treatment has in many cases been shifted from state-run mental 
health facilities and community programs to courts, jails and prisons."

To complicate matters, those with severe mental illness do not always recognize 
their illness, leading them to fire their counsel and represent themselves, 
like Taylor; or they may simply refuse to participate in their defense.

And what about the risk of wrongful conviction?

A 2012 University of Michigan study on wrongful convictions found that roughly 
70 % of the defendants who had a mental illness or disability confessed to 
crimes they did not commit, whereas only 10 percent of defendants without a 
mental illness made false confessions. Individuals with these illnesses are 
more susceptible to police pressure and may not understand the charges against 
them or their Miranda rights.

Still, when an individual who has a severe mental illness is guilty of 
committing a heinous crime, there must be consequences. But is the death 
penalty appropriate? A coalition of mental health advocates and others called 
the Tennessee Alliance for the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion believes that 
individuals with severe mental illness who commit these crimes should be held 
accountable, but with appropriate sentences - life or life without parole, not 
the death penalty.

And there is precedent. In the United States, we don't execute minors or those 
with intellectual disabilities. Excluding individuals with severe mental 
illness from the death penalty on a case-by-case basis (also under 
consideration in North Carolina and Ohio) is just smart policy as victims' 
families are spared decades of litigation, costs to taxpayers are reduced, 
resources can be dedicated to mental health care and support for police, and 
Tennessee can move toward a criminal justice system that is better for all.

(source: Opinion; Hannah Cox is the coordinator for the Tennessee Alliance for 
the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion. She is a former policy advocate for the 
National Alliance on Mental Illness, and a long-time champion for those with 
mental illness----Knoxville News Sentinel)






CALIFORNIA:

Newly found photo could bolster prosecution's case in Berkeley-Oakland death 
penalty trial


A Berkeley man facing multiple murder charges may have inadvertently tipped off 
the prosecution to a notable piece of evidence by insisting he get access to 
material on his old cellphone.

Police had confiscated the phone of Darnell Williams Jr. at the time of his 
arrest in Berkeley in 2013. He has been charged with the murders of an 
8-year-old girl in Oakland and a 22-year-old father with ties to the same West 
Berkeley neighborhood where Williams lived. The trial began 2 weeks ago. If 
convicted, Williams could face the death penalty.

Thursday, after excusing the jury until Tuesday morning, attorneys and Alameda 
County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Horner stayed on in the courtroom to update 
the written record following two conversations they'd had earlier in chambers.

The defendant's cellphone was the topic of those conversations. The defense 
team had, for some time, been pushing Prosecutor John Brouhard to turn over all 
material from the phone at their client's urging. Police had tried in the past 
to download texts and other information from it, but been stymied by technical 
difficulties.

Defense attorneys "thought it was a really stupid and bad idea"

This week, the Fremont Police Department was able to download the entirety of 
the phone contents. Brouhard said a review of those records led to the 
discovery of a photograph that shows a pistol that could have been used to kill 
8-year-old Alaysha Carradine in July 2013. She had been playing at a friend's 
house during a sleepover and was not the intended target. 3 other people, 2 
children and their grandmother, were injured.

The cellphone image is significant because the prosecution previously had 
identified and presented in court several photographs from Williams' phone of 
Glock pistols a firearms expert said could have been used in the September 2013 
shooting in Berkeley of Anthony "Tone" Medearis Jr.

But no photographs had previously been found on the phone showing the type of 
pistol used in the Oakland shooting. (Police never found any guns they were 
able to link to the killings.)

Defense attorney Deborah Levy said she and co-counsel Darryl Billups had tried 
to convince Williams not to pursue the material on the phone because it could 
harm his case. But he was determined to get it.

"Both Mr. Billups and I thought it was a really stupid and bad idea," Levy told 
the court. She said she and Billups had been "very concerned" about digging up 
the records, but also acknowledged they had signed the April 12 order that 
allowed the prosecution to search the phone further.

That order required the prosecution to find a way to get the phone records to 
the defense team as quickly as possible. Brouhard described how Oakland 
investigators had only been able to get some of the photographs off the phone, 
not download its entire contents. After trying twice, they gave up.

At one point, more recently, all 3 attorneys had spent an hour going through 
texts on the phone as an officer paged through them, but it was an arduous 
process, and Williams wanted to look at the information too. His defense 
attorneys passed on the message, so Brouhard said he began looking into how 
that might work.

Brouhard said he considered having an officer sit with Williams to show him the 
contents of the phone, but was concerned about the resources that might take, 
and the officer's safety.

Brouhard said he also spoke with someone in the county crime lab who said he 
could photograph every piece of information on the phone one screenshot at a 
time to "manually extract" the contents. Brouhard said he had been ready to get 
that done when a different investigator came up with the idea to ask Fremont 
for help.

Wednesday morning, Fremont was able to do the download. Brouhard said, as a 
result, all the attorneys got access to the data.

Brouhard said several text messages on the phone, which had photographs 
attached, came to his attention. All 3 were sent from the phone early in the 
morning of July 19, 2013, less than 2 days after Alaysha was killed at her best 
friend's apartment. The prosecution has said Williams went there to take 
revenge on the family of a man he believed had killed his close friend earlier 
that day.

All 3 texts showed firearms, Brouhard said: an M1 rifle, a SIG Sauer pistol and 
a Glock. In connection with the third, Wiliams wrote that he had three guns and 
was trying to "get some more." He had told his girlfriend at the time, she 
testified, he was intent on getting rid of the gun from the Oakland shooting.

Brouhard had a firearms expert look at the photograph of the SIG Sauer in 
particular. After test-firing that kind of gun, using the type of bullet found 
at the Oakland crime scene, the expert determined the SIG Sauer could have been 
the weapon used to kill Alaysha.

"They look the same," Brouhard told the court, of the firing pin impressions 
and ejector marks - 2 indicators of consistency during forensic firearm 
analysis - on the casings from the crime scene and the test casings.

Brouhard cannot definitively say the SIG Sauer in the photo was the one used to 
kill Alaysha. But he can now present evidence to the jury to indicate Williams 
appears to have had access to a gun that could have been used in that shooting.

The jury, judge and attorneys are in recess until Tuesday morning. Brouhard 
said he plans to question several witnesses next week about the cellphone 
download and the phone???s location data.

Levy noted that there are more than 130 pages of text messages from the phone 
she hopes to review before then.

(All of the prior discussion took place as part of the official court record; 
the attorneys are prohibited from communicating with the media about the case 
due to a gag order.)

Much of the testimony this week has focused on the Berkeley shooting of 
Medearis.

(source: berkeleyside.com)






USA:

The death penalty situation in the US has just become even more absurd - 
something has to give----743 inmates are on California's death row - but only 
13 have been executed since 1978, the last one a decade ago. And all this at a 
cost of no less than $4bn in taxpayers' money


The creeping death of capital punishment in America is now becoming as ghoulish 
as the death penalty itself. No longer is the debate about the basic merits of 
a practice that has been abolished either de jure or de facto by three quarters 
of the countries on the planet. It's about whether the companies and pharmacies 
that provide the drugs used for lethal injection - in effect the sole method of 
execution used here - should have their identities protected by law to spare 
them public protest and commercial embarrassment.

Take the latest convoluted turn of events in Virginia. This one-time 
cornerstone of the Confederacy has traditionally been an enthusiastic 
practitioner of capital punishment. But Virginia's "machinery of death" - to 
use the term coined by Harry Blackmun, the great Supreme Court justice who in 
the 1990s turned from acquiescence to outright opposition to the death penalty 
- is now paralysed by the difficulty of obtaining the drugs, and by the 
arguments over a "shield" law for suppliers.

As a result Virginia has managed to put only 1 person to death in the last 3 
years. And other death penalty states like Arkansas, Ohio and Missouri are 
being forced into similar legal contortions, as they seek to get hold of the 
drugs while concealing the source of them.

This week, Governor Terry McAuliffe tried to cut the Gordian knot. McAuliffe, 
it should be noted, is a Democrat and a Catholic who personally opposes capital 
punishment. But Virginia's legislature is Republican-controlled and in favour 
of the death penalty, and McAuliffe has said he will abide by its wishes. So he 
came up with a compromise.

He vetoed a Republican bill that would have simply ordered that if drugs 
couldn't be found for a lethal injection, then the electric chair, Virginia's 
former method of execution, should be used instead. The chair, McAuliffe said, 
was "reprehensible and inhumane." Instead, he put forward an amendment to the 
bill, requiring that the names of drug suppliers should be kept secret, even in 
the event of a botched execution.

McAuliffe will probably have his way. Liberal Democrats are furious that he's 
maintaining capital punishment, but the Republican majority in the state's 
Assembly has little choice but to go along if it wants a death penalty at all. 
And thereby hangs (if you pardon the pun) a larger problem. America, slowly but 
surely, is turning towards getting rid of it.

In its latest report into the death penalty worldwide, Amnesty International 
stated that 1,634 known judicial executions took place in 2015, a jump of over 
50 % in a year. But the vast bulk were in 3 countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran and 
Pakistan.

Then of course there's China, which releases no figures, but whose total might 
well double the Amnesty figure. The US, however, is now a very modest 
contributor to the total.

In 2015, only 28 people were executed here, the least in a quarter century (and 
one of them after a 36-year wait on death row.) Moreover, all but 4 died in 
just 3 states: Texas, Georgia and Missouri.

Of the 50 US states, 34 haven't executed anyone over the last 5 years, and soon 
South Carolina, another historical bastion of the death penalty, will join 
them.

Juries too are handing down far fewer death sentences, only 49 in 2015. Texas, 
long America's chief executioner, was responsible for only 2 of them. For the 
1st time in decades, the death row population has dropped below 3,000 - and 
only a relative handful of them will actually meet their end in the execution 
chamber.

Nowhere is the situation more absurd than in California, where the machinery is 
so rusty it's falling to pieces. Its death row, housing 743 inmates, is the 
most populous of any state, and no wonder. Since California re-instated the 
death penalty in 1978, just 13 people have been executed, the last of them a 
decade ago. And all this at a cost of no less than $4bn in taxpayers' money. In 
economic terms alone, capital punishment is a lousy deal.

But that's far from the only reason the tide is turning. The biggest one is the 
near certainty, as DNA evidence has become more conclusive, that innocent 
people have been put to death.

Last year alone, 6 death row inmates were exonerated. It's anyone's guess how 
many more wrongly convicted murderers are still there, victims of tampered 
evidence, over-zealous prosecutors and clueless, ill-paid defence lawyers. 
Small wonder a majority of Americans, when offered the choice, prefer life 
imprisonment without parole to the lethal injection gurney.

Thus far the demise of the death penalty has been gradual and incremental. 
McAuliffe's manoevring is part of the process - and it too could come to grief 
as journalists use the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment to 
identify suppliers of the drugs, and condemned inmates seek the latters' names, 
arguing a constitutional right to do so.

But everything could soon change. The ultimate arbiter is the Supreme Court, 
which during a quarter century of conservative control has merely chipped away 
at the death penalty, for instance by barring the execution of minors and the 
mentally incompetent. Otherwise it has deferred to the states.

It has shied clear of reviewing the underlying constitutionality of the death 
penalty, not only under the 8th amendment barring "cruel and unusual 
punishment," but also the 14th, that stipulates "equal protection of the laws" 
for all.

In reality the ultimate punishment is disproportionately reserved for blacks 
and Hispanics, and its imposition is a lottery. The death penalty is supposed 
to be for the "worst of the worst" - but in 1 state, even one county of the 
same state, you could be sentenced to death, but in another state or county 
receive 20 years for an identical offence. So much for equal protection.

Now, however, the Supreme Court that Blackmun once graced could be transformed, 
should Democrats win back the presidency and control of the Senate (as polls 
suggest they will, if Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is the Republican nominee.) 
Right now there is a vacancy on the 9-man bench, meaning an equal split between 
4 conservatives and 4 liberals.

But a new Democratic president could, and surely would, choose a liberal, 
meaning there would be a majority ready to accept a case challenging the very 
constitutionality of capital punishment. And if the Court were to agree, not 
only would Terry McAuliffe be off the hook. America would be a better place

(source: Opinion, Rupert Cornwell----The Independent)

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

Killing in the name of justice is insanity


Between 1977 and 2009, more than 1,188 people were killed by means of the death 
penalty.

Most of these subjects were in fact murderers themselves, meaning that the 
punishment for unlawful death classified as "murder" results in unlawful deaths 
classified as "justice" or "the death penalty." Insanity.

Do we teach our kids not to hit by beating them? I may not have kids myself, 
but I know that is not an effective way to teach humans.

Some people may say that the death penalty gives justice to the victim's 
family, but in reality would any grieving person wish that same pain and hurt 
on another family? Would anyone with morals want to give that heartache to 
another mother or father?

That is what happens when our government decides to take an inmate's life to 
give "justice" to a victim. Come on, America. Let's think rationally here.

Caley Elizabeth Henry

Salt Lake City

(source: Letter to the Editor, Salt Lake Tribune)