[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, DEL., GA., KY.

[Rick Halperin]

April 25



TEXAS:

Little River-Academy: Capital murder trial begins in police chief's death


A Little River-Academy man was facing trial Monday in Bell County district 
court charged in the June 2014 shooting death of Little River-Academy police 
Chief Lee Dixon.

David Gene Risner, 59, a former police officer himself, is facing the death 
penalty if convicted of Dixon's shotgun slaying.

Dixon, 54, died June 19, 2014 outside a residence in the 100 block of Allison 
Drove where he'd been sent to investigate a report of a man with a gun, an 
affidavit issued in the case says.

Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza announced his office would seek the 
death penalty last December.

Jury selection in Risner's trial began April 6 with questionnaires being filled 
out by 2 large groups of prospective jurors.

In Texas, when a death penalty is sought, jury selection must be done 
individually, rather than in a group because of the sensitivity of the charge 
to the jury.

If the jury finds Risner guilty but declines to assess the death penalty, he'll 
be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

(source: KWTX news)

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

Racially Charged Testimony Helped Put Duane Buck on Death Row. Will the Supreme 
Court Step In?


There is no question that Duane Buck is responsible for the double murder of 
his ex-girlfriend and her friend in Houston, Texas, on July 30, 1995.

That morning, Debra Gardner was at home with her 2 kids and 3 friends, 
including Buck's stepsister, when Buck stormed into the home armed with a 
shotgun and a rifle. He began shooting: He fired at one of the friends and 
missed; he shot his stepsister point blank in the chest (she survived); and he 
fatally wounded another of Gardner's friends, Kenneth Butler. Gardner fled from 
the house and Buck followed, killing her in the street as her 2 children looked 
on. Buck was arrested at the scene and laughed as he was taken away, according 
to one law enforcement officer. "The bitch deserved what she got," Buck 
allegedly said. In 1997, Buck was tried and convicted of capital murder. He was 
sentenced to die.

What remains an open question in the case is whether the racially charged 
testimony of an expert witness tainted Buck's sentencing hearing, influencing 
jurors to send him to death row instead of giving him a life term. At specific 
issue is testimony from psychologist Walter Quijano, who testified that being 
black made Buck more likely to be violent in the future. That's no minor 
assertion given that Texas's death penalty scheme requires jurors to 
affirmatively determine that a defendant poses a risk of "future dangerousness" 
- meaning, a defendant would be prone to commit future acts of violence, 
including against those inside prison, unless sentenced to die.

It wasn't the 1st time that Quijano had expressed this view during a death 
penalty case. A 2000 review of capital cases by Texas Attorney General John 
Cornyn (now the senior U.S. senator from Texas) found that Quijano had 
testified seven times regarding the influence of race on future dangerousness, 
including in Buck's case. At the time, Cornyn said that if any of those 
defendants were to seek a new sentencing hearing the state would not stand in 
their way because "it is inappropriate to allow race to be considered a factor 
in our criminal justice system." And so it went for 6 of the defendants, all of 
whom were subsequently re-sentenced to death. (To date, 3 of them have been 
executed.) But in the Buck case the state has declined to honor its previous 
pledge and instead has said that Buck does not deserve a new hearing.

In fact, no court has yet considered the merits of Buck's claim that the racist 
testimony impacted his fate. And unless the U.S. Supreme Court steps in - the 
justices are expected to decide soon whether they'll take Buck's case - it is 
entirely likely that Buck will be put to death without that question ever being 
answered.

"Mr. Buck received a death sentence that is the product of explicit and blatant 
racial discrimination," 1 of Buck's attorneys, Kate Black, wrote in an email to 
The Intercept. "The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to reaffirm the 
fundamental constitutional principle that racial discrimination has no place in 
our modern system of justice."

No court has yet considered the merits of Buck's claim that the racist 
testimony impacted his fate.

To the state of Texas, Buck's case is different from the others featuring 
Quijano's conclusions about race and violence because it was Buck's own defense 
attorneys who called the psychologist to the stand. That did happen: Buck's 
lawyers not only elicited the questionable testimony, but they also introduced 
into evidence Quijano's written report, which jurors asked to see during their 
deliberations, and which far more bluntly made the racist connection. In 
discussing the "statistical factors" that relate to future dangerousness, 
Quijano wrote, "Race. Black. Increased possibility. There is an 
over-representation of Blacks among the violent offenders."

But it is also true that in cross-examining Quijano, the Harris County 
prosecutor, Joan Huffman (now a Texas state senator), returned the focus to 
Buck's race. "You have determined ... that the race factor, black, increases 
the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons; is that correct?" she 
asked.

"Yes," Quijano replied.

Then, in her closing arguments, Huffman encouraged jurors to rely on Quijano's 
expertise, reminding them that he'd said that there was a "probability that 
[Buck] would commit future acts of violence."

And despite the state's assertion that somehow Buck's case is inherently 
different from the others in which Quijano testified, it turns out that in 2 of 
those cases the psychologist was also called to the stand by the defense.

To date, the only real consideration given by the courts to the question of 
what impact the racially biased conclusion had on Buck's sentence has centered 
around the issue of who is responsible for its inclusion at the hearing. That, 
according to Buck's current attorneys, is due to deficient lawyering - by 
Buck's attorneys both at trial and on appeal. Introducing the testimony and 
expert report at trial was certainly a dubious decision (as was the failure to 
object to the prosecutor's focus on race in Quijano's cross-examination). But 
perhaps even more damaging to Buck's current situation was the failure of his 
subsequent attorney to argue on appeal that the trial lawyers provided 
constitutionally ineffective assistance to Buck during the sentencing hearing 
by offering the jurors Quijano's conclusions.

In fact, it wasn't until 2 years after Cornyn admitted that Quijano's testimony 
was problematic - and more than five years after Buck's initial appeal was 
filed - that the appellate lawyer raised the issue. But by that time it was too 
late: Failing to make that argument in Buck's 1st appeal meant that he had 
forfeited the ability to do so at all. There is good evidence that the jurors 
in Buck's case were influenced by the racist assertion, because in the 3rd of 3 
notes sent to the court during their deliberations the jurors specifically 
asked to review Quijano's expert report. Procedurally, however, there was no 
way for the courts to consider whether those deficiencies meant Buck should be 
granted a new hearing, free from discriminatory testimony and conclusions.

Nonetheless, judges who have refused to consider the merits of Buck's claims 
have noted that the testimony itself is troubling. In 2011, for example, 
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito opined that the testimony was "bizarre and 
objectionable." Even so, he wrote that it was the defense's fault for eliciting 
that testimony in the first place.

By 2013, the Supreme Court had decided a pair of cases that effectively tweaked 
the law to provide some ability for defendants to revisit defaulted claims of 
ineffective lawyering - but only in "extraordinary" cases. Since then the 
discussion around Buck's case has become exhaustingly focused on whether the 
underlying circumstances are exceptional enough for the appeal to be 
considered. So far the courts have ruled that they are not. Indeed, a federal 
district judge in Houston wrote in 2014 that Buck's trial counsel was in fact 
constitutionally deficient - he "recklessly exposed his client to the risks of 
racial prejudice and introduced testimony that was contrary to his client's 
interests" - but concluded that while "the introduction of any mention of race 
was ill-advised at best and repugnant at worst, it was, in this case, de 
minimis" and thus not eligible for further consideration.

Harris County prosecutors were more than 3 times as likely to seek the death 
penalty against black defendants.

Of course, it is impossible for that judge - or, really, at this point, any 
judge - to know how damaging the improper testimony was without granting Buck's 
appeal. But given the pervasiveness of racism within the criminal justice 
system as a whole, and within the death penalty system in particular, there's 
ample reason to believe that Buck's race had more than a passing impact on his 
fate. For example, a 2012 study found that over a 7-year period that included 
the year Buck was tried, prosecutors in Harris County were more than 3 times as 
likely to seek the death penalty against black defendants than against white 
defendants, and juries were more than twice as likely to sentence black 
defendants to death. The numbers don't appear to have improved: Since 2004, 
even as the number of new death sentences has declined steeply, the county has 
sent 15 new prisoners to death row - all of them minorities.

The Houston numbers are similar to those found in other death penalty states. A 
California study found that defendants who killed a white person were 3 times 
more likely to be put to death than those who killed a black person, for 
example, while a study in Washington state found that jurors are 3 times more 
likely to sentence a black person to death than they are a white person. 
Indeed, 43 % of death row inmates are black, even though black people make up 
just about 13 % of the U.S. population.

Still, raw numbers have not generally impressed the judiciary - including the 
Supreme Court, which opined in a seminal and troubling 1987 case known as 
McCleskey v. Kemp that aggregated numbers demonstrating systemic racism simply 
couldn't prove that racism impacted any single, specific case. That conclusion 
still informs jurists confronted with questions about the impact of racism in 
the criminal justice system today, and, as the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund 
describes it, the decision has actually formed a "substantial barrier to the 
elimination of racial inequalities in the criminal justice system, perpetuating 
an unfair racial imbalance that has come to define criminal justice in 
America."

Even when case-specific racism has been demonstrated, the courts have declined 
to act. Consider the case of Kenneth Fults, executed April 12 by the state of 
Georgia after the Supreme Court, without comment, declined to intervene - even 
in the face of direct evidence that one of the jurors in his case had decided 
to vote to send him to death simply because he was black. "I don't know if 
[Fults] ever killed anybody, but that nigger got just what should have 
happened," the juror, Thomas Buffington, admitted in a 2005 affidavit. "Once he 
pled guilty, I knew I would vote for the death penalty because that's what that 
nigger deserved."

It's unclear why the judiciary seems so reluctant to wade directly into the 
morass of racial bias in criminal cases. It could be that acknowledging the 
problem would strengthen the argument that the death penalty is a cruel and 
unusual punishment. Or perhaps members of the judiciary share some of the 
racist notions that infected Buck's case. There is some support for the latter 
proposition, at least within the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a venue 
notoriously unfriendly to criminal defendants - and the same court that has 
repeatedly denied Buck's appeals. Indeed, in June 2013 several advocacy groups 
filed a complaint against that court's chief judge, Edith Jones, who said that 
February during a lecture on the death penalty at the University of 
Pennsylvania School of Law that the issue of racism in the context of the death 
penalty is a "red herring" and that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to 
commit crime. When asked to explain her comments, according to the complaint, 
Jones "stated that there was 'no arguing' that 'Blacks and Hispanics' outnumber 
'Anglos' on death row and 'sadly' it was a 'statistical fact' that people 'from 
these racial groups get involved in more violent crime.'"

The grievance was eventually dismissed by the judge's peers.

(source: theintercept.com)






DELAWARE:

Del. Supreme Court sets death penalty argument for June----Top state court 
considers whether Delaware's death penalty is constitutional in light of U.S. 
Supreme Court ruling.


The Delaware Supreme Court will hear oral arguments June 15 as it considers the 
constitutionality of the state's death penalty law.

The court has scheduled the arguments for 10 a.m. that day in Dover - giving 
attorneys from the public defender's office and attorney general's office about 
a month and a half to prepare.

The top state court is considering the issue after the U.S. Supreme Court found 
in January that Florida was giving too much power to judges, and not enough to 
juries, when imposing death sentences.

Delaware, Florida and Alabama are the only states that allow judges to override 
a jury's recommendation of life.

The court is using as a test case that of Benjamin Rauf, the Temple University 
law graduate charged with gunning down classmate Shazi Uppal, 27, in the 
parking lot of a Hockessin nursing home last summer.

The public defender's office has argued in briefs that the Delaware's capital 
punishment law has many of the same constitutional infirmities that led the 
U.S. Supreme Court to strike down Florida's sentencing law.

State prosecutors, however, have argued Delaware's law does not violate the 
constitution.

(source: delawareonline.com)






GEORGIA----impending execution

Lawyers Ask Panel to Spare Georgia Death Row Inmate's Life


Lawyers for a Georgia death row inmate scheduled to die this week are asking 
the state parole board to spare his life, saying he has turned his life around 
and is having a positive impact in prison.

Daniel Anthony Lucas is set to be put to death Wednesday at the state prison by 
injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital. The State Board of Pardons and 
Paroles, which is the only entity authorized to commute a death sentence, plans 
to hold a clemency hearing for him Tuesday.

Lucas, 37, received the death sentence in 1999 for the killings of Steven Moss, 
37, his 11-year-old son Bryan and 15-year-old daughter Kristin, who interrupted 
a burglary at their home near Macon in central Georgia.

In a clemency petition filed with the parole board, Lucas' lawyers outline what 
they say was a troubled childhood plagued by drugs and violence. He was 19 at 
the time of the slayings and his own drug and alcohol use had spiraled out of 
control, his lawyers wrote.

"He was at rock bottom, lost and felt like his life was meaningless," the 
clemency petition says.

Lucas and another man, Brandon Rhode, broke into the Moss home in April 1998 
looking for drugs, cash or things they could sell to get money for drugs, 
Lucas' lawyers wrote.

Bryan Moss saw them through a front window, and entered through a back door 
armed with a baseball bat, prosecutors have said. They say the 2 then wrestled 
Bryan to a chair and Lucas shot him in the shoulder.

Lucas then led the boy to a bedroom and shot him multiple times, prosecutors 
have said.

Rhodes met Kristin as she got home from school and forced her to sit on a chair 
and shot her twice with a pistol, according to court records. Rhode then 
ambushed Steven Moss when he arrived home, shooting him 4 times with the same 
pistol. Lucas later shot all 3 victims again to make sure they were dead.

Moss' wife, Gerri Ann, discovered the bodies when she returned home from work.

Lucas' mother had relationships with a string of abusive men, including his 
father, the clemency petition says. Lucas was "scared during much of his 
childhood" and turned to drugs, smoking marijuana and drinking by the time he 
was in seventh grade. Within a few years, he was using LSD, mushrooms and 
methamphetamine and, in 11th grade, dropped out of school with his mother's 
approval.

"At 19, Daniel was a reckless and desperate alcoholic and addict, and he 
committed a horrible crime," his lawyers wrote. "But he is not pure evil, and 
he is not beyond redemption."

Lucas has expressed remorse for the harm he caused and has accepted 
responsibility for what he did, frequently thinking of Gerri Ann Moss and the 
pain he caused her, his lawyers wrote.

He has been in prison for about half his life and has been a model inmate, 
spending his time drawing and reading and serving as an inspiration to other 
inmates, the clemency petition says. He has become a Buddhist and spends part 
of his meditation practice acknowledging the suffering he caused and praying 
for the victims' relief, his lawyers wrote.

Rhode, who was also convicted for the killings, was executed in September 2010.

Lucas' death would bring the number of court-ordered executions in Georgia this 
year to 5. That would tie a record, set in 1987 and matched last year, for the 
most executions carried out by the state in a calendar year since the death 
penalty was reinstated nationwide in 1976.

(source: Associated Press)






KENTUCKY:

Some robberies severed from trial of 2 charged in ex-Marine's death


2 men charged in the 2014 shooting death of a former Marine outside Lexington's 
Austin City Saloon will not be tried simultaneously on other robberies that 
happened after that offense, a judge ruled Monday.

Quincinio D. Canada and Dawan Q. Mulazim are charged with murder, 1st-degree 
robbery and 2nd-degree assault in the slaying of Jonathan Price, 26, and the 
assault on his wife, Megan, on June 21, 2014.

The 2 are also charged with a series of robberies that happened on July 8, 11, 
17 and 25. It is those robberies that Fayette Circuit Court Judge Pamela 
Goodwine said should be "severed," or tried separately, from the June 21 fatal 
shooting.

However, Goodwine said evidence about a June 15, 2014, robbery at Quality Inn 
on Newtown Court will be included in the trial on murder charges. Evidence 
indicates that a gun stolen in that robbery had fired shell casings found 6 
days later at the scene where Price and his wife were shot.

The couple were approached by 2 men on June 21, 2014, in the parking lot of the 
Lexington bar, and were robbed and shot. Jonathan Price died at University of 
Kentucky Chandler Hospital. Megan Price was shot in the leg.

The prosecution will seek the death penalty if Canada and Mulazim are 
convicted.

The Kentucky Supreme Court has previously ruled that in order to justify 
joining separate offenses in a single trial, there must be "a sufficient nexus 
between or among them."

The Kentucky Supreme Court said the required nexus must arise "from a logical" 
relationship between the crimes, or some indication that they arose one from 
the other or otherwise in the course of a single act or transaction, or that 
they both arose as parts of a common scheme or plan.

Kim Green, attorney for Mulazim, argued that there was "no nexus" between the 
robberies and the fatal shooting "to properly join them together."

Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Kimberly Baird argued that the victims in all 
the cases were outside and the suspects had similar descriptions.

Goodwine said she was concerned about trying the robbery counts in the "already 
complicated process" of a potential death-penalty case. For that reason, she 
said the July 2014 robberies should be tried separately.

As for the gun stolen from Quality Inn and allegedly used in the Price 
shootings, "I think that's a pretty good nexus," Goodwine said, meaning that 
evidence could come in at the murder trial.

A trial date might be scheduled at a status hearing scheduled for May 27.

(source: kentucky.com)