[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----CALIF., ORE., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 26



CALIFORNIA:

Trial delayed for man accused of killing Sierra LaMar

A trial has been delayed to next month for a man charged with kidnapping and 
murdering 15-year-old Sierra LaMar nearly four years ago. Antolin 
Garcia-Torres, now 25, is accused of killing Sierra, who was last seen on the 
morning of March 16, 2012. She left her home in unincorporated Morgan Hill and 
never showed up to her bus stop for school.

Garcia-Torres' trial was scheduled for today but Santa Clara County Superior 
Court Judge Deborah Ryan continued the case to May 23 for his defense attorneys 
to submit additional evidence for testing.

Garcia-Torres withdrew his waiver for a speedy trial within 60 days, his 
defense attorneys said.

Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney David Boyd told the judge that 
prosecutors were prepared to proceed with the trial during today's hearing at 
the Hall of Justice in San Jose.

Sierra's Juicy-brand purse and clothes were found two days after she went 
missing and her cellphone was later discovered in an agricultural area south of 
San Jose.

Garcia-Torres was identified as a suspect in the death on May 21, 2012, after 
Sierra's DNA was found in his red Volkswagen Jetta, prosecutors said.

The 25-year-old man, who remains in custody at Santa Clara County Main Jail in 
San Jose, is facing the death penalty in the case.

A grand jury indicted Garcia-Torres in 2014 on charges for Sierra's 
disappearance and death, in addition to kidnapping and carjacking charges 
involving 3 women in Morgan Hill supermarket parking lots in 2009.

Sierra's body hasn't been found despite numerous organized search groups 
through southern Santa Clara County.

Roger Nelson had helped coordinated the search efforts, which ended last year, 
and was present during today's hearing.

Nelson, along with a handful of other supporters of the LaMar family, said 
outside of court that they were bothered the trial was continued to a later 
date, but look forward to justice being served.

Debbie Nunes, a search volunteer who lived down the street from Sierra's bus 
stop, said after today's hearing that the community would like closure in the 
case.

"The family deserves answers and it's been 4 years too long," Nunes said.

(source: ABC news)






OREGON:

Trial underway for man accused of killing inmate


The trial of a convicted murderer from Minnesota accused of killing his 
cellmate at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem in 2013 is underway at 
Marion County Circuit Court following an indictment made in late 2015.

Craig Dennis Bjork, 56, was charged with aggravated murder after another 
convicted murderer, Joseph Akins, 45, was discovered dead, strangled in their 
shared cell in August 2013. If found guilty, Bjork could face the death 
penalty.

In 1982, a Minnesota court convicted Bjork of killing his 2 young sons, his 
girlfriend and a Minneapolis prostitute, according to the Associated Press. He 
was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At the time 
of the killings, Bjork went by the name Craig Dennis Jackson.

It is not Bjork's 1st time standing trial for murder inside a correctional 
facility.

In 1997, while serving his sentence at a Minnesota prison, Bjork beat another 
inmate to death with a pipe. According to court records, Bjork told Minnesota 
corrections department investigators the killing was "not personal." He said he 
wanted to get prison officials' attention and punish them for moving him to a 
different cell block. Bjork said he wanted to kill a staff member but instead 
killed inmate Edwin Curry, 41, because he was nearby.

"There's a saying in the business world, location, location, location, huh, 
location is everything," Bjork told investigators, according to court records.

The Associated Press reported that Bjork was transferred from Minnesota to an 
Oregon prison in January 2013 as part of an interstate compact.

The compact allows prisoners to be sent to out-of-state facilities due to the 
high-profile nature of their crimes, inmate safety or security issues, 
according to Oregon Department of Corrections spokeswoman Betty Bernt. Oregon 
has interstate compacts with 32 states.

Even though Bjork faces charges for a crime that allegedly took place in an 
Oregon Department of Corrections facility, Bernt did not have information 
available on Bjork. She referred any information requests on Bjork's 
incarceration status to his home state of Minnesota.

No motive was provided for the slaying of Akins, and Bjork has not lodged a 
plea with Marion County Circuit Court. Akins was convicted of murder in 2008 
for the 1994 rape and killing of a woman in Multnomah County and was in the 
midst of serving a 22-year, 6-month sentence.

According to the Associated Press, Bjork was immediately held in a segregation 
after Akins was discovered dead in his cell at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

An autopsy found that he died of asphyxiation caused by strangulation, and the 
death was ruled a homicide.

Bjork was arraigned on Dec. 17, 2015. His lawyers at the time motioned to 
disqualify Marion County Circuit Court Judge Courtland Geyer from proceeding 
over the trial, claiming Bjork would not receive a fair and impartial trial. 
Judge David Leith was assigned to the trial.

Bjork later requested new representation. In an affidavit, he said his 
attorneys has "serious ethical issues" and showed a complete disregard for his 
wishes. Following the motion, he was appointed a new attorney.

According to court records, Bjork is housed at Snake River Correctional 
Institution in Ontario, Oregon.

His next status check hearing is schedule for July 14 at 8:15 a.m. at the 
Marion County Courthouse.

(source: The Statesman Journal)

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

District attorney elections and Oregon's criminal justice status quo


Oregonians will soon be receiving their ballots for the May election, but there 
is an incredibly important elected official that most voters will have no 
influence selecting: our county district attorney (DA).

>From 2004-2014, 78 % of Oregon district attorney races were uncontested. In 
other words, nearly 8 out of every 10 district attorney elections in Oregon 
were over before they began.

When it comes to district attorney elections, our democracy has atrophied, and 
the implications for our communities and state are huge.

We rely on elections to elevate public conversations around important issues. 
But with such a high rate of uncontested DA races, Oregon voters aren't able to 
weigh in with how we are feeling about the state of the criminal justice 
system. Furthermore, we now have multiple generations of voters who have never 
in their lifetimes had the opportunity to vote in a district attorney race that 
mattered. Such a dynamic means most of the public has little understanding of 
the role of DAs.

Arguably, district attorneys are the most powerful people in our criminal 
justice system. They have the power to decide whether someone gets access to 
drug treatment or goes to jail. DAs decide whether to keep a young person in 
the juvenile justice system or push them into the adult system. DAs decide 
whether to seek the death penalty, and DAs have the most influence on racial 
disparity within our justice system.

There is an atmosphere of inevitability and permanency connected to incumbent 
district attorneys in Oregon that has locked in the criminal justice status 
quo, and it is time to shine light on another contributing factor to that 
dynamic: gubernatorial appointments.

Nearly 1/2 of all the current DAs were initially appointed to their offices by 
the governor at the time. Longtime district attorneys often retire early, 
leaving it to the governor to select the interim DA. The appointment process 
flies under the radar of the public and allows incumbent DAs to recommend their 
successor to the governor. Once in office, a sitting district attorney is very 
likely to be re-elected, so competition is scarce. In a healthy democracy, no 
elected official should be guaranteed re-election.

Appointing interim district attorneys is one of the most important public 
safety and justice-related roles our governor has. If Oregon is going to 
successfully address core problems in our justice system, the governor needs to 
use a framework that identifies and appoints people who are willing and able to 
modernize and reform criminal justice policies and practices.

And there is ample evidence our current policies need reforming. In the past 20 
years, Oregon's prison population has doubled and our prison budget has more 
than quadrupled. Furthermore, Multnomah County just released research that 
shows severe racial disparity throughout all parts of its criminal justice 
system, including areas entirely within the DAs' power and discretion.

Sadly, these are issues we won't be talking about this election.

(source: Opinion; David Rogers is the executive director of the American Civil 
Liberties Union of Oregon----oregonlive.com)






USA:

Answering the last gasps of Catholic support for the U.S. death penalty


In journeying around the United States to speak about our faith response to the 
U.S. death penalty, I find the overwhelming majority of its supporters are not 
supporting the actual death penalty that we have in this country. They are 
instead supporting a myth, a death penalty that does not exist.

This fantasy death penalty kills neatly and quietly without horrendous botched 
executions. It causes no harm to the innocent family of the condemned or to the 
staff and officers who must kill as part of their job. The myth even promises 
that families of murder victims will experience healing from watching the state 
commit a legal homicide - the killing of the offender. This mythical death 
penalty is not biased by race or wealth, only convicts the guilty, only 
attaches to the worst of the worst, only costs a fraction of life imprisonment, 
only ... only ... only it does not exist.

The facts of the real death penalty, the one we actually have, are not 
ambiguous. It is horribly skewed based on race and wealth, the latter 
translating to quality of legal representation at the initial trial. Meanwhile, 
the cost for the massive government program called capital punishment is 
mind-boggling. Getting a person to an execution costs many times more than the 
cost of life in prison. Reasoned analysis indicates that most of the difference 
in costs is spent on the state side for lawyers and their assistants. It is 
called living off the pipeline.

According to national statistics, the average time from death sentence to 
execution is between 15 and 20 years. In my state of Florida, where we have 400 
people on death row, the average time from death sentence to execution for the 
23 men executed from January 1, 2010 until now is 25.2 years. During all that 
time, hundreds of state-employed lawyers and technical assistants have been 
paid their salaries, benefits, vacations, and retirements from the pipeline of 
death row cases. California has almost twice as many death row inmates as 
Florida, almost twice as large a pipeline. The real death penalty is an 
invisible industry, a work-relief program for state-employed lawyers. The myth 
that it is cheaper to kill inmates than to keep them in prison is a lie.

And there is no accountability for results from such massive outlays of 
taxpayer money. Since 1976, over 150 people have been released from U.S. death 
rows for innocence. In my state of Florida, we have released 26 people from 
death row for innocence over the same period of time that we have executed 92 
people. Our exorbitantly expensive pipeline system has generated at least one 
near-fatal mistake for every 3 1/2 actual executions without anyone being 
sanctioned. A private sector operation with such an abysmal track record would 
have long since been investigated and forced to shut down.

The truth regarding execution of the innocent is even more damning. Our 2 most 
pro-death penalty U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Clarence Thomas and recently 
deceased Antonin Scalia, both acknowledged in Kansas v. Marsh that because our 
human criminal justice system makes mistakes, the only way to guarantee 
innocent people will not be executed is to repeal the death penalty.[1] They 
also said repeal must be done by state legislatures, not by the Supreme Court.

As a Catholic death row chaplain who has witnessed the execution of a man I 
believe was innocent and a botched lethal injection, I confirm that our human 
systems can and will make mistakes. That means when someone claims to support 
the death penalty but not to support botched executions or the execution of the 
innocent, they are supporting a fantasy that does not exist. The reality is 
that if one supports executions, one supports execution of the innocent. We 
cannot have one without the other. If one supports executions, one supports 
botched executions. We cannot have one without the other.

In the face of such overwhelming realities about our U.S. death penalty, it is 
no surprise that, once the fantasies have been stripped away, the only way to 
motivate good people's support is false claims that God and the Catholic Church 
support it. Such claims are thin indeed, but in my experience, those are the 
basis of the last desperate attempts by Catholics to support the U.S. death 
penalty.

Our Church has been absolutely clear. While capital punishment may not be on 
the same moral plane of intrinsic evil with the conventional life issues - 
abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research - it is a 
life issue nonetheless. It can only be morally justified when non-lethal means 
are insufficient to protect society. So what can possibly be the claims that 
advocate Church support?

The 1st claim I frequently hear is that we must execute murderers to protect 
other prisoners; in other words, that incarceration protects free society from 
murderers but does not protect those in the prisons. This claim is based on two 
falsehoods. The first is the assumption that all the so-called worst of the 
worst are being executed already. That simply is not true. In case after case, 
people guilty of horrible murders, whether serial killers or otherwise, have 
been sentenced to life in prison. They are already there with the other 
inmates.

The other falsehood that supports this erroneous argument is the assumption 
that the homicide rate inside prison fences is much higher than in free 
society. That is also not true. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 
the homicide rate in state prisons was at 4 per 100,000 in 2002. There was a 
higher homicide rate among the U.S. free society population (6 per 100,000) 
than either in state prison (4 per 100,000) or in local jails (3 per 
100,000).[2] The statistical evidence continues to support the truth that those 
inside prison fences are less likely to face homicide than those of us in free 
society. In other words, St. Pope John Paul II was right in saying that:

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for 
effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense 
incapable of doing harm ... the cases in which the execution of the offender is 
an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."[3]

The 2nd oft repeated claim is actually a denial of Church teaching. This 
argument alleges that people - as opposed to actions - can be intrinsically 
evil or beyond redemption. Under Catholic magisterial teaching, no human being 
is intrinsically evil, and no act committed by a human being prevents that 
person from susceptibility to redemption through the cross and resurrection of 
Jesus Christ. One of the strongest faith-based arguments against executions is 
that no one should shorten the time that God allows for a man or woman to find 
salvation.

The 3rd such claim presented to me is terrorism. When speaking in Catholic 
churches in Wisconsin during that state's attempt to reinstate the death 
penalty after the horror of 9/11, I encountered the wishful thinking that 
capital punishment could deter terrorism. Although Wisconsin had abolished the 
death penalty in 1853, some state leaders argued it needed reinstatement to 
ensure that a 9/11-type attack never happened there. In church after church, I 
responded to this assertion with the question, "How does capital punishment 
deter a suicide bomber?" Invariably, the questioner had never thought about 
that. Part of our death penalty myth is that capital punishment can protect us 
from people who are determined to harm us even at the cost of their own life. 
Of course, it cannot.

A different kind of argument being voiced more frequently by my audiences is 
one that is touted by some media Catholics. It claims that the teaching on the 
death penalty in Evangelium Vitae and the Catholic Catechism is wrong, a 
liberal aberration that cannot be supported by Tradition. The question from my 
audience might be phrased: "Hasn't the Church supported the death penalty for 
at least 1700 years? Where did this new teaching come from?"

The best answer to that question was actually given by Pope Benedict XVI in 
1997 when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican Congregation for the 
Doctrine of the Faith, he answered, referring to the Encyclical, Evangelium 
Vitae - The Gospel of Life:

'The pope has made important doctrinal progress' in the encyclical's discussion 
of capital punishment. 'What is written in the catechism will be 
reformulated.'[4]

Then Cardinal Ratzinger also noted that Catholic teaching develops by building 
on past affirmations rather than by overturning them. So, we might ask, how 
does the death penalty language in Evangelium Vitae and the Catechism build 
upon past affirmations rather than overturning them? The answer is that, 
throughout our history and Tradition on this issue, the Church has consistently 
looked at 2 sides of a formula: the role of government in preserving the common 
good, on the one hand, and the role of faith in dealing with forgiveness, 
rehabilitation and the human dignity of the offender's life, on the other hand.

For example, in the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent (St. Pope Pius V - 
1566)[5], the chapter concerning murder, the Fifth Commandment says:

Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to civil authorities, to whom is 
entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which 
they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, 
far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to 
this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the 
preservation and security of human life. [Emphasis mine.]

This is an explicit statement of the purpose for recognizing government's power 
to inflict capital punishment: the preservation and security of human life. The 
new language from Evangelium Vitae and our Catechism does not overturn this. 
But that is only one side of the equation. We also want to look at how the 
Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) dealt with the other part of the 
equation, namely with forgiveness, rehabilitation and the human dignity of the 
offender's life. In this regard we see that later in the very same chapter of 
that Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) dealing with murder, it 
says the following:

But the most important duty of all, and that which is the fullest expression of 
charity, and to which we should most habituate ourselves, is to pardon and 
forgive from the heart the injuries which we may have received from others. The 
Sacred Scriptures, as we have already observed, frequently admonish and exhort 
us to a full compliance with this duty. Not only do they pronounce blessed 
those who do this, but they also declare that God grants pardon to those who 
really fulfil this duty, while He refuses pardon to those who neglect it or 
refuse to obey it.

Moreover, in the very next grammatical paragraph of this chapter of the Roman 
Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) dealing with murder, it instructs 
pastors as follows:

As the desire of revenge is almost natural to man, it becomes necessary for the 
pastor to exert his utmost diligence not only to instruct, but also earnestly 
to persuade the faithful, that a Christian should forgive and forget injuries; 
and as this is a duty frequently inculcated by sacred writers, he should 
consult them on the subject in order to be able to subdue the pertinacity of 
those whose minds are obstinately bent on revenge, and he should have ready the 
forcible and appropriate arguments which those Fathers piously employed.

Potent words, especially given the context of the brutal anti-Catholic 
realities of the Reformation being waged against the Church at the time this 
was written. But this 2-sided approach is consistent with Tradition. All the 
way back to St. Augustine, we see the effort to struggle with both sides of the 
formula. He recognized the need for capital punishment in the 5th century, but 
warned against vengeance, saying "our desire is rather that justice be 
satisfied without the taking of their lives or the maiming of their bodies in 
any part..."[6]

Even 1200 years later, in the 13th century, we see the struggle with both sides 
of the formula. St. Thomas Aquinas defended the death penalty as a means of 
protecting the whole body of society, relating the state's role in execution to 
that of a physician who "cut(s) off a decayed limb" in order to "care for the 
health of the whole body." However, he also proposed as a working norm that "in 
this life, penalties should be remedial rather than retributive."[7]

In addition to Aquinas looking at both sides of the formula, the metaphor of 
the diseased limb is extremely poignant. In the 13th century it may have been 
necessary to amputate a diseased limb in order to save a person's life from a 
gangrenous infection. But assume that in our day and age the very same 
infection can be cured with antibiotics. Who would argue that Tradition 
requires us to amputate the limb rather than use antibiotics because that is 
what was done in the time of Aquinas?

Contrary to the abilities of penal systems in the 5th and 13th centuries, St. 
Pope John Paul II has pointed out in Evangelium Vitae, as incorporated into the 
Catechism, that we can use modern penology to protect the whole body of society 
today, and the cases warranting the death penalty now are "very rare if not 
practically nonexistant."

Thus, the language in the Catechism and in Evangelium Vitae continues our 
history and Tradition by addressing both sides of the formula: the role of 
government in preserving the common good and the role of faith in dealing with 
forgiveness, rehabilitation and the human dignity of the offender's life.

This 2-pronged formula may be more difficult than the simple binary yes-or-no 
of the intrinsic evil analysis to which Catholics grew accustomed from 50 years 
in the pro-life trenches. But difficult is not the same as wrong. The teaching 
on the death penalty from Evangelium Vitae, as incorporated in the Catechism, 
is correct. As then Cardinal Ratzinger said, this Catholic teaching on the 
death penalty has been built on past affirmations rather than by overturning 
them.

[1] Kansas v. Marsh, 548 U.S. ___ (2006).

[2] "State Prison Homicide Rates Down 93 %: Jail Suicide Rates 64 % Lower Than 
in Early 1980s," Bureau of Justice Statistics, Aug. 21, 2005).

[3] [Punishment] ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except 
in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible 
otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements 
in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not 
practically non-existent.

John Paul II, The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae), 1995; incorporated into 
#2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

[4] Origins (1997). [5] Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests 
Issued by Order of Pope Pius V (1566) (Rockford, IL: TAN, 1982), 426-427.

[6] St. Augustine, Epistle133, No. 1.

[7] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a2aae, 66.6.

(source: Catholic Mobilizing Network)