[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 12



TEXAS:

Alleged devil worshiper charged with murder


A Houston man has been charged in the death of a 16-year-old who went missing 
in January.

Edward O'Neal Jr., 18, is charged with murder in the death of Ryan Robert.

On Jan. 15, Christina Roberts reported her son Ryan missing after he never came 
home from school. A few days later, he was found brutally murdered in the woods 
near his home.

At the time when her son's body was discovered, Roberts told KHOU 11 News she 
knew who did it and reported O'Neal to the police.

"I just want justice for my son," Roberts said in January. "I'm beyond 
frustrated. I'm angry."

For Roberts, O'Neal's arrest was a long time coming. Roberts says one of 
O'Neal's relatives came to her back and January and said O'Neal had admitted to 
the murder. The relative then told Roberts where Ryan's body was, he was found 
in that spot stabbed to death.

The suspect's father, Edward O'Neal Sr., helped check his son into Ben Taub's 
psychiatric unit last month and says O'Neal has a history of mental illness and 
devil worshiping.

"Oh I know that he's worshiping the devil and stuff," said O'Neal. "He didn't 
tell me nothing. He didn't say nothing about doing nothing. He's mentally 
retarded."

The suspect and victim were close friends, Roberts says O'Neal even lived with 
her for a few months at one point.

Although a motive isn't clear Roberts believes the murder was a satanic ritual 
and wants O'Neal to pay for the life he allegedly took.

"Give him life," said Roberts. "Give him the death penalty, I don't care which 
one but I don't want him harming not another person."

Edward O'Neal is currently in the Harris County Jail on a $50,000 bond.

(source: KHOU news)






CALIFORNIA:

Setting a deadline on California death penalty cases will never work; here's 
why


John Gajdos, in his Jan. 22 letter to the editor, suggests the California legal 
system set the "clock" so that condemned inmates have a maximum of 5 years from 
sentencing to execution in San Quentin prison. The letter reflects the absolute 
failure of the criminal justice system to educate the public on how capital 
punishment laws actually work in this state.

The process is extraordinarily complex. All capital cases automatically go from 
the trial court directly to the California Supreme Court after the death 
judgment is rendered. Each year, the state's highest court receives thousands 
of petitions for review, covering both civil and criminal matters. From these, 
the 7 justices and their staffs cull the petitions down to a few hundred or so.

Since the court has no discretion with regard to capital cases - it has to take 
them - they have to be incorporated into the court's workload. Thus, it might 
take more than a year for the court to hear an appeal in a specific case, and 
that's if everything proceeds apace.

Following trial, transcripts have to be readied for the appeal, a process that 
can take months. Complicating the timeline is the fact that appellate attorneys 
have to be hired to represent condemned defendants. For obvious reasons, these 
attorneys should be well-versed in death penalty jurisprudence. Because most 
condemned inmates have no money to pay attorneys who ordinarily charge $500 or 
more per hour, public defenders - already vastly over-burdened with other cases 
- have to add these cases to the pile. Some inmates go years without appellate 
attorneys.

Then comes the actual appeal process. First the attorneys have to decide which 
issues they want to highlight. This process can take some time, particularly if 
the attorneys are juggling other capital cases. Among the potential issues: 
"incompetence" of counsel. There have been cases, in fact, where trial 
attorneys fail to even put on a defense. Or there may be police misconduct, 
such as gathering evidence without search warrants. Or prosecutors succeed in 
convincing jurors to vote death for a defendant who is mentally challenged, 
with an IQ below 70, for example.

There is no way to make capital punishment "workable."

And what if a condemned individual participated in a crime with another person? 
Was he, or she, acting on his or her own volition, or under duress? This issue 
is particularly relevant for women or for younger people who might commit 
crimes - drug-related murders, for example - out of fear of retaliation from 
older, violent or authoritarian individuals.

DNA evidence also presents another complicating issue; over the past few years, 
more than 100 condemned inmates nationally have been exonerated via new 
evidence. Death penalty proponents often minimize this factor, arguing the vast 
majority of death row inmates are guilty; so what, if a few innocents are 
executed along the way? It's a small price to pay for ridding society of bad 
people. That is not how the law works, however. DNA testing sometimes takes a 
long time, since labs are backed up with samples from convicted and condemned 
inmates proclaiming their innocence.

When the state Supreme Court finally hears a case, that is not the last step. 
If the court upholds a death sentence, the case can be appealed to federal 
courts. California has absolutely no control over what a federal appeals court 
decides to do, or how long it takes to render a decision. In fact, some cases 
involve more appeals to federal than state courts. Before he was executed in 
1992, 14 years after murdering 2 boys in San Diego, attorneys for Robert Alton 
Harris filed dozens of appeals in federal courts. Mr. Gajdos suggests defense 
attorneys wait until the last minute to file appeals, but no attorney, at least 
in modern times, has ever waited until an execution is imminent to file his or 
her 1st appeal.

There can be no schedule for executions. It may be true that California's 
capital punishment machinery is hopelessly broken and that abolitionists have 
purposely gummed up the machinery. Death rows hold some very bad people, but so 
do maximum security prisons in general. And there lies the biggest issue: 
Juries sometimes sentence people to life in prison who have committed far worse 
crimes than those waiting on death row. And some prosecutors rely on jailhouse 
???snitches,??? accomplices who walk away free after testifying against their 
partners in crime who earn death sentences.

There is no way to make capital punishment "workable." Creating a "timeline" is 
an absurdly impossible solution. Better to end the death penalty and place all 
of California's most vicious and violent felons in the general population in 
increasingly over-crowded prisons where they can live 6 or 7 to a cell for the 
rest of their miserable lives and save taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

(source: Opinion; Kathleen Cairns teaches history at Cal Poly and has written 3 
books on the death penalty----San Luis Obispo Tribune)