[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, FLA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 3




TEXAS:

Life after death-row case: Both sides search for justice as 22-year Cook saga 
ends


Editor's note: This story originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News on 
Feb. 21, 1999.

"You cannot put things back together when you inherit a case with material 
misconduct," said Smith Chief County Felony Prosecutor David Dobbs, after the 
22-year-old saga ended with a plea bargain on Tuesday.

After 20 years on death row - once coming within 11 days of execution - Mr. 
Cook walked free Tuesday. Mr. Cook, who had been out of prison on bond for 14 
months, pleaded no-contest and was convicted on a lesser charge of murder in 
the death of Linda Jo Edwards, a result that left both sides unsatisfied.

Mr. Cook and his lawyers question why a fourth jury was nearly asked to digest 
that so-called turnip - a case already tried three times, hobbled and scarred 
by investigative and prosecutorial misdeeds that occurred when Mr. Dobbs, the 
lead prosecutor, was in high school.

"It was pride that kept them coming back," said Mr. Cook, who maintained his 
innocence after the deal. He said he took the deal despite his innocence to end 
his "nightmare."

"This was about them trying to save face, not them going after a guilty man."

Prosecutors cite a simple reason for pushing on: They say they believed they 
had the right guy, and only agreed to a deal because appeals courts ruled that 
prior prosecutors' conduct ruled out the use of key evidence.

"They're are other district attorneys' offices that would have dropped the 
case," Mr. Dobbs. "But we felt Cook was guilty,

Legal experts said that the decision to try, retry, retry and retry again is 
complex, even when a "turnip" is involved. Prosecutorial persistence does not 
automatically mean a defendant is being unfairly treated, they said.

"The law provides that a prosecutor's duty is not to obtain a conviction, but 
to see that justice is done," said Robert Dawson, a professor of criminal law 
at The University of Texas Law School. "But, it doesn't define "justice.'

"There are no really concrete legal guidelines, no set number of bites at the 
apple," he said, "assuming a person is found guilty and that conviction is 
thrown out."

Mr. Cook was convicted and sentenced to death in 1978 and spent 13 years on 
death row until a state appeals court threw out the conviction, after a series 
of problems with the case were discovered by The Dallas Morning News and the 
New Jersey based Centurion Ministries, which investigates questionable death 
penalty convictions.

Among the problems, a state's witness testified in the 1st trial fingerprint in 
the victim's apartment had been left by Mr. Cook about the time of the crime. 
Mr. Cook maintained that the print was left during an earlier visit to the 
apartment, and the expert later conceded that such dating of fingerprints is 
impossible.

The court also found fault because a psychiatrist who interviewed Mr. Cook and 
later testified at his trial didn't tell him that their conversation could be 
used against him.

A 1992 retrial ended with a hung jury. In 1994, Mr. Cook was again convicted 
and sentenced to death. An appeals court overturned that verdict in 1996, 
saying evidence used in that trial was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct in 
1978. That included the failure to tell the defense that Robert Hoehn, a key 
prosecution witness, had given conflicting testimony to the grand jury and at 
1978 trial.

Because of that, the government was barred from using the testimony of Mr. 
Hoehn, who died between Mr. Cook's first 2 trials.

Factors for retrial

Experts described a number of factors that typically influence the decision 
whether to retry a case, though the sides in Mr. Cook's case disagreed on how 
relevant they were:

* The stakes: "Had this been a burglary, the matter would have been resolved 
after the first verdict was thrown out," said Professor Dawson. "With a capital 
murder case, it's harder for both sides to back off."

Indeed, to the end neither side budged from their stands on whether Mr. Cook 
killed Ms. Edwards. The way the brinkmanship ended in a deal was a no-contest 
plea, which allowed both sides continue maintaining their absolute declarations 
of Mr. Cook's guilt or innocence.

* The state's willingness to accept conviction of an innocent person: "No 
matter how airtight a case appears, you can never be 100 % sure," Professor 
Dawson said. "The question is where the prosecution's threshold of risk is. 
Most will not accept a high risk of wrongful conviction."

The reluctance to convict an innocent man was quantified by the 18th century 
British legal commentator William Blackstone - since echoed by thinkers from 
Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin:.

"It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffer," Blackstone 
wrote, an attitude that defense lawyers complain has been turned upside down by 
the Cook prosecutors.

"They'd rather see 1 innocent man locked up, than a guilty man go free," 
defense lawyer Cheryl Wattley said.

Smith County District Attorney Jack Skeen said such formulas were irrelevant in 
the Cook case. He said the prosecution's certainty about Mr. Cook's guilt 
easily cleared any threshold of concern about wrongful conviction.

"We have no doubt," he said.

* Quality and quantity of evidence: Prosecutors trying decades-old cases must 
deal with fading memories, dead or vanished witnessed, and a general lack of 
momentum over time, experts said. In the Cook case, they lost the right to use 
evidence tainted by earlier prosecutor misconduct.

Mr. Skeen and Mr. Dobbs said the exclusion of Mr. Hoehn's "crucial" testimony 
weakened their case to the point they were willing to cut a deal, which the 
victim's family said they didn't like but understood.

In order to obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove "future 
dangerousness," that a defendant will pose a continued threat to others in 
prison or the free world.

Sometimes, evidence on that issue can actually get stronger over time. In cases 
where a prisoner wins a new trial after years on death row, there is usually a 
very complete record of his behavior - good or bad - in prison, said University 
of Texas Law Professor Jordan Steiker.

That new evidence can affect the subsequent case, he said, but it's unclear how 
Mr. Cook's prison record, which included instances of self-mutilation, would 
weigh on that issue. His lawyers explained the incidents as natural reactions 
to sexual assaults in prison.

Prosecutors were ready to argue that the episodes, combined with the original 
killing, showed Mr. Cook is dangerous enough that he should be executed.

Instead they agreed to a deal that let Mr. Cook go free.

"That was the hardest part," Mr. Skeen said.

Although she tried to convince a federal judge otherwise, Ms. Wattley conceded 
that the current law allows the government to retry no matter how many 
convictions are thrown out.

"You can lie, cheat and steal," she said, "then come back and do it again and 
get a chance to correct your mistakes."

But, she said the law would be more fair if, after a certain number of fouls, 
the government was declared ineligible to continue the game.

Questions of costs

* Financial and political cost: Prosecutors, as elected officials, must concern 
themselves with both the financial and political price of their decisions to 
try or not try a case, said University of Houston law professor Sandra Guerra.

"Some smaller jurisdictions cannot afford to retry a capital case. It's very 
expensive," she said.

Mr. Skeen said that the Cook case was under a cloud caused by decades of 
problems. But, he said, neither politics nor money controlled his decision, 
although the savings from avoiding a fourth trial and round of appeals were 
attractive.

The Cook defense team said the casedragged on because Mr. Skeen's office was 
too concerned with saving political face, and not concerned enough with the 
public expense of a misdirected prosecution.

* Wishes of the victim's family: Mr. Skeen, the district attorney, said he 
consulted and got approval for the deal from Ms. Edward's family, but that they 
did not have veto power.

"It's our office's position that we zealously represent victims," as part of 
the duty to pursue justice, said his assistant, Mr. Dobbs said.

The victim's wishes are a legitimate consideration, experts said. But Mr. 
Cook's lawyers said the district attorney's office put the victim's family's 
wishes above a higher obligation to the truth.

Ms. Edward's family left no question where they stood. After the plea, they 
issued a bitter statement, supporting prosecutors but reproofing the appeals 
court for throwing out the earlier conviction.

"There are no lies, excuses or twisting of the facts that will change his 
record as a convicted murderer and felon," they wrote, "nor will it make the 
public any safer."

To that, Mr. Cook said, "I am a gentle man. I am not a thug. I am not a 
street-smart guy, whose going to go out and do bad things."

Mr. Cook, who accepted a felony murder conviction in exchange for his freedom, 
said he realizes that the outcome of the case leaves people wondering about his 
guilt or innocence.

"The system didn't put an end to my nightmare," he said. "I really can't say, 
with any degree of comfort, that this is a case in which the system worked."

On that one point, Mr. Cook and Mr. Dobbs agree.

"This case highlights more than anything else," the prosecution said, "that our 
system is imperfect."

(source: Dallas Morning News)






FLORIDA:

'Woohoo!' says Clearwater man sentenced to death


Pinellas County Circuit Judge Philip Federico sentenced Craig Wall, a 
Clearwater man convicted of murdering his girlfriend and their infant son in 
2010, to death on both murder counts Friday.

After receiving his death sentences, Tampa Bay Times reporter Laura Morel said 
Wall's response was, "Woohoo!"

Wall then asked the judge if he will come watch him die, to which the judge 
said he would consider it.

Wall met 29-year-old Laura Taft after getting out of prison following a 14-year 
sentence for armed robbery and armed burglary in 2008. Their baby, Craig Wall 
Jr., was born shortly after in 2009. Five weeks later, the boy died after going 
into cardiac arrest.

A few days later, Wall was arrested for violating a domestic violence 
injunction and he was released on bond.

3 days after that, Wall broke into Taft's apartment and stabbed her death.

Last February, Wall pleaded guilty to killing Taft and no contest to killing 
their baby.

Before his sentencing, the Times reported Wall said several times in court in 
the past several months that he wanted the death penalty.

On Friday, he got what he wanted.

(source: WTSP news)






USA:

Meet the red-state conservatives fighting to abolish the death penalty


Colby Coash can point to the moment his evolution in thinking about the death 
penalty began.

It was Sept. 3, 1994, and Coash - now a conservative senator in the Nebraska 
legislature but then a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln - decided 
to go with some friends to the state penitentiary. Willie Otey, convicted of 
1st-degree murder, was set to be executed at midnight, and people were 
gathering in the parking lot outside. Coash can still remember the scene: the 
live band, the grilling meat, the revelers popping cans of beer and chanting 
"Fry him!"

"You wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the parking lot of 
the penitentiary and a tailgate. It was pretty ugly," Coash says now. Even 
though he went to the event as a supporter of capital punishment, he says, "it 
kind of changed my heart. I thought, 'I don't want to be a part of 
state-sponsored killing.???'"

For much of the past 40 years, public support for the death penalty has been 
high, topping out at 80 % in 1994, according to Gallup polling. In the late 
1980s and early 1990s, the death penalty was so popular that it was used as a 
political cudgel by Republicans looking to depict opponents as soft on crime. 
In the 1988 presidential race, Democrat Michael Dukakis was hammered by George 
H.W. Bush's campaign and the media after he said at a debate that he would not 
support the death penalty, even if someone raped and murdered his wife. In 
1992, candidate Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas and looking to avoid a 
repeat of Dukakis's trouble, returned to his home state to preside over the 
execution of a mentally disabled prisoner named Ricky Ray Rector. Since the 
Supreme Court legalized capital punishment in 1976, "most individuals of all 
political orientations were for the death penalty when asked the question in 
the abstract," says Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty 
Information Center.

But that has started to shift. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and 
Donald Trump both support the death penalty - but Trump is much more 
enthusiastic, and Clinton has had to answer for her husband's criminal justice 
policies during her primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders. A Pew poll 
found that just 40 % of Democrats supported capital punishment last year, down 
from 71 % in 1996.

That same poll showed GOP support for the policy dropping 10 points, from 87 to 
77 %, over the decade. Times are changing for conservatives, too - but for 
markedly conservative reasons. In the past year, Republican lawmakers in 
red-leaning Nebraska, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio, Wyoming, Montana, 
South Dakota and New Hampshire have all sponsored bills to repeal the death 
penalty. They're organizing themselves in places like North Carolina, 
Tennessee, and Washington state, too. Coash is now part of a small group of 
activists who argue that the best case against the death penalty is a 
conservative one - and that the best way to make progress on the issue is to 
convince other Republicans in red states where the death penalty is, for the 
most part, uncontroversial.

***

After that night in Lincoln, Coash decided he couldn't support the death 
penalty as a pro-life Catholic. But it wasn't until he made it into the 
Nebraska legislature in 2008 that he could do anything about it. For years, 
state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a progressive firebrand from North Omaha, had been 
introducing bills to stop the death penalty, but only twice - in 1979 and 1999 
- had they passed, and both were promptly vetoed. In 2015, though, Coash sensed 
an opening. Though Nebraska's legislature is technically nonpartisan, it's not 
difficult to tell that many of the members are, like their voters, Republicans 
- and voters had sent a group of freshman lawmakers to the state House that 
year whom Coash figured might be open to his conservative arguments. So he 
began reaching out to his new colleagues, one by one, and asking them to sign 
on to Chambers's bill.

Coash realized that the traditional arguments against the death penalty - the 
potential for error; the way it is unevenly applied to poor, black and mentally 
handicapped defendants - were not working on conservatives. Those arguments, he 
figured, were too abstract for death penalty supporters, who looked to death 
row inmates and saw men who they felt didn't deserve their sympathy. So he 
tailored his approach. "I started to frame the death penalty in a different 
way, to change the narrative," he says. "I used Republican principles to argue 
that this was a broken system."

First, he made the case that the death penalty was costly and ineffective. 
Nebraska had spent an estimated $100 million on death penalty cases and 
executed only 3 people since the Supreme Court's 1976 ruling that affirmed the 
constitutionality of capital punishment. 2nd, Coash argued, conservatives are 
supposed to be the party that pushes back against unjust overreach into 
individuals' lives, and what would be a better example of that intrusion than 
potentially taking an innocent life through capital punishment? 3rd, he said, 
the families of victims - many of whom had testified before his committee that 
the endless appeals on death penalty cases were traumatizing and unjust - 
deserved better. When asked to describe his position in personal terms, he said 
it was consistent with a promise he made to always vote pro-life.

The debate on the bill was long and emotional. But in May 2015, Nebraska's 
legislature voted to repeal the death penalty, becoming the 19th state to ban 
it and the 7th since 2007. A week later, lawmakers wrangled enough votes to 
overturn Gov. Pete Ricketts's veto. The governor has poured his considerable 
financial resources into a November ballot measure to reinstate it, but the 
efforts of Coash and his colleagues have turned Nebraska into a test lab for 
opposing the death penalty from the right.

***

Religiously committed conservative activists have received a number of boosts 
over the past few decades, including Pope John Paul II's declaration of 
Catholic opposition to the death penalty in 1995. (Pope Francis has been just 
as emphatic.) The past several years have also seen what Dunham calls the 
"innocence revolution" - more prisoners being exonerated, sometimes through new 
investigations, other times through DNA evidence - which has drawn attention to 
the potential for error. Dunham thinks the resurgence of activist groups 
focused on limited government in the wake of the recession reignited the 
dialogue about the costliness of the policy. Younger voters, too, are slightly 
less likely to support capital punishment than older conservatives.

Last year, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition voted unanimously to 
oppose the death penalty. In October, the National Association of Evangelicals 
updated its 1973 resolution in support of the policy to acknowledge the 
opposition of some of its members.

To help reach pro-death-penalty Republican voters, anti-death-penalty 
conservatives are turning to people who can speak in ways conservatives might 
identify with, even if these advocates aren't, themselves, conservative - such 
as Christy Sheppard, a counselor from Ada, Okla., whose cousin, Debra Carter, 
was murdered in 1982. A few months ago, Sheppard traveled to Nebraska to tell 
the story of what happened after her cousin's death. 5 years after the slaying, 
police arrested 2 men, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, and charged them with 
murder. Fritz received life in prison; Williamson was sentenced to death. For 
years the family was satisfied, even happy with the outcome - until DNA testing 
11 years later proved that both men were innocent. The man eventually found 
guilty in Carter's death, Glen Gore, was already in prison on other charges by 
the time a DNA test identified him. He walked away from a work crew after 
learning that he was a suspect in the 1982 murder but turned himself in a week 
later. He was convicted in 2006. .

Sheppard felt tremendous guilt over the ordeal that Williamson, who suffers 
from bipolar disorder, faced. "To think that we wanted him to die for a crime 
he wasn't even guilty of - he didn't even know her - is just horrible,' she 
says. When anti-death-penalty groups began asking her to tell her story, she 
says, "I felt like I couldn???t not say anything."

But anti-death-penalty conservatives are still working against broad support 
for capital punishment, especially among their fellow conservatives. Kentucky's 
bill failed by one vote to make it out of the House Judiciary Committee. In 
Utah, the Senate passed a bill, but it was pulled from the House floor after 
leaders realized that it didn't have enough votes. And in Nebraska, Ricketts 
and his billionaire father, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, have invested 
hundreds of thousands of dollars backing November's ballot initiative to bring 
the death penalty back. The group organizing those efforts, Nebraskans for the 
Death Penalty, said in a news release last year that, according to its polling 
information, 64 percent of Nebraska voters agreed with its position.

***

The thread running through Nebraska, Kentucky, North Carolina and other states 
where conservatives have been working against capital punishment is 
Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a group founded by Heather 
Beaudoin, a 31-year-old from Michigan with a background in conservative 
politics.

Beaudoin was raised in an evangelical family. She likes to say that her 
opposition to the death penalty is "of the Lord," because it's something she's 
felt passionate about since she was a little girl. After a brief stint in 
Washington, D.C., after college, Beaudoin moved to Montana to work for 
AmeriCorps, and one day, outside her office, the Montana Abolition Coalition 
held a rally with exonerees and their family members. Beaudoin landed a job 
with the coalition by suggesting that she lead outreach to evangelicals and the 
law enforcement community. After a few years, she went to Equal Justice USA, a 
group that works on criminal justice reform issues, to launch a national 
organization aimed at conservatives. That turned into Conservatives Concerned 
About the Death Penalty.

Beaudoin reaches out to evangelical and other faith-based leaders and gets them 
talking about policy; her colleague Marc Hyden, the group???s national advocacy 
coordinator, works with movement conservatives, college Republicans, tea party 
activists and libertarians.

"For me, it's about redemption," Beaudoin says. "I think that is true for most 
evangelicals as well. That's at the center of our faith. We believe in grace, 
we believe that God can do wonderful things. How can we say, 'You are the worst 
of the worst, you are not worthy, and we will dispose of you?' What does that 
say about us and what we believe?"

Hyden says he and Beaudoin have been surprised by how they've been welcomed at 
events like the Conservative Political Action Conference and on conservative 
college campuses. "I'm finding that we are being accepted in some of the most 
conservative circles of America," he says.

Hyden, who previously worked for the National Rifle Association, frames his 
arguments to movement conservatives in a slightly different way than Beaudoin 
does. "There's nothing limited about giving power to the state to kill you," he 
says. Especially "if you don't trust the government to launch a health-care 
site or deliver mail."

But he understands as well as anyone that the journey to opposing the death 
penalty is a long and difficult one. "I used to support it, I'm a little 
ashamed to say," Hyden says. "I was willing to violate my own conservative 
principles." The harder he looked at the issues, though, "the less I could 
justify supporting it. It risks innocent lives, there's no way it's pro-life 
and it costs more than life without parole."

That kind of introspection, Coash and his allies say, is exactly what their 
side needs.

During the debate over the death penalty in Nebraska, Coash said, his 
father-in-law, a farmer, was shocked and asked him, "What the hell are you 
doing?" Coash laid out his case, landing on the fact that the state hadn't even 
carried out an execution in 20 years. Coash says his father-in-law responded: 
"Well, shoot, get rid of it then!" He knows that the pro-death-penalty movement 
is formidable, but he remains hopeful.

"Nebraskans," he says, "are very practical people."

(source: Washington Post)