[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 9



PENNSYLVANIA:

Top court says judge should have stepped aside in death penalty case


The U.S. Supreme Court, siding with a death row inmate, ruled on Thursday that 
Pennsylvania's former top judge should have stepped aside when his court heard 
a case in which he earlier as a prosecutor had authorized seeking capital 
punishment.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in favor of Terrance Williams, convicted in the 
1984 bludgeoning murder of a 56-year-old man in Philadelphia. Williams, 18 at 
the time of the crime, said the man had sexually abused him as a youth.

Williams will now get a new hearing before Pennsylvania's Supreme Court to 
challenge his death sentence.

The justices threw out a 2014 ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that 
upheld the death sentence given to Williams. Williams' appeal focused on the 
actions of Ronald Castille, who served as Philadelphia's district attorney when 
Williams was convicted and was Pennsylvania's chief justice and served on the 
state Supreme Court when it affirmed the death sentence.

"Where a judge has had an earlier significant, personal involvement as a 
prosecutor in a critical decision in the defendant's case, the risk of actual 
bias in the judicial proceeding rises to an unconstitutional level," Justice 
Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.

Kennedy was joined by the court's 4 liberal justices in the ruling, with 
conservative justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito 
dissenting.

As district attorney, Castille gave the go-ahead for the prosecution to pursue 
the death penalty against Williams, who separately was convicted in a 2nd 
murder. In 2014, Castille served on the state Supreme Court when it unanimously 
reinstated the death penalty against Williams after a judge had thrown out 
capital punishment in the case due to prosecutorial misconduct.

Castille, now retired from the bench, was elected to the state's high court in 
1993 after touting his record of sending criminals to death row. Castille 
refused a request by Williams' lawyers to recuse himself when the case went 
before the state Supreme Court.

Williams, a former star high school quarterback, was convicted of bludgeoning 
the man and later setting the body on fire. Prosecutors claimed the killing was 
tied to a robbery.

During the appeals process, Williams' lawyers introduced evidence that he had 
been sexually abused by the man he killed, a church deacon. A lower court then 
found that prosecutors working for Castille had withheld evidence about the 
man's sexual abuse of boys.

There is currently a death penalty moratorium in Pennsylvania imposed by 
Governor Tom Wolf.

The justices heard arguments in the case on Feb. 29.

(source: Reuters)






USA:

A Major Latino Coalition Just Called For An End To The Death Penalty


The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), a coalition of 40 prominent 
Latino organizations, this week joined the growing, bipartisan list of groups 
calling for the end of the death penalty, noting that Latinos are "directly 
affected by its injustices."

For the 1st time ever, the NHLA Public Policy Agenda includes positions on drug 
policy and criminal justice and policing reforms. Perhaps most notably, the 
groups unanimously agreed to support abolition of capital punishment, a 
practice they say "disproportionately impacts people of color."

"The criminal justice system is so broken, there will never be an impartial way 
to apply capital punishment to avoid the fact that the most determinant factor 
in whether or not someone is put to death is the race of the victim," said Juan 
Cartagena, co-chair of the NHLA Civil Rights committee and president of 
LatinoJustice.

"We never had to dig any deeper into morality or issues about death in 
general," he added. "The racialized aspects of the imposition of the death 
penalty in the United States could not just be overlooked, and that became the 
unifying piece."

According to U.S. Department of Justice statistics from 2010, Latinos make up a 
growing portion of defendants on death row. That year, they constituted 13.5 % 
of the U.S. death row population, up from 11 % in 2000. A recent study found 
that white jurors were more likely to impose the death penalty in cases where 
the defendant was Latino and poor.

The racialized aspects of the imposition of the death penalty in the United 
States could not just be overlooked.

And as Cartagena noted, defendants who victimize a white person are far more 
likely to be sentenced to death than those whose victims are black or Latino. 
Of all the executions in the country since 1976, more than 75 % of victims were 
white, while just 6.8 % were Latino and 15.4 % were black.

The racial disparities in the death penalty are one of the many reasons why a 
growing list of political leaders have come out against the practice. Even 
conservative organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals have 
reconsidered their support for the death penalty in recent years, and support 
for the practice is no longer a given in red states. Nebraska recently 
abolished capital punishment and there are movements in other 
Republican-controlled states including Utah and Nevada to do the same.

2 weeks after Pope Francis told Congress to eliminate capital punishment, 
calling it "inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime committed," the 
National Latino Evangelical Coalition, a national network of 3,000 Latino 
evangelical churches, also came out against the practice for the 1st time ever.

The NHLA includes several organizations that lean conservative and Republican, 
like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. But Cartagena said he never heard any 
negative feedback about the decision to call for the abolition of the death 
penalty.

"It was an easy lift," he said. "There was no real contentiousness about this 
issue, nor the one about drug policy reform, nor the one about mass 
incarceration, juvenile justice, et cetera, et cetera."

Just 56 % of Americans say they support capital punishment, a 40-year low, down 
from 78 % just 2 decades ago. Yet 31 states and the federal government still 
allow for the execution of certain defendants.

While Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, has said she 
still supports the limited application of the death penalty, Cartagena said he 
hopes that grassroots movement against it, like the coordinated decision of the 
NHLA, push her to reconsider.

"We've only had sporadic movements from the bottom on justice reform and death 
penalty reform," he said. "This is a long and arduous process ... Am I 
concerned that the current Democratic leadership is not fully attuned to the 
needs to reform the criminal justice system in all its aspects? Of course I am. 
Am I surprised? Definitely not."

"The ability for us to move this particular issue is going to take a long, long 
time," he added.

(source: thinkprogress.org)