[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., S.C., FLA., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 24



PENNSYLVANIA:

Pa. Supreme Court voids death sentence for 'Greensburg 6' torture murder of 
intellectually disabled woman


Saying a legal error gives it no other choice, a divided state Supreme Court 
has overturned the death sentence for a western Pennsylvania man involved in 
the torture and murder of an intellectually disabled woman.

The court's decision, outlined in a majority opinion Justice Kevin M. Dougherty 
issued this week, requires the Westmoreland County Court to summon another jury 
to again consider whether Melvin Knight should be executed for the 2010 slaying 
of 30-year-old Jennifer Daugherty in Greensburg.

The justices refused to overturn Knight's murder conviction.

Knight, 27, of Swissvale, pleaded guilty to 1st- and 2nd-degree murder, 
conspiracy and kidnapping. The jury in his case only weighed whether he should 
receive a death sentence or spend the rest of his life behind bars.

The error the high court cited in voiding his death sentence involved a failure 
to instruct the jury that Knight's lack of a criminal record should have been 
considered as a mitigating factor against capital punishment, Dougherty 
concluded.

So the Supreme Court majority sent the case back to county court for a new 
penalty hearing. Justice Sallie Updyke Mundy filed a dissenting opinion, 
arguing that her court should not have substituted its judgment for that of the 
jury.

Knight was among a group of defendants, dubbed the "Greensburg 6," who pleaded 
guilty or were convicted in connection with Daugherty's horrific death.

In his opinion, Dougherty noted that the Mount Pleasant woman, who had the 
intellectual capacity of a 14-year-old, was targeted for abuse by the group 
after she made sexual advances toward the boyfriend of one of the group's 
female members.

Over 2 days, the victim was beaten and raped. Her tormentors cut off her hair 
and made her drink concoctions of urine and feces, the justice noted. He added 
that after the group voted to kill her, her abusers made Daugherty write a 
suicide note.

Knight forced Daugherty into the bathroom, made her kneel and asked her if she 
was ready to die. Then, Doughtery wrote, Knight stabbed her in the chest and 
cut her throat. When she didn't die immediately, another man cut Daugherty's 
throat while Knight strangled her with some Christmas lights.

Daugherty's body was found the next day stuffed head-first into a trash can in 
the parking lot of a middle school.

The other defendants in the case either pleaded guilty or were convicted. One 
of them, Ricky Smyrnes, also received a death sentence. A 17-year-old girl 
involved in the slaying was sentenced to life in prison, while the other 
defendants are serving prison terms of at least 30 years.

(source: pennlive.com)






SOUTH CAROLINA:

Grace, Justice, and Mercy brings awareness to problems with the death penalty


Justice 360 is a South Carolina non-profit organization that advocates for 
fairness, equality, and the eradication of racial bias in the prosecution of 
capital punishment cases in our state. Justice 360 was founded in South 
Carolina in 1988 and through the work of its legal staff and advocacy efforts 
has moved 38 men off death row since the organization's then. South Carolina 
has the 7th highest per capita execution rate in the country. It is estimated 
that 4 out of every 100 death row inmates are innocent.

According to Mandy Medlock, executive director of Justice 360, "Every state, if 
they have an active death penalty also has some type of death penalty resource 
center that provides legal representation to those facing the death penalty in 
their state."

She shares that the prevailing challenge facing organizations such as Justice 
360 is an observed racial bias in the prosecution of death penalty cases.

Another issue affecting these inmates is mental illness. Over 70 % of South 
Carolina's current death row population suffers from a serious mental illness.

Medlock says, "Folks are starting to realize the death penalty, in fact our 
entire criminal justice system is biased against people of color, people with 
mental illness, people with intellectual disability, and most of all the poor, 
the least among us."

Approximately 800 - 1,000 people attended a special event at the Township 
Auditorium in Columbia sponsored by Justice 360 called "Grace, Justice, and 
Mercy" featuring attorney and author Bryan Stevenson who has dedicated his 
legal career to the cause of those facing possible unjust capital punishment 
decisions.

Bryan Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in 
Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, the Equal Justice Initiative has won 
major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating 
innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the 
mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Stevenson is the author 
of Just Mercy which tells his story in working with these special cases and 
clients, compared in its impact to Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. 
Stevenson spoke to the crowd on the importance of not losing hope when working 
for change for the underprivileged.

Panel speakers included Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, poets from The Watering 
Hole, and Master of Ceremonies Sherard Duvall.

Medlock encourages the public to get involved in the advocacy work of Justice 
360 by following their social media sites on Facebook and Twitter and signing 
up for the e-blast newsletter on the organization's website: justice360sc.org.

(source: The Columbia Star)






FLORIDA:

Death penalty ruling could set big precedent in future cases


The Florida Supreme Court set a potentially big precedent on Wednesday when it 
overturned a death sentence for a convicted murderer. The court ordered that a 
death row inmate be re-sentenced because the jury was not unanimous when it 
handed down the sentence.

"While we're somewhat disappointed in the ruling, we have to abide in the 
decision," Assistant State Attorney John Molchan said.

Molchan said that the ruling has turned their office upside down. He is not 
sure how this will affect the nearly 400 people on death row in Florida. He 
said that it is possible they may all have to be re-sentenced, but that has not 
been clarified. Molchan is confident that the new ruling will apply to any 
person awaiting or currently standing trial.

For opponents of the death penalty, it is a victory.

"I just feel like there's certain limits that we have to make judgement as an 
individual human on this earth," Wylie Murray said.

Others believe the ruling makes it too difficult to sentence anyone to death.

"If they're murdering people, if they're mutilating people, they're cutting up 
people, then yeah, they should get the death penalty," Laurie Zaslove said. 
"There's something wrong in their head."

The ruling could impact some potentially high-profile local cases.

Nearly 2 decades have passed since the murder of Cynthia Harrison. A community 
was shocked that Timothy Hurst tied up his boss, stabbed her more than 60 times 
and left her body in a Popeye's freezer. Hurst has been waiting on death row 
since then, but he successfully appealed his sentence last year.

"That went to the U.S. Supreme Court who sent it back and indicated that there 
had to be findings of aggravating circumstances that had to be found by the 
jury," Molchan said.

Molchan said the Hurst is now waiting to be re-sentenced. This time, all 12 
people on the jury will have to recommend capital punishment to send him back 
to death row.

There are 385 people currently on death row, 8 sentenced in Escambia County, 
seven in Santa Rosa County and 4 in Okaloosa County.

(source: WEAR TV news)

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

Supreme Court rejects death row appeal


Condemned murderer Tavares J. Wright will remain on death row for killing 2 men 
during a robbery and leaving their bodies in a Polk City orange grove, 
according to a Florida Supreme Court ruling released Wednesday.

Wright, 35, had appealed on grounds that his trial lawyers failed to adequately 
investigate and present testimony to support a sentence of life imprisonment, 
as opposed to the death penalty, and their failure to discredit 2 jailhouse 
informants who testified against Wright during his 2004 trial. He also 
challenged a Circuit Court ruling that he's not intellectually disabled.

The Florida Supreme Court rejected those arguments Wednesday.

Wright, along with co-defendant Samuel Pitts, was convicted of abducting James 
"Jimbo" Felker, 18, of Plant City, and his cousin, David Green, 21, who was 
visiting from Virginia. They were taken from a Winn-Dixie supermarket parking 
lot in north Lakeland and driven in Green's car 15 miles north to an orange 
grove in Polk City where they were shot.

In November 2004, a Polk County jury convicted Wright of 2 counts of 1st-degree 
murder, 2 counts of kidnapping, 2 counts of robbery and 1 count of carjacking. 
Wright waived his right to jury recommendation in the penalty phase, and in 
October 2005, after hearing testimony and other evidence, Circuit Judge Dick 
Prince sentenced him to death for the 2 execution-style slayings.

The murders were part of a 3-day crime spree in April 2000. Investigators 
linked the crimes to a stolen pistol, which investigators tied to Wright.

Pitts, 36, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the 
killings.

In Wright's initial appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, which is automatic 
when a death sentence is imposed, the state's high court rejected his 
arguments.

With Wednesday's ruling, the state's high court again rejected Wright's 
arguments, which means he will remain on Florida's death row.

(source: The Ledger)

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

Death row inmate who killed corrections officer to be resentenced----Sgt. Ruben 
Thomas stabbed 14 times in cell at Columbia County Correctional

The Florida Supreme Court is ordering a new sentencing hearing for a man on 
death row for killing a 24-year-old Columbia County corrections officer in 
2002.

The court issued its ruling Wednesday, saying the jury that voted to condemn 
Richard Franklin wasn't unanimous.

Franklin was serving 2 life sentences for murder and robbery in March 2012 when 
he fatally stabbed Sgt. Ruben Thomas in the neck with a handmade knife. 
According to the report, Franklin stabbed Thomas 14 times.

He was convicted the following year and a jury voted 9-3 in favor of executing 
Franklin.

Last month the state Supreme Court ruled that death sentences have to be 
unanimous, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in January that overturned a 
Florida death sentence issued on a 7-5 jury recommendation.

Franklin's case will go back to a jury for a new penalty hearing.

Thomas was training to fulfill his dream as a game warden. He loved the 
outdoors, but most importantly, he adored his family, daughter Emma and his 
pregnant fiancee.

"Just so excited about the baby and watching his little girl grow," Paula 
Thomas said of her son.

Investigation into corrections officer's death

According to the investigation into Ruben Thomas' death, he went into Franklin 
cell after the inmate called him on the intercom. Franklin put him in a 
headlock, and the officer's radio and personal body alarm fell down a floor.

Ruben Thomas got away and Franklin chased after him across the catwalk and down 
the stairs to a door, which was immediately opened for him. The chase continued 
to another door that another officer working opened. Ruben Thomas tried to 
close it, but the inmate grabbed the handle.

The two began a tug of war over the door, and each time Franklin pulled open 
the door he stabbed Ruben Thomas, as the other officer repeatedly radioed for 
assistance. According to the report, Franklin used a shank, a homemade knife 
that a fellow inmate made from a piece of metal pipe.

Widow believes Thomas' death was preventable

"I don't think a lot of people understand that there are murderers walking 
around in an open cell population, and I think that they should be classified 
differently amongst themselves than with somebody who has maybe written a bad 
check and is in prison," Paula Thomas said.

She said the prison definitely needs more guards working, especially at night.

"The ratio is awful," Paula Thomas said. "It's two to around 200, and there's 
no way that they could protect themselves, if needed."

(source: news4jax.com)


MISSOURI:

Prosecutor files 1st-degree murder charge in motel room death


Last Saturday, a woman charged in the shooting death of a suspected 
methamphetamine dealer in a Columbia motel room told someone the man was dead - 
before police released his name - and that she was the last person to see him 
alive.

Jaclyn A. Rose years ago may have been in a relationship with Gregory J. Moore, 
who was found dead in his room on Thursday. But recently their relationship was 
limited to meth transactions, a witness identified only as E.M. told Columbia 
police, according to a probable cause statement. 2 people who visited Moore 
before his death at his ground-floor room in the northwest corner of Welcome 
Inn, 1612 N. Providence Road, provided Columbia Police Department Detective 
Alan Mitchell with Moore???s phone number and one said the phone should be in 
the room with Moore. One of the people, identified as S.P. in the statement, 
told police Moore sold meth and kept a gun for protection.

When police searched the motel room Moore's phone and gun were missing. Rose, 
33, was arrested on suspicion of drug possession early Thursday, before Moore's 
body was discovered, and investigators found on her a phone they later learned 
belonged to Moore, Mitchell wrote.

Columbia police put out information to other area law enforcement agencies that 
detectives were looking for Rose and she was picked up Tuesday night in Fulton. 
Detectives brought her back to Columbia and on Wednesday afternoon, Boone 
County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Knight charged Rose with 1st-degree murder and 
armed criminal action. Rose remains in the Boone County Jail on a $1 million 
cash-only bond. She did not have an attorney listed in online court records.

Knight declined to say whether he would seek the death penalty for Rose, 1 of 2 
penalties for 1st-degree murder. The other possible punishment is life in 
prison without parole. No Boone County prosecutors have sought capital 
punishment against murder defendants during Knight's almost 10 years in office. 
Knight declined to comment on the case.

Police were called to the motel at 6:28 p.m. Thursday after someone found Moore 
unresponsive in the room. He was pronounced dead at the scene with an apparent 
gunshot wound.

Surveillance video, Mitchell wrote, shows a woman who appears to be Rose pull 
up to the motel in a light-colored sedan last Wednesday just after Moore 
arrived and went into his room. As Moore went to his car, the woman, who was 
carrying a bag, walked past him and went into his room, and Moore returned. A 
person identified as S.P. came and left the room and, Mitchell wrote, "A short 
time later subjects standing near room 149 all look in the direction of the 
room as though they heard something."

The woman later left the room carrying 2 bags and briefly stopped at a car 
before leaving the motel. S.P., the person in the car, told Mitchell the 
suspect spoke to them briefly and described the woman as having blonde hair. 
Police tied Rose to the scene using S.P.'s description and surveillance video.

After police obtained a search warrant for Moore's phone and turned it on, they 
found texts from Rose that Moore read before he died, Mitchell wrote.

A police spokeswoman at the motel when Moore was found told reporters that 
Moore was a long-term resident there. Residents told the Tribune he had been 
there for a few weeks.

At the time of his death, Moore had pending charges of failing to register as a 
sex offender and distribution of a controlled substance. Moore was convicted in 
St. Louis County in 1996 of statutory sodomy involving a 16-year-old girl. 
Boone County sheriff's deputies arrested Moore on Oct. 3 after they learned he 
was living at 110 Ripley St., which is close to several schools, and never 
registered as a sex offender in Boone County. Deputies found several bags of 
meth, packaging materials, a scale and marijuana in his home.

(source: Columbia Daily Tribune)

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

The long road; Death row: the lawyer who keeps losing ---- A single attorney 
has had more clients sentenced to death in federal court than any other defence 
lawyer in America. He's part of a deeply flawed system that is about to get 
worse


On the evening of 19 November 1998, the body of a Colombian man, Julian Colon, 
was found in the boot of an abandoned car in Kansas City, Missouri. His hands, 
feet and eyes had been bound with duct tape, and he had been shot in the head. 
Cartel drug lords, who were importing cocaine, via Mexico, into Texas and 
distributing it onwards from Kansas City, were convinced that Colon had stolen 
$300,000 from them, and had him executed.

10 days later, a Colombian immigrant, said to be an enforcer for the cartels, 
German Sinisterra, was arrested. Under interrogation, he confessed, saying that 
he had been told by the traffickers to fly to Kansas City from his home in 
Dallas, and to undertake a job for a fee of $1,000. He was afraid to say no: 
most of his family was in Colombia, vulnerable to reprisals. Sinisterra 
described how Colon was lured to a meeting by 2 cartel associates, where he was 
bound and beaten, before Sinisterra was ordered to shoot him.

Sinisterra went on trial for 1st degree murder in Kansas City in December 2000. 
His case was not heard in the local state court, but in the separate federal 
system, run by the Department of Justice - the forum for some of the most 
serious cases, many involving organised crime or terrorism. The prosecution 
asked the court to sentence him to death.

Leading his defence was Frederick Duchardt, a Kansas City attorney appointed by 
the judge. American death penalty trials consist of 2 successive phases. In the 
1st - the "guilt phase" - the jury decides whether the prosecution has proven 
its case beyond reasonable doubt. Then, in the "penalty phase", the same lawyer 
presents the case, and the same jurors determine whether the prisoner should be 
sentenced to death or life imprisonment.

As Sinisterra's guilt was not disputed, what sentence he would receive was 
crucial. Duchardt's plea for Sinisterra in the second, penalty stage focused on 
evidence that he was a caring husband and father, beloved by his family in 
Texas, and his relatives still in Colombia. Duchardt revealed that Sinisterra 
was raised in poverty in the port city of Buenaventura, had emigrated in his 
late teens and worked in construction. His wife, a nurse named Michelle Rankin, 
told the court he was "loving and caring". They had 2 small children, and he 
also took care of his daughter from a previous relationship. His mother-in-law 
testified that all her family adored him. Videotapes in Spanish recorded by 
family members in Colombia spoke of his generosity. His 9-year-old said that 
her father played with her, took her to school, and had bought her a Bible 
story book.

None of this made much impact. The jury deliberated for less than a day before 
sentencing Sinisterra to death.

Since Sinisterra's sentencing, 3 more of Duchardt's clients have been condemned 
to death: Wes Purkey, Lisa Montgomery, and, most recently, in 2014, Charles 
Hall. Out of 7 federal death trials, 4 of Duchardt's clients have received the 
death penalty, 2 have been handed life sentences and 1 has been acquitted after 
an appeal and a retrial. This tally means that Duchardt has had more clients 
sentenced to death in federal court than any other defence lawyer in America.

The lawyers appealing against the death sentences of Sinisterra, Purkey and 
Montgomery have all separately argued that their sentences should be quashed 
because Duchardt's performance was "deficient", and that his failure to present 
critical mitigating evidence amounted to what US law terms "ineffective 
assistance of counsel". (Hall's appeals have not yet started.)

Duchardt finds these allegations preposterous. A tall, softly spoken figure of 
64, he has wispy, greying hair and a droopy moustache. Not for him the lawyer's 
uniform of white shirt and dark suit: both times we met, he wore jeans and an 
old sweater. I got the impression he wanted to be liked, generously suggesting 
we set aside at least 2 hours for our meeting on my first day in Kansas City.

When it came to specific claims about his own conduct, he stiffened and, 
palpably defensive, declined to go into details. The reason his clients got the 
death penalty, he said, had nothing to do with his performance, but related 
only to the seriousness of their crimes: "If you've read the facts of these 
cases, you'll know they were ugly, ugly." He didn't mind criticism if it was 
fair, but all too often, it was not. "Some allegations of ineffectiveness which 
are made in post-conviction cases are frivolous, simply not comporting with the 
facts and/or the law."

Blaming trial defence counsel for death sentences, he pointed out, was merely a 
legal ploy: "Frankly, unless you've got fresh evidence, it's the only way you 
can get relief, because you have to raise issues that haven't been raised 
before. The question is, are you going to be bound by the facts, or make stuff 
up? You show me where I screwed up, and I'll admit it."

He acknowledged that he was a maverick, but he insisted that his methods were 
appropriate.

Professor Sean O'Brien of the University of Missouri law school, a veteran 
defence lawyer who has fought numerous capital trials and appeals - and who has 
known Duchardt for many years - disagreed. He believes Duchardt's work has been 
so poor that it helps to explain a surprising fact: that federal courts in 
Missouri are far more likely to pass death sentences than those in any other 
state.

"Meeting the proper, nationally agreed standards of capital defence is 
demanding, and complying with them is expensive," O'Brien said. "One reason why 
Missouri's federal courts crank out so many death sentences is that they 
repeatedly appoint a lawyer - Duchardt - who has rejected these standards."

Missouri has become a federal death penalty hotspot. Of the 62 prisoners on 
federal death row, 9 were convicted in Missouri, 14.5% of the national total, 
though the state's population of 6 million amounts to just 1.9% of the US as a 
whole. Since the 1990s, the chances of being sentenced to death in a federal 
court in Missouri have been many times higher than anywhere else.

To Duchardt, the explanation is simply that Missouri has more heinous 
murderers, more homicides with "egregious facts". Again, O'Brien disagreed. 
"When the prosecution seeks the death penalty, it commits skilled lawyers with 
unlimited resources to get the job done. For an indigent defendant, getting a 
skilled lawyer who will demand the resources to make it a fair fight is like 
winning the lottery - you will probably live. Many defendants lose that 
lottery, and they get a lawyer more worried more about pleasing the court and 
the prosecutor than about fighting for the client. Those are the ones who die. 
When one lawyer produces nearly half the federal death sentences in a state, 
there's a problem."

It has long been recognised that in state courts, the quality of capital 
defence lawyers is sometimes appalling. In Texas, which as of October 2016 had 
executed 538 men and women since 1982 - far more than any other state - at 
least 3 prisoners have been sentenced to death, despite the fact their 
attorneys spent parts of their trials asleep. At an appeal for 1 of them, 
prosecutors argued that this did not matter, because the man's attorney only 
missed unimportant parts of the testimony. One Texas lawyer, Jerry Guerinot, 
has had 21 clients sentenced to death in state courts, including a British 
woman, Linda Carty. When I interviewed him in 2007, he said he was "an 
extremely aggressive lawyer" unlike those who "just sit in their chair and let 
the state run over them". However, he admitted he spent barely an hour with her 
before her trial started, and failed to speak to crucial witnesses who would 
have supported her claim of innocence.

It is not easy to be a capital defence lawyer. By definition, most cases in 
which prosecutors seek the death penalty will be horrifying. Jurors will be 
questioned before they are sworn in, and those who admit they are opposed to 
capital punishment are excluded - creating an inherent, pro-death bias. The 
system is not always good at deciding which defendants really are the "worst of 
the worst", and in 1994, Stephen Bright, founder of the Southern Centre for 
Human Rights in Atlanta, argued in a seminal paper that death sentences were 
generally imposed "not for the worst crimes, but the worst lawyers."

African American people make up 12% of the population of the US, but almost 1/2 
of federal death row's inmates

By contrast, federal courts are supposed to be a paragon of American justice. 
Federal judges are appointed by the president, and prosecutors work for the 
Department of Justice in Washington. The US attorney general has to approve 
every federal case in which prosecutors seek the death penalty. As for the 
defence, public funding is generous: defence costs in a federal capital trial 
will usually be about $2m (in the Missouri state system, the average defence 
cost of a capital murder trial is $127,000).

Yet there is evidence that the federal death penalty is applied unevenly, 
disproportionately affecting minorities and the marginalised. African American 
people make up 12% of the population of the US, but almost 1/2 of federal death 
row's inmates. Sinisterra was convicted of drug trafficking and murder, and 
sentenced to death under a law devised for drug trade "kingpins", although, as 
a cartel courier and hitman, he was pretty low down the hierarchy.

Sinisterra's main challenge against the death sentence - known in the trade as 
a "2255 motion", after the relevant section of the US penal code - was handled 
by a team led by Tim Gabrielsen, a death penalty specialist from Arizona. When 
he started work in 2004, he formed the view that Duchardt's conduct of the 
penalty phase of the trial ignored long-established practice. In many capital 
cases where prisoners' lives have been spared, it is because their lawyers have 
been able to show that their childhoods were grotesquely abusive, that they 
were mentally ill, or intellectually disabled. In such circumstances, the US 
supreme court has set binding precedents, determining that prisoners who are 
not so much evil as deeply damaged should be shown mercy.

"Digging deep into the defendant's background is at the core of mounting a 
defence: you have to persuade the jurors the defendant is not a monster, but a 
fellow human being," said Professor O'Brien. "It isn't enough to present 
testimony from mental health experts. You have to connect the jury with their 
life story. Some might say that's touchy-feely. But it's the way to save 
lives."

For decades, the accepted way to get at this evidence has been to engage a 
"mitigation specialist": an investigator skilled at persuading an offender's 
friends and family to reveal painful secrets, and at finding the medical, 
psychiatric and other records that may support such disclosures. In 1998, 
America's National Judicial Conference endorsed a report by a senior judge 
stating that all capital defence teams should include a mitigation specialist: 
this, it said, was nothing less than a "minimum standard of care". The American 
Bar Association followed this with supposedly binding guidelines in 2003, 
saying lawyers "must" employ such experts.

However, when Duchardt was preparing for Sinisterra's trial case, he chose not 
to do so. In advance of the appeal, Gabrielsen employed an experienced 
mitigation specialist of dual US-Colombian citizenship, who carried out a 
painstaking investigation in Colombia to see whether there was anything 
Duchardt had missed.

Talking to Sinisterra's friends and family, the specialist discovered that from 
an early age, Sinisterra had been beaten by both his parents. His father used 
his fists, but sometimes his mother would lash him with a horsewhip, or 
submerge his head in a bucket of water.

When Sinisterra was 7, 2 men raped him at knifepoint, an attack so traumatic he 
ran away from home and lived on the streets. There, he was assaulted again. His 
attacker smashed his head against a lamppost so hard he was unconscious for 2 
days. When he did finally go home, he was raped repeatedly by a friend of his 
mother who was a known paedophile, and by an elder brother who was high on 
drugs. While he was in his teens, 2 of his other brothers were murdered, one of 
them in front of him.

Gabrielsen also had Sinisterra assessed by a forensic neuropsychologist, 
Professor Antolin Llorente of the University of Maryland, who found that 
Sinisterra had an IQ of 68, below the threshold of what American law then 
called "mental retardation". His head injuries had left him with permanent 
"organic brain damage". This impaired his cognitive abilities, and he was 
unable to read or write.

It became clear that the view the original trial jury had of Sinisterra was far 
from complete. But almost as troubling as the details of his childhood were the 
reasons why Duchardt had failed to uncover them.

It turned out that Duchardt had left the preparation of the penalty phase to 
his junior co-counsel, Jennifer Herndon, who filed an affidavit describing her 
role for the appeal. In this she said that before the trial opened, she had 
also been getting ready for an unrelated capital case in St Louis, and was 
extremely busy. She said she had urged Duchardt to ask to have the trial 
postponed, to give them more time. He declined. She also said she had begged 
him to employ a mitigation specialist. In 10 years' experience of capital 
trials, she said, she had never known a defence team without one.

Finally, just 4 weeks before the trial began, Herndon had travelled alone to 
Sinisterra's home town, Buenaventura, and interviewed some of his family via an 
interpreter, but these were only "get acquainted" interviews, designed to 
establish "rapport and trust with the family". They contained nothing revealing 
about his early life.

It is true, as Duchardt said, that it is common to claim "ineffective 
assistance of counsel" in challenges against sentence. Otherwise, a court will 
usually refuse to consider evidence that could have been heard at the trial. On 
the other hand, it is very hard to win such claims: the judge not only must be 
persuaded that the trial lawyer did a poor job, but that there is a "reasonable 
probability" that the unheard testimony would have produced a different outcome 
- a very high bar.

In April 1998, 7 months before Sinisterra's trial began, the supreme court 
reviewed a case with a direct bearing on his - the death sentence imposed on 
Terry Williams, a murderer tried in a state court in Virginia. Like Sinisterra, 
Williams had endured an appalling childhood, marked by frequent and extreme 
sexual and physical abuse, and had grave intellectual disabilities. None of 
this emerged until after he was sentenced.

The court decided that the mitigating evidence the jury never heard was 
compelling enough to save Williams's life, and that his lawyer's failure to 
produce it amounted to ineffective assistance. Had he cited this, and uncovered 
the evidence that made it relevant, this binding precedent should have been a 
great help to Duchardt's defence. But he did not.

In 2002, the Supreme Court also issued a general ban on executing anyone who 
was "mentally retarded", deeming this "the purposeless and needless imposition 
of pain and suffering".

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I contacted Duchardt, he readily agreed to be interviewed, stipulating 
that we should meet in his favourite restaurant, Arthur Bryant's Barbecue, in 
the Kansas City jazz district - a multiracial neighbourhood that once nurtured 
musicians such as Charlie Parker. Duchardt was proud of that heritage and proud 
of the restaurant, whose walls are decorated with photos of famous customers 
such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Steven Spielberg and Jack 
Nicholson. Duchardt insisted he would be paying, and after we met a second time 
in another traditional restaurant closer to his home, he told me to put my 
wallet away, saying I could pay when we met in England, which he hoped would be 
soon.

He hadn't a bad word to say about anyone. The prosecutors he faced in court 
might be trying to kill his clients, but they were, he said, "in my experience, 
some of the best of the best of the local bar, who also take their duties to 
uphold the law very seriously. To call these folks worthy opponents against 
defence attorneys like me would be to say the least."

Duchardt said that although the people he defended had committed horrifying 
crimes, "very few are any different to you or me. Some are among the nicest 
people I've met. It's a classic case of 'there but for the grace of God go I'. 
No matter what the facts of the case, most of us in the capital defence bar 
believe we should save every client's life, and experience bitter, personal 
disappointment over a death penalty verdict."

In the mid-1990s, Duchardt tried to prevent African-Americans charged with 
capital murder being tried by all-white juries in the Missouri state system. 
However, he admitted that when it came to death penalty defence, he had learned 
"on the job" - without any of the specialised training that has since become 
standard for "death-qualified" attorneys.

Fresh out of law school in 1980, he spent 15 years at the Missouri state public 
defender's office. "30 years ago, none of that specialisation existed," he 
said. "I was hired as an assistant public defender in the office in Clay 
County, a suburban portion of the Kansas City area. A year later, I was running 
that office." 4 years into his career, he successfully argued that a double 
murderer and rapist named William Wirth should not be executed. That led to his 
being appointed in a further 5 state capital trials.

Duchardt said he left the public defender system in 1995 after a row with a new 
boss. Since then, he has worked from his home in a Kansas City suburb as a sole 
practitioner. Most of the cases he has taken on in that time have been in the 
federal system, where fees are higher - although, as he pointed out, he was 
still making less than he would in commercial branches of the law.

Here too he has had some success. His first federal capital client, Dennis 
Moore, was sentenced to life, as was the triple killer Demetrius Hargrove in 
2005. Another, an alleged murderer and drug dealer named John P Street, was 
sentenced to death, but Duchardt managed to have his conviction overturned by 
challenging the forensic evidence. Duchardt appears to have been more 
successful with good old-fashioned forensics. His critics accept that in this 
instance, he did a good job. For the past 20 years, Duchardt said, he has 
defended "in most of the federal capital cases in the Western District of 
Missouri" - 1/2 half the entire state.

Duchardt has no lack of confidence in his abilities. He was, he added, proud to 
be "old-school", a term he used several times. He also said that his critics, 
with their faddish modern theories, knew much less than he did about how to 
impress juries - especially when it came to the penalty phase of trials. There, 
he said, he was proud to be a maverick. The American Bar Association could 
insist all it liked that capital defence teams must include a mitigation 
specialist, but in his view, they were usually of little value. "I do not 
follow orthodoxy," he said. His voice became a sneer: such specialists focused 
on mere "social work type issues", and he considered these irrelevant.

"As a lawyer, you have to understand your audience. Social work perspectives 
are accepted by a lot of well-educated, liberal people," he said. "But there 
are a lot of people on juries who don't have that education." The problem with 
lawyers who tried to impose this approach was that they did not realise that 
often, it just didn't work. "There's a saying in American football: when your 
opponents can stop the plays, you need to find a new one."

In the UK, it is axiomatic that a judge who has tried a case will never be 
appointed to hear its appeal. In America, however, one of the system's 
peculiarities is that the judge who originally tried a capital case - and 
appointed the defence lawyer - will often be asked to decide whether that trial 
was fair. Few judges will relish admitting they got such matters of life and 
death wrong. Another peculiarity of the system is that in order to save his 
former client from execution, the lawyer must admit he made mistakes - which is 
something not many lawyers are keen to do.

Duchardt was appointed to all his federal capital cases by 2 judges, Gary 
Fenner and Fernando Gaitan. They were, he said, known for being tough, but 
"I've known both of them for years, and if you wanted to pick 2 guys to sit 
down and have a beer with, you'd pick those 2. Fernando Gaitan has a dry sense 
of humour; Gary Fenner is just a very nice guy."

Later, he amplified his comments in an email. "I believe both of those men are 
well-educated, well-experienced, and smart lawyers, and at the same time are 
very fine persons ... whenever I have a case assigned to either of those 2 
judges, I always rest assured that my client will get a fair hearing on the 
fact and the law."

It was Fenner who presided over Sinisterra's trial in 2000, and Fenner who 
dealt with his appeal. After the appeal lawyer Gabrielsen filed it, Duchardt 
set out an affidavit about his conduct of the trial, in which he insisted that 
he had always been "aware of all the information" about his client's 
background, but had chosen not to use it for unspecified "strategic" reasons. 
He admitted that he had not known about Sinisterra's cognitive disabilities.

In December 2007, Judge Fenner rejected the appeal, quoting extensively from 
Duchardt's affidavit in his ruling. He concluded that far from providing 
ineffective assistance, the "strategic decisions of Mr Duchardt were well 
reasoned, as reflected by the record and the oversight of the court".

But the case wasn't over. Sinisterra appealed to the 8th circuit court of 
appeals, 1 of the 12 federal appeals courts, the last rung in the ladder below 
the US supreme court. This "remanded" it back to Judge Fenner, ordering him to 
conduct a hearing, in which the witnesses to Sinisterra's childhood abuse gave 
evidence.

Duchardt also testified in person. Contradicting his earlier affidavit, he now 
admitted that before the trial, he had known nothing about the abuse Sinisterra 
had endured in childhood. But he blamed Herndon for this gap in his knowledge, 
saying he believed that when she went to Colombia, she would "exhaust all 
leads". Gabrielsen commented: "He threw her under the bus."

Sinisterra's appeal lawyers were hopeful that after this hearing, the death 
sentence might be quashed. They never got a chance to find out. In March 2013, 
Sinisterra died from a heart attack in prison. Fenner had given no indication 
which way he was likely to rule, and the legal saga was over.

Gabrielsen still regards the case with bitterness. "Fred said in his affidavit 
that he knew all about Sinisterra's background, and decided not to use it. Yet 
he didn't even go to Colombia. And Judge Fenner simply believed everything Fred 
said." As for Duchardt, he said he could not comment on the details of this or 
any of his cases beyond what was in the legal record.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1998, a 16-year-old named Jennifer Long, who lived on the Missouri side of 
Kansas City disappeared. All efforts to find her proved futile. The following 
year, while a habitual criminal named Wes Purkey was in a Kansas state jail 
awaiting trial for murdering an 80-year-old woman, he said that he had picked 
Long up in his car, kidnapped and murdered her. This was a crime that involved 
the crossing of the Kansas-Missouri state line, which bisects Kansas City. That 
meant that Purkey was tried in federal court. He explained the absence of 
Long's body by saying that, having raped her and stabbed her to death, he had 
dismembered her remains and burned them in his fireplace.

Duchardt was appointed by Judge Gaitan to represent Purkey. To use Duchardt's 
term, the facts of murder cases do not get much "uglier" than this. The 
prosecution decided to seek the death penalty, and it was clear that given 
Purkey's confession, the best chance of saving his life would come during the 
2nd, penalty phase.

A mitigation specialist might have found plenty of material to make a case. 
Purkey, who was raised in Wichita, Kansas, had endured an almost unimaginably 
awful childhood. He was just six years old when his alcoholic mother began to 
abuse him sexually, the start of years of frequent, escalating abuse. On 
numerous occasions, Purkey witnessed his mother having sex with strangers. His 
father was also an alcoholic, and beat Purkey, telling him that only through 
violence could he show his worth as a man. Purkey was also seriously injured in 
a car crash, in which he suffered permanent brain damage.

Purkey's lifelong friend Peggy Noe recalled in a later affidavit that when they 
were teenagers, he told her his mother was sexually abusing him. When she asked 
for details, "he would start stuttering really bad, to the point he couldn't 
even talk". Once Purkey brought Noe to his family home. It was afternoon, but 
"when we went in, his mother was in the bed in her nightgown, either drunk or 
hungover ... Wes was ashamed of the abuse and ashamed that his home life was so 
horrible." When they were in their 20s, they shared a motel room on a road 
trip, and she discovered he was still wetting his bed.

Purkey drifted into alcoholism and drugs, and spent time in prison: 1st for 
minor offences, and then, in 1980, for attempted murder. In 1987, by then 35, 
he was seen by a prison psychologist, Dr Rex Newton. Purkey asked him for 
therapy to deal with his childhood trauma and to help him turn his life around.

Newton, the prison psychologist, wrote that Purkey "displayed behaviours and 
characteristics common among many men in prison who started life being sexually 
abused by family members. The sexual abuse made Mr Purkey feel dirty and 
unworthy inside ... those feelings turned to anger and rage in his adolescence 
when he became mature enough to understand how he was victimised." He 
concluded: "Horrific things were done to Wesley Purkey throughout his childhood 
that sent him on a life path so filled with rage it practically guaranteed his 
ending up in prison."

As he prepared for Purkey's trial in November 2002, Duchardt decided once again 
not to employ a mitigation specialist. Instead, he relied on Mic Armstrong, a 
guilt-phase investigator and friend from his time with the state defender's 
office. Duchardt told me that Armstrong, who died in 2015, was an "exceptional" 
investigator.

Duchardt did give the jury some information about Purkey's childhood history of 
abuse. But he and Armstrong had failed to speak to Dr Rex Newton, so there was 
no corroboration. Without it, the prosecution was able to turn it against 
Purkey, thanks to testimony from Dr Park Dietz, a forensic psychologist. 
According to Dietz, Purkey's claim to have endured physical and sexual abuse in 
childhood was a pack of lies, dreamed up to save him from lethal injection: the 
sort of thing criminals said when "facing capital murder charges and have 
people looking for bad things in childhood to help in mitigation". The 
prosecutor called Purkey's story the "abuse excuse", claiming it was a 
"fairytale".

Purkey was sentenced to death. It was only when his new legal team began to 
prepare his 2255 appeal, which was heard in 2008, that the evidence that might 
have produced a different outcome started to emerge. Purkey's brother, Gary, 
had not only witnessed their mother's abuse of Purkey, but had also been 
sexually assaulted by her on multiple occasions. His story, properly researched 
by a skilled mitigation specialist, might have done much to add credibility to 
Purkey's own account. But the prospects of the jury hearing it had been sharply 
reduced by the fact that when Duchardt showed up at Gary's house in order to 
interview him, he brought along his teenage son. This, Gary explained to 
Purkey's appeal lawyers, made it impossible for him to make painful, personal 
disclosures.

Wes Purkey had a daughter, Angie: she could also have told the jury important 
things about her father and his dysfunctional background. She did take the 
stand at the trial, but examining her as a witness, Duchardt seemed to have had 
little idea of what she might say. The reason was that Duchardt and Armstrong 
had introduced themselves to Angie by arriving unannounced at her wedding, 
where, amid the celebrations, they sought to interview her about her father's 
pending murder trial.

In 2003, the year after Purkey's trial, a supreme court judgment overturned the 
death sentence imposed on convicted murderer Kevin Wiggins on the grounds he 
had been severely abused as a child. This case seemed to have considerable 
implications for Purkey's appeal. In its judgment, the supreme court reiterated 
that the American Bar Association guidelines requiring mitigation specialists 
and the fullest possible investigation must be followed - and failure to do so 
would usually amount to ineffective assistance of counsel.

Duchardt knew about the Wiggins case when he came to submit an affidavit, 
justifying his conduct of Purkey's trial, to Judge Gaitan. But in the course of 
an astonishing, self-justifying account that ran to 117 pages, he argued that 
this case had no relevance to Purkey and criticised his client???s appeals 
lawyers. "Despite the invective tone of the arguments advanced by counsel for 
Purkey, there is no factual or legal support for the arguments themselves," he 
wrote.

Much of the affidavit consisted of detailed explanations as to why Duchardt had 
decided not to call particular witnesses, and it made assertions that had never 
been tested in court.

He admitted that he failed to tell the jury that Gary, like his brother, had 
been sexually abused by their mother, because he did not know about it. He 
claimed he had spoken to Dr Newton - although Newton said he had not.

Duchardt's affidavit shocked the legal establishment. Purkey's current lawyer, 
Rebecca Woodman, said: "He went way beyond what would have been acceptable, not 
only revealing confidential information, covered by attorney-client privilege, 
but actually accusing Purkey's new counsel of lying."

The appeals process presents the original defence lawyer with an awkward 
choice: admitting error might help save the client's life, but at cost to the 
lawyer's reputation. According to Professor Sean O'Brien of the University of 
Missouri law school, having once defended Purkey, Duchardt had "switched sides 
against his client". O'Brien added: "The most troubling sections are when he 
claimed that witnesses weren't called for 'strategic' reasons, even though 
those witnesses were never interviewed. You can't possibly know what you have 
never bothered to learn. That's not strategy, it's a failure to prepare."

"This argumentative response ... did not seek to protect Purkey's interests," 
wrote Professor Tigran W Eldred in the Hofstra Law Review. "Rather, it was a 
full-throttled defence by Purkey's trial lawyer of his own conduct." In 
Eldred's view, this was unethical. Lawyers had continuing obligations to their 
clients, especially those whose lives were at stake, and even if they were 
"motivated to protect their own self-interests", they must not "rationalise 
their own misbehaviour".

Judge Gaitan rejected Purkey's appeal. Purkey appealed to the 8th circuit, and 
then the supreme court, again without success. He has now exhausted his 
appeals.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Duchardt's next client to be sentenced to death was accused of a crime even 
more dreadful, if possible, than Purkey's. The prosecution claimed that having 
met the heavily pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett in an online chatroom, Lisa 
Montgomery arranged to visit her in December 2004. Then, it was alleged, she 
strangled her, cut her unborn baby from her womb and took the infant home to 
care for her.

Duchardt was assigned to the case by Judge Fenner at the end of April 2006, but 
until the end of that year, he was getting ready for the imminent appeal and 
retrial of John P Street and was too busy to do much preparation, so he only 
visited Montgomery 3 times. Montgomery, it seemed, did not trust men, and in an 
effort to develop a rapport with her, Duchardt sent his wife, Ryland, to visit 
her in prison 16 times. Ryland had no experience of investigating death penalty 
cases. Her recent expertise was in horse therapy for autistic children.

As the trial date approached in October 2007, Duchardt was focused on the guilt 
phase, convinced he could secure a not-guilty verdict through 2 contradictory 
strategies. The 1st was to suggest that Stinnett was killed not by Montgomery 
but by Montgomery's brother, Tommy, who had then given his sister the baby. But 
shortly before the trial it emerged that Tommy had an alibi: at the time of the 
murder, he had been with his probation officer.

Duchardt was forced to abandon this line of defence just a week before the 
trial began, and it had a disastrous consequence. The rest of Montgomery's 
family, who might have been able to give the "life story" mitigation evidence 
that could save her from death row, believing she had tried to blame her 
brother, withdrew their cooperation. Duchardt's 2nd strategy was to admit that 
although Montgomery was the killer, she was not guilty by reason of insanity - 
because, he believed, she had been suffering from a phantom pregnancy, or 
pseudocyesis.

The pseudocyesis theory did not stand up. Before the trial started, the 
prosecution managed to have the diagnosis offered by Duchardt's main expert 
excluded from the case altogether, on the grounds it had no scientific basis. 
Lisa Montgomery was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Her appeals 
team, led by Kelley Henry from an office in Nashville, dug deep into her 
background, swiftly learning there were very good reasons why she did not trust 
men. Of all Duchardt's clients, the physical and sexual abuse she had suffered 
as a child and young woman was the most extreme and relentless.

Her stepfather raped her over many years. When she turned 13, he built a 
special room in his trailer where he could attack her in privacy. He also 
stored liquor there, which she would drink in order to block out her horrifying 
reality. The following year, her mother burst in as she was being attacked. 
There followed what her appeal filing describes as "the most terrifying night 
of her life", as her mother held a gun against her daughter's head.

Montgomery tried to escape her chaotic home by marrying when she was just 18. 
The couple had 4 children. But both this and a subsequent marriage were marked 
by further violence and abuse. The experts who examined Montgomery 
post-conviction found that unknown to her trial jury, her upbringing had left 
her suffering from florid psychosis, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress 
disorder. She was often disassociated from reality, and as a result of her many 
beatings, had suffered permanent brain damage.

But before her trial, neither the prosecution nor the defence had investigated 
the relationship between Montgomery's many symptoms and her appalling history. 
She had seemed to the jury impassive and unemotional, as if she bore no 
remorse. In fact, this was the result of powerful antipsychotic medication. 
About the only relevant condition she had not suffered from was pseudocyesis. 
The evidence that Lisa Montgomery was a victim as much as a perpetrator should 
have been overwhelming.

Just as he had in the Purkey case, Duchardt responded to Montgomery's appeal 
with an affidavit of more than 100 pages defending his conduct, insisting that 
"none of the issues raised" by her appeal lawyers "has merit". He added: "I 
have tried and prepared more than a dozen capital cases, and I have addressed 
complex mental health issues in many ... My guess is that my credentials stack 
up as well as any capital case attorney or 'mitigation specialist' to be found. 
I know that my credentials are as good or better than those who have been 
relied upon as experts by Current Counsel for Ms Montgomery."

In fact, Duchardt concluded, his former client's appeal lawyers were nothing 
more than "spoiled, selfish prima donnas". This time, Judge Fenner did not 
accept Duchardt's word, but held a hearing. Duchardt testified over 2 days in 
November 2016. On the 1st, he sported a Kansas City Chiefs football team tie. 
On the 2nd, he replaced it with one bearing the stars and stripes.

With the prosecutors, his demeanour was friendly: he even inquired after the 
health of the "lovely wife" of the lawyer cross-examining him. His attitude 
while being questioned by Montgomery's appellate defence was more hostile. 
Repeatedly, he interrupted 1 of her lawyers, Amy Harwell, telling her 
patronisingly there was a "problem with the way you're asking the questions, Ms 
Harwell".

When it was put to him that he "didn't like mitigation specialists", he denied 
this, saying: "I don't know where this comes from." He refused to accept that 
pursuing the pseudocyesis line had been an error. As for the evidence of 
Montgomery's appalling background, in Duchardt's view, much of the research 
into this by other lawyers was "garbage".

It was clear that Duchardt was not going to admit he had made mistakes, even 
though it would have helped his former client if he did so. Montgomery's 
defence lawyers declined to comment for this article. Fenner's decision whether 
to quash her sentence is expected by the end of the year.

According to Professor O'Brien, by defending himself so fiercely, once again, 
Duchardt seems to be trying to impress the judges who appoint him. But, he 
added: "The court is not the client."

The election of Donald Trump has set the clock ticking. The Obama 
administration has not sought to execute anyone on federal death row, although 
there are several inmates who have exhausted their appeals. Trump has been an 
outspoken supporter of capital punishment for 30 years, as is Jeff Sessions, 
whom Trump has announced he will nominate as US attorney general. "Death 
penalty, it's going to happen," Trump said in 1 campaign speech. "I expect use 
of the death penalty to be ramped up really quickly," said Rebecca Woodman. 
"Defending capital clients is going to be much harder."

(source: David Rose, The Guardian)






CALIFORNIA:

Seal Beach Mass Murderer's Death Penalty Up to State AG ---- Whether or not 
Scott Dekraai will bet the death penalty is ultimately up to the California 
Attorney General, according to OCDA's office.


Revelations from Tuesday show that the ultimate decision on Scott Dekraai's 
future lay with the California Attorney General, according to a recent release 
from the Orange County District Attorney's office.

"It will be up to the California Attorney General to decide whether or not to 
pursue the death penalty for Scott Dekraai, to take this case to a jury to 
decide whether or not the defendant will get the death penalty, or to appeal 
the decision. The OCDA will support her decision," OCDA Chief of Staff Susan 
Kang Schroeder said in a recent statement.

"The defendant stands convicted of 8 murders with special circumstances and one 
attempted murder," she said. "If he does not receive the death penalty then he 
will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The property is currently the most expensive listing in Malibu, even for the 
ultra-posh beachside town.

"Our hearts, of course, first go to the victims and their families in this 
case, and we feel tremendous pain for their loss. Many of them know that we 
truly care about them and that we worked tirelessly and vigorously to seek 
justice in this case. The OCDA worked hard along with the Seal Beach Police 
Department and many first responders to make sure this defendant was convicted. 
As a result of hard work by local law enforcement, Dekraai will never see 
freedom outside of prison. No matter who handles this case, the OCDA believes 
that these murders were callous, cruel, and committed with a malignant heart. 
The defendant deserves the ultimate punishment of death."

(source: patch.com)






USA:

Decline in capital punishment is result of America getting tough, not soft, on 
crime


On Nov. 8, Nebraskans voted to repeal controversial 2015 legislation banning 
execution in the state. The result comes as no surprise; national opinion polls 
show a strong majority support the death penalty, though the number of 
executions and support for them have declined since the turn of the century.

While eliminating the death penalty is regarded by progressives as important 
criminal justice reform, the decline in executions across the U.S. in recent 
decades is more an acknowledgment that America's "tough on crime" policies have 
succeeded than that they have failed. Indeed, the fact that the death penalty 
has come under scrutiny in a state like Nebraska suggests that conservative 
states could soon be phasing out capital punishment for fiscal purposes.

Use of the death penalty started declining in the 1960s and 70s. Historic lows 
in public support of the death penalty dominated the 60s, and Supreme Court 
challenges almost eliminated execution altogether. The landmark 1972 Furman 
decision declared all death penalty legislation unconstitutional, which wiped 
the slate clean until the court upheld revised death penalty laws in 1976.

The Furman ruling

With a doubtful outlook on the future of execution, politicians sought workable 
alternatives to remain tough on the worst offenders.

Prior to Furman, 7 states had life without parole (LWOP). Between Furman and 
1990, 25 states and the District of Columbia put LWOP statutes on the books. 
Today, only Alaska refrains from punishing offenders with life sentences - and 
it has no death penalty, either.

The expansion of LWOP legislation has broadened and increased the power of 
states to lock up offenders for the rest of their lives, making it an agreeable 
substitute to the dying practice of executing criminals for both those who want 
to be tough on crime and those who morally oppose putting criminals to death.

Indeed, the post-Furman peak in executions (98 in 1999) did not halve the 
pre-Furman peak (199 in 1935) despite public support for capital punishment 
reaching an historic high of 80 % in 1994.

Meanwhile prisons, as of 2012, have filled with almost 50,000 prisoners 
sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Compare that to the 8,446 
sentenced to death between 1973 and 2013.

Voters ensured the death penalty will endure in Nebraska by the letter of the 
law, yet execution may have reached a technical end before any ballots were 
cast. Like many states, Nebraska has seen the use and allowed methods of 
execution limited by court challenges and legislation.

Currently, Nebraska has found no reliable supplier to replenish the state's 
store of the 3 drugs required to perform a lethal injection, the only method of 
execution allowed under a 2009 state law. Electrocution was ruled by the state 
supreme court to be "cruel and unusual punishment" in 2008.

Other states have encountered problems with lethal injection, which is the only 
shared method of execution among the 31 states with the death penalty. 
Pharmaceutical companies in the United States and the European Union no longer 
sell drugs to states intending to use them in executions.

To tighten the market for lethal injection drugs further, the FDA has blocked 
several attempts to import lethal injection drugs from elsewhere, including 
Nebraska's 2015 purchase of the drug sodium thiopental from India.

Because lethal injection has been used in all but 15 of the 841 executions 
since 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, these economic 
and regulatory barriers pose an existential threat to capital punishment in the 
United States.

Today as in the late 1970s and 80s, conservative state lawmakers find 
themselves at a crossroad where they can fight federal restrictions on 
execution or find alternative ways to stay tough on crime.

The enduring legacy of "tough on crime" policies from the 1980s and beyond 
allows for a painless switch away from capital punishment to the expanded use 
of LWOP, increased mandatory minimum sentences, and broadened criminalization 
of nonviolent offenses.

Because the additional cost of sustaining the death penalty is estimated to be 
as high as $14 million annually, conservative politicians and advocacy groups 
in Nebraska and elsewhere have opted for the cheaper alternatives and added 
capital punishment to their list of ineffective and costly government programs 
to strike down.

Thus, the decline of capital punishment has not come as the result of moral 
concern regarding how the government punishes criminals but because of a simple 
exercise in fiscal responsibility.

(source: Michael Kotrous is a graduate of Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., 
where he studied economics and journalism. He is a former student research 
scholar with the Institute for Economic Inquiry at the Creighton University 
Heider College of Business--The Hill)

**********

In the US, The Death Penalty Has Now Become A Way of Life - Is There Any Hope?


"To survive, you need to occupy your mind", Ricardo, an inmate at the Allan B. 
Polunsky Unit, Texas's death row, explains to me from behind the thick, 
soundproof glass that separates us. He is encased in a claustrophobically small 
booth and his voice reaches me through a phone. To occupy himself, Ricardo 
writes poems, draws horses, devours books, and listens to current affairs on 
the radio. He has been on death row for over 8 years.

Last week, 3 states in the US - California, Oklahoma and Nebraska - voted 
overwhelmingly to either retain, strengthen or restore the death penalty. Even 
more consequential is the election of Donald Trump, a vocal and enthusiastic 
supporter of capital punishment who now wields the power to appoint a Supreme 
Court justice.

The fact that the death penalty is getting a comeback should frighten anyone 
committed to human rights and justice. Over the summer, on behalf of Amicus 
ALJ, I worked as a law clerk in a capital defense office in Austin that 
represents death row inmates in their appeals to the State of Texas. My work in 
researching and investigating capital cases directly exposed me to the 
injustices that result from the application of the death penalty, namely, the 
ways in which race, socio-economics, violation of due process and ineffective 
legal counsel determine the fates of our clients. Race remains the most 
reliable predictor of whether a defendant will be executed.

Prolonged isolation devastates the psyche. And yet contact visits are 
prohibited at the Polunsky Unit. From the moment they are sentenced, inmates 
are deprived of human touch: they will never again experience a handshake, much 
less the embrace of a loved one. Other than a few minutes to shower and an hour 
alone in a larger recreational cage, inmates inhabit a small cement enclosure 
for 23 hours a day. At least 10 % of the death row population consists of young 
veterans with PTSD, leaving one to contemplate how much such conditions must 
exacerbate their trauma. Decades of solitary confinement meant that many of the 
inmates I spoke to were battling depression, suicidal thoughts and 
hallucinations.

"Polunsky is full of success stories", an attorney at my office once quipped. 
She was not being facetious. Indeed, more often than not, those that I met on 
death row disproved the logic of capital punishment: like all human beings, 
they manifest a capacity to change. Many had taught themselves to read or 
write, using those skills to study law and correspond to the outside world. 
Others had learned sign language in order to communicate across the aisle of 
the visitation room, to other inmates locked in glass booths. Some had applied 
themselves to yoga or meditation to stay sane. They were resilient and hopeful. 
They were 'rehabilitated.' But still, they will be executed.

In the US, the death penalty is more than state policy: it is a way of life. It 
has taken on a political resonance, shorthand for elected officials to signify 
a cluster of positions on other issues. "Law and order" candidates are not just 
"tough on crime," but tough on immigrants and minorities, rooted in tradition 
and conservative on social issues.

On my way back to Austin, we drive through Huntsville, the notorious site of 
Texas's execution chambers. Right across the road from the Huntsville Unit, the 
prison housing Texas's execution chamber, a local restaurant called "Mr 
Hamburger" proudly advertises its specialty "Killer" and "Old Sparky" burgers. 
One burger named after Huntsville's most famous sojourners; another named after 
their historical demise by electrocution on the euphemistically-called "Old 
Sparky".

The original "Old Sparky", an electric chair that killed 361 prisoners from 
1924 and 1964, is housed across town, at the Texas Prison Museum. The museum 
also includes an exhibit of lethal injection syringes lined up neatly in a row, 
with cards under each to explain its purpose - from sedation to death. Children 
under 6 visit for free, and for a dollar per person, visitors can wear striped 
shirts and take selfies behind bars.

In some quarters of the US, therefore, the death penalty has been reduced to a 
tourist attraction - a testament to a culture of disrespect towards human life. 
Capital punishment is not just state-sanctioned killing, but state-sanctioned 
dehumanization.

Is there any hope? For now, hope seems to lie in the work of those tireless 
advocates who in the absurdly mundane visitation room at Polunsky courageously 
play the roles of social worker, friend and champion in an increasingly 
unforgiving world. Most of all, hope lies behind the soundproof glass, where 
human beings, continue to endeavour at living a meaningful life ...

(source: Sam Mottahedan, Co-Director at Vocalise UK; former intern at Amicus, 
huffingtonpost.co.uk)