[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, N.H., N.C, ., FLA., MISS., OHIO

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 7




TEXAS:

Death penalty does not represent justice


I strongly disagree with the recent Amarillo Globe-News editorial on the death 
penalty (Editorial: Death penalty can be justified, Aug. 20, amarillo.com.)

Society can be protected without taking another human life since we now have 
"life without parole" as an optional punishment for capital murder.

Furthermore, our criminal justice system is very imperfect - many innocent 
people have been sent to death row - at least 13 in Texas and over 150 
nationwide.

And there is strong evidence that we have executed innocent people.

Even if there is strong evidence that someone is guilty, the death penalty is 
applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner because of economic, racial and 
geographic biases in the criminal justice system.

Because of these problems, the death penalty will probably be declared 
unconstitutional in the not-too-distant future.

David Atwood

Founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

Houston

(source: Letter to the Editor, Amarillo Globe-News)

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

Texas appeals judge questions fairness of life without parole----Once a 
Republican, now a Democrat, Judge Larry Meyers says no-parole sentences lack 
legal protections.


Life without parole is a slow-motion death penalty, longtime Texas judge says.

Judge Larry Meyers, the longest-serving member of the state's highest criminal 
court, has grown uncomfortable with the way Texas allows for life in prison 
without parole, calling it a slow-motion death sentence without the same legal 
protections given to defendants who face the death penalty.

It can be argued, Meyers said, that the prospect of decades of prison - ended 
only by death from old age, medical problems or even violence - is as harsh or 
harsher than execution.

Even so, life without parole can be given in some capital murder cases without 
jurors answering two questions that must be considered before issuing a death 
sentence - is the defendant a future danger to society, and are there any 
mitigating factors such as mental disability or childhood abuse that weigh 
against capital punishment?

"I'm not saying the death penalty is unconstitutional. I think right now it's 
about as fair as it could be," Meyers said. "But there are 2 variations of the 
death penalty; one is just longer than the other. People are getting a (life 
without parole) death sentence without the same safeguards and procedures that 
you get when there is a death sentence."

Meyers, the only Democrat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, plans to make 
changing the life-without-parole system an issue of his re-election campaign, 
an admittedly uphill battle after he switched from the Republican Party in 2013 
over disagreements in its direction under the surging tea party movement.

His Republican opponent in the Nov. 8 election, 22-year state District Judge 
Mary Lou Keel of Houston, believes Meyers has strayed from his principal task 
as a judge.

"Policy issues like this are best left to the Legislature," Keel said. "Doesn't 
he have enough work to do as a judge?"

Keel and Meyers are vying for 1 of the 9 seats on a court that has the last 
word on criminal matters in Texas.

Death row down 40%

Life without parole, an option for capital murder cases since 2005, has been 
credited with helping to sharply reduce the number of death row inmates by 
allowing prosecutors to reserve capital punishment for the worst cases, yet 
ensure that other convicted murderers are permanently removed from society.

Since life without parole became an option, the population of Texas' death row 
has fallen to 244 inmates, down about 40 p%, as the pace of executions has 
outstripped the number of new death sentences.

In contrast, 782 inmates were serving life without parole for capital murder as 
of July 31.

An additional 54 inmates are serving life without parole after repeat 
convictions for sexually violent offenses, including crimes against children, 
since the Legislature allowed the punishment for the crime of continuous sexual 
abuse in 2007.

In capital murder cases, life without parole is handed down 2 ways:

-- In cases in which the prosecutor seeks death by lethal injection, if jurors 
convict, a 2nd trial begins over the punishment.

Prosecutors try to prove that the defendant will pose a future danger to 
society unless put to death, and defense lawyers attempt to convince jurors 
that execution isn't the appropriate punishment. Jurors must be unanimous on 
the future danger question, and they must all reject the defense's mitigating 
evidence.

If 1 juror disagrees on either point, the sentence automatically becomes life 
without parole.

-- In cases in which the prosecutor waives the death penalty, life without 
parole is the only available option for capital murder.

Seeking life without parole is by far the simpler option. Jurors are easier to 
seat - death penalty opponents aren't allowed on juries if execution is an 
option - and there is no punishment phase trial. The appeals process also is 
less rigorous, with death row inmates granted 2 appeals before the state's 
highest criminal court, while inmates serving life without parole go through 
the normal process.

Meyers, a 23-year member of the Court of Criminal Appeals, believes life 
without parole has been made too simple, providing "an easy, inexpensive way of 
getting the death penalty."

It would be fairer, he said, to let jurors consider some variation of the 
future danger question and to allow defense lawyers to present mitigating 
evidence. If jurors cannot agree that life without parole is appropriate, the 
defendant would get a life sentence and be eligible for parole after 40 years 
or some other suitable time, Meyers said.

The bigger reform - what Meyers called the "smarter fix" - would be for the 
Legislature to end capital punishment, making life without parole the ultimate 
punishment and including an option for parole.

The political reality in Texas, by far the nation's top death penalty state, 
makes that an extremely unlikely option for legislators, Meyers admits. "But 
right now, as I see it, there's just 2 options - both for death," he said.

Change of heart

Meyers' misgivings fall short of concerns raised by another judge on his court, 
Elsa Alcala, who said this summer that her confidence in the death penalty had 
been eroded after weighing appeals in cases with mistaken witness testimony, 
exonerations based on previously unavailable DNA tests and scientific 
advancements that have called earlier expert testimony into question.

Meyers said his change of heart on life without parole didn't come about 
because of appeals. Nobody is going to tell his court that they improperly 
received a no-parole term when the alternative is a death sentence, he said.

Instead, Meyers said, his qualms arose after coming to see the sentence as a 
delayed death penalty - one that is particularly harsh on young people - when a 
typical murder conviction is often enough to lock away killers until they are 
no longer a danger.

When the Legislature debated life without parole in the mid-2000s, prosecutors 
were divided on the best course to take, but many opposed adding a "long, 
drawn-out" sentencing hearing to determine the difference between a no-parole 
sentence and parole eligibility after 40 years, said Shannon Edmonds, staff 
attorney with the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.

"You could argue that it's not much difference. It was a lot of squeeze without 
much juice," Edmonds said.

In addition, many capital murder cases are decided by a plea bargain that 
allows defendants to choose perpetual prison time over execution. Some 
prosecutors feared losing bargaining leverage to a defense lawyer who 
threatened, for example, to drag out a sentencing hearing for 3 weeks unless 
offered a sentence with parole for a lesser crime like murder, Edmonds said.

Life without parole raises questions about whether Texas is imprisoning people 
long past the point that they "will ever be dangerous," said Kathryn Kase, 
executive director of Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit that provides capital 
murder legal representation at trial and on appeal.

"We've got places in prisons that look like nursing homes. It makes me wonder, 
as a taxpayer, are these people dangerous? Why are we paying the extra cost of 
imprisoning them when they are geriatrics?" Kase said.

(source: Austin American-Statesman)






NEW HAMPSHIRE:

Democratic candidates for governor spar on opioid fight, 
immigration----Candidates debate in final week before primary


The Democratic candidates for governor sought to distinguish themselves from 
each other in Tuesday night's debate on WMUR.

Polls show that Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern, former state Rep. Mark 
Connolly and former Portsmouth Mayor Steve Marchand are largely unknown to 
voters, so the debate was an opportunity to make first impressions on voters 
with one week to go before the primary.

Marchand called himself the progressive candidate in the race.

"I am the progressive choice for governor," Marchand said. "I'm the only one 
here that voted for Bernie (Sanders) this spring. I'm the only one 100 % 
against both Northern Pass and the death penalty. I'm the only one with a plan 
for paid family leave and that supports legalization of marijuana."

On the opioid crisis, all said they favor more aggressive action and more 
funding for treatment. To pay for it, Van Ostern said that part of his plan is 
making sure that the state's alcohol fund will go toward fighting addiction 
instead of being raided for other purposes.

He also said that expanded Medicaid plays a key role in the fight.

"When we expanded Medicaid to now 50,000 of our fellow citizens, part of that 
coverage now includes substance-abuse disorders," Van Ostern said.

Connolly said that the fight against opioid addiction will be costly,

"This is not a $6 million or $8 million problem, this is a $20 million, $25 
million problem," he said.

He said he would increase the tobacco tax by 10 cents to help pay for it.

Marchand countered that by targeting aid to specific communities for specific 
programs, about $8 million would be needed to help deal with the problem. He 
also said that legalizing and taxing marijuana would help pay for more state 
services.

"I'm the only candidate in this race talking candidly about the need for more 
money," he said. "If you want things that matter, you have to pay for them."

The candidates also addressed the economic pressures on the state caused by its 
aging population. Connolly said immigration is part of the solution.

"We need to welcome immigrants into our state, into our country," Connolly 
said. "And there's a vetting process now of over 2 years for these kind of 
refugees. I welcome the Syrian refugees into our state."

Marchand noted that his family moved to Manchester from Canada, so he has 
personal experience with the issue of immigration.

"When I look to the future of New Hampshire and America's economy, the key to 
our economic growth, the key to getting younger as a state, the key to 
entrepreneurship is increasing the amount of immigration that we have in New 
Hampshire," Marchand said.

Van Ostern said that immigrants seeking a better life in New Hampshire should 
be welcomed, with individualized background checks and assessments that don't 
lead to blanket denials based on their countries of origin.

"I saw a picture a week or two ago of a young boy, a Syrian in Aleppo, I think 
it was, maybe 5 years old, covered in blood and dirt," Van Ostern said. "He was 
in a state of shock. He is not a security threat."

Van Ostern continued to make a $300 million commuter rail project a centerpiece 
of his campaign, saying it will help grow new businesses.

"5600 new jobs will be created by local businesses if we bring passenger rail 
from Boston to Nashua, the airport and the Millyard in Manchester," Van Ostern 
said. "This isn't about what we need to tell voters. This is a product of 
listening to voters."

Connolly and Marchand said they also support commuter rail, though they also 
both called for improving the state's infrastructure. Marchand said that 
bringing in commuter rail as part of a plan to improve roads and bridges across 
the state would help sell the plan to voters.

All the candidates called for more action on dealing with climate change. Van 
Ostern said he has worked on the Executive Council to support more renewable 
energy projects, while Marchand called for increased conservation. Connolly 
said the state should set more aggressive goals for renewable energy.

The 3 candidates all said they support repealing the death penalty, but they 
split on whether they would also commute the death sentence of the state's only 
death row inmate. Michael Addison was sentenced to death for shooting and 
killing Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs.

Van Ostern and Connolly said they would not commute Addison's sentence, but 
Marchand said he would.

"If you believe the death penalty is wrong, and I do, then it is not just wrong 
in the future, it is wrong today, as well," Marchand said.

Van Ostern is viewed as the front-runner in the race for the Democratic 
nomination, but both Connolly and Marchand projected confidence that the race 
is still in play.

(source: WMUR news)






NORTH CAROLINA:

Duke Divinity Students Offer Death Row Inmates a Chance to Tell Their Stories


They say it's not about redemption - that providing North Carolina's 150 death 
row inmates with a voice is an opportunity to both restore a sense of humanity 
among the condemned and give those outside the walls of Central Prison a chance 
to "look within" and, perhaps, contribute to the national debate over the death 
penalty.

But Life Lines, an audio journal for the 147 men and three women living on the 
row created by Duke University Divinity School graduates Chris Agoranos and 
Lars Akerson - not to be confused with LifeLines, a British group that writes 
letters to condemned inmates all over the U.S. - isn't about taking a political 
stand.

"I think the voices speak for themselves, so we don't really need to take a 
firm position," Akerson says. "And it's been amazing to hear the guys' 
reflections on it and to hear how enthusiastic they are just to be heard. 
Something as simple as a telephone or hearing someone else's voice. It's been 
revolutionary for them."

With a recent change in phone-access policy - until June, inmates were only 
authorized to make 1 10-minute call a year, but now they can make calls more 
frequently - they saw a chance to let the inmates' stories be heard. And the 
inmates embraced the Life Lines concept. To date, more than a dozen clips have 
been recorded.

In one, George Wilkerson - a Randolph County man convicted in 2006 of murdering 
an 18-year-old over a $30 drug theft - recites a poem he wrote called "Who Am 
I?" "I come from the broken playground, littered with crack pipes, bullet 
shells, and busted beer bottles, my mom's walk and stale nicotine," he says on 
the recording, which can be heard on the Life Lines SoundCloud page 
(soundcloud.com/lifelinesjournal). "I belong to my dad's hard, heavy leather 
belt, our dingy apartment in the projects, and crispy, spicy, sour-smelling 
kimchi."

But in order to fully realize their dream - an ongoing project that includes 
voices from death rows all over the country - Agoranos and Akerson are asking 
for the public's help. Life Lines is currently an active project on 
Kickstarter. With less than a week remaining, it's raised just over $6,000 of 
its $16,000 goal. That money would go toward paying for prisoners' phone calls, 
which aren't cheap.

"We say that this is about recovering humanity on the inside and outside the 
walls," Agoranos says. "It causes us to look within. I would want this to help 
someone think about how they have been taught to see people that are 
incarcerated as like these irredeemable criminals worthy of death. And I think, 
you know, maybe as the lights go off, you begin to see, 'I've made mistakes, 
too.'"

(source: indyweek.com)






FLORIDA:

Death penalty, symbol of Florida's racial bias


The NAACP and its membership have been at the forefront of efforts across the 
country to end the death penalty. We recognize the disturbing role that racial 
bias has played in the death penalty???s history, and continues to play to this 
day.

Alarmed by the death penalty's racial bias, as well as its errors and high 
cost, much of the country is turning away from it. 7 states in the last decade 
have ended the death penalty, 4 have placed a moratorium on executions, and 
death sentences and executions are at record lows.

Unfortunately, a new report from Harvard Law School shows that a handful of 
counties in Florida are resisting this trend, holding onto an institution 
plagued by racial bias that has no place in society today. Between 2010 and 
2015, only 16 counties - out of 3,143 nationwide - sentenced 5 or more people 
to death. A quarter of these 16 outlier counties are in Florida.

>From the days of lynchings through the years of Jim Crow laws, and even today 
capital punishment has always been deeply affected by race. Although African 
Americans make up just under 13 % of the overall population, 42 % of the people 
currently on death row are black, and almost 35 percent of those who have been 
executed in the U.S. are African American.

The death penalty undermines trust and integrity in the criminal justice system 
because it is racially biased and inhumane.

Currently, 30 states and the federal government have the death penalty, though 
many states rarely use it.

There can be no doubt that race plays a role in the use of the death penalty: a 
2014 study found that jurors in Washington state are 3 times more likely to 
recommend a death sentence for an African American defendant than for a white 
defendant in a similar case.

Furthermore, the race of the victim in a death penalty case appears to have an 
impact: A 2011 study in Louisiana showed that the odds of a death sentence were 
97 % higher for those whose victim was white than those whose victim was 
African American.

The problematic role of race sends the troubling message that in our criminal 
justice system African American lives are less valuable than those of white 
Americans.

As the recent Harvard Law School report explains, the justice systems in these 
counties suffer from prosecutorial misconduct, bad defense, racial bias, and 
harsh sentencing practices against youth and those with intellectual 
impairments. In short, too many Florida counties are making a list that no one 
wants to be on.

Miami-Dade County, as well as Duval, Hillsborough, and Pinellas, make the list 
of counties that most frequently use the death penalty. Of these 4, Duval by 
far produces the most death sentences - a quarter of the state's death 
sentences between 2010 and 2015 - despite accounting for only 5 % of Florida's 
population. With 87 % of the defendants sentenced to death between 2010 and 
2015 being people of color, the racial disparities in Duval are especially 
stark. The fact that such racial disparities persist in the old confederacy 
should trouble us all.

As America moves away from the death penalty, the majority of the counties 
stubbornly hanging onto it are in former slave states - Texas, Louisiana, 
Alabama, and of course Florida. The death penalty remains a symbol of racial 
bias, which lives on in locales with some of the most disturbing histories of 
violence and discrimination against African Americans. Part of coming to terms 
with this past requires ending institutions intricately tied to it, such as the 
death penalty.

For this reason and others, the NAACP is committed to ending the death penalty. 
The recent report from Harvard Law School reminds us of the urgency of 
achieving this goal in Florida. The death penalty causes too much harm to allow 
it to continue. There are more effective ways to respond to violence and keep 
society safe.

(source: Op-Ed; Adora Obi Nweze is the president of the Florida State 
Conference NAACP and a Board Member of the National NAACP----Miami Herald)






MISSISSIPPI:

Mississippi Attorney General Tries to Remove Defense Lawyers Who Challenged 
Suspect Bitemark Evidence


Attorneys for Mississippi death row prisoner Eddie Lee Howard (pictured) are 
seeking to prove his innocence and challenging the questionable expert bite 
mark testimony that persuaded jurors to convict him and sentence him to death 
in 1992. As part of the attack on that evidence, Howard's lawyers recently 
deposed Michael West, the discredited forensic odontologist who testified 
against Howard and many other defendants in the 1990s, primarily in Mississippi 
and Louisiana. A 2-part story by Washington Post columnist Radley Balko 
recounts the combative deposition in which defense lawyers systematically 
picked apart the credibility of West's testimony in Howard's case, and the 
apparent retaliatory efforts by the office of Mississippi's attorney general to 
remove the lawyers from the case after they asked that charges against Howard 
be dropped. West, who was belligerent, openly contemptuous, and profane during 
the deposition, was popular as a prosecution expert witness because he 
purported to be able to match marks to a single individual, excluding all other 
possible suspects through an idiosyncratic technique that, he said, he alone 
was capable of using and could reveal bite marks that other experts couldn't 
find. In the mid-1990s, Newsweek and 60 Minutes profiled West and raised 
questions about the veracity of his techniques. He was later expelled from 
three professional organizations, and several people he testified against have 
later been proven innocent, including Kennedy Brewer, who was exonerated in 
2008 after DNA evidence implicated another suspect, who then confessed to the 
crime. Bitemark claims such as those made by West were the subject of stinging 
criticism in a 2009 report of the National Academies of Science, Strengthening 
Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward. The report criticized 
the field of forensic odontology as lacking any "evidence of an existing 
scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others" 
and "lack[ing] valid evidence to support many of the assumptions made by 
forensic dentists during bite mark comparisons."

In April 2016, Eddie Howard's attorneys arranged a deposition with West in 
advance of a hearing in which they planned to present DNA evidence to support 
Howard's innocence claim. West, who had refused to prepared for. the 
deposition, asserted that he stood by his testimony from Howard's trial, even 
as he contradicted that testimony. Days later, Howard's attorney, Tucker 
Carrington of the Mississippi Innocence Project, sent a letter to Mississippi 
Assistant Attorney General Jason Davis describing the deposition and the new 
evidence and asking Davis to drop the charges against Howard. Davis and 
Attorney General Jim Hood filed a motion the next day challenging the 
competency of Howard's attorneys, despite having vouched for their 
qualifications in a different context less than a year earlier. Howard is 
represented by respected and experienced death penalty attorneys, but a vaguely 
written Mississippi court rule known as Rule 22 could potentially have 
disqualified them. Hood's office has repeatedly used Rule 22 against 
well-qualified attorneys from out-of-state law firms or legal aid groups to 
attempt to exclude them from representing Mississippi prisoners. Almost 
immediately after Hood's motion was filed, the Mississippi Supreme Court 
revised Rule 22, effectively stopping the motion in its tracks. An evidentiary 
hearing in Howard's case was held in May, but the judge has yet to rule.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)






OHIO:

Ohio looks at nitrogen as a new execution method


Ohio might consider adding nitrogen gas as a new execution method because of 
problems securing lethal injection drugs.

There have been no executions in the state for 2 1/2 years, largely because of 
lawsuits and difficulty obtaining drugs for lethal injection. Beginning in 
January, there are 28 convicted killers with execution dates scheduled over 
four years.

John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, 
said today lethal injection is "stalled" and it's time for a change. 
Prosecutors have long been strong supporters of Ohio's death penalty law.

"I think the legislature ought to recommend another method of execution," 
Murphy said in an interview. He recommends switching to nitrogen gas, a method 
he called "humane and reasonably inexpensive."

Nitrogen gas, pumped into an air-tight chamber, produces asphyxiation by a lack 
of oxygen in the blood. It has not been used for executions, although Oklahoma 
adopted it as a backup method. The sponsor of the Oklahoma law called it 
"foolproof."

People occasionally die accidentally from nitrogen asphyxiation. Deep-sea 
divers sometimes suffer from a form of it, producing an effect often described 
as euphoric. The gas is widely available and inexpensive.

JoEllen Smith, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and 
Correction, said the agency "continues to seek all legal means to obtain the 
drugs necessary to carry out court-ordered executions."

State Rep. Jim Butler, R-Oakwood, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, 
said, "It's good to look at alternative methods that are humane. That's 
something we should definitely do."

But Butler added, "One problem is if it's something that's not been tried 
before, you need to vet it to make sure it's appropriate. It's certainly going 
to be tested in the court system."

Other states have moved ahead with alternatives. Tennessee permits use of the 
electric chair, Utah allows the firing squad, and Oklahoma allows nitrogen gas.

Dr. Jonathan Groner, a professor of clinical surgery at Ohio State University 
College of Medicine, said using nitrogen gas could be "dangerous and 
impractical."

"You and I are breathing 78 % nitrogen right now," he said. "It's not a poison. 
It's an inert gas."

When nitrogen is introduced, oxygen is pushed out of the bloodstream, causing 
potentially painful suffocation, Groner said.

"I would challenge that it's foolproof. We've heard that before," he said.

Death penalty opponents say it's not time to add a new execution method but to 
abandon capital punishment entirely. The current process is unfair, arbitrary 
and prone to mistakes, concludes a new report by Ohioans to Stop Executions, "A 
Relic of the Past, Ohio's Dwindling Death Penalty."

The report, released today, details the history of the state's death penalty 
law which was reinstated in 1981 after being overturned as unconstitutional by 
a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision that put capital punishment on hold 
nationally. The state resumed executions in 1999 and has put 53 men to death 
over 17 years. The last execution was in Jan. 2014.

The report argues that the Ohio's death penalty law "remains plagued by the 
very same flaws" that caused it to be overturned 40 years ago. There are 
significant disparities in death sentences based on race and geography, the 
report states.

But Murphy said the method aside, the death penalty is "not a broken system" in 
Ohio.

He disputed the report's assertion about geographic disparities. He said 
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, known as a hardliner on capital 
punishment, "keeps getting elected. This is democracy in action. People elect 
prosecutors who reflect the attitude of the community."

(source: The Columbus Dispatch)

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

Death Penalty Opponents Want More Task Force Recommendations Implemented


A group that fights for an end to the death penalty in Ohio has issued a new 
report showing a task force's recent recommendations are not being implemented.

In 2014, an Ohio Supreme Court task force of judges, prosecutors, lawmakers and 
other members issued 56 proposals to change the state's capital punishment 
trial and execution process. But Kevin Werner with Ohioans to Stop Executions 
says only 4 have been adopted. He asking Ohio's lawmakers to approve the rest.

"We want those recommendations to be fully adopted so that at least we know the 
system is a little bit more fair and a little bit more accurate."

And Werner says there were 5 more death penalty cases last year than the year 
before. Ohio hasn't put any inmates to death in almost 3 years since there has 
been a shortage of lethal injection drugs.

(source: WOSU news)