[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----COLO., ARIZ., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 8



COLORADO:

Announcement expected Friday in Montour murder cases



The 4th Judicial Circuit District Attorney will make a public announcement 
about the case of Edward Montour Friday afternoon.

The man accused of beating his daughter to death in 1997 and then killing a 
jail guard in 2002 has run through over a decade of court proceedings.

District Attorney Dan May will host a press conference in front of the 
courthouse on Tejon, across from the Pioneer's Museum at 1:30 p.m.

Other law enforcement figures will be there, including Colorado Springs Police 
Chief Pete Carey and Dr. Leon Kelly from the El Paso County Coroner's Office.

According to the DA, in March '97, Montour beat his 11-week-old daughter while 
her mother was at work. Little Taylor Montour suffered a broken femur, multiple 
broken ribs, a skull fracture and bleeding in her brain.

She would later die.

A jury of his peers found Montour guilty of 1st-degree murder and child abuse 
resulting in death the following year, the DA's office says.

He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Time would pass before Montour was again in court, this time for allegedly 
killing Eric Autobee, a prison guard at the Limon Correctional Facility's 
kitchen.

While fighting those charges, he tried to revisit his conviction for killing 
his daughter. The DA says he was trying to lessen the consequences he would 
eventually face for killing Autobee.

Autobee's surviving family asked the DA to stop trying to get the death penalty 
for Montour - during the 12 years of trials. Eventually, prosecutors did once 
Montour pleaded guilty - and agreed to a life sentence without the possibility 
of parole.

In their release announcing the press conference, the DA's office refers to 
Montour's alleged "endless legal maneuvering, misinformation introduced as fact 
and seemingly never-ending delays," in his case.

Those lines are most likely referring to, among other things, Montour's legal 
team's successful lobbying in April 2014 to have the cause of his daughter's 
death changed from "homicide" to "undetermined."

His legal team would then ardently, if unsuccessfully push that he was wrongly 
convicted of his daughter's death - an outcome that allegedly led him to kill 
Autobee.

He also pleaded not guilty to killing Autobee in 2013 by reason of insanity - a 
plea that would be later dropped.

In 2003, he was ordered to be put to death by a judge. The ruling went all the 
way to the state's Supreme Court where it was decided only a jury could put 
someone to death.

The DA is expected to talk about Montour's case during their press conference: 
what made it so unique, challenging and interesting? They'll also discuss what 
they call the importance of the court's ruling.

(source: KUSA TV news)








ARIZONA:

Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty in Phoenix Serial Killings



Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty against a former city bus driver 
charged in a string of deadly nighttime shootings in Phoenix that led some 
people in neighborhoods where the attacks occurred to stay inside after dark.

A notice of intent to seek the death penalty against 23-year-old Aaron Juan 
Saucedo was filed Wednesday in 8 of the 9 killings in which Saucedo is charged 
with 1st-degree murder. It's not known yet whether prosecutors will seek the 
death penalty in the 9th killing.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez said in court records that the death penalty was being 
sought because the killings were committed in a cold and calculated manner.

Thomas Glow, an attorney representing Saucedo, declined to comment on the plan 
to seek the death penalty against his client.

Saucedo has pleaded not guilty to charges of 1st-degree murder, attempted 
murder and drive-by shooting in attacks that killed 9 people and wounded 2 
others during a nearly 1-year period that ended in July 2016. At court hearing 
in May, Saucedo declared that he was innocent.

Investigators said the victims were shot by Saucedo as he prowled the 
neighborhoods in a car and opened fire from inside it or stepped out briefly to 
shoot before driving away. The victims were outside their homes or sitting in 
cars during the attacks.

Most of the killings were in a mostly Latino neighborhood.

Police said the victims included a 21-year-old man whose girlfriend was 
pregnant with their son and a 12-year-girl who was shot to death along with her 
mother and a friend of the woman.

Authorities say a 9mm shell casing was found in Saucedo's car when it was 
seized by police. Police say the casing was fired from the same gun as the 
shells found in the aftermath of 9 of the 12 attacks.

The killings stumped investigators for months, but they got a break in April 
when Saucedo was arrested in the August 2015 fatal shooting of 61-year-old Raul 
Romero, whose girlfriend was Saucedo's mother. It's unclear whether prosecutors 
are seeking the death penalty against Saucedo in Romero's death.

(source: Associated Press)

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

Media challenges judge's order on not naming prosecutor in murder case



High in a tower at the Maricopa County Superior Court complex in downtown 
Phoenix, prosecutor Jeannette Gallagher was fighting to put John Allen on death 
row for killing a 10-year-old girl by locking her in a plastic footlocker 
overnight.

Meanwhile, in another courtroom in another Superior Court tower, Gallagher was 
the victim in the trial of a man who had stalked her repeatedly after she put 
him in prison in 2008.

When Gallagher's involvement in the 2 cases intersected, a court order was 
issued that appears unprecedented in Maricopa County.

In a hearing Nov. 6, Superior Court Judge Erin Otis weighed a request from The 
Arizona Republic for a still camera to be allowed into the Allen trial. She 
approved the camera but ordered The Republic not to show the lead prosecutor, 
Gallagher. Then she went further: No one would be allowed to use Gallagher's 
name, not on the newspaper's website or in its print edition, not on TV news, 
not in any media coverage.

Gallagher's name already had been published in news reports in the early stages 
of Allen???s trial and throughout court proceedings for his wife and other 
relatives tried for related crimes.

As she issued her order from the bench that day, Otis said she was protecting 
the integrity of the stalking case that was not playing out in her courtroom. 
She did not mention whether anyone had asked her to do so or why.

The attorney representing The Republic in the hearing to request camera access 
argued against the order in court. Now, The Republic and other media companies 
are challenging it, accusing the judge of violating the U.S. and Arizona 
constitutions on First Amendment grounds.

At issue was the legal concept of "prior restraint," which is a pre-publication 
censorship of the media.

The media companies contended that Otis was blocking them from reporting facts 
- in a death-penalty case, no less - that any member of the public easily could 
discover by walking into the courtroom during trial or going on the Internet 
and reading the court record or viewing past news stories about Allen and the 
10-year-old victim.

In essence, the media companies asked, if a judge could bar them from 
publishing something as fundamental as the name of the prosecutor in a 
death-penalty case, what other parts of a public court proceeding could be kept 
secret, too?

The Republic, joined by the Associated Press, 12 News, and Channels 3 and 5, 
filed what is known as a special action with the Arizona Court of Appeals, 
seeking a higher court's ruling that such prior restraint violates the public's 
right to know.

Otis and Gallagher filed responses saying the issue was moot because the cases 
were decided shortly after Otis' order was made, and the bar on using 
Gallagher's name was lifted.

On Tuesday, both sides appeared before a three-judge panel of the Arizona Court 
of Appeals. Their arguments over a few sentences spoken from the bench Nov. 6 
could affect future courtroom news reports for decades to come.

The Allen trial was in its last day of testimony Nov. 6 when attorney David 
Bodney, who represents The Republic and other media outlets, attended a morning 
hearing about The Republic's camera request.

Otis had found The Republic's initial request a week earlier to be "untimely" 
because it had not been submitted early enough but set a hearing for seven days 
later.

Even earlier, a TV station initially had submitted a request to video record 
the trial but did not send a representative to its camera-request hearing. Otis 
had declared that request abandoned.

For decades, camera requests had frequently been made and granted on short 
notice at Maricopa County Superior Court trials. But recently, perhaps in the 
wake of high-profile cases that went viral in the media, judges have begun 
enforcing a rule that requires applying seven days "before the trial date."

Otis, when she made the order, said that she did not want the jury in the 
stalking trial to know that Gallagher was in the middle of a capital-murder 
trial.

Bodney told Otis that her order placed an unconstitutional prior restraint on 
the media. He pointed out that Arizona court rules state that victims and 
witnesses can be protected from being photographed or video recorded in certain 
circumstances, but there is no mention that prosecutors should be shielded from 
view, as they are the representatives of the government.

Bodney also pointed out that this was no ordinary case but rather a 
death-penalty murder case, one of the highest seriousness.

Otis responded that the media could freely use the name of the 2nd-chair 
prosecutor in the case, and the media would be able to use the lead 
prosecutor's name again when her other case had come to a close.

Bodney suggested to Otis that there were less-limiting means to protect the 
integrity of the stalking trial, such as ordering jurors not to follow media 
coverage.

As Bodney would later describe to the appeals court, there were no judicial 
findings, no explanation of why Otis was intervening in another trial, no 
arguments - just an order.

In his pleadings to the appeals court, Bodney quoted Otis' response as, "I just 
don't want her name in print or her image on the news until that trial comes to 
completion."

Otis' final word in the trial court: "That's my order, and I need to get 
going."

Jeannette Gallagher has been a prosecutor in the Maricopa County Attorney's 
Office since 2000, the year she came up from Pima County. She has prosecuted 
accused child abusers, a notorious prison hostage-taker and countless 
murderers.

She is a strong supporter of the death penalty and, under County Attorney Bill 
Montgomery, she is the bureau chief of the office's capital litigation section. 
In effect, she is in charge of the office's death-penalty prosecutions.

A former social worker, she has told The Republic that she remembers the name 
of every victim in every case she ever prosecuted.

Gallagher is known for her hard-driving style. She is famous for being 
combative, so much so that she has ardent fans, many of them former jury 
members, who come to her trials to watch her in action.

Otis, the judge in the Allen case, was a sex-crimes prosecutor at the Maricopa 
County Attorney's Office from 2003, the year after she graduated from law 
school, until 2012, when she was appointed to the bench. She and Gallagher 
worked at the office at the same time, although not in the same bureaus.

It is not unusual for a former prosecutor to become a judge. Of the 94 judges 
at Maricopa County Superior Court, 51 - more than 1/2 - were prosecutors, and 
32 came from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office. By contrast, only 7 judges 
on the Maricopa County bench specialized as public defenders.

And it was not unusual that Gallagher would lead the prosecution of John Allen.

Allen was accused of murdering his wife's cousin, 10-year-old Ame Deal, in July 
2011. He had locked the girl in a plastic footlocker as punishment and left her 
there overnight.

Allen's wife, Sammantha Allen, already had been sentenced to death for the same 
murder, and 3 other relatives have been sentenced to prison for crimes related 
to the girl's death.

Gallagher had tried the Sammantha Allen case as well, and her name had been 
printed in numerous stories about that trial and her husband's.

On Nov. 8, 2 days after Otis barred the media from identifying the prosecutor, 
Allen was found guilty. 8 days later, the jury sentenced him to death.

A stalking case

In her earlier order issued from the bench, Otis told the attorneys and the 
media that she was barring use of Gallagher's name in the John Allen case 
because of an order in another case, presumably the stalking case.

The Republic has not been able to locate that specific order. During Tuesday's 
Court of Appeals hearing, the attorney for the state did not know what kinds of 
instructions had been given to the jury in the other case.

Otis said she did not want the jury in the other case to be influenced by 
Gallagher's appearance in the Allen case. That jury, as with juries in all 
cases, presumably would have been under admonishment from the court not to read 
or watch or research any news coverage or social-media discussion of the case.

Gallagher was personally represented in that trial by two attorneys who 
specialize in victims' rights. To demonstrate her vulnerability, prosecutors 
had filed on her behalf a motion to bring a "facility" dog into court to 
accompany her during her testimony. It was essentially a service dog that would 
sit with Gallagher to calm and assure her.

"The witness is anxious about testifying in front of a group of people," said 
an appendix to the motion. "The service dog met the witness this past Friday in 
preparation for the trial. Think of the dog like an interpreter, an aid to get 
the witness' testimony across to you more clearly."

The defendant was Albert Karl Heitzmann, 69, a tall, slender man with glasses 
and unruly white hair and an apparent dislike for Gallagher that dates back to 
2007.

According to court records, Heitzmann was a substitute math teacher at the 
Adobe Mountain School, a reform school and juvenile prison run by the Arizona 
Department of Juvenile Corrections.

While there, he became acquainted with an inmate named Brian Womble and, when 
Womble was released from Adobe Mountain, Heitzmann let him live in his home. In 
2002, Womble asked Heitzmann to store 2 handguns in his safe-deposit box, and 
Heitzmann agreed to do so.

Womble later used those guns to murder a man, and when he went to trial, 
Gallagher was the prosecutor.

She called Heitzman as a witness. After she had obtained death sentences for 
Womble and his accomplice, she charged Heitzmann with misconduct with weapons, 
perjury and tampering with a witness.

Heitzmann went to prison for 2 1/2 years. He got out in May 2010. 2 years 
later, he sent a letter to an attorney saying he had a plan to assassinate 
Gallagher.

Heitzmann was sent back to prison for another 4 years for intimidation and 
another weapons charge. He was released in September 2015.

According to statements made by prosecutors in court Nov. 9, he already had 
filed a notice of claim against Gallagher. And then, the next year, in 
September 2016, he showed up twice in courtrooms where Gallagher was appearing 
at hearings, though he was forbidden to have contact with her.

He was charged with 2 counts of stalking and one count of misconduct with 
weapons. According to court filings, he could spend up to 15 years in prison on 
each of the counts.

On Nov. 7, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury found him guilty on both 
stalking charges. The next day, the jurors found aggravating factors that would 
allow the judge to impose a stiff sentence.

The weapons charge was severed from his trial because the gun in question had 
nothing to do with the stalking. It was to go to trial before a new jury later 
in December.

Arguments before the appeals court

There was no official court document lifting the ban on using Gallagher's name 
or image in coverage of Allen's murder trial. Instead, the week after Allen was 
convicted, a Superior Court public information officer sent an email to Bodney 
saying his clients were "free to use the prosecutor's name."

The media companies' special action on Otis' order in the Allen case was filed 
after both Allen and Heitzmann had been convicted.

At Tuesday's hearing in appeals court, Bodney called Otis' decision to protect 
jurors in the stalking case "speculation upon guesswork upon conjecture."

Were the judges coordinating with each other? he asked.

"Where does that end if the court does not send a message?"

"Was it to get convictions for Ms. Gallagher in both cases?" he asked.

He emphasized the lack of judicial findings. Generally, a judge would be 
expected to explain her reasoning and weigh the respective constitutional 
rights of the defendant, the victims and the media.

Gerald Grant, a deputy Maricopa County attorney who represented the court and 
the prosecution, said the request for Otis' order did not come from his office.

Grant also argued there was no need for Otis to issue a formal order indicating 
she had lifted the media ban because she said at the outset that it would 
expire as soon as there was a verdict in the case in which Gallagher was the 
victim.

Asked by the appellate panel what he wanted from the court, Bodney said he 
wanted a ruling to prevent the same kind of order from happening in the future.

"Where does that end if the court does not send a message?" he asked.

Grant's answer was that the circumstances were unique, "incapable of 
repetition, and there's no need for the court to get involved in it."

The court took the matter under advisement. The panel gave no indication when 
it would issue its decision.

(source: Arizona Republic)








CALIFORNIA:

Death sentence upheld for Antioch man who killed pregnant wife and daughter



The state Supreme Court upheld the death sentence Thursday of an Antioch man 
who killed his pregnant wife and their 2-year-old daughter in 1996, and later 
told his mother he did it because his wife "wouldn't stop blabbing" about his 
bank robberies.

Christopher Henriquez was 24 when he strangled his wife, Carmen, 25, who was 8 
months pregnant, and clubbed and choked their daughter, Zuri, in their 
apartment in August 1996. He admitted the killings to police.

Henriquez had been paroled from prison in New York in July 1995 after a robbery 
sentence and, the court said, robbed 2 banks in San Francisco a month before 
the murders. His wife moved out that month but, according to relatives, 
returned to her husband after he promised not to rob another bank.

The killings occurred a day after the couple and their child returned from a 
trip to Disneyland. His mother, Deborah Henriquez, who was also on the trip, 
testified that her son came to her house the day after they got back, looking 
dazed. The next day, she said, he told her that he had killed his wife and 
child in a fit of anger.

(source: San Francisco Chronicle)








USA:

Capital punishment is obsolete - this is why it should be abolished



There is overwhelming evidence why the United States should abolish capital 
punishment.

Former President Jimmy Carter in his 2014 book, "A Call to Action," said have 
done so.

The only nations in Europe, North, Central and South America that still execute 
its citizens are the United States, Belarus and Suriname.

In 2007, Nebraska became the 19th state to abolish the death penalty.

The Michigan Law School has a registry of 1728 exonerated folks who had been 
incarcerated for an average of 11 years for crimes they did not commit.

Since there is no fail-safe example of a way a jury can reach a verdict of 1st 
degree of murder, there is an enormous danger of taking the life of an innocent 
person.

Cameron Todd Willingham of Corsicana, Texas was executed for the arson murder 
of his 3 children based on false evidence.

More than 3 years later, the Houston Chronicle, with input from The Washington 
Post, detailed how Willingham's conviction was based on false testimony of a 
jailhouse snitch to benefit himself through a lesser sentence and the 
prosecution misconduct of 2 district attorneys.

Poor and black? You won't get a fair shake in death sentences, new report 
confirms

A new report raises troubling questions about the fairness of Pennsylvania's 
criminal justice system.

Middleweight boxer, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, spent 19 years in prison. He was 
accused of murdering 3 white people in New Jersey, and convicted by an 
all-white jury, mostly on the testimony of two thieves who later recanted their 
stories.

Following his release, he found injustice until he died in 2014 at the age of 
76. Fortunately, he had received life without parole instead of the death 
penalty.

To quote Carter, "Perhaps the greatest argument against the death penalty is 
its extreme bias in its use against the poor, minorities, and those with 
diminished mental capacities.

Although homicide victims are 6 times more likely to be black than white, 77 % 
of death penalty cases involve white victims".

In 2002, the United States Supreme Court banned capital punishment of the 
intellectually disabled and in 2005 adolescents under the age of 18. Studies 
have shown it is not a deterrent.

Violent crime defined as murder, rape, and armed robbery reached its peak in 
1990 and has dropped remarkably since with 58 % in Washington D.C., 70 % in 
Dallas, 74 % in Newark, 75 % in Los Angeles.

What caused the previous peak?

Is lethal injection cruel and unusual punishment?

?Most consider lethal injection a far more humane form of capital punishment 
than hanging or the electric chair.

An investigative reporter, Kevin Drum, from Mother Jones wrote, "The American 
real criminal element was lead."

A HUD counselor, Rick Nevin, noted there was a link between lead exposure and 
juvenile delinquency.

Also there is a marked fall in the IQ of children when exposed to lead. Lead is 
known to be toxic to brain neurons and causes shrinkage in the size of the 
frontal cortex responsible for judgement leading to antisocial behavior and 
adult violence.

Graphs of blood lead levels from 1937 to 1986 show it peaked about 23 years 
before the violent crime peak in 1990.

The biggest source in the post-war years was not lead paint but leaded gas. In 
the 1920's, General Motors, in order to prevent engine pinging and knock, added 
tetraethvl lead to gasoline.

In 2000, Nevin concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions 
from autos explained 90 % in the variation in violent crime.

In 2007, Nevin showed lead data curves peaking 20 years or so before violent 
crime; this fit astonishingly well in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great 
Britain, Finland, Italy and West Germany. During the 1970's and 80's stringent 
environmental agency regulations led to less pollutants as did the catalytic 
converter.

Ending capital punishment means that some guilty of the most heinous crimes and 
serial killers will remain in prison for life.

(source: Guest Editorial; Dr. James P. Bond is a retired oncologist who 
previously practiced in Bryn Mawr, Pa. and currently lives in Beaumont, Texas. 
He is a retired Pennsylvania Prison Society member----pennlive.com)