[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., ALA., TENN.

[Rick Halperin]

July 16



PENNSYLVANIA:

We need to get rid of the death penalty



To the Editor:

The Joint State Government Commission recently released a report on the death 
penalty in Pennsylvania. It highlighted many issues with the system in place, 
including that we may execute an innocent person.

More people in Pennsylvania have been exonerated of their capital charges than 
have been executed. However, Pennsylvania still has one of the largest death 
row population in the country. There is a sickeningly high probability that 
there are innocent people on our death row right now.

It is disturbing that an innocent individual could be put to death by the 
state. Even worse, the report found that we can't put any procedural 
protections in place to prevent this from happening.

The findings of the report should horrify all Pennsylvanians. If we can't 
guarantee that an innocent person won't be executed, then we need to get rid of 
the death penalty.

Sydney Smith, senior at Arcadia University

(source: Letter to the Editor, Montgomery News)








ALABAMA:

Girl with special needs 'beheaded because she witnessed grandmother's 
murder'----Family of 13-year-old weep as court hears of drugs deal that went 
wrong



A 13-year-old girl with special needs was beheaded because she saw her 
grandmother murdered in a cemetery, a US court has heard.

Mariah Lopez was killed after her grandmother reportedly went to buy drugs but 
the deal turned into an argument.

The teenager saw how her grandmother was attacked with a knife by her live-in 
boyfriend and left to die on the ground, testimony revealed.

Israel Palomino, 34, and Yoni Aguilar, 26, are charged with 2 counts each of 
murder - punishable by the death penalty.

The grandmother, Oralia Mendoza, 49, was linked with the Sinaloa cartel, a 
drug-trafficking organisation, a Madison County sheriff's investigator said.

The killings happened after Palomino, Aguilar, Ms Mendoza and a woman named 
Leticia Garcia went to pick up a batch of methamphetamine in Georgia, 
authorities said. The 2 women were linked to the cartel, and Palomino suspected 
there might be a set-up, investigator Stacy Rutherford told a judge.

2 days later Palomino and Aguilar drove Ms Mendoza and her granddaughter to the 
cemetery in Alabama. Ms Mendoza and Palomino got out of the car and argued 
about the drug deal, according to Aguilar's account, recounted in court.

Aguilar told police the argument escalated, and Palomino killed Ms Mendoza. 
Authorities have said her cause of death was "sharp force trauma caused by a 
knife".

Because Mariah was a witness, the suspects took the girl to a secluded area 
nearby, Ms Rutherford said.

Aguilar said in his statement that Palomino forced him to kill the girl, 
telling investigators he was holding the knife when Palomino came up to him and 
moved his arm back and forth in a sawing motion. Mariah was beheaded, Ms 
Rutherford told the court.

Aguilar was said to be afraid of Palomino.

The details emerged during a preliminary hearing for Aguilar, when the district 
judge ruled prosecutors had enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury. 
Palomino's case is set for preliminary hearing tomorrow.

Investigators recovered 2 knives, believed to be the murder weapons. One was 
found under Aguilar's mattress; the other was under Palomino's mattress.

(source: independent.co.uk)








TENNESSEE----impending execution

Tennessee Plans to Restart Executions By Killing a Man With Mental Illness



Tennessee plans to kill Billy Ray Irick next month by lethal injection. If the 
execution goes through on August 9, a few weeks before his 60th birthday, he 
will be the 7th person put to death in the state since 2000, the year 
executions returned to Tennessee. On death row at Riverbend Maximum Security 
Institution, a short drive from downtown Nashville, Irick has faced at least 3 
previous execution dates, most recently in the fall of 2014. But there is an 
urgency this time, his longtime attorney, Gene Shiles, says. "This one feels 
much more ominous."

Irick was convicted in 1986 of raping and murdering a 7-year-old girl named 
Paula Dyer in Knoxville. He was arrested and confessed soon after the crime. 
Irick had stayed with the child's family for 2 years prior to the murder, 
according to court filings; defense attorneys "attempted to create reasonable 
doubt about the identity of the perpetrator" during the guilt phase of the 
trial, yet called "no witnesses."

Like so many who end up on death row, Irick's background was fraught. In the 
Nashville Scene earlier this year, Steven Hale described Irick's harrowing 
upbringing - as a child, he said his mother tied him with a rope and beat him - 
along with compelling evidence that he suffered from severe mental illness. 
Irick "was just 6 years old the first time someone raised questions about his 
mental health," Hale writes. "His school's principal referred him to the 
Knoxville Mental Health Center, requesting a mental evaluation to determine, 
according to court documents, 'whether Billy's extreme behavioral problems and 
unmanageability in school were the result of emotional problems or whether 
Billy suffered from some form of 'organic brain damage.'" A psychologist said 
that he seemed to "fear his own impulses." At 13, after spending time in a home 
for troubled children, Irick had a series of disturbing outbursts during a 
visit home, where he bashed a TV with an axe and "used a razor to cut up the 
pajamas that his younger sister was wearing as she slept."

A fuller picture of Irick's profound mental problems did not come out until 
years after his conviction, Shiles explains, when an investigator working for 
his federal habeas attorneys went to Knoxville and "discovered some hugely 
important facts that came from the victim's family - that he was hallucinating 
and having psychotic episodes at the time that this occurred." In affidavits, 
members of the family described Irick "hearing voices" and "talking with the 
devil." The jury never heard this evidence. If they had, there's reason to 
believe that the outcome of the case could have been different. As Hale writes, 
the same psychologist who examined Irick before his trial "stated in an 
affidavit that he no longer had confidence in his initial evaluation, which had 
been used to argue against an insanity defense."

Barred by the procedural barriers imposed by the Antiterrorism and Effective 
Death Penalty Act, federal courts have declined to review the new evidence of 
Irick's mental illness. As his client's execution date approaches next month, 
Shiles says, "No one has ever looked at the issue of his mental competence with 
all the facts."

Mental illness is notoriously widespread on death row. As in the broader prison 
system, it often goes undiagnosed and untreated. In his memoir, "Life After 
Death," Damien Echols, who spent years on Arkansas' death row as one of the 
West Memphis 3, remembers a man who used to keep everyone awake by screaming 
and arguing with his own reflection for hours at a time. "The only thing they 
do is shoot them full of Thorazine if they start to get riled up," he writes. 
The conditions on death row - prolonged isolation in particular - make such 
symptoms worse. "For many people in prison the worst fear is going insane, 
because if you do all hope is lost. You will be locked up not only within these 
walls, but also within your own rapidly degenerating mind."

In 1986, the same year Irick went to death row, the U.S. Supreme Court handed 
down Ford v. Wainwright, involving a condemned Florida man with paranoid 
schizophrenia. The ruling barred the execution of the "insane" on 8th Amendment 
grounds, but left it up to the states to determine who was "competent" to be 
executed. In 2007, in the case of Scott Panetti, diagnosed as paranoid 
schizophrenic, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the Ford decision, ruling that 
condemned people must have a rational understanding of why a state intends to 
execute them. But this has done little to prevent states from killing people 
with serious mental illness, including those who were suffering symptoms at the 
time of their crimes. Last year, Virginia executed 35-year-old William Morva 
for the murder of 2 police officers, despite significant evidence that the 
killings were driven by delusions. In legal filings and interviews with The 
Intercept, old friends described how a once sensitive and eccentric young man 
became gripped by mental illness that led to a deadly downward spiral. Calls 
for clemency fell on deaf ears; Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe refused to 
intervene. Morva was executed on July 6, 2017.

More recently, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals held oral arguments last month 
in the case of Andre Thomas, a Texas man commonly described in headlines as the 
"murderer who ate his own eye." Rather than reconsidering whether crimes rooted 
in mental illness should be punishable by death, states have sought to medicate 
the condemned until they are fit to be killed. In 2012, Steven Staley faced 
execution in Texas despite a history of schizophrenia. Like Irick, his life was 
marked by a disturbing history of trauma and abuse. "Doctors who have examined 
Staley on death row have said that he talks in a robot-like monotone yet has 
'grandiose and paranoid' delusions, including the beliefs that he invented the 
first car and marketed a character from Star Trek," Emily Bazelon wrote in 
Slate. "He has given himself black eyes and self-inflicted lacerations and has 
been found spreading feces and covered with urine." After the Tarrant County 
District Attorney requested that Staley be forcibly medicated, a judge 
dutifully found that "medicating Staley was the only way to ensure his 
competency to be executed." Although his execution was stayed, Staley remains 
on death row.

Daniel Gwynn, a condemned man in Pennsylvania, has illustrated states' callous 
approach in his artwork. In a pen and ink drawing titled, "Mental illness on 
death row will not stop the machine," a condemned man is haunted by the Grim 
Reaper, burying his head in his hands. In the next frame, a nurse informs a 
huddle of eager state officials, "OK, he's ready for the needle."

Tennessee's last execution took place in 2009, just as death penalty states 
began to face problems obtaining drugs for lethal injection. In 2014, amid a 
lawsuit challenging the state's execution protocol, legislators passed a law to 
bring back the electric chair as an alternative. After the U.S. Supreme Court 
handed down Glossip v. Gross, giving the green light for a controversial 
sedative, midazolam, to be used in executions, Tennessee moved quickly to adopt 
it. The state Supreme Court upheld the new protocol and, in January, set 3 
execution dates, including Irick's. The attorney general then requested eight 
more. Most of those are unlikely to go through, since appeals are still 
pending. With a trial now underway over the newest challenge to the Tennessee's 
lethal injection protocol, Irick's is the likeliest exception.

Meanwhile, a burgeoning movement has risen to address the problem of mental 
illness and the death penalty. In Tennessee, a coalition called the Tennessee 
Alliance for the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion, or TASMIE, spent much of the 
past couple years pushing for an exception to be made among capital defendants, 
to spare those suffering from severe mental illnesses from death penalty 
prosecutions. On its website, it defines Severe Mental Illness, or SMI, 
according to definitions provided in the American Psychiatric Association 
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, identifying 5 of the most severe diagnoses: 
"schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression 
with psychosis and/or delusional disorder."

The move to exclude severe mental illness from the death penalty is rooted 
partly in the 2002 Supreme Court case Atkins v. Virginia, which barred the 
death penalty for the people with mental disabilities - or mental "retardation" 
in the language of the ruling - in light of their "diminished capacities to 
understand and process information ... to engage in logical reasoning, to 
control impulses, and to understand the reactions of others." Recognizing that 
these same factors apply to people with severe mental illnesses, the American 
Bar Association convened a Task Force on Disability and the Death Penalty, 
bringing together lawyers and mental health practitioners to study the issue. 
In 2006, the group proposed a resolution to categorically oppose the death 
penalty for defendants who were suffering from severe mental illness or 
disabilities at the times of their crimes. The resolution was adopted by the 
ABA, along with much of the mental health community. But it would take 10 years 
to spur new legislation across the states. In a December 2016 report, the ABA 
called on advocates to turn its policy into "a meaningful tool to help states 
pass laws that will establish clear standards and processes to prevent the 
execution of those with severe mental illness." Today, some dozen states have 
taken up the task.

In Tennessee, the bill was carefully designed to be as narrow as possible. "It 
is not a repeal bill, at all," says Sarah McGee, TASMIE's educational 
coordinator. "It is a mental illness bill." Where the death penalty remains 
popular among the state's deeply conservative lawmakers, awareness has grown 
about mental illness. In the Senate, Republican Richard Briggs, a veteran and 
trauma surgeon, introduced SB0378, which "prohibits the death penalty as a 
punishment for defendants suffering from severe mental illness at the time of 
the offense." Witnesses at a Senate judiciary hearing in March of 2017 included 
Anthony Fox, CEO of the Tennessee Mental Health Consumers' Association, who 
described how living with depression and bipolar disorder had driven him to 
poverty and bouts of homelessness. "These are examples of what can drive people 
over the edge," he said. The bill does not ask that people go unpunished for 
their crimes, he added - only that they not be sentenced to die.

Christopher Slobogin, head of the criminal justice program at Vanderbilt Law 
School and an expert on mental health law, also testified, explaining the 
Supreme Court precedent provided both by Atkins, as well as the 2005 decision 
in Roper v. Simmons, which banned the death penalty for people who committed 
their crimes as juveniles on the basis that the brains of young people are not 
fully developed. "In both cases, the court emphasized that the death penalty is 
reserved for the worst as the worst," Slobogin explained, a category that 
cannot apply to defendants whose neurological impairments make them less 
culpable or deterrable as adults. Mental illness is even further impairing, he 
said, since it brings "delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking."

Testifying against the bill was Jerry Estes, head of the Tennessee District 
Attorneys General Conference, and previously the longtime elected district 
attorney general in Tennessee's 10th Judicial District. Estes prosecuted four 
death penalty cases over the course of his 24-year career. He argued that the 
bill would undermine juries, drag out the process for victims, and add a 
financial burden on the state. What's more, he said, Tennessee already has 
mechanisms in place to consider mental illness. Defense attorneys can bring it 
up at the sentencing phase, as mitigating evidence, for example. "All they have 
to do is find a witness," he said.

Legislators seemed reassured by Estes's suggestion that Tennessee juries are 
already positioned to hear evidence of severe mental illness before sending 
someone to death row. One lawmaker asked if he could think of any cases in 
which legislation like SB0378 might have changed the outcome - "Are there any 
cases you can think of?" Estes said he was not aware of any. "I can tell you of 
the 4 cases that I personally was involved in. ... I can't say that it would 
ever make any difference."

At a time when death penalty prosecutions are increasingly rare across the 
country, it is true that carving out a narrow exception in Tennessee would have 
a limited effect. By Slobogin's estimation, only 3 % of capital cases 
nationwide involve severe mental illness as defined in the bill. But even a 
cursory look at Tennessee's death penalty history reveals numerous cases 
infected by mental illness - cases in which the state spent considerable time 
and money pushing death sentences that were never carried out.

One dramatic case in point was handled by Estes himself. Ricky Thompson had 
been in and out of mental hospitals for years before he was convicted and 
sentenced to die in 1991 for killing his wife. Court records reveal a 
decadeslong odyssey through Tennessee's death penalty system - 2 trials, 2 
overturned death sentences, a slew of evaluations, hearings, and appeals - 
throughout which his severe mental impairments, including multiple diagnoses of 
schizophrenia, were dismissed by prosecutors. After the Tennessee Court of 
Criminal Appeals overturned his conviction, ruling that his trial judge had 
wrongly denied Thompson's lawyers to bring testimony regarding his mental state 
at the time of the crime, Estes vowed immediately to seek the death penalty 
again, upon learning about the reversal from reporters, according to the 
Jackson Sun.

In a rare move, Thompson's trial judge "modified the jury's verdict to 'not 
guilty by reason of insanity,'" according to court records, which could have 
avoided a retrial. But the state Supreme Court overturned the ruling. In 1998, 
Thompson was found incompetent to be tried again by the McMinn County Circuit 
Court after evaluations by 2 state mental health experts. But the next year, "a 
different trial judge determined that the Defendant had become competent." 
After a 2003 retrial, Thompson was once more sentenced to die.

In 2007, the Court of Criminal Appeals at Knoxville reduced Thompson's sentence 
to life. "It is rare that a capital case contains the volume of documented 
history of mental disease or defects found in this case," the majority wrote, 
detailing his many diagnoses of schizophrenia and hospitalizations dating back 
to childhood. At Thompson's retrial, "2 mental health experts testified that 
the Defendant suffered from an impairment to the frontal lobe of his brain 
which would have affected his reasoning and judgment. One of the experts ... 
testified that the Defendant suffered from a chronic psychiatric disorder 
called schizo-affective schizophrenia which causes a loss of touch with 
reality. ... No expert testimony has ever been offered to contradict these 
findings, and none was presented by the State at the Defendant's trial." The 
majority made clear that its decision was "not meant to minimize the brutality 
of the Defendant's crime or to justify his conduct," but to give meaningful 
consideration to Thompson's severe mental illness as a mitigating factor, which 
his trial utterly failed to do.

Thompson did not live long after leaving death row. Just 6 months after the 
court reduced his sentence to life, he died of "natural causes," according to 
the Tennessee Department of Corrections. He was 57 years old.

There are no statistics tracking severe mental illness on Tennessee's death 
row. But there are many more examples. Gregory Thompson (no relation) was 
sentenced to die in 1985. Represented by attorneys who presented no evidence 
during the guilt stage of his trial, his prison records showed that 
psychiatrists who treated him diagnosed Thompson as having "either a bipolar 
affective disorder, cyclic mood disorder, schizo-affective disorder or 
schizophrenia," according to court documents. All of them described his 
"agitated behavior, hostility, inappropriate affect, auditory and visual 
hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and thoughts of persecution." Thompson's 
case attracted national media attention, including a 2007 "60 Minutes" special 
that described his heavy medication regimen - 10 pills a day - and his 
recollections of trying to kill guards who were "turning into insects." 
Thompson died before the state could execute him, in 2014.

Investigations into such cases have revealed not only how ill-equipped courts 
and prisons are to deal with people suffering from severe mental illness, but 
the sadism it can unleash among those given control over their lives. In 2008, 
the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee won a victory in the case of 
Richard Taylor, whose 1981 death sentence for killing a prison guard was 
reduced to life in prison. Taylor had insisted on representing himself at 
trial. After 4 different findings that he was not competent, he finally did so, 
wearing his prison uniform and sunglasses. According to the ACLU, "Taylor 
called no witnesses, introduced no evidence, and presented no defense. The few 
cross-examination questions he posed during the guilt-innocence phase of his 
trial were delusional, and he was completely silent during the sentencing phase 
of the proceedings. The jury was never presented with compelling evidence of 
Taylor's difficult childhood, suicide attempts, psychiatric hospitalizations, 
or severe mental illness. Jurors deliberated for less than an hour before 
imposing the death sentence."

Upon arriving on death row, prison guards unleashed vicious and sustained abuse 
at Taylor, ostensibly in retaliation for his crime. In a disturbing sworn 
statement given to the ACLU, one former guard said he first realized Taylor had 
problems when he saw him drink his own urine and smear his feces on the wall. 
Yet, rather than trying to handle his mental illness, he said, guards put him 
"through pure hell." They denied him food and showers, refused to let him out 
of his cell, and goaded him into lashing out at them in order to beat him. 
Sometimes they spoke through the air chamber behind his prison cell, with 
messages like "Jesus Christ is coming to see you." At one point, the former 
guard admitted, Thompson set his clothes on fire, and the officers adjusted the 
vents to his cell to help the fire along.

For those tasked with representing people with severe mental illness, the 
already difficult work of death penalty defense becomes immeasurably harder. 
After Assistant Post-Conviction Defender Kelly Gleason was assigned to 
represent the late serial killer Paul Reid in 2004, she went to see him at the 
Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex in East Tennessee. In a lengthy affidavit, 
she described how "Paul informed me that he knew that I was working with the 
military government and that he could not believe a single word I said or 
anything I wrote."

The most recent hearing on SB0378 took place this past March at the Tennessee 
State Capitol. The bill had been amended - no longer was depression among the 
included severe mental illnesses listed, and language had been tweaked to make 
clear that a defendant's "documented history" of mental illness had to be a 
"documented medical history." Speaking again on behalf of his bill, Briggs took 
pains to explain the ways in which it is limited in scope and not aimed at 
ending capital punishment altogether. "Personally I believe in the death 
penalty," he said.

Briggs has attracted more conservative support since first introducing the 
bill. Op-eds have run in newspapers across Tennessee; in January, former U.S. 
Attorney Tom Dillard wrote in support of SB0378, drawing from his own 
experience representing mentally ill defendants who were sent to death row and 
whose conditions were not seriously considered at trial. The "good news," he 
wrote, was that both clients had their sentences reduced to life. "The bad 
news: The cost to taxpayers in Tennessee was enormous and ultimately neither 
received adequate mental health treatment."

This time, the voice of opposition at the hearing came from Craig Northcott, 
elected district attorney general in Coffee County. He called the legislation a 
"solution looking for a problem." Tennessee's death penalty works just fine, he 
said, adding, "I've asked repeatedly from the sponsors to give me 1 example 
where our system has failed." He said that they could not provide a single one. 
"Why are we even considering it?" The Senate Judiciary Committee voted down the 
legislation, 5 to 4.

With Irick's execution date looming, last month the ABA published a new study 
on the costs of mental illness in Tennessee's death penalty system. Its 
findings were the opposite of Estes's claim that excluding defendants with 
severe mental illnesses from death penalty prosecutions would be more costly. 
"If a severe mental illness exclusion were to be implemented in Tennessee, it 
would lead to a saving of $1.4 million to $1.9 million a year," the report 
concluded. "According to our estimate, the state of Tennessee would have saved 
between $57 and $78 million if this exclusion had been implemented in 1977, 
when the death penalty was reinstated in the state."

The ABA's fiscal assessment will be useful as TASMIE gears up to bring forward 
its legislation again next spring. When it does, the legislature would do well 
to consider Tennessee's ugly treatment of defendants with severe mental 
illness, rather than relying on reassurances from prosecutors. After all, some 
of the most compelling moments at the state capitol were the brief reminders 
that mental illness affects people across party lines - and that such people 
might be worthy of compassion. At one hearing, Republican Sen. Janice Bowling 
recalled a neighbor she had known as a child who had murdered her own children 
while living with what would now be acknowledged as severe mental illness. "I 
hadn't thought about it in years," she said. Another legislator, Art Swann, 
addressed Northcott. "I happen to know a particular person that is 
schizophrenic," he said. Swann did not say who he was talking about, describing 
him as a fine young man. But from "time to time," he said, he "loses his 
ability to know the difference between right and wrong."

(source: theintercept.com)