[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ALA., OHIO, WIS., IOWA, COLO., MONT., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

February 10

ALABAMA:

Execution raises uncomfortable constitutional questions



The State of Alabama put a man to death Thursday. He was the 217th person to 
die under the state’s death penalty – the 64th execution since a moratorium on 
executions in Alabama was lifted in 1983.

Dominique Ray’s execution is troubling. Not because there was any question 
about his guilt. Debates about the moral failings of the death penalty aside, 
there was no reason why Ray should not see the sentence imposed on him for the 
murder of 15-year-old Tiffany Harville almost 25 years ago carried out at long 
last.

What’s troubling about Ray’s execution is the constitutional question it 
raises. Ray, who embraced Islam while incarcerated, wanted an imam present with 
him in the death chamber. Prison officials refused, saying they could provide a 
Christian prison chaplain. Ray’s attorneys sued, and a stay of execution was 
issued to sort it all out.

Prison officials argue that only corrections system employees are allowed in 
the execution chamber as a matter of security, which is reasonable. In an 
earlier editorial, we suggested the prison system work to create a pool of 
spiritual leaders from other faiths, and vet them accordingly. That seems 
reasonable as well.

However, Ray’s position was that he was receiving unequal treatment because he, 
a Muslim, did not have the same opportunity in the execution chamber as a 
Christian prisoner would. And he’s right – the constitutional religious 
protections suggest that a condemned inmate of any stripe should have the same 
access to a representative of their chosen faith.

The matter made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in a 5-4 decision, 
vacated the stay imposed by a lower court to allow the execution to proceed. 
The reason – Ray had waited too long to raise his objection.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argues that Alabama’s policy of making 
available only a Christian chaplain violates the constitution’s Establishment 
clause:

“Under (Alabama’s) policy, a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own 
faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites. But if an 
inmate practices a different religion—whether Islam, Judaism, or any other—he 
may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes 
against the Establishment Clause's core principle of denominational 
neutrality.”

For Ray, the argument is moot. However, despite the high court’s green light 
for Ray’s execution, Alabama officials must undertake an in-depth review of 
procedures surrounding the treatment of the state’s inmates, not only to ensure 
constitutional rights are upheld, but to avoid future litigation that the state 
can hardly afford.

(source: Editorial, The Dothan Eagle)








OHIO:

Testimony to begin Monday in quadruple homicide



A trial is slated to begin Monday in a potential death penalty case alleging 
murder in the fatal shooting of 4 people and an attack on another man, in 
Pedro, Ohio, in 2017.

Arron L. Lawson, 24, of Township Road 1051, Ironton, faces 4 counts alleging 
aggravated murder in the shooting deaths of Stacey Holston, 24; her son, Devin 
Holston, 8; Stacey's mother, Tammie L. McGuire; 43, and McGuire's husband, 
Donald McGuire, 50; all of Pedro. The attack occurred Oct. 11, 2017, at the 
Holstons' home.

Another man, Todd Holston, was stabbed with a pocketknife inside the family's 
trailer and survived his injuries.

Lawson also was charged with aggravated burglary, attempted murder and 
felonious assault of Todd Holston, the rape of Stacey Holston, abuse of a 
corpse, kidnapping of Devin Holston, tampering with evidence, theft of a motor 
vehicle and failure to comply with the order or signal of a police officer.

Questioning of potential jurors, which had started Jan. 28, was completed in 
the case Thursday.

The final jury is expected to be selected at 8:30 a.m. Monday at the Lawrence 
County Courthouse in Ironton in Judge Andy Ballard's courtroom with opening 
statements to follow.

According to an order from Ballard, spectators are asked to refrain from 
displaying any messages in support of or against any party involved in the 
case, either on clothing or items.

Those attending the trial are also requested to be seated 15 minutes prior to 
the trial's start.

Following the killings, Lawson is accused of having fled the scene. A manhunt 
by more than 100 law enforcement agencies from the Tri-State area, including 
federal authorities, occurred for more than 36 hours before Lawson was arrested 
along County Road 52.

A motive in the slayings has not been released.

Testimony is expected to last for more than a week as Lawson faces the death 
penalty in the case.

Under Ohio's death penalty laws, a potential death penalty case requires a 
bifurcated trial. First is the guilt phase where a defendant is found guilty or 
innocent. If a guilty verdict is returned, the same jury that heard the case 
will recommend a penalty of life in prison or the death penalty.

(source: The Herald-Dispatch)








WISCONSIN:

Governor should bring back death penalty



Gov. Tony Evers should bring back the death penalty.

Why are the taxpayers feeding and housing murderers for life after they take 
innocent people’s lives?

I am a 91-year-old veteran.

If we can let our decent military get the death penalty in wars and fight other 
countries’ civil wars, it’s time to bring back the death penalty or the prisons 
will fill to the limits with people who don’t deserve to live. advertisement

Fred Gilson

Salem

(source: Letter to the Editor, The Kenosha News)








IOWA:

Lawmakers introduce legislation



N’West Iowa lawmakers are making their marks on this year’s state legislative 
session by way of sponsoring bills.

Rep. Skyler Wheeler (R-Orange City) sponsored House File 62, which would 
implement the death penalty as a possible sentence in 1st-degree murder cases.

The practice of capital punishment ended in Iowa in 1965.

“Iowa needs to seriously consider reinstating the death penalty,” Wheeler said. 
“The purposes are of course first and foremost, justice for the victims and 
their families. Secondly, it gives prosecutors another tool to use when dealing 
with first degree murder cases. Lastly, it sends a message that as a state we 
will not tolerate the shedding of innocent blood and if someone does this, they 
are subject to the highest punishment one can receive on the earth.”

Wheeler has a firm pro-life stance and also introduced a bill to erect an 
abortion victim memorial. He said a person can be pro-life and pro-death 
penalty.

“My stance comes from the Bible, which strongly support the death penalty, but 
also supports protecting innocent and unborn life from the moment of conception 
until a natural death,” Wheeler said. “When someone murders someone else, they 
took their life without allowing that person to die a natural death. They 
violated that person’s inalienable right to life, therefore their inalienable 
right to life is essentially removed. There are consequences to actions, and 
there should be an ultimate consequence for committing the ultimate act of evil 
one can perform. The government’s job is to reward good and to punish evil, and 
my stance on these 2 issues lines up with that.”

(nwestiowa.com)




COLORADO:

Abolish the death penalty in Colorado



If the worth of a public policy is its ability to achieve policy objectives, 
then capital punishment is a failure. It hasn't been shown to deter crime. It's 
not cost-effective. It's unevenly applied. It needs to be abolished.

Colorado abolished the death penalty in 1897 for four years, but subsequent 
repeal efforts have fallen short of success. In 2009 a repeal bill failed by 
just one vote in the Colorado Senate after passing in the House. Abolition 
advocates hope that 2019 is the year when Colorado can finally relegate capital 
punishment to history. There is growing public revulsion with the practice, its 
value to justice is increasingly dubious, and the political circumstances are 
as favorable to repeal as ever — abolition-leaning Democrats control the 
Colorado House and Senate, the state's new attorney general, Democrat Phil 
Weiser, is opposed to the death penalty, and new Gov. Jared Polis, also a 
Democrat, has said he would sign a repeal bill.

The momentum is there. Now lawmakers must follow through.

Executions have become exceedingly rare in the state. The 1st execution to 
occur in what is now Colorado was the 1859 hanging of murderer John Stoefel at 
a cottonwood tree along Cherry Creek. Stoefel is one of 103 men the state has 
put to death. (Every person Colorado has ever executed was a male murderer.) 
The last execution in Colorado was that of Gary Lee Davis in 1997, and that 
event came 30 years after the state's previous execution.

The death penalty in practice might in effect be dormant, but capital 
punishment is still on the books. As long as the death penalty remains viable 
law in Colorado, the state claims for itself the objectionable role of 
institutional executioner. And it's no mere abstraction: Three men today sit on 
Colorado's death row, and the prospect of a death sentence is an emotional and 
practical factor every time courts in the state take up the most heinous 
crimes, such as the prosecution last year of Frederick killer Christopher Watts 
and the Aurora theater mass murderer James Holmes.

Some argue that the death penalty deters would-be killers, but the evidence 
just isn't there. "Research to date on the effect of capital punishment on 
homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty 
increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates," said a 2012 report from 
National Research Council of The National Academies. Prominent death penalty 
scholar Michael L. Radelet, a professor at the University of Colorado, and 
co-author Traci L. Lacock wrote in 2009 that 88 % of prominent criminologists 
"do not believe that the death penalty is a deterrent," and there was an 
"overwhelming consensus ... that the death penalty does not add deterrent 
effects to those already achieved by long imprisonment." The New York City Bar 
Association in a 2017 presentation asserted that murder rates did not rise in 
states that abolished the death penalty.

Not only does the death penalty fail to deter, it's a costly failure. In "The 
Death Penalty vs. Life Incarceration: A Financial Analysis," a 2016 study 
published in the Susquehanna University Political Review, Colorado was shown to 
spend about 15 % more on death row inmates than those in the general 
population. But that's just incarceration costs. Account for the enormous legal 
expenses of trying death penalty cases and the outlays skyrocket. The analysis 
found that in the United States each death penalty inmate costs about $1.12 
million more than a general population inmate.

An especially egregious defect in American death penalty cases is their 
susceptibility to great economic, geographic and racial disparities. A case 
that results in a death sentence often depends less on the underlying facts of 
the alleged crime than on the financial means of the defendant. Of the almost 
1,400 executions that occurred in the United States between 1976 and 2015, 71 % 
were carried out in the South. All manner of racial imbalances can be found in 
capital cases: More than 3/4 of executions stem from cases involving a white 
victim, yet only half of murder victims in America are white. White and black 
inmates make up equal shares of the death row population — 42 % — even though 
the country's population is 61 % white and 13 % black. All 3 death row inmates 
in Colorado — Nathan Dunlap, Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray — were prosecuted 
in Arapahoe County, and all 3 are black. The location of the county line in 
relation to a crime should not determine whether a defendant lives or dies, and 
neither should the skin color of the accused.

It is implausible to think that in the United States innocent people have not 
been executed. Since 1973, more than 160 death row inmates have been set free 
because evidence showed they were innocent. "For every 10 people who have been 
executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S., one person has 
been set free," notes the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. No 
executed inmate in the United States has been posthumously proved legally and 
factually innocent, but this is largely because the justice system has little 
incentive to expend resources on cases in which the defendant is dead. In 2011, 
Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter took the extraordinary step of granting a posthumous 
unconditional pardon to Joe Arridy, who had been executed in 1939 for a murder 
in Pueblo. "(An) overwhelming body of evidence indicates the 23-year-old Arridy 
was innocent, including false and coerced confessions, the likelihood that 
Arridy was not in Pueblo at the time of the killing, and an admission of guilt 
by someone else," Ritter proclaimed.

The state-sanctioned killing of an innocent person is more morally repugnant 
than the execution of a guilty one could be morally just. For this reason alone 
— given that innocent people almost certainly die under a regime of capital 
punishment — Colorado should abolish the death penalty. But the reasons are 
many. Colorado is among the 30 states that still permit capital punishment. 
Legislators this year should withdraw the state from that ignoble club.

(source: Editorial; Quentin Young, for the Editorial Board, Boulder Daiy 
Camera)








MONTANA:

Curious find casts doubt on 1922 execution



Even with a noose around his neck in a stockade behind the Missoula jail, Joe 
Vuckovich swore he hadn’t murdered Mrs. Jerry Shea.

“I am losing my life as innocent as any man that ever was hung,” the 
33-year-old Serbian maintained in broken but clear English on a February 
morning in 1922.

Nora (Goff) Shea was shot dead on Missoula’s Northside on Feb. 12, 1921. 
Vuckovich was there and then he wasn’t, leading authorities on a manhunt that 
ended with his capture 4 days later 35 miles east of town.

A convicted bootlegger and known womanizer prone to violence, Vuckovich was 
tried and convicted of murder in Missoula district court. He was sentenced to 
die, but for most of a year his lawyer’s appeals delayed the hanging.

A final entreaty to Gov. Joseph Dixon, accompanied by 5,000 signatures on a 
petition asking the sentence be commuted to life in prison, was rejected in the 
final hours. Vuckovich was hanged at 6 a.m. on Feb. 17, 1922, and pronounced 
dead 10½ minutes later.

Tom Donovan, in his 2007 book “Hanging Around the Big Sky,” said Vuckovich was 
the last man in Montana to be put to death on a jerk-type gallow. A 320-pound 
weight was dropped, pulling the 140-pound Vuckovich off the ground and breaking 
his neck. 2 hundred invited guests watched.

Donovan listed it as the 8th legal execution in Missoula County dating back to 
1883. The 9th was that of confessed murderer Philip “Slim” Coleman from a 
scaffold inside the Missoula County jail in September 1943. That was the last 
hanging in Montana and the last execution outside the walls of the state 
penitentiary in Deer Lodge.

History tucked the murder and hanging into its macabre pages, to be resurrected 
on occasion over the years but with no further twists.

***

Which makes Cliff Iverson’s “confession board” all the more curious.

The pine board is all of a foot long and five inches wide. It came from an old 
house Iverson’s father had moved from Missoula to Piltzville in the Bonner area 
decades ago. The small house still stands as a rental off Rustic Road.

Anton “Tony” Iverson immigrated from Norway in 1928 and went to work for the 
Anaconda Forest Products mill in Bonner. He retired in 1970 as head outside 
millwright. The same year L.A. Hurt moved the house from the 400 block of East 
Broadway. It joined four others displaced when Interstate 90 was built earlier 
in the 1960s.

After Tony Iverson’s death in 1990, and his wife Thyra’s passing in 1993, Cliff 
Iverson and his siblings prepared the homes for sale.

That’s when the confession board caught his eye.

“I’m thinking it must have come out of the garage,” he said last week. “It was 
probably lying on a workbench or something.”

On one side of the board, in what Iverson thinks is his father’s writing in the 
carpenter’s pencil a millwright always carries, is a synopsis of the Vuckovich 
story:

The handwriting on one side of Cliff Iverson's board states that Jerry Shea 
confessed on his deathbed to killing his wife Nora in 1921.

Hanged on Feb. 17, 1922, for the murder of Mrs. Jerry Shea … ran away to the 
hills … captured near “Bear Mout Mont.” … convicted … granted stay of execution 
… maintained innocence … “last words were that he was not guilty of the Crime 
in wich he was Convicted.”

Turn the board over, and in the same handwriting: “A few years later Mrs Sheas 
husband confesced on his death bed that he had killed her.”

Trial by 2-by-4 is no trial at all. There appears to exist no other evidence 
that Jerry Shea admitted to killing his wife. For history’s sake, justice was 
served when Vuckovich was hanged. He wasn’t the first to go to his death 
proclaiming innocence.

But what if he was telling the truth?

Jerry Shea died 30 years later in Miles City. Obituaries in 1952 said he was 
there visiting his daughter, Mrs. Frank Carlson. Marie Carlson had been 2½ and 
her sister Elizabeth 5 when their mother was murdered.

According to the Montana Standard, Shea was born in Michigan in 1886 and spent 
his childhood in Butte. The family moved to the Bitterroot Valley in 1899, and 
Shea lived at the original home place 3 miles west of Stevensville.

“In 1914 he was married to Nora Gofee (sic), who preceded him in death,” was 
the only mention of Mrs. Shea.

No word of their home in Missoula in 1921, which news reports said was at 504 
N. First St. Today that’s kitty-corner across the street from the north end of 
the Northside pedestrian railroad overpass. At least for a time, Jerry Shea 
worked in the Northern Pacific yard in Missoula, not on a ranch near 
Stevensville.

Nora Shea was shot two blocks to the east, at a corner of North First and what 
was then Rose Avenue, now Woody Street. Sun Mountain Sports and the Zootown 
Arts Community Center are in former warehouses across the street.

There was no eyewitness to the shooting, which happened between 7 p.m. and 8 
p.m. on a Saturday evening and prompted a banner front-page headline in the 
Sunday Missoulian: “Missoula Mother Shot in Cold Blood.”

The subheads included: “Mrs. Jerry Shea is Murdered by Joe Vockolvich (sic). 
Whole City Startled … Talk of Lynching Heard.”

Missoulian front page reporting Nora Shea's murder

Missoulian archives via Newspapers.com

Jerry Shea told police his wife had left their home to buy candy in preparation 
for a family trip to the Bitterroot to visit relatives. A 13-year-old boy told 
police he’d seen her walking down the street with Joe Wines, as Vuckovich was 
known.

Near the Burkhart grocery store at the corner of North First and Rose, “Wines 
crowded Mrs. Shea off the side walk and put his face close to hers,” the boy 
said and the Missoulian reported. “Apparently they were quarreling. A few 
minutes later a shot was heard and Wines was seen running west on North First.”

The initial news account included an interesting detail. Jerry Shea said he was 
in his yard when the shooting occurred. He wasn’t first on the scene, but he 
was there quickly, while his wife was still lying unconscious on the ground, 
her bloodied head on a pillow provided by one of the first arrivals.

“He knelt beside his wife with one knee upon her body. ‘Here, don’t do that,’ 
someone called. ‘She is my wife,’ Mr. Shea replied.”

She was taken by ambulance to St. Patrick Hospital but never regained 
consciousness.

***

Vuckovich sure acted like a guilty man. Neighbors said Shea knew Vuckovich was 
“tampering with his wife’s affections” but was afraid to interfere, the 
newspaper reported.

Vuckovich’s troubles began a couple of weeks earlier. He and Peter Kossich were 
arrested following a disturbance at the Shea home on Jan. 25. Vuckovich was 
said to have slapped Mrs. Shea, bloodying her nose, and to have taken her two 
children as far as the gate of the yard before leaving them and jumping in an 
automobile with Kossich. They only stopped after Chief of Police W.J. Moore 
fired into the back of the car when they returned.

Vuckovich threw away a gun and the car stopped. The men were arrested and 
Vuckovich was fined $250. Nora Shea would not appear against him.

The gun that police found on Joe Vuckovich when he was arrested near Bearmouth, 
which was believed to have been used to shoot Nora Shea.

Five days later, Wines/Vuckovich was back in the police report, arrested for 
bootlegging whiskey. He was released on bail the following day.

Just before dawn on Feb. 13, the morning after the shooting of Nora Shea, 
Vuckovich showed up cold and hungry at a ranch house in Grant Creek. He 
allegedly told E.C. Henry that the law was after him and said, “They have got 
me this time — they will sure hang me this time."

The Henrys thought he was referring to a Prohibition violation. They fed him 
and let him stay, only to discover later that day he’d robbed them of clothing 
and food and disappeared. Vuckovich walked east through the Rattlesnake, to 
Bonner where he stayed a night in an empty cabin, then up the Clark Fork 
Valley. He was spotted by a train crew and captured west of Drummond near 
Bearmouth.

At trial the following month, Deputy Sheriff Barney Wheeler, one of his 
captors, testified that Vuckovich confessed to the murder on the way back to 
Missoula. Wheeler said Vuckovich told him, unbidden: "Well, she wouldn't give 
my money back and I got so mad I shot her. When I get mad I get awfully mad."

Testimony by the Missoulian’s Ray Rocene seemed to clash with Wheeler’s story. 
Rocene had interviewed Wheeler when he returned from Bearmouth with his 
prisoner. He said Wheeler told him Vuckovich had not confessed, “but that he 
thought he would plead guilty.”

***

Meanwhile, Jerry Shea came under suspicion for his wife’s murder, at least in 
the eyes of defense attorney James L. Wallace.

“Did you shoot your wife?” Wallace asked at Vuckovich’s trial in March.

“No,” Shea replied, adding that he’d ejected Vuckovich from his home on Jan. 
25, when Vuckovich assaulted his wife.

Shea denied he had received $1,500 from Vuckovich, and said he didn’t know Mrs. 
Shea withdrew money that belonged to Vuckovich from a bank on the day of the 
shooting.

“Didn’t you know,” Wallace pressed, “about a proposition between your wife and 
Vuckovich whereby she was to get a divorce and marry him and go back to Serbia 
with him?”

No.

“Didn’t you go to see about a divorce from your wife?”

No.

“Didn’t your wife on several occasions threaten to shoot herself?”

No.

The evidence against Vuckovich was strong but circumstantial. Nonetheless, 
after 3 hours of deliberation on March 28, the jury of 12 men convicted 
Vuckovich of 1st degree murder and fixed the penalty of death by hanging.

***

French Ferguson, managing editor of the Sentinel evening paper, interviewed 
Vuckovich the day after he was captured and asked him straight out if he 
murdered Mrs. Shea. Vuckovich seemed to feel a responsibility to reply, but 
said finally, “Maybe, maybe I answer you some time, but I think I better see a 
lawyer first.”

Ferguson concluded Vuckovich was “a contradiction in human form, a mild, 
sparrow-like little man who, probably, has murdered a woman in cold blood upon 
a public street, yet who disliked to refuse to answer a question put to him by 
a man he had never seen before.”

Vuckovich was hanged a year to the day after the interview. The Missoulian 
printed a message from him thanking those who signed the petition to the 
governor on his behalf.

“I want to say as my last message to you that I am losing my life for a crime I 
did not commit,” he wrote. “I want to tell you from my heart that I am an 
innocent man. I am going to my death with a smile. I have no hard feelings in 
my heart toward anybody. They have just made a terrible mistake.”

***

Mike Hopkins hadn’t heard the tale of the Vuckovich hanging and the mystery 
confession until Friday, when he got a summary over the phone at the state 
Capitol in Helena.

“That’s the most interesting story I’ve heard in the Legislature this session,” 
he quipped.

A Republican representative from Missoula House District 92, Hopkins has 
introduced legislation for the 10th session in a row to abolish the death 
penalty.

He said he’s not sure how the story applies to his bill’s quest, “other than 
there are multiple examples throughout the U.S. of individuals who have been 
put to death by the state, via the death penalty, who turned out being 
innocent.”

Hopkins pointed to the recent pardon by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of the 
so-called “Groveland Four,” four young black men who were wrongfully accused of 
raping a white woman in 1949. Three were convicted. The 4th was beaten to death 
by an angry mob before the trial after he’d escaped from jail. None of the 
three was legally executed but all were dead within a few years by either 
violent or mysterious means.

“The only thing I would add,” Hopkins said, “is obviously the only way to 
guarantee the state isn’t in a situation of executing an individual only to 
find out later they’re not guilty is not to execute the individual.”

***

If boards could talk …

There had to be a reason Tony Iverson wrote about Jerry Shea’s “confescion” in 
1952 in so definite terms on such an unorthodox surface.

As far as Cliff Iverson knows, his father never met Jerry Shea in the years 
from 1928 to 1952 when he lived in the Bonner area and Shea lived on the family 
ranch near Stevensville.

He can only speculate.

“They would insulate the houses with newspapers in the olden days, do you 
remember?” he said. “My son-in-law said he’s sure the story must have been on a 
newspaper in the walls of the house and caught his eye, so he grabbed the board 
and wrote it down.”

Shea’s obituary in 1952 was in at least 3 state newspapers. But no published 
account can be found of a confession, in the Missoulian archives or other 
Montana newspapers digitized on newspaper.com.

Tony Harbaugh, sheriff of Custer County where Shea died, graciously took time 
last week to search the coroner records for the entire year of 1952 but came up 
empty.

In fact, he said in an email, “There is no coroner log or report on Mr. Shea’s 
death.”

Keith Belcher, manager of the Missoula County records center, pored through 
records there with no luck.

Belcher said he didn’t know where an official confession would be recorded.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that here,” he said.

Willis and Susan Hintz, both retired from the Missoula County Sheriff’s 
Department, are longtime keepers of law enforcement history in Missoula. 
They’re familiar with the details of the Vuckovich hanging but said they’ve 
never heard a whisper about a confession by Jerry Shea.

Shea was in and out of Missoula hospitals 3 times in 1952. He was discharged 
for the last time in early July, and a blurb in the paper said his daughter 
Elizabeth had arrived from her home in Fairbanks, Alaska, to see him.

Did she take him, sick as he was, to her sister’s home in Miles City? Were both 
of Shea’s daughters at his bedside when he died there on Aug. 21? Did Shea have 
something to get off his chest that somehow ended up on a pinewood board in a 
Missoula home?

“Maybe something new will turn up with this story,” Cliff Iverson said.

Until then we, like the rogue Joe Vuckovich, will be left hanging in history.

(source: missoulian.com)








CALIFORNIA:

Dennis McCarthy: ‘Tool Box Killer’ Lawrence Bittaker got the death penalty 
nearly 40 years ago. But old age will take him in the end----A front-page Daily 
Breeze story from 40 years ago sparks reflection on a murder case and a 
convicted killer who has outlived many of the players in his murder trial.



A promise was made 38 years ago to the families of 5 teenage girls in the South 
Bay and San Fernando Valley who had been kidnapped, raped, tortured, and 
murdered by a monster.

It was a promise not kept.

A jury had voted unanimously to sentence Lawrence Bittaker, 39, to die in the 
San Quentin gas chamber for the gruesome murders, but he lives on today, 
approaching his 80th birthday on death row.

4 of his 5 victims never saw their 17th birthday. One had just turned 18. The 
girls never had the chance to graduate from high school, go to college, have a 
career, get married, have kids, and, by now, grandkids.

They never got the chance to grow old like their murderer is.

When the time came during sentencing for the defense to call character 
witnesses, they could find no one to take the stand on Bittaker’s behalf.

The closest they came was a landlord who said he paid his rent on time.

Bittaker hasn’t paid a dime of rent since. We’ve been picking up his room and 
board for nearly 40 years. He’s outlived half the jurors, the judge, the lead 
detective on the case, an assistant prosecutor, and many others who were part 
of his trial.

“I think they’re just going to let him die of old age,” says Stephen Kay, 
former Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the 
Bittaker case, and the Manson family.

That’s the death penalty in California today for cold-blooded killers – old 
age.

Since 1977, when the death penalty was reinstated, 13 condemned men have died 
in the San Quentin gas chamber, the last in 2006 by lethal injection.

Meanwhile, more than 100 others have died in their beds.

“I had nightmares for almost two years after the Bittaker trial,” Kay says. 
“I’d hear the girls screaming, and run to help them, but always get there too 
late. I’d wake up in a cold sweat.”

He’s 76 now, a grandfather of five, who still replays in his mind a terror tape 
made of a young Burbank girl, Lynette Ledford, 16, begging for her life as she 
is being tortured and brutally murdered by Bittaker.,P> The audio tape was 
found in the back of Bittaker’s van with his tool box – the final piece of 
evidence that there could be no doubt he was guilty, no chance of DNA testing 
later finding a mistake had been made.

It was a slam dunk. The “Tool Box Killer,” as he was known during his 6 month 
killing spree in 1979, was sent off to San Quentin’s death row to bide his time 
until the appeal’s process ran its course – which could take, incredibly, as 
long as 25 years because of the massive back log.

Bittaker blew by 25 years, then 35, and now begins his 38th year waiting for a 
promise that hasn’t been kept, and probably never will. Two lawsuits 
challenging the use of lethal injections have everything on hold.

Bittaker had been on death row 2 years when I went up to San Quentin to 
interview him in 1983. I had covered his trial, seen all the evidence and heard 
the terror tape. I knew I was talking to a monster.

Five minutes into the interview, he began crying. Yes, he had raped the girls, 
but he didn’t murder them, he said. His partner had done that, not him.

And then he smirked. It was the same smug look he had on his face sitting at 
the defense table doodling on a pad when Kay played the terror tape in court, 
and people in the gallery began crying and running out of the courtroom – sick 
to their stomachs for that poor girl begging this monster for her life.

It’s the same smirk you can see today on his most current mug shot in a line up 
with more than 750 other condemned men on death row waiting for their promise 
to be kept.

Bittaker’s hair is neatly combed, and his shirt pressed. He looks like a man 
who has aged well and adapted nicely to prison life. He doesn’t look worried 
that the promise will ever happen to him.

I hadn’t thought of him in a long time until this week while going through a 
stack of old newspapers I’d kept. I came across a front page headline from Feb. 
26, 1981 in the Daily Breeze with my byline on the story.

“Bittaker May Outlive the Jurors,” it read.

And, damn if he isn’t.

(source: Los Angeles Daily News)








USA:

Killer's hearing highlights prolonged nature of death-row appeals



The recent post-conviction hearing for Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. underscored how 
prolonged the appeal process can be for a federal death penalty case.

The appeal process for Rodriguez started in 2006 after he was convicted at 
trial and sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing 22-year-old Dru Sjodin.

Sjodin, a native of Pequot Lakes, Minn., was a student at the University of 
North Dakota in 2003 when she disappeared from the Columbia Mall in Grand 
Forks.

During a nine-day hearing in federal court in Fargo that concluded Thursday, 
Feb. 7, a video clip was played in which Rodriguez told an interviewer in 2013 
how he hid Sjodin's body in a ravine near Crookston, Minn., shortly after he 
killed her.

The hearing focused on a defense claim that Rodriguez is intellectually 
disabled, a condition that would — if the court accepts it as fact — make 
Rodriguez ineligible for execution.

Federal Judge Ralph Erickson, who presided over the trial and is handling 
appeal issues, has given lawyers in the case four months to prepare briefs on 
the mental health question that was explored during the hearing, a timetable 
that doesn't start until the hearing has been reduced to a transcript and 
provided to lawyers.

But the mental health question is not the only issue the judge must decide.

A past hearing covered a claim by the defense that some jurors at Rodriguez's 
trial made false and misleading statements about their background.

A second set of hearings focused on defense claims of alleged false evidence 
presented at trial regarding how Sjodin died and whether she was sexually 
assaulted. The defense also maintains that legal counsel Rodriguez had during 
his trial was ineffective because it failed to recognize and challenge the 
alleged false evidence.

To date, most of the defense claims have yet to be ruled on by the judge.

Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the latest hearing, the defense notified 
Erickson that additional appeal issues could be brought forward in the near 
future, though the issues in question were still being investigated.

With all that remains pending, one knowledgeable court watcher suggested that 
final resolution of all appeal issues may not happen for many, many months, if 
not years.

Taking the mental health question in isolation: If Erickson rules that 
Rodriguez is intellectually disabled, one outcome could be that the court would 
vacate the death sentence and re-sentence Rodriguez to life in prison.

If the court finds that Rodriguez did not fully prove that he is intellectually 
disabled, but nevertheless rules that trial counsel were ineffective in 
pursuing intellectual deficits as a mitigating issue, 1 possible outcome would 
be a retrial of the sentencing phase with a new jury.

Although the ultimate resolution of his case remains a mystery, 1 thing is 
clear: Rodriguez, who is 65, is living in a setting he has become very familiar 
with.

Information presented during the latest hearing highlighted the fact that prior 
to being arrested in 2003 in connection with Sjodin's kidnapping and murder, 
Rodriguez had already spent nearly 3 decades behind bars for 2 rapes and 1 
attempted rape.

Since that 2003 arrest, he has spent approximately 15 more years behind bars.

Expert witnesses who testified for the defense described Rodriguez as a person 
whose mental development as an infant was severely compromised by malnutrition 
and possibly by chemicals he and his family were exposed to as migrant farm 
workers.

By contrast, expert witnesses testifying for the government noted that several 
of Rodriguez's siblings grew up to achieve advanced academic degrees.

They also suggested that problems Rodriguez experienced in school, including 
failing several grade levels, could be understood, at least in part, by 
language issues tied to the years his family traveled back and forth between 
Minnesota and Texas.

(source: The Bismarck Tribune)