[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----FLA., MISS., ARIZ., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 3


FLORIDA:

Prosecutors plan to argue for death sentence for Covington


Edward Covington says the children he murdered loved him.

He says he was close to their mother's family, that before he brutally murdered 
and mutilated Lisa Freiberg and her 2 young children, he spent the holidays 
with the Freibergs and learned from her father how to install a transmission in 
her truck.

Lisa Freiberg's mother says she saw Covington only a few times before he 
slaughtered her daughter and grandchildren on Mother's Day in 2008. Barbara 
Freiberg testified she didn???t even know Covington was living with Lisa, 26, 
Zachary, 7, and Heather Savannah, 2.

This week, prosecutors will argue that Covington's version of the relationships 
justifies a death sentence.

"While living with the Freibergs, Edward Covington routinely and lovingly 
participated as a caregiver in the daily lives of the Freiberg children," the 
prosecution wrote in a court pleading to support prosecutors' assertion that 
Covington's "familial authority" role over the children is an aggravating 
factor justifying a death sentence.

Just after his trial began, Covington pleaded guilty Oct. 24 to murdering 
Freiberg and her children, as well as mutilating their bodies and killing the 
family dog, Duke, a white German shepherd.

Covington told Circuit Judge William Fuente he wants to waive his right to have 
a jury recommend his sentence, and have the judge preside over the penalty 
phase of his trial. Fuente put jurors on standby in case Covington changes his 
mind.

The trial was disrupted when Barbara Freiberg was on the witness stand. Her 
statements minimizing her family's interactions with Covington enraged him. 
Freiberg also testified that she suspected the defendant was abusing her 
2-year-old granddaughter.

Saying they weren't representing his interests, Covington also fired his public 
defenders and said he would represent himself. He said he would present no 
evidence to argue against a death sentence because that is what he deserved.

But Covington relented and agreed to be represented by his team of public 
defenders during the penalty phase of his trial. They are expected to assert 
that his mental illness should justify a sentence of life in prison without 
parole. Covington has been treated for bipolar disorder since he was 15, his 
lawyers have said.

In seeking a death sentence for Covington, 43, prosecutors also will argue 
several aggravating factors in addition to his position in authority over the 
children.

The deaths of Lisa and Heather Savannah, the prosecution says, were what the 
law refers to as "heinous, atrocious or cruel." According to legal instructions 
given to jurors in such cases, "The kind of crime intended to be included as 
heinous, atrocious, or cruel is one accompanied by additional acts that show 
that the crime was conscienceless or pitiless and was unnecessarily torturous 
to the victim."

The acts typically would have to occur while the victims were still alive and 
conscious and wouldn't include the mutilation Covington inflicted on the 
victims' corpses.

Other aggravating factors asserted by the prosecution include the fact that 
Covington was on probation at the time of the killings for driving under the 
influence of drugs, that the killing of Heather Savannah was in the course of 
aggravated child abuse, that the 2 young victims were younger than 12 and that 
there were multiple killings.

(source: Tampa Tribune)






MISSISSIPPI:

Convicted Killer Gets New Attorney


It has been five years since Stephen McGilberry of Jackson County received the 
death penalty for killing 4 members of his family. After all that time, you 
would think his appeals would well be on their way through the state and 
federal courts. But McGilberry has yet to file his 1st federal appeal.

He is on death row, after being found guilty of using a baseball bat to kill 
his mother, stepfather, half sister, and her 3-year-old son. The murders 
occurred in October, 1994, in the family's St. Martin home.

Friday, McGilberry was back in a Jackson County Courtroom asking for a new 
lawyer to handle his appeals. State law entitles Stephen McGilberry to have a 
lawyer who works for the newly created Office of Post Conviction Counsel. 
Simply put, that means Hattiesburg attorney Michael Adelman has been appointed 
to carefully review everything about the case and to prepare McGilberry's 
federal appeals.

Adelman says it will be his job to review the 1996 trial record and the appeal 
that automatically followed to the State Supreme Court. He will look for any 
errors that were made that could force the higher courts to order a new 
sentence or even a new trial for McGilberry.

McGilberry was handcuffed and wore a surgical mask during his short court 
appearance. The judge ordered the mask after McGilberry repeatedly threatened 
to spit on the deputies who were guarding him.

After the hearing, McGilberry asked if he could return to death row right away. 
Judge James Backstrom said he thought that could be accomplished.

(source: WLOX news)






ARIZONA:

Judge Orders Media and Others to Leave Court Room (Except Victim's Family) to 
Protect Witness from Harassment


The Jodi Arias re-trial is getting to be more and more interesting than during 
the trial period before murder suspect Jodi Arias was convicted October last 
year of killing ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander. This time, the controversy is 
attributed to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sherry Stephens when she 
ordered the people inside the court room to go out, except Alexander's family, 
so the defense's witness can be called in for the testimony.

"This was not an easy decision," said Judge Sherry Stephens, who expected media 
ire after they were told to head out the door along with others.

The decision of Judge Stephen to keep the Jodi Arias retrial media-free until 
the verdict was made was to let the defense witness take the stand without fear 
of being threatened or harassed afterwards. Media coverage will make known the 
identity of the witness to the public and haters. Arias's lawyers said media 
coverage drives their witnesses to back-out.

This was contested by a media law attorney who reminded Judge Stephens that the 
public can cite the right of First Amendment in following the Jodi Arias trial. 
The judge responded to this by saying Arias's right to fair trial outweighs the 
public's right to know.

"This is on the presumption that criminal trials are open to the public, open 
to the media, open to anyone who wants to attend," said the media law attorney. 
He added the "notion that they have secret trial going on [that] is troubling."

A new set of jury in the Jodi Arias retrial will decide whether Arias will be 
meted with death penalty, life imprisonment or 25 years.

An outpour of emotion by the victim's family were among the highlights of the 
Thursday retrial. They mentioned suffering from mental and emotional anguish 
due to nightmares, ulcers, and trauma caused by Travis Alexander's murder.

The Jodi Arias trial reached global attention due to the dramatic and graphic 
presentation of evidences between Jodi Arias and the victim Travis Alexander. 
This included sexual exchange of messages and photos that showed brutal murder 
of Alexander caused by jealous rage. Arias admitted to the killing of Alexander 
as self-defense.

Judge Stephen's decision to stretch leeway in favor of the defense is to ensure 
that justice is truly being exercised during the trial before arriving at a 
crucial decision for Jodi Arias.

Trial will resume Monday.

(source: Franchise Herald)






USA:

Life after death row


I'd like to think of myself as a liberal person. The 1st article I ever wrote 
(for my middle-school newspaper) tried to persuade readers to vote against the 
ban of same-sex marriage and, despite my Catholic roots, I identify as a 
supporter of a woman's right to choose. Yeah, I guess it's safe to say that 
when it comes to most social issues, I will be found sitting comfortably on the 
left side.

Key word: most.

If there is one "controversy" that I can most definitely associate with 
conservatives on, it would be the necessity of a death penalty. No matter how 
proud I become of our society, I acknowledge that certain individuals and their 
crimes are on such an atrocious level that there is no worse punishment than to 
feel a needle with lethal poison to pierce their skin.

Too bad the death sentence has become so ineffective.

In 1993, Nathan Dunlap shot up a Chuck E. Cheese. He killed 4 people and 
critically injured a 5th. In 1996, he was sentenced to death row. Recently 
though, he has gotten a brief stay (postponement) of his fate. Many are 
outraged by this action. And they should be. Here is a man who gets to live on 
through his days while there are families who will forever mourn their losses.

This isn't some rare occurrence. The number of death-row inmates who get their 
comeuppance is more rare then most people think. Some, such as Richard "the 
Night Stalker" Ramirez, die of natural causes, while others, such as Jeffrey 
Dahmer, are killed by other inmates. As of 2014, there are 3,054. That is 38 
fewer than 2013.

What bothers me so much about this is the sheer number of death-row occupants 
in comparison with the number who die by mandate. If you add that the average 
number of months to the execution date (as of 2012) is 190 months and that the 
median cost for execution cases is $1.26 million, then it becomes apparent how 
problematic this entire system is.

Now that the problem has been identified, how does one go about to fix it?

I think that getting rid of the death penalty all together would cause more 
harm then good. Overpopulation is still a problem, and the people on death row 
certainly don't deserve to contribute to it. The cost of the process could be 
cut by changing the common execution method, but then again we must still 
maintain the most humane death possible, so that doesn't quite work, either.

What we have here is double-edged sword of a conundrum. By trying to rectify 
one problem, another one is created. Does this then mean that capital 
punishment is a failure of a system?

Even though there are a plethora of flaws, I still believe in the death 
penalty. It has rid the world of several individuals who would have only caused 
more devastation in our society. This why I propose that there should not be 
people arguing over the morality of the death penalty but rather a people 
coming together to try to improve it so that the positive aspects outweigh the 
negative.

That's the 1st step in this equation. It's up to all of us to help create the 
2nd.

(source: Commentary; Christopher Cervantes, The Daily Iowan)

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

U.S. Execution, European Abolition


When Felix G. Rohatyn went to Paris as the American ambassador in 1997, he 
expected the most controversial subject he'd face to be the famous French 
mistrust of "American hegemony." To his surprise, the No. 1 issue turned out to 
be the death penalty.

The "enormous revulsion of the French" over the issue, he told me in 2001 after 
his return to New York, was eye-opening, as was his friendship with Robert 
Badinter, the French minister of justice who, under President Fran???ois 
Mitterrand, led the fight for the abolition of capital punishment in 1981.

"All those demonstrations, in front of the embassy and the consulates, showed 
how really passionate people were," Mr. Rohatyn said. "And in the end, I 
thought they were probably right."

2 recent magazine articles - 1 French, the other American - demonstrate that 
while the issue has not gone away in Paris, it has taken a new turn in the 
United States. There has been a big change in American attitudes toward capital 
punishment during the last decade, and Europe has played a part in it.

In September, Le Monde magazine published a story about Mr. Badinter's return 
to La Sante prison in Paris, now closed for renovation. There, in 1972, he 
witnessed the execution by guillotine of one of the last inmates sentenced to 
death in France, a man for whom he, as a lawyer, had desperately tried to win a 
reprieve. "The shadow of the guillotine is everywhere," Mr. Badinter, now 86, 
somberly observed.

Across the Atlantic, the September issue of Texas Monthly carried a long 
profile of Michelle Lyons, a former reporter with The Huntsville Item who spent 
more than a decade working as a public affairs officer for the Texas Department 
of Criminal Justice. I met Ms. Lyons in 2001 when she was a 25-year-old 
journalist covering the Texas prison system. I asked her about the executions 
she???d seen, and she talked about the prisoner's "last gasp," after the lethal 
injection was administered.

"Some of them sound like they???re coughing," she said, "some have a deep 
sigh."

I was struck by the matter-of-fact demeanor of this young woman confronted with 
such a dark reality. She was smart and open, and I, in exchange, did not push 
her too hard on her views about the death penalty. I imagined, in my European 
mind, that she had to be struggling, though she did not show it.

Ms. Lyons, now in her late 30s and a mother, has left the Texas Department of 
Criminal Justice. By the time she departed, she had witnessed 278 executions. 
With remarkable candor, she told Texas Monthly, "I think about it all the 
time."

If Mr. Badinter is haunted by the guillotine 42 years after the one execution 
he attended, it would come as no surprise to Europeans that Ms. Lyons is 
troubled after witnessing 278 inmates die. What's new is that Ms. Lyons is 
unloading her feelings, and finding an audience in her own country.

Support for the death penalty in America, according to a Gallup poll last week, 
is now at 63 %, down from 80 % in the '90s. Relentlessly, over the past 3 
decades, European public opinion, campaigners and, finally, governments have 
pressed the mighty United States on the issue. Even the European Commission got 
involved in 2011, banning the export of eight lethal-injection drugs used by 
states' prison departments. The European Union's "Action Plan on Human Rights 
and Democracy," adopted in 2012, makes the fight against the death penalty a 
priority.

Capital punishment remains a legal sentence in 32 states, but the trend is 
clear: 6 states have abolished the death penalty in the last 6 years, and more 
than a dozen others are observing a moratorium on executions. 2 factors have 
been decisive in the retreat of capital punishment in the United States over 
the past 15 years. One is the campaign waged by admirable American lawyers to 
prove the innocence of wrongly convicted people, sometimes with the help of DNA 
evidence; this campaign has led to the exoneration of 146 inmates on death row 
since 1973. The fact that these men could have been executed for crimes they 
did not commit is troubling to many American citizens.

The other factor is the shortage of drugs used for execution because, under 
pressure from European activists, pharmaceutical firms stopped selling them to 
death penalty states. The shortage has plunged the execution industry into 
disarray.

Some states began experimenting with other drugs or different protocols. 
Sometimes this works, sometimes it does not. Botched procedures, like the April 
29 execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, which had to be called off as he 
writhed, convulsed and tried to rise from the gurney, but nevertheless died 
from a heart attack 43 minutes later, have given new meaning to the "cruel and 
unusual punishments" banned by the Eighth Amendment.

In a cat-and-mouse game, it is now the turn of the Pennsylvania-based 
pharmaceutical group Mylan to be the target of anti-death penalty campaigners. 
After Alabama named a Mylan-made drug as one of a new combination for lethal 
injections, a German investment fund sold off its shares in the company.

To European campaigners, for the machinery of death to be so stubbornly 
persistent is beyond comprehension and only strengthens their determination. 
Europe and America, after all, are supposed to share the same values.

"The death penalty has never fit well with the fundamental ideals of this 
country," remarked Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information 
Center, at a recent meeting organized by the European Union delegation in 
Washington.

It has not fit well either with the European idea of American ideals. And the 
European Union has made it known. This is Europe's soft power at its best.

(source: Op-Ed; Sylvie Kauffmann is the editorial director and a former editor 
in chief of Le Monde----New York Times)