[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----COLO., UTAH, USA, US MIL.

[Rick Halperin]

Oct. 14



COLORADO:

Defense Outreach In Holmes Case Was 'Manipulative,' Victim Says


A victim of the Aurora theater massacre said he believes defense lawyers and 
anti-death penalty groups have tried to use him like a pawn.

Marcus Weaver voiced his previous opposition to the death penalty and spoke and 
wrote about forgiving suspect James Holmes. His stance drew the attention of 
groups opposed to capital punishment and eventually led to a meeting with a 
victim's advocate who worked for Holmes' lawyers.

That advocate, Tammy Krause, told Weaver she'd encountered difficulty reaching 
out to other victims.

Weaver said he felt puzzled by that.

"You're a victim's advocate," he remembers telling Krause.

"I'm a DIVO," he says she told him.

That's short for Defense-Initiative Victims Outreach, a program that defense 
attorneys say help victims recover.

Weaver, 43, said when he was asked to disseminate a letter to other victims and 
victims' family to dissuade them from supporting the death penalty in Holmes' 
case, "that's when it got really fuzzy," he said.

"As the conversation ... went on, she was not very clear about who she was, 
what her role was," Weaver said.

That meeting with Krause happened through a series of connections Weaver made 
with people opposed to capital punishment. He originally became involved 6 
months after the shooting when he was contacted by Guideposts Magazine to write 
a story about his life, how he felt about Holmes and how he forgave him - an 
act based on abuse Weaver suffered as a child.

During the attacks, Weaver was shot in the arm. His friend Rebecca Wingo was 
killed. James Holmes is accused of killing 12 and wounding 58 in the July 20, 
2012, attack at an Aurora cineplex. He faces the death penalty if convicted. 
Holmes' attorneys have all but conceded his role but claim he was insane at the 
time of the attack.

The prosecution polled victims and victims' family members prior to the 
Arapahoe County District Attorney's announcement that it would seek the death 
penalty. Most said they supported a capital case.

Before his meeting with Krause, Weaver spoke at a symposium about gun violence, 
specifically addressing the Aurora shooting and his death penalty views. 
Representatives from the Colorado anti-capital punishment group told Weaver 
they were interested in his sharing his story again.

"It was't clear at first. I assume they wanted me to tell the story about how I 
forgive the shooter, how I am involved in a case that has the death penalty," 
Weaver said.

Weaver said that victims have been contacted by groups on both sides of 
volatile issue - including anti-gun control organizations like the NRA and 
anti-capital punishment groups like Coloradans for Alternatives to the Death 
Penalty Foundation.

Later came the meeting with Krause.

"It made me distrust the Colorado (anti-)death penalty folks, too, because she 
had arranged a dinner meeting with a person I thought was a possible advocate 
or a person who wanted to hear my story or wanted me to speak at an event," 
Weaver said. "But what it turned out to be was something that was manipulative, 
I felt, in a way."

He then called his lawyer, who arranged a meeting with the DA's office and the 
defense. That was when it was explained to him that Krause worked for the 
defense team.

He's also been approached by prominent anti-death penalty attorney David Lane.

"I want to empower the victims in the Holmes case to take a different path than 
the one given to them by the DA, which is a path of death and destruction," 
Lane said.

The anti-death penalty foundation also introduced him to Bob Autobee, another 
anti-capital punishment advocate whose son, a prison guard, was murdered by an 
inmate. That inmate was spared largely because of Autobee's actions.

Autobee wrote a letter inviting victims to meet with him, and he wanted Weaver 
to help him.

"I don't feel anybody should be put to death," Autobee said. "My message is, 
'Speak out if you're against it because you're going to have to live with your 
decision for the rest of your life.'"

But Weaver declined to distribute the letter.

Weaver said the victims seem to be caught between two opposing sides.

"There have been some unsavory things that have happened," he said. "It just 
feels like we have been pitted in the middle."

(source: CBS news)






UTAH:

Could firing squad make a comeback in Utah, elsewhere?----In the wake of 
botched executions and with lethal injection drugs difficult to find, states 
around the nation are looking at alternative means of execution. Some, like 
Wyoming, are looking to Utah and its firing squad.

When Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by firing squad in 2010 at the Utah State 
Prison in Draper, more than 59 journalists from news outlets from around the 
globe descended upon Utah to cover the event.

Reporters from Japan and Great Britain called it "a Wild West way of 
dispatching people" and referenced John Wayne movies.

But as anti-death penalty pharmaceutical companies in Europe refuse to sell the 
drugs necessary for lethal injections to prisons in the United States and in 
the wake of botched lethal injection executions in recent months, the firing 
squad could be making its return to Utah and other places.

"I've had several states actually call (to ask about the firing squad)," Rep. 
Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, said. "They asked me not to name them because they 
don't want the media circus on it. But they're in the same boat we are - they 
can't get the drugs, either."

Botched executions involving lethal injections in Arizona, Oklahoma and Ohio 
earlier this year have led Ray to believe that the method could face 
constitutional challenges as well. For that reason, he is proposing legislation 
that would bring back the firing squad as the secondary execution method in 
Utah, should the primary method, lethal injection, be found unconstitutional or 
unavailable.

"It really won't do anything," Ray said. "It's just the plan B if we need it."

A law passed in 2004 eliminated death by firing squad in Utah, but those on 
death row who requested such a death prior to the new law still have the 
option. Ray said the legislation he is proposing would restore the firing squad 
as a possible execution method, but eliminate the inmate choice.

"It will be lethal injection, and then, if the drugs are not there, or it is 
unconstitutional, then it will be firing squad," Ray explained. "There is no 
option for the inmates."

Utah's firing squad comprises 5 riflemen, all certified law enforcement 
officers, using 30-30 rifles. 4 of the guns are loaded with live ammunition and 
1 is loaded with a blank before the officers shoot in unison.

Ray acknowledged that part of the reason the method was eliminated was due to 
the extra attention that surrounded it. But he said there is always going to be 
interest around executions, especially among international media. The firing 
squad may heighten that interest, but Ray doesn't balk at it as an execution 
method.

"It is actually the most humane," he said. "The individual is usually dead 
before they can even hear the gunshot. It's 4 bullets to the heart, so it's not 
'How long did it take for him to die? Could he breathe? Did he feel it?'"

Wyoming Sen. Bruce Burns, R-Sheridan, decided to propose the firing squad as 
Wyoming's secondary execution method, because he said it is what he would 
choose if forced to select to among the alternatives to lethal injection.

"It became a matter of personal prejudice and if I was the one that was being 
executed," Burns said.

Wyoming's current backup if lethal injection is unavailable is the gas chamber, 
which Burns felt was impractical for a number of reasons. For one, the state 
doesn't have a gas chamber, and building one - and the possible litigation 
prompted by a decision to build one - would be expensive.

"It would cost millions of dollars to build one," Burns said. "And sometimes 
you have to put your own experience into it and I think the gas chamber would 
be a horrible way to kill somebody."

The firing squad is simply "more efficient," he said. And Wyoming has an 
example in Utah if it decides to make the firing squad its secondary method.

"I do like the way Utah did it," Burns said. "Utah has a very good protocol. If 
we pass this, I would hope the Wyoming Department of Corrections would look to 
the protocol that Utah uses."

Even before the botched executions, Burns noticed the difficulty getting lethal 
injection drugs from companies in the European Union. He proposed a bill to 
implement the firing squad in Wyoming's legislative session this past January.

It didn't pass, but officials from the Wyoming Department of Corrections came 
forward and spoke about the difficulties states around the nation are facing 
when it comes to obtaining drugs for lethal injections, and the Wyoming 
Legislature's Judiciary Committee decided to look at the issue. Lawmakers have 
since decided to sponsor the firing squad bill in the upcoming legislative 
session in January.

Ralph Dellapiana, a public defender and director of Utahns for Alternatives to 
the Death Penalty, said there are a number of states taking a 2nd look at the 
death penalty with 6 eliminating the punishment in the past 6 years. He 
predicted another 6 states, including Colorado and Montana, will also put a 
stop to capital punishment in the next few years.

"People have different reasons," Dellapiana said. "For some people it's 
immoral, and in other places it's that it's extremely costly and the appeals 
take forever and the victims want it to be over with."

He noted the concerns some have about exonerations of those on death row and 
the fear of executing the innocent. Couple those with the issues regarding the 
manner of the executions, and Dellapiana said there's just no reason to 
continue with the death penalty.

"It doesn't matter what your reason is, there are just too many reasons we 
shouldn't do it," he said. "We should join the civilized world instead of 
joining the ranks of Iran, Pakistan and China."

When Gardner was executed, Dellapiana said he got calls from journalists around 
the world who were shocked that the death penalty even existed and found the 
firing squad "all the more horrific." As far as he is concerned, though, the 
manner in which executions are carried out is largely irrelevant.

"I think there's a lot of costs and problems involved in each of them," he 
said.

There are already legal challenges to the death penalty pending that allege the 
practice amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Dellapiana said there are 
also First Amendment issues in states where officials are trying to keep 
execution details, such as which drugs are being used and where they are coming 
from, from the public and the media.

He believes the challenges will ultimately land in front of the U.S. Supreme 
Court. And while he doesn't think the nation's high court will eliminate the 
death penalty altogether, he does think they will order states to submit their 
methods and policies to public scrutiny and ensure that they meet all due 
process standards.

With life without parole as an option, Dellapiana just doesn't see the point in 
pursuing the death penalty.

"The more people learn about the problems with the death penalty, they'll say: 
'Even if I'm not morally opposed to killing people, I have all these other 
reasons to recognize that it's bad policy and we shouldn't be trying to do 
it,'" Dellapiana said. "The alternative is faster, cheaper and better for 
families of victims."

Ray acknowledged that the current death penalty process in Utah needs to be 
"refined."

"It takes too long, there are too many appeals in the appeals process and it's 
too expensive," he said. "That's something we have to take a look at: 'Here is 
the cost. Can we trim it down?' And if not, if it's worth having. I'm open to 
that discussion."

Burns said the the Wyoming Legislature's Judiciary Committee recently had an 
extended debate about the death penalty and whether to eliminate it altogether. 
A proposed bill was even drafted.

"It went down and not by a whole lot," Burns said, before adding that he likes 
where Wyoming stands now with just 1 man on death row. "We have 22 people in 
prison for life without parole, and any one of those 22 could have been a 
capital case. We haven't executed anyone since 1992, so we use it 
infrequently."

Still, he believes the death penalty is an important tool in the criminal 
justice system to be used as needed.

"I'm not a fan of using it more, but I would like to have it there in reserve 
for those crimes that are so horrible and so heinous that the person doesn't 
even deserve life without parole," Burns said.

(source: Deseret News)






USA:

Pictures at an execution: The condemned in art


A new exhibition aims to humanise condemned prisoners. From the sword to the 
electric chair, the death penalty has inspired challenging art, writes Jason 
Farago.

One man, before dying, said, "I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me." 
Another said, "I'm going to a beautiful place." A 3rd: "I am innocent, 
innocent, innocent."

Those were their last words before an executioner took their lives. And for Amy 
Elkins, a young artist based in Los Angeles, those testaments offered a means 
to humanise the grim statistics of the death penalty in the United States. Her 
photography series - which was awarded this year's Aperture Portfolio Prize and 
goes on view in New York next month - overlays the mugshots of the condemned 
with text of their final words, coursing down the image like the current of a 
river. Another series features letters Elkins exchanged with death row 
prisoners, including several in solitary confinement, interspersed with 
photographs the artist took in an effort to simulate their thoughts. A 
seascape, a forest, an expanse of concrete: these images, mundane in other 
circumstances, become through Elkins the inner worlds of men whom the state 
will destroy.

"People write of capital punishment as if they were whispering," argued Albert 
Camus, the most implacable of death-penalty opponents, in his 1957 Reflections 
on the Guillotine. To an extent, we still do. This year several US states, 
facing a shortage of drugs for lethal injections thanks to a European 
moratorium, resorted to untested and unreliable combinations that resulted in 
severe pain and, in one case, a failed execution. Though campaigners condemned 
the executions as barbaric and inhumane, and though support for capital 
punishment has declined in the United States, these botched lethal injections 
spurred little public discussion. Today, although the death penalty is illegal 
in all but 22 countries, we still write about it in a whisper, preferring not 
to see the consequences of society's ultimate sentence. Can art speak more 
loudly? It certainly has throughout art history; perhaps it can again.

A brutal history

Western art history bulges with depictions of martyred saints and slaughtered 
innocents, but capital punishment is something more precise. It refers not just 
to a death, but to a legal death. There is no death penalty in a state of 
nature; only society, and the laws that govern it, can turn murder into alleged 
justice. Capital punishment exists at a paradoxical junction point of 
civilisation and barbarism. It is "the most premeditated of murders", in 
Camus's phrase, in which the force of law is used to justify something 
otherwise unjustifiable.

2 archetypal executions hover over the Western world's artistic depictions of 
the death penalty. The first is that of Sophocles' Antigone. Sentenced to death 
for giving her condemned brother's corpse an honourable burial, Antigone is 
sealed in a cave but hangs herself to ensure an honourable death. (Though now 
held up as a great anti-death penalty play, it was nothing of the sort in 441 
BC; performances of Greek drama would be preceded by parades of captured war 
orphans and dead soldiers' armour.) The 2nd, of course, is that of Jesus 
Christ. The crucifixion may mark Christ's passage from humanity to divinity, 
but it was also a simple application of Roman law; Jesus, after all, was 
crucified alongside 2 thieves. Andrea Mantegna's blunt and forceful Crucifixion 
of 1456-59, in the collection of the Louvre, captures the dual divine and legal 
nature of Christ's execution. He and the 2 thieves are splayed on the crosses, 
sinews bulging, and beneath them are not only Mary and John, but also ordinary 
soldiers gambling with dice.

In Europe during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, capital punishment was 
not hidden away in execution chambers. It was a public spectacle, advertised to 
city-dwellers and featuring carefully stage-managed processions. Gruesome 
capital punishment, as well as depictions of it in art, had a dual purpose. It 
not only enforced civic order; it also served to encourage piety and warn 
against eternal damnation. In a time when kings ruled by divine right, every 
application of the death penalty was a miniature preview of the Last Judgment.

The most honourable means of death was decapitation, as shown in the 
magnificent Allegory of Good Government, painted in 1339 by the Sienese artist 
Ambrogio Lorenzetti - wherein Justice sits with a sword in her right hand and a 
severed head on her knee. Hanging was a less honourable penalty, and beneath 
that was being broken on the wheel, a horrible punishment that numerous 
anatomy-curious Renaissance painters would have witnessed. Religious crimes 
were often punished via burning at the stake; in Francesco Rizi's 1683 painting 
at the Prado, Madrid's Plaza Mayor is filled with thousands of spectators 
waiting to see the condemned go up in flames. In fact, art itself often played 
a role in the death penalty. In Italy, a comforter would follow the condemned 
carrying a tavoletta, or a painted panel of the Passion or the crucifixion, to 
gaze on in his last moments.

In protest

By the 18th Century, capital punishment was still a public spectacle. William 
Hogarth satirised London's taste for executions, which took place on public 
holidays, in his sharp engraving of a lazy apprentice being carted to Tyburn, 
alongside drunks, hawkers, fighting children and yapping dogs. (On the frame of 
the image Hogarth included 2 gibbeted skeletons: a bonus punishment, in which 
the bodies of the executed were hung on public display.) But in France the more 
gruesome forms of capital punishment were being phased out, and the country 
soon instituted a single, putatively egalitarian mode of execution: the 
guillotine. Jacques-Louis David, who in The Death of Socrates depicted the 
Greek philosopher's jury-ordered suicide, also sketched Marie Antoinette on her 
way to the "national razor", her face stony, her hands bound behind her. 
Indeed, David is almost certainly the only artist ever to apply the death 
penalty. For he was not just a painter; he was a revolutionary and a member of 
the National Convention, allied with Robespierre. Like most Jacobins, David 
cast his ballot for the death of Louis XVI in 1792 - and after Thermidor he was 
lucky to avoid the guillotine himself, ending up in prison in the wake of 
Robespierre's fall.

In the modern era the death penalty has moved indoors. Executions were no 
longer visible, and so the instruments of execution - the noose, the injection 
table and especially the electric chair - have become synonymous with the 
condemned. Andy Warhol, too often misunderstood as an apolitical artist, in 
fact produced some of the most sinister art of America's hot 1960s, and 
alongside his race riots and car crashes he produced multiple paintings of 
electric chairs, impassive in deserted death chambers, silkscreened in serial, 
stomach-turning repetition. The repeated electric chairs testify both to the 
abundance of executions as well as the numbing effect of media representations 
of violence, including state violence. The only sign of life in Warhol's 
electric chair paintings is a printed sign on the wall, reading, over and over, 
"SILENCE".

Warhol kept mum on his individual political beliefs, preferring to let his art 
do the talking. But several contemporary artists have taken much more vocal 
stances. In her commanding photographic series The Innocents, Taryn Simon shot 
exonerated prisoners freed from death row, but with a harrowing twist: the 
photos are taken at the sites of the crimes for which they were falsely 
convicted. But the most powerful contemporary art to understand the true nature 
of the death penalty may come from Japan, where capital punishment is still 
legal. In Tokyo last month, an exhibition took place of drawings and paintings 
created by 34 Japanese on death row. One of the condemned painted a classical 
landscape. Another drew a nude figure alone in a cell, clawing at the brick 
walls. As to what the artists may have felt when they made these serene or 
harrowing images, we may never know. By the time the show opened, 6 had already 
been executed.

(source: BBC)

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

Washington Iranians protest executions under Hassan Rouhani


On the occasion of the World Day Against Death Penalty, a group of Iranians in 
Washington gathered outside White House on Saturday to protest the increasing 
number of executions in their country.

They carried large signs reading "Stop Executions in Iran", "No to Rouhani," 
the president of the clerical regime.

Similar protests were held in a number of major European cities and North 
America.

(source: NCR-Iran)

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

Cop-killer Ronell Wilson's death sentence should stand; no evidence of mental 
incapacity, say prosecutors


A federal judge correctly determined Ronell Wilson was not intellectually 
incapacitated when he slayed 2 undercover detectives 11 years ago and is 
therefore eligible for the death penalty, contend prosecutors.

"After a thorough and analytically sound consideration of Wilson's IQ scores, 
the corresponding SEMs (standard error of measurement) and several other 
factors, the court properly concluded that Wilson was not intellectually 
disabled," wrote Assistant U.S. attorneys James G. McGovern and Celia A. Cohen 
in a brief filed Friday in Brooklyn federal court.

Wilson, 32, was sentenced to death last year in a penalty-phase retrial after 
District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis previously ruled the former Stapleton gang 
member was not mentally incapacitated. He remains on death row in a federal 
prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

In a last-ditch bid to save Wilson's life, his lawyers last month had asked 
Garaufis to reevaluate his ruling and hold additional hearings regarding 
Wilson's mental competency.

Wilson's attorneys maintained Garaufis relied too heavily on IQ scores and 
failed to consider other factors, such as adaptive functioning evidence, in his 
finding.

Attorneys David Stern and Michael Burt had contended Wilson was mentally 
impaired as evidenced by his low IQ and severe emotional and behavioral 
problems while growing up.

In a landmark 2002 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court found that executing the 
mentally retarded violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual 
punishments. Such persons typically have an IQ below 70.

In June, a federal appeals court ordered Garaufis to reconsider his decision on 
Wilson's intellectual capacity in light of a recent Supreme Court decision.

The country's highest court found that Florida had adopted a too-rigid cutoff 
for IQ test results in deciding who could be spared the death penalty due to 
intellectual disabilities.

The defendant was convicted of murdering Detectives Rodney J. Andrews, 34, and 
Detective James V. Nemorin, 36, during an undercover gun buy-and-bust operation 
in Tompkinsville on March 10, 2003.

In a July hearing after the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second 
Circuit, Garaufis said he would consider what steps, if any, should be taken 
once Wilson's lawyers and prosecutors had submitted their briefs.

In the Florida case, Hall v. Florida, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that some 
states draw a too-rigid line on IQ-test results. Such a standard doesn't 
account for the margin of error that professionals say is inherent in IQ tests, 
the court said.

In his ruling last year, Garaufis said the evidence belied Wilson's claims of 
mental incapacity.

The judge said he relied on clinical standards that define mental retardation 
as significantly subaverage intellectual functioning and significant deficits 
in adaptive behavior skills, such as communication, self-care and 
self-direction. Those conditions must manifest themselves before the age of 18, 
and Wilson also had to be found mentally deficient at the time of the crime, 
said Garaufis.

He said 7 of the 8 IQ tests Wilson took at various times between the ages of 6 
and 30 "point(ed) away from mental retardation," as did the opinions of all his 
test administrators.

While Wilson's score on an IQ test in 1994 was "indicative" of mental 
retardation, the judge viewed that result as an "outlier."

Garaufis also noted that a defense psychologist "rule(d) out the likelihood of 
mental retardation" in his October 2003 evaluation of Wilson, 7 months after 
the murders.

Wilson's attorneys maintain Garaufis didn't consider whether evidence of the 
defendant's deficits in adaptive functioning indicated intellectual impairment.

Since the time of Garaufis ruling, the American Psychiatric Association has 
revised its definition of intellectual disability and its diagnostic criteria, 
contend Wilson's attorneys.

Prosecutors maintain Garaufis correctly weighed a variety of factors, including 
the margin of error in the tests and the possibility the results could have 
been inflated by Wilson' repeated taking of the tests, even across an extended 
period of time.

"In sum, there is no credible evidence in the record that Wilson has deficits 
in adaptive functioning that are specifically caused by intellectual 
disability, even if his IQ scores implicated potential significant subaverage 
intelligence, which, they do not," wrote prosecutors.

The case is being handled by the office of Loretta E. Lynch, U.S. attorney for 
the Eastern District of New York.

(source: Staten Island Advance)






US MILITARY:

Robins airman to face death penalty in killing of woman, unborn child


A senior airman at Robins Air Force Base accused of killing his fiancee and 
their unborn child for $1 million in insurance money is now facing the death 
penalty.

Charges against Charles "Charlie" Amos Wilson III were sent to a general court 
martial as a capital referral, according to a base news release Tuesday.

"That means that, if the accused is convicted of premeditated murder, a death 
sentence would be a potential punishment that the members would consider," the 
release stated.

Lt. Gen. Bruce Litchfield, the general court martial convening authority, made 
the referral Thursday.

Wilson was arrested Aug. 31, 2013, on charges of murder and feticide after an 
investigation by the GBI and Terrell County Sheriff's Office into the shooting 
death of 30-year-old Tameda Ferguson. The body of Ferguson, who was 8 1/2 
months pregnant, was found in her Dawson home on the early morning of Aug. 29, 
2013.

The case was turned over to the U.S. Air Force at its request.

At the time of a May 6 military Article 32 hearing, Wilson was facing a 
multitude of military charges, including premeditated murder, death of an 
unborn child and obstruction of justice.

Wilson's attorney at the Article 32 hearing said Wilson is expected to plead 
not guilty. A new military attorney is expected to be appointed now that it is 
a capital case.

Arraignment is scheduled for Oct. 22 at the Naval Consolidated Brig in 
Charleston, South Carolina. A trial date has not been set, but Col. Vance H. 
Spath, the chief trial judge of the Air Force, has been assigned to the case as 
the military judge.

Wilson is a senior airman in the 461st Aircraft Maintenance Squadron.

(source: Macon Telelgraph)

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

Ft. Hood Murderer's Attorney: "I Don't Know Where They Come Up With Workplace 
Violence"


Ft. Hood murderer Nidal Hasan recently sent a 6 page letter to Pope Francis 
about waging Jihad, further clarifying Hasan's murder of 13 people and the 
shooting of 30 others in 2009 was Islamic terrorism, not work place violence as 
the politically correct Obama administration has said and argued.

Last night on The Kelly File Hassan's current attorney, John Galligan, said he 
doesn't understand where the classification of "workplace violence" comes from 
in this case.

"I don't know where they come up with the term 'work place violence.' I've been 
in the Army 30 years, I've been in the practice of law for almost 35 years, 
work place violence was not the crime for which he was charged, it is not a 
punishable offense under the UCMJ and it's certainly not an aggravating factor 
that would warrant the death penalty. Nidal Hasan was charged with mass 
murder," Galligan said, adding the government had the option to charge him with 
terrorism and didn't. Galligan also argued it is inconsistent for the Army to 
pursue the death penalty while attempting to cover the incident with a work 
place violence label.

Although Hasan has been sentenced to death, Galligan doesn't believe his 
sentence will be carried out.

(source: townhall.com)