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

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 9



WYOMING:

Monterastelli: Time to repeal the death penalty


Editor:

On Sept. 11, a state legislative committee will discuss whether to sponsor a 
bill in the 2015 session that would abolish the death penalty. Lawmakers have 
been debating alternatives to lethal injection since many pharmaceutical 
companies began restricting sales of the drugs to prisons throughout the U.S. 
Earlier this year, the Wyoming Legislature rejected a bill that would have 
specified firing squads if lethal drugs were not available. There are many 
reasons to repeal the death penalty in Wyoming. Repeal is a non-partisan issue. 
For many, repeal is a religious, ethical or philosophical matter. Repeal will 
protect victim's families from reliving trauma. Repeal will protect innocent 
people from being executed. The death penalty is not a deterrent. Valuable tax 
dollars can be saved with the repeal of the death penalty. Repeal is part of 
promoting a culture of life. I encourage those on the Judiciary Committee to 
take this opportunity to begin the process to repeal the death penalty in 
Wyoming.

Rox Monterastelli, Casper

(source: Letter to the Editor, Casper Star Tribune)






ARIZONA:

Corrections department renews registration to import execution drug


The Drug Enforcement Administration on Thursday renewed the Arizona Department 
of Corrections' registration to import pentobarbital, the drug of choice for 
executions in states that allow lethal injection.

The notice comes just 6 weeks after the state executed Joseph Wood Jr. using a 
different set of drugs, midazolam and hydromorphone, in a process that took 
almost 2 hours and that witnesses said left Wood gasping for air.

"I would think they want it (pentobarbital) because what happened during their 
last execution was an embarrassment," said Richard Dieter, executive director 
at the Death Penalty Information Center. He called pentobarbital the "most 
desired drug for states who administer the death penalty."

But the drug has become increasingly hard for states to come by, as some 
manufacturers have refused to sell the drug for lethal injection.

Officials at the Arizona Department of Corrections would not comment on the DEA 
approval Thursday, except to note that it was a renewal of a previous license 
to import. A call to the DEA was not immediately returned Thursday.

The renewal is just one step in what would be a long process toward the 
importation of pentobarbital, said experts familiar with the process. In 
addition to the DEA approval, the corrections department would also have to be 
granted approval from the Food and Drug Administration to import the drug.

Even then, they might be hard-pressed to find a seller, Dieter said.

"The major manufacturers don't want to sell it for executions," Dieter said.

While a "local pharmacist might be able to put it together," Dieter said, 
Arizona has not been able to get the drug from compounding pharmacies as states 
like Texas and Missouri have done.

Dale Baich, the assistant federal public defender for Arizona, said he asked 
the state before Wood's execution where it acquired the 2 drugs it planned to 
use in the execution.

"They refused to tell us the source," Baich said.

Wood, convicted of a 1989 double-murder in Tucson, spent 23 years on death row 
before his execution on July 23. Witnesses said in published reports that Wood 
spent almost 2 hours strapped to a gurney in the death chamber after the lethal 
drugs were administered, gasping for air about 600 times by one count.

Donna Hamm, executive director of Middle Ground Prison Reform, said the focus 
on which medications to use for executions is simply a way for death-penalty 
supporters to kill "without the spectacle."

Hamm said that for death-row inmates, a life behind bars is punishment enough.

"People don't realize what the loss of freedom means," she said. "That is a 
harder punishment."

But, for states that do have the dealth penalty, pentobarbital is "paving the 
way for quick, relatively quick executions," Hamm said.

Baich said it is important for the public to know where the state acquires 
drugs that it uses for its executions.

"The public should be fully informed about how the ultimate punishment is 
carried out," Baich said. "That includes the drugs that are used during the 
execution."

(source: The Explorer)






CALIFORNIA:

Oakland: Accused Oikos University massacre killer still mentally unfit for 
court, doctors say


An Alameda County grand jury has returned a 10-count felony indictment against 
accused Oikos University massacre shooter One Goh, who attorneys said Monday is 
still considered too incompetent for prosecution. Goh, 45, was a former student 
at the private nursing college in East Oakland when on April 2, 2012, he 
fatally shot 6 students and a receptionist, and shot and wounded 3 others 
because the school refused to refund his tuition, according to police. Police 
said he confessed to the shootings upon his arrest.

A paranoid schizophrenic who also suffers from a major depressive disorder, Goh 
was deemed in 2012 too incompetent to understand the criminal proceedings 
against himself and assist in his defense.

He has been being treated at Napa State Hospital since January 2013. If the 
doctors there can't determine that he is mentally fit to stand trial within 
three years of his hospital admission date, the Alameda County District 
Attorney's Office will have to pursue a "Murphy conservatorship" to keep him 
hospitalized.

Prosecutor Stacie Pettigrew announced in court Monday that a grand jury on Aug. 
26 returned a 10-count felony indictment against Goh that includes 7 counts of 
murder, and 3 counts of premeditated and deliberate attempted murder.

There are 2 special allegations in the indictment that make Goh eligible for 
capital punishment: multiple murders, and murder in the course of a kidnapping.

The district attorney's office has not announced whether it would seek the 
death penalty against Goh if or when he is found competent. The charges against 
him automatically call for life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Police say Goh was asked to withdraw as a student from the college months 
before he walked on to the Edgewater Drive campus armed with a .45-caliber 
handgun and several magazines and started shooting.

Killed were Judith Seymour, 53, of San Jose; Lydia Sim, 21, of Hayward; Sonam 
Choedon, 33, of El Cerrito; Grace Kim, 23, of Union City; Doris Chibuko, 40, of 
San Leandro; Tshering Rinzing Bhutia, 38, of San Francisco, and Katleen Ping, 
24, of Oakland.

After the shooting, Goh stole a car on campus and drove to Alameda, where he 
was arrested.

The next update on Goh's mental health is due to be heard in court on April 27. 
He will not be arraigned on the indictment, which supersedes a preliminary 
hearing, until he is declared competent.

(source: Mercury News)



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

Man Gets Death Sentence In 2 San Gabriel Valley Murders


A man was sentenced to death Monday for murdering a worker at a Subway sandwich 
shop in Whittier and a man in a San Gabriel parking lot during robberies about 
a decade ago.

Leonardo Alberto Cisneros, 30, was ordered to be transferred to San Quentin 
State Prison sometime within the next 10 days.

"When all appeals have been exhausted...the warden is ordered to put the 
defendant to death," Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen said.

An automatic appeal will be filed in the case.

Cisneros was convicted on May 7 of 1st-degree murder for the 2 killings. 
Diangui Wu, 50, of Rowland Heights, was killed on Aug. 4, 2004, in the 1800 
block of South Del Mar Ave. in San Gabriel. On Dec. 10, 2004, 22-year-old 
Pasadena City College student Joseph Molina was killed during a heist at the 
Subway store in the 5400 block of Norwalk Boulevard.

Jurors found true the special circumstance allegations of murder during the 
course of a robbery and multiple murders. They also found Cisneros guilty of 16 
counts of robbery and 1 count of attempted robbery. Some of those counts 
involved armed robberies at other business in the San Gabriel Valley area. On 
May 23, they recommended the death penalty.

In his closing argument, Deputy District Attorney Frank Santoro told the 8-man 
4-woman panel that Cisneros "does not deserve to walk around a prison or be in 
prison."

"He turned into a monster, a ruthless, brutal killer," the prosecutor said.

3 members of Molina's family, some wearing T-shirts with his likeness, offered 
statements to the court Monday. They included a measure of forgiveness for 
Cisneros.

Calling the defendant "some nervous, misguided thief," Molina's uncle Marty 
Speer said he hoped Cisneros "doesn't have evil in him" and that the killing 
was "just a horrible mistake."

Josephina Molina, the victim's mother, said she wanted Cisneros to repent. 
Otherwise, Molina said, the defendant would suffer "eternal damnation in hell."

Molina said she had come to a difficult personal decision. "I have decided 
today to extend my forgiveness to you, Mr. Cisneros," she said.

Cisneros scribbled notes throughout the family's comments, not turning to look 
at them.

Following the sentencing, Santoro was less forgiving, saying that the shootings 
were gratuitous. Cisneros could have walked away with the money, leaving his 
victims unharmed, the deputy district attorney said.

"He did it because, basically, he was an evil man," Santoro said.

One of Cisneros' attorneys, Nancy Sperber, had implored jurors to spare her 
client a death sentence. She told jurors that life without the possibility of 
parole, the other sentence jurors could have recommended, was "not something to 
treat lightly."

"It is serious," she said. "It's not a sentence to a country club."

Santoro said the punishment was justified.

"It's an appropriate sentence in this case," Santoro said. "It took a long 
time, but justice was finally served."

(source: CBS news)






USA:

Death row doubts? Not in the mind of Justice Scalia


In 1994, Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote a dissent from a Supreme Court 
decision not to review the case of a Texas murderer on death row. Blackmun 
wrote that he no longer could believe that the death penalty could be applied 
fairly and consistently.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a sarcastic rejoinder, noting that death by lethal 
injection was preferable to the death of the murder victim in the case, who was 
shot and left to bleed to death on a barroom floor.

"The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable 
next to that," Scalia wrote. "It looks even better," he continued, "next to 
some of the other cases currently before us ... for example, the case of the 
11-year-old girl raped by 4 men and then killed by stuffing her panties down 
her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!"

Scalia was referring to the case of 2 half brothers with mental disabilities 
who had been convicted of a 1983 rape and murder. One of them, Henry Lee 
McCollum, has been facing the death penalty for 30 years. His brother, Leon 
Brown, was serving life.

There had never been physical or witness evidence against the 2 men, who signed 
admissions of guilt after hours of questioning but later recanted their 
confessions.

Recently tested DNA evidence showed them to be innocent, and a judge in North 
Carolina ordered McCollum and Brown released. Is Scalia having 2nd thoughts 
about the death penalty? Not likely. In 2009, explaining why he voted against 
giving another death row inmate a chance for a rehearing after the major 
witnesses against him recanted, Scalia noted that the Supreme Court "has never 
held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who 
has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that 
he is 'actually' innocent."

Some 3,108 prisoners are on death row nationally. Indiana, one of 32 states 
that still has the death penalty, has 13 of those prisoners.

(source: Journal Gazette)

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

A Whiff of SCOTUS Skunk----The Odor Seeping Out of Our Criminal Justice System


First there was Ferguson, Missouri and the gunning down of an unarmed black 
youth and the ad-nauseum follow-up emphasizing over-and-over the shooting 
officer's fear. Now it's the release of 2 half brothers in North Carolina 
clearly railroaded into convictions and death sentences by a notoriously 
remorseless, good-'ol-boy district attorney.

Once a fair-minded superior court judge actually looked at the evidence and 
declared the emperor had no clothes, any 8th-grader could see the criminal 
justice system in this nice little North Carolina community had cynically set 
up Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown, 2 intellectually vulnerable African 
American teenagers, to clear the docket of a sensational, vengeance-demanding 
child murder case. Until the judge's ruling, everyone had simply assumed 
because they had been convicted and were in prison these men were guilty. In 
1994, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia even cited the barbarous natures of 
McCollum and Brown in defense of the death penalty.

The Ferguson case of a police homicide in broad daylight on a public street has 
been intentionally placed on a secret, very slow wheels-of-justice track that 
can only benefit Officer Darren Wilson's expected argument in court that he 
felt fear, which in the realm of courtroom narrative and reasonable doubt means 
he walks. In common US jurisprudence, a police officer's fear and his or her 
perception of threat - even if shown to be unfounded - is sacrosanct and 
excuses pretty much anything.

On the other hand, fear is never permitted as an excuse when an ordinary 
citizen responds violently to a police officer. If Michael Brown had had a gun 
and, with a couple non-lethal rounds in his back, had turned and got off a 
lethal shot at Officer Wilson, every court in the land would have sentenced him 
to lethal injection or life in prison. There can be no self-defense against a 
police officer. Any kind of violence directed at a police officer can only be 
additional provocation, demanding an escalation of violence from the officer. 
The Law looks out for its own.

In North Carolina, Superior Court Judge Douglass Sasser had the courage to 
declare McCollum and Brown innocent after 30 years in prison. They were 
convicted in 1983 of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl. 30-year-old DNA 
evidence on a cigarette butt at the scene pointed to a known violent pederast 
who lived near the 11-year-old girl's house. While the already malodorous 
Ferguson case awaits shoes yet to drop, the McCollum/Brown case released a 
particularly loathsome pent-up stench that reaches all the way to the US 
Supreme Court.

The interrogating police officers used what is called "fear-up" tactics to 
intimidate the 2 teenage brothers into signing bogus confessions with 
information the police manipulated into their frightened, vulnerable minds. 
McCollum tells us now that he had never been in police custody before that day 
and was simply overwhelmed by the behavior of the cops. He told them what they 
wanted so he could go home, something they had promised. He "confessed" that 2 
other boys were involved in the raping and killing of the 11-year-old girl. 
Neither of those boys were ever charged with anything. Why not? Because The 
System had everything it needed: 2 confessed killers to wrap up the case. They 
were poor, black and not too smart, so who would give a damn? Case closed.

The district attorney at the time, Joe Freeman Britt, is 6'6" tall and was 
notorious over his career for sending people he had charged to death. He 
reportedly withheld evidence that might have altered the case. As expected, 
Britt still insists the 2 men are guilty. Like he's going to tell the press, 
sure, I framed those 2 vulnerable boys to wrap up a highly emotional child 
rape-murder case. Citizens wanted vengeance for such a heinous crime, so I gave 
it to them. How do you think I stayed in office all those years? If there was 
such a thing as real justice in a case like this, Britt and the cops involved 
would each be sentenced to 30 years of lousy prison food and having to look 
over their shoulders 24/7.

But that's not how the American criminal justice system works. You get the 
"justice" you're able to pay for. The recent exoneration of McCollum and Brown 
is the exception, based in this instance on the tireless hard work of 
good-hearted people. 3 cheers for the exceptions!

(Allow me to parenthetically slip in, here, that, 1, while prisons are too 
often a bad way to solve societal problems, sometimes they are necessary. Two, 
the majority of inmates in prison are guilty as charged. And 3, the prison 
system in this country is a runaway train of evil dysfunction saturated with 
racism and class arrogance.)

The worst smell seeping out of the McCollum/Brown case is a little like the 
smell of a skunk. On one level, it's really obnoxious, but then a little of it 
can be pleasantly musky. I'm speaking of the image of Supreme Court Justice 
Antonin Scalia suddenly caught with his pants around his knees.

It involves a 1994 exchange between Scalia and fellow Justice Harry Blackmun in 
SCOTUS chambers. Blackmun had written that he was morally fed up with the death 
penalty and would not vote to approve one ever again.

"Rather than continue to coddle the court's delusion that the desired level of 
fairness has been achieved," Blackmun wrote in a February 1994 dissent in 
Callins v. Collins, "I feel...obligated simply to concede that the death 
penalty experiment has failed."

Scalia countered Blackmun by citing the McCollum and Brown case. He was aware 
of the case because it was upcoming on the docket that term. (The court 
eventually refused to hear the case, with Blackmun dissenting.)

As Scalia responds to Blackmun, his tone gets smarmier and snottier as it goes 
forward. He doesn't like the example Blackmun cites in making his case that the 
death penalty is too sloppily applied and, thus, unconstitutional. Scalia cites 
"the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by 4 men and then killed by stuffing 
her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection 
compared to that!" (Scalia doesn't seem to be bothered that 2 of the "4 men" - 
actually boys - he cites as guilty of this heinous crime were oddly never 
prosecuted.)

Earlier, Scalia had ridiculed the liberal death penalty abolitionist movement 
for being unable to come up with even one innocent person put to death. 
(Blackmun also assumed McCollum and Brown were guilty.) Scalia was driven by 
the need for certainty and vengeance in cases like the murder of an 
11-year-old, while Blackmun had serious doubts focused on the very real human 
shortcomings of a justice system they both sat astride in godlike splendor.

We should not expect any kind of comment, let alone an apology, from either 
men. Blackmun died in 1999, and Antonin Scalia is too much the defender of 
government, corporate and institutional power in all its forms to say anything. 
In fact, innocence doesn't seem to even matter to him. He made this clear in 
2009 in a remark he made on the Troy Davis death penalty case in California.

"The Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a 
convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to 
convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent. Quite to the contrary, 
we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable 
doubt that any claim based on alleged 'actual innocence' is constitutionally 
cognizable."

We have been given a glimpse into a criminal justice system that sees police 
murder as an unfortunate but necessary evil, and, at the very top, sees the 
execution of an innocent person as legal. Or in Scalia SCOTUS mumbo-jumbo, 
constitutionally un-cognizable.

The fetid stink rising from such an inbred institution can be overwhelming at 
times. But, then, if these matters were unfolding in Venezuela or Cuba or Iran, 
the evil would be crystal clear.

(source: John Grant is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent 
3-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper; 
counterpunch.org)

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

What Will Doom the Death Penalty----Capital Punishment, Another Failed 
Government Program?


To opponents of the death penalty, recent accounts of botched executions and 
DNA-based exonerations of death-row prisoners have revived hope that judges and 
voters will finally see capital punishment for what it is: an intolerable 
affront to human dignity.

But while such optimism is understandable, it is misplaced. Support for capital 
punishment is, in fact, in decline - but it's less the result of a moral 
awakening on the part of the public than a symptom of a 40-year-plus process of 
disillusionment.

In 1972, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutionally 
unfair, but left the door open for states to come up with new laws to remedy 
the arbitrary sentencing criteria it found troubling. Conservatives seized that 
opportunity to advance a broader agenda of reclaiming a government that, in 
their minds, had been captured by liberal elites - welfare-oriented 
bureaucracies and Earl Warren's Supreme Court - that were intent on using big 
government to upend traditional values. The timing was right. Violent crime had 
been rising since the mid-1960s. More and more Americans wanted a government 
that would vanquish evil rather than manage it. The revival of capital 
punishment expressed a powerful moral clarity that "time off for good behavior" 
did not.

When it came to delivering punishment in a timely and dramatic fashion, 
moreover, the death penalty delivered the goods: As late as 1959, most of those 
executed spent less than 2 years on death row. Thus, as states created new 
death penalty laws, which the Supreme Court approved in 1976, few foresaw the 
degree to which federal oversight of capital cases would continue.

This, more than wrongful convictions and botched executions, is what is 
distinctive about the contemporary American death penalty. New layers of 
appeals and new issues to litigate at both the state and federal levels meant 
that inmates put to death in 2012 had waited an average of almost 16 years for 
their execution date. The deeply unsatisfying, decades-long limbo that follows 
a death sentence today is without precedent. The 3,054 men and women 
languishing on the nation's death rows have become the unwitting cast of a 
never-ending production of "Waiting for Godot."

A sense of moral solidarity is hard to generate when the devil appears in the 
execution chamber 20 years later, a middle-aged or elderly man whose crimes 
have long faded from popular memory. And it's impossible to generate when he 
doesn"t appear in the execution chamber at all: A vast majority of those 
sentenced to death since 1977 were not, or have not yet been, executed.

Efforts to remedy the problem by reforming the appellate process have been 
unsuccessful. In 1996, when the average stay on death row was approaching 11 
years, Congress enacted legislation restricting death-row inmates' access to 
federal courts, in order to speed up executions. But it didn't work; since 
then, the time between sentencing and execution has grown by over 50 %.

The problem, it turns out, isn't foot-dragging by defense lawyers or 
bleeding-heart judges. It's money. In California, for instance, the low wages 
paid by the state to qualified lawyers who take on indigent inmates' appeals 
have meant that there aren't enough lawyers willing to do the work. Inmates 
wait an average of 3 to 5 years after sentencing for a government-appointed 
lawyer to handle their appeal. And that's just the beginning of a process - 
sometimes lasting 25 years or more - that a federal judge recently determined 
was so protracted that it made capital punishment in California 
unconstitutionally cruel and unusual.

More money for defense lawyers would reduce the high error rates in capital 
trials and speed up appellate reviews. But it is unlikely to be forthcoming. 
The costs of capital trials and appeals overwhelm budgets everywhere, but 
particularly in places, like the South, where the political will to fund them 
is the weakest. It has simply become unsustainable to be both pro-death penalty 
and anti-taxation, as so many Americans are.

Delivering this message to voters, rather than a moralistic one, might change 
their thinking. A 2012 ballot measure to abolish the death penalty in 
California, the shrewdly named Savings Accountability and Full Enforcement for 
California campaign, appealed to voters' wallets more than their hearts and 
came tantalizingly close to passing. Importantly, though, that near-win 
occurred after nearly 7 years of no executions in the state, suggesting that it 
wasn't just about the financial cost of the death penalty. It was about what 
that money had stopped delivering to taxpayers: the sense of control, closure 
and confidence that are the raison d'etre of the death penalty.

As depressing as it may be to abolitionists driven by a commitment to human 
rights, Americans, most of whom are white and live above the poverty line, find 
it hard to sympathize with members of an indigent, mostly minority death-row 
population who have been convicted of horrible crimes. Preaching to the 
congregation rather than the choir, then, ought to focus on the failure of 
capital punishment to live up to the promise of retributive justice it once 
held.

Casual supporters of the death penalty can be made to recognize that the death 
penalty has become inextricably mired in the very bureaucracy and legalism it 
was once supposed to transcend, and that the only solutions to the problem - an 
elimination of appellate lawyers for death-row inmates or a financial bailout - 
are unlikely to be legal or feasible.

Resources for fighting the death penalty are scarce, and for too long, 
abolitionists have spent them appealing to the humanistic ideals they wished 
most Americans shared, instead of one they actually do: distrust of government. 
Arguing that the death penalty is an affront to human dignity just doesn't 
work. But portraying it as another failed government program just might.

(source: Daniel LaChance is an assistant professor of history at Emory 
University; Op-Ed----New York Times)