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

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 13




ARIZONA:

Arias Won't Represent Herself Anymore During Her Upcoming Sentencing Phase


Jodi Arias no longer wants to represent herself in the upcoming 2nd penalty 
phase in her murder case, according to a new court filing.

The 3-page document by her court-appointed attorneys notes that Arias is 
relinquishing her right to serve as her own lawyer, "effective immediately upon 
filing."

Judge Sherry Stephens previously granted Arias??? motion to serve as her own 
attorney after conflicts arose with one of her lawyers over trial strategy. 
Attorney Kirk Nurmi then sought to quit the case, noting in a motion that "a 
completely fractured relationship between counsel (and client) now exists."

Stephens denied his request, and ordered Nurmi and another lawyer to remain on 
as legal advisers to Arias.

Stephens previously told Arias she could change her mind and relinquish her 
right to represent herself. Her court-appointed attorneys will now again take 
over as lead counsel.

The retrial is set for Sept. 29.

Arias' lawyers did not return telephone messages. Prosecutors declined comment.

The 34-year-old former waitress was convicted of murder last year in the 2008 
killing of her ex-boyfriend, but jurors couldn't reach a decision on her 
sentence. Under Arizona law, prosecutors have the option of putting on a 2nd 
penalty phase with a new jury in an effort to secure a death sentence.

If the new jury fails to reach a unanimous decision, the death penalty will be 
removed as an option. The judge would then sentence Arias to spend her entire 
life behind bars or be eligible for release after 25 years.

Arias admitted killing Travis Alexander at his suburban Phoenix home, but she 
said it was self-defense. He was stabbed nearly 30 times, had his throat slit 
and was shot in the head.

Prosecutors argued the killing was premeditated and carried out in a jealous 
rage when Alexander wanted to end their affair.

(source: The Epoch Times)






WYOMING:

Committee Endorses Death By Firing Squad


Wyoming's Joint Judiciary Legislative Committee has voted to support a bill 
that would allow for execution by firing squad, but voted down an attempt to 
abolish the death penalty altogether.

States nationwide are being forced to find alternatives to executions now that 
drugs for lethal injections are hard to come by. Abolishing the death penalty 
altogether generated considerable debate. Baggs Senator Larry Hicks says the 
death penalty provides justice for victims.

But Laramie Representative Cathy Connolly says the issue is greater than that.

"I would love a statute that said that Cathy Connolly could kill child 
molesters with her own hands. But that is not acceptable, that is not 
appropriate, just because I as a victim or a parent of a victim would like 
that. It's our role in the legislature to come up with the appropriate 
punishment."

The full legislature will consider the death by firing squad bill when the full 
legislature meets in January.

(source: Wyoming Public Media)

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

Gingery death penalty abolishment bill dies in committee


A bill by House District 23 Representative Keith Gingery to abolish the death 
penalty in Wyoming failed to advance past the Legislature's Judiciary Committee 
Friday.

The committee's 5 Senate members shot down the bill, and approved another bill 
that will allow the state to kill prisoners with a firing squad. The firing 
squad bill is needed, proponents say, because of a shortage of drugs used to 
kill prisoners by lethal injection.

Rep. Marti Halverson, whose House District 22 covers southern and western Teton 
County and large portions of Lincoln and Sublette counties, voted in favor of 
the bill repealing the death penalty.

"I don't think it's a deterrent," she said.

"I did buy the argument presented that it costs more to fund the automatic 
capital-punishment appeals than it does to keep the prisoner in prison for 20 
years before his execution," Halverson said.

"There are so many barriers to execution that we might as well not have the 
death penalty," she said.

Halverson said she also opposes the death penalty on the grounds that, without 
effective drugs, the execution can be "botched," as was the case with a man 
recently killed in Oklahoma.

"Life in prison without parole works for me," Halverson said. "I think justice 
can be served in that way [just] as well as execution."

The committee's debate, she said, "centered around 'revenge is not the state's 
role,' versus 'justice for the victim is the state's role.'

"It was not a lengthy debate," she said.

Gingery said he hoped the bill would make it to the legislative assembly if for 
no other reason than to generate needed debate on the topic.

He was pleased to have 6 of the committee's House members vote to abolish the 
death penalty, with only 2 against.

Sen. Leland Christensen, whose District 17, like Gingery's, covers most of 
Teton County, voted against repealing the death penalty. 3 of his fellow 
senators on the committee did as well, with only 1 voting for repeal.

Rep. Stephen Watt, whose district covers Rock Springs, said he would introduce 
a bill to abolish the death penalty himself once the Legislature was in 
session, Gingery said.

The bill to employ the firing squad was approved by the committee with little 
opposition, Halverson said.

A firing squad will be used to kill prisoners only if drugs to achieve the same 
end aren't available, according to the bill's text.

The committee wrote the bill to kill prisoners with a firing squad after 
considering every possible alternative to lethal injection, Gingery said 
earlier this week.

"The only viable option out there besides lethal injection is the firing 
squad," he said. "There are problems with electric chairs, with gas chambers, 
with hanging, with beheading, and whatever else you can think of."

The state doesn't own a gas chamber or an electric chair, Halverson said.

Though legislators on the committee warmed up to the idea of a firing squad, 
the public has not, Halverson said.

"We got a lot of comments about the barbarity of the firing squad," she said.

Gingery introduced his bill also as a result of the committee???s inquiry into 
alternatives to lethal injection.

"As chairman, I said 1 alternative we haven't looked at, which is viable, is 
just getting rid of it," Gingery said.

Since committee members were already on the topic, he said, they might as well 
debate the question of "should the state be killing people."

(source: Jackson Hole News & Guide)






USA:

States Really Don't Want You To Know How They Execute People. This Lawsuit 
Wants To Change That.


Missouri's Earl Ringo fought his death sentence as hard as he could - but early 
Wednesday morning, he lost. Shortly after midnight, Ringo's more than a decade 
in prison for a 1998 double murder ended with a lethal injection. But what 
exactly he was injected with is a mystery.

According to Ringo's lawyer, Richard Sindel, the death row inmate asked not to 
be injected with the controversial drug midazolam - thought to contribute to 
prolonged suffering in three recent executions in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona - 
but neither Sindel nor anyone else outside of Missouri's Department of 
Corrections knows what happened in the execution chamber. The state's execution 
guidelines only sanction the drug pentobarbital, but recent reports have raised 
concerns that midazolam is also being administered.

"Because there is an IV line put into the inmate, they can inject anything they 
want," Sindel told VICE News. "He's strapped to a table and can't do anything 
about it. We were told he refused it but we don't know for sure."

On May 15, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Missouri 
chapter of ACLU, and St. Louis Public Radio reporter Chris McDaniel filed suit 
against the Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC) for violating freedom of 
information laws by withholding information on lethal injections.

Through separate freedom of information requests, McDaniel received documents 
showing the state had not only withheld information, but lied about the 
injections. In a September 3 investigative report, McDaniel revealed that 
midazolamwas part of every 1 of the 9 executions that occurred in the state 
between November 2013 and July 2014 - despite the fact that when specifically 
asked about midazolam, DOC Director George Lombardi swore under oath that, "We 
will not use those drugs."

In response to the reports, according to the Associated Press, an official 
reaffirmed pentobarbital was the only drug used in the execution, but that the 
administration of sedatives was allowed beforehand - he did not name the 
sedative that the state employs.

It's this type of secrecy that has American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and 
death row attorneys around the country alarmed. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania 
chapter of the ACLU filed the latest in a string of multi-state lawsuits 
demanding that state corrections officials in the state increase transparency 
regarding execution protocols and the sources of drugs used in lethal 
injections.

Cassandra Stubbs from the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project told VICE News that 
in a historical context, details surrounding executions used to be more out in 
the open.

"Historically, we have always had information about executions. When we used to 
have hangings, they would post information about the rope and who made it," 
Stubbs explained. "This move to hide information about executions is all 
totally new, ahistorical, and in violation of the First Amendment."

Even more recently, Stubbs said corrections officials released information 
about what drugs were being used in executions and where those drugs came from.

But in 2011, suppliers in the European Union discovered that Sodium Thiopental 
was being used as the primary lethal injection drug in the US. The EU placed a 
ban on exporting the drug, along with a list of other items that it determined 
to be strictly used for "capital punishment, torture, or other cruel, inhuman, 
or degrading treatment or punishment."

The thiopental ban forced states to develop alternate lethal injection 
cocktails. Now, many states are veering toward compound drugs, the quality of 
which can differ between batches. In response to secrecy around the drugs used 
to execute Missouri's Michael Taylor this February, Eighth Circuit Court Judge 
Kermit Bye stated that due to "the absolute dearth of information Missouri has 
disclosed to this court, the 'pharmacy' on which Missouri relies could be 
nothing more than a high school chemistry class."

Missouri is just one of several US states with complicated legal statutes 
around revealing execution protocols. Missouri's states that while the 
identities of people involved in executions is a total secret "not subject to 
discovery, subpoena, or any other means of legal compulsion," the statute does 
claim, "the administration of lethal gas or lethal chemicals is an open 
record."

The Department of Corrections office in Missouri did not respond to email or 
phone requests for comment.

Over the past few years, other states have tightened information around lethal 
injections. In 2013, a Colorado district court ruled that the state DOC could 
withhold information about a lethal drug source, stating: "releasing the 
information could possibly expose the pharmacy and its employee to ridicule" 
and "raise safety concerns." This May, the Texas Attorney General issued an 
opinion that also allowed the identities of pharmaceutical suppliers to be 
withheld.

In Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee, recently amended 
state codes prohibit the release of information about anyone who compounds, 
supplies, manufactures, or administers drugs for lethal injections.

In addition to the secrecy revolving around midazolam, the state-sanctioned 
pentobarbital is not without controversy. Sindel, who also represents another 
22 other Missouri death row inmates in a class action suit, told VICE News 
there aren't any executions currently slated. The next in line, however, is 
another plaintiff in the suit, Russell Bucklew, whose concerns revolve around 
the use of pentobarbital. He suffers from a congenital disorder that causes his 
blood vessels to be malformed and occasionally bleed. According to Sindel, 
Bucklew is afraid that an injection of pentobarbital could cause an extremely 
painful reaction.

When Oklahoma's Michael Lee Wilson was injected with pentobarbital this 
January, his reported last words were "I can feel my whole body burning." Since 
then, advocates for death row inmates have suggested that there could be 
something wrong with the "cocktail" method of lethal injections, or with the 
drugs themselves.

The FDA-approved version of pentobarbital is currently not available to 
corrections officials, because its Danish manufacturer decided in 2011 to ban 
the drug's use in state-sponsored executions. Pentobarbital can only be 
acquired from compounding pharmacies - which are not approved by the FDA. 
Compounding pharmacies must be licensed by state pharmacy boards, and are 
accused of lacking in quality control and standards.

In 2012, a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy was found responsible for 64 
deaths after it helped spread fungal meningitis through steroid injections. 
After the scare, the state forced 11 compounding pharmacies to shut down and 
pass new regulations around inspection and reporting, but those only applied 
within Massachusetts.

It's that kind of health risk that has the ACLU and other groups clamoring to 
get answers.

"The information sought by our clients is central to today's debate about 
capital punishment. If the drugs are not made properly, they will not work 
properly, and the public should be very concerned about that possibility given 
the gruesome executions we have heard about in other states," said Mary 
Catherine Roper, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

Besides being a matter of capital punishment, information about death penalty 
protocols is constitutionally protected by the Eighth Amendment, which bans 
cruel and unusual punishment even in cases of execution of the most violent 
offenders. But without knowing exactly what the method of execution is, it's 
impossible to determine whether it fits humane standards.

"It's enshrined in our constitution that we will not inflict cruel and unusual 
punishment," Stubbs told VICE News, "The torturing of death row inmates says 
terrible things about us, that we would be willing to tolerate that. Losing 
your life is the penalty that we as a society have inflicted on death row 
inmates. We have not added torture as an additional punishment."

(source: Mary O'Hara, vice.com)

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

Boston Marathon Bombing Case Lawyers Want 2,000 Jury Summonses


Prosecutors and defense attorneys in the trial of Boston Marathon bombing 
suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev say they will need to summon 2,000 people to pick a 
jury.

The2 sides jointly submitted their proposed jury selection process to U.S. 
District Court Judge George O'Toole on Friday. The lawyers want to issue 
summonses about 6 weeks before the expected Nov. 3 start of the trial.

The proposal lays out the process by which the 2 sides hope to pare down that 
pool of 2,000 jurors to a 12-person jury and 6 alternate jurors. On the 1st 2 
days of trial, 800 people will be brought to the courthouse, sworn in, and 
asked to fill out questionnaires.

After reviewing the questionnaires, the 2 sides, with the judge's approval, 
would further whittle down that list to a consensus pool of 70 qualified 
jurors. From there, both sides would have a chance to dismiss an equal amount 
of jurors for their own reasons.

In a related development, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz's office on Friday also 
filed a motion opposing Tsarnaev's request to delay the trial at least to 
September 2015. Defense lawyers are also seeking to move the trial from Boston 
to Washington, D.C. The 2 sides have filed more than 100 pages of legal briefs 
vehemently arguing their positions for and against the move in recent weeks.

Prosecutors say the defense team's request for a change in trial date 
represents virtually the same appeal they had made - and the judge rejected - 
when he set the November trial date earlier this year. They say the challenges 
that the defense claims are valid reasons for the delay are largely 
self-inflicted, such as requesting the government produce essentially all the 
evidence in its possession.

Prosecutors also note in their legal brief that 3 members of Tsarnaev's legal 
team were recently expelled from Russia after misrepresenting themselves as 
tourists to local authorities.

"While conducting interviews in Russia, the members of the defense team 
reportedly refused to produce documents confirming their legal status and 
identified themselves as employees of the FBI," the brief states. "As a result, 
the Russian government found that the defense team members had violated the 
Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation and expelled them."

Tsarnaev, 21, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who came to the Boston area from 
Russia with his family more than a decade ago.

He is accused of detonating 2 bombs at the 2013 marathon along with his 
now-deceased brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killing three people and injuring 
about 260 others. Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to 30 federal charges. He 
could face the death penalty if convicted.

(source: WBUR news)