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

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 16




OKLAHOMA:

Lawmaker calls for study on new execution method


There has been a lot of talk about the death penalty in our state following the 
botched execution of Clayton Lockett earlier this year.

Now 1 lawmaker is trying to change the conversation. Representative Mike 
Christian is calling for a new way to execute inmates.

He wants to use nitrogen gas. It's an idea he has asked state lawmakers to 
review in an interim study.

The process is officially called Nitrogen Asphyxiation, a fancy term for the 
process of slowly replacing oxygen with nitrogen.

Those who have studied the process say it causes no pain and can kill a person 
within a matter of minutes.

Representative Christian said, "This is not a debate about the death penalty. 
It's not about the Clayton Lockett incident. This is about another method of 
execution."

The process slowly robs the body of oxygen, replacing it with nitrogen.

Rep. Christian said, "If you deplete oxygen it's within 8-to-14 seconds, up to 
no more than 20 seconds that they pass out. And then, within a few minutes, up 
to 8 minutes, probably less, that they would be pronounced dead."

Christian thinks it is a great idea.

He said, "As a government, a civilized government, I think this is the way to 
do it."

It's a process which was documented in a 2008 BBC Horizon documentary.

In the documentary a pig is put in a chamber filled with nitrogen and argon 
gases. Unaware of the effect the gases are having on its body the animal falls 
over and then gets back up, returning to its food.

The demonstration is said to show the gas does not cause pain and, in theory, 
the pig eventually succumbs to the deadly gas.

Michael Portillo, who is the main man featured in the documentary, said, "Not 
only is in painless, the person dies with euphoria."

However, there are those already opposed to the idea.

The ACLU says rather than looking for humane ways to execute people the state 
should reconsider the death penalty.

Ryan Kiesel, with the ACLU, said, "There's no full proof way to do something 
that is inherently inhumane."

Christian says the gas could be administered through a mask, a hood, or even a 
chamber. He says there would be no IV's, no doctors, and he believes less room 
for error.

Christian said, "It's a humane way. It's a quick way. It's practical."

The interim study will take place at the capitol Tuesday.

That BBC Horizon documentary is just one of the things which will be presented 
during the study.

Christian said, and the documentary recorded, there are some who support the 
death penalty but are opposed to the idea of using nitrogen because they 
believe it is too humane.

(source: KFOR news)

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

Oklahoma Lawmaker Suggests Nitrogen as Alternative to Lethal Injection


The most common method of executing condemned prisoners in the U.S. - lethal 
injection - has suffered a mountain of setbacks in recent months. Most notably, 
executions using relatively untested drugs have not gone as intended in several 
states, including Arizona, Ohio and Oklahoma.

But 1 Oklahoma lawmaker thinks he might have a potential solution to the 
lethal-injection crisis: nitrogen gas.

Rep. Mike Christian, a Republican from Oklahoma City, is slated to present the 
idea Tuesday to the state legislature, inviting its members to take up a 
broader study on the issue.

According to a story by a local television station:

[Rep. Christian] wants to use nitrogen gas. . . . The process is officially 
called Nitrogen Asphyxiation, a fancy term for the process of slowly replacing 
oxygen with nitrogen. Those who have studied the process say it causes no pain 
and can kill a person within a matter of minutes.

A message left with Rep. Christian wasn't immediately returned. But he told 
NewsChannel 4 that "if you deplete oxygen it's within 8-to-14 seconds, up to no 
more than 20 seconds that they pass out. And then, within a few minutes, up to 
8 minutes, probably less, that they would be pronounced dead." According to the 
Oklahoman, nitrogen has likely never been used for an execution. But Mr. 
Christian told the paper that the approach seems humane. "Some who have 
received an accidental excess of the gas have even said the effect was mildly 
euphoric," according to the story.

Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, 
an organization largely opposed to the death penalty, said "a lot more study" 
would be needed before a state adopted such a proposal. "This is just more 
experimenting with human lives," he told Law Blog.

In the wake of problems with lethal injections, several states have revisited 
bringing back older techniques. Tennessee in May passed a law allowing for use 
of the electric chair in situations in which lethal-injection wasn't possible. 
This week, lawmakers in Wyoming moved a bill forward that would authorize the 
state to use a firing squad to execute inmates on death-row if prison officials 
fail to obtain drugs for lethal injections.

(source: Wall Street Journal)






COLORADO:

Judge allows fingerprint evidence: Cinema shooting


A judge presiding over the murder case of Colorado cinema shooting suspect 
James Holmes will let fingerprint evidence linking him to the mass shooting be 
used at trial, a ruling made public on Monday showed.

Arapahoe County District Court Judge Carlos Samour denied a motion by lawyers 
defending the former neuroscience graduate student that sought to exclude the 
evidence, arguing that fingerprint comparison is a subjective, inexact science.

Public defenders also had made a similar argument challenging the reliability 
of firearms analysis, which Samour also rejected earlier this month.

Holmes, 26, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to opening fire inside 
a suburban Denver movie theater during a midnight screening of the Batman film 
"The Dark Knight Rises." 12 moviegoers were killed and 70 were wounded in the 
July 2012 rampage.

Prosecutors have charged Holmes with multiple counts of 1st-degree murder and 
attempted murder, and have said they will seek the death penalty for the 
California native if he is convicted.

The defense challenged the reliability of fingerprint analysis testimony, 
citing the 2004 train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people. An FBI 
investigation initially said fingerprints found at the Madrid scene matched 
those of an American lawyer, who was arrested but later released after the 
error was discovered.

But Samour said in his ruling that despite occasional mistakes, fingerprint 
evidence has been deemed reliable in U.S. courts for more than a century.

"The fact that fingerprint examiners make false positive identifications is 
more directly related to the competency of the practitioners, not to the 
reliability of fingerprint comparison as a methodology," he said.

Prosecutors plan to call a police analyst and an FBI agent who matched Holmes' 
fingerprints to prints lifted from the theater's emergency exit door, firearms, 
and other items recovered from his apartment, which was rigged with explosives.

The trial is set to begin with jury selection in December.

(source: Toronto Sun)






WYOMING:

Death penalty opponents are making gains in Wyoming


A lot of good country songs are about prison or death, including "Life in 
Prison," which is about both.

I was reminded about the song while driving to the Interim Judiciary 
Committee's meeting in Laramie last Friday. I was going to listen to lawmakers 
talk about the death penalty, and I unwittingly played a CD that featured the 
Merle Haggard tune.

The story is told by a man who has received a life sentence for killing his 
"darling" in a fit of rage:

"I prayed they sentence me to die/ But they wanted me to live and I know why/ 
So I do life in prison for the wrongs I've done/ And I pray every night for 
death to come."

In the end, the killer sadly concludes, "My life will be a burden every day/ If 
I could die my pain might go away."

The idea someone whose punishment is sitting in a prison cell for the rest of 
his life may have it worse than if he'd been killed by the state is a theme the 
committee discussed. In fact, it's a central part of the argument advanced by 
many who would like to see the death penalty abolished.

But first, legislators debated a bill to address another capital punishment 
controversy. How can you humanely kill a prisoner by lethal injection if the 
countries that manufacture the chemicals used in the process consider the 
practice so barbaric, they won't sell them to American prisons?

18 states have abolished the death penalty (green) while 32 states still have 
capital punishment.

During the last budget session, Sen. Bruce Burns (R-Sheridan) sponsored a bill 
to use a firing squad, like Utah does. But problems obtaining the banned 
chemicals weren't well known then, and it was quickly defeated. The national 
media treated it as an example of a trigger-happy state anxious to cull its 
prison population.

But after horrific, botched lethal injection attempts in Oklahoma, Ohio and 
Arizona, the Judiciary Committee not only considered Burns' bill, it decided to 
sponsor the measure.

Steve Lindly, deputy director of the Wyoming Department of Corrections, 
explained if the state can't use lethal injections, it needs an alternative on 
the books. Right now the legal option is to use a gas chamber, which presents a 
problem - Wyoming no longer has one.

Building a chamber would cost a lot, several lawmakers pointed out, and it 
would be a questionable expense for a state that hasn't executed anyone in more 
than 2 decades, and now has only 1 inmate on death row.

The draft bill doesn't have many specifics about how a firing squad would be 
used. Lindly said that???s intentional, because procedures should be developed 
through rules and policies instead of in state statutes.

Rep. Marti Halverson (R-Etna) wanted to know if the state could encourage 
condemned inmates to donate organs. Sen. Floyd Esquibel (D-Cheyenne) asked what 
would happen if the penitentiary couldn't get enough volunteers for a firing 
squad. What if everyone misses, wondered Rep. Stephen Watt (R-Rock Springs). 
Rep. Cathy Connelly (D-Laramie) noted it would be odd for Wyoming to add an 
execution method when other states are moving away from the death penalty. She 
voted against the bill, as did Esquibel, Watt and committee co-chairman Rep. 
Keith Gingery (R-Jackson), who is not running for re-election.

9 members approved the bill, so it will be considered next year. In general, 
committee bills have a better chance of becoming laws than measures sponsored 
by individual legislators.

The 2nd proposal, to end capital punishment, drew a much more emotional 
response. That's not a surprise, since many hold opposite views on an issue 
that really is a matter of life or death. But I didn't expect this: A majority 
of members actually supported the bill. That would have been unthinkable just a 
few years ago, but the anti-death penalty contingent is definitely changing 
some minds.

Watt sponsored a similar bill earlier this year that failed introduction by a 
margin of 2 to 1. A former Wyoming Highway Patrol officer, he reversed his 
position on capital punishment several years ago. He said we have a good 
justice system, but it isn't perfect. "Law enforcement officers do lie," he 
explained. "They fabricate evidence; prosecutors withhold evidence." Watt said 
he saw it happen when a family member was wrongly accused of sexual assault.

Sen. Larry Hicks (R-Baggs) was the most adamant in his support of executions. 
"This is justice for the victims," he maintained. "The people who have been 
murdered, raped and kidnapped, and their families."

But Gingery, an attorney, said convicts cleared of crimes by the Innocence 
Project and advancements in DNA technology show the possibility of executing 
the wrong person.

"Personally, I do not condone the state committing homicide on my behalf," 
Gingery said.

Chesie Lee of the Wyoming Association of Churches represents eight 
denominations and more than 200 churches. "We have a strong feeling that murder 
is wrong, whether it's done by a person or the state," she said, adding that 
death penalty supporters seek revenge, not justice.

Hicks said some condemned convicts would rather be executed than remain "locked 
inside a cage the rest of their life." Lee, though, said that's not a choice 
inmates should be allowed to make; they should have to think daily about the 
crimes that put them in prison for life.

"You just don't get out of it so easily," she said.

Burns made 2 valid points against the bill. "We do not execute people 
willy-nilly," he said, and that's true. Capital punishment is a sentence rarely 
imposed by Wyoming courts, which is as it should be.

Second, the legislature addressed concerns about capital punishment when it 
created the optional sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. 
"We have about 22 people serving (that sentence) and every one of them could 
have been a capital case," Burns said.

"Some crimes are so horrible, so barbaric, that it's a punishment we need to 
keep in reserve," he said.

Many people feel that way. But it's the totality of the arguments against the 
death penalty that ultimately provides the best case against a punishment that 
almost all civilized nations reject. The United States joins countries like 
Iraq and Syria in carrying out death sentences, which isn't the company we 
should be keeping.

There's no way to take back an execution, and correct a horrible injustice if 
an innocent person is killed by the state.

It costs much less to house a prisoner for life without parole than it does to 
mount the automatic appeals process that is part of capital punishment.

Some of those public defenders do an inadequate job, and may have absolutely no 
experience handling a capital case.

Statistics show minorities and the poor are disproportionately sentenced to 
death compared to white defendants and/or those who can afford to hire a dream 
team of lawyers.

The death penalty doesn't truly serve as a deterrent to crime, because 
criminals don't expect to get caught and punished.

Finally, the state can't bring back the victim. It might provide some comfort 
to survivors to know the guilty party is no longer a threat to society, but 
that's also accomplished by life without parole.

While the panel voted 7-6 to end the death penalty, the Judiciary Committee 
will not sponsor the bill. It takes a majority of both House and Senate members 
approving a measure to gain such sponsorship, and the bill died 4 to 1 on the 
Senate side. Only Democratic Sen. Esquibel voted for it.

But death penalty opponents shouldn't feel disheartened. The bill got 5 
Republican votes from House members, which is considerable progress. Several 
said they felt the issue is important enough to be debated by the entire 
legislature.

"It's a matter of educating people about the issue," said Watt, who is in a 
tough battle for re-election. "We should have town hall meetings about it."

If he returns to the House, Watt said he will sponsor the bill again. Even if 
he loses, the committee vote shows there should be someone willing to take the 
ball the Republican legislator put into play and run with it next year.

(source: wyofile.com)





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

Lawmakers support firing squad, keeping death penalty


The Department of Corrections should be able to employ a firing squad to 
execute condemned inmates if the state can't find the drugs to carry out lethal 
injections, a legislative committee voted Friday.

Meeting in Laramie, the interim Joint Judiciary Committee advanced a 
firing-squad bill for the full Legislature to consider when it convenes early 
next year. The committee rejected another bill that would have called for the 
state to repeal the death penalty altogether.

On the death-penalty repeal bill, several witnesses urged the committee to move 
the bill forward so the full Legislature could consider the issue.

Committee co-chair Rep. Keith Gingery, R-Jackson, a deputy county attorney, 
said it's clear to him the death penalty doesn't deter crime but is solely an 
issue of revenge. He said there have been cases around the country of people 
who have been wrongfully convicted.

"Personally, I do not want the government to commit homicide on my behalf," 
Gingery said. "I disagree with the state of Wyoming committing murder."

Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs, responded that he doesn't view the death penalty as 
revenge but rather as justice for victims who have been brutally murdered, 
raped and tortured.

He said recent technological advances have made it increasingly unlikely for 
innocent people to be convicted.

Linda Burt, director of the ACLU in Wyoming, said the U.S. stands with such 
nations as China, Iraq and Syria in continuing to employ the death penalty.

"The reason that we are here today is because most Western nations do not 
believe in the death penalty," Burt said.

The bill failed to get a majority vote among committee members from both the 
House and Senate. It would still be possible for individual legislators to 
introduce a death penalty abolition bill on their own, although similar bills 
have failed in the past.

(source: Associated Press)






ARIZONA:

Judge grants Arias motion to stop representing herself


A Superior Court judge has granted Jodi Arias' request to stop representing 
herself in her Sept. 29 penalty phase retrial.

Judge Sherry Stephens granted the motion Monday morning and re-appointed 
Jennifer Wilmott as Arias' defense attorney.

Stephens also took under advisement a motion by attorney David Bodney, who is 
representing the Phoenix media, to allow daily video coverage of the trial with 
a 30-minute delay.

The trial had been scheduled to begin 2 weeks ago but Stephens allowed a 
postponement after Arias decided she wanted to represent herself.

Arias since then requested that she give up her right to serve as her own 
attorney and instead allow her court-appointed lawyers to handle the case.

Arias was convicted of murder last year in the 2008 killing of her ex-boyfriend 
at his suburban Phoenix home, but jurors couldn't reach a decision on her 
sentence. The retrial will determine if she gets the death penalty or life in 
prison.

(source: KPHO news)






CALIFORNIA:

Jurors recommend death penalty for man convicted in 3 San Gabriel Valley 
murders


Jurors recommended the death penalty today for a 37- year-old man who was 
convicted in the killings of 3 people within about a month in 2009.

Robert Louis Caballero was convicted Aug. 14 of 1st-degree murder and other 
charges for the shooting death of a Pomona man, the strangulation of a Covina 
woman and the bludgeoning death of an El Monte man.

Jurors deliberated for about an hour before reaching their verdict in the 
penalty phase of Caballero's trial. Sentencing was tentatively set for Nov. 13.

In addition to 3 counts of 1st-degree murder, Caballero was also convicted of 2 
counts of kidnapping, 1 count of assault with a firearm, 1 count of firearm 
possession by a felon and evading an officer. Jurors found true gang and gun 
allegations and special circumstance allegations of lying in wait, murder 
during the course of a kidnapping and multiple murders.

During closing arguments of the trial's penalty phase Monday, Deputy District 
Attorney Sarika Kim called Caballero a proud and remorseless psychopath. A 
defense attorney, however, urged the panel to recommend life in prison without 
parole, saying such a sentence would be punishment enough for a man who had a 
chaotic upbringing.

Co-defendants Andrew Valenzuela, 24, and Pete Trejo Jr., 32, were each 
convicted of 1st-degree murder and kidnapping charges in connection with 2 of 
the killings.

The 2 men each face a possible maximum of life without parole when sentenced 
Oct. 3.

(source: San Gabriel Valley Tribune)

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

On death row for Peninsula mansion murder, David Raley loses mental retardation 
claim


Condemned Santa Clara County killer David Allen Raley has lost perhaps his last 
legal argument to get off California's death row for the 1985 murder of a 
Peninsula teenager and the attempted murder of her friend in a deserted 
Hillsborough mansion.

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Linda Clark this week rejected Raley's 
argument that he was mentally retarded at the time of the crime, a finding that 
would bar his execution under a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. In particular, 
Clark disagreed with Raley's novel legal claim that he is autistic and 
therefore entitled to legal protections against sentencing the mentally 
retarded to death.

The judge's ruling, handed down late Monday, is not final. The California 
Supreme Court will now consider her findings and rule in the appeal, a process 
likely to take a year or longer.

Raley, on death row since 1988, has also raised the issue in the federal 
courts. But he has exhausted all of his other appeals, putting him near the 
front of the line of 750 inmates on San Quentin's death row if California 
resumes executions after a more than 8-year hiatus.

Clark's ruling stems from a hearing last year in which dueling experts offered 
testimony on Raley's mental capacity. The judge concluded Raley's intellectual 
capacity was well above the standard established by the Supreme Court, which 
last year also held in a Florida case that courts can consider more than IQ 
levels below the standard of 70 to assess mental retardation.

"The circumstances of this case, when considered with all the other evidence, 
demonstrate that (Raley) has a level of intellectual functioning much higher 
than contemplated" by the Supreme Court, the judge wrote in a 43-page ruling. 
The 52-year-old Raley is on death row for kidnapping 2 high school students, 
Jeanine Grinsell and Laurie McKenna, in the Carolands mansion where he was a 
security guard. Raley stabbed both girls dozens of times and left them in a San 
Jose ravine; Grinsell died at a hospital, but McKenna survived to testify.

Raley's lawyers argued he should spend his life in prison for the crimes, but 
not to be eligible for execution. Raley tried to fire his lawyers for raising 
the mental retardation argument, but the judge allowed them to continue their 
defense.

Robert Bacon, Raley's lawyer, said he was "disappointed" in the ruling and will 
"seek further review."

"David Raley should not be under death sentence," Bacon said. "This is not the 
end of the line for David Raley."

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen opposed Raley's appeal. Deputy 
District Attorney Matt Braker, who handled the case, could not immediately be 
reached.

Raley's case is part of an increasingly common legal battle unfolding in recent 
years in California and other death penalty states as death row inmates raise 
challenges over the mental retardation issue. The California Supreme Court has 
ordered hearings in dozens of cases like Raley's since the U.S. Supreme Court 
ruled on the question 12 years ago.

(source: San Jose Mercury News)






USA:

How many more innocent men on death row?----Lily Hughes of the Campaign to End 
the Death Penalty examines another case of innocent men freed from prison--but 
what it tells us about the broken injustice system.


Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown are free today after serving 30 years in 
North Carolina prisons for a crime they did not commit. McCollum was on death 
row, and Brown had a life sentence. New DNA testing has cleared both men and 
points to another person as the likely perpetrator.

Stories of prisoners, on death row and off, who are proven innocent, but only 
after having the better part of their lives stolen from them, are all too 
common in the past several decades. But this case is striking a chord for 
several reasons.

For one, the 2 half-brothers were demonized as monsters at the time of their 
conviction. Right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia even singled out 
McCollum's case as an example of the kind of crime and criminal for which the 
death penalty is intended. But if Scalia and the racist lynch mob got their 
way, an innocent man would have been murdered by the state years ago.

Second, McCollum and Brown's exoneration comes on the heels of questioning of 
the lethal injection method following several botched executions, including the 
torturous death of Joseph Wood, whose state-sponsored murder took nearly 2 
hours.

As a result, more mainstream voices are speaking up for the complete abolition 
of the death penalty. As the New York Times wrote in an editorial, the 
exoneration in North Carolina has exposed "a textbook example of so much that 
is broken in the American justice system. And it is further evidence (as though 
more were needed) that the death penalty is irretrievably flawed as well as 
immoral."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

McCollum and Brown were convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of 11-year-old 
Sabrina Buie in Red Springs, N.C. At the time of their arrest, McCollum was 19 
and Brown only 15 - both have been shown to have intellectual disabilities.

There was no physical evidence linking the men to the crime. Like so many other 
people - especially young African American men -railroaded into prison, they 
were convicted based on false confessions - the confessions were written out by 
police after hours of interrogation, in which neither teen was allowed to talk 
to a lawyer or their parents.

McCollum described the ordeal in an interview with a North Carolina newspaper: 
"I had never been under this much pressure, with a person hollering at me and 
threatening me. I just made up a story and gave it to them so they would let me 
go home."

Both young men repudiated the confessions and explained how they were coerced, 
but Robeson County prosecutors pressed ahead with the case against them, going 
so far as to hide evidence that would have linked Roscoe Artois--the man now 
implicated by DNA testing--to the crime.

Artois was a suspect in Buie's murder and had been picked up within weeks of 
her death on charges of the rape and murder of another girl in the area. 3 days 
before McCollum and Brown's trial began, police requested testing on a 
cigarette butt found at the crime scene, in order to match fingerprints to 
Artois. This test was never done, nor was the request revealed to McCollum's or 
Brown's lawyers.

The request for testing was only discovered a quarter century later - in 2011, 
during an investigation by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. The 
panel's inquiry also revealed multiple inconsistencies between the signed 
confessions of the 2 defendants, including factual statements about the crime 
itself.

And still McCollum and Brown remained behind bars - they were only freed when 
DNA testing of the cigarette butt revealed Artois was present at the crime 
scene.

More than 300 people have been released from prison, 18 from death row, because 
of DNA testing. Each of these cases tells its own story of injustice. Yet this 
one contains so many of the elements common to cases of wrongful convictions: 
coerced confessions (in this case, from two men with intellectual 
disabilities); prosecutorial misconduct; and the rubber-stamping of shaky 
convictions by successive appeals courts, all the way to the highest court in 
the land.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The actions of the prosecutor in the McCollum and Brown case are particularly 
galling. Joe Freeman Britt is infamous for his entry in the Guinness Book of 
World Records as the "deadliest prosecutor in America," having sent close to 50 
people to death row.

With more and more people being proved innocent, prosecutorial misconduct is 
not only being revealed, but in some instances, district attorneys have faced 
charges for their role in wrongful convictions. But that isn't causing Britt to 
lose any sleep.

Despite the evidence clearing McCollum and Brown, Britt still believes the two 
men are guilty. "You find a cigarette, you say it has Roscoe Artis' DNA on it, 
but so what?" he said in a recent interview. "It's just a cigarette, and absent 
some direct connection to the actual killing, what have you got? Do you have 
exoneration? I don't think so.'"

Britt also referred to the current DA as a "pussy." When asked about the 
coercion of intellectually disabled suspects, he had this to say: "When we 
tried those cases, every time they would bring in shrinks to talk about how 
retarded they were. It went on and on and on, blah blah blah."

As badly as the prosecution behaved in this case, the wider court system did no 
better. After being denied by state and federal appeals courts, the case made 
its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994. In the majority decision to turn 
down a review of the case, Justice Scalia insisted that the crime was so 
heinous that McCullom deserved lethal injection.

Then, in another opinion in favor of capital punishment, written for an 
unrelated case out of Texas, Scalia again referenced the McCollum case. He 
described the rape and murder of the 11-year-old Buie, and then wrote: "How 
enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!"

And like so many other cases, the justice system failed to find its mistake. 
Death penalty proponents like to claim that the system has all the necessary 
safeguards for correcting wrongful convictions. But in this case, it was 
lawyers and advocates working tirelessly to prove the innocence of the 2 men, 
despite countless legal hurdles and unwarranted rejections by appeals courts.

Again and again, the Supreme Court majority has maintained that it isn't 
specially concerned with preventing the execution of innocent people. In a 2009 
Supreme Court decision denying relief to innocent Georgia death row prisoner 
Troy Davis, who was murdered by the state in 2011, Scalia again affirmed this 
position: "This 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 court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Scalia still maintains that no one 
innocent has ever been executed. "It should be noted at the outset that the 
dissent does not discuss a single case--not one--in which it is clear that a 
person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had 
occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name 
would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby" Scalia rote in a 
2006 opinion in the Kansas v. Marsh case.

Anti-death penalty activists are shouting out the names of the innocent 
executed for years - Troy Davis and Cameron Todd Willingham. But Scalia and his 
compatriots don't want to listen.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

People are justly angry about the tragedy that is the modern-day death penalty. 
One of Henry Lee McCollum's lawyer's, Kenneth Rose, wrote about that anger in a 
recent essay about his client's release:

Now, with Henry finally free, some people expect me to feel satisfied, or even 
happy. The truth is: I am angry.

I am angry that we live in a world where 2 disabled boys can have their lives 
stolen from them, where cops can lie and intimidate with impunity, where 
innocent people can be condemned to die and where injustice is so difficult to 
bring to light.

As I lie awake at night, mulling over the maddening details of this case, I 
wonder: How many more Henry McCollums are still imprisoned, waiting for help 
that will never come?

Is it any wonder that 18 states have now abolished the death penalty? That 
others have indefinite moratoriums or are poised to abolish through new 
referendums or legislative decisions? Can it be any surprise that major 
newspapers continue to editorialize about the need to finally do away with this 
most gruesome and cruel punishment? Racial bias, lack of funding for defense of 
the poor, botched executions, executions of people with mental impairment 
(despite a Supreme Court ban), corruption in district attorney's offices and in 
the courts - all these are the modus operandi of the American "injustice" 
system.

The shout from the rooftops today is an indictment of the whole rotten system 
of capital punishment: The death penalty must go!

(source: Lily Hughes, Socialist Worker)






WASHINGTON:

Death penalty: Cost of trials is too high


2 people who allegedly killing 6 family members in Carnation in 2007 are still 
awaiting trial ["Carnation death-penalty case hit by more delays," Local News, 
Sept. 5]. 7 years, so far, of delay.

Why? Because the state is asking for the death penalty and the defense lawyers, 
as they should, are fighting vigorously for their clients' lives.

How much is this costing state taxpayers? A lot. And for what, to satisfy our 
blood lust for vengeance? And, of course, if convicted, the appeals, mandatory 
under state law, would take many more years and cost us more millions.

When will we wake up and abolish the death penalty? It is barbaric and many 
studies find that it is not a deterrent.

Don Logerwell, Seattle

(source: Letter to the Editor, Seattle Times)