[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., S.C., GA., OHIO

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 24



PENNSYLVANIA:

Jury selection in Upper Merion murder trial nears completion; trial might start 
Thursday


A pool of approximately 20 prospective jurors will return to the courthouse 
Wednesday morning to be questioned for 1 spot as an alternate juror in the 
capital case against a man accused kidnapping and killing a 10-month-old baby 
and killing her 61-year-old grandmother in Upper Merion in 2012.

On Tuesday, the sixth day of jury selection, attorneys were able to seat one 
man and one woman, completing the panel of 12 primary jurors. They also 
selected 3 people to sit as alternates, but were unable to settle on a fourth 
alternate to hear the case against Raghunandan Yandamuri.

The make-up of the 1st 12 jurors is 6 men and 6 women.

If attorneys are able to select a 4th alternate on Wednesday, it is likely the 
trial will begin on Thursday morning with opening arguments from both sides and 
testimony from the 1st of the commonwealth's witnesses.

Yandamuri, 28, is facing 2 counts of 1st-degree murder and, if convicted, faces 
the death penalty. He will be representing himself during trial but will have 
Stephen Heckman as standby counsel to offer advice. If Yandamuri is convicted, 
he will be represented by Henry Hilles, who will argue against the death 
penalty to the same trial jury.

First Assistant District Attorney Kevin Steele is prosecuting the case, along 
with Deputy District Attorney Samantha Cauffman and Assistant District 
Attorneys Stewart Ryan and Kristen Feden.

Yandamuri, 28, is accused of the kidnapping and killing of Saanvi Venna and the 
killing of her grandmother, Satyavathi Venna, in the Marquis Apartments on Oct. 
22, 2012. Investigators immediately began searching for Saanvi Venna and found 
a note demanding $50,000 or the baby would be killed.

Police were able to narrow down the list of suspects because the kidnapper used 
the nicknames of Saanvi Venna???s parents, which were known only to a few 
people. Yandamuri was on that list and was later taken in by police for 
questioning. During questioning, Yandamuri allegedly confessed to the killing 
and kidnapping. He also allegedly revealed to investigators that Saanvi Venna 
was killed shortly after the kidnapping.

Yandamuri has since said the confession was coerced by police and that he had 
been forced to lead 2 other men into the apartment. He maintains the 2 other 
men were the ones who killed Satyavathi Venna and kidnapped and killed Saanvi 
Venna.

(source: mainlinemedianews.com)






SOUTH CAROLINA:

Jury expected to get Cottrell case today


Attorneys are scheduled to make their final comments to a jury this morning 
with a verdict in a death penalty retrial coming as soon as late today.

If the jury finds Luzenski Allen Cottrell innocent or guilty of manslaughter, 
the 12-year-old case will be concluded. If the jury finds him guilty of murder, 
the court will reconvene in 24 hours to decide if his life should be be spared.

An attorney from the state's indigent defense commission started a retrial for 
a man previously sentenced to death for the killing of Myrtle Beach police 
officer Joe McGarry in December of 2002 with the assertion that McGarry shot 
1st when the 2 struggled and a more appropriate charge for Luzenski A. Cottrell 
should have been self-defense or voluntary manslaughter.

Bill McGuire said if the officer used a level of force stronger than he was 
authorized to do, then voluntary manslaughter is the proper charge.

"He (Cottrell) had a right to fire back to protect his life," he said.

Cottrell, 36, of Myrtle Beach was found guilty of murder in 2005 and was 
sentenced to death, but the S.C. Supreme Court reversed the conviction saying 
Circuit Judge R. Markley Dennis Jr. erred when he failed to allow the jury to 
consider the lesser charge of manslaughter.

Cottrell's 1st trial in Horry County brought out testimony about 3 murders, a 
failed arson attempt, misuse of drugs and connections with escort services.

The retrial was first scheduled for January of 2012, but in 2011 Circuit Court 
Judge Larry Hyman, who is presiding in this week's trial, relieved both lawyers 
who were working on the case and appointed new attorneys who needed time to 
prepare their case.

When the Supreme Court reversed Cottrell's murder conviction, it let 3 other 
charges stand. Cottrell was sentenced to 3 concurrent 10-year terms for assault 
with intent to kill, resisting arrest with a deadly weapon and grand larceny. 
These sentences remain in effect.

Cottrell was also sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of 
Jonathan Love in Marion County in 2005. He was charged with killing Richard 
Hartman in Horry County, but those charges were dismissed after Cottrell was 
sentenced to death.

In testimony Monday, Myrtle Beach police Lt. Mike Guthinger said he saw his 
friend McGarry on the night of Dec. 29, 2002, for the first time since 
Christmas. He said McGarry asked him to go with him to get some coffee and then 
to a beach access road where they could talk because he had some exciting news 
for him.

Guthinger didn't say what the exciting news was Monday, but in the trial in 
2005 he said McGarry was excited because he was recently engaged to be married 
and wanted to talk about the military-style wedding he and his fiance were 
planning.

Guthinger said he and McGarry were really good friends who spent their off-duty 
time together jet skiing, going to the beach and watching movies.

Guthinger said he and McGarry went to Dunkin' Donuts at U.S. 17 at 30th Avenue 
North so McGarry could buy coffee.

When they went into the business, McGarry saw a man whom he recognized from a 
previous traffic stop.

Guthinger said he noticed Cottrell because he was talking loudly with an 
employee. In 2005 Guthinger said Cottrell was complaining about the doughnut 
not having enough sugar, but McGuire said Monday that Cottrell is a playful 
kind of guy and was teasing with the employee about the doughnuts.

Guthinger testified that McGarry whispered to him several police code numbers 
indicating that Cottrell, the boisterous customer, was a suspect in the killing 
of Richard Hartman who was shot to death in the Carolina Forest area in 
November of 2002 and dispatch had passed along the information that Horry 
County police were looking for him and that he might have a gun.

McGuire said the information that Cottrell was a suspect in Hartman's shooting 
was wrong, but the 2 officers didn't know that at that point.

Guthinger also testified that there were no warrants calling for Cottrell's 
arrest, but they didn't know that when the trouble started between McGarry and 
Cottrell.

He said McGarry followed Cottrell out to the parking lot, approached him and 
asking if he remembered him from the previous traffic stop.

Cottrell said he did remember him before McGarry asked for his identification, 
which he provided. Guthinger testified that Cottrell asked McGarry why he was 
harassing him.

Guthinger said McGarry instructed Cottrell to show him his hands, but he 
refused to follow instructions. Shortly after that the pleasant conversation 
between the 2 men intensified and McGarry tried to handcuff Cottrell while he 
checked on his status and made sure he didn't have a gun.

However, he had trouble controlling Cottrell's right arm.

After a brief struggle, the 2 men squared off, Guthinger heard a quick "pop, 
pop" and saw his friend get shot in the face. Guthinger and Cottrell then got 
into a firefight with Guthinger twice waving customers back into the Dunkin' 
Donuts.

Guthinger testified that he believes 1 of his first shots hit Cottrell in the 
back of his leg.

After a volley of gunfire, Guthinger quoted Cottrell as saying, "I give up. I 
give up. Don't shoot me."

But when he went to detain him, Cottrell jumped up and started shooting again.

But McGuire suggested to the heavily-female jury Monday that McGarry 
accidentally fired the first shot that wounded Cottrell, and Cottrell responded 
with gunfire.

McGuire said McGarry's gun was fully loaded with a bullet chambered ready to 
fire, without a safety when the struggle started.

Cottrell who was bleeding from the gunshot wound in his leg, got into the back 
seat of the car with his then-girlfriend driving. Police chased the speeding 
Honda to 67th Avenue North where it was disabled by stop sticks and swarmed by 
police who arrested the duo and confiscated 2 guns and ammunition from the car.

After Cottrell went to jail, a witness came forward and offered information 
about the killing 40-year-old Richard Hartman of the River Oaks community.

McGuire says Hartman ran a prostitution ring and Cottrell sometimes drove the 
girls for him.

It came out in the penalty phase of Cottrell's 2002 trial that he and a friend 
Fred R. Halcomb Jr., 35, of Myrtle Beach were accused of luring Hartman from 
his home under the guise of selling him drugs and robbing him before Cottrell 
gunned him down in his truck, according to a police affidavit.

In the 3rd killing, Cottrell was sentenced to life for shooting Love to death 
after getting him to dig his own grave because he had botched instructions to 
burn a man's house down.

Halcomb is serving a life sentence for Love's murder, according to the S.C. 
Department of Corrections inmate search.

(source: myhorry news.com)






GEORGIA:

No Death Penalty for Dad Charged in Toddler Death


A Georgia man accused of leaving his toddler son to die inside a hot car will 
not face the death penalty, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds said in an emailed statement that he 
won't seek the death penalty against Justin Ross Harris after reviewing the 
state's death penalty statute and other factors. He declined to elaborate.

Police have said the toddler was left in the vehicle for about seven hours on a 
day when temperatures in the Atlanta area reached at least into the high 80s. 
The medical examiner's office has said the boy died of hyperthermia - 
essentially overheating - and called his death a homicide.

Harris' attorney Maddox Kilgore did not immediately return a call seeking 
comment.

Harris faces multiple charges, including malice murder, felony murder and 
cruelty to children. The malice murder charge indicates prosecutors intend to 
prove Harris intentionally left his 22-month-old son Cooper to die in the hot 
car.

The 8-count indictment also includes charges related to sexually explicit 
exchanges prosecutors say Harris had with an underage girl.

During a 3-hour bond and probable cause hearing in July, Cobb County Assistant 
District Attorney Chuck Boring questioned a police detective at length, 
outlining evidence he said proved that Harris intentionally left his young boy 
in the hot SUV. Harris was sitting in his office exchanging nude photos with 
several women, including a teenager, the day his son died, Cobb County Police 
Detective Phil Stoddard testified at the hearing.

The indictment also accuses Harris of asking a girl under the age of 18 to send 
him a nude photo and of sending nude photos of himself and sexually explicit 
messages to her. It charges him with attempting to sexually exploit a child and 
with disseminating harmful material to a minor.

Harris' attorney has said the state has introduced several inconsistent 
theories about a potential motive in the boy's death, which he has said was a 
terrible accident.

Page Pate, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney who's not involved in the 
Harris case, said it's somewhat surprising that Reynolds decided not to seek 
the death penalty.

"If this is truly a malice murder case and they have sufficient evidence to 
show that he intended to kill his son, then this is the kind of case that would 
normally call for the death penalty," Pate said.

But he said that while the case meets the legal requirements to qualify as a 
capital case, the district attorney also has to weigh the strength of his 
evidence.

"Sometimes even if a jury finds sufficient evidence to convict a person, they 
may waiver on the death penalty if they think the evidence isn't 100 % solid," 
Pate said.

Harris is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and moved to Georgia in 2012 to work 
for Home Depot.

Harris had been due to appear Thursday before Cobb Superior Court Judge Mary E. 
Staley for an arraignment. Because of a scheduling conflict for his defense 
attorney, that has been postponed until Oct. 17, Reynolds said.

(source: Associated Press)






OHIO----new death sentence

Death penalty for David Martin


A judge sentenced David Martin to death Wednesday at the Trumbull County Court 
of Common Pleas after a jury convicted him of murder and recommended the death 
penalty last week.

Martin had been standing trial for the death of Jeremy Cole and the wounding of 
a woman during what investigators say was an attempted robbery in the fall of 
2012 and is currently serving 21 years in federal prison for illegally 
possessing a weapon.

Martin was found guilty on Sept. 11 on 10 charges, including aggravated murder, 
aggravated robbery and kidnapping. The jury recommended the death penalty for 
Martin last Wednesday, Sept. 17.

(source: WKBN news)

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

Change of Heart----Conservative former justice officials seek to reform Ohio's 
death penalty


Dozens of times during his 30 years of service with the Ohio Department of 
Rehabilitations and Corrections, Terry Collins made the 45-minute drive from 
his home in Chillicothe to the prison at Lucasville to witness the state put a 
prisoner to death. Collins, who retired as director of the ODRC in 2010, says 
the drive never got easier.

Today, the man who oversaw 33 executions is calling for deep changes to the way 
Ohio institutes capital punishment, an issue most often taken up by 
progressives. Collins says he's deeply conservative and strongly believes in 
the rule of law - and also wants to see the death penalty banned in Ohio.

"Every time when I left my home that was a question that always entered my 
mind," Collins said during a Sept. 20 panel on the death penalty held in Mount 
Auburn. "Did we get this right? We can't afford to make mistakes with the death 
penalty."

Collins is not the only conservative former official from Ohio's justice system 
calling for repeal of capital punishment in the state. Former Ohio Attorney 
General Jim Petro has also come out against the death penalty. Both say the 
state's highest penalty falls most often on low-income minorities in Ohio's 
urban areas and that recent exonerations of death row inmates prove that the 
process for seeking a capital punishment conviction is far from perfect.

It's a turnaround for Petro. The Supreme Court effectively halted the death 
penalty in 1972 with a ruling requiring states to rewrite their capital 
punishment laws. After retooling laws to address the court's concerns, the Ohio 
legislature voted in 1981 to reinstate the state's death penalty. Petro, a 
state representative at the time, voted for that bill. But when he became 
attorney general in 2003, he was shocked by the number of upcoming executions 
he would need to oversee. "The 1st one we undertook was a few months into my 
1st year," he says. "Honestly, I was an emotional wreck afterward. It was 
difficult for me."

Petro would eventually oversee 18 executions during his term, which ended in 
2007.

During his time as attorney general, Petro gradually realized he was opposed to 
the death penalty. He and his wife Nancy, also an active opponent of the death 
penalty, authored a book making a case against capital punishment, titled False 
Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent. "We will, and we have in the 
past, executed innocent people," Petro says. "That's an overwhelming thought, 
but I know it to be a fact."

Activists are encouraged by the way Petro and Collins have spoken out. "I think 
Ohio has really come full-circle on this issue," says Kevin Werner, executive 
director of Ohioans to Stop Executions. "To hear people like Jim Petro say 'I 
don't know that we're getting this right,' I think that should give us all 
pause."

Nationally, 1,320 people have been executed since 1978. A 2014 University of 
Michigan study found that courts run about a 4 percent error rate in death 
sentence cases, meaning that it's likely dozens of people have been wrongfully 
executed since that time. Sometimes justice catches up before it's too late. 
633 people have been exonerated of murder charges since 1978, many of them 
recently with the help of DNA identification. 104 of those wrongfully convicted 
were sentenced to death. Petro touts his work on a statewide DNA database, 
which has helped exonerate a number of people wrongly convicted of murder and 
other serious crimes.

1 of those people is Joe DeAmbrosio, who was convicted with 2 other men in the 
1988 killing of 19-year-old Estel Klann. Later reviews of the case found 
prosecutorial misconduct, including suppressed evidence of DeAmbrosio's 
innocence. These revelations, along with DNA evidence, led to his exoneration 
in 2012. He's the 6th death row inmate in Ohio to be exonerated.

Ohio has executed 53 people since reinstating its death penalty. The state's 
large urban counties are responsible for most of the state's death sentences. 
Hamilton County counts for less than 7 % of the state's population, for 
instance, but has given out 19 % of its death sentences. And Cuyahoga County, 
where Cleveland is located, has only 11 % of the state's population but hands 
down an astounding 37 % of its death sentences. Race is also a factor. More 
than 2/3 of murder victims in the state are black, but 3/4 of death sentences 
are for the murder of a white victim, according to state data.

"My stance on the death penalty changed because of the fairness of the system," 
Collins says. "I don't believe it's right in this state that the county you may 
be arrested in, what your economic status may be or your race may be should 
determine whether or not you end up on death row."

Another overarching theme critics bring up is the power prosecutors have to 
pursue death penalty cases, even when evidence is very thin. "Prosecutors have 
to give up some of the broad discretion that they have for the greater good," 
Werner says. "When we look at why wrongful convictions happen, when we look at 
the counties they come from, it's always about human error, it's always about 
tunnel vision."

A 2011 task force meant to evaluate the fairness of the state's capital 
punishment system did so with one limitation - an outright ban on capital 
punishment was off the table. This spring, the task force delivered 56 
recommended changes, including a ban on executing the mentally ill and limits 
to the powers prosecutors can wield. But even with growing support, many 
changes are unlikely to make it through the legislature.

State Senator Bill Seitz, a Republican, says he thinks change is vital but that 
it will take baby steps. He says he'll work the task force's recommendations 
into a number of bills that will come before the legislature next session.

Fellow conservatives like Petro and Collins agree with this approach but also 
say they'd ideally like to see capital punishment done away with entirely.

"I've always been and will always be a person who believes you should be 
punished if you violate the rules of society," Collins says. "And there are 
some people in prison who should never get out of prison. But that doesn't mean 
they should get the death penalty, either."

(source: citybeat.com)

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

Jury selection begins in Ohio sledgehammer slayings


Jury selection is scheduled to begin in the trial of a 19-year-old Ohio man 
accused of bludgeoning his girlfriend's parents to death with a sledgehammer.

Shawn Eric Ford could face the death penalty is he is convicted of aggravated 
murder in a Stark County courtroom in Akron. Jury selection is scheduled to 
begin today.

Ford faces a variety of charges in the April 2013 slaying of 56-year-old 
Jeffrey Schobert and his wife, 59-year-old Margaret "Peg" Schobert, at their 
home in New Franklin. Jeffrey Schobert was a prominent local attorney.

Ford has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Police say he dated the 
Schoburt's teenage daughter.

The Akron Beacon Journal reports that jury selection is expected to take at 
least 2 weeks, with opening statements due sometime next month.

(source: Associated Press)