[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, MASS., PENN., DEL.

[Rick Halperin]

April 22



TEXAS:

Capital murder suspect argues death penalty in final pretrial hearing



A final pretrial hearing for capital murder suspect James Calvert was held 
Wednesday afternoon, 1 day before jury selection was scheduled to begin. The 
hearing got underway with Calvert addressing the Smith County District 
Attorney's Office's decision to pursue the death penalty. Calvert argued 
against the possibility by citing a list of chemicals used in the execution 
process by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice; none of which are 
currently used. The state uses pentobarbital, which was not included in the 
list.

Calvert later argued the use of the drug, saying injection chemicals affect 
people differently, saying "death is not a light switch."

"Lethal injection is a good idea, if you want to kill somebody," Calvert 
chuckled in court Wednesday.

Calvert complained Smith County Judge Jack Skeen, Jr. was "short-circuiting" 
him.

"You don't sit in here and dictate the proceedings," said Skeen.

Calvert is accused of killing his ex-wife and kidnapping their son in October 
of 2012. The Smith County DA has said they intend to seek the death penalty in 
the case. Calvert is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.

(source: KLTV news)








MASSACHUSETTS:

Boston's Last Brush with Capital Punishment



Last Monday, a few days after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of helping his 
late brother, Tamerlan, plant and set off 2 bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, 
a local cable station invited a man named Bob Curley on air to discuss whether 
Tsarnaev should be put to death. Curley was once a vocal proponent of capital 
punishment. In 1997, his 10-year-old son, Jeffrey, was kidnapped, murdered, and 
then raped. It was among the city's most talked-about crimes since the days of 
the Boston Strangler, in the early 1960s, and Curley and his allies inundated 
state representatives with requests to reinstate the death penalty, which had 
been effectively banned in Massachusetts since 1984. And yet, when he appeared 
on television last week, Curley argued against Tsarnaev's execution, a position 
that, according to recent polls, his fellow-Bostonians share by a factor of 
more than 2 to 1. What made Bob Curley and the citizens of Massachusetts change 
their minds?

For those who were following the news in Greater Boston at the time, the Curley 
murder seemed like the crest of a wave of gruesome and high-profile crimes. In 
1995, a local mother was stabbed 98 times by her adolescent neighbor. In 1996, 
in a northern suburb, 2 men dragged a woman into some bushes and bludgeoned her 
to death with a rock. In the fall of 1997, a woman and her 2 young sons were 
strangled by her former boyfriend, who stuffed the boys' bodies into his locker 
at the Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. And then came the murder of 
Jeffrey, the lively boy from a working-class neighborhood in Cambridge. 
Unbeknownst to his parents, he had been befriended by a 23-year-old pedophile 
named Charles Jaynes. One day, Jaynes and another man, Salvatore Sicari, took 
Jeffrey to buy a bicycle. Later, in the car, Jaynes smothered him with a 
gasoline-soaked rag. Then the men put the boy's body in a plastic tub, weighted 
it with concrete, and dumped it in a river in Maine.

In truth, 1997 was a peaceful time in Massachusetts, with the homicide rate at 
a 34-year low. The state was heavily liberal and Catholic, as it remains today, 
and both groups were opposed to the death penalty. But the image of the 
freckle-faced boy in a Little League uniform, a Louisville Slugger perched on 
his shoulder, was everywhere in the press. His father, Bob, a fire-engine 
mechanic, became part of the coverage, too - at first reluctantly, as a 
stricken parent, and then passionately, as an advocate for the death penalty. 
Within days of the killing, some 60,000 people had signed petitions demanding 
that executions be made legal again. One representative, from a liberal suburb, 
received 2,000 phone calls urging the same. The issue split families. Tim 
Toomey, a state representative from Cambridge and a longtime death-penalty 
opponent, became the 1st of his colleagues to publicly reverse his position, 
much to the disappointment of his brother, a Catholic priest who had presided 
at Jeffrey???s funeral. The Massachusetts Senate easily passed a reinstatement 
bill, and the House of Representatives narrowly passed its own version, 81 
votes to 79. All that was left was for the 2 houses to come up with a 
compromise bill and send it to Paul Cellucci, the state's Republican governor, 
who had pledged to sign it.

The intervening 9 days were among the most fraught in the history of the State 
House, as the Boston Globe reporter Brian MacQuarrie wrote in his book "The 
Ride: A Shocking Murder and a Bereaved Father's Journey from Rage to 
Redemption." No prisoners had been executed for half a century, and Nicola 
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a pair of Italian-born anarchists who were sent 
to the electric chair under dubious circumstances in 1927, still held a place 
in the public mind. (In 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis had declared Sacco and 
Vanzetti's trial flawed and said that "any disgrace should be removed from 
their names.") Members of the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called 
Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty - one of its founders was 
Sarah Ehrmann, whose husband had been on Sacco and Vanzetti's defense team - 
flocked to the State House to make a stand against a measure that they saw as 
useless and barbaric.

When the final vote was taken, on November 6th, it was not religious or moral 
arguments that held sway but a growing distrust of the American justice system. 
By the end of 1997, the Innocence Project had reversed the convictions of 50 
people, 13 of whom had been wrongfully convicted of murder. John Slattery, a 
Democratic representative from the northern coastal town of Peabody, cast the 
decisive vote. Though he had supported reinstatement when the House drew up its 
bill, he had subsequently spent several days interviewing legal experts and 
constituents, and what he learned about the fallibility of the legal system was 
enough to change his mind. Before the vote, he made a speech on the House 
floor. He explained that he did not want to be lying awake, fifteen years in 
the future, knowing that someone had been wrongfully executed because of a law 
that he had helped create. "I need to be able to look myself in the mirror the 
next day and like the person that I see," he said.

The House split evenly on the bill, eighty to eighty, which under Massachusetts 
law effectively killed it. That vote was a tipping point: never again would the 
Commonwealth come close to reinstating capital punishment. In 2005, Governor 
Mitt Romney proposed a bill that would set a "gold standard for the death 
penalty in the modern scientific age.??? Sentencing would require a "no doubt" 
standard of proof, reinforced by DNA and the most advanced forensic techniques. 
The bill lost in the House by nearly two to one. The truth is that, in a state 
with one of the lowest murder rates in the nation (tied with Oregon for eighth 
lowest), capital punishment has ceased to seem necessary. "There's a 
self-reinforcing quality of these policies," Phyllis Goldfarb, a George 
Washington University Law School professor who taught at Boston College at the 
time of the Curley hearings, told me. "If you haven't had the death penalty for 
a long time, the appetite for it kind of dissipates."

2 years after his son's murder, Bob Curley appeared on a local talk show to 
debate Bud Welch, a death-penalty opponent whose daughter was killed in the 
Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995. Later, in getting to know Welch and meeting 
other parents of murdered children, Curley began to change his mind. In 2001, 
at the first national conference of Murder Victims' Families for 
Reconciliation, held at Boston College, Bob Curley "came out" as being against 
capital punishment. This stance, he told the television interviewer last week, 
"is solely based on the inequities of our criminal-justice system," which he 
has witnessed firsthand. Jaynes, who could afford an excellent lawyer, was 
convicted of 2nd-degree murder and kidnapping; his sentence included the 
possibility of parole. Sicari, whom Curley called "just a tag-along stooge," 
had no financial resources; he was convicted of 1st-degree murder and sentenced 
to life without parole. "These guys are scum - the worst of the worst," Curley 
said, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his comment. "But how do you decide which 
one is worth the death penalty and which one is not?"

Given capital punishment's history in the state, it seems strange to many 
Bostonians that Tsarnaev could be executed. Yes, he was tried and found guilty 
under federal antiterrorism statutes, and as such legally faces the death 
penalty, which would likely be carried out at the federal penitentiary in Terre 
Haute, Indiana. But, in order to make that punishment a possibility, the judge 
had to "death qualify" each member of the jury - that is, confirm that each 
person was prepared to vote in favor of lethal injection. In a state that made 
the death penalty illegal more than 30 years ago, and in a city whose citizens 
overwhelmingly oppose it, to what extent does that jury represent the 
community?

Several days after Curley's TV appearance, the Boston Globe ran a front-page 
editorial by Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of Martin, an 8-year-old boy 
who died in the Marathon bombing. They urged the U.S. Department of Justice to 
"take the death penalty off the table" and sentence Tsarnaev to life without 
parole. To sentence him to death, they argued, would force them to relive the 
tragedy with each inevitable appeal. Curley, one of the few people in the state 
who can honestly claim to understand their feelings, agreed. "I could care less 
what happens to this kid," he said of Tsarnaev. "He should just be gone, and 
that should be the end of it." The next time people hear of him, he added, 
"should be when they read his obituary."

(source: Douglas Starr, The New Yorker)








PENNSYLVANIA:

York DA asks Gov. Wolf not to commute death-row killer's sentence



York County's district attorney has sent a 3-page letter to Gov. Tom Wolf, 
asking him not to issue a reprieve to death-row inmate Hubert Michael Jr., 
whose execution is scheduled for this summer.

Wolf has issued what he calls a moratorium on death sentences in Pennsylvania, 
and has said he will issue reprieves to inmates scheduled for execution.

State law requires a sitting governor to sign a death-row inmate's death 
warrant within 90 days after judicial appeals end, unless a pardon is granted 
or the person's sentence is commuted.

Wolf has said he will not sign death warrants.

It was state Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel who on Tuesday 
signed Michael's death notice, according to the department's website.

Michael, 58, formerly of Lemoyne, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on 
June 5, according to the department.

A call to Wolf's staff seeking comment was not immediately returned.

DA's letter: In his letter to the governor, dated Wednesday, District Attorney 
Tom Kearney, wrote, "I urge you, in the name of justice, to allow the execution 
to proceed."

16-year-old Trista Eng, who lived in the Dillsburg area, "was a totally 
innocent victim" who was kidnapped, raped and killed because Michael "was angry 
about his Lancaster County rape case then pending, and wanted to take his anger 
out on a woman," according to the letter.

Trista's family "feels very strongly that the sentence should be carried out," 
Kearney wrote in the letter, and both former DA Stan Rebert and Michael's trial 
prosecutor, Christy Fawcett, oppose commutation of the sentence.

'Poster child': Taking a page from his predecessor's playbook, Kearney 
described Michael as "the poster child" for the death penalty. When Rebert was 
in office, he used the same phrase to describe cross-state spree murderer Mark 
Newton Spotz, who in 1995 killed 3 women in 3 counties in 3 days while on the 
run for killing his brother.

Kearney's letter notes there is no doubt about Michael's guilt.

"(The) crime is heinous," he wrote, and Michael has never "made a full 
disclosure of the magnitude of his conduct," except privately to his own 
defense attorney.

The murder: Michael told his former defense attorney, York County chief public 
defender Bruce Blocher, that he offered Trista a ride as she was walking to her 
job at Hardee's in Dillsburg on July 12, 1993.

At some point during the ride, Michael stopped the car and used the electrical 
cords to tie up Trista, then drove her to state game lands in Warrington 
Township, according to Blocher.

He raped her, put a bag over her head and shot her 3 times, Blocher has said, 
and then hid her body in a wooded area.

Blocher revealed details of Michael's confession when called to the stand 
during a 1997 appeals hearing in the case.

Michael fled the state 10 days after murdering Trista. At the time, he was free 
on bail for a Lancaster County rape charge.

Captured: He was captured July 27, 1993, in Utah. Police found the murder 
weapon in the car he was using, officials said. He was charged with homicide in 
late August 1993.

Trista's body was found by Michael's own family members after he confessed the 
murder to his brother.

In November 1993, Michael escaped from Lancaster County Prison but he was 
captured in New Orleans in March 1994, according to the Department of 
Corrections. He was later sentenced to 10 to 20 years for the Lancaster County 
rape.

He pleaded guilty to 1st-degree murder for killing Trista and was sentenced to 
death.

Previous stay: Michael was scheduled to die at the state prison in Rockview in 
Centre County on Sept. 22, but the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 
stay of execution in August so his case could be reviewed. It was the 4th stay 
Michael's attorneys have obtained on his behalf.

Kearney's open letter to Wolf notes "you and I have taken an oath to support 
the laws enacted by our legislature," and argued that granting a reprieve to 
Michael "makes a mockery of the judicial system."

Since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s, Pennsylvania has put to 
death 3 death-row inmates, all of whom had abandoned their appeal rights.

(source: York Dispatch)








DELAWARE:

Interfaith group calls for Delaware death penalty repeal



Delaware's top clergymen came together Wednesday in Dover to call on lawmakers 
to repeal the state's death penalty, calling the punishment unjust and 
ineffective.

"It has often been felt that the death penalty brings justice, we often quote 
the Bible, 'An eye for an eye,'" said the Rev. John Deckenback, of the 
Conference Minister for the United Church of Christ Central Atlantic. "Those 
type of responses tend to alleviate our emotional need for revenge, but we 
would question whether they bring about true justice."

Deckenback, Bishop W. Francis Malooly, from the Diocese of Wilmington; Bishop 
Wayne Wright, from the Episcopal Church of Delaware; and Rabbi Yair Robinson 
spoke during a press conference Wednesday afternoon supporting the push to 
repeal Delaware's death penalty.

Backers of the repeal effort have increased their presence in Legislative Hall 
as the controversial measure heads to the House Judiciary Committee. The 
hearing on Senate Bill 40 has yet to officially be scheduled, but House prime 
sponsor Rep. Sean Lynn, D-Dover, said he was told it would be during the 2nd 
week of May.

"We are hearing that the people in our pews believe that this is the right time 
for the death penalty to end here in Delaware," Wright said.

Earlier this week, a poll commissioned by the Delaware Center of Justice found 
that 63 % of Delawareans support the death penalty. In a follow-up question, 64 
% said life with or without parole was a better option than death for those 
convicted of murder. About 1/2 the 573 people polled said they supported the 
measure to repeal the death penalty.

"There is no justice in the death penalty," Robinson said. "There is no peace 
in the death penalty and the time to repeal this form of punishment is now."

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Karen Peterson, D-Stanton, includes an 
exemption for the 15 inmates currently sitting on Delaware's death row, who 
would still face execution by lethal injection. The Senate passed the 
legislation 11-9 earlier this month.

Gov. Jack Markell has yet to weigh in. A spokeswoman for Markell has said that 
the governor is following the debate, but would not take a position. The clergy 
said they are planning to try and meet with Markell Wednesday afternoon.

Police groups strongly oppose repeal and are expected to step up opposition in 
the House, where they have an ally in powerful Speaker Pete Schwartzkopf, D- 
Rehoboth, a retired state trooper.

Delaware is 1 of 32 states that employs capital punishment. The last inmate put 
to death was Shannon Johnson, 28, in April 2012 by lethal injection.

Advocates for the death penalty have long argued that it is a fair penalty for 
the most heinous of prisoners and deters crime, but opponents say execution 
violates human rights, is expensive, encourages a cycle of violence and is used 
disproportionately against minorities and the poor.

(source: The News Journal)

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

Take the lead on death penalty repeal



I respond to the April 7 letter, "There's a price to pay for breaking the law," 
whose author asserts that God invented the death penalty and, therefore, it 
should not be fiddled with. Unfortunately, the death penalty is not perfect, 
and does not uphold the sanctity of human life in the way that anyone's God 
could have intended.

I'm not a member of the clergy, but I am a person of faith. As a member of the 
Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware, I am proud that the Unitarian 
Universalists of America have long opposed the death penalty, holding capital 
punishment as inconsistent with the sanctity of human life on account of its 
retributive, discriminatory, and non-deterrent character.

It's comforting to me that Delaware bishops and leading clergy of the following 
faith groups are all advocating strongly for repeal: The Roman Catholic Church, 
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, The Evangelical Lutheran Church in 
America, The Episcopal Church, The United Methodist Church, The Presbyterian 
Church, the United Church of Christ, as well as the leading Jewish clergy 
members in our state.

It is clear from the experience of our neighbors in New Jersey and Maryland 
that we do not need the death penalty in order to be safe from violent 
offenders or to hold them accountable.

I urge Speaker of the House Pete Schwarzkopf to take the lead on this issue and 
help get SB40 passed.

Don Peterson,Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware

(source: Letter to the Editor, Cape Gazette)