[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.H., N.C., FLA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 30



NEW HAMPSHIRE:

NH Supreme Court upholds death penalty for Michael Addison



The New Hampshire Supreme Court unanimously upheld the death sentence for 
Manchester cop killer Michael Addison saying his sentence was not imposed under 
the influence of passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor.

Evidence, the court found, was sufficient to support the jury's findings of 
aggravating circumstances and it concluded that Addison's sentence was neither 
excessive nor disproportionate.

Addison was convicted 7 years ago of the 2006 capital murder of Officer Michael 
Briggs, 35, a decorated police officer and father of two young children.

"The police department is very pleased with the ruling," said Assistant 
Manchester Police Chief Nick Willard, who was the lead investigator in Briggs' 
murder.

Willard, who along with Briggs' parents, Lee and Maryann Briggs of Epsom, and 
other police officers attended the Jan. 15 Supreme Court hearing, said after 
listening to the compelling arguments of both the defense and prosecution, he 
thought the Supreme Court "came down with the right decision."

David M. Rothstein, deputy director public defender, was out of the office 
Thursday and Chief Appellate Defender Christopher M. Johnson was unavailable. 
"We have no comment," a woman answering the office telephone said she was told 
to say.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery A. Strelzin said he was happy for 
both the Briggs family and the Manchester Police Department.

"They have been living with Michael Briggs' murder every single day and this is 
another step in the process of justice for them," he said.

Strelzin explained the decision was the final phase of Addison's direct appeal 
to the state Supreme Court on his capital murder conviction and death sentence.

What the court did in this phase of the appeal was look at other similar cases 
across the country - those that involved the murder of a police officer in the 
line of duty - and determined if the death sentence imposed for Addison was an 
aberration, Strelzin said.

"The court did that analysis and concluded it was not an aberration and upheld 
the death sentence," he said.

The defense and prosecution presented different sets of cases to the court for 
their review and, Strelzin said, the court used the 10 cases the state 
presented from four other states - Arizona, Indiana, New Jersey and Texas - in 
reaching its decision.

An appendix attached to the decision lists the cases the state presented. All 
of them involved a police officer being shot dead at close range while on duty. 
Eight of the 10 defendants were given the death penalty.

Addison still can pursue his appeals in the federal court system. Strelzin said 
he already filed several appeals with the U.S. Supreme Court, all of which were 
rejected.

Officer Briggs, 35, was on bicycle patrol the night of Oct. 16, 2006, with 15 
minutes left on his shift, when he and his partner went to the area of Lincoln 
Street, between Lake Avenue and Central Street, for a report of shots fired in 
a domestic dispute.

Addison, from just feet away, fired a shot, hitting Briggs in the head. The 
officer died the following day.

Addison is the 1st defendant to be convicted of a capital crime and sentenced 
to death in New Hampshire since the legislature adopted the current death 
penalty statute in 1977, though other police officers have been slain in the 
line of duty since then.

The state alleged in its prosecution of Addison that he had a "purpose to kill" 
Briggs on that October 2006 night, but the defense pointed out the jury did not 
find that to be an aggravating factor. Because of that, the defense argued the 
death sentence was comparatively disproportionate because in cases in which 
defendants did not purposely kill a police officer - they presented 350 cases 
from more than 2 dozen states - the defendant was sentenced to life 
imprisonment.

"We are not persuaded by the defendant's attempt to negate the significance of 
the death penalty cases relied upon by the state," the court said in its 9-page 
ruling. "Under New Hampshire law, a defendant is not eligible for a death 
sentence unless a unanimous jury finds beyond a reasonable doubt both that the 
defendant is guilty of capital murder for knowingly causing the death of 
another under 1 of 7 specific circumstances, and that the state has proved 2 
statutory aggravating factors, 1 of which is that the defendant acted purposely 
when committing capital murder."

The justices said they reviewed all the cases cited by the parties and 
concluded the 10 cases relied upon by the state generally represented those 
that most closely fit the parameters set out for the comparison.

In a lengthy footnote, the court listed the statutory aggravating factors the 
jury found in reaching agreement on the death sentence, which included Addison 
purposely inflicting serious bodily injury resulting in Briggs' death and that 
he murdered him to avoid being arrested.

The jury also found 13 non-statutory aggravating factors that included 3 other 
serious acts of violence committed by Addison dating back to 1996. They 
included assault and battery; threatening to commit a crime; assault with 
intent to kill; assault and battery; possession of a firearm without a permit; 
armed robbery, and 2 counts of assault and battery with a knife and a shod 
foot.

The court also listed 9 "other serious criminal behaviors" that included false 
imprisonment and the armed robberies of the El Mexicano Restaurant and the 
7-Eleven in 2006, just days before Briggs' death.

The jury also found 16 mitigating factors, which included that the murder did 
not involve substantial planning or premeditation, Addison's upbringing that 
included a mother with a history of psychiatric problems and drug and alcohol 
abuse and who abused him as a child, and a father who was a drug abuser with a 
criminal background.

(source: New Hampshire Union Leader)








NORTH CAROLINA:

Prosecutors to say whether death penalty will be sought in 'Top Model' murder 
case -- Emmanuel Rangel is charged with 4 counts of 1st-degree murder.



Prosecutors will announce Thursday whether they'll ask for the death penalty

Mecklenburg prosecutors are scheduled to announce Thursday morning whether 
they'll seek the death penalty against Emmanuel Rangel and 3 other defendants 
accused in 4 killings in February.

Rangel, 19, was granted protective immigration status 2 years ago despite being 
included in a federal database of gang members.

Rangel, Emily Isaacs, Edward Sanchez and David Lopez are to appear in 
Mecklenburg Superior Court on Thursday. At that time, the district attorney's 
office is to announce whether it will prosecute the defendants as capital 
murder cases.

Death penalty cases have become rare in Mecklenburg and around the state. 
Mecklenburg District Attorney Andrew Murray says he reserves the status for 
extreme crimes that shock the community.

Rangel is accused of 4 counts of 1st-degree murder stemming from 2 attacks that 
were 2 days apart.

-- Rosool Jaleel Harrell, 22, of Charlotte, was found fatally shot outside a 
Matthews hotel on Feb. 22. Another man was seriously wounded.

-- 2 days later, the bodies of Jonathan Cosme Alvarado, 23, Jusmar Isiah 
Gonzaga-Garcia, 21, and Mirjana Puhar, 19, were found in a home about a mile 
from uptown. Puhar was a former contestant on "America's Next Top Model."

Police say the triple slaying was drug-related and that Rangel knew the 
victims.

Sanchez, 19, is charged with 1st-degree murder in connection with the Matthews 
killing, while Isaacs, 18, is accused of being an accessory after the fact to 
1st-degree murder. The pair was captured in Texas.

David Lopez, 19, also is charged in the triple slaying. He surrendered to 
police in March.

Rangel became part of a Capitol Hill debate last month when congressional 
Republicans discovered that he received protective immigration status despite 
an apparent gang background. Earlier this month, immigration officials 
acknowledged that Rangel had been wrongly included in President Barack Obama's 
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, otherwise known as DACA.

(source: Charlotte Observer)








FLORIDA:

Death penalty upheld in Milton double murder



A death row inmate found guilty of killing 2 people during a botched 2010 drug 
deal in Milton had his conviction and sentence affirmed by the Florida Supreme 
Court today.

In 2012, a Santa Rosa County jury found Robert Lee Hobart, 45, guilty of 
shooting engaged couple Robert Hamm and Tracie Tolbert in their heads and 
leaving them on the side of an Allentown-area road.

Hobart's jury returned a 7-5 recommendation that Hobart receive the death 
penalty, and Hobart later appealed his conviction and sentence on five claims. 
He alleged, among other things, the evidence against him was legally 
insufficient, that the trial court had committed errors during the trial, and 
that the death penalty was not proportionate to his offenses. The Supreme Court 
rejected all of his claims.

According to court records, Hobart had a prescription drug addiction and often 
purchased narcotics from Hamm and Tolbert. Hobart said that on the day of the 
murders, he was meeting the couple in a secluded area to purchase drugs when 
Hamm attacked him with a metal pipe.

Hobart asserted he had shot in self defense, but the medical examiner later 
established that Hamm died as a result of a gunshot wound to the back of his 
head at close range. Tolbert was shot twice in the head at close range. Neither 
of their bodies had physical injuries consistent with a struggle or fight, 
according to court records.

Prosecutors said Hobart stole cash and narcotics from the couple and hid their 
bodies on the side of the road.

DNA and ballistics evidence linked Hobart to the murder weapon, his DNA was 
found on Tolbert's left arm, and he could not be excluded as the contributor of 
hair discovered at the crime scene.

Hobart is currently incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Raiford. He 
still has the option to file additional appeals.

(source: Pensacola News-Journal)

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

Supreme Court upholds death sentence in 2004 'Xbox murders'



The state Supreme Court says a lower court was correct to impose the death 
sentence on a man convicted in the bloody, 2004 "Xbox murders."

The court released an opinion Thursday upholding the conviction and sentencing 
of Jerone Hunter, who was 18 at the time of the crime. Hunter was 1 of 4 men 
convicted of fatally stabbing and beating 6 people with baseball bats in a 
Deltona house.

Prosecutors said one of the men was angry with 1 of the victims because she 
evicted him when she found him living in her grandmother's home and kept some 
belongings including an Xbox video game.

The Supreme Court rejected Hunter's contention that his defense in his 2006 
trial was inadequate and that Florida's death penalty statutes are 
unconstitutional.

(source: Associated Press)








USA:

What You Need To Know About The Supreme Court Lethal Injection Case



Botched executions, inmate exonerations, lethal drug boycotts and admissions of 
prosecutorial misconduct -- in recent years opponents of the death penalty in 
the United States have been calling attention to serious concerns about when 
and how the state kills.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard opening oral arguments in the 
closely watched case of Glossip v. Gross, which centers on the 
constitutionality of using the drug midazolam in executions.

The plaintiffs, all inmates on Oklahoma's death row, argue midazolam has no 
pain-relieving properties and "cannot reliably produce a deep, comatose 
unconsciousness" to ensure the inmate doesn't experience "intense and needless 
pain and suffering" when the paralytic and heart-stopping drugs are injected.

The state of Oklahoma argues that midazolam is humane and effective.

The court is expected to issue its ruling by early to mid-June, and how it will 
rule is far from obvious.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt told HuffPost via email: "Seven previous 
courts have considered the same facts that will be considered by the U.S. 
Supreme Court on Wednesday. All previous courts have ruled that the lethal 
injection protocol used by Oklahoma is constitutional. My office believes the 
U.S. Supreme Court, after considering these facts, will also find that 
Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol is constitutional and thus allow the 
sentences for these heinous crimes to be carried out in accordance with the 
law."

Fordham Law professor and death penalty expert Deborah Denno told The 
Huffington Post, "I find it very hard to predict what the court's going to do. 
I do think this is a court that's going to be much more educated in 
pharmacology and science and medicine than it was in 2008" in the case of Baze 
v. Rees.

It's "a statement in itself" that the court chose to hear the case in the first 
place, Denno noted.

How we got here

Currently 32 states have the death penalty, and all of them use lethal 
injection as the primary method of execution. For years, states used a fairly 
similar 3-drug protocol in which the 1st drug, sodium thiopental (also know as 
sodium pentathol), was used to render the inmate unconscious, a 2nd drug 
stopped respiration, and a 3rd drug essentially induced cardiac arrest. In the 
2008 case Baze v. Rees, which challenged that protocol, the court ruled in a 
7-2 decision that Kentucky's protocol did not violate the Eighth Amendment 
barring cruel and unusual punishment.

Nevertheless, drug manufacturers decided either to stop selling sodium 
thiopental to prisons or to stop making the drug altogether, forcing 
departments of corrections to look for alternatives.

Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law and history at Hofstra 
University, told The Huffington Post Tuesday that in the wake of Baze, a 
patchwork of protocols sprang up where there previously had been just one.

Now many states use midazolam as part of a three-drug protocol. Other states, 
like Georgia, have started using lethal doses of the barbiturate pentobarbital 
on its own.

"Baze was a spectacular failure because [the court] didn't provide clear 
guidance to anyone," Freedman said.

What's at stake

In states like Oklahoma that have a three-drug protocol, the controversial 
sedative midazolam is the first drug deployed. It was used for the first time 
in 2014 in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett.

"The case is a very narrow case," said Dale Baich, one of the attorneys for the 
plaintiffs. "We're simply asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that states 
cannot use midazolam as part of the lethal injection protocol."

"If we're successful in the Supreme Court, it doesn't mean that lethal 
injections cannot go forward," Baich said. "Oklahoma can purchase 
pentobarbitol. Since a stay was issued in our case, Texas and Missouri and 
Georgia have all carried out executions using pentobarbitol."

If the court's opinion is broad, however, it could ripple out to other states, 
according to Rick Halperin, a death penalty and human rights expert at Southern 
Methodist University.

"The decision has the potential to affect other states' protocols, even if they 
have a different one from Oklahoma," Halperin said. "It depends on if the order 
is narrowly applied just to Oklahoma or more broadly."

Who to watch

"We have 4 justices who are pretty fed up with the way things are going," Denno 
said, "but even [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor's dissent in the stay [for Oklahoma 
inmates] was a narrow dissent. It seems pretty clear than Kennedy is going to 
be the swing vote."

Denno suggested that evolving public opinion about the death penalty could also 
be an X-factor.

"We always know the justices are looking at the surveys, the reports. They're 
factors we know the court considers, but how much they weigh them is an open 
question," Denno said. "The court certainly isn't immune to what's happening in 
the public sphere, and they're not supposed to be."

Another figure to watch will be Oklahoma's expert witness, Dr. Roswell Lee 
Evans. Though doctors are ethically barred from participating in executions, 
Evans has previously offered testimony that inmates "would not sense the pain" 
of an execution after receiving a large dose of midazolam.

Sotomayor is likely to have some of the strongest opinions on this score. She 
wrote previously she was "deeply troubled" by Evans' research, which she 
criticized for not citing any case studies and for appearing to rely heavily on 
the website Drugs.com as a source.

Possible outcomes

Abolitionists who hope the court will strike down the death penalty entirely 
will almost certainly be disappointed by the ruling: All the experts 
interviewed by The Huffington Post agreed that SCOTUS tends to write its 
opinions narrowly and is unlikely to address any wide-ranging questions about 
the death penalty.

"Technically the court could make the opinion so broad that it would get rid of 
the death penalty," Denno said. "The court isn't going to do that."

Halperin agreed: "The court is certainly, almost assuredly, not poised to 
strike down lethal injection as a method of execution. It's never struck down 
any method of execution. The court is going to allow executions to continue."

Freedman said the court has an interest in ruling narrowly if they want a 
consensus.

Halperin, for his part, thinks Glossip v. Gross will be a small but nonetheless 
meaningful step toward the eventual elimination of the death penalty in the 
U.S.

"It took 17 years -- from 1988 to 2005 -- for the court to see that executing 
juvenile offenders was wrong. It took 13 years -- from 1989 to 2002 -- for a 
pro-death penalty Supreme Court to decide executing someone with mental 
disabilities is wrong," Halperin said. "We're now at a point where a lot of 
people can really see an end to this."

(source: Kim Bellware, Huffington Post)

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

Hillary's next flip-flop: the death penalty?



With so many other controversies sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, the 
nascent 2016 campaign hasn't offered much time for candidates to stake out and 
clarify their positions on some of the traditional, "old news" issues which 
crop up every election cycle. Sooner or later, though, they're all going to 
face some of these perennial questions. 1 of them is the issue of the death 
penalty, which renewed its position as a controversial subject following 
several "botched" executions over the past 2 years. (I still fail to see how an 
execution is really "botched" if the killer winds up dead.) Politico's Adam 
Lerner wonders if this will wind up being the next subject where Hillary 
Clinton will flip-flop on her position.

As a young lawyer, Hillary Clinton helped save a mentally handicapped black man 
from the electric chair. This is not a fact she has promoted in her years as a 
tough-on-crime U.S. senator or amid her quest to become the Democratic 
presidential candidate in 2016.

POLITICO discovered her role buried in an appeal to save Henry Giles, a 
convicted murderer, back in 1976, when Clinton headed the legal aid clinic at 
the University of Arkansas. A brief filed by the Cummins Prison Project, a law 
school effort to defend prisoners at one of Arkansas???s most notorious 
prisons, played an important role in winning leniency for Giles because of his 
mental impairment, court documents show.

Hillary Clinton's involvement in the case illustrates a profound shift in her 
views over time on an issue she last discussed publicly in her 2000 race for 
the U.S. Senate. Her comments then - that the death penalty had her 
"unenthusiastic support" - riled the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party. 
The death penalty poses a complicated issue for Clinton, whose husband, Bill 
Clinton, carried out executions as Arkansas governor and loudly defended 
capital punishment as he sought to establish himself as a law-and-order 
Democrat during his 1992 White House bid.

The Giles case wasn't some one off trial where Clinton was forced to provide 
the best defense available for a client (as all trial lawyers must do from time 
to time) but rather a campaign intended to move national policy. Henry Giles is 
still in prison today, serving life for the murder of a shoe store clerk. As 
the Politico article describes it, Clinton was an active participant in a 
blanket effort to force Arkansas to reexamine the death penalty and to roll it 
back. It was in keeping with the pristine liberal credentials she brought to 
her new home when she followed her soon-to-be husband there after publishing 
her Wellesley thesis on Saul Alinsky.

But by the time she was First Lady of Arkansas (and later of the United States) 
continuing through her campaign for a Senate seat in New York, she described 
herself as an "unenthusiastic" supporter of the practice. Was this a case of a 
politician's views "evolving" over time or simply swapping out her talking 
points to suit the mood of the public at that given hour? And more to the 
point, where is she today? There's been virtually no record of any comments 
from her since roughly 2000, but the day is coming when she'll have to take a 
position one way or the other.

Hillary Clinton has already flipped her views on gay marriage, immigration 
reform, domestic energy production, drivers licenses for illegal immigrants, 
gun control and who knows how many other things at this point. In some ways it 
might be hard to debate Clinton on any major issues of the day because she's 
held essentially every possible position on all of them at one time or another.

Capital punishment is less popular than ever with Clinton's base these days and 
if she had any serious competition for the Democrats' nomination there would be 
somebody asking her about it today. (Sorry, Bernie Sanders, but you don't 
count.) What will she say this time? Stay tuned, and make sure you have your 
cameras running. Her next position may not last very long.

(source: Jazz, Shaw, hotair.com)