[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OHIO, MO., KAN., NEB., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 29



OHIO:

Prosecutors to seek death for man charged in 4 Ohio slayings


Prosecutors say they will seek the death penalty for a 27-year-old man if he's 
convicted of aggravated murder in the June slayings of 4 people at an Ohio 
home.

The Franklin County grand jury on Thursday returned a 29-count indictment 
charging Robert Lee Adams of Columbus in the fatal shootings of 4 people 
ranging in age from 18 to 41 on June 13. A 5th person was shot but survived.

A 16-year-old boy accused of helping Adams is charged as a juvenile with murder 
and kidnapping. He pleaded not guilty.

Police said Adams told investigators that the teen suspect was the one who 
pulled the trigger.

Adams is being held with a $10 million bond and is scheduled to be in court for 
an arraignment on Monday.

(source: Associated Press)






MISSOURI:

rosecutor to seek death penalty in south KC massacre----Brandon Howell is 
accused of killing 5


Public defenders for the man accused of 1st-degree murder in a rampage of 
violence that left 5 people dead in south Kansas City may have to focus on 
Brandon Howell's mental state, a Kansas City defense lawyer said.

The Jackson County Prosecutor's Office says it will seek the death penalty when 
Brandon Howell's case goes to trial.

Howell is accused of shooting and killing 5 people in a south Kansas City 
neighborhood on September 2, 2014.

"Our focus today is on the 5 victims who tragically lost their lives on the 
afternoon of Sept. 2 2014, and their loved ones left behind," Jackson County 
Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said.

The prosecutor's office said no additional statements would be issued on the 
matter.

(source: KMBC news)






KANSAS:

White supremacist on trial for Jewish center killings says he is 'proud' of 
shootings


A white supremacist charged with killing 3 people at Jewish sites in suburban 
Kansas City spent more than 2 hours Friday telling jurors how he planned the 
attacks and is sorry he didn't kill more people.

Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., who is acting as his own attorney, called himself to 
the witness stand and spoke of his military history and of how he started a 
group in North Carolina called the White Patriot Party. Miller also told jurors 
the prosecutor had a "slam dunk" and he knew they would put him on death row.

If convicted, Miller could be sentenced to death.

All the 3 exhibits Miller tried to introduce - a video of him in military 
uniform leading the White Patriot Party and 2 news articles - Friday morning 
were disallowed. Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan told him any similar materials likely 
would be as well.

After a nearly 3-hour lunch break, Miller returned to the stand and told jurors 
he wanted to tell them more about why he wanted to kill Jews, but the court 
wouldn't let him.

Instead, he talked about an emphysema attack he had 10 days before the April 
13, 2014, killings and his desire to "take out" Jewish people before he died.

He said he didn't initially know if he would have the courage to carry out the 
attacks, but afterward felt an exhilaration that dwarfed even the feeling of 
jumping out of airplanes when he was in the Army.

"I've been proud of myself for 15 months," he said.

The 74-year-old Aurora, Missouri, man is charged with killing William Corporon, 
69, and Corporon's 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, at the Jewish 
Community Center in Overland Park, and Terri LaManno, 53, at the nearby Village 
Shalom retirement center.

He said his only regret was that he killed the teenager, who he thought was 
older. But under cross-examination, Miller admitted that he would have been 
fine with killing Reat if he had been Jewish.

He said he was justified killing the other 2 because they were Jewish 
sympathizers, adding that he thought the prosecutor and judge also associated 
with Jews.

"If I had known you and you were there, I would have probably shot you, too," 
he told District Attorney Steve Howe moments before finishing his time on the 
witness stand.

During Miller's testimony, Howe objected frequently and said Miller's comments 
were not relevant to the capital murder trial. As the judge sustained each 
objection, Miller appeared to grow more frustrated.

"I promised this court that I would not lose my temper," he said. "I'm doing 
the best I can."

Miller said that while he was carrying out the attacks he knew he might end up 
getting the death penalty.

"You guys are going to put me on death row. We all know that," he told jurors.

Miller, who insisted on a speedy trial even after his stand-by attorneys said 
that didn't give them enough time to prepare a legitimate defense, has at times 
seemed overwhelmed by legal proceedings he called "mumbo jumbo."

Capital murder trials in Kansas have a guilt phase focusing on evidence about 
the crime and a sentencing phase when defendants are allowed to present 
mitigating evidence - including what was on their mind at the time - intended 
to spare them from a death sentence.

After Miller finished speaking, testimony was concluded on Friday. Closing 
arguments will begin on Monday.

(source: Chicago Tribune)






NEBRASKA:

Death penalty repeal on hold


Supporters of retaining the death penalty in Nebraska turned in thousands more 
signatures than necessary on Wednesday to suspend the repeal and place the 
issue before voters.

Nebraskans for the Death Penalty turned in petitions containing 166,692 
signatures. Leaders of the group called that a surprisingly large number and 
said it signaled that voters in the 2016 general election will retain the 
ultimate penalty for the most heinous murders, reversing the repeal enacted by 
the State Legislature this spring.

A lot of senators will find out that their constituents have a different view, 
I really believe that," said State Sen. Mike Groene of North Platte, a death 
penalty supporter who circulated petitions.

Opponents of the death penalty, meanwhile, said that they expect Nebraska 
voters to come to the same conclusion as 30 of the state's 49 state lawmakers. 
Voters will learn that the risks of executing innocent people, the "tremendous 
waste" of taxpayer dollars and the hurdles in obtaining the necessary drugs 
have made the death penalty immoral, unjust and unworkable, said the Rev. 
Stephen Griffith of Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

"Just like the legislators they elected, we believe the more Nebraskans learn 
about the failures of capital punishment, the more they will be inclined to get 
rid of it," said Griffith, the group's new executive director.

The pro-death penalty group formed in June and launched its petition drive just 
after state lawmakers overrode Gov. Pete Ricketts' veto and repealed the death 
penalty.

The vote drew national attention as Nebraska became the first conservative 
state since North Dakota in 1973 to do away with the death penalty. Currently, 
31 states have capital punishment.

But the victory by death penalty opponents in Nebraska now appears to be in 
jeopardy.

The pro-capital punishment group turned in nearly 3 times as many signatures as 
is necessary to place the issue on the ballot: 5 % of the state's registered 
voters, about 57,000 signatures. The drive must also meet that 5 % threshold in 
38 of the state's 93 counties.

The exact number of signatures needed won't be announced until Friday, a 
spokeswoman for the Secretary of State's Office said.

But Nebraskans for the Death Penalty also appears to have a comfortable cushion 
to suspend the repeal of the death penalty until voters decide its fate at the 
ballot box.

To do that, the drive needed to submit valid signatures of 10 percent of the 
state's voters, or about 114,000 signatures.

Typically, 15 % to 25 % of signatures are invalidated, either because a signer 
wasn't registered to vote or for other technical reasons. Even if 25 % of the 
signatures were disqualified, the drive would still have 125,000 valid 
signatures, more than enough to suspend the repeal.

State Treasurer Don Stenberg, a former attorney general who was an honorary 
co-chairman of the pro-death penalty group, said there was "a lot of 
significance" to collecting so many signatures.

"It's reflective of the tremendous support that Nebraskans have in keeping the 
death penalty," Stenberg said.

He was one of several supporters of capital punishment who spoke at an 
afternoon press conference, staged in front of an 8-foot-high wall of boxes 
holding petitions gathered by the group's nearly 600 paid and volunteer 
circulators. Signatures were collected in all 93 counties.

Officials in the counties are expected to take more than a month to count and 
validate the signatures.

Stenberg, as well as the Attorney General's Office, both said the signatures 
are presumed valid when they are turned in, until the count proves otherwise.

So, they said, the repeal of the death penalty - which was scheduled to go into 
effect on Sunday - is on hold until the count is completed.

"There will be some uncertainty in the law," Stenberg said. But, he added, 
"It's not unusual to have uncertainty in the law."

Nebraska lacks the necessary drugs to carry out an execution via its only legal 
means, lethal injection. But Stenberg, who as attorney general presided over 
the state's last 3 executions in the 1990s, said that if the state obtains the 
necessary drugs, there's nothing preventing current Attorney General Doug 
Peterson from asking for execution dates for the 10 men on death row.

Peterson, on Wednesday, said he was reviewing the cases.

The State Supreme Court would have to approve any requests for execution dates. 
It's unclear if the court would do that while a referendum on the issue is 
pending and after the Legislature voted to repeal the death penalty.

One of the senators who voted for the repeal, Bob Krist of Omaha, said death 
penalty supporters will need a lot more support to overturn the repeal in the 
2016 election.

He said the referendum should not be about vengeance but "justice and fiscal 
conservatism." Krist said the state has spent millions and only executed 3 
people in the last 6 decades.

He also questioned if the drive collected most of its signatures from Omaha and 
Lincoln, or from areas like Norfolk and Falls City, where there have been 
horrible murders and support for capital punishment is higher.

"So here we go. Game on," Krist said.

Officials with Nebraskans for the Death Penalty said they collected enough 
signatures to qualify the issue for the ballot in the 1st month, then used a 
last-minute push to qualify the measure in the necessary 38 counties.

Chris Peterson, the drive's spokesman, said the group expects to spend about 
$800,000 to $900,000 on its petition-gathering effort, which included hiring 
hundreds of paid circulators and an Arizona consulting company.

That spending, he said, is comparable to what a group spent last year to get an 
initiative petition on the ballot to increase the state's minimum wage. 
Nebraskans for Better Wages turned in 134,899 signatures after a 60-day drive.

Ricketts and his family were among the prime financiers for the pro-death 
penalty drive. The Republican governor contributed $200,000 in the first 2 
months, and his father, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, gave $100,000.

Officials with the pro-death penalty group said that petition signers 
overwhelmingly said they deserved a chance to vote on the issue.

"It's too important of an issue to be left to the give-and-take of politics," 
said Groene.

Vivian Tuttle of Ewing, whose daughter Evonne was 1 of 5 people slain during an 
attempted robbery at a Norfolk bank in 2002, said she put 8,000 miles on her 
car seeking support for the referendum drive.

"Wherever I went, people said 'I want to help do this,'" Tuttle said.

The last time a referendum petition appeared on the ballot was in 2006, when 
voters were asked whether to overturn a law mandating the consolidation of 
Class I school districts.

(source: lexch.com)






CALIFORNIA:

State death penalty law faces challenge in federal appeals court


Nearly 3 years after state voters narrowly rejected repeal of capital 
punishment, California's death penalty law faces another challenge Monday as a 
federal appeals court reviews a judge's ruling that the state's system is so 
plagued with delays and arbitrary actions that it violates the Constitution.

In his July 2014 decision, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney of Santa Ana noted 
that condemned prisoners commonly spend 25 years or more awaiting executions or 
reprieves and said the state was primarily responsible - taking lengthy periods 
to appoint lawyers, process cases and issue rulings from an overburdened and 
underfunded legal system.

California has the nation's largest death row, with 749 inmates, and its lowest 
execution rate, with 13 inmates put to death since 1992. By contrast, out of 
more than 900 convicted murderers sentenced to death since voters passed the 
current law in 1978, nearly 100 have died from illnesses, suicides or other 
causes. Others have had their sentences or convictions overturned.

'Arbitrary selection'

For most condemned prisoners, "systemic delay has made their execution so 
unlikely that the death sentence carefully and deliberately imposed by the jury 
has been quietly transformed into one no rational jury or legislature could 
ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death," said 
Carney, a 2003 appointee of President George W. Bush.

That delay, Carney said, "has resulted in the arbitrary selection of a small 
handful of individuals for execution."

Carney's ruling applied to only 1 inmate, Ernest Jones, sentenced to death in 
1993 for a rape and murder in Orange County. But it would have statewide 
application if upheld on appeal, starting with Monday's hearing before the 
Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena.

Other federal courts have rejected lawsuits over inmates' long periods on death 
row, finding that the prisoners could ease the situation by filing fewer 
appeals. Attorney General Kamala Harris, in her appeal of Carney's ruling, 
takes a more measured approach, arguing that the pace of California's death 
penalty review reflects the state's commitment to justice.

"Everyone involved in this process - counsel for the state, counsel for capital 
defendants, and the courts themselves - works carefully and methodically to 
ensure that death sentences are lawfully imposed and carried out only in 
appropriate cases," lawyers in her office said in a court filing. A "suitably 
deliberate pace," they said, is a safeguard against "arbitrariness and error."

Major divisions

The appeals court panel of Judges Susan Graber, Johnnie Rawlinson and Paul 
Watford - all Democratic appointees with moderate records - is facing a 
potentially momentous decision on an issue that has divided the state and its 
leaders for decades. But they might not get that far, because the case could 
run aground on a 1996 federal law that severely limits federal court review of 
state criminal cases.

The law prohibits a federal judge from overturning a state prisoner's 
conviction or sentence unless the state court that ruled against the prisoner 
used an "unreasonable application of clearly established federal law," as 
defined by U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

The high court has interpreted the law to mean that unless it has already ruled 
on an issue, in a way that conflicts with the last decision by a state court in 
the prisoner's case, a federal judge's hands are tied. The state Supreme 
Court's last action in Jones' current case was to dismiss his appeal without a 
written opinion in 2009. Unless that was an "unreasonable application of 
clearly established federal law," Carney's ruling might be abruptly overturned.

It all depends on how you frame the question, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of 
the UC Irvine Law School. He said U.S. Supreme Court rulings have "clearly 
established" that arbitrary executions are unconstitutional - so if that is the 
issue in this case, Carney's ruling should be reviewed on its merits. But the 
court has never decided that a system like California's leads to arbitrary and 
unconstitutional executions - and if that's the defining issue, the courts will 
probably decide Carney should have stayed out of it, Chemerinsky said.

Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and co-director of the law school's 
Criminal Justice Center, had a harsher forecast. If the case reaches the 
Supreme Court, he said, the justices will quickly dismiss the challenge to the 
death penalty law and rebuke the lower courts for letting it get that far.

To assert that the system, and the state courts that upheld it, "contradict 
clearly established Supreme Court law is ludicrous," Weisberg said.

Judge finds flaws

Jones' attorney, Michael Laurence, executive director of the Habeas Corpus 
Resource Center in San Francisco, had a different analysis. When Jones' case 
was last before the California Supreme Court, he said, the state's lawyers 
never presented arguments on issues of delay and arbitrary executions, and the 
court never considered the issue. That means there is no contradictory ruling 
that requires federal court deference or prevents Carney and the higher courts 
from ruling on the death penalty, Laurence said.

Whatever the outcome, executions in California are unlikely to resume soon. A 
federal judge ordered a halt in 2006, finding numerous flaws in lethal 
injection procedures and staff training at San Quentin, and the state has made 
little progress in repairing the defects. Gov. Jerry Brown recently settled a 
suit by a pro-death penalty group with an agreement to switch from a 3-drug 
execution procedure to a single lethal drug, but it's not clear how long the 
change will take, where the drug will come from or whether the courts will go 
along.

(source: San Francisco Chronicle)

***********

Death-penalty trial in case of slain Suisun City teen pushes to late 2016


It will be another year before the possible start of a jury trial for the 
Fairfield man who faces the possibility of the death penalty for allegedly 
raping and strangling 13-year-old Genelle Conway-Allen in 2013.

Anthony L. Jones was in court Friday and said little during a hearing that 
focused on typos and spelling errors that occurred at all of his past court 
appearances.

The case against Jones has pretty much been put on hold since April because his 
defense team wanted to perfect the record of those court appearances since 
prosecutors announced they intend to seek the death penalty. Jones has pleaded 
not guilty.

Progress the defense team made in the case through the summer was to identify 
hundreds of minor mistakes in the transcripts of past hearings. Among the 
corrections, "hear" was replaced by "here," "duck" was replaced by "duct," 
"sites" was replaced by "cites." The mistakes also included misspellings of the 
names of people involved in the case.

Judge E. Bradley Nelson ended the hearing by setting a date for the start of 
Jones' jury trial that is estimated to take more than 2 months. Nelson set jury 
selection for the trial to begin Sept. 7, 2016.

Conway-Allen, of Suisun City, was abducted as she walked home from school on 
the afternoon of Jan. 31, 2013. Her nude body was discovered 14 hours later on 
the morning of Feb. 1, dumped in Allan Witt Park.

(source: Daily Republic)






USA:

What's the Future of the Death Penalty in America?


2 recent high-profile cases have once again highlighted America's complex 
relationship with the death penalty. In Colorado, a jury declined to impose the 
death penalty on theater shooter James Holmes. And in Connecticut, whose 
legislature had recently abolished capital punishment prospectively, the state 
supreme court held that the Connecticut constitution barred the execution of 
those whose offenses had preceded that legislative change.

Both cases contributed to the ongoing national capital punishment debate. Some 
openly wondered whether the availability of the death penalty in Colorado still 
has any practical meaning, if jurors couldn't be convinced to impose it on 
someone like Holmes. And the Connecticut court's opinion included an extensive 
discussion of the various trends taking shape across the country. It's clear 
that the question of the future of capital punishment in America remains a 
lively one. (Full disclosure: I'm a criminal defense attorney, and my practice 
includes capital cases, including one that is currently pending.)

It's not hard to understand why this debate generates such strong feelings on 
both sides. Although my work has been on the defense side, anyone involved in 
the justice system gets a first-hand look at the heinous nature of violent 
crime. Crime scene and autopsy photos, and the visible emotions on the faces of 
the family members who attend every hearing, are constant reminders of the 
horrific harms that human beings can inflict on one another and the irreparable 
damage caused to those left behind.

On the other hand, some believe that regardless of the circumstances it's 
simply unacceptable for the state to take the life of one of its citizens. 
Others who can accept capital punishment in theory question whether our 
existing system is sufficiently reliable to support that penalty (a concern 
I've come to share based on my time in that system).

With such powerful motivations on both sides and the highest of stakes 
involved, it shouldn't be surprising that this is such a passionate debate. And 
one development that's significantly affected the course of capital punishment 
in America is the fact that death penalty opponents have been extremely 
effective in making it increasingly difficult to actually secure and impose a 
death sentence.

First, they've devoted an extraordinary amount of effort and resources to 
training defense lawyers at the trial level to avoid death sentences for their 
clients. (Colorado, where the Holmes trial took place, is a national center for 
this type of education; the "Colorado Method" of jury selection is a staple of 
capital defense training.)

And of course, an initial death penalty determination doesn't end the matter. 
There are several layers of appellate review through a series of courts, and 
cases involving death sentences get extra appellate scrutiny. The actual legal 
rules are more demanding, and those rules may be applied in an especially 
exacting way--particularly if some of the judges along the way have their own 
reservations about capital punishment. The result is that death-penalty cases 
are regularly reversed and sent back for new trials or sentencing proceedings. 
For example, in Oregon, where my practice is based, the State is about to take 
its fourth shot at securing a death sentence for serial killer Dayton Leroy 
Rogers; Rogers was convicted back in 1989 and has been sentenced to death 3 
times, with the Oregon Supreme Court ordering resentencing each time.

Finally, even if a death sentence survives all of this review, it still has to 
be imposed, and this is no mere formality--again, partly because of the efforts 
of abolitionists, who have made it difficult for companies to supply the 
chemicals needed for executions. The result is that even some states with large 
numbers of prisoners on death row virtually never actually execute anyone. In 
recent years, several governors have gone as far as declaring moratoria on 
executions in their states, in some cases formalizing what had already been the 
rule in practice.

All this means that it takes a lot of political will to actually carry the 
process to its end and execute someone--a point illustrated by some intriguing 
facts cited in the Connecticut court's opinion. Apparently, the vast majority 
of American executions are concentrated within a small band of states--in 2014, 
for example, Texas, Missouri, Florida and Oklahoma collectively accounted for 
approximately 90 % of the nation's 35 executions, and similar concentrations 
within small subsets of states appear across broader time periods. Presumably, 
these are the states where legislators, prosecutors and others not only believe 
strongly in the death penalty themselves, but understand that their 
constituencies share that belief and will support them in the face of vigorous 
opposition.

So what's the future of the death penalty in America? I don't see it going away 
at the national level. Abolitionists have fought for decades to have the 
Supreme Court declare capital punishment categorically unconstitutional, but 
although they've come close at times and clearly have the ears of some current 
justices, I don't expect that the Court will ever go that far--at least not 
anytime soon. So I expect that capital punishment will remain constitutionally 
permissible, and that those states with steadfast support will continue 
imposing it.

Meanwhile, those states whose residents are more ambivalent about the death 
penalty may increasingly reconsider whether a capital punishment regime is 
worth the immense costs, burdens and endless litigation required to keep it in 
place--especially given the increasingly significant possibility that even a 
defendant sentenced to death may never actually be executed. These questions 
may be mulled over by legislatures, governors, prosecutors, and others. (A 
judge in Kentucky, for example, recently forbade the state from seeking the 
death penalty in a murder case based on her apparent conclusion that that 
penalty would never actually be imposed, so that the enormously increased costs 
and burdens compared to a non-capital case would end up being wasted.) And 
through it all, Americans of goodwill will continue to debate the questions of 
whether and when the ultimate penalty should be imposed.

(source: Kevin Sali, criminal defense attorney in Portland, 
Oregon----Huffington Post)