[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., FLA., ALA.

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 17



PENNSYLVANIA:

Prosecutor wants death penalty for man with bodies in yard



A prosecutor has asked a jury to send a Pennsylvania man convicted of 
strangling 2 people during a 2002 robbery to death row.

The penalty phase of Hugo Selenski's capital murder trial opened Tuesday, 4 
days after Pennsylvania's governor declared a moratorium on the death penalty.

Selenski's attorneys filed a motion asking the judge to preclude jurors from 
considering a death sentence, but he told them they are to consider either life 
or death for Selenski.

Selenski was convicted last week of 2 counts of 1st-degree murder in the deaths 
of pharmacist Michael Kerkowski and his girlfriend, Tammy Fassett.

Luzerne County Assistant District Attorney Jarrett Ferentino says Selenski 
tortured Kerkowski and deserves death.

Authorities found at least bodies in Selenski's yard in 2003. He beat 2 
previous homicide charges.

(source: Associated Press)








FLORIDA:

Capital punishment in Florida is death by judicial whim



The premise underlying Florida's death penalty is that it will be carried out 
fairly. To borrow a phrase, that is a bright and shining lie.

As the 1st to re-enact capital punishment after the U.S. Supreme Court struck 
it down in 1972, Florida's Legislature provided specific criteria for death 
sentences and required the state Supreme Court to review each one.

In upholding that law, the state court promised in 1973 that "the reasons 
present in one case will reach a similar result to that reached under similar 
circumstances in another case ... the sentencing process becomes a matter of 
reasoned judgment rather than an exercise in discretion at all."

The U.S. Supreme Court bought it.

But it was sophistry then and it is sophistry now. The Florida Supreme Court 
rarely sees the vast majority of murder cases that result in life sentences 
rather than death, and so it cannot compare them for true proportionality. When 
an appeal forces it to consider the disparate fates of co-defendants, its 
scales of justice are often out of balance.

Emilia L. Carr helped her boyfriend strangle his estranged wife in Marion 
County 6 years ago. She's on death row. He's not.

Heather Strong died slowly. She was duct-taped to a chair, beaten with a 
flashlight and suffocated with a plastic bag. Those were what the law calls 
aggravating circumstances.

Still, Joshua Fulgham was equally guilty.

As the court rationalized in upholding Carr's conviction and death sentence 
this month, the pair had separate trials before separate juries. And although 
the court invited her to protest the disparity in a subsequent round of 
appeals, three of the seven justices believed there was already enough in the 
record to justify executing her alone.

That concurring opinion, written by Justice Ricky Polston, said she was "more 
culpable" because her intelligence was superior to that of her low-IQ lover, 
whom she probably manipulated into carrying out the murder.

Carr, who is 30 and has been on death row for 4 years, will be a lot older 
before her fate is sealed.

And Florida taxpayers will be out a lot more money than it would cost them if a 
life sentence rather than death hung in the balance.

The Miami Herald once calculated that Florida was spending $3.2 million for 
each death case, 6 times the total for litigation and incarceration of a life 
sentence. More recent studies in other states vary from twice to 5 times the 
cost of death over life, and figured in Maryland's recent decision to abolish 
capital punishment. In declaring a moratorium on executions pending a 
legislative study, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf said Friday, "This decision is 
based on a flawed system that has been proven to be an endless cycle of court 
proceedings as well as ineffective, unjust, and expensive."

There is something inherently foul in a system that gives life to the 
co-defendant who cops a plea and death to the one who might be less guilty.

Jesse Tafero, executed in 1980, was put in the electric chair by a 
co-defendant, Walter Rhodes, who said Tafero was the triggerman in the deaths 
of 2 law enforcement officers. Rhodes later recanted, saying he had been the 
shooter, but the courts wouldn't believe him. The execution a month ago of 
Johnny Kormondy owed similarly to a co-defendant's subsequently recanted 
testimony. The same thing happened to John Marek in 2009 despite the sworn 
testimony of other inmates that a co-defendant serving life - and subsequently 
murdered in prison - had boasted of being the actual triggerman.

Carr's is another of those cases in which the jury did not recommend death 
unanimously - the vote was only 7 to 5 - but Florida allows the judge to make 
his or her own decisions. Most often, the Supreme Court approves them.

That's just one of the ways the 1972 law perpetuated discretion. Some judges 
and juries are harsher than others. Prosecutors have great leeway in deciding 
whether to accept a plea or go for the kill, and their decisions can't be 
appealed.

In fiscal 2014, 1,056 people went to prison in Florida for murder or 
manslaughter. Of those convictions, 384 were for 1st degree murder, the only 
kind eligible for death. But of those 384, only 12 were death-sentenced. Those 
12 are the only cases the Supreme Court is required to review. Appeals of the 
others rarely go beyond the 5 district courts of appeal.

There's a man serving life from Collier County for killing his mother and 
sister with a pipe bomb. That would seem to be more diabolical than what Carr 
did. But his case never figures in any proportionality review.

Once upon a time, Florida governors commuted sentences to prevent comparative 
injustice. The last to do so was Bob Graham, in 1983. There has been no 
commutation for any reason since then.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Harry Blackmun eventually despaired of 
finding justice in capital punishment.

"From this day forward, I no longer will tinker with the machinery of death," 
he wrote in a 1994 solitary dissent. " ... The problem is that the 
inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know 
must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, 
consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution."

He was right. Florida remains in the wrong.

(source: Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg 
Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina----floridapolitics.com)








ALABAMA----stay of impending execution

Judge halts state's plan to execute Arthur



Death-row inmate Tommy Arthur's Thursday execution has been stayed by a federal 
judge in Montgomery.

The order this morning from Judge Keith Watkins said that Arthur has met his 
burden and is entitled to a stay.

"Arthur's February 19, 2015, execution date is stayed pending a trial and final 
decision on the merits of his claims," the order states.

A trial will be held in U.S. District Court May 5-6 on objections Arthur's 
attorney's raised to the lethal injection methods the state plans to use for 
the execution.

A spokeswoman for the Alabama attorney general's office said it had not comment 
on the stay.

Last week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said the 2012 stay preventing 
Arthur's death has expired.

The Alabama Supreme Court in December scheduled Arthur, 73, for execution 
Thursday. However, a federal judge ruled the 2012 stay issued by the 11th U.S. 
Circuit Court of Appeals remained in place.

Lawyers for the state attorney general's office last month asked that the 2012 
stay be lifted, arguing it applied only to Arthur's previously set execution 
date and Arthur's challenge to the lethal injection procedure the state used at 
that time.

Alabama in September adopted a new drug combination that uses midazolam 
hydrochloride as the sedative to render a prisoner unconscious at the start of 
an execution.

Arthur's lawyers have argued the new drugs should not be used until a court has 
time to review them.

Arthur has challenged the state's various drug combinations as potentially 
cruel and unusual.

Arthur was sentenced to die for the 1982 murder-for-hire of a Muscle Shoals 
man.

On the day of the murder, Arthur is said to have walked away from a work 
release program in Decatur and driven to Muscle Shoals.

(source: Decatur Daily)

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

Shoals killer Tommy Arthur gets another stay, 2 days before his scheduled 
execution



Alabama death row inmate Tommy Arthur has been granted another reprieve 2 days 
before he was scheduled to be executed. He has been on death row for 32 years 
and this is the 6th time he's been granted a stay.

Arthur's lawyers had filed an emergency motion late Monday in an effort to 
postpone his execution. They learned today the U.S. District Court has granted 
their request until a hearing about the matter in May. Arthur is protesting the 
combination of drugs Alabama uses to execute inmates.

Arthur had been scheduled to die by lethal injection Thursday, February 19 at 6 
p.m. at Holman Prison in Atmore. He was scheduled to be moved to the room known 
as the 'death chamber' today. Arthur was sentenced to death for the contract 
killing of Troy Wicker of Muscle Shoals in 1982.

Arthur has filed several previous court challenges against the combination of 
drugs used for lethal injection executions. There are many similar challenges 
from death row inmates in other states.

(source: WHNT news)