[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----GA., ARK., OKLA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

NOTE----my postings to this list will resume on Jan. 14




Jan. 5




GEORGIA:

Death penalty hearing postponed in rape, murder case



A hearing in a death penalty murder proceedings that have spanned 20 years has 
been postponed, according to the District Attorney.

Ray Johnson was sentenced to death in 1998 for the murder of 34-year-old Angela 
Sizemore in March of 1994. She was raped and stabbed 41 times.

According to the D.A., there was a scheduling conflict. Records show this is 
not the first time a hearing has been rescheduled for Johnson.

Family members of Sizemore said they were upset by the decision.

A new hearing date has not been set.

(source: WALB news)

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

Man arraigned in death penalty case of killing of Griffin officer



Michael D. Bowman was arraigned Monday in Spalding County Superior Court, where 
he faces the death penalty on charges that he murdered a Griffin police 
officer.

Bowman is accused of shooting to death Officer Kevin Jordan, who was working an 
off-duty security job at a Waffle House on May 31, 2014. He has pleaded not 
guilty.

Jordan, a 43-year-old father of 7, was shot after he tried to break up a 
squabble between people who were asked to leave the restaurant, police said.

Officer Kevin Jordan, father of 7, had been with the Griffin Police Department 
for 4 years.

Bowman's girlfriend, Chantell Mixon, was also charged with murder in the case. 
Both are being held without bond.

Jordan was on the ground trying to restrain Mixon when Bowman, then 30, 
"maliciously shot" him multiple times in the back, Officer Mike Richardson with 
the Griffin Police Department said last year.

(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)








ARKANSAS:

Prosecutors to seek death penalty in Bentonville murder case



Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for a Bentonville man accused of 
killing his grandmother.

Michael Eugene Conklin , 26, is charged with capital murder and aggravated 
robbery. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges in connection with the death 
of Nelma Darline Conklin .

He is being held without bond in the Benton County Jail.

Conklin appeared in court Monday morning and the prosecutor announced that the 
death penalty would be sought in the case.

Conklin is accused of acting with "premeditation and deliberation" in his 
76-year-old grandmother's death, according to court documents. Stab wounds to 
the neck were the cause of death, according to court documents.

Proceedings in the case remain suspended since Circuit Judge Robin Green 
granted a request from Conklin's defense attorneys for him to have a mental 
evaluation at the Arkansaas State Hospital in Little Rock.

A mental status hearing is now set for March 30.

Police went to Nelma Conklin's home for a welfare check July 20. She hadn't 
been to work at the Walmart Supercenter on Pleasant Grove Road in Rogers since 
July 14. A co-worker had been unable to contact her and called police, 
according to court documents.

Police found her dead July 20 in the garage of her home at 3300 SW. Elm Manor 
Ave., according to a probable cause affidavit. Her body was concealed by trash 
bags and pieces of cardboard, according to the affidavit.

Michael Conklin lived with his grandmother. He was arrested several days later 
in Saline County after police found his grandmother's body. Police interviewed 
Nelma Conklin's family and co-workers and learned she and her grandson hadn't 
been getting along.

Michael Conklin could be sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty if 
he is convicted of capital murder. He faces from 10 to 40 years or life 
imprisonment if he is convicted of aggravated robbery.

(source: nwaonline.com)

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

Prosecutor Seeks Death Penalty for Man Accused of Killing Grandmother



The Benton County, Arkansas prosecutor says he'll seek the death penalty for a 
man accused accused of killing his own grandmother.

According to the Prosecutor's officer, Michael Conklin was back in court Monday 
after defense requested a mental evaluation during a July court appearance. 
Defense was granted that evaluation which is scheduled for March 30th.

Police believe Conklin stabbed 76-year-old Nelma Darline Conklin to death in 
her Bentonville home in July 2014. The 26-year-old was living with his 
grandmother at the time. After the murder, investigators say Conklin stole her 
car and took off.

He was captured 4 days later.

(source: ozarksfirst.com)








OKLAHOMA:

DA to seek death penalty for Stillwater murder suspect



An Oklahoma district attorney will be seeking the death penalty against a man 
accused of murder with a machete. Authorities arrested Isaiah Marin, 21, of 
Stillwater in connection with the murder. Authorities said Marin and the 
victim, Jacob Crockett, were acquaintances.

Authorities said Crockett's head was almost completely severed in the murder.

According to the Medical Examiner's Office, Crockett's cause of death was a 
"subtotal decapitation due to multiple sharp force injuries" and the manner of 
death is homicide.

Police said Marin told investigators that he had fantasized about committing 
multiple homicides and that Crockett was one of his intended victims.

(source: KOCO news)








USA:

Death Penalty Becomes More Rare and More Problematic



As executions in the United States hit a 20-year low, one might assume that 
this trend reflects a more judicious and careful application of the death 
penalty--that judges and prosecutors are truly reserving the punishment for the 
worst of the worst. But comprehensive death penalty assessments by the American 
Bar Association, along with many other organizations, tell a different story.

While a majority of states have abandoned the death penalty altogether, either 
in law or in practice, the handful of states that continue to execute prisoners 
do so despite a number of troubling issues relating to its implementation. Many 
defendants and prisoners receive poor quality legal assistance. Many are 
factually innocent: indeed, in just the past month, 3 men previously sentenced 
to death in Ohio were exonerated of their crimes. Poor training and shortages 
of drugs traditionally used in lethal injection have led to a series of botched 
executions that cause horrific suffering to the executed persons. And according 
to a 2014 study, the vast majority of recently executed prisoners nationwide 
suffered from 1 or more significant cognitive and behavioral deficits, and more 
than 1/2 had a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic 
stress disorder, or psychosis.

The Supreme Court has held that each of these issues--ineffective legal 
assistance, factual innocence, flawed execution procedures, and mental illness 
and impairment--raises the possibility that the execution could be found 
unconstitutional. A closer examination of the seven states that carried out 
executions in 2014 only amplifies these concerns.

Recently, Georgia executed Robert Wayne Holsey, an intellectually impaired man 
with an IQ of 70. During Holsey's trial, his lawyer drank a quart of vodka 
every night. The lawyer failed to present evidence of Holsey's intellectual 
disability or to hire a mitigation specialist who could have shed light on 
Holsey's background, despite receiving money from the court to do so. The 
lawyer was disbarred and imprisoned for theft of client funds in an unrelated 
case shortly after Holsey was sentenced to death.

Just weeks earlier, Missouri executed Leon Taylor, an African-American man 
sentenced to death by an all-white jury. The racial dynamics are particularly 
troubling given that the prosecutor removed all 6 prospective African-American 
jurors from the jury pool. Taylor was raised in deplorable conditions. His 
mother was an alcoholic who choked and beat Taylor. He was sexually assaulted 
when he was only five, and he witnessed terrible violence, including his 
mother's murder of her husband.

In January, Florida executed Thomas Knight, who was sentenced to death by a 
vote of nine jurors to three. Along with Alabama, Florida is one of only two 
states that do not require unanimity to impose a death sentence; moreover, 
Florida requires just seven of twelve jurors to recommend a sentence of death. 
Knight's case offered ample grounds for such disagreement: during his trial, 
more than half a dozen mental health experts testified that Knight was severely 
mentally ill at the time of his crime. The jury was also presented with 
evidence showing that Knight was exposed to extreme violence, abuse, and hunger 
as a child.

Texas executed 10 prisoners last year--the lowest number since 1996. One of 
those 10 was Lisa Coleman. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that 
Coleman was severely abused as a child starting from the age of 4 months. As a 
baby, she was whipped with extension cords, sexually abused by her uncle for 
years, and later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Yet despite Coleman's serious 
mental illness, the court allowed her execution to proceed in September.

Also in Texas, the Fifth Circuit stepped in just hours before the state's 
scheduled execution of Scott Panetti to issue a temporary stay. Panetti's 
30-year history of paranoid schizophrenia cast serious doubt on whether he 
could be constitutionally executed. His case is currently pending before the 
Fifth Circuit.

Executions also occurred in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Ohio in 2014, including the 
horrifically botched executions of Joseph Wood, Clayton Lockett, and Dennis 
McGuire respectively. Wood's execution was particularly gruesome: the 
executioners injected him with supposedly-lethal drugs at least 15 times, yet 
it still took nearly 2 hours to kill him while he gasped for air. In a horrific 
sequel, Lockett's executioners ran out of execution drugs before he died, and 
the injections were performed so incompetently that Lockett bled profusely, 
leading one state official to describe the execution as "a bloody mess." 
Following the botched executions, each state temporarily put further executions 
on hold to review its execution procedures.

As long as executions to continue to take place in the United States, at a 
minimum the process should be fair and humane, consistent with the requirements 
of the Constitution. But a review of the executions that took place last year 
raises serious questions about whether current execution practices meet this 
standard.

(source: Nancy Leong, Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm 
College of Law----Huffington Post)

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

Marathon bomb suspect death penalty deal rejected; Lawyers start picking jury 
in trial from pool of 1,200 people



The trial of a man suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013 has begun 
with jury selection as it emerged that prosecutors rejected a deal that would 
have spared him from the death penalty.

Chechen-American Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (21) is accused of killing 3 people and 
injuring 264 others, including at least 17 who lost limbs, by detonating 
home-made bombs near the finish line of the marathon on April 15th, 2013.

He has also been charged with killing a Massachusetts police officer. He 
pleaded not guilty to the charges, including 17 that could carry the death 
penalty.

Mr Tsarnaev's older brother Tamerlan was killed in a confrontation with police 
hours after the shooting dead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
police officer following the bombings during a manhunt that shut down the 
Boston area.

Lawyers for the surviving Tsarnaev brother tried to negotiate a plea deal with 
prosecutors that would have involved the student pleading guilty and receiving 
a life sentence without parole, but the US Department of Justice has insisted 
on the death penalty as a possibility.

Mr Tsarnaev's attorney Judy Clarke has previously negotiated deals that 
protected people from the death penalty, including Zacarias Moussaoui, a 
plotter in the September 2001 terror attacks on the US, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski 
who killed 3 people, and gunman Jared Loughner who killed 6 and gravely injured 
then congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at an Arizona shopping centre in 2011.

Lawyers in the Boston case will start their opening statements on January 26th 
in a trial expected to last 3 to 4 months, according to a timeline provided by 
District Court judge George O'Toole.

Appearing in a jury assembly room, Mr Tsarnaev, wearing a dark top and khaki 
trousers, picked at his beard and stared at potential jurors as the process to 
select a jury from a pool of 1,200 people began.

He faces 30 charges, including the possession and use of a weapon of mass 
destruction. Massachusetts banned the death penalty in 1984 but Mr Tsarnaev is 
being tried in a federal rather than state court.

The trial is expected to be divided into 2 phases: deciding Mr Tsarnaev's 
innnocence or guilt and then his sentencing if found guilty.

Judge O'Toole has denied requests from the accused seeking to move the trial 
out of Massachusetts, claiming that he cannot receive a fair trial in a court 
just a few miles from where the bombing occurred.

Finding a jury is expected to be a lengthy process given the number of people 
disrupted by the "shelter-in-place" police order during the manhunt in the days 
after the bombings and the level of opposition to the death penalty in 
Massachusetts, a traditionally liberal state.

"It is going to be difficult to find an impartial and fair jury but not 
impossible," said Daniel Medwed, professor of law at Northeastern University in 
Boston. "I just think it???s going to take a long time to find 12 jurors and 6 
alternatives. There is a strong sentiment here that the trial should be held in 
the community where the crime took place."

Mr Tsarnaev moved from Kyrgyzstan when he was 8 and lived in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts. He was a popular student at the University of Massachusetts at 
Dartmouth at the time of the bombings.

Prosecutors are set to present strong evidence showing Mr Tsarnaev's 
involvement and his anger at the killing of innocent Muslims in the US wars in 
Afghanistan and Iraq as motives for the bombings.

Defence lawyers are expected to portray Mr Tsarnaev as a young man influenced 
by his radicalised older brother, suggesting that the most intense legal 
arguments will take place in the sentencing phase.

(source: Irish Times)

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

Don't give Tsarnaev death penalty

Editors Note: Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst and the CEO of 
Mel Robbins Enterprises, a management consulting firm. In 2014, she was named 
outstanding news talk radio host by the Gracie Awards. Follow her @melrobbins. 
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

Almost 2 years since the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly placed 2 bombs at the 
Boston Marathon finish line, turning the city's beloved Patriot's Day race into 
a war zone, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is finally going on trial.

By the time the brothers were captured (1 dead, 1 alive), they were accused of 
having killed 4 people, blown the limbs off another 16 and injured more than 
260. But while I have heard many say they wish the authorities had simply added 
the younger Tsarnaev brother to the list of the deceased while they had the 
chance, that didn't happen. So now we find ourselves facing down a trial.

Tsarnaev will be convicted (after all, the prosecution has, according to The 
New York Times, lined up 590 law enforcement witnesses, 142 civilians and more 
than 1,000 exhibits, including images of him placing his backpack -- believed 
to have contained a bomb -- near an 8-year-old killed by the explosion). But it 
is unclear what the punishment will be.

That raises what is perhaps the key question of the case: Should we kill 
Tsarnaev? And the answer, despite the abhorrent nature of the crime, is simple: 
No, we should not. We are better than that.

The fact is that the death penalty isn't justice, it's revenge. And in seeking 
it out, we would be engaging in something Tsarnaev is alleged to have sought in 
the name of Muslims killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He made his motive clear 
when he scrawled "Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop" as he hid 
from police in a boat.) Indeed, the death penalty is nothing more than 
institutionalized revenge. And while seeking revenge makes for great action 
movies, in real life it lowers our own standards.

And we have set our standards very high in Massachusetts, including having 
abolished the death penalty 3 decades ago. In fact, no one has been executed in 
Massachusetts for 67 years.

It goes without saying that this is a deeply painful time for family and 
friends who lost loved ones that day, but research does suggest that executions 
do not give victims' families closure. Getting revenge won't bring back the 
lives that were lost, and state-sanctioned killing is not how we do things 
here. And it isn't how we want things done, either. In a Boston Globe poll in 
September 2013, for example, only a third favored the death penalty over life 
without parole for Tsarnaev.

I've been disappointed that our leading politicians -- Elizabeth Warren, the 
Democratic senator from Massachusetts, and our new mayor, Marty Walsh, both 
opponents of the death penalty -- have failed to speak out clearly against the 
federal government for seeking the death penalty in this case. Indeed, even 
though Attorney General Eric Holder is personally against the death penalty, he 
authorized it in this case, and plea deals to avoid the death penalty have so 
far failed.

I guess it's easier to be outspoken against the death penalty when you're not 
defending an alleged terrorist, but instead pointing out the alarming number of 
death row prisoners who have been wrongly convicted. Or that according to some, 
it costs 10 times more to try to execute someone than put them in jail for 
life. Or that it doesn't actually appear to deter crime. Or that the Eighth 
Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and the Supreme Court has 
already ruled against the death penalty in cases against the mentally ill or 
minors.

And with that in mind, it's important to remember in this case that the defense 
will not be eyeing an acquittal, rather a sentence that spares Tsarnaev's life. 
To make this case, the defense attorneys will no doubt delve deep into his 
personal history, the evidence that his older brother, Tamerlan, was the 
mastermind, and that Dzhokhar was under his brother's spell. Perhaps most 
importantly, it should be remembered that in defending Tsarnaev, they are not 
endorsing him, but instead are endorsing our collective humanity and our 
Constitution, fighting for even the worst among us to be afforded its 
consideration and its protection.

My husband and I have lived in the Boston area for 18 years, we have run many 
marathons, and like so many folks, we had friends who were injured when those 
bombs when off. What struck us so profoundly about the attack, though, was not 
the destruction and devastation, but our response. Our response was profound 
and full of courage. First responders went running toward the blast areas to 
help. Runners, many of whom were doctors or veterans who had just finished 
running 26.2 miles, carried the injured to safety or ran to emergency rooms to 
help tend to the wounded.

It's that kind of resolve that defined the day, not the attack itself. Greater 
Boston, an area of millions, became a community of one: a "Boston Strong" 
community. And after the bombings, we took our kids to the makeshift memorial 
at Copley Square, we donated to the One Fund, we cried as we watched the 
interfaith memorial service held just days after the blast.

A year later, we joined millions of people along the race course and cheered on 
the 36,000 runners who ran one year after the bombing. Running the race again 
was a way to reclaim both the day and the finish line. Like marathoners, the 
survivors have pushed ahead one step at a time, and in their own ways: starting 
foundations, getting married, and learning to dance and run again. And this is 
what we should keep doing -- moving forward, leaving the attackers in the dust, 
forgotten in a cell somewhere to live with what has been done.

Revenge is by its very nature a backward-looking emotion. If we are to truly 
leave that atrocious act behind us, we should therefore shun it, and instead 
keep putting our best foot forward, looking to our future, not behind us. If we 
do that, we will be the stronger ones -- Boston Strong.

(source: CNN)