[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., FLA., OKLA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 15



PENNSYLVANIA:

District Attorney Seeks Death Penalty



The Bedford County District Attorney is asking for the death penalty for one of 
the men charged in a September homicide in Hyndman, Bedford County.

19 year-old Jonta Bishop is charged with homicide and DA Bill Higgins is asking 
for the death penalty.

Family members of the victim, James Deneen, say they hope his case can serve as 
an example for others.

Thursday was the 1st day James Deneen's aunt visited the site where the fire 
department found her nephew's body burned in the back of a car.

Carol Ansell, James Deneen's aunt, said, "First is the shock and you're mad 
then the grieving comes in and of course we were close to the holidays which we 
did not look forward to it all."

The trees still show the burns from the night Deneen was murdered. It's a night 
his father won't forget.

James Deneen Sr. said, "There's not a day that goes by that you don't think 
about it."

Ansell said, "I don't think you'll ever have closure when someone in your 
family is killed the way Jimmy was killed."

Thursday the district attorney said he will seek the death penalty against 
Jonta Bishop. It's a step the family was ready to hear.

Deneen Sr. said, "Someone like that doesn't deserve to stick around as far as 
I'm concerned."

Ansell said, "We feel that if you purposefully choose to take somebody else's 
life regardless of your age regardless of your race you deserve the death 
penalty." Deneen Sr. said, "Nobody knows what goes through these peoples minds 
when they do something like that."

Deneen says he hopes the death penalty in his son's case will make others think 
twice.

(source: wearecentralpa.com)








FLORIDA----execution

Florida executes ringleader of 1993 home invasion that ended with man's murder, 
wife's rape



Florida executed Thursday the ringleader of a 1993 home-invasion robbery that 
ended with the murder of a Pensacola banker and the repeated rape of the 
banker's wife.

Johnny Shane Kormondy, 42, was pronounced dead at 8:16 p.m. at Florida State 
Prison, shortly after the lethal injection was administered. Kormondy was the 
21st inmate executed under Gov. Rick Scott, tying him with former Gov. Jeb Bush 
for the most executions since the death penalty was reinstated in Florida in 
1979. The executions under Bush occurred over his full 2 terms, while Scott has 
just begun his 2nd term.

The execution was delayed by 2 hours after a last-minute appeals was filed by 
Kormondy's lawyers with the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually denied it.

Kormondy was convicted of the July 1993 murder of Gary McAdams and the rape of 
McAdams' wife, Cecilia, who had just returned home from her high school reunion 
late in the evening. The couple was confronted just outside their home by 
Kormondy and two others, who forced their way inside. Kormondy and his 
accomplices repeatedly raped Cecilia McAdams, and shot Gary in the back of the 
head. The Associated Press doesn't usually identify the victims of sexual 
assault but Cecelia McAdams has spoken publicly about her rape and her 
husband's murder.

Prosecutors said Kormondy had recruited the 2 others after watching the McAdams 
house in preparation for a burglary, and that he also threatened to kill 
witnesses who testified at his trial.

The 2 other men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Department of Corrections spokesman McKinley Lewis said Kormondy met with a 
spiritual adviser and family members on Thursday.

Florida employs a 3-drug mixture to execute prisoners: midazolam hydrochloride, 
vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride. The drugs are given intravenously, 
and are designed to first induce unconsciousness, then paralysis and finally 
cardiac arrest.

Midazolam, a sedative used commonly in surgeries, has been part of the 3-drug 
mixture since 2013. Sodium thiopental was used before that, but its U.S. 
manufacturer stopped making it and Europe banned its manufacturers from 
exporting it for executions.

Kormondy becomes the 1st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in 
Florida and the 90th overall since the state resumed capital punishment in 
1979; only Texas (518), Oklahoma (111), and Virginia (110) have executed more 
individuals since the death penalty was re-legalized in the USA on July 2, 
1976.

Kormondy becomes the 2nd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the 
USA and the 1397th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 
1977.

(sources: Associated Press & Rick Halperin)





OKLAHOMA:

Oklahoma Execution: Baby's Mom Says Killer Charles Warner Should Live



Death-row prisoner Charles Warner is set to be executed in Oklahoma on Thursday 
for the rape and murder of an 11-month-old baby, but 1 person who doesn't want 
to see him killed is the infant's mother.

Shonda Waller told defense lawyers in a videotaped statement that a lethal 
injection for Warner - the 1st in the state since a bungled procedure 9 months 
ago - would be a "dishonor" to her daughter Adrianna's name and against her 
religious beliefs.

"I don't see any justice in just sentencing someone to die," Waller said. "To 
me, the justice is in someone living with what they have done to you, your 
family, and having to live with that for the rest of their life knowing they 
will never walk out those bars."

Adrianna Waller, 11 months old, was murdered by Charles Warner on August 22, 
1997.

The statement made last January was played for Oklahoma's parole board in March 
when Warner was up for clemency. The panel voted not to give him a reprieve and 
he was scheduled to die April 29. He was waiting to be escorted to the death 
chamber when an earlier execution that same night was so badly botched it 
sparked global outrage.

That inmate, Clayton Lockett, was supposed to die within minutes after a doctor 
ran 3 drugs through an IV in a vein his groin, but he regained consciousness 
and appeared to writhe in pain midway through the procedure. He said, "Oh man," 
and tried to rise from the gurney.

The warden tried to halt the execution, but Lockett died anyway, after 43 
minutes of suffering.

The disturbing scene made headlines around the world, prompted President Obama 
to order a Justice Department review of lethal injection protocols nationwide - 
and bought extra time for Warner, whose execution was called off while the 
debacle was investigated.

Among the questions asked: Did Oklahoma's use of midazolam contribute to the 
debacle? The sedative was the 1st of 3 drugs administered and critics say it 
carries the danger of not rendering an inmate fully unconscious before the 
other 2 chemicals, a paralyzing agent and a heart-stopper, hit the bloodstream 
with potentially excruciating results.

"I don't hate him. I have forgiven him."

The Oklahoma probe ultimately determined the midazolam itself was not the 
culprit and a poorly placed IV that leaked the drug into the surrounding 
tissues instead of a central vein was to blame.

The corrections department promised to increase the dose of midazolam for 
future injections, improve training for the execution team and revamp 
procedures to make it easier to stop an execution gone awry.

A new date with death was set for Warner, whose latest appeal is sitting with 
the U.S. Supreme Court after a federal appeals panel this week rejected his 
claims that midazolam would cause too-painful an end, in violation of the 
constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

There could be no debate about the cruelty of the crime.

It happened Aug. 22, 1997, in the home that Warner and his 2 children shared 
with Waller, who is variously described as an ex-girlfriend or former roommate 
in court papers. Waller went out to run errands and when she returned, the 
child was unconscious. Resuscitation efforts failed and the baby was pronounced 
dead at the hospital.

An autopsy uncovered a horror: a crushing injury to the head and brain damage, 
a broken jaw, 3 fractured ribs, a lacerated liver, a bruised spleen and lungs, 
eye hemorrhages consistent with being shaken and rectal tears. Warner's own son 
testified that he saw his dad shaking the baby.

In her taped statement, originally obtained by NBC station KFOR, Waller made 
reference to the depression and anxiety she suffered after the murder of her 
child and said she feared that having Warner executed would dredge up the 
trauma for her.

"For me, morally it's wrong," she said. "God always has the final say-so on 
life and death, and after everything I've been through, I wouldn't want his 
family to suffer the way I've suffered or his child to have to endure losing 
her father. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

"I don't hate him. I have forgiven him," she continued. "As a Christian woman 
you know that you have to forgive anyone in order to even move on with your 
life."

Waller could not be reached for comment by NBC News about whether Lockett's 
execution had heightened concerns for her, and an attorney for Warner said she 
was not interested in speaking to the media as the execution date neared.

The man who prosecuted Warner said the mother's view had no bearing on whether 
the convict should be put to death.

"God bless her. She's a sweet lady and I can't imagine going through what she's 
gone through," said Lou Keel, former Oklahoma County assistant district 
attorney Lou Keel.

"But when you do the worst kind of killing to the most vulnerable of 
victims...if that doesn't deserve the death penalty, how do you get there from 
here? It can't just be the luck of the draw. It can't be the fortune of whether 
the parents agree or disagree with the death penalty."

(source: NBC news)

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

Supreme Court allows execution with controversial drug



A sharply divided Supreme Court refused Thursday to block the execution of an 
Oklahoma inmate over concerns about a drug protocol that has caused problems in 
the past.

Charles Warner, 47, who was convicted in the murder and rape of an 11-month-old 
girl in 1997, was to become the 1st Oklahoma inmate to be put to death since 
April, when the botched lethal injection of Clayton Lockett caused him to 
struggle, groan and writhe in pain for 43 minutes.

A state investigation later blamed Lockett's ordeal on a failure by prison 
staff to realize that drugs had not been administered directly into the man's 
veins. The state has since changed its procedures and increased the strength of 
midazolam, the drug in question.

The court's 5 conservative justices denied the request for a stay of execution 
without comment. But the 4 liberal justices issued an 8-page dissent in which 
they questioned whether the drug protocol.

"The questions before us are especially important now, given states' increasing 
reliance on new and scientifically untested methods of execution," Justice 
Sonia Sotomayor wrote. "Petitioners have committed horrific crimes and should 
be punished. But the Eighth Amendment guarantees that no one should be 
subjected to an execution that causes searing, unnecessary pain before death. I 
hope that our failure to act today does not portend our unwillingness to 
consider these questions."

Warner's execution was to come within hours of another in Florida, where Johnny 
Shane Kormondy, 42, was awaiting death for killing a man during a 1993 home 
invasion. Both executions were to use the same combination of three drugs.

Lawyers for Warner and 3 other convicts set for execution in Oklahoma over the 
next 7 weeks had sought the Supreme Court's intervention after 2 lower federal 
courts refused their pleas.

The lawyers claimed that midazolam, the 1st drug in the protocol, is not 
FDA-approved as a general anesthetic and is being used in state executions 
virtually on an experimental basis. Inmates who receive the drug may not be 
thoroughly rendered unconscious and could suffer painfully as the other drugs 
in the protocol are administered, they argued.

They said it was a factor not only in Lockett's execution but in 2 other 
gruesome deaths last January's execution of Ohio's Dennis McGuire, who made 
snorting noises for 20 minutes before dying, and July's execution of Arizona's 
Joseph Wood, who appeared to gasp hundreds of times during a death that took 
nearly 2 hours.

Those same concerns were raised by Sotomayor in her dissent. "I am deeply 
troubled by this evidence suggesting that midazolam cannot constitutionally be 
used as the 1st drug in a 3-drug lethal injection protocol," she said, citing a 
"substantial body of conflicting empirical and anecdotal evidence."

The same 4 members of the court -- Sotomayor and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 
Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan -- also dissented in September in a Missouri 
execution that used the same drug.

Lawyers for Oklahoma responded that their opponents showed no real evidence 
that midazolam would not work as a general anesthetic. They noted that it has 
been used successfully in 10 previous executions.

The high court's ruling should make it easier for states that are scrambling to 
find necessary drugs to carry out executions. According to the Death Penalty 
Information Center, at least 7 states rely on midazolam.

The justices ruled in 2008 that using 3 drugs in succession to kill an inmate 
does not violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The 
1st drug would render the inmate unconscious, a 2nd would paralyze him and a 
3rd would stop the heart.

The problem for states is that the 1st drug in that series was sodium 
thiopental, a fast-acting barbiturate no longer in supply as drugmakers and 
pharmacies - particularly those in Europe opposed to the death penalty -- have 
cut off production. States then substituted midazolam, a psychoactive drug that 
is used as an anti-seizure medication and for sedation.

The high court has appeared increasingly wary of the death penalty over the 
past year, for a variety of reasons.

In May, the justices blocked the execution of a Missouri murderer because his 
specific medical condition made it likely that he would suffer from a 
controversial lethal injection.

Later that month, they ruled 5-4 that Florida must apply a margin of error to 
IQ tests, making it harder for states to execute those with borderline 
intellectual disabilities.

And in October, the court stopped the execution of yet another Missouri man 
over concerns that his lawyers were ineffective and had missed a deadline for 
an appeal.

(source: USA Today)








USA:

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51b78582e4b09028821c7c1a/t/5385fc39e4b07cdf0285d8de/1401289785785/IBP-ResourceGuide-May2014.pdf

(source: squarespace.com)