[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., MD., GA., FLA., UTAH, USA

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 28



TEXAS----impending execution

2nd appeal filed to stop Ladd execution ---- 1st appeal denied Tuesday



Appeals are hitting the courts this week in a rush to stop the pending 
execution of Robert Ladd.

The 1st appeal to stay the execution, filed last week, was dismissed Tuesday.

Ladd is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville prison 
sometime after 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29, for the 1996 rape and capital murder 
of Vicki Garner in Tyler.

According to officials in the Texas Attorney General's office, Tuesday morning, 
Ladd's defense counsel filed in the federal court of appeals an original 
complaint and motion for a temporary restraining order on behalf of both Ladd 
and another inmate, Garcia Glenn White.

White is scheduled for execution today, Jan. 28, for the 1989 murders of 
Bernette and Annette Edwards in Harris County.

An AG spokesperson, Tuesday, said the federal appeal challenges the state's 
lethal injection protocol.

The 1st appeal filed in the Ladd case was filed on Jan. 21 by Ladd's legal 
counsel, according to the AG's office - a successive state habeas petition in 
the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals challenging the execution as violating 
Ladd's rights as a mentally handicapped individual, according to AG officials.

That appeal marks the 2nd time an appeal on those grounds has been filed for 
Ladd. That 1st appeal regarding Ladd's intellectual capacity was filed April 
23, 2003 - the same day Ladd was initially scheduled for execution.

"That appeal resulted in a stay of execution based on Ladd's last-minute claim 
of mental retardation," Ladd's murder victim's sister Teresa Wooten, of Mount 
Pleasant, says she remembers.

(source: The Daily Tribune)








PENNSYLVANIA:

Grounds Laid Out For Death Penalty In Pa. Trooper Ambush Case



A Pennsylvania prosecutor is formally notifying the court he's seeking the 
death penalty for a man accused of killing 1 state trooper and wounding another 
in a barracks ambush.

Pike County District Attorney Ray Tonkin filed a document Tuesday listing 
aggravating circumstances that could send Eric Frein to the state's death row.

Frein's formal arraignment is scheduled for Thursday at the courthouse in 
Milford, but Tonkin says he expects Frein to participate by video from the Pike 
County Correctional Facility.

Defense attorney Michael Weinstein is declining to comment on the death penalty 
filing and says his client intends to plead not guilty at the arraignment.

Frein is charged with 1st-degree murder and other offenses in the September 
ambush that killed Cpl. Bryon Dickson and severely wounded Trooper Alex 
Douglass.

(source: Associated Press)

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

King of Prussia, Bridgeport serial killer's death sentence upheld by state 
Supreme Court



A Montgomery County serial killer's conviction and death sentence have been 
upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court with a harshly worded opinion that 
criticized the killer's federal defenders.

The state's highest court denied the latest appeal by John C. Eichinger, who 
received triple death sentences for the Good Friday 2005 murders of 27-year-old 
Heather Greaves, her 23-year-old sister Lisa Greaves and Heather's 3-year-old 
daughter, Avery Johnson, in King of Prussia. In the appeal, Eichinger 
challenged the effectiveness of his trial lawyers.

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did the right thing, reached the correct 
result, and it's been a long process in this case," county Deputy District 
Attorney Robert Falin, chief of the district attorney's appellate division 
since 2010, said Tuesday.

In addition to the 3 death sentences, Eichinger previously was convicted of 
1st-degree murder for the July 6, 1999, fatal stabbing of 20-year-old Jennifer 
Still in her Bridgeport apartment and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Essentially, the high court judges found no merit to the Federal Community 
Defender Office's argument that Eichinger's trial lawyers were ineffective for, 
among other things, not raising a defense that Eichinger suffered from 
cognitive impairment, incompetency or mental illness. The high court affirmed a 
county judge's 2012 decision denying Eichinger's appeal under the Post 
Conviction Relief Act, during which there were 22 days of hearings dedicated to 
Eichinger's mental health.

"The PCRA Court listened to mental health experts from both sides and found 
none of the appellant's evidence compelling. It further found appellant 'was 
competent, did not suffer any cognitive limitations and ... was not brain 
damaged either at the time of murders or at the time of trial,'" the Supreme 
Court justices wrote in the opinion.

The Supreme Court judges found Eichinger's trial lawyers??? strategy "was 
entirely reasonable."

"Upon assuming (Eichinger's) representation, trial counsel were presented with 
overwhelming evidence of his guilt, including DNA evidence, confessions to 
police and (Eichinger's) writings describing both incidents in detail," the 
judges wrote.

The Supreme Court also found no merit to Eichinger's claims that his waiver of 
a jury trial was insufficient and that his police statements used against him 
at trial were unconstitutionally obtained.

In a harshly worded opinion, the high court judges also criticized Eichinger's 
federal defenders for raising "numerous claims that, beyond lacking merit, are 
patently frivolous and deliberately incoherent."

"PCRA counsel's predictable tactics designed merely to impede the already 
deliberate wheels of justice have become intolerable, and we repeat our prior 
warning in clearer terms, the failure to curb further abuse may demand 
disciplinary action," the Supreme Court judge's wrote.

County prosecutors contended Eichinger had a fair trial and urged the high 
court to uphold the death sentence.

Eichinger, now 42, could still file additional appeals in federal court and 
with the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We will continue to oppose his post-conviction demands for relief and we will 
see that justice is served," Falin vowed.

The Supreme Court's decision was welcomed by District Attorney Risa Vetri 
Ferman, who subsequently awarded Falin with the District Attorney Medal.

Ferman said Falin and her appellate division "engaged in an ongoing, 
bare-knuckled battle over the propriety of the trial and sentencing" and "took 
on a well-funded team of anti-death penalty attorneys from the Federal Public 
Defender's Office."

"An expert in criminal and procedural law, you protect the hard-fought verdicts 
of trial prosecutors. With quiet and steadfast zeal, you work to assure that 
Montgomery County's most dangerous offenders stay where they belong, in 
prison," Ferman said as she presented Falin with the medal.

While the public sees media reports about murders and guilty verdicts, it is 
the work that comes next that doesn't make headlines, Ferman said. In the 
majority of murder cases "what comes next is a grueling process of appellate 
review," Ferman said.

Eichinger's previous appeals in the state and federal courts have all been 
denied.

In November 2005, county Judge William R. Carpenter convicted Eichinger of 4 
1st-degree murder charges in connection with the deadly knife attack of Still 
in her Bridgeport apartment and the March 25, 2005, stabbing deaths of the 
Greaves sisters and little Avery Johnson at the Greaves family residence on 
Kingwood Road in King of Prussia.

A jury then had the responsibility to determine if Eichinger should receive 
life imprisonment or death for the Greaves killings. Prosecutors used Still's 
murder to support seeking the death penalty against Eichinger for each of the 
Greaves-Johnson slayings.

The jury returned with three verdicts of death by lethal injection against 
Eichinger.

Carpenter subsequently imposed 3 consecutive death sentences and a life prison 
sentence against Eichinger for the 4 killings.

At trial, then District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. claimed Eichinger killed 
Still when she spurned his romantic overtures. 6 years later, Eichinger killed 
Heather Greaves because he wanted a relationship with her when she was entering 
into a romantic relationship with another man, prosecutors said.

Lisa Greaves and Avery Johnson, who were at the Greaves home when Eichinger 
confronted Heather, were murdered because Eichinger believed they could have 
identified him, Castor theorized at that time.

(source: Times Herald)








MARYLAND:

Lawmaker Seeks Return Of Death Penalty In Limited Cases



Baltimore County Republican Delegate Pat McDonough has introduced a bill that 
would restore Maryland's death penalty for those convicted of murdering police 
officers, correctional officers, firefighters or any other first responder 
killed in the line of duty.

McDonough said that he considers this bill the 1st step in an effort to restore 
Maryland's death penalty which lawmakers abolished in 2013.

McDonough says there is little consequence in cases where an inmate serving 
life without parole kills a correctional officer.

He says such a killing occurred in 2011 at a state prison in Cumberland.

McDonough believes a majority of Marylanders want this bill want the death 
penalty restored.

Governor Larry Hogan's office has not commented yet on this bill, though during 
the campaign Hogan said that the abolition of the death penalty was "settled 
law" and he was not inclined to pursue death penalty legislation, and instead 
focus on budget matters.

McDonough says that he respects Hogan, but he said the "Maryland General 
Assembly is open for business," and will not set aside work on social issues, 
even as the governor focuses on the budget.

Before leaving office last week, Governor Martin O'Malley formally commuted the 
death sentences of the 4 men who remained on Maryland's death row to life in 
prison without parole.

(source: WBAL news)








GEORGIA----execution

Warren Lee Hill executed in Georgia



Georgia on Tuesday executed a man who killed a fellow inmate despite arguments 
from his lawyers that his execution was prohibited by the Constitution because 
he was intellectually disabled.

Warren Lee Hill was put to death by an injection of pentobarbital at the state 
prison in Jackson. The 54-year-old was pronounced dead at 7:55 p.m. He declined 
to make a final statement but did accept an offer to have a prayer read over 
him by a clergy member.

After reading the execution order, the warden left the room at 7:42 p.m. 
Records from previous executions show that the drug generally begins to flow 
within a minute or 2 of the warden leaving the room. Hill kept his head raised, 
looking out at the witnesses, for a couple of minutes and then laid back and 
took a few deep breaths before becoming still.

"Today, the Court has unconscionably allowed a grotesque miscarriage of justice 
to occur in Georgia," Brian Kammer, a lawyer for Hill, said in an emailed 
statement. "Georgia has been allowed to execute an unquestionably 
intellectually disabled man, Warren Hill, in direct contravention of the 
Court's clear precedent prohibiting such cruelty."

Hill was sentenced to serve life in prison for the 1986 killing of his 
18-year-old girlfriend, who was shot 11 times. While serving that sentence, he 
beat a fellow inmate, Joseph Handspike, to death using a nail-studded board. A 
jury in 1991 convicted Hill of murder and sentenced him to death.

Hill was previously set to die in July 2012, February 2013 and July 2013, but 
courts stepped in at the last minute with temporary stays so they would have 
time to consider challenges filed by Hill's lawyers. State and federal courts 
rejected his lawyers' filings this time around, and the U.S. Supreme Court 
declined his request for a stay of execution at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Lawyers for Hill have long argued he is intellectually disabled and, therefore, 
shouldn't be executed. State law and a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision both 
prohibit the execution of the intellectually disabled.

But Georgia has the toughest-in-the nation standard for proving intellectual 
disability. It requires capital defendants to prove beyond a reasonable doubt 
that they are intellectually disabled in order to avoid execution on those 
grounds. The state has consistently said Hill's lawyers failed to meet that 
burden of proof.

Hill's lawyers have argued that Georgia's standard is unconstitutional because 
mental diagnoses are subject to a degree of uncertainty that is virtually 
impossible to overcome. But the standard has repeatedly been upheld by state 
and federal courts.

Hill's lawyers had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider Hill's case in 
light of a ruling it issued in May that knocked down a Florida law. The high 
court said in that ruling that defendants should have a fair opportunity to 
show the Constitution prohibits their execution. Hill's lawyers argued that 
ruling should also invalidate Georgia's tough burden of proof.

Days before Hill was to be executed in February 2013, his lawyers submitted new 
statements from the three doctors who had examined Hill in 2000 and testified 
at his trial that he was not intellectually disabled. In their new statements, 
the doctors wrote that they had been rushed at the time of Hill's trial, and 
new scientific developments had surfaced since then. All 3 reviewed facts and 
documents in the case and wrote that they believed Hill is intellectually 
disabled.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles, the only entity authorized to commute a 
death sentence to life in prison, on Tuesday rejected Hill's clemency petition.

(source: Times Free Press)








FLORIDA:

Largo man faces death penalty



Jury deliberations were expected to begin this week in the first-degree murder 
trial of a Largo man.

That same jury convicted Joel Adrian Cruz, 29, of the 1st-degree murder of a 
2-year-old child Jan. 22.

The Largo Police Department investigated the toddler's death in May 2013. An 
autopsy revealed that she was struck more than 30 times over her entire body, 
with blows so hard her pancreas and liver ruptured.

Cruz lived with her mother, his girlfriend, at in apartment Foxbridge Circle in 
Largo. He had custody of the toddler during the late hours of May 4, 2013, 
according to police. He drove around the county with the child and brought her 
home after midnight, placing her in her crib.

But the toddler was not well. Cruz went to bed with the mother and told her he 
was sorry. The mother checked her baby, "who was gasping for breath and was 
rigid, essentially she was dying," explained Largo Sgt. Joseph Colyle in a 
summary of the case.

Instead of calling 911, the couple drove the child the All Children's Hospital. 
The child died May 5 from her injuries. Largo police were called to the 
hospital to begin investigating.

Detectives John Berard and Brendan Arlington interviewed Cruz, who confessed. 
He was arrested.

Both detectives testified during the trial. The Medical Examiner and Dr. Sally 
Smith of St. Petersburg Pediatrics also testified that the 30 impacts covered 
the toddler's entire body.

The jury returned a guilty verdict of 1st-degree murder 45 minutes after 
closing arguments Jan. 22. The jury is now considering whether to recommend 
that Cruz receive the death penalty. The final decision is up to the judge.

"Such an emotional case like this really impacts all involved," Largo Police 
Chief Jeff Undestad wrote regarding the case. "Great to see justice will be 
served."

(source: Tampa Bay Weekly)



UTAH:

Anti-death penalty protest takes aim at Ray's firing squad bill



About 20 people held signs on Utah's capitol steps Tuesday in protest of the 
death penalty, and in particular, Rep. Paul Ray's bill that would reinstate the 
use of firing squads when lethal injection drugs could not be obtained for 
executions.

Ralph Dellapiana, director of Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty 
(UTADP.org), said that there is widespread condemnation in Utah for use of the 
firing squad, calling it a barbaric and archaic form of execution that 
inevitably turns into a wild west sideshow.

"Execution by firing squad sends a very tragic message that goes completely 
against the sanctity of life that I think most Utahns have great respect for," 
Dellapiana said. "It calls into question whether government should be killing 
people at all. We think no. Many of us think thou shalt not kill - that says it 
all."

Dellapiana, an attorney who works as a public defender in Salt Lake City. said 
that UTADP represents a broad coalition of 10 religious denominations and many 
thousands of Utahns.

Ray, a Republican from Clinton, defended HB11 Tuesday, saying that its scope is 
fairly limited.

"We're saying if we can't get the drugs for the lethal injection, then we'll go 
back to the firing squad," Ray said. "If (lethal injection) is declared 
unconstitutional by the courts, then we automatically revert to the firing 
squad. That is the current law and mine just adds 1 more caveat and says that 
or if the drugs are not available, we'll revert back to the firing squad. 
That's all it does."

However, Ray underscored his support for the death penalty.

"We've asked for a study on the death penalty to tell us the true costs versus 
life in prison. We'd have to look at all those facts," Ray said. "I think it 
needs to be streamlined and it needs to happen a lot quicker than it does. 
That's my only complaint about it, we string it out too far."

Dellapiana fundamentally disagrees, but said his group is not hoping to bring a 
bill eliminating the death penalty this year.

"Frankly, we're trying to build support from the people within the criminal 
justice system before trying to repeal it. This session is only about the 
firing squad bill," Dellapiana said, noting the act of executing another takes 
a toll on the people doing that job.

"I know that prison wardens from around the country who used to carry out 
executions have now come out against the death penalty because of the personal 
impact it has on not just them but on the officers and guards who are required 
to be part of the execution," Dellapiana said.

Ray said he expects HB11 to come up for discussion in the House Law Enforcement 
and Criminal Justice committee in within a week.

(source: Standard Examiner)








USA:

In Boston and Aurora, Jurors May Risk Mental Health for Justice



In Massachusetts and Colorado right now, thousands of ordinary citizens are 
answering jury summons, undergoing screenings that will decide if they will sit 
on the panels that will determine the fate of 2 young accused killers.

Jury selection is underway in both the Boston Marathon bombing trial of 
21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is accused of killing 4 people and wounding 
260 more at the 2013 race, and in the Aurora Theater shooting trial of 
27-year-old James Eagan Holmes, who has been charged with killing 12 and 
wounding 70 in a mass shooting during a showing of the movie "The Dark Knight 
Rises."

Unfortunately, experts say, the trauma that these crimes may have inflicted on 
the people living in and around Aurora, Colorado, and Boston is likely to be 
magnified for anyone who goes through the jury selection process, and 
especially for the jurors who are ultimately chosen to hear these cases. They 
will have to watch and listen to graphic testimony, including pictures of 
wounded and dead victims at the crime scenes. In the case of the Boston bombing 
trial, jurors will likely have to watch security-video footage of the death of 
the youngest victim, 8-year-old Martin Richard, The Washington Post reported.

"The juror is going to be exposed to emotional testimony, often observing 
graphic visual evidence, autopsies and crime-scene photos," said James Acker, a 
professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York in Albany and 
one of the directors of the Capital Jury Project, a research effort to 
understand jury decision making in death-penalty cases.

"For all of these reasons," Acker told Live Science, "you can just envision 
stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, going up."

The jury's mental health

Indeed, research on the mental health of jury members bears out Acker's 
predictions. For example, in a 1992 study published in the Journal of the 
American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, researchers interviewed 40 jurors 
who served in 1 of 4 criminal trials. 2 were murder trials, 1 was a child abuse 
case and the 4th involved of charge of illegally selling pornographic videos. 
The researchers found that 27 out of 40 jurors had at least 1 physical or 
psychological problem stemming from the trial, including sleeplessness, 
nightmares, difficulty eating and long-lasting anxiety.

A female juror on 1 murder trial - which dealt with the rape, beating and 
murder of a young woman by a man who posed as a door-to-door salesman - 
described her flashbacks:

"I'm paranoid," she said. "I can't shake it. I went to the Smoky Mountains, and 
twice, I ran into a fellow who looked like him. I flipped out. I got 
hysterical, shook and just ran ... I dreamed he broke into my apartment on 
several occasions."

Such reactions aren't uncommon, said Michael Antonio, a professor of criminal 
justice at West Chester University in Pennsylvania who has studied jury 
psychology and mental health. In his research, 1 juror described breaking down 
on vacation after walking through a rock-strewn field because the victim in the 
trial she'd heard a year or 2 before had been bludgeoned to death by a boulder.

Even in trials involving milder crimes, like the obscenity trial in the 1992 
study, jurors can find the proceedings upsetting. Several female jurors 
described having trouble having sex with their husbands after having to watch 
the pornographic videos in question, which they found disturbing.

Aggravating factors

Capital cases tend to be more traumatizing than typical criminal procedures, 
Acker said. The trials are often lengthy, which can result in financial 
hardship for jurors who are not compensated for months of leave from their 
jobs. The crimes discussed are, by definition, horrendous murders. And 
community and media scrutiny can be intense.

"The sense of the responsibility felt by the juror to the offender, the victims 
and to the community from which the juror has come, and will return, may cause 
divided emotions," Acker said.

In the cases of Aurora and Boston, the trials are national news.

"Those jurors are going to be scrutinized by everybody, regardless of what they 
find or don't find," Antonio said.

An interview that Antonio and his team conducted with one juror highlights the 
responsibility jurors feel in life-and-death decisions, he said. The woman had 
been on the jury in a death-penalty trial, and the defendant wound up being 
sentenced to life in prison, rather than getting the death penalty. Not long 
after, the juror saw the victim's family in the grocery store and had a 
breakdown, fearing how the family would react to one of the people who'd spared 
the killer's life.

In interviews with 1,198 jurors of capital cases, Antonio and his colleagues 
found that 711 ??? or 59 % - described the experience as "upsetting." Moreover, 
36 % had anxiety symptoms, including a loss of appetite, trouble sleeping and 
nightmares. Women reported more symptoms than men, with 70 % of women and half 
of men calling capital jury duty upsetting, the researchers reported in The 
Justice System Journal in 2008.

Interestingly, the study also found that the emotional impact of a trial didn't 
change much based on whether juries decided on life or death for the convicted. 
In cases where the sentence was death, 63 % of jurors said the experience was 
upsetting, versus 57 % in cases where they decided against the death penalty. 
Furthermore, the sentence chosen did not affect whether jurors had problems 
eating or sleeping.

Isolation can worsen the stress, as jurors are not allowed to discuss the trial 
or their feelings about it with anyone, including one another. That rules out 
counseling during the trial. Some court systems offer jurors counseling after 
the trial, and officials in Aurora have said that professional counseling will 
be offered after the Holmes trial. However, the availability of this service 
varies from state to state and from trial to trial.

After their findings about juror stress, Antonio and a colleague attempted to 
get post-jury-duty workshops off the ground at some of their local courthouses.

"Some had interest; others did not," he said. The workshops never materialized 
due to a lack of time. And although lawyers and judges are aware that jury duty 
can take an emotional toll on people, most courts lack formal proceedings, or 
even requirements, that judges debrief the jury after the trial, Antonio said.

Stress and justice

Although jury duty is a known burden for jurors, it is less clear how the 
emotional fallout of being on a capital jury may affect justice. What is known, 
however, is that even as capital juries feel a huge weight of responsibility in 
making the right decision, they often come to verdicts without living up to the 
legal standards set by the Supreme Court.

After a series of Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, states were forced to offer 
juries guidance on how to weigh mitigating and aggravating factors in the 
crime, and to split the decision-making process into two stages: Juries are 
supposed to decide first whether a defendant is guilty, and then later arrive 
at a sentence in a second phase of the trial, after hearing from the 
prosecution and defense.

William Bowers, another co-director of the Capital Jury Project, has found that 
jurors frequently fail to separate the two decisions. In interviews with 1,198 
jurors from 353 separate capital trials, "half of the jurors told us that they 
knew what the punishment should be at the guilt stage of the trial," Bowers 
told Live Science. What's more, those jurors reported sticking to that 
conclusion throughout the sentencing phase of the trial, refusing to change 
their minds in response to aggravating or mitigating evidence presented in 
court.

"That's pretty firm confirmation that it wasn't working the way it was supposed 
to," Bowers said.

Similarly, defendants are supposed to be protected by the Fifth Amendment, 
which guarantees the right to remain silent. But here, messy human emotion 
comes into play, too. Antonio and his colleagues analyzed Capital Jury Project 
data and found that when a defendant failed to testify during the guilt stage 
of the trial, 27 % of jurors felt the silence implied guilt, and 10 % said it 
implied a lack of remorse. When the defendant stayed silent during the 
sentencing phase, nearly 10 % said it implied the defendant's guilt, and 22 % 
of jurors said the lack of testimony indicated a lack of remorse. The findings 
were published in the journal Judicature in 2005.

The jurors in the study knew they weren't supposed to consider the defendant's 
silence in their decision making but told the researchers that it was difficult 
to set aside.

"I don't care how much they instruct you - there is always that question," 1 
juror said. "I think it was nagging in the back of my brain, but I also tried 
very hard to make sure the evidence corroborated guilt."

Jurors are always given instructions about how to approach the sentencing 
decision, Bowers said, but the legal language can remain difficult to parse. 
Often, jurors end up weighing evidence that may shorten or lengthen a 
defendant's sentences by "sort of down-home personal feelings," he said. One 
juror may feel strongly that a defendant who was abused during childhood 
deserves a shorter sentence, whereas the juror sitting nearby might see 
childhood abuse as no excuse at all, Bowers said.

But in any case, as the jurors deliberate, they often become entrenched in 
their positions, research shows. This "biased assimilation affect" was 
described in a 1979 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 
In that study, students were shown evidence either "proving" that capital 
punishment deters crime or evidence "proving" that it does not. Both the 
students who had previously favored the death penalty, as well as those who 
were against it, accepted the evidence that supported their own pre-existing 
beliefs and picked apart the evidence that didn't.

A jury deliberation "often deteriorates into a personality conflict dispute 
between the two sides," Bowers said. This can stress jurors further, 
particularly if they feel bullied or regret "giving in" to a verdict or 
sentence they did not originally want to hand down.

The pressure can be worst for holdouts. Juries must unanimously agree on a 
death sentence, so just one outlier can hang a jury. A hung jury, however, 
means a retrial, which judges are keen to avoid. Thus, judges will often insist 
that juries deliberate for days to try to reach a unanimous decision.

"Just imagine you against 11 other people," Antonio said. "And the other people 
want to get the heck out of there." Some of the most anguished jurors 
interviewed in the Capital Jury Project were holdouts for life sentences who 
eventually caved to the pressure for a death sentence.

Researchers haven't looked directly at whether jurors who are more mentally 
affected by the trial are more likely to disregard legal criteria, but it is a 
concerning possibility, Acker said.

"People may well be affected by what they've seen and heard, and they're thus 
distracted from paying attention to the legal criteria that ought to be guiding 
their decisions," Acker said.

(source: livescience.com)