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

[Rick Halperin]

July 13




FLORIDA:

He was a death row survivor----In an obituary written for the New Abolitionist, 
Lily Hughes remembers the 1st death row prisoner exonerated in the modern era 
of the death penalty.


Florida death row survivor Dave Keaton died this past week at the age of 63. 
Dave was the 1st death row prisoner to be exonerated in the U.S.

Dave was part of a group of young men known as the Quincy 5, a group of young 
Black men accused of murder of an off-duty police officer and robbery of a 
Tallahassee convenience store. The young men were all convicted based on false 
eyewitness testimony and coerced confessions.

Dave was the 1st of the group to be convicted, by an all-white jury, based 
solely on a confession that was obtained by the use of beatings, threats and 
lies.

Convicted when he was 18 years old, Dave spent 2 years on death row. Physical 
evidence eventually led to the actual culprits, while the coerced confession 
was thrown out by the courts upon appeal. Like many prisoners, Dave never 
received compensation from the state for the time he spent on death row.

After his release from death row, Dave joined the recently founded Witness to 
Innocence (WTI) in 2005. WTI is an organization based on the membership of 
exonerated death row prisoners and their families. WTI Executive Director 
Magdalene Rose-Avila described Dave's activism, "Dave Keaton was the 1st death 
row exoneree to begin speaking out against the death penalty. His false 
imprisonment and the life struggles he faced as an exoneree demands that we 
abolish capital punishment."

Dave is also known as an accomplished poet and singer, performing around the 
country as a part of his work. His story was immortalized The Exonorated, the 
renowned play about death row survivors.

As Kathy Spillman, director of programs and outreach for WTI said of Dave:

His life was very difficult. He was sentenced to death row as a teenager. And 
like all exonerees, he struggled with issues related to being on death row and 
integrating back into a society that does not provide support for these men and 
women. Yet he was stoic and very gentle. He was a poet and a singer and 
whenever he got the chance, he participated in activities against the death 
penalty so that nobody else had to go through what he did.

(source: socialistworker.org)






OKLAHOMA:

Death Penalty foes schedule Capitol press conference for Monday morning


Opponents of the ultimate sanction have slated a press conference on Monday 
morning (July 13) to present their case against execution of Richard Glossip, 
now on death row at the state prison in McAlester.

Participants will include Don Knight, an attorney who believes Glossip was 
wrongly convicted of procuring murder.

A press release announcing the Monday morning meeting with reporters detailed 
that Knight wants help from the public as he makes the case for Glossip's 
exoneration:

"There were many people at the Best Budget Inn during the early morning hours 
of January 7, 1997 who may have knowledge of the crime, or who may have 
interacted with individuals who were there at the time. Mr. Knight will be 
asking these, and other, members of the public to come forward and speak the 
truth to prevent another tragedy from occurring."

House Democratic staff summarized the focus of Monday's event in a press 
release: "A team of lawyers has volunteered to work on behalf of Mr. Richard 
Glossip because he has always maintained his innocence and the evidence against 
him is paper thin. Knight will discuss evidence the team is attempting to 
uncover that would exonerate Richard Glossip, as no one wants an innocent man 
to be executed."

Since the start, Glossip has asserted his innocence in the murder of Barry Van 
Treese, owner of the hotel where he was manager.

The admitted killer is Justin Sneed, who beat Van Treese to death with a 
baseball bat. Sneed said Glossip was afraid of losing his job at the Inn, and 
promised to pay him $10,000 to kill their boss. Sneed testified against 
Glossip, and received a life sentence without parole.

Former state Sen. Connie Johnson, D-Oklahoma City, serves as chair of the 
Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (OK-CADP), the group sponsoring 
Monday's press conference, slated for 10 a.m. in Room 432B, in the broadcast 
media press room.

In a statement to The City Sentinel concerning capital punishment and the 
scheduled execution, Johnson said:

"Once again, Oklahoma has set a date, September 16, to kill for its citizens as 
punishment for the killing of one of its citizens. It's ironic that this 
particular choice of punishment only applies to citizens and not law 
enforcement as Oklahoma once again notoriously leads the nation - this time in 
the number of deaths at the hands of law enforcement - but that's a 
conversation for another article.

"The difference this time is that this particular citizen who is sentenced to 
die appears to be innocent.

"The date-setting - coming on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision 
upholding Oklahoma's lethal injection drug's constitutionality - while 
expected, is no less disappointing.

"Our advocacy opportunity in the next eight weeks is to educate people, in 
order to support Mr. Glossip's legal team in shedding new light on information 
that proves his innocence; information that the criminal justice system has 
refused to allow to be presented.

"There is so much wrong with this case, the system, and the penalty. If it's 
wrong to kill, it's always wrong to kill."

Sister Helen Prejean, a leading foe of the death penalty, will return to 
Oklahoma for Monday's event. Also scheduled to attend and participate are Sen. 
Johnson, state Rep. George Young, D-Oklahoma City, and OK-CADP spokesperson 
Rev. Adam Leathers.


In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Oklahoma's death penalty 
protocols (including use of the drug midazolam), were constitutional. That 
allowed the state to move forward with 3 executions, with Glossip slated to be 
the 1st.

At the time, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt commented, "This marks the 
8th time a court has reviewed and upheld as constitutional the lethal injection 
protocol used by Oklahoma. The Court's ruling preserves the ability of the 
Department of Corrections to proceed with carrying out the punishment of death. 
The state appreciates the justices' thoughtful consideration of these important 
issues."

Pruitt said, "The families in these three cases have waited a combined 48 years 
for justice. Now that the legal issues have been settled, the state can proceed 
with ensuring that justice is served for the victims of these horrible and 
tragic crimes."

As Johnson hinted, the affirmation of capital punishment - rebuffing a case 
brought by death row inmates - was expected in the case of Glossip v. Gross.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, with these essential 
conclusions: "First, the prisoners failed to identify a known and available 
alternative method of execution that entails a lesser risk of pain, a 
requirement of all Eighth Amendment method-of-execution claims. ... Second, the 
District Court did not commit clear error when it found that the prisoners 
failed to establish that Oklahoma's use of a massive dose of midazolam in its 
execution protocol entails a substantial risk of severe pain."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the primary dissent, in which three of her 
colleagues joined. She argued lawyers "presented ample evidence showing that 
the State's planned use of this drug poses substantial, constitutionally 
intolerable risks." She and other justices pointed, among past precedents, to 
the U.S. Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment to support their 
dissent.

Going a step further, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote (with Justice 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg joining) that the Court should move toward ending capital 
punishment.

In support of his reasoning, Breyer observed, "Last year, in 2014, 6 death row 
inmates were exonerated based on actual innocence. All had been imprisoned for 
more than 30 years."

(source: The City Sentinel)






MISSOURI----impending execution

The lethal injection ruling that takes America another step away from banning 
executions ---- A recent Supreme Court ruling has breathed new life into the 
lethal injection - what does this mean for the anti-death penalty lawyers 
defending David Zink, who's due to be executed tomorrow?


Next week is the year anniversary of Joseph Wood's execution. A convicted 
murderer, he was given a cocktail of drugs by the state of Arizona - a lethal 
injection. It took 2 hours for him to die. It was the 3rd highly problematic 
execution in 2014, after the similarly harrowing deaths of Dennis McGuire in 
Ohio and Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.

The execution induced wildly different reactions from states. Arizona suspended 
its death penalty programme. Utah re-introduced the option of execution by 
firing squad. Nebraska outlawed the death penalty completely earlier this year.

They were all responding, at least in part, to the same possibility - that the 
lethal injection in America would be ruled as unconstitutional. Last month that 
very nearly happened.

On 29 June, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Glossip vs Gross. 3 Oklahoma 
inmates on death row argued that the use of Midazolam - used in the 3 bungled 
executions last year - should be ruled as a "cruel and unusual punishment". The 
8th amendment of the American constitution expressly forbids this. They lost by 
5 votes, to 4.

Crucially, however, the details of the ruling have consequences for attorneys 
defending people on death row up and down the country.

Rick Sindel and Kay Parish represent death row inmate David Zink. In 2001, he 
murdered 19-year-old Amanda Morton after he had rear-ended her car off a 
freeway in Missouri. After raping her he admitted to strangling Morton and then 
cutting her spinal cord so that she would "remain that way". He buried her body 
in a graveyard. The state of Missouri has set his date of execution for 14 July 
- tomorrow.

David Zink is due to be executed this week.

His legal team are in the last stages of appeal. His confession means that 
their main focus falls on the type of drugs that Missouri intends to use to 
kill Zink.

Sindel and Parish are one of the first, if not the first, lawyers who have to 
work with the ramifications of the Supreme Court's ruling.

The most notable problem they have is with a specific judgement - that lawyers 
using the "cruel and unusual punishment" defence must suggest an alternative 
form of execution that is not cruel and unusual. Or as Parish says "lawyers 
must tell a court how to kill our clients".

It puts lawyers like Sindel and Parish, who are viscerally against capital 
punishment, in a difficult position.

"It's a pretty nasty ruling in my opinion, and one that puts those of us trying 
to prevent our clients from being forcibly subject to this human 
experimentation in quite an ethical quandary", says Parish.

The decision suggests that method x cannot be cruel and unusual because you 
have not explained a better method. Or to put it another way, it asks people 
who believe that all methods of execution are cruel and unusual to accept the 
court's contention that there are humane and dignified forms of execution.

After much deliberation Zink's team decided last week not to suggest an 
alternative form of capital punishment.

It's left Sindel and Parish in a fairly desperate position. Previously they had 
argued that Missouri's lethal agent - a form of "pentobarbital" - was illegal. 
They claimed the drug was made by an unknown compounding pharmacy and was a 
"copy" of an FDA-approved drug, rather than a directly approved agent. They 
also put forward the argument that the method of execution violated state and 
federal controlled substance laws because the compounded pentobarbital is 
procured by an invalid "prescription" - written by a doctor who is 
contractually-bound to write the prescription and who conducts no medical 
examination.

It didn't work.

As a result, another lawyer has decided to take one last roll of the dice. 
Justin Gelfand is an attorney with a very different legal specialism to Sindel 
and Parish. He's a former federal tax prosecutor. Counterintuitively he thinks 
he might be able to save Zink's life using his own specialisms in tax law.

Gelfand has prepared a public interest lawsuit using an obscure law, a 
Taxpayers Suit. The law has never been used in this context in Missouri legal 
history. It allows an action to be brought by a private individual to prevent 
state or federal government from unlawfully diverting public funds. It is 
generally used in cases of corruption or impropriety. It's been filed by four 
(carefully chosen) plaintiffs, including a former member of the Missouri Senate 
and a Catholic nun, no less.

They argue that the suit "is not about the general legality of the death 
penalty in Missouri or elsewhere," but has been filed because "Missouri public 
officials responsible for overseeing and administering executions are violating 
federal and state law using the tax dollars of hardworking Missourians."

The suit makes particular reference to arguments made by Sindel, Parish and 
others - that the state of Missouri's use of compound pentobarbital is illegal 
- arguments that had previously been dismissed by Missouri courts.

The hearing for the lawsuit will continue today, less than 24 hours before 
Zink's execution date. We'll know by tomorrow whether it's been successful, 
though as it's never been used before it's a bit of a long shot. It marks the 
penultimate day of years of appeals that have fallen on deaf ears in Missouri 
courts.

The Supreme Court's decision won't stop lawyers like Sindel and Parish, but it 
does make their lives harder. "There are those of us who just won't give up as 
long as there is breath in our bodies", says Sindel. It's the language of hope, 
perhaps, over expectation.

(source: New Statesman)






CALIFORNIA:

Driving getaway car ruled not a life-without-parole crime


Driving a getaway car in a fatal armed robbery is grounds for a murder 
conviction. But it's not enough for a capital crime, the state Supreme Court 
has ruled in a case that defines new limits on California's death penalty law.

Thursday's unanimous decision overturned the life-without-parole sentence of 
the getaway driver in an October 2008 break-in at a Los Angeles medical 
marijuana dispensary in which a security guard was fatally shot. The court said 
the driver, Lovie Troy Matthews, though guilty of the murder, was not a "major 
participant" subject to a no-parole sentence - or to a death sentence, which 
the prosecution did not seek.

There was no evidence that Matthews "knew his own actions would involve a grave 
risk of death," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar said in the 7-0 ruling. She 
said the driver may have known he was taking part in an armed robbery but did 
not supply the weapons, attend or play any direct role in the fatal shooting, 
intend to kill, or conspire with those he knew had killed others.

Matthews is still likely to spend the rest of his life in prison, as he faces a 
sentence of up to 80 years to life, based on his previous record, said his 
appellate lawyer, Danalynn Pritz. But she said the ruling would benefit other 
defendants and was a sign of change on a court that recently added 2 new 
justices, Mariano-Florentino Cu???llar and Leondra Kruger, both appointees of 
Gov. Jerry Brown.

"It's encouraging from a defense perspective," Pritz said. "I feel like they're 
listening to what we're saying."

Evan Lee, a constitutional law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco, 
agreed that the ruling should make defense lawyers "cautiously optimistic" 
about the newly composed court.

The guard at the La Brea Collective, Noe Gonzalez, was shot and killed by one 
of the robbers, Leon Banks, during a struggle as Banks and 2 other men were 
trying to flee, the court said. Matthews then drove up in an SUV and 2 of the 
robbers jumped in. Police soon stopped the vehicle and arrested the robbers. 
Banks and a 2nd man, Brandon Daniels, were sentenced to life without parole for 
the murder, and the 3rd robber, David Gardiner, got 45 years to life.

Matthews, a member of the same gang to which Daniels and Gardiner belonged, was 
found guilty of 1st-degree murder as a participant in a felony in which someone 
was killed. But the court said he was not guilty of murder with "special 
circumstances," as California defines capital crimes, because he was not a 
major participant in the fatal shooting.

A 1990 ballot measure authorized a sentence of death or life without parole for 
accomplices in fatal crimes without proof that they intended to kill. But 
Werdegar said the court was bound by the constitutional standard set by the 
U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, which allowed a death sentence only when a driver 
or other accomplice is substantially involved in the fatal crime and shows a 
"reckless indifference to the grave risk of death created by (his) actions."

That generally isn't the case for someone whose only role is driving the 
getaway car, she said.

(source: sfgate.com)






USA:

Death penalty doubts


As questions mount over whether the death penalty can be applied fairly or 
effectively, the U.S. Supreme Court has again taken up the issue. Ruling 5 to 4 
in late June, it turned back a challenge by 3 condemned men seeking to block a 
specific drug from being administered in executions. The inmates argued that 
including the sedative midazolam in a 3-step lethal injection process could 
expose subjects to excruciating pain, thereby violating the Eighth Amendment's 
prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments.

Lethal injection came into use in the late 1970s, when Oklahoma embraced it as 
a supposedly humane alternative to such methods as electrocution or hanging. 
However, it did so without much research. Other death-penalty states soon 
followed along, making lethal injection by far today???s most common method of 
executing a human being in the United States.

In recent years, as misgivings about the death penalty grew, suppliers of 
sedatives commonly used in executions began refusing to sell them for that 
purpose. Midazolam slipped in to fill the void, but, as the defense in Glossip 
v. Gross argued, it cannot reliably render a person unconscious. It has not, 
for instance, been federally approved for general anesthesia during surgery.

A grisly series of executions last year seemed to support the defense. Among 
them was the case of Clayton Lockett, executed in Oklahoma. He woke after 
midazolam was administered and appeared to writhe in pain as the 2 subsequent 
drugs (a paralyzing agent and one aimed at producing cardiac arrest) were 
injected. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent, suggested that Lockett 
had endured "the chemical equivalent of burning alive." Today, in their search 
for workable drug combinations, death-penalty states are essentially performing 
experiments on live human beings, a thought that should chill every American.

Rhode Island is among 19 states that have no death penalty, and for compelling 
reasons. Heading the list: the risk of killing an innocent person is simply too 
great. Nor is the penalty imposed fairly. Blacks are more likely to be executed 
than whites, suggesting bias and inadequate legal representation may contribute 
to the ultimate penalty. There is little proof that capital punishment deters 
crime. It arguably coarsens societies that practice it.

Dissenting justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg seized on Glossip v. 
Gross to invite a broad review of capital punishment by the high court. The 
death penalty itself, Justice Breyer wrote, is "unfair, cruel and unusual."

While capital punishment remains constitutional, surely the United States would 
be better off without it. Polls show a majority of Americans still favor it, 
but the margin has narrowed significantly, to just over half. In May, Nebraska 
joined the growing number of states that have abolished the death penalty. 
Others have suspended its use.

We join the dissenting justices in wondering whether justice can reliably be 
achieved through capital punishment.

(source: Editorial, Providence Journal)

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

Death penalty's biggest fan reinforces every reason to be against it We didn't 
need any more reasons to abolish the death penalty in America. At least 152 
sentenced to death have now been exonerated since the early 1970s. That should 
be enough.

But consider this, too: The death penalty does not land on those who most 
deserve ferocious punishment. It is inconsistent and arbitrary, as Justice 
Stephen Breyer pointed out in his compelling dissent on the Supreme Court's 
ruling to allow lethal injection last week.

One defendant gets sentenced to death for a single-victim murder, while another 
does not, despite having kidnapped, raped and killed a young mother while 
leaving her baby to die at the crime scene. It often depends on who the victim 
is and where the crime occurred. Defendants are more likely to be sentenced to 
death if their victims were white, and society's ultimate punishment is 
frequently a matter of simple geography.

Was the crime committed in a state, or even county, where the prosecutor has a 
taste for this punishment? And should a matter of life and death hinge on such 
random chance?

Consider the case of Dale Cox, a 67-year-old prosecutor in Louisiana with a 
serious vindictive streak, who unintentionally made a great case against the 
death penalty during a recent rant. Capital punishment is primarily and rightly 
about revenge, he says, and the state needs to "kill more people."

This is the man who essentially decides who lives and who dies in Caddo Parish 
county. 2 harrowing profiles, published recently in The New York Times and The 
New Yorker, detail how his bitter views and aggressive courtroom behavior have 
helped turn a county with a history of racism into a major outlier on capital 
punishment.

Juries in Caddo, where Cox is first district attorney, have sentenced more 
people to death per capita than those in any other county in the United States. 
Since 2011, he has been responsible for more than 1/3 of the death sentences in 
Louisiana. It is, as one law professor told the Times, "a personality-driven 
death penalty."

Cox is known to demand death verdicts on the basis of Biblical passages, and to 
be wildly unstable. Locals say he has changed on the job from an amiable man to 
a sullen, solitary one known for angry outbursts - even threatening defense 
lawyers with criminal contempt for filing opposing motions.

He reinforces every reason to be against capital punishment, even as he 
trumpets it. Take the disturbing conviction of a black man in 2014 by a 
primarily white jury, for murdering his infant son. Cox's evidence against the 
man, now on death row, seemed dubious at best. It was hotly disputed among 
forensic experts. He used all kinds of irrelevant, racially loaded details to 
assail the man's character, including his marijuana smoking and joblessness.

And not only did he demand capital punishment, he wrote that the man "deserves 
as much physical suffering as it is humanly possible to endure before he dies."

Cox later showed no misgivings about any of this, even though he could barely 
remember the facts of the case. The society we live in allows a man like him to 
play God. So what can we do when he chooses the Old Testament?

(source: Editorial, Star-Ledger)