[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, VA., OHIO, USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 15



TEXAS----impending execution

Texas inmate set to die Thursday for killing elderly woman


When firefighters responded to a call about smoke coming from a home in East 
Texas, they found the burned body of a 93-year-old woman who lived there alone.

Investigators later determined that Cecelia Schneider was beaten and stabbed 
before her body, and the bed where she was found, was set on fire at her home 
in Tyler. Her missing car was found later that day, wrecked and abandoned.

Clifton Lamar Williams, a 21-year-old former fast food restaurant worker and 
cocaine user, was arrested about a week later after investigators found his 
fingerprint and blood inside the car. He had been dating a woman who lived a 
few doors away from Schneider's home.

Williams was later convicted of capital murder - and his death sentence is 
scheduled to be carried out Thursday in Huntsville.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review his case in April, and no other court 
appeals are pending.

"There is nothing else that can be filed," Williams' appeals lawyer, James 
Volberding, said Tuesday.

If the sentence is carried out, Williams, 31, will be the 10th inmate to 
receive lethal injection this year in Texas, equaling the number of prisoners 
put to death all of last year in the nation's most active capital punishment 
state.

Volberding unsuccessfully argued in appeals that Williams' legal help at his 
2006 trial in Tyler was deficient. He also said Williams, who dropped out of 
school in the 12th grade, was mentally impaired and therefore ineligible for 
the death penalty.

At Williams' trial, defense attorneys told Smith County jurors that Williams 
became known on the streets as "Crazy C" after a stint in a mental health 
rehabilitation center.

Prosecutors said Williams broke into Schneider's home to get money to buy 
cocaine. According to trial testimony, Williams told a psychiatrist he began 
smoking marijuana at age 15, started lacing it with embalming fluid, then moved 
on to cocaine by the time he was 17.

Investigators said Williams led police to a pond where Schneider's purse that 
had contained about $40 was found, along with a knife from her kitchen that 
investigators believe was used to stab her.

During trial, a pathologist testified that Schneider was stabbed 4 times on 
July 9, 2005, including in her heart and lungs, and was beaten and may have 
been strangled.

Williams told police another man was responsible for the slaying and forced him 
to drive Schneider's car. His attorneys said the man, who denied any 
involvement in the slaying, wore gloves and therefore didn't leave 
fingerprints. Williams told a relative he cut his hand in a fight.

After Williams was convicted, defense lawyers said during the trial's 
punishment phase that Williams had been raised by a mentally disturbed mother 
who died when he was about 12. Court documents showed she was not abusive and 
practiced voodoo.

Williams is among at least 8 Texas prisoners with execution dates in the coming 
months.

Some death penalty states have had difficulties obtaining drugs for lethal 
injections, but Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials say they have 
enough pentobarbital, a powerful sedative, to accommodate all scheduled 
punishments. They have refused to identify the drug provider.

(source: Associated Press)

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

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----9

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----527

Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #

10----------July 16------------------Clifton Williams-----528

11---------August 12----------------Daniel Lopez----------529

12---------August 13----------------Tracy Beatty----------530

13---------August 26----------------Bernardo Tercero------531

14---------September 2--------------Joe Garza-------------532

15---------September 29-------------Perry Williams--------533

16---------October 6----------------Juan Garcia-----------534

17---------October 14---------------Licho Escamilla-------535

18---------October 28---------------Christopher Wilkins---536

19---------November 10--------------Gilmar Guevara--------537

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)






VIRGINIA:

How It Feels To Kill 62 People


When it comes to capital punishment, we already know the fiscal cost: studies 
have found that a death sentence is up to 10 times more expensive than life 
without parole, often at a cost of around $300 million per head.

But what about the moral cost?

The death penalty is often justified on the grounds that it brings peace to the 
families of victims; that the act of ending a life may mark an end to their 
pain. But for those who impose the death penalty, the truth about the emotional 
trauma of killing another human being belies this logic.

"You can't tell me I can take the life of people and go home and be normal. If 
I had known what I'd have to go through as an executioner, I wouldn't have done 
it. It took a lot out of me to do it."

These are the words of Jerry Givens, former state executioner for the Virginia 
Department of Corrections. Givens executed 62 people over 17 years in a state 
that ranks third in the nation for number of executions. The emotional toll of 
his former job is something he can't escape. "You have to transform yourself 
into that person that will take a life. Every time an execution was announced, 
it meant that I had to prepare myself mentally to kill."

Confessions of an Executioner

It's rare to find a former executioner willing to speak openly about their 
experiences. The nature of the job causes many to conceal their real occupation 
like a shameful secret. But Givens is one of the few executioners who speaks 
candidly about his past career, and he provides a unique insight into a world 
that few people ever venture into.

You can't tell me I can take the life of people and go home and be normal.

It's clear from speaking to Givens that he is a compassionate man. He talks 
often of being able to look past the crime to see the human being underneath. 
"We degrade people and call them animals," he told ThinkProgress. "But when I 
worked on death row, I didn't see that animal. I saw a human being. When you 
call people an animal and treat them like that, that's the behavior they'll 
show you. But they can also show you that they're not like that; that everybody 
can change."

An executioner seems a curious job for a person to whom empathy comes easily. 
How did this compassionate man become an enforcer of the death penalty? What 
did it take for him to kill another human being? For Givens, it was a steadfast 
faith in the justice system. This faith meant that doubts were suppressed and 
fears were tolerated. Any gnawing unease was overpowered by the notion that it 
must be the right thing to do - it was state-certified, after all.

"I always ask myself, would I have agreed to participate in executions if I 
knew then what I do now?" Steve J. Martin, an execution witness for the Texas 
Department of Corrections, told ThinkProgress. "We do these things that we 
would normally never be involved in because they're sanctioned by the 
government. And then we start walking through them in a mechanical fashion. We 
become detached. We lose our humanity."

Givens agrees. "The people who pass these bills, they don't have to do it. The 
people who do the executions, they're the ones who suffer through it," he said.

Flashbacks, nightmares and other post-traumatic stress related symptoms are 
frequently seen in prison wardens, executioners, and corrections officers, 
according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Research has 
shown that 31% of prison staff who carry out executions will suffer from PTSD. 
This is an unusually high proportion; for Iraq war veterans, the same statistic 
is 20%.

Deliberately killing another human being goes against all normal societal 
standards, and many individuals must go to unusual and harmful measures to 
accomplish such an act. A 2005 Stanford University psychology study by Michael 
Osofsky highlighted the tactics employed by prison staff to absolve themselves 
from feelings of guilt and despondency.

"Individuals must morally disengage in order to perform actions and behaviors 
that run opposite to individual values and personal moral standards," Osofsky 
explained in the study. "Capital punishment is an example of this type of moral 
dilemma, where everyday people are forced to perform the legal and 
state-sanctioned action of ending the life of another human being, which poses 
an inherent moral conflict to human values."

For many people involved in enforcing the death penalty, the subsequent trauma 
would never dissipate. California Governor Edmund Brown was responsible for 
deciding whether death sentences would ensue or be commuted to life without 
parole. Though he granted clemency to 23 out of his 59 cases, the weight of 
these decisions still overwhelms him.

"The longer I live, the larger loom those 59 decisions about justice and mercy 
that I had to make as governor," Brown said. "It was an ultimate power over the 
lives of others that no person or government should have. And looking back over 
their names and files now, I realize that each decision took something out of 
me that nothing - not family or work or hope for the future - has ever been 
able to replace."

Needless to say, the enforcers of the death penalty aren???t the only ones to 
suffer. Fully accepting the imminent end to your life, against your will and at 
the hands of another is a bizarre reality that many prisoners just couldn't 
face, as Givens recounts.

"This one guy ... was sort of moderately retarded. He'd ordered McDonald's and 
a chocolate nut sundae for his last meal. But he couldn't swallow it. So he 
said to me, 'I can't finish it so I'll put it in the fridge for tomorrow.' Here 
he is, 3 hours away for being executed and he's thinking about putting his 
sundae away for tomorrow. But there was no tomorrow for him. He hadn't realized 
this was his last day."

There was no tomorrow for him. He hadn't realized this was his last day.

Givens' experiences in the death chamber have led him to campaign for the 
abolition of capital punishment, even driving him to write a book, Confessions 
of an Executioner. His motivation is deep-seated. "There are things I want the 
public to know that they don't. I need to expose things that should be exposed. 
I don't want to leave anyone in the dark, because America is still putting 
innocent people on death row. And people don't know about it. People don't 
understand."

A Lethal Dose

The botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma last year is one example 
of the realities of the death penalty, which Givens believes all people should 
know about. "He strained and struggled violently, his body twisting, his head 
reaching up from the gurney," journalist Katie Fretland wrote. "16 minutes 
after the execution began, Lockett said "Man," and the blinds were lowered ... 
It would be a full 43 minutes after the drug was administered before Lockett 
died - and only after he had thrashed on the gurney, writhing and groaning."

Lockett was killed using a new combination of experimental drugs and the 
consequences were nightmarish. The doctor was sprayed with blood when an artery 
was hit; Lockett was in "some pain" as he was pricked at least 16 times in the 
attempts to find a vein; the scene was described by prison wardens as "a bloody 
mess" and the prisoner's multiple attempts to talk like something from "a 
horror movie."

The emotional repercussions of this blood-splattered scene were harrowing. 
Witnesses to the execution spoke of their distress and recounted not being able 
to sleep for days after. It is the quiet nature of lethal injections that is 
their selling point, after all - state-sanctioned homicides veiled with a 
clinical serenity. As Givens knows all too well, no one wants to see actual 
blood spilled, or face the unwelcome reminder that, murderer or not, there is a 
human being dying in front of them.

After Europe blocked sales of the lethal drug sodium thiopental to the United 
States, the Department of Corrections were forced to look elsewhere for such a 
powerful anaesthetic. But global pharmaceutical companies didn't like the idea 
of their drugs being used to kill people, and so drugs were sourced, purchased, 
but then again quickly blocked. Soon, the departments of corrections hit a 
wall. There were simply no anaesthetics strong enough.

But there were other drugs. Not anaesthetics, but sedatives like midazolam, 
usually administered in conjunction with an anaesthetic to relax a patient. 
Despite the warnings that midazolam is simply not powerful enough to produce 
the same coma-like state as sodium thiopental - a state absolutely necessary to 
ensure the subject feels no pain and the execution is 'humane' - midazolam 
became the drug of choice and the fatal experimentations began.

This unyielding desire to purchase and use barely-tested lethal drugs on 
prisoners doesn't surprise Givens. "The criminal justice system is corrupted 
and we don't want to own up to it. They think they can get any drugs they want. 
Where they got so much power from, I don't know. The drugs should be disclosed 
to the lawyer and to the condemned - he should know what he's going to die 
from."

As many expected, the first midazolam executions were riddled with red flags. 
Pastor Laurence Hummer's account of the execution of Dennis McGuire is just one 
of them: "His stomach swelled up in an unusual way. He struggled and gasped 
audibly for air. I was aghast. Over 11 minutes or more he was gasping for 
breath, his fists clenched the entire time. His gasps could be heard through 
the glass wall that separated us. There is no question in my mind that Dennis 
McGuire suffered greatly over many minutes. I consider that inhumane."

Despite these reports, midazolam was recommended for use by the Oklahoma 
Department of Corrections, and correctional facilities across the country 
jumped aboard. Last week, despite significant condemnation the Supreme Court 
rejected the idea that midazolam is a cruel and unusual punishment and 
sanctioned its use, clearing the way for deferred executions to ensue.

"The drugs they're using, who approved it? What doctor approved it?" asks 
Givens. "You can't judge pain. You can't measure the pain that a person is 
going through, physical or psychological. The guy receiving the drug can't tell 
you, because he's gone. You've never died before, so you can't say. Even 
myself, I don't know. I can't tell you what a guy on the other end is feeling 
when I'm pushing drugs into his body."

The Baseline of Morality

The botched executions didn't end in Oklahoma. Sentenced to death in Arizona 
for a 1989 double murder, in July 2014 Joseph Wood took 2 hours to die. 
Journalist Mauricio Marin had never witnessed an execution before; prison staff 
had told him the process "lasts about 10 minutes" and would be "very clinical". 
Instead:

"I saw a man who was supposed to be dead, coughing - or choking, possibly even 
gasping for air. What seemed like an eternity passed ... Finally, the warden 
pronounced the killer dead, at 3:49 pm, 1 hour and 57 minutes after the 
execution began. I thought: Is this how long it's supposed to take a man to 
die?"

Republican Senator John McCain was outspoken in terming Wood's protracted 
execution as "torture", but the governor of Arizona Jan Brewer disagreed. "Wood 
died in a lawful manner and by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not 
suffer," she said. "This is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious 
suffering that he inflicted on his 2 victims."

The argument that a convict's crime was so heinous that it negates any qualms 
about their execution is popular with death penalty supporters. The incongruity 
of using the actions of a convicted killer to determine the baseline for what's 
morally acceptable is not lost on Givens, who views this as a dire expression 
of our most base and ugly thirst for revenge.

"It is revenge - you can't put it any other way," he said. "We want revenge and 
we want it right away. Death is going to occur anyway, but we're so impatient 
we have to execute someone. That's the mentality people have. America was built 
on killing and there's hatred in our hearts. But it shouldn't be that way."

While most supporters of the death penalty refute the idea that it's about 
revenge, District Attorney Dale Cox - responsible for 1/3 of the death 
sentences in Louisiana since 2011 - readily agrees. "I'm a believer that the 
death penalty serves society's interest in revenge. I know it's a hard word to 
say and people run from it, but I don't run from it because I think there is a 
very strong societal interest," Cox recently told a local reporter. "I think we 
need to kill more people."

A death sentence is also no quick way to closure, as Bill and Denise Richard, 
parents of the 8-year-old boy killed in the Boston Marathon bombings took pains 
to point out. Publishing a personal appeal in the Boston Globe titled 'To end 
the anguish, drop the death penalty,' the Richards implored prosecutors to 
sentence Dzhokhar Tsaernev to life without parole instead of death.

"The continued pursuit of that punishment could bring years of appeals and 
prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives," they wrote. "We hope our 2 
remaining children do not have to grow up with the lingering, painful reminder 
of what the defendant took from them, which years of appeals would undoubtedly 
bring."

The Richards are not alone. Marietta Jaeger, whose 7-year-old daughter was 
kidnapped and murdered by a mentally ill man, requested that prosecutors seek a 
mandatory life sentence instead of the death penalty. Jaeger has been vocal in 
her opposition to capital punishment, asserting that in reality, the death 
penalty only creates more grieving families and turns the victims into that 
which they deplore - people who kill people:

"To say that the death of another person would be just retribution is to insult 
the immeasurable worth of our loved ones. That kind of justice would only 
dehumanize and degrade us because it legitimates an animal instinct for 
gut-level, blood-thirsty revenge. My daughter was such a gift that to kill 
someone in her name would have been to violate the goodness of her life; the 
idea is offensive and repulsive to me."

Where To Go From Here

Studies have shown time and again that the death penalty is no deterrent for 
criminals and in fact, states with the death penalty have much higher murder 
rates than states without. Capital punishment is used unduly against non-whites 
(a disproportionate 55% of death row inmates are people of color) and the 
awareness of judicial incompetence and racial bias is felt keenly by Jerry 
Givens.

Givens recalled the case of Earl Washington Jr., a 22-year-old black man 
wrongfully convicted of rape and murder, as 1 example that made him lose faith 
in the justice system. Washington's execution was stayed 9 days before Givens 
was scheduled to kill him. Years later, new DNA evidence led Virginia's 
governor to pardon Washington, who was released in 2001.

"I knew the system was corrupted when we exonerated Earl Washington Jr. from 
death row. Days later, I would have executed him," Givens said. "You have 2 
types of people on death row: the guilty and the innocent. And when you have 
the guilty and the innocent, you shouldn't have death row."

But even if the law has not yet caught up, attitudes are starting to change on 
the death penalty. Support for the death penalty is at historic lows, and 
abolitionists remain optimistic even after the most recent Supreme Court 
ruling.

"We have to look at the big picture," Givens explained. "Everyone on Earth has 
a death day: you, me, everyone. We can't stop death, but we can stop killing 
...We have to think about the generation that's coming up. We can't let them go 
through what we had to go through. We tried it; we tried it, and it didn't 
work. Now let's get them going in a different direction from us."

(source: Selene Nelson is an British-American freelance writer. She writes 
about criminal justice and current affairs; thinkprogress.org)






OHIO:

GOP lawmaker joins legislative fight to end Ohio's death penalty


Democratic lawmakers have again introduced legislation to abolish the death 
penalty in Ohio.

But this time, they have visible support from a member of the Republican 
majority.

State Rep. Niraj Antani, a freshman GOP lawmaker from the Dayton area, joined 
Democratic Rep. Nickie Antonio of Lakewood at a Statehouse news conference 
Wednesday to call for an end to capital punishment in Ohio.

Their bill, which would replace death sentences with lifetime prison terms 
without parole, isn't likely to pass the Ohio General Assembly. Most Republican 
lawmakers - as well as some Democrats - favor capital punishment.

Antonio, who has introduced similar bills in previous sessions, said while 
Antani's Republican predecessor, the late Rep. Terry Blair, also backed her 
bill, Antani is playing a more prominent role as a joint co-sponsor of the new 
legislation.

Antonio said she hopes such conspicuous support from a conservative lawmaker 
will spark a broader discussion about ending the death penalty.

"Adding his voice to my voice, I think, really helps balance the discussion," 
Antonio said. "And hopefully we can reach more of our colleagues with it."

Antani said in a release that "pro-life, small-government conservatives" should 
be in favor of ending capital punishment.

"I believe there is a growing movement in the Republican Party to end the death 
penalty," he said in a statement.

However, such sentiments haven't caught fire so far in the General Assembly. 
Last December, lawmakers passed an execution secrecy bill designed to persuade 
small-scale drug manufacturers called compounding pharmacies to sell 
lethal-injection drugs to the state.

Executions have been on hold in Ohio since the controversial execution of 
Dennis McGuire in January 2014 using a never-before-tried drug cocktail.

The state is set to resume executions early next January with 1 of 2 
alternative lethal-injection drugs.

However, Ohio's prisons agency director said last week that state officials 
have had trouble finding someone willing to sell them the drugs.

Like other death-penalty states, Ohio has struggled in recent years to find 
reliable sources of lethal-injection drugs, as European pharmaceutical 
companies have stopped sales on moral and legal grounds.

(source: cleveland.com)






USA:

The trustworthiness of an inmate's face may seal his fate


The perceived trustworthiness of an inmate's face may determine the severity of 
the sentence he receives, according to new research using photos and sentencing 
data for inmates in the state of Florida. The research, published in 
Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 
reveals that inmates whose faces were rated as low in trustworthiness by 
independent observers were more likely to have received the death sentence than 
inmates whose faces were perceived as more trustworthy, even when the inmates 
were later exonerated of the crime.

"The American justice system is built on the idea that it is blind to all but 
the objective facts, as exemplified by the great lengths we go to make sure 
that jurors enter the courts unbiased and are protected from outside influences 
during their service. Of course, this ideal does not always match reality," say 
psychological scientists John Paul Wilson and Nicholas Rule of the University 
of Toronto, co-authors on the study.

"Here, we've shown that facial biases unfortunately leak into what should be 
the most reflective and careful decision that juries and judges can make - 
whether to execute someone."

Previous research had documented a bias against faces perceived as 
untrustworthy, but much of the research had relied on study participants 
contemplating criminal verdicts hypothetically. Wilson and Rule were interested 
in knowing whether this bias extended beyond the lab to a very real, and 
consequential, decision: whether to sentence someone to life in prison or to 
death.

The researchers capitalized on the fact that the state of Florida maintains a 
comprehensive database of photos of all its inmates; Florida is also one of the 
states that still regularly delivers death sentences.

The researchers obtained photos of 371 male inmates on death row in Florida - 
226 of the inmates were white, 145 were black, and all were convicted of 
1st-degree murder. They converted the photos to gray scale to minimize any 
variations in the images and asked an online panel of 208 American adults to 
look at the photos and rate them on trustworthiness using a scale from 1 (not 
at all trustworthy) to 8 (very trustworthy). The raters also evaluated photos 
of age- and race-matched inmates who had also been convicted of 1st-degree 
murder but received a sentence of life in prison instead of death. Importantly, 
the raters did not know what sentence an inmate had received, or even that the 
photos depicted inmates.

Wilson and Rule found that inmates who had received the death sentence tended 
to be perceived as less trustworthy than those sentenced to life in prison; in 
fact, their analyses showed that the less trustworthy a face was deemed, the 
more likely it was that the inmate received the death sentence.

This association remained even after the researchers took various other factors 
- such as facial maturity, attractiveness, and the width-to-height ratio of the 
face - into account.

The researchers point out that the inmates in the 2 groups had committed crimes 
that were technically equally severe, and neither sentence would have allowed 
for the inmates to return to society - as such, the motivation to protect 
society could not explain the harsher punishment doled out to the less 
trustworthy looking individuals.

"Any effect of facial trustworthiness, then, seems like it would have to come 
from a premium in wanting to punish people who simply look less trustworthy," 
they explain.

More striking, a follow-up study showed that the link between perceived 
trustworthiness and sentencing emerged even when participants rated photos of 
inmates who had been sentenced but who were actually innocent and were later 
exonerated.

"This finding shows that these effects aren't just due to more odious criminals 
advertising their malice through their faces but, rather, suggests that these 
really are biases that might mislead people independent of any potential 
kernels of truth," say Wilson and Rule.

The research ultimately shows just how powerful appearances can be in guiding 
judgment and decision making, influencing outcomes in situations that are 
literally a matter of life and death.

"In a few states, like Florida, it only takes a majority of jurors to sentence 
someone to death. In Alabama, judges even have the power to override juries 
that choose a life sentence by unilaterally replacing that sentence with the 
death penalty, which actually happens with some regularity," the researchers 
note.

"We think it is critical that people know and understand that these biases 
exist, else they might not have the presence of mind to police their thoughts 
and overcome them," they add. "Every jury-eligible citizen is subject to 
participating in the process of delivering justice to others, meaning that the 
majority of people have a stake in better understanding how peripheral 
information like facial appearance can bias their ability to perform their 
civic duty."

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council 
of Canada.

(source:scienceblog.com)