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

[Rick Halperin]

July 16



TEXAS----stay of impending execution

Court delays Texas execution that had been set for Thursday


A Texas death row inmate won an indefinite reprieve Thursday, hours before he 
was set to die for the slaying of a 93-year-old woman at her home during a 
robbery a decade ago.

The Texas Court of Criminal of Appeals halted the scheduled lethal injection of 
Clifton Lamar Williams until questions about some incorrect testimony at his 
2006 trial can be resolved.

Williams, 31, had faced execution Thursday evening for the killing of Cecelia 
Schneider of Tyler, about 85 miles east of Dallas. Investigators determined she 
had been beaten and stabbed before her body and her bed were set on fire.

In a brief order, the court agreed to return the case to the trial court in 
Tyler to review an appeal from Williams' attorneys. They want to examine 
whether incorrect FBI statistics regarding DNA probabilities in population 
estimates cited by witnesses could have affected the outcome of Williams' 
trial.

"We need time to look at this," said Seth Kretzer, one of Williams' lawyers. 
"No way we can investigate this in 5 hours.

"It requires some time, and the CCA saw that."

The Texas Department of Public Safety sent a notice June 30 that the 
FBI-developed population database used by the crime lab in Texas and other 
states had errors for calculating DNA match statistics in criminal 
investigations. The Texas Attorney General's Office informed Williams' 
attorneys of the discrepancy on Wednesday.

Prosecutors in Tyler, in Smith County, had opposed Williams' appeal for a 
reprieve, telling the appeals court the state police agency insisted that 
corrected figures would have no impact. Williams is black, and prosecutors said 
the probability of another black person with the same DNA profile found in 
Schneider's missing car was 1 in 40 sextillion. Jurors in 2006 were told the 
probability was 1 in 43 sextillion. A sextillion is defined as a 1 followed by 
21 zeros.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Robert Hurst said Williams had 
not yet been moved to a small holding cell outside the death chamber at the 
Huntsville Unit prison when the court-ordered reprieve was issued. Death row is 
at another prison about 45 miles to the east.

Williams would have been the 10th inmate to receive a lethal injection this 
year in Texas. The state carries out the death penalty more than any other 
state, and has at least seven other executions scheduled in the coming months.

Challenges to DNA evidence and arguments about Williams' guilt were not 
included in previous appeals from Williams, whose lawyers had argued 
unsuccessfully in earlier appeals that his legal help at his trial was 
deficient and that he was mentally impaired and therefore ineligible for the 
death penalty.

Prosecutors said Williams broke into Schneider's home to get money to buy 
cocaine. Her missing car was found later that day, wrecked and abandoned. 
Williams, then 21, was arrested about a week later.

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.

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.

(source: Associated Press)






VIRGINIA:

Delaware inmate may face death penalty in Maryland killing case


A Delaware inmate could face the death penalty for killing 2 sisters who 
disappeared from near their suburban Maryland home 40 years ago, authorities 
said Wednesday. Their bodies haven't been found.

Lloyd Lee "Michael" Welch Jr., 58, a convicted sex offender serving a 30-year 
sentence at Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna, has been charged with 2 
counts of 1st-degree murder during an abduction with intent to defile.

Sheila Lyon, 12, and Katherine Lyon, 10, in 1975 were taken while they looked 
at Easter decorations at a strip mall near their house in Wheaton, Maryland, 
north of Washington. Welch at the time was 18 and working as a ride operator 
for a carnival company that often set up in mall parking lots, according to 
prosecutors.

The case stalled until a few years ago, when detectives searched a property 
owned by the Welch family on Taylor's Mountain in central Virginia. A grand 
jury in Bedford, Virginia, returned an indictment charging Welch with the 
murders on Friday. It was unsealed on Wednesday, with a press conference in 
Wheaton, where the Lyons family still lives.

Officials believe the girls were abducted in Maryland and killed in Virginia, 
prosecutors in both states said. They would not disclose the evidence in the 
case.

Welch is serving time in the Vaughn Correctional Center near Smyrna for 
molesting a 10-year-old girl in 1997. The incident was at an apartment complex 
on South Du Pont Highway in New Castle over the course of about a week in the 
summer, during which Welch watched a pornographic video while the girl was in 
the living room with him, according to court documents.

He pleaded guilty the following year to 1st-degree unlawful sexual intercourse, 
unlawful sexual penetration, and unlawful sexual contact. He had been scheduled 
to be released in 2026.

Welch was named a person of interest in the Lyon case last year. If convicted 
on the new charges, he could face 20 years to life in prison or could be put to 
death. Prosecutors have not decided whether to seek the death penalty, 
officials said.

Welch traveled extensively throughout the United States from the 1970s through 
the mid-1990s, police have said. He has family in this region, including some 
relatives in Delaware.

His stepsister, Darlene Hawn, 58, stood outside of her family's home in Dover 
on Wednesday and described Welch as the "black sheep" of the family.

"I remember him really not being loved by my stepdad and my mother, even though 
she did her best trying to take care of him," Hawn said.

She was not aware that he had been indicted.

"I really don't know what to say," Hawn said.

Hawn said her family moved to Delaware in 1998, but didn't know Welch was in 
the Smyrna prison until 2010. She and son John Scotton used to visit Welch in 
Smyrna every so often, but stopped because police would usually come and ask 
questions about what they had talked about, she said. Hawn said the last time 
she heard from her stepbrother was last month, after he responded to a letter 
she had written to him.

"He said he fell over because I wrote him a letter," she said.

Said Scotton, 28, on Wednesday, "The way I look at it, if he had something to 
do with it ... it's between him and God. In the end, he has to pay a debt to 
God."

Debbie Roe - Hawn's daughter and Welch's niece - said her uncle is innocent. 
She corresponded with Welch and would sometimes visit him in prison, she said.

"I'm shocked. I don't believe he did anything with those girls," she said.

Roe said Welch told her that he and his girlfriend were walking around the mall 
to submit work applications and saw someone taking pictures or recording the 
sisters. They left the mall and saw the girls get into the car with someone, 
Welch told Roe.

She stopped talking to Welch because she "didn't want to be bothered with all 
of the cops and whatnot," Roe said.

Delaware prison officials were informed of Welch's indictment on Tuesday, said 
Randy Krantz, the prosecutor in Bedford bringing the murder charges. Welch will 
be facing extradition to stand trial in Virginia soon, he said.

Delaware Department of Correction spokesman Jason Miller said a prison 
administrator in Dover will have a video conference with Welch when they get 
the official request to move him to Virginia. Inmates also have the right to 
contest extradition, Miller said.

Asked during the press conference if there were likely to be more indictments 
related to the Lyons girls, the prosecutor for Montgomery County, John 
McCarthy, said, "The investigation continues. I think there's a logical 
conclusion you can reach."

When Welch spoke with investigators recently, he implicated his uncle, Richard 
Allen Welch, according to police affidavits filed in court. Lloyd Welch said 
that he saw his uncle sexually assaulting one of the girls at his uncle's house 
in Hyattsville, Maryland, according to police affidavits filed in court.

Richard Allen Welch's wife, Patricia Jean Welch, 65, was indicted by a Bedford 
County grand jury for lying to the grand jury investigating the case of the 
missing sisters.

The whole process, through the end of the investigation to the trial "will be 
lengthy," Krantz said. "It will be meticulous."

Law enforcement has served more than 50 search warrants and has more to serve, 
mostly in the Bedford area, detectives said at the press conference Wednesday.

A press conference is scheduled at noon Thursday in Bedford to announce further 
developments.

Roe said she is supporting her uncle.

"I still love him," she said. "Nothing is never going to change that. He's my 
family."

(source: Delaware News Journal)






USA:

Why Obama is 'close' to opposing the death penalty, according to a long-time 
associate

A long-time associate and mentor to President Obama says the president is 
"close" to opposing the death penalty but not quite there yet -- and needs to 
be pushed to do it.

"He's not there yet, but he's close, and needs some help," said Charles J. 
Ogletree, Jr., a law professor at Harvard University and prominent death 
penalty opponent who taught the president and First Lady Michelle Obama when 
both were students there. The legal scholar said he was planning on meeting 
with his former student next month and would confront him about the issue then.

As Obama has increasingly confronted racial disparities in the criminal justice 
system and in American society in in his second term -- including on Tuesday 
before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- Obama 
has committed to doing more to address these issues in his final 
year-and-a-half. This week alone, he commuted the sentences of more than 40 
low-level offenders, and is visiting a prison in Oklahoma today, becoming the 
1st president to visit a federal penitentiary.

Obama, who has said he supports executions in some circumstances but raised 
concerns about the application of capital punishment, has not yet focused in 
this new push on racial disparities in capital trials -- the most serious cases 
before any criminal court. Now, just as he publicly changed his opinions on 
other major social issues in which public opinion changed, like gay marriage, 
some have wondered whether the president will change his perspective. As the 
charts below show, support for the death penalty, for decades strong in the 
United States, has been declining in recent years, just as support for gay 
marriage has increased.

Ogletree predicted that the president will eventually have no choice but to 
oppose the death penalty, confronted with the data on racial disparities in 
capital punishment, as well as on the costs of litigating capital cases and on 
the number of defendants who are eventually exonerated.

"Even if he doesn't change his mind in the next year and a half, I think the 
public's point of view is going to influence him," Ogletree said. "As a 
citizen, he can have an enormous amount of influence."

The White House declined to comment for this story, beyond noting times Obama 
has talked about the issue in the past. He has said that he supports capital 
punishment in cases where the crime is especially horrific, but worried that 
the penalty is being meted out unfairly.

"In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen 
significant problems -- racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty," 
he said last year, following a gruesomely botched execution in Oklahoma.

He asked former Attorney General Eric Holder to review the issue, but the 
Justice Department hasn't made a recommendation. Last month, the Supreme Court 
upheld the death penalty, even when administered with what some physicians say 
is an excruciating cocktail of lethal drugs, although two of the justices 
raised questions about it remains constitutional. Only nine countries in the 
world actively execute people, including Iran, Sudan and North Korea, according 
to an Amnesty International report.

Some advocates for ending capital punishment have encouraged the White House 
not to take an overly activist stance, preferring action in the states where 
the issue may be less partisan. Support for capital punishment has fallen most 
sharply among Democrats and independents, compared to Republicans where support 
remains high.

Still, advocates for ending capital punishment say the time is ripe for action. 
Nationwide, black defendants are more likely than white defendants to receive 
the death penalty, even after being convicted of similar crimes.

Nowhere has this been more true than in Philadelphia. The city's courts have a 
history of sentencing black defendants to death at some of the country's 
highest rates. In Philadelphia County, for example, there are more African 
Americans on death row than any other county. Among counties with significant 
numbers of capital cases, Philadelphia also had the most minority defendants 
awaiting execution as a share of the overall minority population.

Philadelphia has also been the site of several important studies on how courts 
and juries treat defendants differently, depending on the color of their skin. 
One examination of 350 capital cases in the city found that when the law gave 
jurors a choice, they were 29 times more likely to return a death sentence if 
the defendant was black.

The racial disparities in death penalty cases have been well documented for 
decades. The scholar credited with establishing this field of enquiry was David 
Baldus, a law professor at the University of Iowa who died in 2011.

After studying capital cases in Philadelphia in the decade from 1983 to 1993, 
Baldus concluded that juries were 29 times more likely to sentence black 
defendants to death if they identified conflicting circumstances in the case 
that both aggravated and mitigated the severity of a crime. In such cases, 
jurors discretion over whether to return a capital sentence.

The disparity is even more pronounced when the victim is white.

"It's a black-lives-matter problem," said Jeffery Fagan, a law professor at 
Columbia University. "They don't matter when it comes to capital punishment."

Between 1977 and 2000 across Pennsylvania, murder cases involving a black 
defendant and a white victim resulted in death penalties at nearly 5 times the 
rate as cases in which the defendant was white, the victim black, according to 
figures from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

The numbers suggest that jurors are acting on "a visceral fear response, 
unrelated to the severity of the crime," said the center's executive director, 
Robert Dunham.

"The risk in a death penalty case is that a jury may be sentencing a defendant 
to death not based on what he or she did, but because of conscious or 
subconscious fears that result from the defendant's race," he added.

A subsequent study with Baldus's data from Philadelphia found that black 
defendants with stereotypically African features -- such as as a broad nose, 
thick lips and dark skin -- were about twice as likely to receive death 
sentences in cases with white defendants.

Dunham, who is from Philadelphia, argued the process of selecting a jury for a 
capital case results in juries that are more likely to hold racial prejudices. 
The grimly named protocol of "death qualification," in particular, allows 
prosecutors to object to jurors who oppose death penalty.

Death qualification tends to exclude black jurors from capital cases, since 
though about 55 % of all Americans support the death penalty, and the same 
share of blacks oppose it, according to one recent Pew survey.

As for the prosecutors themselves, about 95 % of elected prosecutors are white, 
according to a study published this month.

In recent years, prosecutors in Philadelphia have stopped seeking so many death 
penalties, although death row there remains overwhelmingly black and Latino. Of 
the 24 death sentences imposed in Philadelphia in the 21st century, just 1 was 
given to a white defendant.

In the meantime, recent research in Delaware, North Carolina, Florida and 
elsewhere confirms that racial disparities in capital sentencing persist around 
the country.

Opponents of the death penalty are optimistic, however. Although a majority of 
Americans still support capital punishment, polls have shown declining support 
in recent years. Some compare the cause of abolition to that of gay marriage.

"20 years from now, people that are for the death penalty are going to be in 
the same place as people that are against gay marriage," Matthew Dowd, a 
strategist for former President George W. Bush, recently told ABC's "This 
Week."

(source: Max Ehrenfreund writes for Wonkblog and compiles Wonkbook, a daily 
policy newsletter----Washington Post)

***********

Unsealed testimony sheds new light on Rosenberg trial


Grand jury testimony from 1950, unsealed in the United States Wednesday, has 
called into question the outcome of one of the most sensational spy trials of 
the Cold War era.

Legal historians say a long-secret transcript suggests Ethel Rosenberg may not 
have been as deeply involved as her husband Julius Rosenberg in slipping US 
atom-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.

Executed in 1953 via the electric chair at New York's notorious Sing Sing 
prison, the Rosenbergs -- both communists -- remain to this day the only 
Americans ever executed by their own country for espionage.

"I think everyone agrees that the evidence against Julius was quite 
formidable," said Georgetown University law professor David Vladeck, who led a 
legal campaign to unseal the grand jury testimony of Ethel Rosenberg`s brother 
David Greenglass.

"The question is whether Ethel was an active participant in the conspiracy," he 
told AFP, "and the grand jury material -- we've now reviewed it all -- doesn't 
really suggest that she was."

Much of the grand jury testimony that led to the indictment of the Rosenbergs 
for conspiracy to commit espionage has been in the public domain for years.

But until Wednesday, the missing link has been 46 pages of testimony given 
behind closed doors in 1950 by Greenglass, who died last year at the age of 92.

The star witness at the Rosenbergs' 1951 trial, Greenglass -- who had worked 
during World War II on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb -- 
went on to spend nearly 10 years in prison in a plea deal for conspiracy to spy 
for the Soviet Union.

On the witness stand, Greenglass claimed he witnessed his sister in the 
Rosenbergs' apartment in New York in 1945 transcribing atom-bomb secrets on a 
portable typewriter -- a key detail leading to her conviction. But the 
transcript unsealed Wednesday indicated that Greenglass told the grand jury, at 
least twice, that he and his sister never spoke "at all" about passing secrets 
to the Soviets.

"I said before, and say it again, honestly, this is a fact: I never spoke to my 
sister about this at all," said Greenglass when pressed at one point about 
Julius Rosenberg asking him in 1945 to stay in the military and keep relaying 
classified information.

By comparison, Greenglass clearly knew what Julius Rosenberg was doing with the 
atomic secrets he was passing to him, quoting his brother-in-law as saying: "I 
am giving it to my friends."

There is also no mention in the testimony of Greenglass telling the grand jury 
about a hollowed-out wooden table, supposedly provided by the Soviets, that the 
Rosenbergs allegedly used to put the typewritten notes onto microfilm.

No such table was ever found, and defense lawyers argued the Rosenbergs only 
had a plain $21 console from Macy's department store, yet it became another key 
point on their path to the death penalty.

Greenglass himself recanted his testimony in 1996, telling a journalist he had 
lied under oath about his sister's role in order to protect his wife Ruth, who 
he believed had typed the notes for the Soviets. University of Wisconsin law 
professor Brad Snyder said the latest document raises questions as to how much 
federal prosecutors knew about Greenglass changing his story and lying under 
oath at trial.

"There's not a lot of legal evidence in that transcript against Ethel," said 
Snyder, who has researched the Supreme Court's failure to take up the 
possibility of a miscarriage of justice in the case.

"You need an overt act to prove a conspiracy, and there's no overt act in that 
testimony," he told AFP.

Greenglass's grand jury testimony is posted at nsarchive.gwu.edu, the website 
of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

(source: Agence France-Presse)