[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OKLA., COLO., WASH., USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 22



OKLAHOMA:

This Oklahoma Case Should Make You Rethink Capital Punishment


Time is running out for Richard Glossip.


In June, the United States Supreme Court rejected his appeal challenging the 
constitutionality of lethal injection in a heartbreaking 5-4 decision. Now, 
he's scheduled to die in Oklahoma's death chamber Sept. 16.

In any other year, the court's ruling in Glossip's case might have garnered a 
profusion of media attention. But coming on the heels of the court's landmark 
decisions on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, it has been all but forgotten in 
the 24-hour news cycle, save for an excellent article in The Intercept this 
month.

That's a pity--not just for Glossip, but for all of us. His case is the kind 
that should keep people of good conscience awake at night. Both morally and 
legally, it illustrates many of the most troubling flaws in our system of 
state-sanctioned killing: the risk of executing the innocent, the inadequate 
legal representation often provided to poor criminal defendants charged with 
the most serious offenses, the inconsistencies of the appeal process, and the 
cruelty of all forms of capital punishment.

Glossip, 51, was arrested in January 1997 and charged with first-degree murder 
for the death of Barry Van Treese, the owner of the Best Budget Inn, a 
down-market motel frequented by drunks, prostitutes, drug dealers and others on 
the west side of Oklahoma City. Van Treese's body was discovered on the evening 
of Jan. 7 in Room 102. He had been bludgeoned.

Glossip had worked for Van Treese as an on-site manager. In that job, he had 
earned $1,500 per month, and he had needed every penny of his earnings. 
According to local prosecutors, Glossip feared being fired, or worse, for 
skimming money from the inn's receipts. He needed an out, and quickly, because 
Van Treese had begun to audit the inn's financial records.

But there was a problem for the prosecution in its quest to hold Glossip 
responsible for Van Treese's demise: Glossip did not personally kill Van 
Treese, and there was no physical evidence connecting him to the incident in 
Room 102. Unable to show that Glossip had committed the homicide himself, the 
prosecution constructed an alternative scenario in which Glossip convinced 
Justin Sneed--a meth-addicted 19-year-old roofer who lived at the motel in 
exchange for maintenance work--to commit the crime for him by promising Sneed 
money and additional jobs.

Sneed was apprehended a week after Van Treese was slain. After he was taken to 
police headquarters, he was interrogated and was offered a deal that would 
spare him the death penalty if he confessed. He admitted to beating Van Treese 
with a baseball bat, but he fingered Glossip as the architect of a jointly made 
plan. Subsequent searches revealed that Sneed had possessed $1,700 in cash at 
the time of his arrest and that Glossip had had $1,200.

Although Glossip claimed his money had come from paychecks and the sale of 
personal items and that he had intended to use it to buy breast implants as a 
birthday present for his girlfriend, the police demurred. Certain that they had 
confirmed their theory--murder for hire--the authorities formally charged 
Glossip.

Since the death penalty's reinstatement by the Supreme Court in 1976, it has 
been limited to murder prosecutions. But a defendant need not be a hands-on 
killer in order to be eligible for capital punishment in many jurisdictions, 
including in Oklahoma. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, at 
least 10 people have been put to death for contract slayings since the modern 
era of capital punishment began.

At Glossip's first trial, in June 1998, Sneed was the state's star witness, and 
based largely on Sneed's testimony Glossip's jury determined not only that he 
was behind the murder but that the state had proved two aggravating 
circumstances warranting a death sentence--that the murder was especially 
heinous and cruel and that Glossip posed a "continuing threat to society," even 
though the only alternative sentence for him was life in prison without the 
possibility of parole. Prior to his conviction, Glossip had had no criminal 
record.

The weakness of the prosecution's case, built on the self-serving statements of 
an admitted killer, became apparent in due course to the Oklahoma Court of 
Criminal Appeals. In 2001, that court unanimously reversed Glossip's conviction 
without even holding oral argument, ruling that the performance of Glossip's 
trial counsel was so deficient that "we have no confidence that a reliable 
adversarial proceeding took place."

In that court's view, Glossip's attorney had also failed to introduce an 
available videotape of Sneed's confession, which could have made a crucial 
difference in Glossip's defense team's ability to cross-examine Sneed. The 
court emphasized that the evidence against Glossip "was circumstantial except 
for the testimony of Justin Sneed."

Undeterred by such blunt commentary, the state re-tried Glossip, who by then 
was represented by a new team of lawyers, and it secured a second conviction 
and death sentence, in August 2004. Three years later, in a closely divided 3-2 
decision, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed both the conviction 
and the sentence.

Glossip's lawyers then spent the next seven years filing additional writs and 
appeals without success and without attracting much national attention, until 
April 29, 2014, when the Oklahoma Department of Corrections horrendously 
botched the lethal injection of Clayton Lockett, a 38-year-old 
African-American. After receiving a 3-drug cocktail that--for the 1st time in 
the state's history--began with an injection of the sedative midazolam, Lockett 
agonized for a reported 43 minutes before he succumbed. The state had shifted 
from pentobarbital to midazolam because the former had become increasingly 
harder to obtain.

Glossip's attorneys--together with lawyers for three other condemned Oklahoma 
prisoners, including one Charles Warner--responded promptly to Lockett's 
gruesome death by filing a federal lawsuit seeking to enjoin the state's use of 
the new 3-drug mixture and arguing that it violated the Eighth Amendment's 
prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment." A brief stay was issued, putting 
the state's executions on hold, but the moratorium was lifted by the 10th 
Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan. 12.

3 days later, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider further stay requests 
from any of the inmates. Within a matter of hours, Warner was on a gurney with 
a midazolam-laced chemical combination coursing through his veins. As he lay 
dying, Warner complained that the drugs in his body felt "like acid."

Then in an extraordinary turn of events that laid bare the arbitrary and 
capricious nature of the death penalty even at the highest level of the 
judiciary, the Supreme Court reversed course Jan. 28 and ordered stays of 
execution for Glossip and his two remaining co-plaintiffs. The litigation was 
re-titled, with Glossip replacing the deceased Warner as the lead party, and 
oral argument was scheduled for April 29.

Although the technical issue before the justices was narrowly framed--whether 
Oklahoma's use of midazolam in its lethal injection protocol violated the 
Eighth Amendment--the court's June 29 decision approving the protocol has broad 
ramifications for the future of capital punishment.

Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion, endorsed by the court's other 
Republican appointees, is an exercise in circular reasoning that has 
established a new set of "Wonderland rules for method-of-execution claims," 
according to Steven Schwinn, a professor at the John Marshall School of Law in 
Chicago.

"Because capital punishment is legal," Alito wrote, "there must be a 
constitutional means of carrying it out." Surveying the history of the death 
penalty, he continued: While methods of execution (from hanging to 
electrocution, firing squads, lethal gas and injections) have changed over the 
years, the Supreme Court "has never invalidated a State's chosen procedure."

Nor were Alito and his conservative colleagues about to do so in this term, 
even though record clearly shows that midazolam is ineffective and leads to 
extreme pain during executions. Worse still, Alito assigned the burden of proof 
in such death penalty cases to the inmates seeking to stay alive rather than to 
the states seeking to kill them. That burden, he elaborated, is two-fold, 
requiring prisoners to show both that any challenged means of execution 
"presents a risk that is sure or very likely to cause needless suffering" and 
that there are "feasible, readily implemented" and less painful alternatives 
available to the states for putting them to death. Glossip and his fellow 
petitioners, Alito held, failed both prongs.

Not content with Alito's grim majority decision, Justice Antonin Scalia crafted 
a particularly venomous and unhinged concurrence that began with the 
salutation: "Welcome to Groundhog Day." From Scalia's twisted perspective, 
condemned prisoners like Glossip have no business taking up the court's 
precious time and time again with doomed objections to being executed. In 
addition, he charged that the opinions of the dissenting justices were 
exemplars of inferior scholarship, especially the one authored by Justice 
Steven Breyer, which he called "gobbledy-gook."

What offended Scalia most deeply about Breyer's dissenting opinion--which was 
joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg--was that Breyer had the temerity to 
suggest that the nation's experiment with creating a rational, reliable and 
fair system of capital punishment had failed and that the time had come to 
re-evaluate the entire system's constitutionality. Breyer's opinion marked the 
first time since the late Justice Harry Blackman's 1994 dissent in a case from 
Texas that a sitting member of the court had formally taken an abolitionist 
position on the issue.

Unfortunately, Breyer's fine sentiments offer little comfort to the condemned.

Glossip and his supporters, whose ranks include the renowned death penalty 
opponent Sister Helen Prejean, insist that he had nothing to do with Van 
Treese's murder.

His defense attorneys are frantically working to present new evidence of his 
innocence. Late last year, they obtained a letter from Sneed's adult daughter, 
who wrote that her father has told her he wants to recant his testimony against 
Glossip. However, Sneed, who is serving a life sentence, has yet to issue a 
statement of his own.

But even if Sneed finds the courage to come forward, there is no assurance that 
the courts will accept his recantation. In the modern era of capital 
punishment, 10 men have been executed despite strong evidence of their 
innocence. Their case histories are chronicled on the Death Penalty Information 
Center's website. Come September, Richard Glossip could raise the number to 11.

(source: Bill Blum; *This post was originally published by 
Truthdig.com----Huffington Post)






COLORADO:

If theater shooter gets death, execution could take decades


The time has come for jurors to hear whether James Holmes should be executed 
for killing 12 people in a Colorado movie theater. But even if they decide on 
death, Holmes could spend the rest of his life in prison awaiting capital 
punishment that never happens.

Colorado has executed only one person in nearly half a century, and just three 
people sit on the state's death row. The man closest to seeing his death 
sentence carried out was granted an indefinite reprieve in 2013 by the state's 
Democratic governor, who said he had doubts about the fairness of the state's 
death penalty system.

"Capital punishment is on life support in Colorado," said Denver defense 
attorney Craig Silverman.

As a prosecutor, Silverman secured a death penalty verdict against a man for 
kidnapping and killing a woman in 1984. 19 years later, Frank Rodriguez died on 
death row from Hepatitis C complications.

"If you want a case that never dies, seek capital punishment and get a death 
verdict, and you'll be working on it for the next 20 years," he said.

The same jurors who convicted Holmes of 165 counts of murder, attempted murder 
and other charges in his July 20, 2012 theater attack must soon decide whether 
he should pay with his life. The sentencing phase of his trial begins 
Wednesday.

The district attorney who prosecuted Holmes, George Brauchler, said that if any 
crime should be punished by death, it is this one: He opened fire on an 
audience of more than 400 defenseless strangers in a darkened theater during a 
Batman movie premiere, killing 12, wounding 58 and leaving 12 others injured in 
the mayhem he caused.

But many obstacles stand between Holmes and execution.

Death row inmates in almost every state spend decades in prison as mandatory 
appeals play out in court. But Colorado has adopted a unique system for death 
penalty appeals, requiring those sentenced to death to file post-conviction 
claims before a higher court reviews their case. It was supposed to speed up 
the process, but "it actually slowed it down exponentially," said Hollis 
Whitson, a Denver defense attorney who specializes in appellate law.

Nationally, death row inmates spend an average of 15.5 years in prison before 
they're executed, Radelet said. It's impossible to say how Colorado compares, 
since the state has executed just one man since 1967 - Gary Lee Davis, who was 
put to death in 1997 after a 10-year wait following his convictions for 
kidnapping, raping and shooting a woman 14 times with a .22-caliber rifle.

The other 2 - Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray - were sentenced to death more 
than 5 years ago for the same double murder, but their appeals still haven't 
been heard.

Whitson's study of capital punishment in Colorado from 1999-2010 found the vast 
majority of death penalty prosecutions result in life sentences, pleas to 
lesser offenses or acquittals. Another study, in 2013, found that only 0.6 % of 
1st-degree murder cases resulted in death sentences.

"The cost of death prosecutions in Colorado is high, and the execution yield is 
extraordinarily low," he determined.

Holmes' appeals could be even more complex because of his mental illness.

Doctors testified he suffers from schizophrenia. If his mental state 
deteriorates while he is on death row he may never be executed, said Michael 
Radelet, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has 
long studied the death penalty and opposes it.

"If he is sent to death row, we're going to need dump trucks full of money to 
pay the mental health experts who will continue to argue this for the next 20 
years," Radelet said. "Even if Holmes is sane today, there will be inevitable 
questions about his sanity at the time of execution."

Part of the issue is Colorado's uneasy relationship with the death penalty.

The state abolished it in 1897, only to restore it in 1901, embarrassed by an 
outbreak of lynchings. The state's lower house voted to repeal the death 
penalty in 1999, but the effort stalled in the Senate. Lawmakers' attempts to 
eliminate it again failed in 2009 and 2013.

"You have this odd combination here for ambivalence on the part of prosecutors 
and juries and a statute that permits the imposition of death in most murders," 
said Sam Kamin, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law 
who worked on the study. "In some cases it was lack of resources, in some cases 
it was the belief that a jury wouldn't impose it," or the victims' families 
didn't want it.

Colorado's lonely death row is not necessarily for lack of support. Nonpartisan 
Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli says support for the death penalty in Colorado 
polls has generally tracked those in national ones for decades. In 2013, a 
Quinnipiac University Poll found 69 % of Colorado voters backed capital 
punishment.

(source: Associated Press)

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

Colorado death penalty in focus as massacre trial enters new phase


The lead prosecutor in the Colorado movie massacre trial tore into the state's 
governor at a news conference, calling him arrogant and weak for giving the 
mass murderer a reprieve from execution.

This was 2 years ago, and Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler 
was not talking about James Holmes, who last week was found guilty on all 
counts by a jury for fatally shooting 12 people and wounding 70 at a midnight 
premiere of a Batman film in July 2012.

At the time, Brauchler was responding to Governor John Hickenlooper's decision 
to grant a temporary reprieve in an earlier Denver-area mass killing. That case 
sheds light on the political sensitivities surrounding the ultimate punishment 
in Colorado.

On Wednesday, the jury which convicted Holmes on 165 counts of 1st-degree 
murder, attempted murder, and explosives charges begin the penalty phase of the 
trial. After hearing more weeks of testimony, they will decide if the 
California native is to be executed by lethal injection, or serve life in 
prison with no possibility of parole.

Colorado has executed just 1 inmate in nearly 50 years. Still, a Denver Post 
poll last year showed 63 % of state residents surveyed support the death 
penalty. In the case of Holmes, a separate poll by the newspaper this week 
showed an overwhelming 70 % favored execution for the former neuroscience 
graduate student. That poll had received more than 5,800 votes by Tuesday 
afternoon.

2 years ago, Brauchler called his news conference at the state Capitol to 
denounce Hickenlooper's granting of a so-called "temporary reprieve" to the 
state's longest-serving death row inmate. Nathan Dunlap was convicted in 1996 
of killing 4 workers at a pizza restaurant where he had recently been fired.

The temporary reprieve meant the governor's successor could reinstate Dunlap's 
death sentence, and the prosecutor decried the decision as indecisive, and 
"clemency light."

"You hear frustration and anger in my voice because those victims that have 
waited patiently for justice for 20 years will now wait for years more," 
Brauchler told reporters at the time.

In addition to Dunlap there are 2 other convicted murderers on Colorado's death 
row. All 2 African-American men were prosecuted by the same Arapahoe County 
District Attorney's office, and all attended the same suburban Denver high 
school.

But that is only part of the state's story with the death penalty. At least 4 
Colorado death sentences were overturned after the U.S Supreme Court ruled only 
juries could condemn an inmate to death. The ruling said laws in Colorado and 
other states were unconstitutional because they let judges impose the death 
sentence.

Another inmate's death sentence was commuted to life after it was learned 
jurors consulted a Bible during deliberations.

In another high-profile recent case, prosecutors sought the death penalty for 
Edward Montour, an inmate who was already serving a life sentence for killing 
his 11-week-old daughter. Montour beat corrections officer Eric Autobee to 
death with a ladle in a prison kitchen in 2002.

Acting as his own lawyer, Montour pleaded guilty to 1st-degree murder and was 
sentenced to death by a judge. The sentence was one of those overturned by the 
Supreme Court ruling against judge-imposed death sentences.

The case landed back in the district attorney's office, and Brauchler vowed to 
try Montour again and seek the death penalty.

But the saga took an unexpected twist when the victim's father, Robert Autobee, 
a former corrections officer, went public with his opposition to the execution 
of his son's killer.

Autobee, 60, launched a campaign against the death penalty and was soon 
embroiled in a war of words with Brauchler, who filed a motion seeking to have 
Autobee barred from testifying at Montour's trial.

And the case then took a further turn last year when Montour's new lawyers 
uncovered evidence that he may have been unjustly convicted in his daughter's 
death. The infant may have suffered from a medical condition, the lawyers said, 
and her father may not have inflicted her injuries.

Brauchler relented, and allowed Montour to plead guilty to killing the prison 
guard in exchange for a life sentence.

Autobee has since attended parts of the movie massacre trial, and one day sat 
with Holmes' parents, Arlene and Bob. Autobee said the gunman's mother 
contacted him after she read about his campaign to end the death penalty.

"I could feel their pain, and decided that if I'm going to be against the death 
penalty, I need to be visible," Autobee told Reuters by telephone.

(source: Reuters)






WASHINGTON:

Monfort may address the jury weighing his life or death


Closing arguments are expected to begin Wednesday in the penalty phase of 
Christopher Monfort's aggravated-murder trial. Jurors convicted him last month 
of killing a Seattle police officer in 2009 - and will next decide if he is 
sentenced to life in prison or to execution.

Before they begin their deliberations on whether he should be sentenced to life 
in prison or sent to death row, Christopher Monfort raised the possibility 
Tuesday that he may address jurors who convicted him last month of killing 
Seattle police Officer Timothy Brenton.

He expressed interest in exercising his right to allocution - to make an 
unsworn statement to the jury - after learning he wouldn???t be subject to 
cross-examination by the prosecution.

King County Superior Court Judge Ronald Kessler clarified, telling Monfort that 
he wouldn't be cross-examined unless he veered into discussing facts of the 
case.

"I make the call as to whether you cross that line," the judge told him.

Monfort, who was consulting with his defense team Tuesday afternoon, is to 
notify Kessler of his decision Wednesday morning.

The jury of 6 men and 6 women convicted Monfort June 5 of aggravated 1st-degree 
murder and 3 other felonies, rejecting his insanity defense, after hearing 
nearly 4 months of testimony since the trial began in late January.

The penalty phase of the trial started June 16, with the defense calling 32 
witnesses over 13 trial days in a bid to persuade jurors not to impose the 
death penalty.

The defense rested its case Tuesday morning, with closing arguments to begin 
Wednesday and likely continuing into Thursday.

Brenton's position as a police officer is the aggravating factor that made 
Monfort eligible for the death penalty. Aggravated murder is the only crime for 
which execution is a possible penalty.

But just as a criminal defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, life 
in prison without the possibility of release is the presumed sentence for 
capital murder - and death may be imposed only if the jury unanimously 
determines there are not sufficient mitigating circumstances to merit a life 
sentence.

A unanimous "no" verdict or a split decision will result in an automatic 
sentence of life in prison.

>From the outset of trial, the defense did not dispute that Monfort was guilty 
of killing Brenton or trying to kill his then-rookie partner, Britt Kelly (nee 
Sweeney), as the 2 sat in their patrol car on a residential street in Leschi on 
Halloween night 2009.

Nor did they dispute that Monfort set off pipe bombs that destroyed a handful 
of police vehicles at the city's Charles Street maintenance facility days 
before Brenton was killed, or that Monfort later tried to shoot Sgt. Gary 
Nelson, who was investigating a tip about the car used in Brenton's killing 
that led him and 2 other cops to Monfort's Tukwila apartment building.

Monfort was shot twice by police outside his apartment and paralyzed below the 
waist.

Instead, the defense focused on Monfort's mental state and argued that he 
suffered from a delusional disorder when he waged what prosecutors called a 
1-man war against the Seattle Police Department.

The jury rejected Monfort's insanity defense. Kessler also denied a defense 
motion to dismiss the charges based on insanity, ruling that while the defense 
proved by a preponderance of the evidence that Monfort suffers from a mental 
disease or defect - and that he believed that killing random police officers 
would halt instances of police brutality - Monfort knew the difference between 
right and wrong and knew his actions violated criminal law.

During the penalty phase, the defense called relatives, friends and experts to 
testify about Monfort's troubled childhood, dysfunctional family, mental-health 
issues and delayed psychological development.

On Tuesday, the defense tried once again to stop the case from going to the 
jury.

Defense attorney Todd Gruenhagen argued the state hadn't met its burden of 
proving there were not sufficient mitigating circumstances to warrant leniency 
- and therefore, Monfort's due-process rights would be violated if the death 
penalty wasn't dismissed.

"There wasn't torture, there wasn't pain and suffering ... Mercifully, there 
was an instant or near-instant death," he said of Brenton's killing.

"A verdict of death is going to be based on anger or vengeance or passion or 
prejudice," Gruenhagen said.

After asking a series of probing questions about the defense theory, Kessler 
denied the motion, saying he does not believe he has the discretion to dismiss 
the death penalty.

"If that's error and the matter is remanded, I will exercise the discretion 
ordered by the (state) Supreme Court," Kessler said.

(source: Seattle Times)






USA:

Holmes won't testify during penalty phase ---- Holmes says he wasn't pressured 
by lawyers in decision


James Holmes, who could be sentenced to death for killing 12 people in an 
Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, told the judge Tuesday he will not testify for 
himself during the penalty phase of the trial.

Holmes told Judge Carlos Samour he voluntarily made his decision and was not 
pressured by his lawyers.

The monthlong penalty phase of Holmes' trial is set to begin Wednesday.

The same jury that convicted him will deliberate during that phase. In 2013, 
the prosecution signaled it would seek the death penalty.

Holmes pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but the jury rejected that 
defense July 16 when it found Holmes guilty on 24 counts of murder and 140 
counts of attempted murder.

Additionally, he was found guilty of 1 count of possession or control of an 
explosive or incendiary device. He didn't testify for himself during the 1st 
phase of the trial.

Authorities said he killed 12 people and wounded 70 on July 20, 2012, when he 
opened fire in a crowded movie theater showing "The Dark Knight Rises."

Just after midnight, he started shooting with an AR-15 rifle, a 12-gauge 
shotgun and at least 1 .40 caliber handgun, authorities said. The shooting 
stopped with Holmes' arrest outside the theater about 7 minutes after the first 
911 calls were made to police.

(source: CNN)