[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----KAN., NEB., WYO., CALIF., WASH., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 24



KANSAS:

Life over death



A capital murder case on the other side of the state provides yet another 
reason why Kansas should join other states in abolishing the death penalty.

It would solve the predicament Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe 
faces in the case of Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., a known white supremacist 
accused of killing 3 people at 2 Jewish centers in suburban Kansas City. It was 
a hateful crime in April 2014. Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, had 
published anti-Semitic statements before going on a shooting spree that killed 
3 Christians.

People who commit the crimes Miller is accused of should not be walking the 
streets. He's offered to plead guilty, twice, which would save taxpayers 
thousands of dollars and keep the public safe.


Howe, however, has turned down those opportunities. He insists on pushing for 
the death penalty, claiming Miller should face the toughest penalty available 
under the law. He's right, of course. But that penalty should be life without 
the possibility of parole.

The case, and Howe's rejection of the plea offers, comes as Kansas marks the 
50th anniversary of its last execution. No case has seen a death sentence 
carried out since George York was hanged at the gallows on June 22, 1965.

Since then, we've seen Kansas abolish the death penalty in the 1970s and 
reinstate it in 1994. Not only has no one been executed; no death sentence 
since 1994 has stood up on initial appeal.

Meanwhile, costs continue to rise for a state already strapped by budget 
constraints.

A study last year showed that during the previous decade the state spent an 
average of $395,762 on trials and appeals for cases with the death penalty. 
That compares to $98,963 for trials where defendants faced the same charge, 
capital murder, but prosecutors decided not to seek death.

After being convicted, inmates are sent to the El Dorado Correctional Facility 
to be held in administrative segregation while awaiting a death sentence. 
Others go into the general population to serve out a sentence that will never 
end, because there will be no parole. It costs $49,380 per year to keep an 
inmate in segregation, compared to $24,690 in the general population. In 
Kansas, 10 people remain on death row.

Frazier Glenn Miller is not going to be executed. The chronic emphysema he has 
will be what kills him. In states such as California, which like Kansas has a 
death chamber that has never been used, people are more likely to die from 
natural causes on death row than at the hand of the state.

Meanwhile, those who have lost loved ones at the hands of ruthless killers must 
endure years of appeals and waiting for justice to be carried out. Let's not 
put them through any more misery.

Kansas should enact life without parole as the sentence for the worst crimes. 
Lock them up for good and be done with it, joining 19 other states that no 
longer have the death penalty.

That way, prosecutors could seek the toughest penalty on the books, without 
years of suffering for everyone involved in seeking a penalty that isn't likely 
to ever be imposed.

(source: Hutchinson News)








NEBRASKA:

Gov. Ricketts: No intention of canceling order for lethal injection drugs



Gov. Pete Ricketts says he has no intention of canceling the order for lethal 
injection drugs, despite the statewide ban.

The death penalty drugs cost the state $54,000. A broker in India has not 
shipped them yet.

2 federal agencies told KETV NewsWatch 7 they will not allow them inside the 
U.S.

Ricketts still thinks he can get the drugs.

"We do need the death penalty to protect the public safety," Ricketts said. "So 
we're not even looking at options regarding canceling the checks, because we 
think it's important to get the drugs imported."

Ricketts also supports the effort to place the issue on next year's ballot. 
Nebraskans for Public Safety needs 115,000 valid petition signatures by August.

(source: KETV news)

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

Death penalty debate heating up in Nebraska



The debate over the death penalty is heating up in Nebraska. As hundreds of 
volunteers fan out across the state to collect signatures to get the repeal on 
the November 2016 ballot, a new campaign to keep the penalty off the book 
officially launches.

Nebraskans for Public Safety launched a new commercial on social media Monday. 
It then hit the airwaves Tuesday morning.

"We're encouraging Nebraska voters to get educated, to think about the issue 
deeply," said Danielle Conrad.

Conrad, who is the spokeswoman for the group, says the ad is about education 
and starting a conversation about the death penalty.

The ad features Lincoln Senator Colby Coach, who identifies himself as a fiscal 
conservative Republican pro-life senator. It also features 2 Nebraska voters.

"I think that the majority of Nebraskans are ready to move forward and we're 
going to continue thoughtful public education efforts to help them do just 
that," said Conrad.

The "Decline to Sign" campaign was started as a response to a petition drive 
underway across the state. Nebraskans for the Death Penalty are working to get 
enough signatures to place the death penalty on the November 2016 ballot.

"We just want to put it on the ballot, people can say yes or not in November of 
2016, but it's Nebraskans right to do that," said Rod Edwards with Nebraskans 
for the Death Penalty.

Edwards says about 300 volunteers are spread out across the state to gather 
signatures. They want the penalty, which lawmakers voted to repeal in May, back 
on the book.

The group needs to collect 57,000 signatures to get the referendum on the 
ballot by August 27th. If they get at least 115,000 valid signatures, it will 
keep the bill from going into effect.

"We have people who are opposed to the death penalty sign it, we actually have 
a couple volunteers passing out the petition because they believe Nebraskans 
should have the right to vote on this issue," said Edwards.

(source: scrippsmedia.com)








WYOMING:

Judge sets hearing on Eaton death penalty issue



A federal judge in Cheyenne will hold a hearing to consider whether the state 
of Wyoming may still pursue the death penalty against a man convicted of 
murdering a Montana woman.

U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson of Cheyenne will hear from lawyers 
representing inmate Dale Wayne Eaton and the Wyoming Attorney General's Office 
next Tuesday.

Johnson in November overturned Eaton's death sentence in the 1988 rape and 
killing of 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell of Billings, Montana.

A federal appeals court in May noted the state hadn't followed Johnson's 
instructions to appoint lawyers for Eaton and file notice within 120 days if it 
intended to seek the death penalty against him again. The appeals court ordered 
Johnson to decide if the state could still seek the death penalty.

(source: Associated Press)








CALIFORNIA:

US Supreme Court overturns death row appeal



Last week, the United States Supreme Court overturned the appeal of death row 
inmate Hector Ayala. The case offers a glimpse - behind a veneer of sterile and 
convoluted legal procedures - of the real workings of America's ham-fisted 
regime of institutionalized murder known as "capital punishment."

At Ayala's criminal trial, the prosecutor brazenly struck all of the potential 
black and Hispanic jurors from the jury pool, and the judge excluded Ayala's 
attorney from the hearings regarding these removals. While this conduct was 
clearly unconstitutional, the Supreme Court decided last week by a vote of 5 to 
4 that it was "harmless."

The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito invoked the authoritarian and 
chillingly named "Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996" 
(AEDPA). Expressly designed to "streamline" the process of state killings, 
among other things, the AEDPA erects numerous procedural and substantive 
obstacles to legal appeals by inmates on death row.

The AEDPA imposes strict limits on the writ of habeas corpus, the historic 
procedural vehicle for challenging the legality of a prisoner's confinement. 
Under the AEDPA, even if the constitution was violated in a state criminal 
proceeding, the prisoner can only successfully challenge his conviction in 
federal court if he or she can prove that the error was "contrary to clearly 
established federal law" or an "unreasonable application" of that law. In the 
intervening years, the Supreme Court has further narrowed the availability of 
habeas corpus, imposing additional arbitrary legal doctrines and standards that 
prevent condemned prisoners from challenging their convictions.

Joined by the usual suspects - Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, 
Anthony Kennedy, and John Roberts - Justice Samuel Alito wrote that even if the 
constitution was violated in Ayala's trial, the violations were "harmless." The 
Supreme Court's decision reverses a decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of 
Appeals, which had sided with Ayala.

The Davis v. Ayala case arises from the prosecution of Ayala for the attempted 
robbery of an automobile body shop in San Diego, California, in April 1985. 
Ayala was charged with multiple counts of murder and robbery, and the 
prosecution announced that it would seek the death penalty.

During jury selection in Ayala's trial, the prosecution peremptorily (i.e., 
without giving reasons) struck all seven of the African Americans and Hispanics 
who were available for service on the jury. There were already a 
disproportionately low number of such jurors in the jury pool, and Ayala, who 
is Hispanic, objected to these exclusions as racially motivated.

In a case called Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Supreme Court imposed limits on 
this kind of overt racist jury-packing, a hated practice with a long history in 
many areas of the country, After the Batson case, prosecutors were ostensibly 
required to give race-neutral rationales for striking non-white jurors. 
Notwithstanding this requirement, the deliberate removal of non-white jurors by 
prosecutors in criminal cases remains a systematic and widespread practice. (As 
justifications, prosecutors simply point vaguely to the "demeanor" of jurors or 
other pretexts.)

The judge in Ayala's trial then excluded Ayala's attorney from hearings that 
were conducted in private with the prosecutor, over the attorney's objections, 
during which the judge approved of the removal of all of the black and Hispanic 
jurors.

As dissenters Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena 
Kagan pointed out, these 1-sided private meetings violated a fundamental 
principle of legal procedure, that it must be an "an adversary proceeding in 
which both parties may participate."

The dissenters highlighted the prosecutor's obvious attempt to clear the jury 
of non-white jurors. Prospective juror Oleanders D., who was black, wrote on a 
jury questionnaire that "he does not believe" in the death penalty, and this 
was the supposed reason the prosecutor peremptorily struck him from the jury. 
Meanwhile, white juror Ana L. was seated on the jury even though she wrote, "I 
don't believe in taking a life." The fact that the prosecutor struck black 
juror Oleanders D. and not white juror Ana L., even though their responses were 
indistinguishable, exposed the prosecutor's supposed "race-neutral" rationale 
as a pretext.

The Ayala case also illustrates how the judicial process of "capital 
punishment" tramples over the more humane sentiments of the population. Jurors 
who are opposed to the death penalty at the outset are systematically excluded 
or browbeaten into submission.

For example, asked whether she "would like to serve as a juror and why," juror 
Ana L. initially said, "no - If I am selected as a juror and all jurors voted 
for the death penalty I probably would not be able to vote for the death 
penalty." However, both Ana L. and Olanders D. later changed their positions 
under intense pressure to the "correct" one, indicating that they would be 
willing to consider imposing the death penalty on Ayala.

The Supreme Court's opinion regarding the "harmlessness" of constitutional 
violations in a death penalty case comes amid a wave of exonerations of death 
row inmates and those serving long sentences in the US. In April, Anthony Ray 
Hinton was released after spending 28 years on death row in Alabama. In March, 
64-year-old Glenn Ford was released after spending 30 years in a brutal Angola 
penitentiary.

According to the Innocence Project, a total of 18 prisoners awaiting execution 
on death row have been proven innocent and exonerated through DNA testing. 
There have been more than 300 total DNA exonerations in the US, but this likely 
represents only the tip of the iceberg. The United States incarcerates nearly 
2.3 million adults, of whom more than 3,000 are on death row awaiting 
execution.

In their arguments to the Supreme Court, Hector Ayala's attorneys revealed that 
he has spent most of the last 25 years in "administrative segregation," or 
solitary confinement - a crime in itself, and certainly a violation of the 
spirit of the Eighth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, which prohibits 
"cruel and unusual punishment."

While agreeing with the majority that the constitutional violations in Ayala's 
case were "harmless," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote separately to call 
attention to the Guantanamo-like conditions of Ayala's confinement. Ayala, he 
wrote, has likely "been held for all or most of the past 20 years or more in a 
windowless cell no larger than a typical parking spot for 23 hours a day; and 
in the one hour when he leaves it, he likely is allowed little or no 
opportunity for conversation or interaction with anyone."

In his concurring opinion, Kennedy referred to the case of Kaleif Browder, and 
he cited Fyodor Dostoevsky's observation: "The degree of civilization in a 
society can be judged by entering its prisons." Kennedy was clearly responding 
to popular outrage at the barbaric conditions inside the country's prisons, 
which serve to expose and discredit the entire judicial system.

The embittered, corrupt, and fascistic Justice Clarence Thomas - who very 
seldom speaks or writes anything - penned a separate concurring opinion to 
respond to Kennedy. Thomas angrily declared that "the accommodations in which 
Ayala is housed are a far sight more spacious than those in which his victims 
... now rest. And, given that his victims were all 31 years of age or under, 
Ayala will soon have had as much or more time to enjoy those accommodations as 
his victims had time to enjoy this Earth." In other words, according to Justice 
Thomas - vindictive mistreatment of prisoners is encouraged, and anyway hurry 
up with the execution!

Justice Thomas, who would be perfectly comfortable presiding on the Supreme 
Court of a police state dictatorship, penned a separate tirade in the death 
penalty case of Kevan Brumfield, decided on the same day. Brumfield???s 
attorneys claimed that he was denied a hearing as to whether he was mentally 
disabled, which would have taken the death penalty off the table. Justice 
Thomas responded with an unhinged rant full of graphic details of the 
underlying crime, and a bizarre advertisement of the memoir of the victim's 
son, Warrick Dunn, who apparently had a successful football career.

Thomas wrote, "Like Brumfield, Warrick's father was not a part of his life. 
But, unlike Brumfield, Warrick did not use the absence of a father figure as a 
justification for murder. Instead, he recognized that his mother had been 'the 
family patriarch' when she was alive, and that he had a responsibility to take 
on that role after her death at 37."

Even Justices Alito and Roberts, who joined part of Thomas's dissent, sought to 
distance themselves from Thomas's gratuitous and unjudicial moralizing: "I do 
not want to suggest that it is essential to the legal analysis in this case." 
The embarrassing antics of Justice Thomas are an expression of the degeneration 
of the judiciary in the US, in the context of the collapse of democratic 
institutions more generally.

The Supreme Court's decision last week clears the way for Ayala's death 
sentence to be carried out. Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision, the fact 
that a condemned prisoner's constitutional rights were violated during his 
trial does not present a problem in terms of moving ahead with the execution.

(source: World Socialist Web Site)








WASHINGTON:

Prosecutors 'completely open' to death-penalty talks with Michele Anderson's 
attorneys



Prosecutors may be willing to talk to attorneys for Carnation murder defendant 
Michele Anderson about the possibility of taking the death penalty off the 
table.

Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg is "is completely open to conversations" 
about potentially altering his office's efforts to seek the death penalty 
against Anderson if she is convicted, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Scott O'Toole 
said Tuesday during a case-setting hearing.

O'Toole told King County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ramsdell that Anderson's 
defense attorneys had written prosecutors a letter requesting a meeting.

While Satterberg may be willing to meet with Anderson's attorneys, he cautioned 
that it does not necessarily indicate the prosecutor's office will change 
course.

In addition, O'Toole said Satterberg will not engage in such a conversation 
until after the conclusion of Christopher Monfort's capital trial.

Monfort was convicted earlier this month of killing Seattle police Officer 
Timothy Brenton in October 2009. A jury is now hearing testimony in the penalty 
phase of his trial that will determine whether Monfort is sentenced to life 
without parole or death.

"It would be premature," O'Toole said of talking with Anderson's attorneys 
while the Monfort case is still before a jury.

Anderson, 36, who is accused of killing 6 members of her family in rural 
Carnation on Christmas Eve 2007, appeared in court Tuesday for the 1st time 
since her former boyfriend and co-defendant was convicted and sentenced to life 
in prison.

Anderson is accused of killing her parents, Wayne, 60, and Judy Anderson, 61; 
her brother, Scott, and his wife, Erica Anderson, both 32; and the younger 
couple's children, 5-year-old Olivia and 3-year-old Nathan on Dec, 24, 2007. 
The 6 people were killed as they gathered at Wayne and Judy Anderson's 
Carnation-area home for a holiday celebration.

If convicted, Anderson would face 1 of 2 possible sentences: death or life in 
prison without parole.


Her former boyfriend, Joseph McEnroe, was convicted in March of participating 
in the murders. In May, a King County jury spared his life and sentenced him to 
life in prison without parole.

McEnroe is appealing his sentence.

During McEnroe's trial, prosecutors said Anderson enlisted him to participate 
in the killings because she was angry that her parents wanted the couple to pay 
rent for the trailer they lived in on the family's property. Anderson also 
believed that her brother owed her money for a car, prosecutors said.

McEnroe's defense team claimed Anderson wielded such psychological control over 
him that he was essentially powerless to defy her plans to kill her family.

During a jailhouse interview with The Seattle Times in June 2008, Anderson said 
she and McEnroe committed the slayings and indicated she wanted to be executed. 
She has subsequently pleaded not guilty.

Anderson's attorneys said at Tuesday's hearing that Anderson has refused to 
speak with them for more than a year despite multiple attempts to see her. The 
defense team did not respond in court to O'Toole's statements about his 
office's position on the death penalty, nor could they be reached for comment 
afterward.

Reached by phone, O'Toole said he has not talked with the victims' relatives 
about the defense request for a meeting and said it is too early to speculate 
on possible outcomes.

"We take (the defense) request very seriously, but it's also a very standard 
procedure and no one should read too much into it," he said.

He did, however, confirm that if the death penalty were not sought, the only 
sentencing option for Anderson if she were convicted would be life in prison 
without the possibility of parole.

Anderson's next court appearance is scheduled for July 29.

(source: Seattle Times)








USA:

Boston bomber to be formally sentenced to death



A US federal judge will formally sentence Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to 
death at a court hearing today when the 21-year-old former student will be 
offered the chance to speak.

Tsarnaev kept silent throughout his trial, which ended with the jury sentencing 
him to death on 15 May.

Victims and their relatives are expected to address the court.

Judge George O'Toole will then officially hand down the sentence, reached 
unanimously by the 12-person jury.

Tsarnaev expressed little emotion throughout his 12-week trial despite 
harrowing testimony and grisly video footage.

Neither has he expressed any public remorse, although a prominent Catholic nun, 
Sister Helen Prejean, who visited him in jail, said that he did to her.

"No one deserves to suffer like they did," she quoted him as saying.

The 15 April 2013 double bombings at the Boston Marathon were one of the worst 
assaults on American soil since the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Carried out by Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan, the bombs killed 3 
people and wounded 264 others, including 17 who lost limbs, near the finish 
line at the northeastern city's popular marathon.

It took the jury more than 14 hours to choose death rather than life 
imprisonment for Tsarnaev on 6 counts.

It was a stinging defeat to the defence, who argued for a "lost kid" who would 
never have committed such horrors without being manipulated by his older 
brother.

The brothers went on the run and killed a police officer, before Tamerlan was 
shot dead and Tsarnaev arrested, 4 days later.

He was found, injured, in a grounded boat on which he had scrawled a bloody 
message defending the attacks as a means to avenge US wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan.

Only 3 out of 12 jurors said he acted under Tamerlan's influence or that 
Tamerlan directed the bombings, while only 1 juror determined he was unlikely 
to commit or incite acts of violence while serving a life sentence.

The jury also rejected arguments from his defence team that he was the product 
of a chaotic family life, with a mentally ill father and his parents returning 
to Russia in 2012.

He is of Chechen descent, came to the United States as a child and took 
citizenship in 2012.

During the trial, government prosecutors argued Tsarnaev was a remorseless 
terrorist who deserved to die and declared that life imprisonment would be the 
"minimum" punishment.

The death sentence was possible only under federal law.

The state of Massachusetts outlawed capital punishment in 1947 and opinion 
polls had suggested residents favoured a life sentence for Tsarnaev.

Tsarnaev will then be flown to either America's only "super-max" prison, ADX 
Florence, in Colorado or to the penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana where male 
inmates sit on federal death row.

(source: RTE)

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

Prosecutors question whether judge may have appearance of bias in death penalty 
case



A federal prosecutor said Wednesday that he wants to investigate a US judge's 
relationship with a potential witness in the death penalty trial of Gary Lee 
Sampson, questioning whether the relationship creates the appearance of a 
conflict of interest - 1 of the factors that would force the judge to remove 
himself from the case.

Assistant US Attorney Zachary Hafer told US Senior District Judge Mark L. Wolf 
during a hearing Wednesday that his office has not determined whether to ask 
the judge to recuse himself, but Hafer said the request to look into the 
judge's ties to the witness - a prisons expert whom Wolf once invited to his 
home - was based in part on ongoing concerns about the judge's appearance of a 
lack of impartiality in the case.

Sampson, now 55, pleaded guilty a decade ago to the 2001 carjacking and killing 
of 3 people in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and a federal jury sentenced 
him to death.

Wolf ordered a new sentencing trial in 2011, however, after finding that 1 of 
the original jurors who decided Sampson's sentence had lied on a questionnaire 
about her past experiences with law enforcement. The judge said he would have 
excluded her from the trial had he known, and a federal Appeals Court upheld 
his decision. A new sentencing trial is now slated for September.

Wolf disclosed last week that he spoke on a panel in July 2014 with a potential 
witness in the case, James Gilligan, who has studied the country's prison 
systems. The panel was related to the screening of a film - produced by a 
family friend of Wolf - in Martha's Vineyard that was also about the prison 
system. Wolf also had Gilligan over to his Vineyard home for a lobster roll 
before the screening.

Wolf said Friday and during a hearing Wednesday that he did not recognize at 
the time that Gilligan had filed an affidavit in the Sampson case years 
earlier, part of a lengthy record of submissions by Sampson's defense team. He 
also said he recently recognized that his relationship with Gilligan could pose 
an appearance of a conflict, but he did not raise the issue until the defense 
team decided it may call Gilligan as a witness.

Responding to a request for input by the judge, Hafer said Wednesday that he 
now wants to investigate the judge's relationship with Gilligan, noting that 
Gilligan would be an expert witness on the country's prison conditions - 
offering testimony that could be a key element of Sampson's defense arguments 
against the death penalty. Sampson has argued that he suffered from mental 
illness that was exacerbated by his years of being incarcerated in poor 
conditions.

Hafer asked for a video of the film that the judge screened, and any video 
footage of the panel that Wolf and Gilligan were on. "This was a screening on a 
topic that is very germane to the issues in this case, at a time when the case 
was being aggressively litigated," Hafer said. "We'd like to see it before we 
take a position on what we believe ... is the appropriate course."

In recent years, family members of some of Sampson's murder victims have 
criticized the judge's decision to grant Sampson a new trial, alleging Wolf did 
so because he is against the death penalty. The judge has said in past hearings 
that any decisions he makes are based solely on the law and Sampson's right to 
a fair trial.

Hafer argued Wednesday that Wolf's comments in past hearings and in news 
articles fueled concerns the judge would not be impartial. Hafer did not argue 
that the judge has a conflict, but said he would look into whether there is an 
appearance that the judge may have one - 1 of the factors that could be 
sufficient to force the judge to step aside from the case.

"The analysis for us is whether a reasonable person informed of these facts 
would have a reasonable basis to question your impartiality in these 
proceedings," Hafer said, adding that Gilligan "is known to be a zealous 
advocate on ... issues that are going to come up in litigation."

(source: Milton J. Valencia, Boston Globe)