[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OHIO, OKLA., NEV., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 26



OHIO:

Ohio Gets a 3rd Chance to Kill Michael Keenan ----A case so messy 1 judge says 
it's an argument for abolishing the death penalty.



This morning an Ohio capital case with an extraordinarily complicated history 
became more complicated yet, as the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a man accused 
of a murder 3 decades ago can be tried for a 3rd time, despite the court's 
misgivings about the prosecution's misconduct and the prospects of the 
defendant ever receiving a fair trial.

"By our count, at least 40 judicial decisions have been rendered in this case 
since the original murder conviction in 1989. Nevertheless, more are in the 
offing," the court wrote in the majority opinion of its 4-3 ruling.

Reflecting how twisted this case has become, Justice Paul Pfeifer, who wrote 
the majority opinion saying Keenan could be tried again, took the rare step of 
adding a concurring opinion - in which he said this particular legal debacle 
underscored the need for Ohio to abolish the death penalty. If the majority 
opinion is the story, the concurring opinion is the editorial. In it, Pfeifer, 
a Republican who has been on the court since 1993, noted that the defendant, 
Michael Keenan, might well have been executed before it ever came to light that 
prosecutors had concealed evidence undermining their case.

"It would be an unspeakable travesty if the great state of Ohio were to execute 
a defendant and then determine that it had done so based on deliberate 
prosecutorial misconduct," Pfeifer wrote, adding: "If he had been executed, 
there would have been no way for the state to cleanse itself from the awful 
reality of having executed a person who had not received his full measure of 
legal protection."

Keenan, 65, has been free since 2012 and now lives out of state. He was 
convicted and condemned in the murder of Anthony Klann, whose body was found in 
1988 in a Cleveland park. Beginning with the original trial in 1989, Keenan's 
case became a legal odyssey marked by misconduct or missteps by the prosecution 
and defense alike.

Keenan's 1st conviction was overturned in 1993 because of what the Ohio Supreme 
Court called the prosecutor's "histrionic" conduct at trial, which included 
calling the defendant an "animal," denigrating the defense attorneys as hired 
guns, presenting an argument that amounted to guilt by association, and, in 
front of the jury, taking a large knife and stabbing it into a courtroom table.

In 1994, Keenan was tried again, convicted again, and condemned again. After 
losing his appeals in state court, Keenan turned to federal court - where his 
appellate counsel made a critical mistake, missing a 1-year deadline for filing 
Keenan's habeas corpus petition. (An investigation published last year by The 
Marshall Project and The Washington Post found that Keenan's was among at least 
80 capital cases nationally where the deadline was blown, jeopardizing the 
condemned inmates' crucial, final appeals in federal court.)

In this instance, the federal courts decided to forgive the missed deadline, 
allowing Keenan's appeal to be heard. Had they not, Keenan might have been 
executed.

In 2012, a U.S. District Court judge overturned Keenan's 2nd conviction, 
finding that prosecutors committed "egregious" misconduct by withholding 
evidence that could have been used to impeach the credibility of police 
detectives and other prosecution witnesses.

After that ruling, Keenan's counsel asked that prosecutors be barred from 
trying Keenan a 3rd time. But in its ruling today, the Ohio Supreme Court 
refused to take that dramatic step, despite noting the toll taken by the 
passage of time. At least 5 witnesses in the case have died since Keenan's 
original trial in 1989.

Indicative of how much the state's case has unraveled, Joe D'Ambrosio, a 
co-defendant of Keenan's who was prosecuted with much the same evidence, had 
his conviction and death sentence thrown out in 2006 - and was released from 
prison 4 years later, after a federal judge barred prosecutors from retrying 
him.

Although they can now go forward with a 3rd trial against Keenan, prosecutors 
have yet to decide if they will, said Reanna Karousis, a spokesperson for the 
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office. "It's under review," she told The Marshall 
Project.

As for Pfeifer - the justice who wrote both the majority opinion allowing 
prosecutors to proceed and a concurring opinion urging the legislature to 
abandon the death penalty - this is not the 1st time he has made this plea to 
lawmakers.

In 2011 he spoke in opposition to capital punishment while testifying before 
the House Criminal Justice Committee in Columbus, saying the death penalty is 
applied so unevenly as to be a "death lottery." Pfeifer previously served in 
the legislature - and helped write the death-penalty law that he now wants to 
see repealed.

(source: themarshallproject.org)

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

Judge rules man convicted in New Franklin sledgehammer murders mentally fit for 
execution



A judge ruled Thursday that the man convicted of bludgeoning a prominent New 
Franklin Township couple to death is mentally fit for execution.

Summit County Judge Tom Parker will make the decision Monday whether he will 
adopt the jury's recommendation that Shawn Ford be put on death row for the 
slayings or if he will sentence Ford to prison.

Parker ruled in an 18-page decision on Thursday that Ford's intellectual 
ability is above the standard that bars executions of people with IQs of 70 or 
less.

3 experts - 1 for the defense, 1 for prosecutors and 1 for the court - all 
testified during a 2-day hearing that Ford, 18, of Akron, does not meet the 
legal definition of intellectually disabled.

"Based on the evidence contained in the trial record, in the pretrial 
proceedings, and introduced at the Atkins hearing, the court finds that the 
defendant has not met his burden of proving that he had significantly 
subaverage intellectual functioning or significant limitations in 2 or more 
adaptive skills, at any time before the age of 18," Parker wrote.

Defense expert James Karpawich, a Hudson psychologist, testified that Ford 
likely has a mental impairment but his IQ is too high to be considered 
disabled.

2 other experts - Siliva O'Bradovich of the Summit Psychological Associates and 
the court's expert, Katie Connell of the PsychoDiagnostic Clinic - testified 
that they believe that Ford was eligible for the death penalty based on recent 
tests, his previous scores and school records.

They also testified that they believe 2 of Ford's IQ scores that fell below 70 
were due to his inattention or were purposefully low.

"Whatever other value those studies may have had when conducted, they did not 
lead either evaluator - or anyone since - to conclude that Mr. Ford was 
intellectually disabled," Parker wrote.

Defense attorneys raised the issue after the jury convicted Ford of the murders 
and recommended the death penalty.

If Parker sentences Ford to death, the case will automatically be appealed up 
to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Ford was convicted of aggravated murder for the 2013 slayings of Jeffrey and 
Margaret Schobert, the parents of his ex-girlfriend. The jury then recommended 
he be sentenced to death.

(source: cleveland.com)








OKLAHOMA:

Survivor of Moore beheading attempt says it 'ruined my life'



The survivor of a beheading attempt said in a nationally televised interview 
Wednesday night that the attack on her at a Moore food distribution plant last 
year "kind of ruined my life."

"I'm not the same. I try to be, but I just can't right now," Traci J. Johnson 
said in the interview on Fox News' "The Kelly File."

"I just, I think about it every day. It goes through my head every day, but I 
try to black it out and it doesn't work," she said.

Johnson, now 44, of Oklahoma City, had worked at Vaughan Foods for only four 
days when she was attacked Sept. 25.

Prosecutors allege a plant worker, Alton Alexander Nolen, 30, of Moore, acted 
out of revenge shortly after he was suspended for making racial remarks. Police 
reported in a court affidavit Nolen "openly admitted" he beheaded co-worker 
Colleen Hufford with a large knife and attempted to behead Johnson.

Cleveland County District Attorney Greg Mashburn revealed in September that 
Johnson was the one who had complained about racial remarks.

"There was an altercation about him not liking white people. There was some 
back-and-forth conversation with Miss Johnson and that led her to make the 
complaint with the HR department," the district attorney said.

In the interview with Fox News, Johnson said, "He started slicing my neck. And 
got a hold of my face, and got a hold of my right index finger, and wouldn't 
stop - and I'm screaming for help and didn't think anybody was going to come 
around."

She was saved when Mark Vaughan, the chief operating officer of Vaughan Foods 
and a reserve Oklahoma County sheriff's deputy, shot her attacker.

"He got a millimeter away from my jugular cord," Johnson said.

She said what happened to Hufford "just tore me up."

'Still bothers me'

"It still bothers me to this day," she said in the interview done earlier this 
month. "I am going to be honest with you, I feel like is my fault because of 
what happened, but everybody tells me it's not."

Johnson actually was employed by 1st Staffing Group USA, a temp-to-hire 
service, at the time of the attack. She couldn't work and was paid $352 a week 
in workers' compensation benefits for total temporary disability for months, 
but those payments have now ended.

Nolen, a Muslim convert, is charged with 1st-degree murder and 5 assault 
counts. His case is on hold as he undergoes examinations to determine if he is 
mentally competent. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Johnson has spoken only a few times about the attack. She said last year she 
doesn't want media attention.

For a video honoring Vaughan, she told the sheriff's office last year, "That 
man is my hero. ... If Mark wouldn't have heard me scream ... I'd probably be 
dead, underground right now. ... It's because of him I'm on this Earth."

In an interview that aired last December on KWTV-9, she said, "I have extremely 
hard days, where sometimes I want to give up. ... They say I have a thing 
called survivor's guilt and that's because of what has happened, and I feel 
like a lot of this is my fault."

(source: Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise)








NEVADA:

Death sentence upheld in 2006 drive-thru slaying



A divided Nevada Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the murder conviction and 
death sentence of Timothy "Stone" Burnside in the 2006 fatal shooting of a 
former professional basketball player as he waited at the drive-thru of a Jack 
in the Box in Henderson.

A Clark County jury in 2010 found Burnside guilty of 1st-degree murder with use 
of a deadly weapon and other felonies in the death of Kenneth Hardwick. The 
jury also sentenced him to death.

Burnside's co-defendant, Derrick "Suave" McKnight, 31, was also found guilty of 
1st-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon and sentenced to life without 
parole. Prosecutors alleged McKnight drove the getaway vehicle.

Hardwick played professional basketball in the Continental Basketball League in 
France, Holland and Ecuador.

Authorities said the shooting was part of a scheme to rob Hardwick, a plan that 
originated at the Foundation Room nightclub at Mandalay Bay.

The 2-week trial featured video footage of Burnside and McKnight following 
Hardwick from the club and to his vehicle as he left Mandalay Bay in the early 
morning hours of Dec. 5, 2006.

Once at the Jack in the Box, Burnside shot at Hardwick 8 times and then stole a 
silver cigar case, authorities said. Hardwick died at the scene.

Burnside's conviction and sentence were automatically appealed to the Supreme 
Court for review.

In the decision written by Justice Mark Gibbons, the 5-member court majority 
acknowledged that a prior felony conviction for attempted battery was 
improperly used as an aggravating circumstance by prosecutors in seeking the 
death penalty.

But the improper use of the aggravator does not warrant reversal of the death 
sentence because there were no offsetting circumstances presented in Burnside's 
favor that were accepted by the jury, the court said.

Other claims brought by Burnside's attorneys seeking a new trial or penalty 
hearing were rejected as well.

In his dissent, Justice Michael Cherry argued that a new penalty hearing was 
warranted because of what he said was an erroneous jury instruction regarding 
mitigating circumstances.

There were 17 mitigating circumstances offered to the jury regarding a lack of 
parental involvement, Burnside's exposure to criminals and violence at an early 
age and other factors, Cherry said. But the jury, due likely to the flawed jury 
instruction regarding mitigation circumstances, found none of the circumstances 
as being relevant to its sentencing determination, he said.

Other errors also warrant a new penalty hearing, including the erroneous 
admission of 2 pieces of evidence, Cherry said.

Justice Nancy Saitta dissented as well, also citing what she called an 
erroneous mitigating circumstance jury instruction.

(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)








CALIFORNIA:

Anaheim man accused of stabbing wife, 6-month-old son facing murder charges; 
death penalty possible



An Anaheim man is facing murder charges after authorities say he stabbed his 
wife and the couple's 6-month-old son to death with a kitchen knife during an 
argument Monday.

Kwame Adom Carpenter, 24, was charged Thursday with 2 felony counts of murder 
with special circumstances for committing multiple murders, and a sentencing 
enhancement for personal use of a deadly weapon.

Kimani G. Patrick, a spokesman for the family of the victims, said at a news 
conference Thursday an Anaheim police detective told the family Carpenter has 
confessed to killing his wife, 24-year-old Moureen Gathua-Carpenter, and 
6-month-old son, Kyan Gathua-Carpenter.

If convicted, Carpenter faces a minimum sentence of life without the 
possibility of parole.

The decision to charge him with a special circumstances murder opens the 
possibility of Carpenter landing on death row, although prosecutors have not 
yet decided whether or not to pursue the death penalty.

Shortly after noon Thursday, Carpenter appeared in a courtroom at the Central 
Jail Complex in Santa Ana, but did not enter a plea.

He quietly answered several questions from a judge with a simple "yes." He 
appeared to have his head down for most of the hearing.

Meantime, during Thursday's news conference in Anaheim, Gathua-Carpenter's 
mother, Miram David, who lived with her daughter and grandson, stood silently 
with family and friends while Patrick spoke to reporters.

Gathua-Carpenter immigrated to the U.S. from Kenya with a hope for a bright 
future and plans of becoming a nurse, Patrick said.

"She was determined to make the best of the American dream," he said.

Jimmie Kariuki Gathua, who is Gathua-Carpenter's brother, said while his family 
is mourning her death they are also celebrating her short life.

"It's not how long you live, it's how you live," he told reporters. "She was 
always happy and had a smile."

Prosecutors allege that the fatal confrontation stemmed from a verbal argument 
around noon on Monday between Carpenter and his wife at the Anaheim apartment 
the couple shared with their infant son.

According to an Orange County District Attorney's office statement, during the 
argument, mother picked up her baby and then Carpenter is accused of stabbing 
both of them with a kitchen knife.

Anaheim officers who responded to a 911 call found the mother and son suffering 
from stab wounds. The woman died at the scene, while the baby died at a 
hospital.

On Tuesday afternoon, Santa Ana officers spotted Carpenter sleeping in the back 
seat of a vehicle in a parking lot at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital.

Authorities say Carpenter drove away from the officers, one of whom fired his 
weapon. No one was struck.

The pursuit ended when Carpenter crashed at Miles Square Park, then jumped into 
a lake in a failed attempt to get away from police. He was arrested, then taken 
to a hospital to be treated for a bite from a police dog.

Carpenter is being held without bail. He is expected to return to court on July 
17.

Funeral arrangements for Gathua-Carpenter and her son are pending until her 
father and other relatives obtain visas to travel from Kenya to the U.S., 
Patrick said.

A fundraising event to help the family cover funeral expenses will be held 
Saturday at 1 p.m. at Brookhurst Community Park at 2271 W. Crescent Ave., 
Anaheim.

(source: Orange County Register)

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

Gov. Brown appoints warden at San Quentin State Prison



Gov. Jerry Brown has appointed a 20-year corrections veteran as the new warden 
of San Quentin State Prison, the oldest and most famous of California???s 
penitentiaries.

Ronald Davis, 45, has been acting warden since December while his appointment 
was being vetted. The prison has had about three dozen wardens since it opened 
in 1852, along with numerous acting wardens.

"It's amazing to be a part of the history of San Quentin," Davis said 
Wednesday. "That was part of the draw coming here - everybody worldwide knows 
San Quentin."

Davis started in the corrections department in 1994 after 6 years in the Navy 
and a year as a nuclear power plant operator. He rose from the rank-and-file 
into higher positions while working at the state prisons in Soledad, Corcoran, 
Avenal and Chowchilla.

Davis was the warden of Valley State Prison in Chowchilla from 2012 to 2014.

"He is a strong and innovative leader who understands the importance of 
ensuring offenders receive effective rehabilitation and treatment so if and 
when they are released, they can transition successfully into our communities," 
Scott Kernan, undersecretary of the state prisons department, said in a 
statement. "I'm confident he will continue to work tirelessly to guide and 
inspire our staff, inmates and the many volunteers at San Quentin."

Davis said he views his main challenges as maintaining the aging prison and 
recruiting staff to the pricey Bay Area.

"This plan runs well," he said. "We're always considering new programs. We 
provide opportunities. It's up to the inmates to take advantage of the 
opportunities."

Davis, a Republican, declined to comment on whether he supports the death 
penalty, but he might never have to oversee an execution. California executions 
have been in limbo since 2006, when a federal judge ruled that the state's 
lethal injection procedure violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel 
and unusual punishment.

Davis' salary will be $141,204, the governor's office said. The position does 
not require Senate confirmation.

(source: Marin Independent Journal)








USA:

Bryan Stevenson on Charleston and Our Real Problem with Race ----"I don't 
believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved."



Bryan Stevenson has spent most of his career challenging bias against 
minorities and the poor in the criminal justice system. He is the founder and 
executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., 
an advocacy group that opposes mass incarceration and racial injustice. 
Stevenson is a member of The Marshall Project's advisory board. He spoke with 
Corey Johnson. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CJ: When you saw the news about the Charleston shootings, what were your 
thoughts?

BS: Anytime I hear news of this kind of extreme violence targeting innocent 
people, I think immediately about the ready access to guns that so many people 
in this country have, and I mourn our nation's failure to act more responsibly 
on limiting access to these weapons. I think it was pretty clear early on that 
a young white man going into a historic black church and slaughtering people in 
this way couldn't be understood outside the context of our racial history of 
violence and terror directed at black people. And so, my thoughts about our 
failure to deal more effectively with that history were also right on the 
surface. And then, when more information came about the racially motivated 
character of this assault, it just confirmed all of my fears about what our 
failure to deal more honestly with our history of racial injustice, where that 
has left us.

CJ: Why do you think we keep failing on these fronts? BS: I actually think 
we've never really tried to succeed. I really do believe that this country 
never committed itself to a conversation about the legacy of slavery. At EJI, 
we're really focused on what slavery did to America, what lynching and 
terrorism did to America, what segregation and Jim Crow did to America, and 
we're focused on these historical eras because we've just never had the 
conversation we needed to have. Very few people in this country have any 
awareness of just how expansive and how debilitating and destructive America's 
history of slavery is.

The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. 
It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with 
their ownership of other human beings. And we created a narrative of racial 
difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn't own 
slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North. It was New 
York's governor - in the 1860s - that was talking about the inferiority of the 
black person even as he was opposed to slavery. So this narrative of racial 
difference has done really destructive things in our society. Lots of countries 
had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We became something 
different, we became a slave society. We created a narrative of racial 
difference to maintain slavery. And our 13th amendment never dealt with that 
narrative. It didn't talk about white supremacy. The Emancipation Proclamation 
doesn't discuss the ideology of white supremacy or the narrative of racial 
difference, so I don't believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just 
evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced 
- from the end of reconstruction until WWII - through acts of racial terror. 
And in the north, that was tolerated.

You don't have to have owned a slave to be complicit in the institution of 
slavery, to have benefitted and have cheaper food to buy, cheaper materials, 
cheaper services, because the providers of the foods and services were using 
free slave labor. We were all complicit in the institution of slavery, and the 
same is true in the era of racial terror and lynching. The North and the 
Congress basically gave up on equality for African Americans, and that set us 
on a course that we have not yet recovered from. We've been really focused on 
redefining that era - at the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 
19th century - as an era shaped by terrorism1. Lynchings were not acts directed 
at particular individuals, they were acts directed at the entire African 
American community. And in that respect it was racial terror. A white person 
being hanged was not the same as an African American being lynched. The 
violence against African Americans was a message to the entire black community. 
I think we've got to deal with that a lot more honestly.

Equal Justice Initiative's latest project has been to document the sites of 
lynchings - 3,959 in 12 southern states.

There are very few people who have an awareness of how widespread this 
terrorism and violence was, and the way it now shapes the geography of the 
United States. We've got majority black cities in Detroit, Chicago, large black 
populations in Oakland and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Boston, and other 
cities in the Northeast. And the African Americans in these communities did not 
come as immigrants looking for economic opportunities, they came as refugees, 
exiles from lands in the South where they were being terrorized. And those 
communities have particular needs we've never addressed, we've never talked 
about. We've got generational poverty in these cities and marginalization 
within black communities, and you cannot understand these present-day 
challenges without understanding the Great Migration, and the terror and 
violence that sent the African Americans to these cities where they've never 
really been afforded the care and assistance they needed to recover from the 
terror and trauma that were there.

And even moving closer to the present day, even the era of the civil rights 
movement - in my judgment - has been recast as moments where great heroism and 
courage took place that we can all celebrate. Everybody gets to celebrate the 
courage that it took to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, everybody gets to 
celebrate the march on Washington, everybody gets to celebrate the legacy of 
Dr. King and Rosa Parks, and no one is accountable for all of the resistance to 
civil rights, all of the damage that was done by segregation. I hear people 
talking about the civil rights movement and it sounds like a 3-day carnival. 
Day 1: Rosa Parks gave up her seat on the bus. Day 2: Dr. King led a march on 
Washington, and Day 3: we just changed all these laws. And we tell our history 
as if it's the true history when in fact that's not the true history. The true 
history is that for decades, we humiliated black people in this country every 
day. For decades we did not let them vote, we did not let them get full 
education, we did not let them work for pay, we did not let them live as full 
human beings with dignity and hopefulness, we denied all of these basic 
opportunities to African Americans, and we've never really talked about the 
consequences of that era of apartheid and segregation.

And so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this country 
because we think that things are "of the past" because we don't understand what 
these things really are, that narrative of racial difference that was created 
during slavery that resulted in terrorism and lynching, that humiliated, 
belittled and burdened African Americans throughout most of the 20th century. 
The same narrative of racial difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric 
Garner killed and got Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others - 
of African Americans - wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same 
narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of 
people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the 
executions in Charleston. And the South - to be honest - is a region where we 
are particularly vulnerable to the way in which this narrative of racial 
difference still haunts us, and infects our economic, social and political 
structures, because we have in the South done something worse than silence, 
we've actually created a counter-narrative and invited people to take pride in 
their southern heritage. We've basically minimized the hardships of slavery and 
extolled its virtues - as if there's any virtue at all to being owned by 
another human being. We've ignored the lynchings and the struggles and the 
violence and terror that kept people of color from having any opportunities for 
fairness and equality, and we haven't really addressed all of the pain and 
injury that was created by decades of segregation. So, I think we're not going 
to make progress until that changes.

CJ: Help me understand how the narrative, as you say, could have influenced 
this young white man who was born long after the events you describe. This kid 
is just 21 years old.

BS: When did the narrative of racial difference end? What date did people fully 
embrace and accept, internalize, act on, believe that there is no difference 
between races? When did that happen? It did not happen when the Civil Rights 
Act was passed in 1964 because every state in the South has been fighting it 
until the present day. It did not happen in the 1970s when people were 
violently resisting the idea of integration in schools. It did not happen in 
the 1980s when some people were suggesting that there ought to be affirmative 
action for people who have been denied historic opportunities. It did not 
happen in the 1990s when we saw police violence being directed at blacks like 
Rodney King, and saw the rate of attacks on young men of color increase and we 
constructed this whole apparatus of mass incarceration that has targeted and 
menaced black and brown people in ways that are epidemic. It didn't happen at 
the beginning of this 21st century when for the 1st time, 1 in 3 black males 
born in this country were destined for jail or prison because we think that 
your race makes you presumptively dangerous and guilty. So what date did it 
happen? This young man was born into the same country that has failed to deal 
with this narrative of racial difference, has failed to overcome a lie of 
racial difference and white supremacy that his foreparents were born into in 
the 19th and 20th centuries. The only difference is that we've had these little 
pockets of black achievement and success and people have learned to stop using 
the n-word in many situations, and we call that progress. The question I ask is 
not how could this young man be affected by these historic failures, by this 
ideology, the question is how could he not? We're all affected by it. I'm a 55 
year old lawyer, went to Harvard Law School, all these degrees, had some 
success. I was sitting in a courtroom a couple of years ago in a suit and tie 
in the Midwest waiting for a hearing to start and the judge came out and said, 
"Hey, hey, hey, hey, you go back out there in the hallway and you wait until 
your defense lawyer gets here because I don't want any defendants sitting in my 
courtroom without their lawyer." And I stood and I said, "I'm sorry, Your 
Honor, my name is Bryan Stevenson, I am the attorney." The judge started 
laughing, the prosecutor laughed, I made myself laugh because I didn't want to 
disadvantage my client. My client comes in - a young white kid I was 
representing - and we had the hearing. Afterwards, I thought about it and I 
thought, what is it that when this judge sees a black man - middle aged black 
man - in a suit and tie in his courtroom at defense counsel's table, it doesn't 
occur to him that that's the lawyer. What that is is this narrative of racial 
difference, this ideology that has burdened black people in this country since 
the 1st days we stepped ashore on this continent. And it's supported and 
enforced in lots of ways. So that young man in South Carolina sees the same 
Confederate flags that civil rights activists had to confront in the '50s when 
they were trying to ask for integration, he hears the same kinds of stories 
about black men raping white women and their criminal and carnal character and 
nature, that were spreading throughout the region in the early part of the 20th 
century, resulting in lynching and terror. It is the same ideology that was 
created during slavery. And no one should be shocked that those ideas are in 
his head when they are reinforced in countless ways day in and day out in our 
everyday living, including in the ways that the positions of power and 
influence are still largely owned and occupied disproportionately by people who 
are white.

CJ: What then does this debate about taking down the Confederate flag mean?

BS: I think that it's just a small step in my mind. The topic that we have to 
talk about really is bigger and broader than that. In the South, we celebrate 
Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday in several states. Several states 
make Jefferson Davis's birthday a state holiday. Remember we don't have Martin 
Luther King day, it's Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. If a country said 
we're going to make Osama bin Laden's birthday a holiday, we would be outraged. 
We'd be talking about economic sanctions, we'd be talking about not doing 
business with that country.

This desperate effort to honor and validate and romanticize the architects of 
slavery, the defenders of racial violence and terrorism, the perpetrators of 
this ideology of white supremacy and this narrative of racial difference, feeds 
the consciousness of everybody in the state and we are all affected by it. In 
the state of Alabama you get a license plate, each license plate has a little 
heart on it and the words "Heart of Dixie." They make you - in effect - attest 
your love for Dixie. They're absolutely committed to resisting any effort to 
reengage with this history in a way that would make us mournful and concerned 
about how we do better. That's the challenge. We love talking about mid 19th 
century history in the deep South. In some counties, you can't go 100 meters 
without seeing a marker or a stone or something that honors some Confederate 
general or postmaster or nurse or hospital or teacher, and yet we don't talk 
about slavery at all. Montgomery has 59 markers and monuments to the 
Confederacy, most of our streets are named after Confederate soldiers. The 2 
largest public high schools are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High - 
those are 90% black. And yet - until a couple of years ago - there wasn't a 
word about slavery, not one word. We decided to put up markers about the 
domestic slave trade here. Montgomery was the portal that sent thousands of 
enslaved people throughout the Black Belt, and nobody knew anything it, and EJI 
wanted to put these markers up, and the Alabama Historical Association told us 
that it would be too controversial to put up markers about slavery in a city 
polluted with monuments about the Confederacy. 4,000 African Americans were 
lynched between 1870 and WWII and none of us know anything about it. We don't 
mark these places where these lynchings took place. Most of them took place on 
courthouse lawns that are now adorned with monuments to the Confederacy. Older 
black Americans get angry when they hear people on TV talking about how we're 
dealing with terrorists for the 1st time in the United States after 9/11. They 
grew up in terror.

So yes, the Confederate flag should come down. The Confederate flag as a symbol 
of resistance to integration - that really didn't emerge in most of these 
states until the 1950s. This is not a holdover from the 1850s, this is really a 
symbol of resistance that was embraced and adopted in the 1950s to express 
hostility to civil rights. And people can say, "Well, I don't feel that way, 
it's just part of being in the South," but the fact that the Klan and every 
other hate group has used this symbol is all you need to hear to know that you 
don't want to use it to symbolize something that's important to you.

So yes, the Confederate flag should come down but more than that, we need to 
engage with this in a very different way. You can't go to Germany, to Berlin, 
and walk 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone or a monument to mark 
the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and taken to 
the concentration camps. Germans want you to go to the concentration camps and 
reflect soberly on the legacy of the Holocaust. We do the opposite here. We 
don't want anybody talking about slavery, we don't want anybody talking about 
lynching, we don't want anybody talking about segregation. You say the word 
"race" and people immediately get nervous. You say the words "racial justice" 
and they're looking for the exits. If we're going to change the attitudes of 
the judges who are making sentencing decisions, and police officers who are 
unfairly suspecting young men of color, and employers and educators who are 
suspending and expelling kids of color at disproportionately high rates, if 
we're going to make a difference in overcoming the implicit bias that we all 
have, we're going to have to deal honestly with this history and have to 
consciously work on freeing ourselves from this history.

CJ: Do you see the white supremacist as our - African Americans' - equivalent 
of the Nazi in Germany?

BS: I think it's more complicated. I think when people talk about white 
supremacists we're making it too easy, and we mischaracterize this issue. You 
don't have to be a white supremacist to be responsible for sustaining this 
narrative of racial difference, sustaining this narrative of white supremacy. 
You don't have to say that I believe that white people are better than black 
people to be complicit in this problem. It wasn't just the Nazis, it was the 
entire German government that is responsible for what happened during the 
Holocaust. And so, I think sometimes when we try to make it all seem like it 
was just a handful of bad and dangerous white people that are responsible for 
all of this, we miss the point. The lynching phenomenon was carried out by the 
entire community. It wasn't the Klan. These were police officers and judges and 
lawyers and teachers and store owners and business people who came out and 
facilitated these acts of racial violence. It wasn't the uneducated, white guy 
out in the field that was responsible for resistance to civil rights, it was 
the elected leadership of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and 
Mississippi, it was the governors and the lieutenant governors and the county 
probation officers that were the architects of all of that injury. The Klan 
didn't come up with mass incarceration and police violence. People who were 
acculturated into seeing black and brown people differently are the people who 
created that problem. And so I think we kind of let too many people off the 
hook by demonizing the minority who most unashamedly expressed these thoughts. 
While they are absolutely a particular threat, the bigger challenge is getting 
the rest of us to own up to this. And yes, I do think that we have tried to 
avoid accountability - not because we're incapable of it - but just because 
we've never had to. Everybody has learned to mimic the behaviors of people who 
are not racially discriminatory. They don't say certain things, they don't tell 
certain jokes in front of other people, they use modern terms - African 
American - to describe people who are black, they try to adopt the habits and 
customs of the non-discriminatory in society. But in fact, we haven't actually 
done the hard work of genuinely becoming non-discriminatory, which is why these 
police officers and these judges and these prosecutors and the political 
leaders from the last 5 decades don't feel like they have to apologize for 
acting in a racially biased manner. Yes, I think we are all accountable for it, 
black and white. There are many people of color who have been able to shield 
themselves from the worst and most egregious forms of bigotry, and they're just 
as reluctant to talk about these issues as people who are white because it's 
uncomfortable, it's disruptive. But we are all going to be burdened until we 
deal more honestly with this legacy.

CJ: The president just got into some hot water yesterday because of a 
conversation about this legacy. What are your thoughts about his efforts? Could 
he do more?

BS: I appreciate the president's efforts on this issue. What strikes me about 
his efforts is how extreme and irrational the response has been any time he 
tries to talk about race. So the narrative of racial difference in this country 
is so insidious that electing an African American president means that that 
president has to speak less about the challenges of African American people 
than someone white. There's such profound suspicion and deep resentment that 
maybe he's going to be a president for the black people that he's constantly 
having to bend over backwards to make it clear that he's not prioritizing the 
needs of African Americans. So I've been fascinated by how extreme and 
irrational and emotional the responses have been anytime he touches on race. I 
think some of the contempt and the really out of bounds rhetoric that we've 
seen directed at the president can't be disconnected from this history. 
Billboards across the state of Alabama: "put the white back in White House," 
"Anti-racist equals anti-white," all these are reactions to this perceived 
decrease in power and status for white people directly related to President 
Obama's election. So rather than helping people move forward, in many ways it 
has intensified this need to protect this longstanding narrative. The efforts 
of the president may have been thwarted and frustrated in ways that cannot be 
disconnected from his own identity.

The manifestations of these problems are different in Alabama than they are in 
California. We still have a state constitution in Alabama that prohibits black 
and white kids from going to school together. It is still in there today, and 
nobody seems stressed by that, nobody seems worried about it. They tried to 
take it out twice through a statewide referendum and both times the majority of 
the people in the state voted to keep that language in, in 2004 and 2012. And 
why that's not the shame of America - certainly the shame of Alabama - I can't 
explain. That's the kind stuff we're dealing with here. You don't have those 
issues in New York and California, but you do have that presumption of 
dangerousness, and you've got to deal with that when you're talking about 
stop-and-frisk, you've got to deal with that when you're talking about the 
disproportionate sentencing that kids of color are experiencing in communities 
all over this country, and when you're talking about expulsion and suspension 
rates in elementary schools and middle schools for black and brown kids.

So part of what we're interested in doing is facilitating conversations around 
some of these issues. We want to continue putting up markers and monuments to 
identify the parts of this country where the slave trade was most active. We 
have a project to put up monuments and markers in spots where lynchings took 
place. We're about to issue a report on the civil rights era that documents the 
resistance to civil rights rather than simply celebrating the heroism of those 
courageous African Americans. Because you need to know where the resistance 
came from to know why we're still dealing with these issues in 2015. We're 
going to these communities and trying to create a different story, tell a 
different narrative about our history in hopes that people won't be confused 
and burdened in the way that this young man in Charleston was confused and 
burdened. So that people will confront people like him. This is not the 1st 
time he said crazy things like he said, and my hunch is that very few people 
confronted him. They might have said they didn't agree with him, but they 
didn't think that they had to confront him. We tolerate so much bigotry in our 
thinking and in our expression in this country and that has to change.

CJ: You've spent many years dealing with inequality in the courts, especially 
the disproportionate number of blacks on death row. Has there ever been a white 
person who was put to death for acts of racial terror?

BS: During the era before WWII, no. Acts of racial terror were almost never 
prosecuted, let alone did they result in convictions and sentences of death. In 
the more recent era, we've gotten more comfortable with imposing death 
sentences on poor white people who act so far out of bounds that they disrupt 
the status quo.. And so, there have been instances where someone has committed 
a horrific crime that was racially motivated where they got a death sentence. 
There was a case in Mississippi, we had Henry Hays here in Alabama. You'll see 
lots of people talking enthusiastically about imposing the death penalty on 
this young man in South Carolina. But that's a distraction from the larger 
issue, which is that we've used the death penalty to sustain racial hierarchy 
by making it primarily a tool to reinforce the victimization of white people. 
The greatest racial disparity of the death penalty is the way in which the 
death penalty is largely reserved for cases where the victims are white. In 
Alabama, 65% of all murder victims are black, but 80% of all death sentences 
are imposed against victims who are white. And that's true throughout this 
country. We've used it particularly aggressively when minority defendants are 
accused of killing white people. And history is replete with defendants being 
described with the n- word, cases just saturated with racial bigotry, and the 
courts have largely tolerated that. McCleskey was a Supreme Court decision in 
1987 that basically said racial bias in the administration of the death penalty 
is inevitable, an unconscionable statement for a court that has inscribed on 
its exterior: "Equal justice under law." And so it continues. We've gotten 
sophisticated enough that people will happily impose a death sentence on Dylann 
Roof or Henry Hays, the klansmen who participated in a 1980s hanging of a black 
man in Alabama, or the murderers of James Byrd. We can't be distracted by 
thinking that if they execute 1 person who committed mass violence that's some 
sign of progress. That's a sign of tactical misdirection to preserve a system 
that is inherently corrupted by a narrative of racial difference.

CJ: Does that mean Dylann Roof should not get the death penalty?

BS: I don't think anybody should get the death penalty. I'm against the death 
penalty. Not because I believe people don't deserve to die for the crimes that 
they commit. I think that we don't deserve to kill. The system of justice in 
South Carolina is not going to be better or more racially just based on whether 
this kid gets executed or not. If I were the governor of South Carolina, I'd 
say: "We're going to abolish the death penalty, because we have a history of 
lynching and terror that has demonized and burdened people of color in this 
state since we've became a state. I'm not gonna end the death penalty because 
there are innocent people on death row, I'm not gonna end the death penalty 
because I think it's unreliable or it's too expensive, I'm gonna end it because 
in South Carolina, we have a history of bias and terror and violence and 
segregation, and the death penalty has been a tool for sustaining that, and I'm 
gonna say we're not gonna have that." And most African Americans in South 
Carolina would celebrate that. That actually would be the 1st time somebody has 
done something responsive to this history of racial hierarchy and bigotry. And 
I think every southern governor should do the same. That's when you'd get the 
different conversations starting in this country. Then you might get some 
progress.

(source: The Marshall Project)

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Defence seeks to prove Holmes' insanity



Defence lawyers in Colorado's movie massacre trial opened their case on 
Thursday, calling a psychiatrist as they seek to prove gunman James Holmes was 
insane and not in control of his actions when he plotted and carried out the 
2012 rampage.

Holmes, a 27-year-old former neuroscience graduate student, opened fire inside 
a packed midnight premiere of a Batman film at a Denver-area multiplex, killing 
12 people and wounding 70.

He could face the death penalty if convicted.

The prosecution wrapped up its case last week after calling more than 200 
witnesses, including 1st responders, survivors, and 2 court-appointed 
psychiatrists who both concluded Holmes was sane when he planned and launched 
the attack.

The Defence attorneys' first expert witness, psychiatrist Jonathan Woodcock, 
said that when he examined Holmes in jail on their behalf 4 days after the 
rampage he was startled to hear the defendant tell him he was "bored."

"I found that absolutely extraordinary," Woodcock told jurors, adding he 
diagnosed Holmes to be severely mentally ill, suffering from psychosis, 
delusions and "emotional flattening."

Asked by public defender Daniel King whether Holmes had the capacity to tell 
right from wrong, or to act with intention and after deliberation, Woodcock 
said that he did not.

During cross-examination, District Attorney George Brauchler repeatedly 
challenged the psychiatrist's analysis, noting that Woodcock had met with 
Holmes for fewer than 3 hours.

"He has potentially a motive to want to tell you things that will help him in 
that situation, is that fair?" the prosecutor asked him in one of several testy 
exchanges.

Woodcock agreed that it was.

The defendant, who carried out the murders wearing a gas mask, ballistic helmet 
and listening to loud techno music through headphones, first hurled a teargas 
canister into theatre 9 at the Century 16 cinema in Aurora, an eastern suburb 
of Denver.

He then opened fire with an automatic rifle, shotgun and pistol. Prosecutors 
say he did it because he had lost his career, his girlfriend and his purpose in 
life, and that he had a longstanding "hatred of mankind."

Holmes' public defenders say their client suffers from schizophrenia, that 
since he was in high school he has heard voices in his head commanding him to 
kill, and that he was not in control of his actions.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that the California native was solely 
responsible for the massacre, a conviction and then death sentence is far from 
certain, said former veteran Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman.

"It only takes 1 juror to derail this death penalty train," said Silverman, who 
prosecuted the last defendant in the city to receive a capital punishment 
sentence.

Under Colorado's death penalty statute, a defendant can be found not guilty by 
reason of insanity if a person cannot tell right and wrong, or if a mental 
disease prevents the individual from forming the "culpable mental state."

In a videotaped sanity examination shown to jurors by the prosecution, Holmes 
indicated that he knew he would go to prison if caught, and that he now 
"regrets" the shootings.

A key Defence witness will be psychiatrist Raquel Gur, director of the 
Schizophrenia Research Centre at the University of Pennsylvania.

Gur, who once examined Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Tucson mass shooter Jared 
Loughner, and who was consulted by the White House following the 2012 Sandy 
Hook Elementary School massacre, interviewed Holmes in the months after the 
rampage.

Public defenders will likely argue that Gur's diagnosis is more valid than 
those of the 2 court-appointed psychiatrists, since she met Holmes sooner after 
the massacre than they did, and before he was so heavily medicated.

"The Defence psychiatrist may also have performed some physiological testing, 
such as brain imaging, that could bolster their case," Silverman said.

If the jury cannot reach a unanimous verdict in the trial's guilt phase, 
resulting in a hung jury and mistrial, prosecutors could retry the case.

But if there is a conviction, the Defence need to convince just 1 juror to 
spare Holmes' life at the sentencing phase, and if that happens "then it's game 
over," Silverman said.

(source: Reuters)

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

Residents recall the commotion during McVeigh's execution: "It was the most 
lively part of my life"



Thomas Norris passes the summer afternoons sitting on his front porch. For the 
last 40 years his view has been a building surrounded by guards and chain 
linked fences.

The federal penitentiary in Terre Haute is home to more than 1,000 of the 
world's most hardened criminals. An official with the United States Department 
of Justice confirms approximately 60 of those inmates await their fate on death 
row, and Norris calls them his neighbors.

"This is the most safest place in town," said Norris when asked how he feels 
about living across from the prison.

The area is often quiet, only the sound of a few cars driving by, but there was 
a time when the prison and even Norris' yard was the center of attention.

"Just a lot of people," recalls Norris.

It was 2001 and all eyes were on the federal prison. Oklahoma City bomber, 
Timothy McVeigh was set to be executed. The American terrorist bombed an 
Oklahoma City Federal building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring more 
than 600 more.

Thousands travelled from across the country to Terre Haute. Neighbors of the 
prison were forced to deal with the chaos that led up to the execution.

"It was just kind of nuts around the whole neighborhood here," said Don Bosc.

Some ignored the frenzy while other neighbors, like Norris, embraced it.

"I had about 100 automobiles in my yard and about 700-800 people," he said.

Norris opened his home and his yard to those waiting for the man who committed 
the nation's worst act of domestic terrorism to be put to death. Norris even 
offered his garden as a parking spot.

"Yes mam I made some money," although Norris said he never asked for any money 
he made 7,000 dollars. Norris said he also made some new friends as well.

"It was the most lively part of my life."

Norris said even at 85 he'd do it all over again.

The death penalty was reinstated in 1988 and 74 people have been sentenced to 
death since then but only 3 have been executed.

The federal prison is where Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be 
executed.

(source: WTHI TV news)