[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.C., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 29


NORTH CAROLINA:

Suspects in Cary teen's murder could face death penalty, judge says


The 4 people charged in connection with a fatal hit-and-run that killed teen 
Katie Crow, a Green Hope High School student, appeared in a Wake County 
courtroom Monday.

Jourdan Chanquion Mack, 20; Beth Strange, 18; Abijah James Masse, 17; and 
Joshua Odell Simmons, 17; are all facing 1st-degree murder charges. Mack 
graduated from Green Hope High School in 2014 and Masses is currently a senior 
at Green Hope.

Simmons is a senior at Panther Creek High School and Strange graduated from 
Panther Creek this month.

Police say the death was a result of a drug deal.

Judge Keith Gregory told the 4, "You've been charged with one count of murder. 
You could receive the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole."

Those were frightening words for Strange, who just graduated from high school 2 
weeks ago.

Masse's lawyer, Julian Hall, tried to get him released on $3 million bond, 
arguing that Masse "has never even had a traffic ticket."

Hall said Masse is "very heavily involved" in his church and has been active in 
the youth ministry for 5 years.

"These are very good kids," Masse said. "It's a tragedy for all involved."

But the judge refused bond, saying it was a murder case.

Investigators said emergency crews responded to Lawrence Road near the entrance 
of Walnut Street Park and found 16-year-old Katie Crow lying in the street with 
life-threatening injuries around 9:30 Friday night. She was taken to WakeMed 
where she later died. Investigators believe Crow was robbed during what they 
believe was a pre-planned drug transaction.

While trying to fight back, investigators said the teen fell from the truck - a 
burgundy Ford F150 - driven by Simmons.

"This is a terrible tragedy for all families involved. With around-the-clock 
joint efforts by our Traffic Safety Team and Criminal Investigations Division, 
we hope that being able to wrap this up somewhat relatively quickly will help 
will help start the healing process for them and our community," said Captain 
Randall Rhyne of Cary's Criminal Investigations Division.

Sunday afternoon, a memorial was made at the place where Crow lost her life. 
The memorial continued to grow on Monday.

On Sunday evening, Katie's parents released a statement.

"We are devastated by the loss of our daughter Katie, but we appreciate the 
outpouring of love and support from so many of our friends.

"Katie was a very loving, caring person and it is a shame her life has ended so 
soon. We ask for your prayers and good wishes, but also your respect for our 
privacy at this time.

"We???d like to thank the Cary Police Department for working so diligently on 
this case and quickly apprehending 4 suspects."

Anyone with additional information that may help with this case is asked to 
contact Cary Police.

(source: WNCN news)






CALIFORNIA:

California death penalty: high court ruling could resume executions


A divided U.S. Supreme Court on Monday reinforced the ability of states to rely 
on lethal injection to carry out executions, handing down a ruling out of 
Oklahoma that unlocks California's long dormant effort to revive the death 
penalty in this state.

The Supreme Court's decision triggers what promises to be a tangled, prolonged 
legal process that could ultimately lead to a resumption of executions in the 
Golden State -- although it could still be years before the doors reopen in San 
Quentin's death chamber.

Under a recent settlement with families of murder victims, California prison 
officials agreed to propose a new single-drug execution method within 120 days 
of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Oklahoma legal challenge. It would mark 
the 1st progress in years toward devising a new execution procedure at San 
Quentin, where California has not executed a condemned killer in nearly a 
decade.

By upholding Oklahoma's controversial 3-drug lethal injection method in a 5-4 
ruling, the Supreme Court appears to have removed a key legal hurdle for 
California to rely on some form of lethal drug.

"(It is) a pretty strong green light for California to go forward with whatever 
lethal injection protocol fits their own regulations and interests," said 
Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University law professor and author of the 
Sentencing Law and Policy blog.

"Today's decision ... starts off a very long, costly and wasteful process in 
California," said Ana Zamora, criminal justice policy director for the Northern 
California ACLU.

The Supreme Court, in a decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, rejected the 
arguments of death penalty foes that drugs such as those used in Oklahoma risk 
violating an inmate's right to a humane execution. "Holding that the 8th 
Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would 
effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether," the court's conservative 
majority wrote.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice 
Legal Foundation, said the Supreme Court has made it much more difficult for a 
challenge to succeed against a new lethal injection procedure. "This opinion 
raises the bar for murderers who try to get an injunction against the protocol 
that is adopted," he said.

If California's revised lethal injection method does survive the legal 
gauntlet, it could open the spigot on executions in the state, which has had 
just 13 since the death penalty was restored in 1978. At least 15 death row 
inmates have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for execution dates, 
including three condemned Bay Area killers.

But even though the Brown administration will now restart the process in the 
fall, there are a host of inevitable delays, court showdowns and obstacles that 
will unfold before any of the state's 750 death inmates are executed.

Once prison leaders unveil the new single drug procedure -- which is expected 
to rely on a fatal dose of a single sedative instead of the three-drug cocktail 
that has failed to survive legal challenges in the past -- the state must go 
through mandatory administrative procedures and hearings that in the past took 
more than a year.

In fact, when the state last tried to resolve a longrunning federal court 
challenge to its 3-drug execution method, a state appeals court in 2013 found 
prison leaders did not comply with those administrative rules and invalidated 
the proposed execution method. That resulted in a 3-year limbo that led to the 
recent settlement of a lawsuit aimed at forcing the state to devise another 
lethal injection method.

Even if California completes the administrative process, significant obstacles 
remain. Other states that have opted for the single drug method have struggled 
to find supplies of the sedatives because drug makers are balking at providing 
them to states for executions, and California is expected to face the same 
dilemma.

In addition, the new procedure will face the scrutiny of a San Francisco 
federal judge who has put on hold a challenge to San Quentin's execution 
procedures that began in 2006. At that time, death row inmates argued that 
flaws in the method raise the prospect of a cruel and inhumane execution.

(source: Mercury News)






USA:

Some Supreme Court Justices' Views on Death Penalty Change


Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared for the 
1st time Monday that they believe it is "highly likely" that the death penalty 
is unconstitutional.

In doing so, they joined 3 other justices over the years who came to harbor 
serious doubts about capital punishment after years of reviewing death penalty 
cases at the high court.

The court's modern death penalty cases began in 1972, when a fractured court 
struck down capital punishment laws nationwide in Furman v. Georgia. But four 
years later, a majority of the justices voted to restore the death penalty in a 
case called Gregg v. Georgia. The court approved new capital punishment laws 
that had been drafted in response to Furman, aimed at creating more uniformity 
in the application of the death penalty and eliminating racial bias.

At the time of the Gregg decision, only 2 justices, William Brennan and 
Thurgood Marshall, announced their opposition to the death penalty.

3 other justices have spoken out on the topic:

****

HARRY BLACKMUN

Justice Harry Blackmun started out his Supreme Court career voting to uphold 
the death penalty. In 1972, just 2 years after joining the court, he dissented 
when his colleagues voted to abolish capital punishment. He voted with the 
majority four years later to return the death penalty.

But in February 1994, after more than two decades on the court and only a few 
months before his retirement, Blackmun announced he had changed his mind.

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," 
Blackmun, then 85, wrote in announcing his opposition.

It was Breyer who took Blackmun's seat on the court.

****

LEWIS POWELL

Like Blackmun, Justice Lewis Powell voted in support of the death penalty in 
1972, the year he joined the court, and again in 1976.

Powell retired from the court in 1987 at the age of 79 and announced his 
opposition to the death penalty only after he left the court.

"I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished," he told his 
biographer, adding it "serves no useful purpose."

****

JOHN PAUL STEVENS

Justice John Paul Stevens had to confront the issue of the death penalty 
head-on in his 1st year as a justice. He joined the court in December 1975, and 
1 of his first votes was to join with the majority of his colleagues to 
reinstate the death penalty.

But over more than 3 decades as a justice, Stevens' views shifted. In 2008, he 
concluded that the death penalty represents "the pointless and needless 
extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social 
or public purposes." Stevens left the court two years later, in 2010, at the 
age of 90.

Stevens has written and spoken about his opposition to the death penalty. In 
his 2014 book, "Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution," 
he explains why he believes the Constitution should be changed to ban the death 
penalty.

Stevens, now 95, was in the courtroom Monday and listened to Breyer announce 
his and Ginsburg's views. Both Breyer, 76, and Ginsburg, at 82 the court's 
oldest serving justice, have spent more than two decades on the court.

(source: Associated Press)

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

Death Penalty Abolitionists Optimistic After SCOTUS Ruling


On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of midazolam in lethal 
injections does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, despite its use in 
a spate of botched executions. But death penalty abolitionists remain hopeful 
in the bigger fight to end capital punishment altogether.

Handing down the majority opinion in Glossip v. Gross, Justice Samuel Alito 
asserted states must have access to means of execution:

"Our decisions in this area have been animated in part by the recognition that 
because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional, "[i]t 
necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it 
out." And because some risk of pain is inherent in any method of execution, we 
have held that the Constitution does not require the avoidance of all risk of 
pain. After all, while most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not 
have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the 
elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death 
penalty altogether.

Although his statement is alarming, it does not mean that midazolam - and the 
death penalty itself - can't be fought in the future.

In Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett writhed in pain for 43 minutes when midazolam was 
administered, and Joseph Rudolph Wood similarly gasped for close to an hour. 
Should another botched execution occur in the future, plaintiffs may be able to 
fight the drug's use on other grounds.

"I would fully expect that petitioners in state and federal courts will 
continue to challenge methods that they have reason to believe may cause 
torture. The court was very clear in this case to say that its finding that 
midazolam was OK was in the context of what the lower court had found," 
Director Cassandra Stubbs of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project told 
ThinkProgress. "But that does not mean that's the outcome we should expect in 
future cases, with respect to whether or not midazolam is likely to cause pain. 
Midazolam has no business in lethal injection protocols. We know that it cannot 
do what it's supposed to do."

"The reality is that this drug doesn't do what it's supposed to do," echoed 
Executive Director Diann Rust-Tierney of the National Coalition to Abolish the 
Death Penalty (NCADP). "There's ample scientific evidence to support that. 
Hopefully, state officials will act responsibly and address the gap between 
what is asserted the drug does and what every expert says it does."

Moreover, the dissent penned by Justice Breyer and joined by Justice Ginsburg 
points to the unconstitutionality of the death penalty itself, and gives 
abolitionists serious reason to stay optimistic. Breyer wrote:

Today's administration of the death penalty involves three fundamental 
constitutional defects: (1) serious unreliability, (2) arbitrariness in 
application, and (3) unconscionably long delays that undermine the death 
penalty's penological purpose. Perhaps as a result, (4) most places within the 
United States have abandoned its use. I believe it highly likely that the death 
penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. At the very least, the Court should call 
for full briefing on the basic question ... For it is those changes, taken 
together with my own 20 years of experience on this Court, that lead me to 
believe that the death penalty, in and of itself, now likely constitutes a 
legally prohibited "cruel and unusual punishmen[t].

Stubbs and Rust-Tierney interpret that skepticism as a sign that the death 
penalty may come under intense scrutiny in the future.

"The ACLU Capital Punishment Project represents defendants in a number of 
states. We will continue to advocate on their behalf. We have and will continue 
to look closely at arguments that the death penalty is unconstitutional under 
various state constitutions, and look for opportunities to put forth the kind 
of evidence that we saw in the dissent," Stubbs concluded.

And with public support for the death penalty on the decline, NCADP hopes to 
direct capital punishment opponents towards the 90 Million Strong Campaign to 
halt all executions - a campaign backed by a number of influential 
organizations, including the NAACP, Amnesty International, the National LGBTQ 
Task Force, and Alliance for Justice.

"States are continually on a quest to find a way of killing people that 
complies with the Constitution. At one point they thought the electric chair 
would do it; at one point they thought the gas chamber would. Now lethal 
injection is proving to be as problematic as all the others," Rust-Tierney 
explained. "Our focus is continuing to educate the public and continuing to 
empower the people who know this is the wrong thing. We're going to be working 
state by state to take this to legislators and the people.

"As Justice Breyer points out, all the evidence suggests it's time to finally 
end the death penalty, because it's not serving a penological purpose. It's not 
enhancing public safety. "

(source: thinkprogress.org)

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

Justice Samuel Alito: Death Is Often Painful, So Why Shouldn't Lethal Injection 
Be?


Opponents of capital punishment have long hoped that export restrictions on 
standard lethal injection drugs would either cause courts to find lethal 
injections unconstitutional or force states to stop performing them altogether. 
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Glossip v. Gross on Monday casts these 
hopes into doubt. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito found that 
current lethal injection drugs, however unreliable, must be constitutional 
because lethal injection is itself constitutional:

Our decisions in this area have been animated in part by the recognition that 
because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional, "[i]t 
necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it 
out." And because some risk of pain is inherent in any method of execution, we 
have held that the Constitution does not require the avoidance of all risk of 
pain. After all, while most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not 
have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the 
elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death 
penalty altogether.

Put simply, the questionable efficacy of drug cocktails now used for lethal 
injection is, in Alito???s view, not cruel and unusual because death itself is 
essentially cruel and unusual. While these drugs may leave inmates vulnerable 
to excruciating pain during their executions, Alito does not find this outcome 
to differ enough from typical deaths to consider it relatively cruel or 
unusual.

Which raises a question: If death is by nature often cruel and, for each 
individual person, quite unusual, then perhaps the state has no business 
carrying it out?

While the court's decision was ultimately disappointing, justices Stephen 
Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg each expressed belief in their dissenting 
opinions that the death penalty is entirely unconstitutional, which may lend 
some hope to advocates campaigning against capital punishment. In the meantime, 
Alito's decision holds that, because the death penalty is constitutional for 
the time being, inmates hoping for less cruel deaths must produce better 
methods of taking their own lives, or die by the uncertain methods currently 
available.

(source: New Republic)