[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----UTAH, CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

March 21



UTAH:

Defense attorney will focus on mitigating factors in effort to spare murderer 
the death penalty



After a jury found him guilty for a 2nd time Wednesday for the 1985 murder of 
Ogden woman Joyce Yost. Douglas Lovell's life is in the hands of those same 
jurors.

Douglas Lovell has been convicted for the 1985 murder twice now. First back in 
1993 and again on Wednesday.

"He has defined himself as a burglar," said Jeffrey Thomson, a deputy Weber 
County Attorney. "He's a convicted burglar. He's a convicted robber. He's a 
convicted kidnapper. He's a convicted rapist, and he's a convicted murderer."

In the prosecution's opening statement during the sentencing phase, they 
quoted Lovell from a confession to his ex-wife in which he admitted he knew 
what he had done was punishable by death.

Thomson said, quoting Lovell: "'Capital murder is the worst thing you can do, 
probably the death penalty. I committed a 1st-degree felony to cover up another 
felony, it's the death penalty.' Those words, all of those words, were his 
words."

Lovell pleaded guilty to killing Yost back in 1985, saying he did so to keep 
her from testifying that he had kidnapped and raped her. Lovell's 1993 plea was 
part of a deal to keep him off death row, on the condition he led police to 
Yost's body.

But Yost's body was never found, and a judge sentenced Lovell to die by lethal 
injection.

In 2011, the Utah Supreme Court overturned the conviction. But his defense has 
never challenged his guilt.

"Nothing that we present to you is intended to be a smoking gun," Defense 
Attorney Michael Bouwhuis said. "You aren't going to hear anything that's going 
to make you say, 'I get it. I understand why he raped and murdered this woman.' 
You're not gonna hear anything like that."

Instead, in the sentencing phase, the defense said they plan to focus on 
mitigating factors like Lovell's family history and good behavior in prison.

"It's intended to provide you with a reason not to kill him," Bouwhuis said.

Greg Roberts, the son of Yost, was the 1st witness called to testify Friday.

He said, "I'm haunted by a lot of guilt for leaving her unprotected."

Roberts was away at college in Virginia in 1985 when his mother, who was just 
39 at the time, was murdered.

The last time a death sentence was imposed in Utah was in 2008. The penalty 
phase of the trial will resume Monday.

(source: Fox News)

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

Utah Representative Scared of Grandma's Opinions on the Death Penalty



Utah lawmakers passed a bill last week that would allow the state to bring back 
the firing squad for executions if lethal-injection drugs were not available. 
The governor, Republican Gary Herbert, has until April 1 to decide whether it 
should become law - and he's leaning toward signing it. Utah currently has 8 
inmates on death row and no lethal injection drugs. However, Herbert also said 
that it was unlikely firing squads would even be used if the law were passed, 
as the state is trying to procure the drugs.

"The debate is really more than just the firing squad," he told reporters 
yesterday. "It's should we have capital punishment or not?"

Many states have considered alternative execution methods in recent months, as 
drug companies here and abroad have grown more reticent to be associated with 
death.

Utah is the 1st state to come this close to changing the law, however, and 
death-penalty opponents have flooded the governor's office with calls and 
comments in the past week. Since late January, Herbert has received at least 
433 emails on the legislation; 396 opposed it, with many coming from a campaign 
started by the American Civil Liberties Union, according to the Associated 
Press. Many of them were from out of state, coming from places as far away as 
New Zealand. A petition with 6,200 signatures opposing the measure was also 
sent to the governor's office by Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

One man from Seattle threatened to "never again come to Utah to ski if this 
barbaric execution style is used again in your state." However, the office 
contends that they received far more comments over previous legislative fights 
concerning issues like same-sex marriage.

Republican Representative Paul Ray, who wrote the legislation, says most of the 
response he has received has been positive. Others offered alternative methods 
of execution - one senior citizen from Florida explained how the state might 
want to create a death chamber.

"She scared me," Ray told the AP. "I'm glad she's not my grandmother."

Oklahoma's House recently passed a bill that would allow nitrogen hypoxia 
executions if lethal injection were declared unconstitutional. Last year, 
Oklahoma used a relatively untested cocktail of lethal-injection drugs in an 
execution, given shortages. It took more than 40 minutes for the man sentenced 
to die to stop breathing.

The executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center told the 
Oklahoman that the new legislation "seems like another experiment" and "they're 
trying to find drugs and acceptable protocol, but I think this is too similar 
to what Oklahoma did last year, which is use a new drug without knowledge of 
what the right dosage was and what its side effects would be and what 
contingencies they should have in place if things didn't go right."

(source: New York Magazine)

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

It's time to reconsider the death penalty



I am far away from home but would like to enter into this firing squad 
conversation back there as Provo is my hometown.

Utah, on March 10 our lawmakers decided it was time to bring back the firing 
squad to execute inmates on death row, 11 years after they decided it was a 
decidedly outdated, inhumane method of killing those inmates. The problem is 
that our current chosen method of killing is a lethal cocktail of drugs that 
certain suppliers in Europe and right here in America have decided not to sell 
for the purpose of killing people anymore, so we risk not being able to kill 
our inmates unless we change our laws.

Gov. Gary Herbert, in his public address on March 19, described the conundrum 
succinctly.

"Utah is a capital punishment state," he said "That is the law of Utah. ... We 
have to be able to carry that out."

Does this not seem like a weird statement to anyone else? Basically he said we 
have to change the law so we do not have to change the law. The law must change 
either way, so why not change it in the way that shows us to be more 
compassionate, more humane, more human than our friends in Iran, Saudi Arabia, 
Somalia and China?

Utah, we are the only country in the Americas (well, us and Cuba) -- and among 
only a small handful of developed nations -- who still kill our inmates; and 
though we are still part of the majority, Utah stands defiant against those of 
our fellow states who have also decided the practice is no longer tolerable. 
How about we consider joining those of our partners at home and abroad who have 
taken the moral high ground in the world? Even better, how about we show how we 
can actually be the moral model we wish to be?

Gov. Herbert also said, "The debate is really more than just the firing squad. 
It's should we have capital punishment or not?"

That is a wonderful question, and it should be our focus across the nation with 
this shortage of deadly drugs. We should be asking if killing is even right 
rather than asking how we are going to go on killing. Gov. Herbert tells us we 
should harass the drug companies, force them to sell the drugs so we can follow 
our laws. Utah, how about we harass our public officials until they represent 
the best parts of ourselves instead of the blood-thirsty, barbaric sides of our 
society?

But let's just say we cannot stomach the idea of being compassionate toward 
allegedly terrible people (some innocent souls have been killed for crimes they 
did not commit). What about our fellow upstanding citizens? What are we doing 
to the ones who have to tie down a fellow person, the ones who have to pull the 
triggers, the ones who have to take down the bullet-ridden body and replace the 
blood-soaked sandbags? Utah, the executioner is not a mercenary we hire from 
Chechnya: The executioner is us.

Utah, I am your son, though I am right now far away. I am your son and I have 
spent several years in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have never killed another man, 
but I have had to clean up the blood, wash the faces and pavement, burn the 
clothes - and the memories haunt me still. The Internet is replete with similar 
stories from executioners the country over; executions destroy many of the 
people charged with carrying them out.

Here's the deal, Utah: By our votes we destroy or save our fellow residents, 
both criminal and peaceful. Representative Ray, who introduced the bill sitting 
on the Governor's desk claims this is going to be more humane than our other 
options. He is basically saying that shooting a man in the chest and letting 
him bleed to death is proper, at least more proper than some things.

Why do we not shoot for the head to end it quickly? Why do we put a hood on the 
inmate before we shoot them? Why, Utah, do we not just stick with the methods 
including hangings, guillotines or pushing one from a high place (as one 
country's capital punishment laws allow) we reject? Dead is dead after all. 
What does it matter how we do it?

I posit that we do these things because we recognize, if only slightly, that we 
are disgusted, that killing our fellows, whatever they did, simply does not 
jive with who we think we are; it is cognitive dissonance in the deepest parts 
of ourselves. The truth is that it does not, in fact, match our values. We are 
better than this, Utah: Let's prove it by getting rid of capital punishment 
instead of worrying about how we will kill our fellow human beings. Let's be 
better than that.

(source: Opinion; Jesse Card is a Utah resident and comes from a long line of 
Utahns. He is currently serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 
His opinions are his own---The Herald)








CALIFORNIA:

'Death Penalty For Gays' Ballot Initiative May Be Allowed To Proceed Under 
California Law



A ballot proposal criminalizing sodomy and allowing the death penalty for 
anyone who "touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual 
gratification" is moving forward because constitutionally, there is really no 
way to stop it, despite the neo-Nazi nature of the proposed law.

Huntington Beach attorney Matt McLaughlin filed papers to begin gathering 
signatures for the ballot measure, the "Sodomite Suppression Act" on February 
26th.

In California's "direct democracy" any citizen can follow procedures to propose 
just about any law. That doesn't mean that any law could pass, and even if 
passed, it doesn't mean that any law could actually go into effect. Even laws 
passed by a majority of California voters may been overturned by judicial 
review, as was the case in the Prop. 8 gay marriage debate.

This latest initiative is creating news not because of what it would do if 
passed but because of the fact that it, so far, cannot be stopped at this 
stage.

Along with the required $200 fee, McLaughlin's letter asking for certification 
of his initative, sent to the coordinator for Attorney General Kamala Harris, 
includes some bizarre language: "The abominable crime against nature known as 
buggery, called also sodomy, is a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of 
freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction 
even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha."

McLaughlin's ballot proposal continues, stating, "...the People of California 
wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches 
another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put 
to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method."

Harris' office may actually be legally required to write a title and summary of 
the legislation, allowing signature gatherers to stand in front of shopping 
malls and grocery stores inviting patrons to sign a petition to put a death 
sentence for gays on the statewide ballot.

The Sacramento Bee reports that the Legislature's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and 
Transgender Caucus has now written a letter to the State Bar calling into 
question McLaughlin's fitness to practice law.

A petition to take away his law license already has over 6,000 signers.

While submitting a ballot proposal costs just $200, the preparation of the 
proposal by the state can cost about $8,000.

(source: CBS news)








USA:

Executing the Insane Is Against the Law of the Land. So Why Do We Keep Doing 
It?----Such "mindless vengeance," the Supreme Court points out, "simply offends 
humanity."

6 years before he shaved his head, donned camo fatigues, and fatally shot his 
in-laws in front of his estranged wife and daughter, Scott Panetti piled up 
furniture and valuables in his yard in Fredericksburg, Texas, and sprayed it 
all down with water to get rid of the devil he was sure had possessed the 
house.

It was hardly the first time he'd done something bizarre. Starting in his early 
20s, Panetti had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, delusions, 
auditory hallucinations, and manic depression - he was hospitalized at least 14 
times. 2 years prior to the murders, he was involuntarily committed after 
swinging a cavalry sword at his wife and daughter. After he turned himself in 
for the 1992 killings, he blamed the crime on "Sarge," one of several 
personalities he was convinced shared his body. The state charged him with 
capital murder.

"He wore a large hat and a huge bandanna. He wore weird boots with stirrups ... 
He looked like a clown."

The trial was a farce. Over even the prosecutor's objections, Judge Stephen 
Ables let Panetti act as his own lawyer, and allowed him to continue 
representing himself after he went off his antipsychotic medication. The 
defendant showed up in court decked out in what a family friend described as a 
1920s-era cowboy outfit: "He wore a large hat and a huge bandanna. He wore 
weird boots with stirrups - the pants were tucked in at the calf," she later 
testified. "He looked like a clown."

Standing before the jury, Panetti called himself "Sarge" and rambled 
incoherently for hours about everything from the TV show Quincy, M.E. to 
castrating a horse, with little interference from the judge - who did, however, 
intercede to question the relevance of belt buckles. In addition to his 
veterinarian, Panetti subpoenaed Jesus, John F. Kennedy, and the pope, and 
issued a stream-of-consciousness description of the crime:

Sarge is gone. No more Sarge. Sonja and Birdie. Birdie and Sonja. Joe, Amanda 
lying kitchen, here, there, blood. No, leave. Scott, remember exactly what 
Sarge did. Shot the lock. Walked in the kitchen. Sonja, where's Birdie? Sonja 
here. Joe, bayonet, door, Amanda. Boom, boom, blood, blood.

Demons. Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh, Lord, oh, you.

It's hard to blame the jury that sentenced Panetti to die. At the time, Texas 
had no option for life without parole, and some of the jurors stated they were 
scared he'd get out someday. But whether or not Texas executes a schizophrenic 
man isn't simply about that man and his crimes. It's about the moral ground on 
which America's legal system rests.

Executing the insane, Justice Marshall wrote, "has questionable retributive 
value, presents no example to others ... and simply offends humanity."

That's essentially what the United States Supreme Court ruled in the 1986 case 
of Ford v. Wainwright. Citing centuries of English common-law precedent, the 
court pronounced that a civilized society cannot condone the execution of a 
person with so weak a grasp on reality that killing him, as Justice Thurgood 
Marshall concluded for the majority, "has questionable retributive value, 
presents no example to others, and thus has no deterrence value, and simply 
offends humanity ... Whether the aim is to protect the condemned from fear and 
pain without comfort of understanding, or to protect the dignity of society 
itself from the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance," the Constitution 
forbids it as cruel and unusual punishment.

How is it, then, that Scott Panetti has spent nearly two decades on death row, 
even though the justices have since reaffirmed the ban on executing the insane 
- in a ruling on his specific case? How is it that he came within eight hours 
of lethal injection this past December, only to be saved by a last-minute stay? 
And how is it that numerous seriously mentally ill people have been put to 
death in recent years, in defiance of the law of the land?

The short answer is that, despite its lofty rhetoric, the Supreme Court punted 
on how states should determine whether someone is sane enough to be killed. In 
fact, were it not for the persuasive powers of Marshall, who had handled 
capital cases as an NAACP lawyer, the court wouldn't have even taken the Ford 
case - let alone cast 5 votes in the petitioner's favor. But Marshall couldn't 
convince the holdouts, including Justice William Rehnquist, who pointed out in 
his dissent that death row inmates were liable to simply fake mental illness. 
Giving them an opportunity for a preexecution sanity hearing, he wrote, "offers 
an invitation to those who have nothing to lose by accepting it to advance 
entirely spurious claims of insanity."

In the end, the court offered little guidance on how to define insanity for 
legal purposes. Marshall had suggested that a prisoner too impaired to assist 
in his own defense could not be executed. But the legal test that most of the 
lower courts ultimately adopted was that of Justice Lewis Powell: The offender 
had to be "unaware of the punishment they're about to suffer and why they are 
to suffer it." That is "an extremely low standard," explains Phillip Resnick, 
the director of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University's 
medical school. "You can be quite psychotic and still know those 2 things."

"The law is still basing decisions on folk psychology," notes one death penalty 
expert.

Further muddying the waters, the Supreme Court left the interpretation of its 
ruling to state court judges, who are often elected and who can share the 
public's misconceptions about psychiatric illness' - not understanding, for 
instance, that even highly delusional people can seem normal in certain 
settings. (Prosecutors in Panetti's case recently exploited this 
misunderstanding by citing lucid snippets from a taped conversation with his 
visiting parents to argue that he is not insane, even though, in the same 
conversation, Panetti recalls grooming steers with former CIA agent Valerie 
Plame.)

"The law is still basing decisions on folk psychology," notes Christopher 
Slobogin, a professor of law and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University. Some 
judges, he says, "worry that mental illness is this very wide-ranging concept 
that could apply to a huge percentage of the population depending on how it's 
defined."

The result of all of this ambiguity has been a steady stream of executions of 
profoundly mentally ill people, some of whom - like Nollie Lee Martin, a 
Florida man executed in 1992 - were literally missing pieces of their brains. 
According to a study published in the Hastings Law Journal this past June, 18 
of the 100 most recently executed convicts had been diagnosed with 
schizophrenia, PTSD, or bipolar disorder. Another 36 had other serious 
mental-health problems or chronic addictions that in some cases had rendered 
them psychotic.

Following his conviction, Panetti tried to waive his right to a lawyer for the 
appeal (a move akin to suicide), but Judge Ables ruled him too mentally 
incompetent to make that choice. After many more appeals, Ables set a 2004 
execution date and ruled, without a hearing, that Panetti was sane enough to 
die. The case ultimately landed before the Supreme Court, where Texas Solicitor 
General Ted Cruz (now the state's junior US senator) defended the state's right 
to execute Panetti.

In 2007, the court ruled 5-4 that Judge Ables not only had unjustly denied 
Panetti a hearing on his mental state, but that the federal court reviewing the 
decision had applied an incompetency standard that was too restrictive. It 
wasn't enough that Panetti knew the state was going to execute him for the 
murders of his in-laws, the court said. After all, it acknowledged, Panetti 
could regurgitate these facts. But he also sincerely believed that the state 
wanted to execute him to stop him from preaching the Gospel.

"A prisoner's awareness of the State's rationale for an execution is not the 
same as a rational understanding of it."

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy proclaimed, "A prisoner's 
awareness of the State's rationale for an execution is not the same as a 
rational understanding of it." The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had ignored the 
reality that "gross delusions stemming from a severe mental disorder may put 
that awareness in a context so far removed from reality that the punishment can 
serve no proper purpose." The 5th Circuit was ordered to further investigate 
Panetti's mental state based on this new "rational understanding" standard.

But the Supreme Court's attempt to codify and expand upon the vague guidelines 
it set out in the Ford case has made little difference in practice. Judges 
often ignore the new guidelines, or rule in a way that simply reiterates Ford. 
Cornell law professor John Blume recently did some number crunching involving 
"Ford claims," the last-ditch defense petitions arguing that a person is too 
insane to be executed. He found that the Panetti decision had little impact on 
the outcomes, especially in the states with the most active death chambers.

Florida, 3rd in the nation in executions last year, has never found anybody too 
insane to execute. Nor have Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, or Utah. In Texas, the 
most prolific killer of convicts, the last time a prisoner prevailed on such a 
claim was back in 2006, a year before the Panetti decision - which so far 
hasn't even saved Panetti himself.

So how do judges decide whether a prisoner is too delusional for a civilized 
society to execute? Often, it turns out, they rely on psychiatrists whose 
recommendations seem to have little basis in science - hired guns whose 
testimony can give pro-death-penalty jurists cover for rulings that otherwise 
would seem to contradict the dictates of the Supreme Court.

Consider Dr. Alan Waldman, a forensic psychiatrist and neurologist whose 
testimony has helped send at least 3 mentally ill men to their demise, and whom 
Texas hired to evaluate Panetti in advance of a 2008 hearing on the prisoner's 
fitness for execution. Waldman spent his early career working in various 
hospitals and clinics, including a stint with the Florida Department of 
Corrections. Today, he works in private practice and serves as an expert 
witness for both prosecutors and defense lawyers, holding himself out as an 
expert in the detection of malingering - feigning or exaggerating symptoms of 
illness - although he admitted during the Panetti hearing that he'd never 
published anything on the subject in a peer-reviewed journal. In fact, the only 
published work since 1993 listed in Waldman's public resume is an article in a 
prosecutors' newsletter.

When I reached out to Waldman, he directed his secretary to tell me that he 
would not talk to me under any circumstances and "don't call back." But he has 
a considerable public track record, having served on "competency commissions" - 
panels of psychiatrists convened to assess whether an inmate is too insane to 
execute - in 3 Florida death penalty cases. Like Panetti in Texas, each of 
these 3 prisoners had a long history of mental illness. But Waldman deemed all 
of them legally sane.

To evaluate Panetti's sanity, Texas hired a psychiatrist who'd been arrested 
for threatening a teen with an AK-47 following a traffic incident.

One of them was Thomas Provenzano, an Orlando man who signed documents "Jesus 
Christ" and showed pictures of Jesus to his nephews and nieces. "That's me," 
he'd whisper. "A five-year-old kid could tell my brother had mental problems," 
his sister, Catherine Forbes, told me.

In the mid-1970s, Provenzano checked himself into a mental hospital because he 
was hearing voices. He was eventually released, but his behavior grew 
increasingly bizarre, to the point where his sister begged the doctors to have 
him committed. (They demurred.) In 1983, he was arrested for disorderly conduct 
after screaming obscenities at pedestrians and leading police on a car chase. 
Following the arrest, he started dressing like Rambo and hanging out at the 
courthouse, obsessing over his legal file and the officers who'd apprehended 
him. In early 1984, he smuggled 3 guns into an Orlando courthouse, where he 
shot and killed one man and critically injured 2 other people before an officer 
shot him in the back. In the ambulance en route to the hospital, he yelled, "I 
am the son of God! You can't kill me."

In 1999, then-Gov. Jeb Bush signed Provenzano's death warrant and appointed a 
competency panel that included Waldman. After evaluating Provenzano, Waldman 
reported that he was malingering.

The prisoner's sister was dumbstruck. She tearfully recounted to me how her 
brother had spent more than 15 years on death row sleeping under his cot with a 
box on his head because he was hearing voices. But the Florida Supreme Court 
sided with Waldman, and Provenzano was executed in June 2000.

About 6 months later, Waldman had his own run-in with the law. He allegedly cut 
in front of a teenage girl at a red light, and she believed he'd clipped the 
front of her purple Saturn. But rather than pull over, she said, he took off 
when the light changed. Incensed, she followed him home to try to get his 
insurance information. According to a police report, Waldman emerged from his 
front door carrying an AK-47. He pointed the gun through the car window. "He 
was so close I could feel him spitting at me," she told me.

She drove away and called the cops, only to be told that Waldman had reported 
her first, saying he was scared for his life. After corroborating the gist of 
her account, they arrested Waldman instead. The young woman, who asked me not 
to use her name, decided not to press charges, but says she's still traumatized 
by the episode.

In 2012, Florida executed John Ferguson, who had a long history of paranoid 
schizophrenia. His last words: "I am the Prince of God and I will rise again."

In 2012, Florida Gov. Rick Scott appointed Waldman and two other psychiatrists 
to evaluate John Ferguson, a prisoner with a 40-year history of paranoid 
schizophrenia who had once received free legal help from John Roberts Jr., now 
chief justice of the Supreme Court. Ferguson had killed 8 people after he was 
released from a mental institution over the warnings of state doctors, 
including one who said he was homicidal and "should not be released under any 
circumstances." After a 90-minute interview, Waldman and his colleagues 
concluded that Ferguson was legally sane. He was executed the following year. 
His last words: "I am the Prince of God and I will rise again."

When Waldman evaluated Scott Panetti in 2007, the prisoner insisted on calling 
him "Dr. Grigson" after the late James Grigson, a.k.a. "Dr. Death"???the 
discredited Texas psychiatrist who inspired the Errol Morris film The Thin Blue 
Line. Grigson was known for testifying in capital trials, where he would almost 
invariably argue that the defendant was an incurable sociopath who would 
certainly kill again if allowed to live.

Waldman noted in his report that Panetti had answered most of the questions 
about his crime with Bible quotes and made-up stories, and had claimed JFK had 
once cleaned his burns. He'd talked like a cowboy, and said the other inmates 
hated him for his faith. (Prison staffers told Waldman the inmates didn't like 
Panetti because "he screams and yells and is constantly disturbing the unit by 
preaching the Gospel.") Panetti also told Waldman that "Sergeant Iron Horse" 
was his in-laws' real killer.

Nevertheless, Waldman claimed that Panetti demonstrated "organized" thoughts 
and displayed no evidence of serious mental illness. Furthermore, the 
prisoner's repeated references to Grigson proved that he was malingering. 
Waldman was unaware, he later admitted, that Grigson had in fact testified at 
Panetti's trial, and that Panetti had been obsessed with him ever since.

For his efforts, Waldman charged the state at least $23,000. (The federal 
courts allotted Panetti a total of $9,000 to hire his own experts.) When 
Panetti's lead lawyer cross-examined Waldman in federal court before Judge Sam 
Sparks, she demonstrated that Waldman was unfamiliar with key details of the 
case and hadn't given Panetti a single test or standard psychological exam, 
even though such tests - including 1 to assess whether a patient is faking 
schizophrenia - are used regularly in the field. When the attorney asked about 
the AK-47 incident, Sparks cut her off. He found Panetti eligible for 
execution.

Last November, a state court judge in Indiana offered a glimpse of what a 
competency process conducted in the spirit of the law might look like.

Panetti's lawyers appealed again. But the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which 
covers the busy death penalty states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, 
ruled that Panetti was sane enough to die, quoting Waldman at length - even 
though he was the only 1 of 6 experts to testify that Panetti wasn't affected 
by any psychotic disorder. Last October, the Supreme Court declined to 
reconsider his case, and Texas moved to execute him on December 3. Only after a 
national uproar that drew in prominent conservatives - among them former Texas 
congressman Ron Paul, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and 
Maggie Gallagher, cofounder of the National Organization for Marriage - did the 
5th Circuit hold up the execution.

So what might a competency process look like if it were conducted in the spirit 
of the law? This past November, Jane Woodward Miller, a state court judge in 
Indiana, gave the nation's judiciary a glimpse.

The Indiana Supreme Court had appointed Miller to determine the mental 
competence of Michael Overstreet, a man convicted of abducting, raping, and 
murdering a college student. Overstreet had shown symptoms of psychosis at 17, 
had been in a mental hospital prior to the murder, and, once in prison, was 
repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by state doctors. By 2013, he 
had intractable hallucinations of "shadow people" and firmly believed he was 
already dead and in a coma. He thought his execution would free him from 
purgatory and bring him back to be with his family - and this was when he was 
on his meds.

To assess whether Overstreet was sane enough to execute under the Panetti 
standard, Miller held a hearing lasting 4 days (twice as long as Panetti's). It 
involved 13 witnesses and nearly 1,300 pages of medical records. The state, 
which acknowledged that Overstreet suffered from severe mental illness, could 
rally but a single mental-health expert, a doctor with limited experience in 
forensic psychology.

"The idea that this convicted rapist murdering monster is too sick to be 
executed is nothing short of outrageous," a local prosecutor complained.

Although the case itself was similar to Panetti's, the outcome was entirely 
different. The judge personally watched hours of video of the doctors 
interviewing Overstreet. She also scrutinized their credentials and grilled 
them on their understanding of the Supreme Court's Panetti decision. Her 
137-page opinion determined that the state's mental-health expert's report 
wasn't especially thorough or his conclusions especially credible. And while 
Overstreet knew the state wanted to execute him and why (the test Powell had 
suggested in Ford), that wasn't enough to justify his execution under the 
Panetti standard. "This Court concludes Overstreet means exactly what he said: 
He is dead, in a coma," she wrote. "And that is a delusion...Delusions or other 
psychotic symptoms cannot simply be discounted because a petitioner has a 
cognitive awareness of his circumstances."

One of the local prosecutors went ballistic, texting to the Indianapolis Star, 
"the idea that this convicted rapist murdering monster is too sick to be 
executed is nothing short of outrageous and is an injustice to the victim, her 
mother, the jury, and the hundreds of people who worked to convict this 
animal."

But in December, state Attorney General Greg Zoeller announced that Miller had 
done such a good job of adhering to the Panetti ruling that there was nothing 
to appeal. Overstreet will remain in prison for life, and cannot be executed 
unless he one day recovers his sanity, which isn't likely.

As for Panetti, he remains on death row, growing increasingly paranoid and 
delusional, according to court filings, as he waits for a panel of federal 
judges to decide whether the Supreme Court case bearing his name might, in 
fact, apply to him.

(source: Mother Jones)

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

Execution drug supply is running low, and states are looking for lethal backup 
plans----Nitrogen chamber? Firing squad? Electric chair?



A bulky wooden chair outfitted with leather straps sits in Huntsville's Texas 
Prison Museum, still fully functional, but unused in its faux death chamber. 
But before its retirement in 1964 this electric chair, dubbed Old Sparky, 
carried out 361 executions. For visitors, the chair stands as an illustration 
of how far Texas has advanced in capital punishment - a relic of what some 
consider past barbarism. But with a dwindling supply of lethal injection drugs 
in the U.S., states have started looking to bygone execution methods - not 
unlike Old Sparky - as a backup plan.

If Texas goes through with Kent Sprouse's execution April 9, it will have 
exhausted its last dose of pentobarbital, the lethal injection drug it has used 
since 2012. That leaves the state, which has the macabre distinction of being 
the nation's leading executioner, with 3 more April executions and no plan as 
to how to carry them out. Jason Clark, a spokesperson with the Texas Department 
of Criminal Justice, said the department is "exploring all options, including 
the continued use of the pentobarbital or alternate drugs."

But could "all options" also include plugging Old Sparky back in?

That's what officials in other states are considering. This month, Alabama's 
House of Representatives voted on a bill that, in case of a continued drug 
shortage, would bring back the electric chair. And in May, the Tennessee 
Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the state's attempt to bring back the 
electric chair.

And if the electric chair sounds antiquated in this age of lethal injection, 
just consider the firing squad.

The Utah state legislature passed a bill this month that would reauthorize 
death by a firing squad if lethal injection drugs cannot be secured 30 days 
before an inmates' scheduled execution. Rep. Paul Ray, the bill's sponsor, 
decided to draft it after he learned last year that Utah had no execution 
drugs.

"It became apparent at that time that we needed a plan B just in case," Ray 
said. "We're still 2 or 3 years out on our next execution, but my thought was, 
'Well, let's get something in place now. Just in case we need it, it'll be 
there.'"

Legislation to allow firing squads in Arkansas also was introduced this year, 
along with a failed attempt in Wyoming. Oklahoma, meanwhile, is toying with a 
new take on the gas chamber. The Oklahoma House passed a bill earlier in March 
that would allow nitrogen chamber executions. Like its predecessor, nitrogen 
chambers would involve an airtight chamber, but instead of filling it with 
poison gas, the nitrogen would cause death by asphyxiation.

But it isn't some nostalgia for brutality fueling this wave of states seemingly 
backpedaling on progress. It's increasingly becoming a necessity. A recent GAO 
report shows that the U.S. faces a widespread drug shortage that started in 
2007.

As the stock of drugs began to dwindle, few domestic suppliers were able to to 
keep up with the deadly demand. So states turned to European pharmacies. It 
turned out to be a temporary fix, as 1 by 1 Italian, German and Dutch suppliers 
cut off drugs supplies when they discovered they were being used to kill. The 
companies' bans reflect a larger cultural difference - the U.S. is the only 
Western country that still carries out executions.

Keeping dates with death

But if the aim was to stymie executions, the plan looks like it backfired.

"Our hand has kind of been forced without the availability of drugs," Ray said. 
"There's still support for the death penalty, so you have to have a way to do 
that."

He continued, "The interesting thing is that these companies in Europe are 
opposed to the death penalty so they withhold these drugs. They seem to be 
opposed to the firing squad over there. But they're the reason we're using the 
firing squad. They need to understand that they might not like what we're 
doing, but they're the reason we're doing it."

Most of the state legislation, however, is nothing but the sketching of a 
backup plan. Still, with the clock ticking for 2015's roster of death row 
inmates, 10 across the country and 6 in the state, Texas needs a solution - 
fast. Even for trigger-happy Texas, it's unlikely that there will be a sudden 
shift to another form of execution - or at least not in the next month. Meghan 
Ryan, a law professor at Southern Methodist University, pointed out that even 
if states dodge the problems that lethal injections pose, new methods would be 
open to judicial scrutiny.

"The problem with going to other methods of execution is that there are 
potentially constitutional concerns about that, just like there are 
constitutional concerns about what states are doing now in experimenting with 
different lethal injection cocktails," Ryan said. "We're sort of in a state of 
uncertainty regarding executions in general."

Ryan said that the state push for lethal injection alternatives could hit a 
snag under the Eighth Amendment's bar on cruel and unusual punishment. It is 
unclear if bringing old techniques out of retirement when lethal injections 
exist would hold up in court.

"The idea that punishments ought to be evolving toward more humane methods of 
execution suggests that moving backward, such as toward the electric chair or 
firing squad, might be questionable or possibly unconstitutional," Ryan said.

Texas does have a stockpile of the sedative midazolam that it could adopt into 
its protocol with the stroke of a pen. But the controversial drug, which 
replaced the depleted sodium thiopental in some states' drug cocktails, has 
been used in 3 botched executions. Most notably, it was part of the horrific 
death of Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett last April, which drew worldwide 
attention to lethal injection practices.

"Every Department of Corrections in the country is looking at all of this," 
said Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and expert on lethal 
injections. "They're very aware that if they do anything wrong, and they're so 
capable of it, that this is going to set into motion a series of questions 
about this entire process."

And if midazolam's link to botched executions wasn't enough, there's the 
upcoming Supreme Court case brought by three Oklahoma death row inmates that 
centers on the drug. The case, which is set to be argued April 29, has already 
led judges in Florida and Oklahoma to halt executions until the court reaches a 
decision. So for now, it seems that midazolam's reputation will keep Texas - or 
any other state - from touching its stash.

"My sense is that they're probably scrambling to find a compounding pharmacy in 
this country that would make more pentobarbital for them. That would be my 1st 
guess," Denno said.

The long-term solution to lethal injection drug shortages will take time and 
likely many court battles to sort out. But it's time that Texas, at least, 
doesn't have - unless it wants to do what Ohio did when it halted executions 
indefinitely after one was botched in 2014. The chances of that in the Lone 
Star state? Slim, especially since there have been no efforts for the state to 
take a break from its busy schedule.

"Knowing the history of Texas and other states that are advocates of capital 
punishment, I think they will do what they can to try to keep executions in 
line and on schedule," Ryan said.

Much like the rest of the country, the next steps for Texas are unclear. The 
Supreme Court's guidance on midazolam usage could clear pathways for states to 
use the drug. On the flip side, it could completely bar it, sending the U.S. on 
another pharmaceutical scramble. Or perhaps the frustration of switching from 
one drug to another, each step taken with unsure footing, will lead states to 
alternatives like in Utah.

Meanwhile, Old Sparky is still on display.

(source: Commercial Appeal)






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

The drugs don't work----When lethal injection gets tricky, try guns or gas



In 1996 the state of Utah put John Albert Taylor, a man who had raped and 
murdered an 11-year-old girl, to death by firing squad. Chris Zimmerman, a 
retired police officer who investigated the murder, witnessed the execution. 
"Off to our left was Mr Taylor, off to the right, behind a wall, was the firing 
squad," he remembers. "There was a countdown, and the firing squad were ordered 
to aim and fire. I heard a simultaneous explosion - you couldn't tell the guns 
apart. He clenched his fists, his chest rose a little, like it was suddenly 
filled with gas. Then he unclenched his fists, the doctor walked out with a 
stethoscope and checked his pulse, and it was over."

Since 1976, when capital punishment was brought back in the United States, only 
3 people have been executed by firing squad in America - all in Utah. The state 
banned the method in 2004 (though since the law did not apply to past cases, 
another man was shot in 2010). But on March 10th its legislature passed a law 
to bring back the guns. Utah is one of several states trying to ensure it can 
kill people if lethal injection, the preferred modern way, is not available. To 
the relief of abolitionists, not many are succeeding.

Lethal injection has been becoming more controversial, and trickier, since 
2011, when the European Commission banned the sale of eight drugs if the 
purpose was to use them in executions. Many manufacturers, including American 
ones, fearing bad publicity as well as regulatory problems, stopped making or 
supplying drugs too. The result has been an acute shortage of the chemicals 
with which it is legally possible to execute people in most of the 32 states 
that still have the death penalty. Last year 35 people were executed in 
America, the fewest since 1994.

Several states have tried to acquire drugs in other ways - typically from crude 
"compounding pharmacies". But since this has not always worked, they must find 
alternatives. In Oklahoma, where a botched lethal injection took 43 awful 
minutes to kill a prisoner last year, the state House on March 3rd 
overwhelmingly approved a bill to allow the state to execute people by gassing 
them with nitrogen. On March 12th the Alabama House voted to reintroduce the 
electric chair. In Wyoming, the state House has passed a bill to bring back 
firing squads. Several states now also keep the names of their 
lethal-drug-suppliers secret, to protect them from protests.

So far, however, few alternatives have passed into law. Several states retain 
the option of the electric chair, and a few the use of hanging, but such 
executions are now extremely rare, and almost only because the prisoner 
requests it (the last man to die by the electric chair was in Virginia in 
2013). Wyoming's bill on firing squads was held up by a debate about whether 
prisoners should be sedated, and ultimately failed; Utah's barely made it to a 
vote, and may yet be vetoed by the governor. Only in Tennessee has a law 
reintroducing the electric chair made it on to the books.

While executions are held up, some 3,000 condemned prisoners are left unsure of 
their fate. While waiting, they are in effect serving life sentences of 
solitary confinement, with few visitors allowed. Their number, however, is 
gently declining. In 2013, the latest year for which figures are available, 
more prisoners were removed from death row than were executed, mostly because 
their sentences had been commuted to life.

The problem with resurrecting older methods of execution, says Robert Dunham, 
the head of the Death Penalty Information Centre, an NGO, is that they will 
instantly be challenged as unconstitutional "cruel and unusual punishment" - 
creating as much delay as the drugs shortage. This is why many states moved 
away from the electric chair in the first place. In addition, polls suggest 
that even death-penalty supporters are squeamish about most alternatives to 
lethal injection. "Don't we care about how Utah is perceived in the country and 
in this world?", asked 1 Utah state representative in the firing-squad debate. 
Notoriously, the state was the 1st to seize its chance to execute a criminal 
after 1976. The case of Gary Gilmore caused a media sensation; and so did the 
state's latest use of the firing squad in 2010.

In reality, insists Mr Zimmerman, shooting is hardly more barbaric than 
poisoning with drugs. "There was no blood. He died so quickly he didn't bleed," 
he says of Taylor's execution. But whatever the alternatives, free-flowing 
drugs are not returning. On April 9th Texas is expected to use its last dose of 
pentobarbital, its preferred drug; earlier this month Georgia delayed an 
execution to check the quality of its supply. Death's proponents are not giving 
up, but life is getting harder.

(source: The Economist)

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

Here's how hard it will be to put Aurora theater shooter to death



Sentencing someone to death in Colorado is harder than you may think, as proven 
by the lengthy process involved in capital punishment cases.

It's a process that thousands of potential jurors in the Aurora theater 
shooting trial have been getting an education in over the course of the last 3 
months.

Usually in a 1st-degree murder trial, if the jury returns a guilty verdict, the 
judge must return a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of 
parole. However, in cases like the theater shooting trial, when the prosecution 
seeks the death penalty, as the Arapahoe County District Attorney is doing in 
this case, it's the jury that decides the sentence.

This is why jury selection on capital punishment cases takes so long: The court 
has to ensure each and every juror can be fair and impartial throughout both 
the trial and the sentencing hearing, if there is a sentencing hearing. 
Following a guilty verdict, jurors have to be able to consider both penalties - 
life imprisonment and death by lethal injection - and follow a specific process 
to decide the appropriate punishment.

Capital punishment sentencing hearing phases

A sentencing hearing consists of 3 phases. In phase 1, the prosecution must 
prove beyond a reasonable doubt at least 1 statutory aggravating factor, or a 
fact or circumstance which makes a murder more serious than others.

There are 17 aggravating factors in Colorado, including killing a police 
officer, killing a judge, an ambush, killing a child, and killing multiple 
victims, the latter of the 2 will in all likelihood be presented in the Aurora 
theater shooting case should it continue to the sentencing phase, as 12 people 
were killed in the shooting, including Veronica Moser-Sullivan, a 6-year-old 
child.

In phase 2, jurors must consider mitigation, or any reason that might favor a 
life sentence over a death sentence. Mitigation can include mental illness, a 
defendant???s background or upbringing, the age of a defendant and a catch-all 
category that would detail any and all reasons a defense attorney might believe 
a jury should consider a life sentence. Jurors have to weigh each mitigating 
factor against any aggravating factors, and only if they are convinced beyond a 
reasonable doubt that the mitigation does not outweigh the proven aggravation 
does the hearing proceed to phase 3.

In phase 3, each juror is called upon to make a moral evaluation of the 
defendant's character and crime. In this phase, each juror is asked to apply 
his or her individual reasoned, moral judgment as to whether death is the 
appropriate penalty, beyond a reasonable doubt.

The process is set up in such a way that unless every condition is met and 
every phase is completed, the jury must return a verdict of life imprisonment 
without the possibility of parole. The vote must be unanimous to return a death 
sentence.

And therein lies the heart of jury selection in the theater shooting case.

The defense is searching for that one juror who could vote for life in prison 
against 11 others who vote for death, and the prosecution is fighting just as 
hard to eliminate those sorts of jurors.

Lawyers fight for death penalty jurors

When prospective jurors for the theater shooting trial come in for individual 
questioning, they first watch a video in which Arapahoe District County Judge 
Carlos Samour discusses the aforementioned three phases of a sentencing 
hearing. He follows up with them as a group, making additional remarks to put 
the discussion in perspective. Then, the jurors are each questioned by the 
judge and both counsels to ensure they both understand the process and can be 
fair and impartial.

To say it's thorough might be an understatement.

Jurors must be willing and able to consider and decide the facts, fairly and 
impartially. Unlike following traffic laws, it's completely allowed - 
encouraged, in fact - for jurors to be honest and say they can't follow the law 
in being fair and impartial. They may just be better suited for a different 
kind of case, Samour says.

Having a bias in favor of or against the death penalty doesn't necessarily 
disqualify a juror, though. The standard Colorado law applies is whether a 
juror's views on the death penalty prevent or substantially impair the 
performance of his or her duties as a juror in a sentencing hearing.

"To put it even more simply, can you set that bias aside?" Samour says in his 
group remarks.

Both the defense and the prosecution thoroughly question prospective jurors 
trying to prove a juror can or cannot set their preformed biases aside. The 
defense always ensures that jurors understand even though the court is talking 
about possible sentences, their client, James Holmes, the admitted gunman in 
the July 2012 theater shooting, is presumed innocent unless proven otherwise.

The prosecution almost always asks jurors if they can sentence "that man" to 
death, pointing to Holmes and never naming him. That question is always 
accompanied by another question, with prosecutors asking the juror whether he 
or she could also sentence Holmes to life in prison.

Jurors weigh in on sentencing process

Most prospective jurors have found the sentencing process to be long and a tad 
tedious, but necessary. Some have even expressed relief that it's so difficult 
to sentence someone to death, saying that it's refreshing to see that the 
justice system doesn't take the death penalty lightly.

"It seems long, but it's something that needs to be done. Without proper 
thought, something could go wrong," said a juror retained Thursday, a foster 
father of 5.

Another juror retained Thursday started sobbing when one of the alleged 
aggravating factors in this case, the murder of a child, was mentioned. A 
mother of 3, she said it hit close to home but she could still consider both 
penalties.

"It still doesn't mean he doesn't deserve a fighting chance. He's a human," she 
said, referring to Holmes.

Even though the court has taken its time with individual questioning to make 
sure every juror kept can be fair and impartial, it has still retained jurors 
at a much faster pace than expected, moving the theater shooting trial date up 
to April 27 from the projected date in June. Group questioning, the final phase 
of jury selection, will take place on April 13, possibly spilling over into 
April 14. At that time, the court will narrow down a pool of 120-130 jurors to 
just 24.

The trial is expected to last 4 to 5 months, Samour said.

(source: KDVR news)

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

Dispatches: Saving US Children From the Death Penalty



10 years ago this month, the United States Supreme Court found the death 
penalty unconstitutional when imposed on people who committed crimes when they 
were younger than age 18.

The decision, Roper v. Simmons, spared the lives of 72 inmates on death row at 
the time. It also paved the way for later decisions that addressed other 
abusive sentences.

Until that moment, the US had been the world leader in executing juvenile 
offenders. In fact, just eight other countries had put juvenile offenders to 
death between 1990 and 2004, and the 19 executions of juvenile offenders 
carried out in the US during that period equalled the known total for the rest 
of the world combined.

The court had considered the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty 
before, but in 1989 ultimately decided that the punishment was acceptable for 
someone who was 16 or older at the time of the crime.

So what had changed in a decade-and-a-half?

Advances in neuroscience, for one thing. Research was beginning to show what we 
already knew from everyday experience: teenagers have limited comprehension of 
risk and consequences, and they are much more likely than adults to engage in 
risky behavior, particularly with peers.

These studies confirmed that for most adolescents, risk-taking and criminal 
behavior is fleeting. That means that young offenders are particularly amenable 
to change and rehabilitation.

International law also played a part. The court in Roper cited the Convention 
on the Rights of the Child and other human rights treaties and incorporated 
points made in the amicus brief submitted by human rights organizations, 
including Human Rights Watch.

The Supreme Court has since gone on to apply these lines of reasoning to 
juvenile offenders sentenced to life without the possibility of parole - 
incrementally, to be sure. In Graham v. Florida, the court struck down 
life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of crimes other than 
homicide. In Miller v. Alabama, the court determined that the mandatory 
imposition of life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, including those 
convicted of homicide, violates the US Constitution.

The Supreme Court hasn't yet addressed the non-mandatory imposition of life 
without parole for juvenile offenders. It's also left open the question of 
whether resentencing was available to people already serving mandatory 
life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed when they were juveniles - 
although a case now before the court could resolve that question and apply the 
rule of Miller retroactively, as Florida's highest court has just done.

Now that the US is out of the business of executing juvenile offenders, the 
shameful club of countries that put children to death has only a handful of 
members. Pakistan and possibly Iran have carried out such executions this year; 
Yemen also likely has juvenile offenders on death row.

US juvenile justice practices still don't fully comply with international 
standards, but Roper and the cases that followed represent enormous strides 
forward. Roper also removes any cover for the few other countries that continue 
to engage in the abhorrent practice of putting people to death for crimes they 
committed as children.

(source: Human Rights Watch)

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

Mental competency report delays federal trial for man in 2007 fatal Bessemer 
bank robbery



The federal trial of a man who faces a possible death sentence if convicted in 
the 2007 slayings of 2 Bessemer bank tellers and the wounding of 2 others has 
been delayed again after a government expert found the man is not competent to 
stand trial.

U.S. District Court Judge David Proctor, in an order issued Friday afternoon, 
indefinitely delayed the trial of William Merriweather Jr. The trial had been 
slated to begin April 20.

The judge ordered Merriweather to be taken to a federal mental health facility 
for a period of not more than 4 months to determine "whether there is a 
substantial probability that in the foreseeable future he will attain the 
capacity to permit the trial to proceed."

Examiners are then to file a psychological report regarding Merriweather's 
treatment and their conclusions at the end of that period, the judge ordered. 
He also ordered that hundreds of people summoned to be in the pool of potential 
jurors for the trial be released from jury duty. The trial was expected to last 
2 months and included a larger jury than normal.

"The order reflects that there are still competency matters pending, but the 
government is still seeking the death penalty in the case," Peggy Sanford, 
public information officer for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Birmingham, said 
Friday afternoon.

Richard Jaffe, one of Merriweather's attorneys, declined comment on the delay.

Merriweather is charged in the May 14, 2007 bank robbery and deaths of Eva 
Lovelady Hudson and Sheila McWaine Prevo, and with the wounding of Anita Siler 
Gordon, Latoya Shaniece Freeman, all tellers at a Wachovia Bank branch in 
Bessemer.

Merriweather faces 1 count of killing during the commission of a bank robbery 
and 2 counts of use of a firearm during a crime of violence. If convicted he 
could face the death penalty.

Merriweather's trial has been reset multiple times as attorneys have argued the 
past 8 years that Merriweather is schizophrenic and is incompetent to stand 
trial.

Proctor first ruled Merriweather competent in early 2013 - based on a 2011 
hearing. The judge set a trial, but then delayed it as Merriweather's attorneys 
argued that previously undisclosed nurses notes from his mental evaluation at a 
federal prison plus a doctors' new concerns deserved new look at competency.

Proctor held another competency hearing last summer and in October issued a 
124-page ruling, again declaring Merriweather competent for trial.

In his ruling Friday Proctor noted his previous rulings. But he wrote that the 
court must "remain alert" to any changes that would render Merriweather 
incompetent to stand trial.

"The recent reports of a government-retained expert finding that defendant 
(Merriweather) is not competent presents just such a circumstance," Proctor 
wrote.

The U.S. Attorney's Office has had what's called a "firewall team," made up of 
prosecutors unknown and operating separately to the trial prosecutors. That 
firewall team prepares for the possibility of a sentencing hearing involving 
the death penalty in the event of a guilty verdict.

The government's firewall team arranged for a psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Welner, 
to evaluate Merriweather in Feb. 2015, Proctor states in his order. "As it 
turns out, before his retention by the Firewall Team, Dr. Welner had been 
assisting the government's trial team for more than 6 years," the judge stated.

Dr. Welner had advised and assisted the trial team of prosecutors in evaluating 
and confronting the defense's mental health evidence, Proctor wrote. "As part 
of his earlier work with the trial team, however, Dr. Welner did not actually 
interact with defendant (Merriweather). In fact, he did not actually meet with 
-- and personally evaluate -- defendant until February 2015, when he did so on 
behalf of the Firewall Team."

Welner reported that Merriweather's disorganized thought processes and speech 
were consistent with schizophrenia and that his current condition impedes his 
ability to rationally consult with this lawyers, Proctor wrote. Welner, 
however, also reported that Merriweather's condition is treatable with 
medication.

"Dr. Welner's conclusions appear to hold that before December 2014 defendant 
(Merriweather) was not suffering from a mental disease so severe that it 
compromised his competency and that defendant has been selectively cooperative 
with evaluators," Proctor stated. "These opinions are consistent with the 
court's findings articulated in its previous competency opinions."

But Welner reported that Merriweather's mental state had recently begun to 
deteriorate, Proctor stated.

A fresh look at Merriweather's competency is warranted because a "competency 
finding is not static," the judge wrote.

The more than 7-year wait for a trial has frustrated and angered the victims 
who survived and the families of the 2 tellers who died.

Merriweather, wearing a green baseball-style cap, white shirt, tie, and slacks 
and shoes partially wrapped in electrical tape, walked into the Wachovia Bank 
branch on Ninth Avenue in Bessemer.

Minutes later, Merriweather walked out of the bank with $11,255 cash and the 
bank manager in tow as a hostage after having killed and wounded the tellers. 
Merriweather didn't make it out of the parking lot after being wounded by a 
sheriff's deputy.

(source: al.com)