[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OHIO, IND., KAN., ARIZ., CALIF., WASH., USA

[Rick Halperin]

May 1



OHIO:

Bans on local hiring quotas, death penalty among new bills in the Ohio 
legislature



Death penalty ban

On Wednesday, Sen. Edna Brown, a Toledo Democrat, proposed legislation to 
prohibit capital punishment in Ohio. Brown said in a news release that she 
introduced Senate Bill 154 after meeting with death-row exonerees.

Brown introduced similar bills during the past 2 legislative sessions without 
success, and her chances of success this year aren't much greater in the 
GOP-dominated legislature.

(source: cleveland.com)








INDIANA:

Expert: Daniel Messel could face death penalty in Hannah Wilson's murder



The man accused of murdering IU senior Hannah Wilson could face the death 
penalty, if prosecutors charge him with kidnapping.

Daniel Messel, 49, already faces a charge of murder.

"It's my opinion that the state is probably considering a death penalty count 
in this murder case," said criminal defense attorney Jack Crawford, a former 
county prosecutor. "It appears strongly like Hannah Wilson was abducted, that's 
a kidnapping. A murder committed in the course of a kidnapping is an 
aggravating ground or circumstance to seek the death sentence."

In the Brown County field where Hannah Wilson's body was found last Friday, so 
was a cell phone that police say belonged to Messel. Police then found blood 
and hair inside Messel's car and, when he was arrested, he was carrying a trash 
bag full of clothes.

But there are apparently no witnesses to the murder.

"It's not unusual to have a circumstantial case. You let the jury put the 
pieces together. And these are some big pieces," explained Crawford, who said 
the prosecution in this case does not have to prove motive.

If Messel never testifies about the case, that's fine, too he can still be 
convicted.

"If they connect up the DNA, if they find his DNA on or near her body, or if 
they find her DNA in his vehicle, that's strong circumstantial evidence that he 
committed the killing," said Crawford.

If detectives are able to show that Hannah was abducted, this could become a 
capital case.

The Brown County prosecutor, so far, isn't talking about the evidence or 
additional charges.

"We will remain playing this close to the vest, I don't want to make a comment 
at this time," said Brown County Prosecutor Ted Adams on Monday.

Hannah's father is focused on the loss and mostly, celebrating a young and 
vivacious life.

"She's gone. It doesn't matter whether they find a killer or don't find a 
killer," said Dr. Jeff Wilson, Hannah's father, "I think, though, the police 
and the detectives have done a great job. They're on it. I'm not too concerned 
about that."

(source: WTHR news)








KANSAS:

Kansas Supreme Court delays death penalty ruling



The Kansas Supreme Court announced Friday that it has delayed issuing a 
decision in the death penalty case of Scott D. Cheever while the U.S. Supreme 
Court considers appeals in three other Kansas cases that raise similar issues.

Cheever was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2005 killing of Greenwood 
County Sheriff Matt Samuels.

Attorneys for both the prosecution and defense in the Cheever case agreed to 
the stay, according to a statement from the court.

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering appeals in 3 other death penalty cases 
from Kansas. In each case, the Kansas high court vacated death sentences due to 
procedural errors in the sentencing phase of the trials.

Those cases involve Jonathan and Reginald Carr, who were convicted and 
sentenced for a brutal murder spree in December 2000 in which 4 people were 
shot execution-style in a frozen field near Wichita.

The 3rd case involves Sidney Gleason, who was convicted of killing 2 people 
near Great Bend in 2004 as part of an effort to prevent them from providing 
evidence about an earlier robbery.

1 of the issues on appeal common to all of the cases is whether juries in the 
penalty phase of the trial must be told that the defense does not have to prove 
mitigating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under Kansas law, the death penalty can only be applied if the prosecution 
proves certain aggravating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt. But the law 
puts no similar burden on the defense when presenting mitigating circumstances.

The Kansas Supreme Court reversed Cheever's conviction and death sentence once, 
in 2013, on the basis that the court violated his 5th amendment right against 
self incrimination by admitting into evidence statements he had given to 
federal authorities in a separate proceeding.

But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision a few months later and 
remanded it to Kansas to be considered again.

Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994, but since then the Kansas Supreme 
Court has overturned virtually every death sentence it has considered and, to 
date, no one has yet been executed under the 1994 law.

(source: Lawrence Journal World)








ARIZONA:

Death penalty pros and cons



Over the past couple years, I have tried to completely ignore the Jodi Arias 
case. It is totally disgusting to me. If the case had not been a good looking 
woman involving sex, it would have ceased to be a news story very quickly.

The real sad story here is a couple spoiled kids without any moral values that 
destroyed each other.

I had someone tell me, "I would have really liked to have been on that jury."

Not me; I wanted nothing to do with the story. I did not even want to hear, 
talk or read about the case.

The death penalty is one law I believe Arizona should do away with. I have 
several reasons I feel the death penalty should be eliminated. 2/3 of the rest 
of world has decided to eliminate the death penalty. China, Iran, North Korea, 
Yemen and yes, the U.S. does conduct the majority of executions in the world. I 
am not very proud to be part of that group.

It costs a lot more to execute someone than to let them rot in jail. Yes, it is 
cheaper to feed them than to pay the attorney fees for 20 years' worth of 
appeals.

I believe someone that commits a murder should be prevented from ever 
committing the crime again, and keeping them in jail for the rest of their life 
does that. Do you really believe that dying is worse than sitting in an 8-foot 
box for 20 years?

Some people argue that the death penalty is a deterrent. I do not believe 
someone that is thinking about committing a murder says, "Well, if the 
punishment is life, I will commit the crime, but if it is death, I will not 
commit the murder."

Is that fair?

We say we do not execute people with a mental illness, but I believe anyone 
that commits murder has a mental illness. If you are charged with murder and 
you have enough money, it is very unlikely you would ever get the death 
penalty. The FBI said in the 14 states that do not have the death penalty, they 
have a lower homicide rate than the national average.

Lesson: If you really believe in the death penalty, ask yourself, would I like 
to witness an execution?

(source: Quentin Tolby, retired judge; The Glendale Star)








CALIFORNIA:

Lawyer claims client never deserved death penalty----Attorney: Convicted 
murderer is 'not a dangerous person'



Nearly 15 years ago, Jeffrey Jens represented Paul Gordon Smith Junior, the man 
convicted of killing 20-year-old Lora Sinner during a 1998 camping trip. Smith 
was also convicted of an attempted murder charge while he was in the Shasta 
County Jail.

This week, the California Supreme Court ruled that Smith did not get a proper 
sentencing trial and therefore he is no longer on death row, for now. Jens 
shared he is happy his former client's death sentence was overturned.

"I've had 350 jury trials and to have somebody on death row, it's something 
that you can't quite forget and to have that overturned and have that off your 
conscious at this stage in my career means a lot," Jens said about his former 
client Smith.

Jens said the case never should have been a death penalty case because Smith is 
not a dangerous person.

In an interview with KRCR News Channel 7 in 2002, Jens said Smith had a "far 
from normal," childhood.

"He was raped by his father over and over again. He was neglected, abandoned, 
abused, and then shuffled into the system. He never really had a chance. He has 
a brain dysfunction. This is not the kind of person that you put to death this 
is the kind of person that gets life without parole," Jens shared in 2002.

On Monday, the high court ruled that an expert was wrongly prevented from 
testifying. The jury was told of Smith's several attempts to escape from the 
jail and his violent attitude toward guards.

The court said a prison expert was barred from telling the jury that security 
is tighter at San Quentin, which is where Smith resides currently.

Smith could face another death penalty trial or he may be sentenced to life in 
prison.

The Shasta County District Attorney's office said they haven't started 
reviewing the case and they have not made a decision about whether or not they 
will retry the penalty phase.

(source: KRCR tv news)








WASHINGTON:

The state Supreme Court justice who stepped down to protest the death penalty



The Supreme Court's heated debate over lethal injection on Wednesday 
highlighted the stark divide that remains in how the justices view the death 
penalty. It was the 1st time in nearly a decade that the justices had 
contemplated lethal injection, the country's primary method of execution, and 
their arguments were notable for the sharp tone as much as their underlying 
disagreements about what they were debating.

As Ken Armstrong at the Marshall Project points out, not long after these 
arguments wrapped up, the Washington state Supreme Court was holding a memorial 
service to honor one of its former justices. It seemed oddly relevant, because 
that justice had specifically said he was stepping down from the court 2 
decades ago to protest the state's use of the death penalty.

Robert F. Utter, who died last year at age 84, wrote in April 1995 that his 
only regret about serving on the court was a failure "to provide equal access 
to justice" to everybody in the state.

"I have reached the point where I can no longer participate in a legal system 
that intentionally takes human life in capital punishment cases," Utter wrote 
in a letter explaining his decision, which you can read in full over at the 
Marshall Project. "We continue to demonstrate no human is wise enough to decide 
who should die."

Utter is not the most high-profile judge to turn against the death penalty, of 
course. Just a year before Utter's letter, former Supreme Court justice Harry 
A. Blackmun declared that he had reversed his position on the death penalty 
after almost a quarter of a century on the court. Blackmun declared that he 
would no longer meddle "with the machinery of death" and decried the country's 
capital punishment system as "fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, 
caprice and mistake." (Blackmun retired from the court that year.)

Still, Utter's resignation and his later comments were dramatic in a different 
way, a judicial swan song reached after dissenting 2 dozen times from cases 
that upheld the death penalty. His feelings on capital punishment were not with 
him all of his life, though, but rather were forged in his experiences as a 
young judge and strengthened over his years on the bench, as he later explained 
in a series of interviews with the Washington State Legacy Project in 2009.

In these interviews, Utter recalls that while serving as a prosecutor in King 
County, he asked for death sentences while working on cases. "I just felt it 
was part of the law," he said. "We didn't win those cases when I was a 
prosecutor in the 1950s, thank goodness."

Utter said that his views on capital punishment could be traced back to a trial 
involving Don Anthony White, a young black man who had what Utter described as 
"all sorts of mental problems." White had killed 2 people and been sentenced to 
death, but he was granted a new trial before Utter, who was a superior court 
judge at the time. Utter said White as a young man had dramatically changed 
while on death row, and the jury in the new trial found him guilty but spared 
his life.

"That really opened my eyes to the power of rehabilitation," Utter told the 
Legacy Project.

However, he said, these were his personal feelings, and he said he could not 
dissent against the death penalty without a legal basis. "But the legal reasons 
against it are there in almost every case you look at," he said. Over his 
nearly 23 years on the state Supreme Court, Utter said his opposition continued 
to grow, until he finally decided he could do more good by stepping aside than 
by continuing to dissent.

"There were 2 death penalty cases coming up in the next term," he told the 
Legacy Project. "At that point I had to ask myself, 'Am I going to do more 
benefit in the long term by staying on the court or by resigning and bringing 
the issue to the floor?'"

A majority of Americans support the death penalty, though that level of support 
has been consistently falling since about the time Utter stepped down. And a 
sizable majority of people are also pretty sure that an innocent person can be 
executed in the current system, an opinion that transcends race, gender and 
political preferences.

Washington state has carried out 5 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court 
reinstated the death penalty in 1976. It last executed an inmate in 2010, when 
Cal Brown, who was convicted of raping and murdering a woman, was killed by 
lethal injection. Utter spoke out against that execution, again stating that he 
felt the system remained unequal and costly.

Last year, Gov. Jay Inslee (D) announced a moratorium on executions in the 
state due to what he called an unequal and inconsistent system. "There are too 
many flaws in the system," Inslee said in a statement at the time. "And when 
the ultimate decision is death there is too much at stake to accept an 
imperfect system."

(source: Washington Post)








USA:

There's more to executions than pain----Supreme Court must consider what the 
death penalty inflicts on America's political and legal values



America's death penalty system is in crisis. Its severity was vividly on 
display Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of Glossip v. 
Gross, a challenge to Oklahoma???s use of the drug midazolam as a component of 
lethal injection.

On April 29, 2014, Oklahoma's botched lethal injection of Clayton Lockett 
brought dramatic attention to what was once believed to be a safe, reliable and 
humane method of putting someone to death. Lockett died of a heart attack 43 
minutes after the 1st execution drug was administered and after a series of 
frantic attempts to find a useable vein. He groaned, writhed, lifted his head 
and shoulders off the gurney and said "man."

The case highlighted the vain effort of states to find drugs that can be relied 
on to do the business of killing humanely. So serious are the problems with the 
death penalty system and with lethal injection that Dr. Jay Chapman, the 
pathologist who pioneered this method of execution, now says that he has 
"revised his view of capital punishment" and has serious doubts about whether 
it should continue to be used.

With medical heavyweights such as Chapman criticizing the suitability of 
midazolam for use in executions and with the bulk of scientific evidence now 
suggesting that midazolam cannot be used "to maintain adequate anesthesia" 
during an execution, Oklahoma has been forced to rely heavily on the expert 
testimony of Dr. Roswell Evans, dean of the school of pharmacy at Auburn 
University, to support its execution protocol and its use of midazolam.

Despite never himself having used the drug on a patient or had any experience 
with anesthesia, Evans testified in the district court that first considered 
the Gross case that inmates given midazolam "would not sense pain" during an 
execution. Junk science reached a new low when he supported this assertion by 
relying almost exclusively on citations from a consumer website, drugs.com, a 
website that offers the disclaimer that it is not intended to provide "medical 
advice."

The claims of so-called experts in the science of pain should warn us that the 
constitutional status of the death penalty in the United States has tended to 
turn on the question of whether we can know for sure whether the condemned 
suffer when they are executed. But can we really answer this question? And, 
even if we could, is it the right question?

"The constitutionality of capital punishment should not depend exclusively on 
whether there is a painless method of execution, because that is a question we 
may never be able to answer."

Does the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" require us to 
depend on science to reveal the pain of those we execute? Or is the effort to 
answer that question inevitably going to evince the confused rhetoric that was 
on display in Wednesday's oral argument? (Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, 
for instance, went so far as to contend that the Gross case was one part of "a 
guerrilla war against the death penalty," in which opponents try to deny states 
the drugs that could carry out executions with little or no pain, such as those 
used in assisted suicide.)

This doubt and confusion can neither be put to rest nor alleviated. Pain "has 
no voice," Harvard English professor Elaine Scarry observes in "The Body in 
Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World":

When one hears about another's physical pain, the events happening within the 
interior of that person's body may seem to have the remote character of some 
deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography.

The constitutionality of capital punishment should not depend exclusively on 
whether there is a painless method of execution, because that is a question we 
may never be able to answer. Rather, we must consider the damage the death 
penalty inflicts on America's political and legal values. We know, for 
instance, that for every 9 people executed in the U.S. since 1976, 1 person has 
been falsely convicted, condemned and subsequently exonerated - and that death 
sentencing has been impermissibly tainted by racial discrimination. We must 
gauge how such social harm measures up to America's commitment to respecting 
the humanity of all citizens and its belief that no one's worth or dignity can 
be measured simply in terms of his or her own worst act, no matter how heinous.

Displacing that inquiry and focusing simply on the pain of those we execute 
turns complex moral and political questions into questions of science. It 
pushes people such as Evans to the forefront of our most important 
constitutional controversies, where they do not belong.

Justice Elena Kagan got it right Wednesday when she asked whether it would be 
constitutional to burn someone at the stake after an anesthetic with debatable 
pain-killing properties. She answered her own question by saying, "Maybe you 
won't feel it. Maybe you will. We just can't tell."

(source: Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence 
and political science and the associate dean of the faculty at Amherst College. 
He is the author of "Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's 
Death Penalty."----Al Jazeera)

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

Prall: No sense in the death penalty



The death penalty is somehow still implemented in the United States. China, 
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States carried out 88 % of death 
penalty executions in 2007, according to Northwestern University. These are not 
countries we want to align ourselves with in terms of human rights.

So, who's even for the death penalty? A recent Pew poll found that 56 % of 
Americans are in favor of capital punishment, the lowest level in 4 decades.

Besides all the states that have deemed it unethical, the United Nations has 
voted 117-38 for a global moratorium on the death penalty. You'll never guess 
which side the United States voted on.

As U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, "The death penalty has no place in 
the 21st century. Leaders across the globe must boldly step forward in favor of 
abolition. Together, let us end this cruel and inhumane practice."

There have even been reports of China re-evaluating its death penalty policy, 
according to the New York Times. Germany refuses to assist in a murder case of 
a U.S. serviceman because the death penalty may be involved. There has to be a 
change here in the States, in every state. Oklahoma is up to bat.

Oklahoma's Supreme Court is going to hear another appeal for the abolishment of 
capital punishment after the horrific incident with Clayton Lockett. Lockett 
was given a state-sanctioned, untested sedative drug (midazolam) to bring about 
his death in a quick and painless way. Instead, he was not sedated and writhed 
in agony, fully conscious, until a he had a major heart attack.

How could the Oklahoma Supreme Court approve the use of such a drug? Justice 
Sonia Sotomayor noted in the dissent that the state expert testifying on behalf 
of midazolam's effects relied on the website drugs.com.

That is an absolutely incompetent job done by the highest judicial officials in 
the state of Oklahoma. The justices have voted to take up the case again after 
other botched executions from across the United States have made headlines.

What is actually on the table in this case is actually quite ridiculous when 
considered. The justices are ruling on whether midazolam violates "cruel and 
unusual punishment" in the 8th Amendment. They are also considering whether 
someone who challenges a lethal-injection protocol has to find a substitute 
drug that would cause less pain.

How about the state just stops killing people?

The question before them now is whether the use of midazolam violates the 
Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Because this is the 
death penalty, where logic often does not apply, the justices will also 
consider the bizarre question of whether someone challenging a lethal-injection 
protocol must identify drugs the state could use that would cause less pain.

And it isn't cheaper to use the death penalty. After a recent study the Kansas 
Judicial Council concluded, "Defending a death-penalty case costs about 4 times 
as much as defending a case where the death penalty is not considered." Not to 
mention the appeal process which can go on for years, if not decades.

All of this is paid for on our dollar, and at the end of the day, it might be 
our dollar taking a human life. Knowing that innocent men have been put to 
death before is reason enough not to support the death penalty. We are not 
Salem; that may be our history, but it doesn't have to be our legacy. Putting 
people to death in any form has dangerous moral implications on an entity such 
as the state.

(source: Opinion, Jacob Prall, The Daily Iowan)

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

Death Row's Other Killers



Glenn Ford, 64, convicted of murder in 1984, spent 30 years on the death row of 
Louisiana's notorious Angola prison before his conviction was overturned and he 
was freed last month. Anthony Ray Hinton, 58, convicted of murder in 1983, 
spent 30 years on Alabama's death row before his murder conviction was 
overturned earlier this month and he was freed.

That means they've joined the growing number of individuals convicted of 
capital murder and other serious crimes who've been proven innocent only after 
years in prison. Their exonerations also underscore how widespread are the 
terrible flaws of American's criminal justice system, and especially its 
ultimate evil: the death penalty. In fact, these men - whom the nation's death 
penalty advocates would have sent to their execution decades ago - are, 
literally, living proof that the death penalty itself is a crime.

According to data compiled by The Innocence Project, which seeks to exonerate 
the wrongfully-convicted, since 1989, 329 inmates convicted of capital murder, 
murder or rape charges have been exonerated via DNA testing. The exonerated had 
served an average of 14 years in prison.

Equally horrifying are the conclusions of a 2014 study that determined that at 
least 4 percent of the 3,000 inmates now on the nation's death row are probably 
innocent; that a "comparatively low" percentage of innocent inmates have been 
executed since 1973; and that there is a greater percentage of innocent people 
whose death sentences have been commuted to sentences of life without the 
possibility of parole.

One of that study's authors wrote: "The great majority of innocent defendants 
who are convicted of capital murder in the United States are neither executed 
nor exonerated. They are sentenced, or resentenced to prison for life, and then 
forgotten."

Whenever I read of another death-row exoneration, 4 considerations immediately 
come to mind.

The 1st is, having been convicted of a capital crime, how does it feel to sit 
awaiting execution on one of America's death rows and know that you are 
innocent?

How does it feel to know that men and women, inhabiting offices of power and 
clad in the trappings of respectability, are going to kill you so they can keep 
pretending the American criminal justice system is just? How does it feel to 
know that the only thing standing between you and execution is a few people who 
have the resources to help you breach the extraordinarily high barriers put in 
place to help the legal system try to avoid admitting it made a mistake?

Anthony Ray Hinton's words, quoted in an April 5 article of theatlantic.com are 
worth focusing on. "They didn't just take me from my family and friends," he 
said. "They had every intention of executing me for something I didn't do."

The 2nd thing I think about whenever another exoneration is announced is the 
studied silence of the get-tough-on-crime crowd and the death penalty advocates 
who are always complaining that the appeals process of capital sentences is too 
drawn out. If those now exonerated had been executed "on time," this crowd 
would have declared: justice done.

The 3rd thing I think about is the injustice to the crimes' victims of these 
wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project data show that in the 329 cases of 
DNA-proved exoneration, less than half of the true perpetrators of the crimes 
have been brought to justice.

Finally, I've come to think that all these cases prove there are 4 kinds of 
souls inhabiting America's death rows. There are the correction officers, of 
course. There are the men and women who actually are guilty of murder. There 
are the men and women actually innocent of the crime they've been blamed for or 
whose guilt was not actually proved at trial. And, finally, there are, in 
spirit, the death penalty advocates, hanging around like vultures waiting for 
the next execution so they can pull the tattered rags of their 
self-righteousness every more tightly around them.

The death penalty is itself morally repugnant, and the growing numbers of 
death-row inmates whose innocence has been proven before they could be executed 
has shown that the process of capital punishment in America is shot through 
with, not just the possibility, but the reality of grievous error.

So, the next time you hear a death-penalty advocate spouting off about its 
validity, ask them how many state-sponsored murders of innocent people they're 
willing to take responsibility for.

(source: Lee A. Daniels' new collection of columns, Race Forward: Facing 
America's Racial Divide in 2014, is available at www.amazon.com; 
baystatebanner.com)