[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----COLO., ARIZ., USA

[Rick Halperin]

May 28



COLORADO:

Jury Selection Begins For Denver's 1st Death Penalty Case In 14 Years



Jury selection has started for Denver's 1st death penalty case in 14 years. 
Dexter Lewis is accused of fatally stabbing 5 people at a bar in October 2012. 
Lewis is accused in the brutal stabbing and killing of 5 people at Fero's Bar 
and Grill near Colorado and Alameda. He also allegedly set the bar on fire to 
cover up the crime.

Police claim the attacks happened while Lewis was trying to rob the business. 
The men allegedly got away with just $170.

Jurors will be selected from a pool of 600 people.

2 brothers, Joseph and Lynell Hill, have been sentenced after pleading guilty 
to their roles in the deadly stabbings. As part of their plea agreements, the 
Hill brothers agreed to testify against Lewis.

(source: CBS news)








ARIZONA:

Arizona should follow Nebraska and dump death penalty



When I heard that the Nebraska Legislature outlawed the death penalty, 2 words 
occurred to me.

Jodi Arias.

That case alone is enough of a reason why the Arizona Legislature should follow 
their conservative Cornhusker colleagues and dump our state's death penalty as 
well.

Certainly, our leaders won't do it because innocent people wind up on death 
row, though innocent people do. Consider the case of Ray Krone, 1 of 8 Arizona 
condemned inmates who have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty 
Information Center. Since 1973, when 153 men on death row in U.S. prisons have 
been exonerated.

Certainly, they won't do it because 1 out of every 10 people who has been 
executed in the United States since 1977 is mentally ill, according to the 
National Association on Mental Illness.

Certainly, they won't consider the decades it takes to carry out the death 
penalty, which is tough on victims' families and something less than the crime 
deterrent our leaders like to call it.

Certainly, they won't do it on moral grounds that the state is little better 
than the killers we seek to punish.

Certainly, they won't do it because we can't seem to get the right drugs to do 
the job right.

So how about doing it in the name of fiscal conservatism?

Our conservative Legislature is constantly cutting taxes then wondering why we 
don't have enough money to properly fund things like schools.

Jodi Arias alone likely boosted class sizes in this state.

Arias, of course, is the deranged woman who killed her ex-boyfriend by stabbing 
him, shooting him and slashing his throat.

Taxpayers spent $3.5 million to provide her with a defense as prosecutors 
tried, then tried again to put her on death row. That doesn't count the cost of 
prosecution or putting up witnesses and family for the various hearings and 
trials.

And that's before inevitable appeals. Or the inevitable new trial that she 
would someday get when the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that her 
constitutional rights were violated.

Meanwhile, it would have cost a fraction of that to simply toss Arias' sorry 
behind into a prison cell for the rest of her life...preferably one without a 
mirror or a microphone.

2 juries declined to put Arias on death row.

So now we're paying $3.5 million to try to kill her, plus the cost of 
prosecution plus the price of tossing her sorry behind into prison for the rest 
of her life.

According to the Department of Corrections, we pay $79.40 a day to house 
maximum-security inmates. Lock Arias up for 30 years and you're still only at 
$869,430.

Arizona is 1 of 31 states that still have a death penalty. The Arizona 
Legislature should make it 30.

Why not save ourselves a few bucks and spend them on schools rather than 
vengeance?

(source: Laurie Roberts, The Arizona Republic)








USA:

Why The Death Penalty Should Live----If you take lives, yours can be taken



I hadn't put a lot of thought into the death penalty until I was lying on a 
sidewalk on Boylston Street two years ago. There, then, I believed that I was 
going to die and that my husband was already dead. But we're still alive. I 
lost my leg below the knee; both of his legs were wounded. We are lucky.

When I woke up in the hospital, I decided not to use the name of the person on 
trial for the crimes against the 2 of us and more than 260 other people, 
including 4 murder victims, 1 of whom was 8 years old. Part of posttraumatic 
stress disorder is the feeling of losing control: one minute you're holding 
your husband's hand in beautiful, sunny Boston; the next, your life is changed 
forever. The killer never wanted to learn my name, so why should I learn his?

And I also decided early on that the death penalty was the verdict that I 
wanted for him. I believe in my heart of hearts that he knew exactly what he 
was doing the moment before he did it, and possibly months before that. Among 
other horrific charges, he used a weapon of mass destruction to intentionally 
harm and kill people.

You can't use a weapon of mass destruction in the United States and not think 
that if you succeed, you're going to face a federal jury and the possibility of 
the death penalty.

It must have been nice for him to be surrounded by a courtroom full of people 
fighting about whether he should live or die. None of us in Boston that day had 
such a luxury.

I testified in the penalty phase of the trial. When I was leaving the stand, I 
looked up and realized how close I was to him. I stood there and thought to 
myself, I wonder if he's scared. I wonder if he's scared that I'm this close. 
There didn't seem to be security covering him. Nobody budged. Maybe it's 
because of my tiny little arms that they didn't think I could do much. I 
certainly know I really wanted to.

But I stood there. I stood there for myself, and I stood there for the survivor 
community, and I stood there for my husband, and I stood there for my left leg. 
Since that moment I feel like there's a bit of closure for me. I'm never going 
to have to see him again.

Many in the survivor community feel like the death penalty offers a sense of 
justice being done. And that???s what his sentence felt like to me. I hope it 
also brings closure to those who lost loved ones that day. There are, of 
course, many in the survivor community who feel that he should spend his life 
in prison and sit in a cell and think about what he did. I don't speak for 
everybody.

I hope that the death penalty in this case sets a precedent, and I hope that 
it's a deterrent. I hope it sends a message from Boston and America: We don't 
put up with terrorism or terrorists. You're not going to get a bed or a 
television or an occasional phone call to your family. When you take lives, 
yours can be taken as well.

Nobody should ever have to go through what anyone in our Boylston Street family 
has. If anyone else is thinking of doing something like this, I hope they look 
long and hard at the sentence this guy got, and decide to change their minds 
and get the help that they need.

(source: Adrianne Haslet Davis is a ballroom dancer, public speaker, and 
philanthropist, TIME)

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

Why the Death Penalty Should Die----Killing killers won't bring back victims



In hauntingly similar but unrelated crimes, separated by 23 years and a 
thousand miles, my father Robert Cushing and my brother-in-law Stephen 
McRedmond were murdered, both at their own houses. Family homes became crime 
scenes; horror displaced happiness; and homicide, as it always does, brought to 
my family pain for which there are no words.

Nothing prepares a person for the murder of a loved one - to have what is most 
precious taken, forever, by another human being. Murder is the ultimate 
disempowerment, for both the victim and the survivors. And every family 
responds differently to murder and its traumatic wounds.

The challenges are many: Finding the strength to get out of bed. Figuring out 
what to do with the empty chair at the kitchen table. Working to understand - 
and avoid being crushed by - police investigations and court systems. And 
honoring the life and the memory of the deceased while seeking justice.

But I do not believe the needs of crime victims or their survivors are met by 
killing the killers. In 2004, I helped create Murder Victims' Families for 
Human Rights, an organization of survivors of homicide victims who oppose the 
death penalty. As a New Hampshire state representative, I work to promote 
policies that enhance public safety and meet the needs of crime victims. My 
father's murderer, who had been a local police officer, is serving life without 
parole; my brother-in-law's murderer, his nephew, took his own life.

Our society is conflicted about the death penalty. I recognize and respect the 
diversity of opinions about capital punishment among survivors of murder 
victims. Unlike those of many death-penalty opponents, my views are 
victim-centered. My opposition is not rooted in what an execution does to a 
condemned prisoner but in what a system that embraces the ritual killing by 
government employees of an incapacitated prisoner does to me - to us, as 
individuals and as a society.

Arguing that an execution is the solution to the pain of victims' families does 
not reflect an understanding of the journey of surviving family members after a 
murder, and it completely ignores the reality of our broken capital-punishment 
system. Most important, executions do not do the one thing we all really want: 
bring our loved ones back from the dead.

For any person, the worst murder is the murder of a family member. A system 
that purports to execute only those who commit heinous murders creates a 
hierarchy of victims. Families devastated by crime become revictimized by a 
system focused on criminals, while the impact of crime itself and the needs of 
victims are all too often ignored. Sadly, some victims' survivors spend so much 
time focusing on how their cherished one died that they end up forgetting how 
the person lived.

As a society, we can and we must do better by victims of violent crime. We can 
live without the death penalty.

(source: Renny Cushing is a 5-term New Hampshire state representative and a 
founder of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights----TIME)

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

VICTORY: Nebraska Becomes the 19th US State to Abolish the Death Penalty!



Wow, who would have thought it possible? Red-state Nebraska (with a few purple 
splotches) actually has repealed the death penalty by voting to override the 
Governor's veto! And who were the people responsible for finally pushing this 
through? A strong coalition of abolitionists, plus some unlikely suspects, 
that's who.

First, a little bit of history: Nebraska was the 1st state to legislatively 
abolish the death penalty in the modern era, in 1979, but the bill failed to 
survive the governor's veto. Subsequently, we saw 3 executions in the 1990's, 
the last one being in 1997.

In 1999 a legislative moratorium bill passed, but was vetoed. In its place, a 
study was authorized, to be conducted by David C. Baldus of Iowa. The study 
concluded that the death penalty was arbitrarily applied, depending more on 
geography, class, race, and the discretion of prosecutors than on fairness.

In 2008, the State Supreme Court ruled that the use of the electric chair was 
deemed "cruel and unusual punishment" because at that time Nebraska was the 
only place on earth that had electrocution as our sole method of execution. 
Lethal injection replaced the electric chair as the means of execution, but 
since legal procurement of drugs has eluded the state, the death penalty has 
essentially been put on hold.

Finally, in 2013, we had enough votes for abolition, but not enough to overcome 
a filibuster.

But this year, after decades of struggle, we had the votes to halt a 
filibuster, and the bill sponsored by Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who has 
fought for abolition for some 40 years, finally saw its way to final passage.

The suspense was great; would we be able to override the Governor's promised 
veto, or would that prove to be an unsurmountable barrier as in 1979? Today, we 
have our answer. Let the celebration begin!

So, getting back to my crediting "unusual suspects" ... Just who has helped 
bring us to this historic moment? Many victims' family members have spoken out 
about the tremendous negative impact the continuous attention presented by the 
media has had on their lives. Many religious voices (including the Pope and the 
Dalai Lama) have supported repeal. Law officers, and even some prosecutors, a 
former Nebraska judge, and former wardens from other states have said that it's 
time to move on. But in Nebraska, it's really the conservative legislators who 
have turned the corner and have begun to present arguments, both moral and 
economic, that signal an end to a failed enterprise.

But clearly, this couldn't have happened without the hard work of groups 
dedicated to ending state barbarism. Amnesty International USA has been there 
for us, with phone banks and email alerts asking Nebraska's Amnesty 
International members to contact their legislators.

Nebraska also benefits from a strong coalition of people working together; 
Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NADP), Equal Justice USA 
(EJUSA), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and many others have worked 
diligently to try to educate policy makers and constituents. The media has had 
many editorials in the major statewide newspapers calling for abolition.

So thank you all for your support, phone calls, and emails. Now Nebraska has 
joined the ranks of states to abandon this broken and unfixable punishment - 
the 19th state without the death penalty, and the 7th state to abolish in the 
only the last 8 years.

The tidal wave of abolition is continuing to sweep over the United States, and 
soon the death penalty will be relegated to the history books where it belongs. 
Who's next?

(source: Christy Hargesheimer, Nebraska resident and Nebraska State Death 
Penalty Action Coordinator for Amnesty International; AIUSA)

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

Nebraska Made History ---- Joins Growing Number of States Replacing Death 
Penalty with Smart Alternatives



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE----May 27, 2015

Today, a supermajority of Nebraska legislators voted to override Governor Pete 
Rickett's veto of LB 268, a bill that replaces the death penalty with a life 
sentence that has no possibility of parole.

Statement from Danielle Conrad, Executive Director

Today marks a remarkable and historic victory for our state. We are grateful 
for the dynamic leadership of policymakers, and we are proud to be part of an 
incredibly diverse coalition led by faith leaders, fiscal conservatives, and 
victim's families. This is a meaningful victory for all Nebraskans. The 
Nebraska Legislature, with the world watching, made their voice a part of the 
national conversation. We are a nation that is turning away from the death 
penalty. This victory stands as a testament to what can happen in our sister 
states. Our work helped to identify what we were hearing and seeing on the 
ground and across the nation a majority of voters favor smart alternatives like 
life in prison that put public safety first.

Around the country, the number of executions per year and the number of states 
that carry out executions continue to decline. The state of Nebraska has been 
unable to carry out an execution for 15 years. Efforts to obtain drugs for 
lethal injection have failed time and time again. The Governor's most recent 
desperate attempt to secure lethal injection drugs raises the same legal and 
procedural red flags. Thankfully, Nebraska can now implement this law and 
devote more resources to solving crimes, supporting victims' families, and 
bringing sensible reforms to our crisis-riddled prison system.

(source: ACLU Nebraska)

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

Boston bomber sentenced to death, so why has Australia gone silent? The recent 
decision in Boston should reminder us of how easily the capital punishment 
apparatus is hijacked in pursuit of a political agenda.



It's been 2 weeks since a United States federal jury handed down a sentence of 
death for the Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In that fortnight, Australia's 
apparent disinterest - and the silence of some who vowed to oppose capital 
punishment in all circumstances - has been conspicuous. Now that the payoffs 
are less clear, and when it comes to one of our closest allies, just how far 
are we prepared to go with our principled opposition? Perhaps we'd prefer not 
to see the disheartening similarities between recent events in south-east Asia 
and the punitive machinery of justice in the "land of the free".

We're only too well-acquainted with the shortcomings of Indonesia's criminal 
justice system, but the recent decision in Massachusetts - a state 
overwhelmingly opposed to capital punishment and abolitionist since 1980 - 
ought to serve as a sombre reminder of just how easily the capital punishment 
apparatus is hijacked in pursuit of a political agenda. The particulars may be 
different but it's the same old story.

We might like to imagine that the failings at the core of Indonesia's death 
penalty regime can simply be attributed to Third World legal standards and 
corruption, but we'd be deceiving ourselves.

Former US president Bill Clinton's dramatic expansion of US federal death 
penalty laws - in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombings in the mid-1990s 
- to a broad range of terrorism offences was, according to some observers, 
"about politics of the most cynically expedient variety". Further reforms, 
particularly Clinton's duplicitously titled Antiterrorism and Effective Death 
Penalty Act, significantly limited appeals for all death-row prisoners, 
terrorist and non-terrorist alike.

The fervour for a truncated capital appeals process was widespread among US 
"law-and-order" politicians, who presented this as a remedy to what they termed 
"frivolous" appeals by death-row inmates attempting to delay their executions.

The trend towards fast-track capital convictions in the US is particularly 
alarming when viewed alongside the growing list of exonerations; since 1973, 
150 people have been found to be innocent of the crimes for which they had been 
sentenced to death. Since Clinton enacted the one-year statute of limitations 
in 1996, at least 80 death-row prisoners have missed the deadline, despite, in 
some cases, compelling evidence of errors or bias. Of these, 16 have been put 
to death.

The Boston verdict is not just a legacy of Clinton's enthusiasm for the death 
penalty - designed to underpin his "tough on crime" credentials - but also a 
federal jury selection process that almost guarantees its application. 
"Death-qualified" juries tend to be "conviction prone", according to research, 
and are further biased by extensive questioning on sentencing preferences, 
implying a guilty verdict even before the trial begins.

The US is seemingly unperturbed by the prospect of proceeding with executions 
in violation of binding judgments of the International Court of Justice - which 
it has done twice in 2014, in the case of two Mexican nationals - or in cases 
of recorded mental illness.

But it's not foreigners or the mentally unsound that appear to be the primary 
target of the US capital punishment machine. Victim race and geography are the 
key predictors of a death sentence; in the federal districts of St Louis and 
New Orleans, the death sentence is applied at about 6 times the rate of the 
federal districts of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

A review of US sentencing over the past 4 decades reveals that offenders with 
white victims are up to four times more likely to receive a death sentence as 
those with black victims, and heaven help you if you're a black offender.

In light of these bleak statistics, it seems reasonable to ask whether 
Clinton's death penalty laws have deterred terrorism. Well, no, as it happens - 
no more than south-east Asia's punitive sanctions have deterred drug offenders. 
Bruce Shapiro, award-winning reporter on criminal justice and politics, points 
to a calamitous list of terrorist attacks from the Oklahoma City bombing to 
9/11, and a range of lone-wolf attacks, which have all occurred on US soil in 
the past 2 decades. If national security was the objective, Clinton's measures 
have failed the US spectacularly.

The forces that shape the circumstances of death-row inmates across the US are 
not so different, it seems, from those that sealed the fates of Myuran 
Sukumaran and Andrew Chan in central Java a month ago. We might like to imagine 
that the failings at the core of Indonesia's death penalty regime can simply be 
attributed to Third World legal standards and corruption, but we'd be deceiving 
ourselves. The evidence is mounting that flaws in the death penalty - wherever 
it is applied - are far more insidious, and more fundamental, than that.

In which case, who are the real beneficiaries of state-sanctioned killing? This 
question seems particularly salient in view of the capital sentence for the 
Boston bomber; a sentence opposed in Massachusetts law, opposed by the vast 
majority of Bostonians, and even opposed by many of the maimed and the 
bereaved. If the death penalty - applied unjustly, expeditiously, or 
inequitably - doesn't even serve the victims, then just who is it serving? When 
we get to the bottom of that - hopefully sooner rather than later - we'll find 
a solid foundation for our principled opposition.

(source: Sarah Gill has worked as a writer, researcher and government policy 
analyst. She is undertaking postgraduate study in law, policy and government at 
the University of Western Australia----The Age)

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

Will Republicans Follow Nebraska and Give Up the Death Penalty?



Yesterday, Nebraska's legislature abolished the state's use of capital 
punishment, voting 30-19 to override Republican governor Pete Ricketts's veto 
of a bill that had repealed the state's death penalty law. As the New York 
Times reports, it is the 1st time in 40 years that a conservative state has 
banned the death penalty, and Nebraska now becomes the 19th state, along with 
the District of Columbia, to forbid capital punishment. The last conservative 
state to do so was North Dakota in 1973, though 6 blue states have banned the 
practice since 2006.

Prior to the vote, Nebraska had 11 inmates on death row but had been unable to 
execute anyone for 17 years. Indeed, even if they had not repealed the 
practice, the state, which relied on the procedure of lethal injection after 
banning the electric chair in 2009, would have had the same difficulty that 
most other death penalty states currently have: a decisive shortage of lethal 
injection drugs, after European manufacturers decided it was no longer ethical 
to sell state governments the components they need to make their lethal 
injection cocktails. According to the Times, even Texas, which leads the nation 
in executions by a considerable margin, only has enough drugs to execute one 
more prisoner.

The endgame in Nebraska came after months of debate and previous attempts by 
the state's unicameral legislature to repeal the law. The Times notes that 
death penalty opponents "were able to build a coalition that spanned the 
ideological spectrum by winning the support of Republican legislators who said 
they believed capital punishment was inefficient, expensive and out of place 
with their party's values, as well as that of lawmakers who cited religious or 
moral reasons for supporting the repeal." Along those lines, The Atlantic's 
Russell Berman spoke with Marc Hyden, of the group Conservatives Concerned 
About the Death Penalty, regarding his rationale for opposing capital 
punishment:

[Said Hyden,] "It's not pro-life because it risks innocent life. It's not 
fiscally responsible because it costs millions more dollars than life without 
parole." Yet Nebraska's bumbling and occasionally shady attempts to carry out 
death sentences - along with incidents in neighboring states like the botched 
execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma - have given rise to another argument 
that sells among conservatives: the death penalty is just another example of 
government run amok.

"At the end of the day, this is just another big government program that's 
really dangerous and expensive but doesn???t achieve any of its goals," Hyden 
told me, summarizing his pitch to Republicans. "They don't need to ask 
themselves, 'Do some people deserve to die?' The question they need to ask 
themselves is, do they trust an error-prone government to fairly, efficiently 
and properly administer a program that metes out death to its citizens? I think 
the answer to that is a resounding no."

According to the Pew Research Center, 77 % of Republicans currently support 
capital punishment. Looking at overall public opinion trends, NPR's Danielle 
Kurtzleben adds:

Support for the death penalty has slowly fallen over the past couple of 
decades, from a high of 80 % in favor in the mid-1990s to just over 60 % 
currently, according to Gallup. That is actually near a 40-year low, but the 
longer history of public opinion on the death penalty is much more unstable.

She goes on to note that a primary reason for that instability is the shifting 
influence of fear and distrust among Americans:

"There are spikes in death-penalty support appearing during particular eras of 
what can be described as fear mongering," contended Robert Dunham, executive 
director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that 
studies the policy. He explained that during the "red scare" of the 1950s, 
American support for the death penalty picked up. It fell off in the early 
1960s, only to pick up again in the late 1960s and early 1970s after a rash of 
high-profile assassinations - Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., for 
example, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace. All of that 
contributed to a national conversation about the death penalty as the Supreme 
Court in 1972 found some death penalty statutes to be unconstitutional 
(effectively ending the practice for several years), but a 1976 decision opened 
the doors again. Then, the racially charged political rhetoric on crime in the 
1980s (think Willie Horton) likewise fueled that support, according to Dunham's 
explanation.

Conversely, if a culture of fear contributes to support of the death penalty, 
public distrust of the government turns people against the policy, Dunham 
explains. During the Vietnam War era, when people started to question the 
government's choices, they also questioned the death penalty as a valid form of 
punishment.

So theoretically, in the age of bogeyman Obama, NSA overreach, and Jade Helm 
paranoia, death penalty support among conservatives should be falling off a 
cliff. But looking at the fear dynamic, if there are additional terrorist 
attacks here in the U.S., would support for the death penalty then tick up? 
Looking at the high-profile case of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 
who was recently sentenced to die under federal death penalty law, an April 
CNN/ORC poll found that 53 % of Americans thought he should be executed. In 
addition:

Fewer feel Tsarnaev ought to face the death penalty than said so about Timothy 
McVeigh following his conviction for carrying out the bombing of the Alfred P. 
Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. An August 1997 CNN/USA 
Today/Gallup poll found that 64% of Americans felt McVeigh ought to face the 
death penalty for his crimes, 34% preferred life in prison.

Meanwhile, when the Boston Globe commissioned a Massachusetts poll on the same 
question, also in April, they discovered that "although nearly a third of 
Massachusetts residents say they support the death penalty for egregious 
crimes, less than 20 % [supported executing Tsarnaev]".

What impact Nebraska's move will have on the national debate remains unclear, 
but it does seem possible the news will help convince more conservatives to 
reconsider their position. In the meantime, with lethal injection drugs 
unavailable, Utah recently reauthorized the use of the firing squad, a move 
three other conservative states are also considering.

(source: nymag.com)