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

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 2



OKLAHOMA:

New laws on criminals take effect in Oklahoma


A new law resulted from last year's botched execution of death row inmate 
Clayton Lockett and the problem Oklahoma has had acquiring the drugs needed to 
carry out lethal injections. Written by state Rep. Mike Christian, a former 
Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper and staunch advocate of the death penalty, it 
paves the way for Oklahoma to use nitrogen gas to execute inmates if lethal 
injection is ruled unconstitutional or if the necessary drugs become 
unavailable.

There are no reports of nitrogen gas ever being used to execute humans, and 
critics have voiced concern that the method is untested.

(source: Associated Press)






NEVADA:

Ammar Harris trial death penalty phase begins Monday


A jury returns to a Nevada courtroom Monday to begin deciding whether a 
self-styled pimp gets the death penalty for killing 3 people by shooting into a 
moving car and triggering a fiery crash on the Las Vegas Strip.

Ammar Harris was found guilty Oct. 26 of killing an aspiring rapper in a 
Maserati sports car and a cab driver and a tourist from Washington state in a 
taxi that exploded in a fireball early Feb. 21, 2013.M

The 29-year-old Harris grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and lived in Miami, 
Atlanta and Las Vegas.

He's got prior felony convictions for a weapon in South Carolina in 2004; rape 
and robbery in Las Vegas in 2013; and this year for bribing a Nevada prison 
guard to smuggle cellphones to him.

(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)






USA:

The 'worst of the worst' myth behind Clinton's pro-death penalty stance----How 
can we reserve the death penalty for the "worst of the worst" when we can't 
rely on the judicial system to not sentence the innocent to death?

The death penalty made a rare appearance on the presidential campaign trail 
last week with Hillary Rodham Clinton saying she backs it "because I do think 
there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the 
death penalty, but I'd like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed 
to what we've seen in most states."

There's the rub. How do we know with full certainty that someone is guilty of a 
"worst of the worst" crime?

There are many arguments against the death penalty, from the inherent 
immorality of allowing a state to kill its own citizens, to the arbitrary and 
inconsistent application depending on the race of the convicted killer, and the 
race of the victim (black killers of white victims get the death penalty in a 
disproportionate number of cases). Geography matters, too. According to a 2013 
report by the Death Penalty Information Center, "2% of the counties in the U.S. 
have been responsible for the majority of cases leading to executions since 
1976 .... [A]ll of the state executions since the death penalty was reinstated 
stem from cases in just 15% of the counties in the U.S. All of the 3,125 
inmates on death row as of January 1, 2013 came from just 20% of the counties."

But another fundamental problem underscores the weakness of the "worst of the 
worst" reasoning that Clinton seems to embrace (her rivals for the Democratic 
presidential nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. 
Martin O'Malley, both oppose capital punishment): We can't be sure that those 
convicted of the most heinous crimes are actually guilty.

Analyzing data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center shows that 
since 1973 at least 156 people have been released from death row after being 
exonerated of the crime for which they were convicted, defined as acquitted, 
had all charges dismissed, or been granted a pardon based on evidence of 
innocence. So these aren't the oft-cited "technicalities," but either findings 
of innocence or the complete collapse of a prosecutor's case.

"We can't be sure that those convicted of the most heinous crimes are actually 
guilty."

The racial breakdown of the exonerated is heavily weighted to African 
Americans, who accounted for 81, or 52%, of the exoneration cases, while whites 
accounted for 61, or 40%, of the exonerations. Latinos (12 cases) and "other" 
(1 case) accounted for the rest.

But the disparity extends further. The 156 exonerated people spent an average 
of 11.4 years on death row. But wrongfully convicted whites spent an average of 
9 years on death row, compared with the average 13.5 years blacks spent before 
being set free.

So what is the "worst of the worst?" That's a judgment call, which is why even 
saving the death penalty for such cases is still an arbitrary act. For 
instance, "Green River Killer" Gary Ridgway admitted killing 48 people in 
Washington state and, in return for a life sentence, pledged to own up to other 
killings as evidence emerged. The prosecutors put verifying crimes (and guilt) 
above seeking the death penalty, which is an arbitrary decision.

But Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, brothers in North Carolina, had nothing to 
bargain with and, on the basis of their confessions to the 1983 rape and murder 
of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie, they received death sentences. In a later ruling 
in a different case about the constitutionality of lethal injections in 
executions, pro-death penalty Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited the 
"the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by 4 men and then killed by stuffing 
her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection 
compared with that!"

It was, indeed, a heinous crime. But McCollum and Brown didn't commit it, as 
DNA evidence revealed. The confessions, it turns out, were coerced (both men 
have intellectual disabilities), and investigators failed to follow up on clues 
that implicated another man who lived nearby, and who was later convicted of a 
similar rape-murder that occurred just a month after Sabrina's.

When you can't be sure that the justice system is convicting the guilty, how 
can you rely on it to determine who lives and dies?

Pro-death penalty activists argue that the problem with the absurdly expensive 
system is that it is too slow and cumbersome. But speeding things up just 
ensures that a higher percentage of the innocent will be executed. Of the 156 
death row inmates exonerated since 1973, a full 22 served at least 20 years 
there before being cleared. The median years on death row was 10, which means 
half of those exonerated spent a decade awaiting execution before being freed. 
So how fast should we move to execute?

The "worst of the worst" sounds more and more like a description of the death 
penalty system than of the crimes for which it is supposed to be reserved.

(source: Opinion, Scott Martelle; Los Angeles Times)

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

Can Courtroom Prejudice Be Proved? ---- The Supreme Court considers what it 
takes to show that prosecutors, when they pick juries, are discriminating 
against minorities.


For decades, scholars who have analyzed death-penalty cases have consistently 
found racial disparities, with death sentences disproportionately handed down 
to black men, more often in cases with white victims.

But defense lawyers who want to challenge these sentences continue to face a 
predicament: How do you prove that racial discrimination infected a specific 
case?

This broad question has often turned on the reasons that prosecutors offer for 
excluding black men and women from juries. Decades after the Jim Crow era of 
all-white juries, defense lawyers continue to argue that prosecutors - 
particularly in the South, where the death penalty is most popular - use more 
subtle methods to exclude blacks.

Clarity could come with a U.S. Supreme Court case, Foster v. Chatman, which 
will be argued on Monday and decided next year. Both prosecutors and defense 
lawyers hope the outcome will guide prosecutors to avoid accusations of bias 
while showing the defense what kind of evidence is necessary to prove that 
prosecutors really are discriminating.

In 1987, Timothy Tyrone Foster, 19, was sentenced to death for the murder of 
Queen Madge White, a 79-year-old white widow in Rome, Georgia, a small town 
near the Alabama border. White had just returned home from choir practice. 
Foster - who is currently on death row - was found guilty of breaking into her 
home, raping and strangling her, and stealing some of her possessions, 
including an air conditioner, several lamps, and drinking glasses.

Foster is black, and his jury was all-white, which is legal. But years later, 
as Foster's lawyers examined notes made by prosecutors during jury selection, 
they made a discovery: names of black members of the jury pool had been 
highlighted in green and labeled "B#1," "B#2," and "B#3." Clayton Lundy, an 
investigator for the prosecution, had said these men and women should be 
ranked, just in case "it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors." 
(Incidentally, Lundy himself is black). Foster's lawyers are seeking a new 
trial.

Prosecutors and defenders have wide latitude as they take turns "striking" 
potential jurors from the pool - these are called peremptory strikes - but they 
cannot base their decisions on race, ethnicity or gender. Officially, Foster's 
prosecutors did provide reasons unrelated to race for considering these jurors 
less than ideal for their side; 1 had a son incarcerated for theft, another had 
stated she would not vote for death "regardless of the evidence." The Georgia 
Supreme Court later agreed that prosecutors fully investigated all of the 
prospective jurors and that these reasons were sufficiently "race-neutral."

A year before Foster's trial, the Supreme Court had decided that excluding 
potential jurors because of their race would violate the equal protection 
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case was called Batson v. Kentucky, and 
calling out the other side for trying to base a decision on race is now called 
a "Batson challenge."

Since then, "prosecutors have become pretty adept at paying attention to the 
reasons they can give that are not race-related," says Tim Cole, the former 
district attorney of Montague County, Texas, (and now an opponent of the death 
penalty). If there is no paper trail - like the highlighting and circling in 
this case - it is practically impossible to prove the "subjective intent inside 
someone's mind."

Many defense attorneys and legal scholars argue that Batson v. Kentucky has 
proved to be a weak regulator of behavior. Yale law professor Stephen Bright, 
who will argue Foster's side before the High Court, told The Marshall Project 
that "people of color are routinely being excluded from juries so that even in 
jurisdictions with substantial minority populations, cases are being tried to 
all-white juries." In 2010, the Equal Justice Initiative1 found that in some 
Alabama counties, more than 75 % of black jury pool members in death penalty 
cases had been struck by prosecutors.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, is on the advisory 
board of The Marshall Project.

How does this happen? Bright points to training sessions for prosecutors like 
one that took place in Texas in 2004. The training document - "Batson Basics" - 
featured what Bright called "ready-to-use race neutral reasons" for excluding 
black jurors. These included, "Agreed with O.J. Simpson verdict," "Long hair 
and a goatee," "Chewing gum," "Worked for a labor union" and "Smiled at or 
flirted with defendant."

Shannon Edmonds, the director of governmental relations for the Texas District 
and County Attorneys' Association, which sponsored the training, says these 
reasons are not "ready-to-use," but rather examples of justifications that have 
been approved by judges in past cases. "I'm not sure how you teach about the 
law on a particular subject without discussing the cases interpreting that 
subject," Edmonds told me. "Failing to do so would be some pretty worthless 
legal training, in my opinion." (The document, which Edmonds sent to us, 
provides a rich look at how prosecutors prepare for trials).

But what if prosecutors do not even know they are really striking someone based 
on race? Federal Judge Mark Bennett has argued that prosecutors might strike 
black jurors because of "implicit" bias. Whatever the prosecutor is really 
thinking, he writes, the "defendant's practical burden [is] to make a liar out 
of the prosecutor" and "most trial court judges will only find such deceit in 
extreme situations."

In a statement to the justices, a group of prosecutors sympathetic to the 
defense in Foster's case wrote, "If this Court does not find purposeful 
discrimination on the facts of this case, then it will render Batson 
meaningless." But Supreme Court cases decided after Batson already have 
significantly watered down its meaning. In a 1991 case styled Hernandez v. New 
York the justices allowed prosecutors to remove Latinos from a jury because 
they spoke Spanish. In another case, Purkett v. Elem, the Court's majority 
declared in 1995 that a prosecutor's reason for removing a potential juror of 
color need not be "a reason that makes sense" so long as that reason "does not 
deny equal protection."

Christina Swarns, the litigation director at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, says 
cases with overt forms of bias in jury selection are a "canary in the coalmine" 
for broader problems of racial discrimination. In recent years, the Supreme 
Court has declined to look at the cases of Duane Buck (whose Texas jury was 
told by an expert witness that he was more likely to commit future crimes 
because of his race - Swarns is his lawyer) and Kenneth Fults (whose Georgia 
jury had one member who later said of the death sentence, "that's what the 
nigger deserved").

Swarns sees these overt cases as exceptions only in their bluntness; usually 
discrimination is more subtle. "If you have to have racial epithets coming out 
of your mouth to prove you're discriminating," she says, then it's "going to be 
impossible" for defense attorneys to prevail on claims of bias.

A small group of judges, including Bennett and Supreme Court Justice Stephen 
Breyer, have suggested that the ultimate way to fix the situation is to 
completely eliminate "peremptory challenges" - the ability of prosecutors and 
defense attorneys to cut jurors from the pool without a reason.

But David LaBahn, president of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, says 
prosecutors need a lot of discretion to vet jurors. He describes jury selection 
as "an art, not a science," and says that since most states require a unanimous 
jury in order to impose a death sentence, a single juror can keep a death 
sentence from being imposed, leading "over and over" to costly retrials.

This, LaBahn said, "would not be justice."

(source: themarshallproject.org)

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

Supreme Court takes up racial discrimination in jury selection


The original jury pool for Timothy Foster's 1987 murder trial in Rome, Ga., 
included 10 blacks among 95 potential jurors. During the selection process, 
prosecutors highlighted their names, circled the word "black" on their 
questionnaires and added handy notations such as "B#1" and "B#2."

After more than half the pool was excused for specific reasons, each side was 
allowed to make a set number of additional strikes - as long as it wasn't 
because of race or gender. On a sheet they labeled "definite NO's," prosecutors 
listed the 5 remaining black prospects on top, and they ranked them in case "it 
comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors."

Foster, who is black, was swiftly convicted of murdering an elderly white 
woman. At sentencing, the prosecutor urged the all-white jury to impose death 
in order to "deter other people out there in the projects" - where 90% of the 
residents were black.

In a case that would appear to have multiple smoking guns, Foster's conviction 
and death sentence will go on trial Monday at the Supreme Court - and so, too, 
the process by which judges consider claims of racial discrimination in jury 
selection.

The case is important on 2 levels. If the justices find that Foster's 
constitutional rights were violated and instruct that he be given a new trial, 
the ruling could impact the way prosecutors, defense attorneys and trial judges 
handle jury selection in the future. And because Foster received a death 
sentence, it could fuel concerns previously voiced by 2 justices that the death 
penalty itself may be unconstitutional - in this case because of racial bias.

In capital punishment cases, where jury selection can take almost as long as 
the trial itself, "the racial diversity of the jury is everything," says 
Stephen Bright, Foster's lawyer at the Southern Center for Human Rights.

Since the high court upheld a controversial form of lethal injection 4 months 
ago, 8 executions have gone forward in 5 states - Texas, Missouri, Georgia, 
Virginia and Florida - and 2 more are scheduled this year. Dozens of others 
have been delayed, including all those previously scheduled in Arkansas, Ohio 
and Oklahoma - the state that won the case in June - because of continuing 
doubts about the method of execution.

Foster's case raises another concern about the death penalty: racial 
discrimination in its application and, in particular, in jury selection. 
Despite the Supreme Court's 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky that said 
prosecutors cannot have jurors dismissed because of their race, civil rights 
groups contend the practice still exists today.

"I think the court is upset, and that's why they keep taking these cases, 
because it does persist," says Christina Swarns, director of litigation at the 
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. As a result, she says, "it undermines 
confidence in the outcomes that the jury actually produces."

A new study by the anti-death-penalty group Reprieve Australia showed that 
prosecutors in Caddo Parish, La., struck would-be jurors who were black three 
times as often as others. In 200 verdicts over a 10-year period ending in 2012, 
juries with fewer than 3 blacks did not acquit any defendants. When 5 or more 
blacks participated, the acquittal rate was 19%.

Another study in North Carolina in 2012 found blacks were twice as likely to be 
struck from juries by prosecutors. And in Houston County, Ala., from 2005-09, 
prosecutors removed 80% of blacks qualified for jury duty, producing juries 
with either 1 black or none at all.

Georgia officials accuse Foster's lawyers of acting on "unfounded speculation." 
Their Supreme Court brief argues that the prosecution's notes, which the 
defense gained through a public records request, are "perfectly consistent with 
conscientious, non-discriminatory prosecutors preparing to rebut a defense 
challenge to the array of the jury and a pretrial Batson challenge to any black 
prospective juror that may be peremptorily struck."

Joshua Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor active with the National District 
Attorneys Association, says most prosecutors take the Batson process seriously 
and avoid jury strikes based on race, ethnicity and gender. Foster's case, he 
says, "is literally an artifact from a generation ago. The question is, does 
this reflect what???s going on today in America???s courtrooms? I really don't 
think that it does."

But E.G. "Gerry" Morris, president of the National Association of Criminal 
Defense Lawyers, says discrimination remains prevalent, particularly in the 
Deep South. "This case is certainly a blatant example of it," he says. "The 
fact that this occurred in a death penalty case just underscores the 
seriousness of it."

A brief submitted on Foster's behalf by a group of prominent former prosecutors 
says discrimination "goes both ways" - defense lawyers seek to strike white 
jurors disproportionately just as prosecutors go after black jurors.

Their recommendation? "This court should send a clear message that blatant race 
discrimination will not be tolerated in jury selection."

(source: USA Today)

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

Photographer recreates the last meals of death row inmates


In the 18th century, French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, 
"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." Now, in 2015, a 
photographer from New Zealand is using that old adage to humanize inmates on 
death row.

>From Ted Bundy to Timothy McVeigh, photographer Henry Hargreaves has recreated 
the last meal requests of notable criminals executed under the American penal 
system, and photographed them. The meals range from original recipe KFC chicken 
to mint chocolate chip ice cream and pecan pie; all fairly relatable items that 
the average viewer is likely to have consumed in his or her own life. And 
that's the idea behind the project.

"I read about what they ordered, and it gave me a glimpse into the inmates as 
people," Hargreaves explains. "They kind of treat them like statistics, like 
these anonymous faces of death. And suddenly, when I realized what these people 
like to eat, and you know these are things that I understand, they became real 
people in my mind."

Hargreaves contacted several U.S. prisons to inquire about photographing actual 
last meals, but was told such a thing would never be allowed. So, he did a 
little research, and chose instead to recreate the last meals of men and women 
who had already been executed. In doing so, he found that the re-creation 
actually posed a number of fascinating questions, as well.

"There's never actually been a real picture of a last meal," Hargreaves says. 
"So, to me, what this was also about was recreating what I think the last meal 
may be like. You know, do they serve it on plastic plates, or on china? Does 
the shift take pride in cooking this last meal for someone, or do they just 
slap it together with no love? It was a conversation with all those sorts of 
things as well."

As a New Zealander, Hargreaves admits that it's difficult for him to wrap his 
head around the death penalty, and in particular the disproportionate number of 
African-Americans put to death. However, he insists that his "No Seconds" photo 
series isn't about swaying public opinion on the death penalty in either 
direction.

"Look, I'm not trying to preach whether someone should agree or disagree with 
the death penalty," Hargreaves says. "All I'm trying to do is open up the 
conversation about it... to get people to empathize with the condemned men and 
woman as real people."

Of all the photographs, Hargreaves says the ones of Ricky Ray Rector and Victor 
Feguer's last meals are his favorite. He finds the one of Rector - who was 
mentally impaired - particularly haunting because he had chosen to save his 
pecan pie for later.

"This guy might have been so checked out that he didn't even know he was off to 
be executed," says Hargreaves. "So, suddenly he's being punished for something 
that doesn't even register with him."

Feguer's, on the other hand, Hargreaves finds especially meaningful because of 
the polarizing nature of his food choice.

"We think about last meals, and is it something that's going to be totally 
gluttonous," Hargreaves says. "And then he just has a single olive. You know, 
it's so simple, beautiful, and kind of final. It's almost like a full stop at 
the end of his life."

(source: CBS news)