[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA

[Rick Halperin]

Oct. 1



USA:

In US, murder masterminds are put to death while killers live


3 recent death penalty cases have exposed concerns about executing those 
convicted of planning a murder - especially when the actual killers receive a 
lighter punishment.

On 7 February 1997, Douglas Gissendaner was kidnapped at knifepoint from his 
home, driven to a secluded woods and forced to walk to a muddy patch. Douglas - 
a mechanic and former serviceman in the US Army - was bludgeoned with a night 
stick, then stabbed repeatedly in the neck and back. His body was not 
discovered for two weeks.

Kelly Gissendaner was sentenced to death for her husband's murder. On Tuesday, 
nearly 20 years after the killing, the state of Georgia executed her by lethal 
injection.

No one contests that on the night Douglas was killed, Kelly was nowhere near 
the woods. She was out at a nightclub with friends.

It was her boyfriend, Gregory Owen, who lay in wait for Douglas, marched him 
into the woods, then left him face down in the mud after stabbing him. Kelly 
set Douglas up: she and Owen wanted to be free of her husband, as well as cash 
in his life insurance policies.

During the investigation, Owen testified against Kelly in exchange for a life 
sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

Before she was executed, Gissendaner's lawyers argued that Owen, the actual 
killer, will be eligible for parole in seven years while she was set to die, 
evidence of "arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory" application of the death 
penalty. They wrote that such disproportionate sentencing violated the Eight 
Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.

On Wednesday this week, Richard Glossip was scheduled to be put to death in 
Oklahoma for orchestrating the fatal beating of his boss. The execution was 
stayed at the last minute by Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin.

Next week in Missouri, Kimber Edwards will receive a lethal injection for 
paying a man to shoot his ex-wife.

Neither Glossip nor Edwards were present for the murders, yet they received 
much harsher sentences than the men who carried out the killings.

According to Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information 
Center, capital punishment for proxy murder is very rare. He says only 10 
inmates have been executed for orchestrating a killing.

But critics say these cases speak to inherent problems in how the death penalty 
is meted out. Each state has individual laws about what types of murder are 
eligible for the death penalty - and within those states, similar crimes might 
be treated much differently depending on the prosecutor.

"The death sentence is considered to be the maximum, the harshest sentence 
society can impose. If that's going to be justifiable it can only be in 
circumstances where the person on the receiving end of that punishment is 
justifiably classified as the worst of the worst," says Keir Weyble, associate 
clinical professor and director of death penalty litigation at Cornell 
University Law School.

"Very often we end up in what sure looks to any regular person to be 
disturbingly disproportionate sentencing outcomes. That is something people 
should pay attention to."

One man paying attention is former death penalty advocate, retired Georgia 
Supreme Court judge Norman Fletcher.

"In this state, there are judicial districts where the death penalty is rarely 
if ever sought. And then there are other districts where the death penalty is 
sought in nearly every case. That just shows how arbitrary is," he says.

"If it's a place where they've got plenty of resources, a district attorney 
determined to make some big name for himself, they'll seek it in every case."

Fletcher says it is this type of arbitrariness that results in killers getting 
plea deals and so-called masterminds receiving death. He now wants the death 
penalty abolished.

While on the bench Fletcher actually ruled that Gissendaner's death penalty 
sentence was appropriate.

Then he read a post-conviction affidavit from Gissendaner's boyfriend admitting 
that he lied when he said Gissendaner provided him with the murder weapon and 
came to the scene after Douglas was dead. The affidavit also revealed for the 
first time that there may have been a third killer whom Owen has never named.

"The system's broke," Fletcher says.

In Missouri, where Kimber Edwards awaits his 6 October execution, Orthell 
Wilson is serving life without parole for the murder of Edwards' ex-wife. 
Wilson told police Edwards wanted his wife dead because she was going to 
testify against him in a child support hearing, and Edwards gave Wilson $3,500 
to break into her apartment and shoot her.

Edwards initially denied any involvement, then confessed after extended 
interrogation - a confession he has since recanted, saying it was coerced.

15 years later, in an interview with the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, 
Wilson revealed that Edwards was not involved in Cantrell's murder.

"Him and I never had that conversation about him trying to kill his wife," 
Wilson told the reporter. "I'm just telling you point blank."

Wilson went even further in an affidavit filed by Edwards' lawyers seeking 
clemency.

"I alone shot and killed Kimberly Cantrell. At the time of her death, Kimberly 
and I were in a secret romantic relationship that began after her divorce from 
Kimber Edwards," Wilson wrote.

"We had a heated argument about my drug addiction and constant need for money 
and its effect on our relationship. It was this argument that led to me 
shooting her, an act I regret to this day."

Edwards' attorneys have filed motions seeking to halt his execution based on 
this late confession by Wilson.

If he fails to earn a stay, Edwards will be the 1st man executed in Missouri 
for a contract killing.

There are similar issues at play in Richard Glossip's case in Oklahoma. Hotel 
owner Barry Van Treese was beaten to death with a baseball bat in 1997 by 
Justin Sneed, a drifter handyman who was staying at the hotel. But Sneed 
testified that Glossip, the hotel manager, put him up to it.

Sneed received life without parole. Glossip has always denied involvement, and 
Sneed's daughter allegedly wrote an email to the Oklahoma parole board saying 
that her father wants to exonerate Glossip, but is too afraid of the death 
penalty to do so. Sneed's former cellmates have also given affidavits alleging 
that Sneed has spoken about framing Glossip.

The Oklahoma Court of Appeals denied Glossip's most recent request for a stay 
of execution, saying that Sneed's reliability has already been held up in 
previous court proceedings.

Critics argue that when a prosecutor is willing to play one defendant against 
the other in murder-for-hire or proxy murder case, it creates an unavoidable 
incentive to lie.

"It becomes a race to the deal table. The person who gets there first very 
often is in the position to make the deal, and that deal takes death off the 
table. That dynamic is fraught with the opportunity for, shall we say, impeding 
the search for truth," says Weyble.

"If you're facing a death sentence and you're being offered the chance to point 
the finger at someone else and say, 'Yeah, I did it, but he put me up to it,' 
that's a pretty powerful incentive."

But some legal experts say that people who organise a murder more than meet the 
"worst of the worst" definition.

"The hired killer who kills for a living, all things equal, deserves to die. 
The one who hires them from a motive of greed - that is, to collect an 
insurance or inheritance - deserves to die," says Robert Blecker, a New York 
Law School professor.

Douglas Gissendaner's parents agree. They issued a statement earlier this week 
asking the public not to forget their son amid the highly-publicised effort to 
spare the person who conspired in his murder.

"Kelly planned and executed Doug's murder. She targeted him and his death was 
intentional," they wrote in a statement. "As the murderer, she's been given 
more rights and opportunity over the last 18 years than she ever afforded to 
Doug who, again, is the victim here. She had no mercy, gave him no rights, no 
choices, nor the opportunity to live his life. His life was not hers to take."

Just before her death, Gissendaner made a short statement.

"Tell the Gissendaners I am so, so sorry that an amazing man lost his life 
because of me. If I could take it all back, I would," she said.

She died singing Amazing Grace.

On Wednesday, Glossip had exhausted his appeals and was moments from execution 
when Governor Fallin sent word she was granting a 37-day stay. The delay is due 
to the fact that Oklahoma may have procured the wrong drug for the execution, 
and has nothing to do with Glossip's possible innocence or sentencing issues.

Edwards is scheduled for a 6 October execution.

(source: BBC news)

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

1/2 Of U.S. Catholics Disagree With Pope Francis On The Death Penalty


A papal appeal didn't stop Kelly Gissendaner's execution, which took place 
Wednesday morning in Georgia nearly 17 years after she was convicted of 
arranging the murder of her husband. Pope Francis sent a letter to the Georgia 
Board of Pardons and Paroles asking that her death sentence be commuted and 
made it clear in his speech to Congress last week that he opposes the death 
penalty in all cases, saying that "a just and necessary punishment must never 
exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation."

The pardons board in Georgia disagreed with the pontiff, and so do many 
American Catholics.

In a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, 55 % of Americans said they 
supported the death penalty for people convicted of murder. Catholics were a 
little less likely than other Americans to express support: 51 % endorsed it, 
while 41 % were opposed.

Catholics varied considerably on this issue by race. White, non-Hispanic 
Catholics were much more likely to support the death penalty than Hispanic 
Catholics (59 % versus 37 %). The majority of American Catholics are white 
non-Hispanics (59 %), but Hispanic Catholics are a sizable 34 % of the Catholic 
Church in America.

Protestants also showed a racial gap. Overall, 57 % of Protestants in the Pew 
survey said they supported the death penalty, but white evangelical and 
mainline Protestants were more likely to endorse it (67 % and 64 %, 
respectively) than black Protestants (33 %).

A 2010 survey by the Death Penalty Information Center found that Catholics were 
more likely than others to agree with concerns about how the death penalty is 
administered, although they largely did not share the pope's blanket moral 
opposition or his concerns about the dignity of all prisoners, even the guilty.

The Death Penalty Information Center asked respondents to rate their agreement 
with statements on a 10-point scale, where 0 represents strong disagreement, 10 
represents strong agreement and 5 is neutral.1

For many American Catholics, opposition to the death penalty might be more a 
factor of race than religion, and their qualms have more to do with how it is 
carried out than whether it should ever be allowed.

(source: fivethirtyeight.com)

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

Francis leaves -- and U.S. flips the death penalty switch back on


When Pope Francis' jet took off from Philadelphia International Airport at 7:47 
p.m. on Sunday, you know who breathed a huge sigh of relief? I mean, besides 
Mayor Nutter. The nation's proud execution workers. They quickly grabbed their 
hoods -- or whatever executioners wear in the 21st Century -- and their 
briefcases full of lethal cocktails and went back to work, still partying like 
it's 1099.

It already seems like a long time ago that Francis stood up before a joint 
session of Congress and said this:

"Every life is sacred, every human person is endowed with an inalienable 
dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those 
convicted of crimes," he said. "Recently my brother bishops here in the United 
States renewed their call for the abolition of the death penalty. Not only do I 
support them, but I also offer encouragement to all those who are convinced 
that a just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope 
and the goal of rehabilitation."

I guess the lights went out in Georgia while the pontiff was uttering those 
words last week -- or more likely they just don't care. Early this morning, the 
Peach State executed a woman for the first time in 70 years. Kelly Renee 
Gissendaner, 47, who'd conspired in 1997 with her boyfriend to have her husband 
murdered, was put to death by lethal injection. Gissendaner, who'd become a 
minister behind bars, was singing "Amazing Grace" right up to the moment they 
stuck her with a needle and killed her.

Pope Francis -- kind of like the tourist in a strange land who talks louder 
after no one understands him the first time -- issued a specific plea for the 
life of Gissendaner. His U.S. representative wrote to the Georgia Board of 
Pardons and Parole: "While not wishing to minimize the gravity of the crime for 
which Ms. Gissendaner has been convicted, and while sympathizing with the 
victims, I nonetheless implore you, in consideration of the reasons that have 
been expressed to your board, to commute the sentence to one that would better 
express both justice and mercy."

But that didn't matter.

Nor did it matter that Gissendaner's 2 children, who reconciled with their mom 
a number of years ago, pleaded with the state to spare their only living 
parent. "My dad would not want my mom to be executed, even knowing her role in 
his murder," Kayla Gissendaner said in a statement. "He would not want us to 
endure another devastating loss."

Nor did it matter that Gissendaner had earned a divinity degree behind bars and 
that several former inmates credit her with playing a huge role in turning 
their lives around. "Kelly told me God loved me," said Kara Stephens, a 
convicted bank robber who later started the Struggle Sisters, a network of 
formerly incarcerated women. "Kelly taught me to hope." But now Kelly is gone. 
Once the wheels of Georgia's midnight execution train start spinning, they just 
don't stop.

Oh, one more curiosity about this case. Gregory Owen, that boyfriend who 
actually plunged the knife into the neck and back of Douglas Gissendaner, 
killing him? He's very much alive. In fact, prosecutors cut a deal to spare him 
any chance of the death penalty if he testified against his girlfriend. He 
could be going home a free man as early as 2022.

That arbitrary and capricious way that the state decides who lives and who dies 
is one of the many arguments against capitol punishment. The question of 
redemption -- whether the life of a murderer can still bring value to society 
-- is a tougher one, and yet that is the one that Francis challenged America to 
contemplate.

And here's another problem: America has sent at least 155 men and women to 
death row, and actually killed some more, who did not commit the crime they 
were accused of. Incredibly, some are now questioning whether an innocent man 
is about to be put to death in Oklahoma -- a state that hasn't exactly brought 
glory upon itself in the execution department lately.

Richard Glossip's case starts out similar to the Kelly Gissendaner matter. Like 
in that case, Glossip didn't actually kill his co-worker Barry Van Treese -- 
someone else did, a man named Justin Sneed. Also similar to the Georgia 
prosecution, Sneed was spared the death penalty after he testified that Glossip 
told him to commit the murder. But unlike Gissendaner, Glossip has long 
maintained his innocence -- and there's reason to believe him, or at least 
harbor reasonable doubt. There's zero physical evidence linking Glossip, a 
video shows a detective coaching Sneed in his confession, and Sneed's story has 
since changed a lot over the years. Sneed's daughter wrote state officials 
implying her dad might recant.

As always happens in these cases, the DA for Oklahoma City, rather than 
listening to growing mound of evidence that seems to exonerate Glossip, accuses 
the convicted man of a "bull(bleep) PR campaign." Still, Glossip has received a 
tiny sliver of good news. Tonight, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin gave Glossip a 
37-day reprieve, not to debate his innocence but because of questions about the 
lethal injection cocktail in the state that tortured a man in one of its last 
executions.

Will America come to its senses in the next 37 days? Don't count on it. Despite 
growing public concern about capital punishment, America remains a pariah among 
civilized nations -- and instead in the company of such proud lands as Saudi 
Arabia, Iran and China -- when it comes to state-sanctioned murder. Pope 
Francis didn't get the job done, apparently. So I can't even guess who God -- 
who once said, and I'm paraphrasing here, thou shall not kill -- has warming up 
in the bullpen.

(source: Will Bunch, philly.com)

***********

Courts, states put death penalty on life support----Despite Supreme Court 
support, executions on the wane


If there is such a thing as a lock for the death penalty, the case against 
Daniel Higgins appeared to be just that.

Already sought for sexually assaulting a child, Higgins killed Sheriff's Sgt. 
Michael Naylor last October with a point-blank shot to the head, making him the 
only deputy slain in the department's 130-year history. "I wanted him dead," 
Sheriff Gary Painter says of the murderer.

But Naylor's widow, Denise Davis, said she couldn't bear the likely rounds of 
appeals that could stretch on for decades. Higgins was allowed to plead guilty 
and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The death penalty in America may be living on borrowed time.

The emotional and financial toll of prosecuting a single capital case to its 
conclusion, along with the increased availability of life without parole and 
continuing court challenges to execution methods, have made the ultimate 
punishment more elusive than at any time since its reinstatement in 1976.

Prosecutors, judges and juries also are being influenced by capital 
punishment's myriad afflictions: racial and ethnic discrimination, geographic 
disparities, decades spent on death row and glaring mistakes that have 
exonerated 155 prisoners in the last 42 years.

Those trends may be squeezing the life out of the death penalty. That doesn't 
even take into account the added burden of legal clashes, legislative repeals, 
and problems finding and administering drugs for lethal injections.

The Supreme Court in June upheld a controversial form of lethal injection by 
the narrowest of margins, thereby giving Oklahoma the green light to reschedule 
3 executions. But courts in many states continue to wrestle with that issue, 
and the justices have 4 more death penalty cases on their docket this fall 
challenging the roles of Kansas juries, Florida judges and Georgia prosecutors.

"The imposition and implementation of the death penalty seems capricious, 
random, indeed arbitrary,'' Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said in 
dissenting from the court's June decision allowing the continued use of a 
problematic sedative for lethal injections. "From a defendant's perspective, to 
receive that sentence, and certainly to find it implemented, is the equivalent 
of being struck by lightning."

Even in Texas - long home to the most active execution chamber in the country - 
the death penalty is on the ropes. The state sentenced 48 people to death as 
recently as 1999. So far this year? Not a single one.

In Colorado last month, jurors couldn't agree on the death penalty for James 
Holmes, who killed 12 people watching The Dark Knight Rises at an Aurora movie 
theater three years ago. Their indecision resulted in an automatic sentence of 
life without parole.

The sobering conclusion reached by Naylor's widow - that the lengthy pursuit of 
the death penalty wasn't worth the personal sacrifice - illuminates the forces 
now contributing to a precipitous drop in death sentences across the nation, as 
well as the declining numbers of those who reach the execution chamber.

Among signs the death penalty may be on life support:

-- The number of death sentences dropped from a high of 315 in 1996 to 73 last 
year - 1/2 of them coming in just 2% of the nation's counties.

-- The number of prisoners on death row peaked at 3,593 in 2000 but now hovers 
around 3,000, a 17% decline.

-- The number of executions peaked at 98 in 1999 and has dropped since then, 
hitting a low of 35 last year. In the first 8 months of this year, 20 prisoners 
have been killed - 16 of them in Texas and Missouri.

-- 7 states have repealed the death penalty since 2007. Among the 31 that 
retain it, governors have imposed a moratorium in 4, and most others haven't 
executed anyone in years. Only 7 states carried out executions in the past 2 
years.

-- The federal government has not carried out an execution since 2003. An 
unofficial moratorium has been declared pending the completion of a Justice 
Department review of the death penalty ordered last year by President Obama.

However, the average time spent on death row for those eventually executed 
continued to rise until 2011, reaching a peak of 16.5 years before dipping to 
15.5 years in 2013.

For all the ethical arguments made by death penalty opponents - 
"abolitionists," in the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia - states 
now are faced with a more practical problem: how to carry out executions.

All states favor lethal injection as the most humane method, but the supply of 
drugs that can do the job has been drying up because of a confluence of 
factors. They include: opposition to capital punishment in Europe, where many 
of the drugs are produced; federal regulations preventing the importation of 
drugs that don't meet U.S. standards; and recalcitrance by doctors and 
pharmacists who work to save lives, not end them.

Still, the Supreme Court has twice upheld the constitutionality of lethal 
injection, 1st in 2008 and again in June, when the justices ruled 5-4 that 
Oklahoma can use a sedative involved in 3 botched executions last year. Justice 
Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said challengers could not suggest a 
better alternative.

The ruling gave impetus to states such as Alabama and Mississippi seeking to 
jump-start executions after a hiatus of several years. But it also rejuvenated 
legal efforts by groups opposed to the death penalty, who continue to fight 
against lethal injection protocols in several states.

Caught in the middle are people like Richard Glossip, Oklahoma prisoner 
#267303, who lost the Supreme Court case in June and now faces execution this 
Wednesday at the state penitentiary in McAlester. It's the 4th time a date has 
been set for his death.

Glossip, twice convicted of masterminding a 1997 murder at the run-down budget 
motel he managed, still proclaims his innocence. "If they execute me, then I 
want it to be for a reason," he said during a lengthy phone interview. "What I 
want to come out of that is that they finally stop executing innocent people in 
this country."

Several states took the high court's ruling as a reason to rejuvenate the death 
penalty. Missouri wasted little time resuming executions, putting David Zink to 
death 2 weeks later, on July 14. Texas, by far the nation's leader in 
executions with 528 since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 
1976, followed suit with an execution in August and has 6 more on tap this 
year.

States from Alabama to Montana that have not killed anyone for several years 
are in court, seeking to rejuvenate dormant death penalties. Some states are 
establishing backup methods in case lethal injections become impossible. 8 
permit electrocution, 3 allow gas chambers, 3 allow hanging, and 2 would use 
firing squads - as Utah did in 2010 and 2013.

The Supreme Court has chipped away at states' freedom to choose the ultimate 
punishment, first in 2002 by exempting those with intellectual disabilities, 
then in 2005 by exempting juveniles who were under 18 when they committed their 
crimes. In the latter case, decided 5-4, Justice Anthony Kennedy said trends 
against juvenile death penalties in the states had created a "national 
consensus."

Today, there is a similar consensus: 2/3 of the states have held no executions 
since 2010. And the percentage of Americans who favor capital punishment is 
down from 78% 2 decades ago to 56% today, according to the Pew Research Center.

"There seems to be a massive reassessment underway in this country in terms of 
capital punishment," says Kathryn Kase, executive director of the Texas 
Defender Service, which provides legal aid for those facing death sentences. 
"Everywhere you look with the death penalty, there's a problem."

Chapter 1

The long, painful wait for justice

For the past 3 decades, Gary Painter - a self-described "staunch Republican" - 
has been the law in Midland County. In a weathered straw hat and snap-button 
western shirt, the sheriff appears as if drawn from central casting. 
Blunt-spoken, he is an unwavering supporter of the death penalty. There are 
people, Painter says, who "need to die'' for their crimes.

Yet he readily concedes that the circuitous journey to the execution chamber 
needs an overhaul.

"The process has to be shorter, because that alone amounts to cruel and unusual 
punishment for the victim's family and the person who committed the act," the 
sheriff says. "That person has to know what punishment he must face.''

In the past 2 months, 2 defendants linked to separate high-profile mass 
killings in the U.S. eluded death sentences for rampages that claimed a total 
of 18 lives.

-- A Colorado jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision to execute Holmes, 
who also wounded 70 people in the Aurora shooting, because there was 1 holdout.

-- A Washington state prosecutor withdrew the state's notice to seek death in 
the murder trial of Michele Anderson, 1 of 2 suspects charged in the 2007 
slaying of 6 family members. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg acted after 
a jury could not render a unanimous decision to seek death for Anderson's 
accomplice, Joseph McEnroe.

Jeff Blackburn, a Texas civil rights attorney, calls the Holmes sentence a 
"watershed moment for the death penalty.'' Despite serious concerns for the 
killer's mental state, Blackburn said, the outcome may have been different had 
Holmes been tried a decade earlier.

In Texas, the number of death sentences declined from 48 in 1999 to 11 last 
year. That lower level had remained fairly constant since 2006, after state 
lawmakers approved life without the possibility of parole as an alternative to 
death in capital cases.

Prosecutors who seek the death penalty often appear to be acting against 
historical trends. The federal government won a death sentence against Boston 
Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in May but hasn't put a prisoner to death in 
more than a decade.

A South Carolina prosecutor this month said she would seek death for Dylann 
Roof, who is charged with shooting nine black church worshipers in June, but 
the state's execution chamber has been dormant since 2011.

In Kansas, a jury has recommended death for white supremacist Frazier Glenn 
Cross, recently convicted of killing 3 people outside Jewish sites. A formal 
sentencing is scheduled for November. A death sentence would seem fruitless: 
The state has not executed anyone in 50 years.

Oregon prosecutor Joshua Marquis, a vocal proponent of the death penalty, says 
the prospect of long and costly campaigns to beat back post-conviction appeals 
has cut the number of death cases filed in the first place. The quality of 
defense lawyers has been upgraded with the creation of regional defender 
systems dedicated to death penalty cases.

Those types of improvements have only added to the costs -- and the calendars. 
A California study in 2008 found the state spent $137 million annually to 
support the death penalty but would spend only $11.5 million if it was 
repealed. A Colorado study in 2013 found that death penalty cases took more 
than 5 years on average to complete, compared to 1 1/2 years for cases 
involving life without parole.

"Cases are being bypassed because it's going to take 15 to 20 years on 
appeal,'' Marquis says. "Do prosecutors consider these things? Absolutely."

Such increased scrutiny has become commonplace in Odessa, just 23 miles west of 
Midland's modest skyline. In recent years, District Attorney Bobby Bland has 
seen his share of vicious killings, from the torturous murder of 5-year-old 
Zachery Dominguez in 2011 to the brutal stabbing deaths of prominent local 
couple Dick and Peggy Glover at their home just four months later. Both cases 
were "death eligible," in capital punishment vernacular, but Bland didn't seek 
it.

The prosecutor describes the murder of Dominguez, whose stepfather had 
subjected him to repeated dunking in scalding water and assaults resulting in a 
ruptured bowel, as the "most horrible death I've ever seen of a child.'' Yet 
his concern that Dominguez's siblings could be subjected to painful 
cross-examinations as witnesses in the case prompted him to offer a deal for 
life without parole. Ralph Martinez Jr., the mother's boyfriend, readily 
pleaded guilty.

"I felt that if I could get a plea for life without parole, that would be best 
for all,'' Bland says.

In the Glover case, Bland had a catalog of damning evidence against James 
Burwell. His DNA was at the bloody crime scene, the couple's credit card 
records linked him to purchases made after their deaths, and he was driving 
their truck when arrested. But Bland also warned the family that it could take 
years to secure his execution.

Skeet Glover, a death penalty proponent who believed Burwell deserved to die, 
said it was nevertheless an "easy decision'' to recommend that the prosecutor 
seek life without parole because other family members expressed concern about 
the long and likely painful effort.

"It really wasn't difficult to get it done,'' says Glover, seated in the chair 
once occupied by his father, founder of The Glover Companies, which services 
the local energy industry. "As a family, we were going to do this together. I 
couldn't help my dad anymore. I couldn't help (stepmother) Peggy ... and I 
didn't want to punish anyone else in the family.''

In less than a week in 2012, Burwell was convicted and sentenced to life 
without parole. "There are no regrets,'' Glover says.

Chapter 2

Dead men walking

Anthony Ray Hinton figures he was within a year, maybe 2, of being executed.

Hinton was nearing his 30th year on Alabama's death row when the U.S. Supreme 
Court, in a little-noticed decision last year, granted him a new hearing 
because of a defense lawyer's mistakes during his 1985 murder trial.

That led to a new review of ballistics evidence used to convict Hinton of two 
murders half a lifetime ago, when he was 29. Although prosecution witnesses had 
testified the bullets came from a gun found in Hinton's mother's home, defense 
experts hired this year found no such connection. The case fell apart, and in 
April, Hinton was freed.

"Being on death row has taken so much from me as a human being," he says. "I 
spent 30 years on death row for something I didn't do."

Hinton became the 152nd death row prisoner exonerated since 1973. Many of them 
are now poster children for the myriad problems cited in June by 2 Supreme 
Court justices who questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty.

Hinton, who is black, was an apparent victim of racial discrimination. He was 
convicted in a county known for delivering death sentences, making him a victim 
of geographic disparities. He spent decades in solitary confinement under 
threat of execution, a cruel and unusual punishment in the eyes of the two 
justices. And ultimately, the prosecution admitted it no longer had a case.

"If this court had not ordered that Anthony Ray Hinton receive further hearings 
in state court, he may well have been executed rather than exonerated," Breyer 
wrote in dissent from the high court's decision upholding a controversial form 
of lethal injection. Instead, Hinton will be welcomed back into his mother's 
renovated home during an open house next week, thanks to donations from the 
likes of Starbucks' Howard Schultz and his family foundation.

Of all the arguments against capital punishment, none is as powerful as the 
risk of executing the innocent. Yet research shows about 4% of prisoners 
sentenced to death are just that.

They're also locked away for ever longer terms before their innocence is 
determined. The 12 men exonerated in 2014-15 served a combined 322 years in 
prison, an average of nearly 27 years. 7 of them, like Hinton, had served 30 
years or more. 9 of them were black.

Several condemned men recently exonerated from death row bring to life the 
issues raised in Breyer's dissent:

-- Henry Lee McCollum was a black teenager with an intellectual disability 
when he was convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl in North 
Carolina. He spent 30 years in prison before DNA found on a cigarette butt led 
to his exoneration. Earlier this month, he won $750,000 in compensation from a 
state commission. "I represented him for 20 years and could not get anyone's 
attention," says Ken Rose, senior staff attorney at the Center for Death 
Penalty Litigation in Durham. "It is the most frustrating experience to know 
that you might have an innocent client and that there's nothing you can do 
about it."

-- Ricky Jackson served 39 years in prison for murder in Ohio based on the 
false testimony of a 12-year-old boy. He holds the record for time in prison 
before being exonerated, though his death sentence eventually was commuted to 
life without parole. "If Ricky's sentence had not been commuted, he already 
would have been executed by the time we proved his innocence," says Brian Howe, 
one of his lawyers at the Ohio Innocence Project. "There's a very good chance 
that he would not have lasted that long on death row, and no one today would 
have known what happened."

-- Glenn Ford languished on death row for nearly 30 years in Caddo Parish, 
Louisiana - home to half the death sentences rendered in the state - after 
inexperienced lawyers couldn't convince an all-white jury in 1984 that he did 
not murder a Shreveport jeweler. His exoneration produced an extraordinary mea 
culpa from 1 of the prosecutors, A.M. "Marty" Stroud. "At the time this case 
was tried, there was evidence that would have cleared Glenn Ford," Stroud wrote 
in The Times of Shreveport. "I apologize to Glenn Ford for all the misery I 
have caused him and his family." After 15 months of freedom, Ford died of lung 
cancer on June 29, the same day the Supreme Court upheld lethal injection.

Former prosecutor Marty Stroud is calling for the abolishment of the death 
penalty. Stroud was the lead attorney in the 1984 murder trial of Glenn Ford. 
Ford spent almost 30 years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit.

In addition to the death row prisoners still claiming innocence, some 
apparently innocent people have been put to death. Among those Breyer cited 
were 2 Texas men: Carlos DeLuna, executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a 
single mother, and Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 for killing his 3 
young children in an arson fire.

Hinton's conviction in 1985 hinged on flawed forensic evidence tying an old .38 
revolver found under a mattress in his mother's house to bullets that killed 
two restaurant assistant managers in separate incidents.

It also pointed up basic problems in the criminal justice system, particularly 
for poor black men. "He was convicted because he didn't have the money to get 
the expert assistance he needed at trial," says Bryan Stevenson, his new lawyer 
at the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama non-profit that provides legal aid 
to indigent defenders and prisoners.

Hinton believes the situation is worse in Alabama than elsewhere because judges 
who must run for election tout their support for capital punishment - a concern 
cited in 2013 by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. State courts refused to 
grant him the hearing later ordered by the Supreme Court.

"The judges on the United States Supreme Court do not have to be re-elected," 
Hinton says. "The judges in Alabama have to be re-elected every 4 years or 6 
years."

Chapter 3

Lethal injection on trial

Capital punishment by lethal injection has been upheld twice in seven years by 
the highest court in the land, but it's still a bone of contention in places 
like Davidson County Chancery Court. For the better part of a month after the 
Supreme Court's most recent decision, lawyers for more than 30 death-row 
inmates in Tennessee argued that its execution protocol is unconstitutional.

Their legal challenge - similar to others in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, 
Montana and elsewhere - illustrates the difficulty still faced by many states 
seeking to carry out executions in the wake of the high court's ruling.

Despite the justices' imprimatur, their narrow 5-4 ruling that "the 
Constitution does not require the avoidance of all risk of pain" was hardly a 
vote of confidence for lethal injection, the preferred method for all states 
with an active death penalty - itself a dwindling number.

Oklahoma, whose use of the sedative midazolam was challenged by three death row 
inmates, immediately declared victory and set September and October execution 
dates for Glossip, Benjamin Cole and John Grant.

But Glossip, facing death on Wednesday, has 2 sets of lawyers still battling on 
separate fronts and continues to assert his innocence in what prosecutors and 
jurors concluded was a 1997 murder-for-hire at the motel he managed in Oklahoma 
City. The man who beat motel owner Barry Van Treese to death with a baseball 
bat, Justin Sneed, avoided the death penalty by fingering Glossip as the 
mastermind.

Glossip's contention has won support from the likes of British business 
executive Richard Branson, actress Susan Sarandon and TV's "Dr. Phil" McGraw. 
More than 250,000 online petitions seeking a 60-day reprieve were delivered to 
Gov. Mary Fallin this month. On Friday, former U.S. senator Tom Coburn and 
former University of Oklahoma head football coach Barry Switzer added their 
names.

"We ... don't know for sure whether Richard Glossip is innocent or guilty. That 
is precisely the problem," Coburn and Switzer said in a letter co-signed by 
others. "If we keep executing defendants in cases like this, where the evidence 
of guilt is tenuous and untrustworthy, we will keep killing innocent people."

Van Treese's family issued a statement to the Tulsa World contending that the 
criminal justice system has run its course. "Execution of Richard Glossip will 
not bring Barry back or lessen the empty hole left in the lives of those who 
loved Barry," the statement said. "What it does provide is a sense that justice 
has been served."

>From his cell on death row, Glossip remains upbeat. "If you're innocent, you 
can't just lay back and let them execute you," he says. "You've got to speak 
out. You've got to raise hell."

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, 
which opposes capital punishment, says Glossip's case "has numerous hallmarks 
of innocence cases." If he's executed, Dunham says, Glossip "would fall in the 
category of people whom states have killed despite significant doubts as to 
their guilt."

Glossip's legal battle is not unique. In Florida, more than 400 death row 
inmates are awaiting a state Supreme Court ruling on the pending execution of 
Jerry Correll, who murdered four women 30 years ago, following a lower court's 
approval of the planned drug protocol. In Alabama, seven prisoners challenging 
the state's lethal injection protocol are battling in federal district court; 
the state argues that its three-drug protocol is "virtually identical" to the 
one upheld by the Supreme Court.

A federal judge in Mississippi last month temporarily blocked lethal injections 
after two of the state's 48 death row inmates protested it would be "chemical 
torture." Even in Lewis and Clark County, Montana, court proceedings continued 
through the summer in a case that dates back seven years and several lethal 
injection methods. The state's death row population: 2.

The cross-country battle over lethal injection methods has taken on added 
importance since last year, when inmates in Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona gasped, 
moaned or writhed in pain during the administration of a 3-drug cocktail 
including the sedative midazolam. But other protocols have come under attack as 
well.

"It can be quite a horrendous death," says Ron Waterman, an attorney 
challenging Montana's use of the drug pentobarbital.

The situation is similarly uncertain in other states - particularly those that 
use midazolam, the sedative at issue in the Oklahoma case. Although Florida has 
used it with apparent success since 2013, critics claim it doesn't mask the 
pain of paralytic and heart-stopping drugs that follow.

In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich - now 1 of 16 Republicans seeking his party's 
nomination for president - postponed all scheduled executions until 2016 after 
a prisoner there snorted through a 26-minute execution. Arizona, where a 
prisoner gasped for nearly 2 hours on the gurney last July, has been seeking 
alternatives to its drug cocktail.

"The cat is out of the bag on midazolam, regardless of what the Supreme Court 
says," maintains Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University. "The 
departments of corrections recognize that this is a problem drug. ... No one 
wants to be the next one that has a botched execution."

The debate over lethal injection has energized legislatures as well as courts 
and corrections departments. North Carolina and Arkansas, two Southern states 
seeking to rejuvenate their dormant death penalties, approved laws this year 
that impose secrecy on the source of lethal injection drugs. Arkansas recently 
purchased a new supply of drugs.

The problem for the legal system is that it's more of a medical issue. Some 
drugs, such as sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, no longer can be obtained 
from European drug makers. That has sent states scurrying to compounding 
pharmacists, where the drugs they get are not subject to Food and Drug 
Administration regulation.

But those pharmacists aren't pleased. Its trade group in March discouraged 
members from "participating in the preparation, dispensing or distribution of 
compounded medications for use in legally authorized executions." A week later, 
the American Pharmacists Association called executions "fundamentally contrary 
to the role of pharmacists as providers of health care."

In Tennessee, Davidson County Chancellor Claudia Bonnyman ultimately ruled late 
last month that the state's use of compounded pentobarbital is constitutional. 
"This court cannot find that the possibility of an accident ... causes the 
protocol to violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual 
punishment," she said. An appeal is likely.

Some states, meanwhile, are hedging their bets by establishing backup methods. 
Tennessee last year approved the use of the electric chair if lethal injection 
drugs are unavailable - a method Virginia used as recently as 2013. In March, 
Utah opted for the firing squad. In April, Oklahoma selected nitrogen gas.

Chapter 4

States, courts confront new death challenges

>From Connecticut to California, the death penalty is on trial in state and 
federal courts. From Delaware to Nebraska and from New Hampshire to Montana, 
it's on trial in state legislatures.

The continuing court clashes illustrate that the debate is far from over. But 
the continuing legislative clashes showcase a clear trend in favor of retreat 
or repeal: No states are seeking to reinstate the death penalty.

"The Eighth Amendment forbids punishments that are cruel and unusual," Breyer 
said in his dissent in June. "In the last two decades, the imposition and 
implementation of the death penalty have increasingly become unusual."

Governors have declared moratoriums in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Oregon and 
Washington. In Ohio, all executions have been pushed back at least until next 
year. State legislators who came within a vote of repealing the death penalty 
this year in Delaware, New Hampshire and Montana are sure to try again.

Just last month, Connecticut's Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for 
prisoners already convicted of their crimes, going beyond the legislature's 
prospective repeal.

And on the last day of August, a federal appeals court in California heard oral 
arguments in a case that ultimately could reach the Supreme Court.

Now housing roughly 25% of the nation's 3,000 death row prisoners, the state 
cannot pay enough defense lawyers or settle on a lethal injection method, even 
as the population at San Quentin continues to grow. The death penalty was 
narrowly upheld in a 2012 referendum, but attorneys for convicted murderer 
Ernest Jones noted that only 13 of more than 900 people sentenced to death 
since 1978 have been executed. The majority will die in prison or spend decades 
fighting their convictions.

"There has been an extreme malfunction in California's death penalty process," 
Michael Laurence, the lead defense lawyer, told the three-judge panel on Aug. 
31. "The average time it takes from start to finish in the state courts exceeds 
20 years."

Nebraska this year became the 1st "red" state to ban capital punishment. That 
law faces potential repeal in 2016 if death penalty proponents can put it to a 
vote.

The attention Nebraska received overshadowed near-misses in Delaware, where 
Rep. Sean Lynn says the death penalty is applied in discriminatory fashion, and 
Montana, where Rep. David Moore says the costs are proving to be unaffordable.

In New Hampshire, where the Senate deadlocked 12-12 on a repeal bill in April, 
Rep. Renny Cushing is an unlikely proponent of abolition. His father and 
brother-in-law were murdered in separate incidents, 23 years and a thousand 
miles apart. Still, he says death sentences just divert attention from where 
it's most needed.

"The entire death penalty debate is really offender-centered," Cushing says. 
"It makes rock stars out of killers. It allows us in many ways to ignore or not 
tend to the needs of individual victims' survivors."

As capital punishment disappears from courtrooms and statehouses, the Supreme 
Court maintains a steady diet of death penalty cases. On Oct. 7, the day one of 
Glossip's co-defendants is slated to die, the justices will hear the 1st of 4 
such cases on their 2015 docket.

The most prominent of those cases, to be argued Nov. 2, involves Timothy Tyrone 
Foster's allegation that the prosecution in his May 1987 trial in Rome, Ga., 
illegally struck four potential jurors because they were black. That produced 
an all-white jury, in apparent violation of the court's ruling a year earlier 
in Batson v. Kentucky that peremptory challenges during jury selection can't be 
based on race.

It took Foster's jury all of 90 minutes to convict him for killing a retired 
white female teacher, and about an hour to deliver his death sentence after 
hearing the prosecutor urge them to "deter other people out there in the 
projects."

Prosecutors claimed their jury strikes were for race-neutral reasons. But since 
then, defense lawyers obtained the prosecution's notes, showing that they 
singled out prospective black jurors with a "B," circled the word "black," 
identified them with shorthand such as "B#1" and "B#2," and ranked them in case 
"it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors."

A new study by the anti-death penalty group Reprieve Australia showed that 
prosecutors in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, struck would-be black jurors 46% of the 
time, compared to 15% for others. And that mattered: In 200 verdicts from 
2003-12, juries with fewer than 3 blacks did not acquit any defendants. When 5 
or more blacks participated, the acquittal rate was 19%.

Stephen Bright, Foster's lawyer at the Southern Center for Human Rights, says 
the upcoming Supreme Court case illustrates 2 of Justice Breyer's many 
concerns: racial discrimination and decades spent on death row.

"If this case gets reversed," Bright says, "it will be back to Rome 30 years 
after the conviction ... starting all over again."

(source: USA Today)