[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ARK., NEB., CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 1



ARKANSAS:

Rutledge asks governor to set executions for 8 inmates


Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge has officially asked Gov. Asa 
Hutchinson to set execution dates for 8 death-row inmates who have exhausted 
all appeals.

The request Tuesday came after a 10-year hiatus on executions in the state 
because of legal challenges to the state's death-penalty procedures.

The last execution - Eric Nance, convicted of murdering 18-year-old Julie Heath 
of Malvern in 1993 - was carried out in November 2005 by using a 3-drug 
cocktail of phenobarbital, a paralytic agent and potassium chloride.

The Arkansas Department of Correction recently obtained the execution drugs, 1 
of which was midazolam.

The use of the drug was challenged in federal court after a handful of botched 
executions. Death-penalty opponents claimed that the drug does not induce a 
complete level of unconsciousness, which allows the inmate to feel pain.

(source: arkansasonline.com)






NEBRASKA:

Ricketts says death penalty signatures should be verified before Nebraska 
pursues executions


Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts says his administration is still pursuing lethal 
injection drugs for executions but will not decide how to proceed until state 
officials verify the signatures on a petition to keep capital punishment legal.

Ricketts said Tuesday that he first wants to ensure that Nebraskans for the 
Death Penalty has collected enough valid voter signatures to prevent the law 
from being repealed.

Nebraska lawmakers voted in May to abolish the death penalty, overriding the 
governor's veto. Death penalty supporters responded with the petition drive 
that sought to halt the repeal before it went into effect and place the issue 
before voters in 2016.

The group announced last week that it had collected nearly 167,000 signatures. 
At least 113,883 valid signatures are needed to suspend the repeal.

(source: Associated Press)






CALIFORNIA:

Appeals court looks reluctant to overturn California death penalty


A federal appeals panel showed little appetite on Monday for upholding a 
lower-court ruling that could potentially overturn California's death penalty, 
saying a defense attorney's argument had already been dismissed by a state 
court.

During oral arguments, a lawyer for Ernest Jones, who was sentenced to die in 
1995, asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to agree with a federal 
judge's ruling that the death penalty is unconstitutional in California because 
of the time and uncertainty involved in carrying out such sentences.

U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney last summer had cited the oftentimes 
decades-long judicial review process involved in putting an inmate to death 
when he overturned Jones' death sentence, saying it amounted to a violation of 
the Constitution's prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris appealed, maintaining that the long 
appeals process represents an important safeguard for the condemned.

California, which has more than 740 prisoners on death row, has not executed a 
condemned inmate since 2006 and has put 13 people to death since 1978. Several 
inmates awaiting execution at San Quentin State Prison have been behind bars on 
death row for more than 3 decades.

Jones' attorney, Michael Laurence argued that the judge's ruling was supported 
by a 43-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision that put a 4-year moratorium on 
the death penalty on the grounds that it was applied inconsistently.

But the justices said that a state appeals panel had already heard and 
dismissed those arguments and that they were bound to follow the precedent set 
by its opinion.

A state attorney, meanwhile, said the Supreme Court has never vacated a death 
sentence based on length. He added that the 1972 ruling had no bearing on 
Jones' case, since it addressed the randomness of sentences based on race.

1 of the justices, Judge Susan Graber, agreed, saying the case that had been 
before the Supreme Court was "a completely different issue."

(source: Reuters)

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

Do Rare Executions Mean California's Death Penalty is Unconstitutional?


Former State Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George once quipped that "the 
leading cause of death on California's death row is old age." And he's pretty 
much right.

It's been nearly a decade since California executed a death row inmate. In that 
time more than 50 condemned inmates died, mostly of natural causes or suicide.

Last year those delays led federal trial court Judge Cormac Carney in Orange 
County to issue a stunning decision - saying California's death penalty was so 
dysfunctional that it no longer had any meaning - that the rare execution was 
determined not by the severity of the crime but by arbitrary factors like whose 
appeal process was exhausted first. And that, he said, was unconstitutional.

Attorney General Kamala Harris, who personally opposes the death penalty, 
appealed the decision. And Monday a 3-judge panel heard arguments on both sides 
for the better part of an hour.

Arguing for the state A.G.'s office, Michael Mongan acknowledged that the 
system is a lengthy one. He said that is to avoid mistakes.

"We do not believe that there's any evidence, not on this record or any we're 
aware of, that the system is arbitrary or random or leads to random results," 
Mongan told the court. He went on to say that California insists on a careful 
review of death penalty cases, and that takes time.

But attorney Michael Laurence, representing convicted murderer Ernest Jones, 
said appeals drag on because California refuses to fund enough attorneys for 
indigent death row inmates.

"The average time it takes in the state courts exceeds 20 years," Laurence 
said. "I don't think it is a stretch to say that a system that produces such 
lengthy delays constitutes a gross malfunction of the criminal justice system."

Laurence referred to a report by the bipartisan Commission on the Fair 
Administration of Justice on how to fix a "dysfunctional" system, mainly with 
an infusion of funds to provide legal defense for indigent death row inmates.

"That was 2008 and not one dime has been spent to fix this problem," Laurence 
noted.

Truth is with a governor and an attorney general who oppose the death penalty, 
along with the Democratic majority in the Legislature, opponents may figure 
that starving the legal appeals process for condemned inmates will slow it down 
enough to essentially invalidate it.

The state has also responded very slowly to a 2006 order by federal Judge 
Jeremy Fogel, who stopped executions until California's lethal injection 
procedure was changed. Earlier this year the California Department of 
Corrections and Rehabilitation agreed to submit a new protocol for review by 
the end of October.

Much of Monday's hearing focused on technical issues, including whether this 
case belonged in federal court at all. Attorneys for the state argued that the 
condemned inmate must exhaust all his appeals in state court first. It's 
unclear where the justices will come down on that.

"As an aside, all 3 judges in the panel were appointed by Democratic 
presidents, 2 by Bill Clinton and 1 by Barack Obama. But any legal expert will 
say you can't read tea leaves based on that alone.)

After today's oral arguments, Santa Clara University Law School professor Ellen 
Kreitzberg said if the lower court decision striking down the death penalty is 
upheld, it will lead to many more lawsuits - even if it's appealed to the U.S. 
Supreme Court.

"Every person on death row in California will now raise the claim that the 
delay there, the whole process by which they're brought to execution in 
California is unconstitutional," said Prof. Kreitzberg, "and these sentences of 
death should be converted to life without the possibility of parole."

All these delays outrage advocates for crime victims. Kent Scheidegger of the 
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, predicted Judge Carney's 
decision will be reversed. The silver lining he said is that the dysfunctional 
nature of the state's capital punishment system has gotten renewed attention.

He hopes it may also rekindle interest in a ballot measure, once backed by 3 
former California governors, to speed up the appeals process.

On the other hand, death penalty opponents are considering another ballot 
measure to ban capital punishment and convert all death sentences life without 
the possibility of parole. In 2012 voters narrowly rejected a measure to do 
just that.

(source: KQED news)