[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----COLO., MONT., CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 6



COLORADO:

After Aurora and Denver verdicts, Colorado mulls death penalty 
again----High-profile murder trials jump start death penalty debate in Colorado


The statewide conversation on capital punishment promised more than two years 
ago, when Gov. John Hickenlooper granted a death-row inmate a temporary 
reprieve, hasn't materialized in the way some had hoped.

But the life sentences that jurors recently handed down to 2 of the state's 
most heinous mass murderers have jump-started debate on the death penalty's 
future in a state that rarely uses it.

Prosecutors in both cases said death was the only appropriate sentence for the 
2 men - and 2/3 of Coloradans polled in a survey during the Aurora theater 
trial agreed.

But the eventual actions of the 24 jurors in the 2 cases - although the precise 
breakdown for each remains unclear - re-energized the discussion over a 
punishment gathering resistance nationally.

By any measure, the crimes, 3 months apart in 2012, were devastating in their 
scope: 12 shot dead and 70 wounded inside a movie theater; 5 stabbed to death 
in a Denver bar later set ablaze.

For some, the verdicts in the James Holmes and Dexter Lewis trials underscore 
long-standing issues: Is the death penalty worth the expense when it's so 
seldom used? Should a single juror be able to nullify a death sentence? Should 
Colorado join the national trend toward repeal?

For others, the cases demonstrate that the system worked exactly as it should.

One week after the final verdict was read in the theater shooting case, 
Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler sat in his Centennial 
office, reflecting on reports that a single juror voted for a life sentence for 
Holmes.

Had the majority of the jury come back in favor of life, Brauchler might have 
2nd-guessed his decision to seek the death penalty.

But not for 1 juror.

"Do you re-evaluate policy for an entire state, an entire system, off one 
juror?" Brauchler said. "The death penalty is rock solid in the state, and 
everything was done right."

Weeks later, after a Denver judge read the verdict forms that spared Lewis' 
life in the bar murders, Chief Deputy District Attorney Joe Morales balanced 
his disappointment against the wider implications of the jury's decision.

"If you cannot get 12 people to agree beyond a reasonable doubt that the person 
should lose their life for their crimes, then it should not be imposed," 
Morales said. "This was a great day for justice.

But what about the day after? And the day after that?

Broader conversation?

Colorado's top public defender has been awaiting a broader conversation about 
the death penalty for more than 2 years.

"There needs to be an honest, open, frank discussion about the different 
components of the death penalty," Colorado Public Defender Doug Wilson said 
recently.

Wilson oversaw the teams of public defenders in the Aurora and Denver cases and 
felt that justice was served.

Still, he said, the system should be examined - and the governor should fulfill 
the promise he made when he granted the reprieve to death-row inmate Nathan 
Dunlap three months before he was scheduled to die for killing 4 people in 1993 
at a Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant in Aurora.

"That discussion has not occurred," said Wilson, envisioning a statewide 
commission to address all aspects of the issue.

Hickenlooper, who had reserved comment until after the state's 2 capital cases 
were resolved, makes his case against the death penalty on the front page of 
Sunday's Perspective section in The Denver Post - but he stops short of any 
direct recommendation for repeal.

"The death penalty does not make our homes or our state any safer," he writes. 
"Life in prison without hope of parole is just and harsh punishment."

For the moment, what the discussion lacks in structure, it makes up for in 
immediacy. And for Sam Kamin, a law professor at the University of Denver, the 
2 juries' decisions reflected an evolving public attitude toward capital 
punishment.

"I think that there's clearly an ambivalence about the death penalty in 
Colorado," he said.

The death penalty, Kamin said, has been a moving target for decades, and as 
discussions resume in Colorado, those involved should be asking: What do we 
think we're getting from the death penalty?

"Right now, we have an expensive system that doesn't execute anyone," Kamin 
said.

Kamin co-authored a study examining the nexus between race, geography and 
Colorado's death penalty from 1999 to 2010. The study, which was released 
during the theater trial, concluded that the death penalty in Colorado is 
sought too infrequently and is applied so arbitrarily across racial and 
geographic lines that it is unconstitutional.

But Kamin examined hundreds of cases for his study and notes the hazards of 
allowing two distinct cases to shape the conversation.

Bob Grant, the former Adams County district attorney who prosecuted the death 
penalty case that resulted in the state's last execution, also cautions against 
drawing broad conclusions based on particular cases.

The outcomes of the 2 Colorado trials carried characteristics that he could see 
causing at least one juror to balk at capital punishment.

Grant doesn't necessarily see that as an indictment of the death penalty. 
Whether capital punishment stays or goes deserves a broader discussion, he 
said, like the one the governor promised.

And then, perhaps, a vote.

"If people feel the death penalty has no place in Colorado jurisprudence, so be 
it," Grant said. "I suspect they think that there are those cases heinous 
enough that the defendant deserves to look the devil in the eye and have the 
case weighed by a jury in terms of the ultimate punishment."

A lifelong dream

Repeal of the death penalty has been a lifelong dream for state Sen. Lucia 
Guzman, whose father was a murder victim.

In her mind, the back-to-back Colorado decisions against death in 2 
particularly brutal crimes points to just how confounding the issue can be for 
juries.

"The death penalty is definitely not any longer a clear-cut decision," said the 
Denver Democrat, "even in the midst of absolute certainty that the perpetrators 
tried and convicted were the actual perpetrators."

But the Senate minority leader also recognizes she cannot run a repeal bill on 
her own without Republican support. For that reason, she's not sure whether 
she'll press the issue in the upcoming session - "but there will be a time."

Rep. Rhonda Fields views capital punishment through a unique lens: 2 of the 3 
men currently on Colorado's death row were involved in the murder of her son.

She sees the recent verdicts differently.

"I have drawn some conclusions," said the Aurora Democrat. "Our criminal 
justice system works. ... At the end of the day, we have to accept what the 
jury said. That doesn't mean the death penalty doesn't have its place."

She said she expects someone to introduce repeal legislation in the upcoming 
session, but she remains uncertain whether she would counter that with a bill 
of her own, such as to refer the issue to voters.

The political discussion at the Capitol could very well be informed by events 
unfolding just across the state line.

Raised voices in the death penalty controversy were well within Colorado's 
earshot last spring, when neighboring Nebraska's legislature voted to abolish 
its little-used punishment - then overrode Gov. Pete Ricketts' veto by the 
slimmest of margins.

Not only did it become the 7th state since 2007 to repeal the death penalty, 
but it became the 1st predominantly Republican state to do so in more than 40 
years.

Arguments touching on religious, fiscal and practical concerns gained new-found 
traction with some conservative Nebraska lawmakers and dovetailed neatly with 
traditional values.

"We pride ourselves on being a conservative legislature," said state Sen. Colby 
Coash, a Republican who represents a district in Lincoln. "We saw that 
repealing the death penalty is in line with our conservative nature of fiscally 
responsible government. If any other program in Nebraska were so inefficient 
and costly, we would've gotten rid of that a long time ago."

Nebraska's last execution, which was by electrocution, was in 1997, the same 
year Colorado put convicted killer Gary Davis to death by lethal injection. 
Since Nebraska moved to lethal injection in 2009, the state has carried out no 
death sentences amid difficulty in legally obtaining one of the necessary 
drugs.

A signature drive, largely financed by the governor's family, appears likely to 
take the issue to voters in the 2016 election.

"Regardless of the outcome," Coash said, "I believe Nebraska has executed its 
last inmate."

Stacy Anderson, widely credited with galvanizing conservative grassroots 
support for Nebraska's repeal, moved to Denver in July and has begun work as 
outreach coordinator for Colorado's effort, the Better Priorities Initiative.

She has been invited to speak to some conservative groups in Colorado, where 
she said the death penalty conversation has been in high gear because of the 
recently resolved cases. She doesn't think that structured forums are 
necessarily the best places for this conversation to happen.

"I think the best types of conversation are ones that happen over cups of 
coffee. They're the least emotionally charged and ones where we get the best 
sense of what's best for our community," said Anderson, who describes herself 
as a Republican convert to the repeal community. "It's easy for these things to 
get politicized in super-organized sessions."

On the national radar

The ongoing conversation about the death penalty in Colorado could touch on 1 
element that raised concerns locally - and has appeared on the national radar.

The decision for a life sentence over death, in both cases, may have revolved 
around the vote of a single juror.

While the judge in the Aurora theater trial squashed any claims that there was 
a "plant" on the jury, the potential for 1 juror to nullify 11 other votes for 
death has drawn criticism.

But unanimity in pronouncing a death sentence remains the rule in most states. 
Colorado briefly abandoned that rule in 1995 after prosecutors - who became 
frustrated by juries declining to impose a death sentence - backed a 
controversial law that allowed a three-judge panel to sentence a defendant to 
death instead of a unanimous jury.

The state returned to juries in 2003.

Still, 3 states do not require jurors to be unanimous in handing down a death 
sentence. Alabama, Delaware and Florida allow a jury to recommend a death 
sentence without unanimity, and judges in each of those states have the power 
to override a jury's decision.

The law in Alabama allows for a 10-2 majority vote. Florida requires a simple 
majority when deciding whether aggravating circumstances exist or a defendant 
should live or die.

The American Bar Association, which does not take a position on the death 
penalty, released a resolution in February urging all jurisdictions with the 
death penalty to require unanimity among jurors in finding aggravating factors 
and in imposing death.

"This deliberative function is crucial in order to ensure that the death 
sentence is not being unfairly or arbitrarily imposed," the resolution reads.

While it's unclear what persuaded any individual jurors to spare the defendants 
in the Colorado cases, defense attorneys sought to establish mental health 
issues and child abuse as mitigators.

Are those arguments finding more traction with jurors?

In what would be some of his final comments to the jury, Lewis' defense 
attorney Christopher Baumann reminded jurors that months earlier, during jury 
selection, they each said they could consider a death sentence but also wanted 
to hear about the defendant's life.

And so, for a week, jurors heard about the chronic abuse that consumed the 
defendant's childhood.

Less than 3 hours after Baumann sat down, at least one of the jurors found that 
the facts of the case that suggested mercy outweighed the horrific details that 
suggested death.

Alan Tuerkheimer, a jury consultant who founded the Chicago-based firm Trial 
Methods, said as topics such as mental illness and abuse are discussed more 
frequently and comfortably in the public, those considerations eventually enter 
deliberation rooms as well.

"Everybody shares more," Tuerkheimer said. "More people are aware of these 
things or have been connected to these issues personally."

Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford who has written 
extensively on death penalty issues, doesn't think juries are necessarily 
better-informed on behavioral science or that defense lawyers have found better 
ways to make those arguments.

Rather, he ties the willingness to consider those issues to a shift in the way 
the public generally perceives the death penalty.

"There have always been lots of cases where mental illness is brought in as a 
mitigator or child abuse, and most of the time it fails," he said. "I think 
it's really more a matter of what's in the water, what's in the national 
consciousness. There's simply less motivation behind the death penalty, a 
greater sense of it being kind of a pointless exercise."

Hickenlooper, citing what he called Colorado's arbitrary use of the death 
penalty, said it does not advance justice.

"Each of these killers will die in prison," he writes in Sunday's Post. "In the 
meantime, let's honor the memories of the victims and continue to support the 
survivors, their families and loved ones as they heal."

(source: Denver Post)

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

A renewed debate on Colorado's death penalty


In the past 12 months, two separate polls have indicated that most Coloradans 
support the death penalty.

In September of last year, a Denver Post poll found 63 % of respondents support 
the death penalty, with 28 % opposed (the rest were unsure).

And 2 months ago a Quinnipiac University poll found 67 % of respondents in 
Colorado supported the death penalty, with only 26 % saying it should be 
abolished.

Both of those polls occurred, of course, before the recent verdicts that 
sentenced both James Holmes and Dexter Lewis to life in prison without a chance 
for parole.

Does that change the political calculus for Coloradans?

Does the fact that criminals who committed 2 of the most brutal massacres in 
memory in this state escaped the death penalty despite the efforts of highly 
skilled prosecutors say anything about whether the law should be retained?

We think it does. Indeed, the verdicts seem to confirm what death penalty 
opponents have been arguing for years: that some of the same Coloradans who 
tell pollsters that they support the death penalty are actually reluctant to 
vote for it when they find themselves on a jury faced with the life-or-death 
question.

For that matter, prosecutors are clearly reluctant to ask for the penalty given 
the resources of staff and money they have to pour into the effort over a 
period that stretches into years.

The result is that it is almost impossible to predict who will get the death 
penalty and who will not - not to mention when a prosecutor will even choose to 
seek it.

No law with such serious consequences should be applied so haphazardly.

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the essays published in this section today 
suggest that despite the 2 verdicts, opinions on the death penalty remain 
nearly as entrenched as they ever were.

With one possible exception: In her reaction, state Rep. Rhonda Fields, 
D-Aurora, appears to flirt with repudiating her past support for the death 
penalty, without actually doing so. If she ever does, it will be a major loss 
to the coalition in support of capital punishment given her party affiliation 
and personal history of having her son's killers on death row.

Even if Colorado's law remains unchanged, it's an ideal time for Coloradans to 
reassess arguments for and against the death penalty given what has just 
occurred. So long as the penalty remains on the books, the debate about its 
morality and fairness will surely continue.

(source: Denver Post Editorial Board)






MONTANA:

The ironic persistence of Ron Smith


Pardon our dismay.

Once again, the good people of Montana have been forced to watch the spectacle 
of lawyers jumping through hoops in order to try to save the life of a man who 
gave up his right to that life 33 years ago when he murdered 2 men because he 
wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.

Ronald Allen Smith pleaded guilty in 1983 to executing Harvey Mad Man Jr. and 
Thomas Running Rabbit Jr. near Marias Pass in Flathead County after the 
Browning cousins picked him up hitchhiking. He said at first that he wanted to 
die for his crime, but then changed his mind, and for the last 3 decades, 
Montanans have watched him squirm out of one execution date after another.

Last week, he was at it again. Smith's attorneys have gone to court in Helena 
to argue that lethal injection using pentobarbital is cruel and unusual 
punishment because the sedative may not be "ultra-fast acting."

The irony of this argument would be delicious were is not so nauseating. Here 
we have a man who shot 2 men with a sawed-off rifle in the back of the head 
arguing that he thinks it would not be humane to sedate him slowly in 
preparation for his death. If he really wants to go quicker, we are sure that 
the citizens of Montana would happily volunteer a number of methods of 
execution that would be fast-acting.

But honestly, we all know that's not the issue. What Smith and his lawyers are 
after is a chance to find a judge who will rule that the death penalty is 
unconstitutional. Just as other traditional values have been struck down by 
activist courts, so too the notion of compelling the ultimate penalty for 
particularly heinous crimes is in the sights of the progressive left. They 
haven't been able to convince the Legislature to do away with the death 
penalty, so that leaves an activist judge as their best hope.

The other irony, and one we have repeatedly noted in the past 20 years, is that 
prolonging Ron Smith's life year after year has amounted to cruel and unusual 
punishment not of Smith, but of his victims' friends and family. It is the 
legal system itself that should be on trial, not the method of execution. 
Keeping Ron Smith alive is an affront to justice itself.

As we noted in 2002, "Smith originally asked for the death penalty. We still 
hope he gets his wish."

(source: Editorial, Daily Interlake)






CALIFORNIA:

Court to Hear Appeal of Long Beach Cop Killer Sentenced to Death----The 
California Supreme Court will hear the appeal of a gang member who shot to 
police officers and a pregnant woman.


The California Supreme Court is set to hear an automatic appeal next month in 
the case of a gang member who was sentenced to death for the April 2000 murder 
of a Long Beach police officer.

The state's highest court is scheduled to hear the case against Ramon Sandoval 
Jr. on Oct. 7 in San Francisco.

Sandoval was convicted in October 2002 of 1st-degree murder for the April 29, 
2000, killing of Officer Daryle Black, along with the attempted murder of 
Black's partner, assault with an assault weapon on a peace officer and assault 
with an assault weapon.

Jurors also found true the special circumstances of murder of a police officer 
in the performance of his duties, murder to avoid arrest, lying in wait and 
street gang murder.

The 1st jury that convicted Sandoval of the crimes deadlocked on whether he 
should face the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of 
parole. A 2nd jury recommended a death sentence in April 2003.

Sandoval was sentenced to death the following month, with Superior Court Judge 
Joan Comparet-Cassani calling him a "cold-blooded, heartless killer."

The judge said Sandoval spotted Black and his partner, Rick Delfin, in an 
unmarked patrol car and fired 28 rounds from an assault rifle to prevent the 2 
from nabbing one of his fellow gang members, who was armed and on parole.

At the May 2003 sentencing hearing, the judge said Sandoval recognized the 
unmarked car as a police unit as he and other gang members prepared to attack a 
member of a rival gang they believed was responsible for an earlier drive-by 
shooting in which Sandoval was wounded.

"Defendant Sandoval shot at the police officers 28 times, each and every time 
pulling the trigger. He aimed at their heads," the judge said, noting that 
Sandoval was about 15 feet away and could see the officers' bodies move as they 
were being shot.

"Even though Officer Delfin managed to slowly drive the car down the street to 
try to evade the shooter, Sandoval continued to shoot at the police officers," 
the judge said. "The trajectory analysis showed that Sandoval followed his 
targets as they attempted to leave the area of the attack."

Black died of a massive head wound, and his partner had to undergo numerous 
surgeries, including a knee replacement.

The gunfire also struck a pregnant woman in a nearby residence, with the bullet 
lodging inches from her unborn fetus, the judge said.

"If there is a case where death is appropriate, this is one of those cases," 
Comparet-Cassani said.

(source: patch.com)