[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----KAN., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 10



KANSAS:

A look at the costs associated with death row in Kansas


Tax dollars add up quickly in death penalty cases and typically state and local 
governments bear the burden of costs.

The Now KC talked with a local criminal defense lawyer, Paul Cramm to learn 
more about what factors into the cost behind death row.

Death Row Life Sentence

Trial Defense $395,762 $98,963

Court Costs $72,530 $21,554

Guilty Plea $130,595 $64,711

Incarceration $130,595 $64,711

Appeals: 20x more hours are spent on death row than non-death row appeals.

*Figures from the Kansas Judicial Council Death Penalty Advisory Committee 
(Feb. 2014).

In Kansas, housing prisoners on death row costs more than twice as much per 
year ($49,380) as it does for prisoners in general population ($24,690).

(source: KSHB news)






SOUTH DAKOTA:

Former police chief indicted on 1st-degree murder charge


A grand jury in southern South Dakota has indicted a 63-year-old man who has 
served as a police chief on a 1st-degree murder charge.

Attorney General Marty Jackley's office said Wednesday that if Russell Ray 
Bertram of Sioux Falls is convicted, he faces the death penalty or a mandatory 
life sentence.

Authorities say Bertram in 2009 killed Leonila Stickney, who was his 
26-year-old fiance.

At the time, the Gregory County Sheriff's office said authorities believed 
Stickney's death was the result of an accidental shooting.

Officials said then that Stickney's friend was getting back into a vehicle 
after shooting a pheasant when he accidentally fired, striking her in the 
chest.

Bertram has served as police chief of Harrisburg and as a police officer.

Court records don't list an attorney for Bertram.

(source: Associated Press)






CALIFORNIA:

Constitutionality of death penalty in California


I am saddened the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is considering 
overturning a federal ruling on the constitutionality of the death penalty in 
California. The death penalty simply does not work in our state. It is 
administered infrequently and, at times, it has also been administered 
arbitrarily. Both of these factors together create a situation where today the 
death penalty is a cruel and quite unusual form of punishment.

If we look closely at the history and economic background of the death penalty 
in California, we find that only a small number of inmates have been put to 
death since 1978. In fact, one has been put to death in the last 9 years. 
However, we currently have over 740 inmates on death row and, on average, each 
death row inmate costs the state $90,000 per year. The 740 inmates taken as a 
whole cost $67,500,000 per year, and total systemic costs related to 
maintaining the death penalty run to nearly $184,000,000 per year. On the other 
hand, the cost of administering a penal system that has life without parole as 
its severest punishment is only a tenth of the cost of the current death 
penalty system. And it is not cruel and unusual in the sense outlined above.

The death penalty is cruel and unusual to all members of society, not simply 
those on death row. We all bear some of its weight, both economically and 
morally, and it is time we laid such a burdensome penalty down.

Peter Loetterle, Arcata

(source: Letter to the Editor, Times-Standard)






USA:

APA Bars Psychologists from Participating in National Security Interrogations; 
'It is time to do the same for psychologists' involvement in death ...


Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association (APA) voted almost 
unanimously to adopt a policy banning psychologists from participating in 
national security interrogations, including noncoercive investigations now 
conducted by the Obama administration.

"The vote followed an emotional debate in which several members said the ban 
was needed to restore the organization's reputation after a scathing 
independent investigation ordered by the association's board," The New York 
Times has reported.

Psychologists are now barred from working at "Guantanamo, CIA black sites and 
other settings deemed illegal under the Geneva Conventions or the U.N. 
Convention Against Torture, unless they are working directly for the persons 
being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human 
rights," according to a report by Democracy Now.

The final vote - which was 157-1, with 6 abstentions and 1 recusal - resulted 
in a standing ovation from APA members, as well as many in attendance, 
including anti-torture activists, some of whom wore T-shirts reading "First, Do 
No Harm," a reference to the Hippocratic oath.

Fordham University Center for Ethics Education Director Dr. Celia B. Fisher, 
who has previously addressed human rights issues with psychologists' 
involvement in death penalty assessments, weighs in on the APA's new policy:

"The most recent APA ban on psychologists' involvement in national security 
interrogations makes clear that psychologists' ethical duties supersede their 
legal obligations when their activities contribute in any way to a violation of 
human rights," Dr. Fisher explained.

In addition, Dr. Fisher, who chaired the 2002 revision of the APA's Ethics Code 
and is author of Decoding the Ethics Code: A Practical Guide for Psychologists, 
now in its 3rd edition, has called for the end of psychologists' involvement in 
death penalty evaluations.

"This [new APA policy] brings the field's moral compass in line with the UN 
Convention Against Torture and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is 
time to do the same for psychologists' involvement in death penalty cases, an 
inequitable legal process that lethally violates the human rights of defendants 
in capital cases," Dr. Fisher stated.

In May 2013, Dr. Fisher addressed these ethical issues in a blog post entitled, 
"Are Psychologists Violating their Ethics Code by Conducting Death Penalty 
Evaluations for Defendants with Mental Disabilities?"

In this post, Dr. Fisher writes:

Some have argued that psychological assessment is neutral and does not 
determine whether a judge or jury will sentence a prisoner like to death. 
However, given the current flaws, psychologists' contribution to legal 
decisions concerning competency and predictions of future violence hearings 
places the defendant at the mercy of an imperfect and unjust system.

Even as Americans continue to disagree on whether the death penalty in itself 
violates human rights, the unwarranted and inequitable killing of innocent 
persons by their government is a flagrant violation of the basic rights of 
individuals to life and liberty. It is time for psychologists to consider 
whether the APA Ethics Code prohibition against activities that justify or 
defend violating human rights applies to forensic psychologists conducting 
evaluations that contribute to an inequitable correctional system whose 
inconsistencies lethally violates the human rights of innocent persons.

For more information on the ethics of psychologists' involvement in death 
penalty evaluations - particularly for defendants with mental disabilities - 
read Dr. Fisher's blog post in its entirely, or her 2013 article in Ethics & 
Behavior entitled "Human Rights and Psychologists' Involvement in Assessments 
Related to Death Penalty Cases."

APA Bars Psychologists from Participating in National Security Interrogations; 
'It is time to do the same for psychologists' involvement in death ... was 
originally published @ Ethics and Society and has been syndicated with 
permission.

(source: socialjusticesolutions.org)

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

U.S. Terrorist Attacks Fast Facts


Here's a list of terror attacks on U.S. soil since 1980 with casualties:

1978-1995 - 3 people die and 23 others are wounded after a string of mail 
bombings carried out by Ted Kaczynski. "The Unabomber," as he is also known, is 
serving 8 life sentences for murder. He was not charged with terrorism, but the 
string of bombings is considered to be a terror case.

February 26, 1993 - A bomb explodes on the 2nd subterranean level of Vista 
Hotel's public parking garage, below the 2 World Trade Center building. 6 
people are killed, and more than 1,000 people are treated for injuries. 6 
suspects are convicted of participating in the bombing. The 7th suspect, Abdul 
Rahman Yasin, is still at large.

April 19, 1995 - A bomb rips through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring almost 700. Timothy 
McVeigh is convicted on federal murder charges and executed in 2001.

July 27, 1996 - A bomb explodes in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during 
the middle of a concert during the Summer Olympics. 1 person is killed, another 
dies from a heart attack, and 111 others are injured. Bombing suspect Eric 
Robert Rudolph is arrested in North Carolina in 2003, after being indicted in 
2000 for the Atlanta bombing and for other bombings, including 1 at an abortion 
clinic where 1 person died. Rudolph is serving 4 consecutive sentences of life 
in prison plus 120 years for the attacks.

September 11, 2001 - 19 al Qaeda members hijack 4 U.S. passenger airliners. 2 
are flown into the Twin Towers in New York, 1 crashes into the Pentagon and 
another crashes into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers attempt to 
wrest control of the aircraft to prevent an attack on the U.S. Capitol. 2,753 
people are killed at the World Trade Center site; 184 at the Pentagon; and 40 
in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. A total of 2,977 people are killed.

November 5, 2009 - Major Nidal Hassan goes on a shooting rampage at a military 
processing center at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32. Hassan is 
convicted of 13 counts of murders and 32 counts of attempted murder. He has 
been given the death penalty. Hassan was not charged with terrorism, but the 
rampage is considered by many to be a terror incident.

April 15, 2013 - Twin bomb blasts explode near the finish line of the Boston 
Marathon, killing three and wounding at least 264. Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev 
has been charged by the U.S. government with 1 count of using and conspiring to 
use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death and one count of malicious 
destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death. He 
is given the death penalty on June 25, 2015.

(source: GantDaily.com)

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

Judge in Boston's next death penalty case won't step down


A lobster roll and a film panel on Martha's Vineyard isn't enough to force a 
federal judge off the bench in Boston's next death penalty trial, that judge 
ruled today. Prosecutors in the federal death penalty case against admitted 
carjacker and killer Gary Lee Sampson asked for Judge Mark L. Wolf to recuse 
himself in July. Sampson, who admitted to killing 3 people in Massachusetts and 
New Hampshire in 2001, was scheduled to be retried starting next week.

At question is a panel discussion Wolf moderated on Martha's Vineyard in July 
2014. The topic was a film, called The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest, about a 
prisoner who may have a mental illness exacerbated by his solitary confinement. 
Sampson was never mentioned in the film or during the discussion.

James Gilligan, a prison trauma expert, was on the panel at the request of the 
filmmaker. Wolf hosted Gilligan and the filmmaker for supper at his rented 
vacation house, he wrote in the 114-page decision released Tuesday.

A year later, Sampson's defense attorneys said they planned to call Gilligan as 
an expert witness. Wolf also learned that Gilligan had submitted an affidavit 
contained in a 1,100-page petition for a new trial for Sampson back in 2009.

None of that rises to the level "in which his impartiality might reasonably be 
questioned" as required by law, the judge wrote.

Sampson admitted to killing Phillip McCloskey, Jonathan Rizzo and Robert 
Whitney over several days in 2001, and was sentenced to death by a jury in 
2003. But Wolf in 2011 threw out the sentence after it was discovered 1 of the 
jurors lied under oath.

Sampson's attorneys plan to argue, among other mitigating factors, that Sampson 
suffers from a mental illness and brain damage, and that he was assaulted in 
prison.

The penalty phase of Sampson's trial had been scheduled to begin on Sept. 16.

Prosecutors will have until Oct. 13 to decide whether to appeal.

(source: boston.com)

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

Legal system churns as Dru Sjodin's killer appeals death sentence


9 years after Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. received a death sentence for abducting and 
murdering 22-year-old college student Dru Sjodin, his lawyers are still working 
to keep him alive.

Their latest efforts came Wednesday in a Fargo, N.D., courtroom. While the 
hearing was closed to the public, Rodriguez's attorneys in hearings earlier in 
the week raised allegations of juror misconduct tied to the 2006 trial.

Based on public testimony this week it appears the defense is trying to raise 
questions about information that was not part of the trial that may have 
influenced the jury's death penalty verdict.

Federal rules limit what questions jurors can be asked about the jury 
deliberations. 2 exceptions are probably at play in this week's questioning of 
jurors: Was extraneous, prejudicial information improperly brought to the 
jury's attention? Was an outside influence improperly brought to bear on any 
juror?

Defense attorneys and prosecutors will file briefs on the information presented 
at Wednesday's hearing and the judge will rule, probably early next year, on 
whether this issue can be part of Rodriguez's long appeals process.

Sjodin's abduction from a Grand Forks, N.D., mall parking lot gripped the 
region in 2003. An extensive search followed her disapperance. Her body was 
found the following spring near Crookston, Minn., where Rodriguez lived. He was 
initially charged in state court in North Dakota, but the case was transferred 
to federal court.

Rodriguez was a convicted level 3 sex offender in Minnesota who'd recently been 
released when he abducted Sjodin, who was from Pequot Lakes, Minn. He was 
convicted of murder in 2006. The case prompted wide discussion and some change 
in Minnesota sex offender laws about when sex offenders should be released.

In a 2nd phase of the trial the jury was asked to decide if he should be 
sentenced to life in prison or death by lethal injection. The jury chose the 
death sentence.

The next stop for Rodriguez is expected in mid-January, when an evidentiary 
hearing takes up testimony related to his mental capacity. It's not clear what 
issues will be raised. But in a 2011 appeal, the defense argued Rodriguez is 
"mentally retarded," using a phrase that is no longer widely used.

The defense claimed, in effect, that Rodriguez suffers from an intellectual 
disability now and did at the time of the crime, that his execution would 
violate the 8th amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

(source: mprnews.org)

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

Seventh Circuit grants immunity to bite mark 'experts' who put innocent man in 
prison for 23 years


Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit granted qualified 
immunity to Lowell Thomas Johnson and Raymond Rawson, the 2 bite mark 
specialists whose testimony helped convict Robert Lee Stinson of raping and 
murdering an elderly Wisconsin woman in 1984. Stinson spent 23 years in prison 
before DNA testing exonerated him in 2009. Further testing implicated a man 
named Moses Price, who then confessed to the crime.

The only real evidence against Stinson was the testimony of Johnson and Rawson, 
who claimed they could match bite marks on the victim's body to Stinson, to the 
exclusion of everyone else. Johnson claimed that the marks on the woman "had to 
have been made by teeth identical in all of these characteristics" to 
Stinson's. Rawson claimed the marks matched Stinson's teeth "to a reasonable 
degree of scientific certainty."

Stinson claims to have been severely beaten when he was arrested. Before trial, 
Stinson's attorneys consulted with their own bite mark analyst. That analyst 
too claimed that the marks were a match to Stinson. So Stinson's attorneys 
never called a witness to contradict Johnson and Rawson. They did attempt to 
draw attention to a line in a forensics journal about how some experts 
disagreed with the conclusions of bite mark analysts. The trial judge refused 
to let them. Stinson was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

I wrote a bit about Stinson's case in my series on bite mark evidence that ran 
in February. The particularly remarkable thing about Stinson's case is that in 
his appeal, he challenged the validity of bite mark analysis, claiming that 
there's no scientific research to support its claims. In 1986, the Wisconsin 
Supreme Court conceded in a footnote that without the bite mark evidence, the 
state's case against Stinson "may not have been sufficient to convict him." But 
the court not only rejected Stinson???s appeal; the justices also spent a dozen 
paragraphs meticulously explaining why bite mark evidence is sound.

In 1 footnote, the justices pointed out that at the time of the decision, "bite 
mark comparison has received evidentiary acceptance in 19 jurisdictions. No 
jurisdiction has rejected the admission of such evidence."

This is true. But as I pointed out in my series this year, this is almost 
entirely due what you might call a judicial echo chamber that began with the 
1975 case Marx v. California. In that case, a California appeals court admitted 
testimony from bite mark analysts who had done their analysis six weeks after 
the murder victim had been autopsied, embalmed and buried. Even so, the court 
did not perform an analysis of the scientific validity of the evidence. Indeed, 
it conceded that there was no scientific evidence to analyze. Instead, the 
California court simply stated that the trial judge had eyeballed the evidence 
and found it persuasive. To overrule the trial judge, the court concluded, 
"would be to abandon common sense." As one critic of forensic analysis put it, 
Marx became a "global warrant" for bite mark evidence across the country.

In the end, the Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded "that the evidence presented 
was sufficient to convince the jury, to a moral certainty, that there was no 
reasonable hypothesis of Stinson's innocence." The opinion was unanimous.

The Stinson case itself then became a case that prosecutors would cite in 
seeking to have bite mark evidence admitted and that appeals courts would cite 
in upholding its validity.

Of course, Stinson was innocent, although that wasn't discovered until he'd 
lost 23 years of his life. In its decision last month, the unanimous Seventh 
Circuit panel found that unless Stinson can show that Rawson and Johnson 
knowingly fabricated evidence, the 2 dentists are protected by qualified 
immunity and can't be sued. It isn't enough that their expert testimony was 
self-evidently bogus; Stinson would have to prove that they didn't believe 
their own nonsense. And barring some smoking-gun audio recording of the experts 
admitting as much, that's next to impossible. From the opinion:

Arriving at an unreasonable expert opinion may suggest negligence, perhaps even 
gross negligence, but it does not amount to the intentional fabrication of 
evidence. A mistake in forensic analysis - even an egregious mistake - is 
grievous given the stakes in this context, but an expert who renders a mistaken 
opinion is protected by qualified immunity. Fabricated opinion evidence, for 
which the expert might not have qualified immunity, must be both wrong and 
known to be wrong by the expert.

Stinson places special emphasis on the discrepancy between Dr. Johnson's early 
hypothesis - that the murderer was missing the right lateral incisor - and his 
ultimate opinion that Stinson's dentition matched the bite marks on Cychosz's 
body. (Recall that Stinson was missing his right central incisor, the tooth 
just next to the right lateral incisor.) This discrepancy suggests that 
forensic odontology is not very precise (raising legitimate questions about its 
reliability), but it's not evidence that Dr. Johnson knew his opinion was false 
- i.e., that it was a lie.

We acknowledge that it's not easy to prove that an expert knowingly falsified 
an opinion. We also recognize that the first step toward proving that an expert 
was intentionally lying is proving that his opinion was wrong. But to conclude 
that an expert fabricated his opinion solely because it was wrong - even 
grossly wrong - would collapse the essential distinction between mistaken 
opinions (for which there is immunity) and fabricated opinions (for which there 
is not). Stinson's fabrication claim is based entirely on the opinions of new 
experts that Drs. Johnson and Rawson were terribly wrong about the bite-mark 
evidence and that they used unreliable methods falling far below the standards 
of their profession. We do not second-guess this new opinion evidence, but it 
demonstrates at most that the odontologists acted unreasonably, not that they 
fabricated their opinions. Stinson has nothing else to support his 
evidence-fabrication claim.

On some level, this opinion makes some sense. To start allowing witnesses to be 
sued for making honest mistakes would provide a disincentive to testifying. If 
we're talking about charlatans and quacks, we want such a disincentive. But it 
could also prevent good witnesses from coming forward.

The problem is that this case didn't exist in a vacuum. The courts allowed 
fraudulent experts to put a man in prison. But the courts now say that because 
the courts made that mistake, the man who was wrongly imprisoned can't sue 
those experts.

Moreover, Raymond Rawson and Lowell Thomas Johnson didn't just use bogus 
science in this one case; they also were evangelists for bite mark evidence. 
They actively tried to persuade other judges and other appeals courts to accept 
bite mark evidence. And they (and others like them) have been enormously 
successful.

In fact, Raymond Rawson would go on to help convict another innocent man - Ray 
Krone spent a decade in prison and was nearly executed after he was convicted 
of killing Phoenix waitress Kim Ancona. Krone was exonerated by DNA evidence in 
2002. Over the years, Rawson has authored dozens of articles about bite mark 
analysis published by forensic journals. He was president of the American Board 
of Forensic Odontology, the leading advocacy group for bite mark analysts. He 
co-wrote the group's original guidelines for bite mark matching. He has taught 
bite mark analysis and served as a consultant to local governments. He even won 
a seat in the Nevada state Senate.

Lowell Thomas Johnson has also been a fierce advocate for bite mark matching. 
In May 2008, Johnson was profiled in USA Today for starting a database of human 
dentition that he claimed would provide scientific validation for his field. 
(It didn't.) That article appeared about a year before Johnson would learn that 
a man he helped convict two decades ago had been proved innocent by DNA 
testing.

It took more than 3 decades, but over the past several years, actual scientists 
have finally started testing the claims of bite mark analysts. And as we've 
pointed out on several occasions here at The Watch, those scientists are 
showing that bite mark analysis is a fraudulent field. Even the ABFO's own 
effort to show that its accredited analysts used sound science backfired and 
showed precisely the opposite. When given photos of marks on human skin, the 
analysts couldn't even come to a consensus on whether marks were made by human 
teeth. Last July, a senior-level science adviser to President Obama said that 
bite mark evidence should be "eradicated" from the courtroom. The same month, 
Judge Gary Feinerman of the United States District Court for the Northern 
District of Illinois found that "There appears to be little, if any, 
scientifically valid data to support the accuracy of bite mark comparison, and 
the data that does exist is damning." He went on to call bite mark analysis 
"transparently fraudulent" and compared the field to astrology.

But just as with Stinson, Feinerman found that bite mark analysts who testify 
are protected by qualified immunity. In fact, he ruled that the very quackery 
of the field protects its practitioners from liability.

It would be akin to saying that an astrologer "falsified" his conclusion that, 
because the planets are in a particular alignment, the defendant must have 
committed the crime, or to complaining that a palm reader grossly deviated from 
professional standards by mistaking the heart line for the head line.

Keep in mind, Feinerman wrote this in an opinion that denied a wrongly 
convicted man the opportunity to sue the experts Feinerman was comparing to 
palm readers and astrologists.

This might all be dismissed as an outrageous and unjust but anachronistic quirk 
in the annals of our criminal justice system - like fugitive slave trials, or 
the use of phrenology - except for one huge problem: To date, not a single 
state court in the United States has rejected bite mark evidence. In Wisconsin, 
Stinson is still good law. It's still cited by prosecutors in other states when 
they want to argue for the validity of bite mark evidence. (Such as Mississippi 
Attorney General Jim Hood in the case of Eddie Lee Howard.)

If you were to look up the Stinson case on a legal database like Lexis or 
Westlaw, you wouldn't even know that he had been exonerated. You'd see the 
Wisconsin Supreme Court's through defense of bite mark matching in 1986, and 
you'd think that was the end of the story. (And if you didn't know better, 
you'd probably find it pretty convincing.) That's true of the other bite mark 
exonerations, too.

And it isn't as if the courts merely haven't had the chance to revisit the 
issue. In 2012, an appeals court in Texas once again upheld the validity of 
bite mark evidence. So did a Pennsylvania judge in 2011. In 2013, a state judge 
in New York did the same, siding with a prosecutor in the Manhattan DA's office 
who has become a fierce public advocate for bite mark analysts. The courts and 
public officials aren't ignoring this issue. They're doubling down on it.

Robert Lee Stinson wants the courts to extract a reckoning from the men who 
wrongly put him in prison. Our system doesn't allow that. But before you can 
have a reckoning with fraudulent expert witnesses, the system would first have 
to admit that it was wrong to allow them to testify. And yet despite all the 
exonerations, critiques and science debunking bite mark analysis, that???s 
still something no state court has been able to do.

(source: Radley Balko, WashingtonPost)