[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----FLA., ARK., S. DAK., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 11



FLORIDA:

Bessman Okafor case: Hearing delayed despite Jeff Ashton's objection----Jury 
finds Bessman Okafor guilty of 1st-degree murder, all other counts


A jury has recommended Okafor be put to death for the 2012 witness execution of 
19-year-old Alex Zaldivar.

A hearing for convicted murder Bessman Okafor's possible death penalty has been 
delayed at the request of his defense attorneys.

Circuit Judge John Marshall Kest said he will reset the hearing for some time 
in October.

The judge has also pushed the sentencing hearing back to Nov. 17.

Orange-Osceola State Attorney Jeff Ashton objected to the delay.

Now a judge must decide whether to impose capital punishment or sentence Okafor 
to life in prison.

Last month a jury convicted Okafor of 1st-degree murder to prevent Zaldivar and 
his 2 roommates from taking the stand after their Ocoee home was robbed. 
Zaldivar was killed by 2 fatal bullets to the back of his head.

The same jury recommended he receive the death penalty after hearing testimony 
about Okafor's upbringing in the 31/2 week trial.

(source: Orlando Sentinel)






ARKANSAS:

8 Planned Executions in Arkansas 'Out of Step' With US Opinion - NGO


Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson's decision to resume executions of prisoners 
on death row flies in the face of mounting opposition to capital punishment 
across the United States, advocacy group Equal Justice USA Executive Director 
Shari Silberstein told Sputnik.

"Setting 8 execution dates after a long hiatus is out of step with a strong 
trend across the United States to move away from the death penalty," 
Silberstein said.

On Wednesday, Hutchinson announced execution dates for eight convicted felons 
which will revive the practice of the death penalty process in Arkansas after 
it was dormant for 10 years.

Arkansas Governor Sets Dates for Inmates Executions for 1st Time in 10 Years

2 executions are scheduled to take place once a month starting on October 21. 
The last 2 of the 8 inmates will be executed on January 14, 2016.

Silberstein said 7 US states have already banned the death penalty, while four 
others have officially stopped any sort of death row execution.

"Americans have seen the writing on the wall: the death penalty is a failed 
policy that risks executing innocent people, wastes millions of taxpayer 
dollars and distracts from public safety," she said.

On September 1, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge sent a letter to 
Hutchinson urging him to set execution dates for the 8 prisoners as their legal 
appeals had been exhausted and the state had enough drugs to carry out the 
executions by lethal injection.

Capital punishment is currently the law in 31 US states, and abolished in 19 
states.

(source: sputniknews.com)






SOUTH DAKOTA:

Prosecutor mulling death penalty in Lead stabbing death


The Lawrence County State's Attorney is still deciding whether to seek the 
death penalty against a Lead man charged in the Aug. 12 stabbing death of a 
27-year-old woman.

James Lewis Rogers Jr. is charged with one count of 1st-degree murder in the 
death of Caitlin Kelly Walsh. Rogers pleaded not guilty and has been held 
without bond in Lawrence County Jail since his arrest.

State's Attorney John Fitzgerald tells the Rapid City Journal that prosecutors 
are still reviewing the facts of this case. Fitzgerald declined to comment on 
whether a potential plea deal was being discussed with Rogers and his 
court-appointed Rapid City defense attorney, Ellery Grey.

Lead police say they arrested Rogers on Aug. 17 after discovering Walsh's body 
in his Main Street apartment.

(source: Associated Press)






USA:

The Executions That Still Shock ---- 2 new plays revisit Roy Cohn and the 
Rosenbergs, whose stories continue to haunt the Jewish psyche.

Whether it was the crime of the century or a government frame-up of an innocent 
Jewish couple - or, as is more likely, something in the middle - the execution 
for treason of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg continues to send shockwaves through 
American culture. Among the most troubling and fascinating aspects of the case 
was the involvement of Roy Cohn, the (secretly) gay, corrupt Jewish attorney 
who prosecuted the Jewish couple. 2 plays that opened last week in New York, 
Joan Beber's "In Bed With Roy Cohn," which imagines Cohn's last days, and Karen 
Ludwig's 1-woman show, "Where Was I?" in which she recalls playing Ethel 
Rosenberg in the 1992 TV film, "Citizen Cohn," testify to the unslackened grip 
of the Rosenberg case on our collective imagination.

Cohn grew up in an observant Jewish family in the Bronx; his father, Albert 
Cohn, was active in Democratic Party politics. After graduating from Columbia 
Law School in 1947 at the age of 20, and being admitted to the bar a year 
later, Cohn was immediately hired by Irving Saypol, the U.S. attorney in 
Manhattan, and began prosecuting Communists in counterespionage cases.

The 1951 trial of the Rosenbergs, who were accused of passing atomic secrets to 
the Soviets, thrust Cohn into the national spotlight; his direct examination of 
Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, was a major factor in the couple's 
conviction and execution. (Half a century later, Greenglass admitted to New 
York Times writer Sam Roberts that he had lied on the stand in order to divert 
attention from himself and his wife, Ruth, who had also been part of the spy 
ring. And in the grand jury transcript of his testimony, released just 2 months 
ago, Greenglass never mentioned that his sister was involved in any way, which 
has led legal experts to conclude that Ethel was innocent.)

After the Rosenberg case, Cohn became Sen. Joseph McCarthy's right-hand man in 
conducting his crusade against Communists, many of whom were also Jewish. He 
went on to have many high-profile clients, from mafia boss John Gotti to 
nightclub owner Ian Schrager to the New York Yankees. One such client, 
now-presidential candidate Donald Trump, is even said to have learned his 
abrasive style of public discourse from Cohn. But Cohn's career ended in 
disgrace. He had just been disbarred when he died of AIDS in 1986.

Cohn was most famously portrayed in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," a 1990s 
Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part play, filmed in 2003 by HBO, in which the 
power-mad attorney appears fiendishly realistic. By contrast, Beber's play, 
which is directed by Katrin Hilbe, is a more surrealistic take on Cohn 
(Christopher Daftsios); in it, the dying lawyer, surrounded by blinking vital 
signs on the walls of his bedroom, hallucinates that he is visited by figures 
from his past like Ronald Reagan (Nelson Avidon), Barbara Walters (Lee Roy 
Rogers) and Julius Rosenberg (Ian Gould). Cohn's overbearing mother, Dora 
(Marilyn Sokol, "Old Jews Telling Jokes") is, the play suggests, most 
responsible for Cohn???s deep-seated psychological conflicts, because of her 
disapproval of his homosexual lifestyle.

Beber, 81, is the author of a previous play about the Rosenbergs, "Ethel 
Sings," which ran in New York in 2013. She grew up in Omaha, Neb., the daughter 
of an attorney who was a distant relative of Ethel Rosenberg, and who not only 
visited the Rosenbergs in prison but also fruitlessly tried to get President 
Dwight Eisenhower to intervene in the case. In an interview, Beber told The 
Jewish Week that while she was only a teenager when the Rosenbergs were 
executed, she developed a lifelong fascination with the case, and particularly 
with Cohn.

While Cohn was, the playwright opined, a "hateful person," he suffered from the 
"agony of having to hide his homosexuality," which he identified with utter 
powerlessness. "I wanted to find some humanity in him," she explained, in 
contrast to what she perceives as Kushner's portrayal, in which he is, she 
believes, "not explored in a complex way - he's just shouting, loud and 
impossible."

For Ludwig, 72, who grew up in a Reform Jewish family in San Francisco, playing 
Ethel Rosenberg on TV has been a highlight of a career that has ranged from 
portraying Meryl Streep's lover in Woody Allen's 1979 film, "Manhattan," to 
performing, in 1991, in Craig Lucas' Broadway play, "Prelude to a Kiss." When 
she was a child, Ludwig recalled in an interview, she came home from school to 
see her father crying while watching TV. The Rosenbergs had just been 
electrocuted.

Given that early memory, the opportunity to play Ethel, she said, "detonated in 
my body," and she became obsessed with "recreating everything that I could 
about her life and death." In the show, directed by Dorothy Lyman, Ludwig acts 
out the rehearsal of the electrocution scene - in which she was asked to be 
more vocal than Ethel actually was during her execution - and discusses how she 
felt waiting in her trailer to do the scene just as Ethel waited in her cell to 
be conducted to the electric chair.

In the same way, playing Cohn on stage has given Mark Yochum, a law professor 
at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, both a personal and professional 
fascination with the corrupt attorney. After performing last year in a regional 
theater production of both parts of "Angels in America," Yochum, who 
specializes in bankruptcy law and legal ethics, was inspired to organize a 
continuing legal education (CLE) seminar on Cohn in which he analyzed Cohn's 
misdeeds, ranging from his ex parte communications with Judge Irving Kaufman in 
the Rosenberg case (in which Cohn urged him to impose the death penalty) to 
later incidents of bribery - and perhaps even murder. Portraying the 
"spectacular, sharp dressing, flamboyant" character, Yochum said, "was like 
playing the Joker in 'Batman' - you know that whenever Cohn comes on the stage, 
there will be fireworks."

Henry Feingold, an emeritus professor of American Jewish history at Baruch 
College, has written widely on the reaction of American Jewry to the Holocaust. 
Feingold, who himself participated in the marches for the Rosenbergs that took 
place in New York, recalled that many Jews at the time felt that America, 
"which had not done enough to save the Jews of Europe, was now giving vent to 
the kind of anti-Semitism that could - and did - stage a judicial lynching." As 
Cohn rode the wave of anti-Communist hysteria, he became, Feingold noted, "the 
answer to an anti-Semitic dream, a Jewish caricature who acted out every canard 
that had ever been thrown at the Jews throughout history."

"In Bed With Roy Cohn" runs through Saturday, Oct. 3 at the Lion Theatre, 410 
W. 42nd St. Performances are Tuesday at 7 p.m. and Wednesdays-Saturdays at 8 
p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. For tickets, $56.25-$66.25, 
call (212) 239-6200 or visit telecharge.com.

"Where Was I?" runs through Sunday, Sept. 13 at Theatre 54, 244 W. 54th St. 
Performances are Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. For 
tickets $18, call (212) 352-3101 or visit SpinCycleNYC.com.

(source: thejewishweek.com)

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

Neuroscience and the Future of the Insanity Defense----A legal scholar 
discusses why neuroimaging won't soon change how our courts measure crazy.


The concept of the insanity defense dates back to ancient Greece and the Roman 
Empire. The idea has always been the same: Protect individuals from being held 
accountable for behavior they couldn't control. Yet there have been more than a 
few historical and recent instances of a judge or jury issuing a controversial 
"by reason of ..." verdict. What was intended as a human rights effort has 
become a last-ditch way to save killers (though it didn't work for James 
Holmes).

The question that hangs in the air at these sort of proceedings has always been 
the same: Is there a way to make determinations more scientific and less 
traditionally judicial?

Adam Shniderman, a criminal justice researcher at Texas Christian University, 
has been studying the role of neuroscience in the court system for several 
years now. He explains that neurological data and explanations don't easily 
translate into the world of lawyers and legal text. Inverse spoke with 
Shniderman to learn more about how neuroscience is used in today's insanity 
defenses, and whether this is likely to change as the technology used to 
observe the brain gets better and better.

Can you give me a quick overview of how the role of neuroscience in the courts, 
has changed over the years? Especially in the last few decades with new 
advances in technology.

Obviously, [neuroscientific evidence] has become more widely used as 
brain-scanning technology has gotten better. Some of the scanning technology we 
use now, like functional MRI that measures blood oxygenation as a proxy for 
neurological activity, is relatively new within the last 20 years or so. The 
nature of brain scanning has changed, but the knowledge that the brain 
influences someone???s actions is not new.

I don't know how familiar you are in the case of Charles Whitman. He was the 
Texas Belltower shooter in 1966 who killed over a dozen people on the campus of 
University of Texas, Austin, after killing his mother. He sort of intuitively 
knew that something had gone wrong with him, so he asked in his suicide note 
that his brain be examined during his autopsy for irregularities. They actually 
found out that he had a tumor pressing on his frontal lobe, which may have been 
a significant cause in this aberrant behavior.

Neuroscience certainly played a growing role in courtrooms from then on. There 
was a big 2007 New York Times Magazine article called, "The Brain on the 
Stand," that got people very interested in the notion that the brain would 
radically change the way criminal cases are tried; that it would radically 
change the conception of why people do what they do.

But, you tend to find that this neuroscience is coupled with the study of 
psychopathy, and people aren't really sympathetic to psychopaths.

That makes sense.

The other, bigger problem is that the insanity defense isn't sort of what you 
might think of colloquially as insane. In most jurisdictions, it has to do with 
the knowledge of what's right versus wrong. So if you knew what you did was 
right or wrong at the time you did it, you aren't legally insane. So you tend 
to find that the very rare case where it is successful is like a paranoid 
schizophrenic who is completely in the state of delusion, and didn't know it 
was wrong because they thought they were killing ants, not people.

It must be extremely difficult to prove that sort of state of mind.

The insanity defense has little to do with the ability to sort of control your 
actions. We still haven't seen really much of an effect of neuroscience on the 
insanity defense - in part because the insanity defense is rarely offered and 
even more rarely successful. Contrary to the popular myth that people plead 
insanity all the time and then it works and they're back out on the streets, 
it's just rarely offered because criminals don't really want to be labeled 
insane. And juries, because of the potential misconception that you get to walk 
away and there's no repercussions for people who are deemed legally insane, 
very rarely find anyone legally insane. So neuroscience has had less of an 
impact directly in the insanity defense.

Insanity plays a bigger role in sentencing, rather than convicting. The 
insanity defense is more used to mitigate punishment rather than exculpation 
via insanity.

Do you see that moving in a different direction in any way in the next few 
years or in the next several years? Is the role of neuroscience in the insanity 
defense going to stay this way, with an emphasis in sentencing rather than 
determining guilt?

The champions of neuroscience said, 'This is great, look at neuroscience is in 
the Supreme Court!' Some of us sort of said, "that's great, but it's really 
just a sort of crutch for a decision that they already wanted to come to on 
things we already knew." There's a reason insurance companies don't lower your 
rates until you're 25; there's a reason that, you know, all sorts of things. 
You can't rent a car until you're 25 because we knew that brain development 
wasn't fully formed in minors and people that are under 25 made worst 
decisions, they're more impulsive, etc. I mean, sort of when I teach this 
stuff, I say, you know, 'How many of your parents know you make bad decisions 
'cause you're teenagers?" Every parent knows that teenagers make bad decisions, 
so it wasn't really any novel insight that this neuroscience that was submitted 
by the APA to the Supreme Court in a brief really shed light on. But, it was in 
a way to sort of bolster their decision. At the time - this was about 2005, I 
believe, maybe a couple years later - sort of used what was popular. 
Neuroscience was very popular.

I think so. In research I did with a colleague that was published in Plos One, 
we looked at a phenomenon in social psychology called 'motivated reasoning,' 
which is where people sort of assimilate information in biased ways to come to 
desired conclusions.

So science is popular with juries. But don't they struggle to interpret it? 
After all, it's not like jurors can be expected to have an applicable 
background.

We made up a bunch neuroscience studies. They weren't real, but they were 
plausible, about the death penalty and about abortion. We basically showed 
participants how these supposed neuroscience studies back up the notion that 
either the death penalty was or was not a more effective deterrent to crime 
than life without parole or any other sentence. And we asked people to rate the 
studies.

We looked at whether the participants' prior attitudes were a significant 
predictor of how they dealt with the neuroscience data, and it turned out that 
it was. People who were pro-death penalty rated the study really well when it 
said that the death penalty was a deterrent and really bad when it said it 
wasn't a deterrent. People who were anti-death penalty - sort of a flip. When 
we said the death penalty was a deterrent and the neuroscience data supported 
this, they said 'Oh, that's bad science, that's biased reporting, the 
researcher has an agenda,' and all this stuff.

All of this is to say that people's prior attitudes seems to be one of the 
biggest determinants in how they evaluate neuroscience. If they agree that 
criminals are the worst and criminals should be put to death and all of this 
kind of very harsh-on-crime attitude, then if you give them neuroscience that 
says, 'Well, he's really not that responsible. He's not that bad a guy. It's 
his brain that made him do it.' They're simply going to say, 'Aw, that's bad 
science. That's BS, I don't trust it, it's biased. I know what I know. Your 
science is flawed.'

In some sense, neuroscience is still just telling us a lot of what we already 
knew from psychology and just from common sense. In Graham vs. Florida, the 
Supreme Court said, "look, neuroscience tells us that the brain isn't fully 
formed in minors and therefore they're not of the most, you know, culpable 
class of offenders. So we can't sentence them to life without parole for 
non-homicide crimes because that's sort of reserved for among the worst of the 
worst of offenders. And these people can be changed because their brain still 
allows them to change."

The champions of neuroscience said, 'this is great! Neuroscience is in the 
Supreme Court!' Some of us instead said, 'that's great, but it's really just a 
sort of crutch for a decision that they already wanted to come to on things we 
already knew.' There's a reason insurance companies don't lower your rates 
until you're 25. You can't rent a car until you're 25 because we knew that 
brain development wasn't fully formed in minors and people that are under 25 
made worse decisions. Every parent knows that teenagers make bad decisions.

When it comes to neuroscientific evidence being presented in court, this is 
almost exclusively data in terms of imaging, correct? Or are there other ways 
to gauge brain activity

Where neuropsychology is involved in the court system, some psychologists do 
scanning, while others have tests where the individual sits down and does tasks 
and it'll tell something about the functioning of their brain. For instance, if 
you do poorly on one task, it tells the psychologist you have problems in say 
your frontal lobe or whatever. If you do poorly on another task, maybe it's on 
facial recognition of expressions and that tells them something about your 
inability to relate to expressions of emotion or something that tells about a 
different part of your brain.

Scanning has been the focus, but there have been instances where people who 
have done scans have been allowed to testify but the scans themselves have not 
been admitted. This is in part because of the seductive allure of neuroimages. 
One study from many years ago showed how neuroimages have this fancy effect on 
people. It bamboozles them. That study was never replicated, and the results 
were perhaps just due to the participant sample that one experiment got. But it 
was causing judges to be wary of allowing the images themselves, even when they 
did allow the expert to testify at sentencing.

In the Brian Dugun case in Chicago, psychologist Kent Kiehl was brought in to 
testify about Dugan's brain activity. He was only allowed to use pictures of 
brains with x's drawn on areas where he found lower activity in Brian Dugun's 
brain, because the judge was worried that if he let him bring in multi-color 
images from the fMRI, the jury would be confused and just sort of agree with 
Kiehl, and all the jurists would just forget their responsibility to weigh all 
the evidence.

So it's sort of a mix. I had some unpublished evidence that suggested that 
imaging wasn't really key - it was really the analysis at the brain level 
rather than at the behavioral level. There's a belief that at the behavioral 
level you can fool a psychologist, but it's harder to fool a psychologist at 
the brain level, even if they're not conducting a scan.

If the tools used to measure brain activity or track what's going on inside a 
suspect's or defendant's head - if all of that were to converge into a kind of 
a simpler and more universal method that the legal system can trust, would we 
finally be able to kind of come to a place where we can determine whether a 
criminal is sane or insane? Or are there too many factors and ambiguities in 
play?

I think there are always going to be ambiguities, for a number of reasons. 
Again, you come back to the sort of legal definition of insanity. It's never 
going to really tell them the question of right from wrong. I don't think 
anyone anymore believes the brain is so mechanistic where a brain scan is gong 
to tell you, "well, he absolutely was bound and determined to do this because 
he had lower activity in his pre-frontal cortex or in his frontal lobe.

You are maybe slightly more likely to engage in antisocial conduct if you find 
yourself in a situation where that person's brain had less activity in key 
regions. There's a professor at the University of California, Irvine, where I 
did my Ph.D, named James Fallon. He actually did an opening of an episode of 
Criminal Minds where he was giving a lecture on psychopaths. He scanned his 
brain and his brain looks exactly like a psychopath's. And he has other 
characteristics that fit. He's got a decreased prefrontal cortex activity; he's 
got a lower resting-heart rate, and all these sorts of things that are 
supposedly markers of things that predispose you to violence. But he's not 
violent. I believe he's married and has kids, and he was a professor at UCI for 
decades until he retired. And he's sort of still there, teaching classes for a 
bit of extra fun and doing some research. But this guy's never really had any 
run-ins.

The psychologist Adrian Raine found out he has sort of the same markers that 
suggest, from his research, that he should be predisposed to antisocial or 
criminal behavior. But, again, he's a college professor. He's not antisocial, 
he isn't engaging in a life of crime or anything like that. It's all so 
probabilistic. So many other factors go into whether somebody is going to 
commit a crime or not that we could never find ourselves in a type of Minority 
Report situation where you can scan somebody and tell whether they'll commit a 
crime.

We'll never be able to scan someone after the fact, either, and say, "well 
absolutely, his brain is what made him do it," because the question of criminal 
behavior is so much more complex than that. It's sociological, it's economic, 
it's perhaps brain- and genetic-based, etc. I don't think you're ever going to 
be able to say, 'yes, he can never overcome this impulse," because, again, it's 
probabilistic. Theres going to be a guy out there with the same brain chemistry 
who will have overcome all the impulses and lead a completely productive life.

The last thing I'll point out is research that my colleague Cory Clark 
published in 2014. It showed that people still believe in free will despite 
evidence to the contrary, in part because of the desire to punish. She found 
that people believe in free will not just because of free will in the abstract, 
but because it helps them justify their desire to punish people for bad 
conduct.

It comes back to motivated reasoning - the notion that people cling to things 
that help them justify actions that they want to take. I think people are going 
to cling to the notion that somebody still had a choice in part because we want 
to punish people for bad actions.

(source: inverse.com)