[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----FLA., OKLA., NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 14




FLORIDA:

Man facing death penalty in strangulation of 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle 
back in court Monday


The man accused of raping and killing 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle will be 
back in a Jacksonville courtroom Monday morning for a pretrial hearing that 
might lead to a trial date being set.

Donald James Smith, 59, is facing the death penalty. Circuit Judge Mallory 
Cooper has previously said she'd like to get a trial date set, but defense 
attorneys have said they are still examining the evidence in the case and don't 
want to move forward until they have a good handle on the evidence against 
Smith.

It is likely that defense attorneys Julie Schlax and Charles Fletcher will end 
up arguing that Smith is insane or too mentally handicapped to face the death 
penalty. But the lawyers have not yet indicated what their defense will be.

Smith is charged with 1st-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual battery. He is a 
registered sex offender who was released from prison 3 weeks before Cherish was 
killed.

He is accused of befriending Cherish, her mother, Rayne Perrywinkle, and 
siblings at a Dollar General store in June 2013 and convincing them to go to 
Wal-Mart on Lem Turner Road in his van after offering to buy them clothes and 
food.

Perrywinkle told police that Smith offered to buy the family hamburgers at the 
McDonald's inside the Wal-Mart.

Cherish went with him to get the food, and they did not return.

Cherish's body was found near a creek off Broward Road the next morning.

(source: Florida Times-Union)






OKLAHOMA----impending execution

Richard Glossip's Books of numbers, translations, alternatives, aspirations and 
justice: Time for mercy, not sacrifice


The Ten Commandments include an admonition often translated "Thou shalt not 
kill" - alternatively, "You shall not murder." (Exodus 20:13, NAB)

This directive from the One Who made us, some contend, should in these days 
preclude use of capital punishment, which is obviously the Ultimate Sanction 
for systems based in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Yet, the Holy Bible includes words pointing to a penalty of death for some 
crimes.

In traditional interpretations, for capital punishment, the Hebrew Testament 
does not fundamentally contradict the New Testament to which Christians cling.

That tradition is the basis for much of American law. No surprise, the U.S. 
Constitution explicitly makes provision for death penalties, including in the 
Eighth Amendment.

However, the penalty of death is not required - hence the roughly half-and-half 
split among the 50 states in this matter.

Words, numbers, and meaning(s), have rattled around the gray matter of many of 
us in Oklahoma these past few months. We will soon reach the end - or perhaps a 
fresh start? - in a matter now dominating news and conversation.

Interpretations of Scripture, I believe, best follow those who say we must 
honor the whole even (perhaps especially) when there are matters unbelievers 
assert are "contradictions" among the various authors of the Bible.

The same "Old" testament allowing death as a punishment includes these words, 
cited with some force in recent weeks by Rev. Adam Leathers, a leader of the 
Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (OK-CADP):

"Only on the testimony of 2 or 3 witnesses shall a person be put to death; no 
one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness." (Deuteronomy 
17:6, NAB)

I am among those who have encouraged Gov. Mary Fallin to grant another 60 days 
to attorneys for Richard Glossip. Those lawyers, including Don Knight, have 
introduced levels of doubt about the validity of Glossip's conviction in a 
murder-for-hire case.

Their work amounts to "a web of doubt" about Glossip's guilt. In any case, his 
conviction is based on testimony from 1 man - the admitted killer.

Now, just days before Glossip's date with a lethal injection, as a brother in 
our Lord, I call on the state's top ranking officer to act contrary to thus-far 
stated intentions.

Reflect on these additional prophetic words from Scripture: "For it is loyalty 
that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt 
offerings." (Hosea 6:6) "Loyalty" in the text can also be rendered as "mercy" - 
as in the classic King James Version and the New International Version.

>From personal memory: a summer press conference. The Capitol broadcast room was 
quite warm as a swarm of reporters listened to advocates for Richard Glossip.

References from some on that day, and in the weeks since, were made to the 
Beatitudes of Jesus, asserting the state would be better served if we had a 
Beatitudes monument rather than a Ten Commandments monument at the state 
Capitol grounds.

My thoughts during this process before Glossip's scheduled execution (Wednesday 
afternoon, September 16) have returned to a Saturday afternoon in Israel, at 
the Mount of Beautitudes during my only trip to the Holy Land.

That was in October 2013. It became one of the most memorable Sabbath days of 
my life.

As I gazed across the Sea of Gallilee, there was haze to the east and the 
north. The sun shone through the misty warmth, although it was not too hot.

Traveling companions visited a Chapel atop the spot where many believe Jesus 
preached the words recorded in Matthew 5: 3-12 (with an alternate version in 
Luke 6:20-22).

I stole away to a corner of the summit where fellow Catholics, mostly from 
California, prayed during a Mass celebrated by a Franciscan priest. Franciscans 
are those who follow the model of Francis of Assisi, a not-so-simple man of the 
13th Century (Italy). His best-known prayer included a reflection that in 
"pardoning we are pardoned."

To the Beautitudes (8 in Matthew; 4 in Luke with parallel admonitions) my mind 
has wandered often in recent weeks, fused with memories from that mount.

I don't know what Richard Glossip did, or did not do, at or around the time of 
Barry Van Treece's murder in 1997. I don't even know what Justin Sneed, the 
admitted murderer, did. He's given at least 8 different versions about Barry 
Van Treece's death over the past 19 years or so.

I do know there is doubt surrounding Glossip's conviction, about which there is 
a book or 2 or 3 to be written. The only thing certain is that Glossip's guilt 
is uncertain.

With all my heart - appealing to the totality of Scripture and Tradition - I 
petition (beg might be a better word) Mary Fallin to use her just powers as our 
state's chief executive to grant in this case mercy, not sacrifice. I hope she 
will also support a new look at the entire case in competent courts or panels. 
Therein lies loyalty to shared American traditions.

Dear Mary:

Give Don Knight and his competent, serious and ethical colleagues 60 more days 
to study things previously unseen and unheard. Like you and I, they seek rough 
justice in one corner of this fallen world.

Your friend, Pat.

Editor's Note: Unless otherwise noted, all Scriptural References are from the 
New American Bible (NAB) translation, Revised Edition, 2011.

(source: Patrick B. McGuigan, editor, The City Sentinel)






NEBRASKA:

Groups Respond to Death Penalty Petition Results


A campaign group against the death penalty in Nebraska is getting support from 
state leaders to try to keep the issue in the past.

The Secretary of State's Office said Nebraskans for the Death Penalty received 
enough petition signatures to get the issue on the ballot in November 2016.

Zack Burgin with Nebraskans for Public Safety said there are bigger problems 
the state needs to focus on, considering there hasn't been an execution in 
Nebraska since 1997.

"We're going to continue to monitor the process to make sure it's fair, but 
we're really excited for a strong campaign," Burgin said. "We have a lot of 
support from a strong coalition of supporters."

Burgin said the group will continue its education work it started over the 
summer at petition locations, town hall events and through its online advocacy 
program.

Meanwhile, some Central Nebraskans hold their stance on the issue: "Some crimes 
deserve that kind of punishment. Why do we want to leave them sitting forever?" 
Ravenna resident Brent Luth said.

(source: nbcnebraska.com)






USA:

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


Introduction

'Everywhere you look...there's a problem'

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 
three executions. But courts in many states continue to wrestle with that 
issue, and the justices have four 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 four, 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 fourth 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 Florida 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 9 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 five 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 4 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 2 
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. Seven 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 one 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.

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 3 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 two 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 2 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 7 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, 2 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 2 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 3-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 first of 
four 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 two 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)