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

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 17


OKLAHOMA:

Tears And Hugs After Richard Glossip Reprieve ---- A Sky correspondent invited 
to watch an Oklahoma man put to death describes emotional scenes as the 
execution is halted.


The prison official who checked my passport as ID told us: "This is a horrible 
event but we're going to make it as pleasant as possible. We have cookies and 
coffee for you."

And with that, 3 official witnesses to an execution were waved into Oklahoma 
State Penitentiary.

I was in a car along with Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking 
and Richard Glossip's best friend, Kim Van Atta.

Behind us were the 2 other witnesses who the death row inmate had requested, 
Crystal Martinez, another friend, and Kim Bellware from the Huffington Post.

So 2 friends, 2 journalists and a nun.

Though the official briefing from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections had 
listed Kim Bellware and me as "friends" too.

I may be a reporter but I now consider Richard Glossip to be a friend.

It was 11.30am and Richard Glossip was due to die in 3 1/2 hours.

Sister Helen was optimistic.

She felt that the attorneys who filed a motion for a stay of execution with the 
Court of Criminal Appeals had done a good job.

I didn't believe her.

The speed with which the Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin had rejected the new 
evidence had convinced me the execution would go ahead.

We were shown to a room with water and coffee, though not yet any cookies.

We chatted.

The mood was reasonably upbeat, given that was how Richard Glossip had been the 
night before.

Sister Helen asked to use the bathroom.

I was about to broach the tentative subject of funeral arrangements with 
Crystal and Kim Van Atta when half a dozen men in suits walked into the room.

I recognised one of them as Robert Patton, the Director of the Department of 
Corrections. The big boss.

He looked deadly serious. That was to be expected.

He said he wanted to speak to us, but when told that Sister Helen was out of 
the room, he said he would wait.

Only a few moments passed when she returned and sat down.

Mr Patton announced there had been a stay of execution.

We didn't quite take it in. He needed to repeat it.

And then he emphasised the stay was until 30 September.

There were gasps.

And then people began to hug.

Tears flowed.

It was impossible not be emotionally involved.

I hugged everyone too. I was happy and relieved.

I didn't want this execution to happen. I didn't think it should happen.

I didn't want to see it happen. But I was prepared to watch because I've 
reported on Richard Glossip's case for 9 months.

I may go through it all again in 2 weeks.

Or this story might have more twists to come.

(source: Ian Woods, Sky News)

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

Stay of execution prompts response from local residents, state officials


After an appeals court halted Richard Glossip's execution hours before he was 
scheduled to die Wednesday, several Norman residents and officials across the 
state had mixed emotions.

Norman resident Mary Francis, who protested the execution, said she was glad 
the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals saw fit to provide a little space for 
further investigation of the facts in the case. However, Francis and others 
with the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty are opposed to all 
executions.

"2 weeks is precious little time, but it's better than being executed, of 
course," Francis said.

As a former president of the coalition, Francis said she came across lots of 
data about the death penalty, including a survey conducted at the University of 
Oklahoma in 1988. While a majority were in favor of the death penalty, support 
for executions dropped when certain factors were involved, such as if a person 
was mentally ill or there was racial discrimination.

"The citizenry doesn't really understand how the death penalty works," Francis 
said. "It's a matter of educating the public. They don't understand the 
pitfalls of executing. There is nothing about killing somebody - I don't care 
if it's a drug, or hanging, or shooting, or beating them to death - it's not 
humane. It's immoral, in my opinion."

Facebook user Zakk Flash, who commented on The Norman Transcript's Facebook 
post Wednesday regarding the issue, called not only for a permanent stay of 
execution for Glossip but to free him all together.

"All sides agree that Justin Sneed bludgeoned Barry Van Treese to death. The 
only thing that put Richard Glossip on the chopping block is the word of Sneed, 
a man out to save his own skin. Even Sneed's own daughter wrote to the Oklahoma 
Pardon and Parole Board that she didn't believe him," Flash wrote. "Add this to 
the fact that evidence that could prove his innocence was destroyed before any 
appeal was decided, and you have a miscarriage of justice as big and wide as 
the Great Plains. Richard Glossip shouldn't merely be spared the executioner's 
hand; he should be freed."

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt issued a statement of his own Wednesday 
afternoon following the stay of execution.

"The family of Barry Van Treese has waited 18 agonizing years for justice to be 
realized for his brutal death. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals indicated 
it needs more time to review the filings. I'm confident that the Court of 
Criminal Appeals, after reviewing the filings, will conclude there is nothing 
worthy which would lead the court to overturn a verdict reached by 2 juries who 
both found Glossip guilty and sentenced him to death for Barry Van Treese's 
murder," Pruitt said.

Ryan Kiesel, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of 
Oklahoma, said the appellate court did what elected officials refused to do.

"We stand with the many Oklahomans and individuals around the world in 
expressing our gratitude to the court. For today, at least, the state of 
Oklahoma has avoided the execution of a man not guilty of any capital offense," 
Kiesel said.

Hundreds of Oklahomans and thousands across the country who are members of 
MoveOn voiced their positive reaction to the 2-week stay.

"We are deeply relieved that - despite Gov. Mary Fallin's failure to act - 
Richard Glossip has won 2 more weeks to prove his innocence after coming within 
3 hours of being executed for a crime many believe he did not commit," said 
Mark Crain, campaign director for MoveOn.org Civic Action. "MoveOn members have 
fought hard to save the life of Richard Glossip."

More than 250,000 Americans hailing from every state have signed a MoveOn 
petition, started by Sister Helen Prejean and actress Susan Sarandon, calling 
for a stay of execution. This week, MoveOn members made more than 7,000 phone 
calls to the governor???s office pleading for her to stop Glossip???s 
execution, and they took over the homepage ads of the Oklahoman's website with 
their call for justice. "We will continue to fight to save Richard's life and 
for systemic reform to fix our broken criminal justice system," Crain said.

(source: Norman Transcript)






NEBRASKA:

Death Penalty Opponents File Lawsuit


Nebraska death penalty opponents allege in a lawsuit that a ballot measure to 
reinstate the punishment is invalid because Gov. Pete Ricketts wasn't listed as 
a sponsor.

The lawsuit filed Thursday in Lancaster County District Court by Nebraskans For 
Public Safety argues that Gov. Ricketts should have been named because of his 
efforts to organize the Nebraskans for the Death Penalty campaign.

Nebraskans for the Death Penalty announced last month that it had collected 
nearly 167,000 signatures, more than three times the minimum number needed to 
place the issue on the November 2016 ballot. The drive was launched after 
lawmakers overrode Ricketts' veto and abolished capital punishment in May.

The lawsuit says petition signers should have been told the "true and actual 
sponsors" of the referendum drive because it could have influenced their 
decision.

(source: WOWT news)






CALIFORNIA:

Proposed Ballot Measure Would End Death Penalty In California


A new ballot initiative is being proposed in California to end the state's 
death penalty.

Longtime anti-death penalty advocate actor Mike Farrell is promoting "The 
Justice That Works Act of 2016," which would amend the California penal code to 
replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of 
parole.

Initiative supporters have to collect more than 365,000 signatures in 180 days 
to get the measure on the November 2016 ballot.

It's the latest move toward ending capitol punishment in California. In July 
2014, a federal judge ruled California's death penalty unconstitutional. That 
ruling is awaiting review.

California has not executed a prisoner in nearly a decade despite the state 
having more than 740 condemned convicts on death row - that's the largest 
number of any state.

Alex Simpson, associate director of the California Innocence Project, will 
discuss the status of the death penalty in California Thursday on Midday 
Edition.

(source: KPBS news)






USA:

Neuroscience and the Future of the Insanity Defense


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. There's 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: Neel Patel, Huffington Post)

**********

Here's The Map Of What The Death Penalty Looks Like In The U.S. Today


On Wednesday, the state of Oklahoma was scheduled to execute Richard Glossip, 
the 1st execution in the state since January and the 21st execution in the 
country this year.

Hours before the execution, the state's Court of Criminal Appeals granted 
Glossip a 2-week stay of execution so that it can consider a last-minute filing 
by Glossip???s lawyers. Without further order from the court, however, the 
execution will proceed on Sept. 30.

While the Supreme Court's June decision to allow Oklahoma to continue to use 
midazolam as part of its 3-drug execution protocol was a loss for opponents of 
the death penalty - who were attacked at oral arguments by Justice Samuel Alito 
as waging a "guerrilla war" against executions - the decision itself was 
overshadowed in some ways by a dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer.

"In 1976, the Court thought that the constitutional infirmities in the death 
penalty could be healed; the Court in effect delegated significant 
responsibility to the States to develop procedures that would protect against 
those constitutional problems," Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg 
wrote. "Almost 40 years of studies, surveys, and experience strongly indicate, 
however, that this effort has failed."

Breyer's reference to 1976 was to the Supreme Court's decision upholding the 
death penalty laws considered in Gregg v. Georgia as constitutional. The 
decision ended a 4-year moratorium on executions in the country that had 
resulted from the court's 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia that the 
implementation of the death penalty was unconstitutional.

In detailing the reasons why he and Ginsburg called for reconsideration after 
nearly 40 years of whether the death penalty itself is unconstitutional, Breyer 
laid out 3 defects: unreliability of the death penalty process, arbitrariness 
of how that process is implemented, and delays in the process that undermine 
its purposes. "Perhaps as a result ... most places within the United States 
have abandoned its use," Breyer wrote.

As part of its coverage of the death penalty in America, BuzzFeed News will be 
updating this map as needed to provide a visual answer - along with 
descriptions below - to the question of where the death penalty is used in the 
U.S.

Active Death Penalty Law

14 states with the death penalty and with an execution in the past 5 years: For 
the past several months, only Texas and Missouri have been conducting 
executions. The states are the only known 2 that have both wanted to proceed 
with executions and have been able to secure pentobarbital, a single execution 
drug that was not at issue in the recent Supreme Court case.

Earlier this year, Florida, Georgia, and Oklahoma also held executions, all in 
January.

Over the past 5 years, however, 9 other states also have conducted executions, 
with several of them planning to conduct executions over the coming 6 months.

In Virginia, Alfredo Prieto, a foreign national from El Salvador, is scheduled 
to be executed on Oct. 1.

In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich put off all executions in 2015, but they are 
scheduled to resume in January 2016.

12 states with the death penalty and no moratorium, but no executions in the 
past 5 years: Among the states that could but have not conducted an execution 
over the past 5 years is Arkansas. On Sept. 9, however, Gov. Asa Hutchinson 
announced that he had set execution dates beginning Oct. 21 and continuing 
through January 2016 for eight death row inmates.

In many states, however, the death penalty remains the law but actual 
executions have all but ended.

In Kansas, the most recent executions took place in 1965 and included Perry 
Smith and Richard Hickock - the killers of the Clutter family made famous by 
Truman Capote nonfiction novel In Cold Blood.

New Hampshire last executed someone in 1939.

In other states, the death penalty has been used since executions resumed in 
the U.S. again in 1976, but not recently. In Wyoming, for example, only 1 
person has been executed since Gregg, and he was executed in 1992.

Moratorium

4 states with a governor-imposed moratorium on executions: Halts on executions 
in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have taken executions off the table in 
those states without much pushback, but Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf's decision 
to set a moratorium has been challenged by the Philadelphia district attorney. 
The state's Supreme Court heard arguments recently on whether Wolf has the 
authority to issue continual, indefinite reprieves on executions in the state.

1 state with a court-imposed moratorium on executions: A federal court declared 
California's death penalty system to be unconstitutional, although the state 
has appealed the ruling. The appeal was heard recently by the 9th Circuit Court 
of Appeals.

In Flux

1 state with death penalty abolition referendum pending: Although the Nebraska 
legislature - over Gov. Pete Ricketts's veto - passed legislative repeal of the 
state's death penalty, a group, backed by Ricketts, has collected and submitted 
signatures seeking to put the measure up to a vote in 2016.

No Death Penalty

There are 18 states with no death penalty: The states include Alaska and 
Hawaii, which never had the death penalty as a punishment since becoming 
states.

Among the states without the death penalty, Connecticut has the notable 
distinction of having had the death penalty legislatively repealed and declared 
to be unconstitutional by the state's Supreme Court. This happened because the 
state's legislative repeal of the death penalty was not retroactive, leading 
those remaining on death row to successfully challenge their continued death 
sentences.

The lack of retroactivity in legislative death penalty repeal is also the 
reason why 2 people remain on New Mexico's death row, despite the fact that the 
death penalty there was repealed 6 years ago.

(source: buzzfeed.com)