[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, USA

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 26



TEXAS:

Questions raised after shock belt used at Texas murder trial


A potential death penalty trial in East Texas is set to resume on Monday after 
it was put on hold when a judge was said by a TV station to have had a shock 
belt used on the defendant for misbehaving.

James Calvert, 45, of Tyler, Texas, is on trial in Smith County, where 
prosecutors allege he beat and fatally shot his former wife at her home and 
abducted their 4-year-old son in October 2012.

Judge Jack Skeen allowed Calvert to defend himself, over objections from 
attorneys specializing in the death penalty, at the outset of the trial in 
August. Skeen also ordered a shock device be placed on Calvert for security 
reasons because of his unpredictable behavior, legal officials said.

On Sept. 15, when Calvert did not stand up at the judge's request, Skeen had an 
electric shock administered on the defendant that caused him to twist in pain 
before the jury, local TV broadcaster KLTV reported.

"Calvert refuses to stand up when talking to judge. Shock belt is administered, 
Calvert scream 'ahh' for about 5 seconds," Cody Lillich, a KLTV reporter, 
tweeted from the courtroom.

After Calvert was shocked, Skeen allowed public defenders who had been 
monitoring the hearings to defend him, court officials said. The trial is set 
to resume on Monday after it was put on recess on Sept. 16.

The judge has issued a gag order in the case, a court official said.

Skeen did not respond to requests for comment.

Legal experts said the judge's conduct could open the door to appeals if 
Calvert is convicted and possible sanction for abuse of the shock belt, which 
is to be used only if the defendant poses an immediate security risk.

"This is just a travesty of justice as far as I'm concerned. This man is facing 
an execution if he's convicted," said George Parnham, a Houston lawyer who 
represented Andrea Yates, who drowned her 5 children and was found innocent by 
reason of insanity on appeal.

Skeen, who was Smith County district attorney before he was elected a district 
judge, has had no disciplinary sanctions, according to the Texas Bar 
Association.

Calvert has been disruptive because of mental illness, making it all the more 
reasonable to have had a lawyer represent him from the start, said Kathryn 
Kase, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, which has been 
monitoring the case.

"I know of no death penalty trial in the state of Texas where the defendant has 
been able to represent himself who got life in prison," Kase said.

It is common to have a shock belt on defendants at jury trials for safety, and 
the device is less obvious than handcuffs or leg irons, Smith County Sheriff's 
Lieutenant Gary Middleton said.

"It's really pretty effective when we use it. It's kind of like a Taser," he 
said.

(source: Reuters)






USA:

International Community Condemns U.S., Recommends End to Police Deadly Force, 
Racial Profiling and Death Penalty


America's racist practices - including police violence and the implementation 
of its criminal justice system - have human rights implications and face 
international scrutiny. The United Nations has reviewed the country's human 
rights record and the international body slammed the U.S. for its racial 
profiling and use of deadly force, and its implementation of the death penalty.

Of the 343 recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, 
Switzerland, the U.S. accepted 44 recommendations for eliminating racial 
discrimination and addressing excessive use of police force and racial bias in 
the death penalty, as Al Jazeera America reported. In addition, the U.S. 
supported another 20 recommendations "in part" and rejected 1 - calling for an 
independent commission to prosecute racially motivated crimes.

During the peer review process - in which 117 UN member states participated, 
and each state must undergo every four years - the international community was 
able to weigh in and offer comments and recommend changes. The panel called on 
the U.S. - which often characterizes itself as a beacon of human rights and 
criticizes other nations on their human rights record - to abolish the death 
penalty, end extrajudicial killings, and protect the human rights of indigenous 
people and immigrants. The council also urged the U.S. to punish torturers, and 
close its Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.

The French delegation recommended the U.S. "take necessary measures to fight 
against discriminatory practices of the police based on ethnic origin." 
Meanwhile, Malaysia suggested the U.S. "double its efforts in combating 
violence and the excessive use of force by law enforcement officers based on 
racial profiling through training, sensitization and community outreach, as 
well as ensuring proper investigation and prosecution when cases occur." The 
U.S. accepted these peer recommendations, while also explaining its criteria 
for supporting recommendations.

Some recommendations ask us to achieve an ideal, e.g., end discrimination or 
police brutality, and others request action not entirely within the power of 
our Federal Executive Branch, e.g., adopt legislation, ratify treaties, or act 
at the state level," the U.S. wrote in an official response to the review 
process. "We support or support in part these recommendations when we share 
their ideals, are making serious efforts to achieve their goals, and intend to 
continue doing so. Nonetheless, we recognize, realistically, that the United 
States may never completely accomplish what is described in these 
recommendations' literal terms."

The U.S. added that, "We support recommendations to take actions we are already 
taking or have taken, and intend to continue taking, without in any way 
implying that our ongoing or prior efforts have been unsuccessful or that these 
actions are necessarily legally required. With respect to judicial remedies, we 
note that we cannot make commitments regarding, and do not control, the outcome 
of court proceedings."

However the U.S. did say it would take a closer look at other recommendations.

"Where recommendations include inaccurate assumptions, assertions, or factual 
predicates, we have decided whether we support them or support them in part by 
looking past their rhetoric to the proposed action or objective," the U.S. 
said.

The UN report came as Pope Francis gave a speech to a joint session of Congress 
on September 24, in which he called for an abolition of the death penalty and 
urged the U.S. to adopt policies that embrace immigrants. According to Amnesty 
International, the U.S. is 1 of 5 countries accounting for the overwhelming 
majority of executions in the world.

Further, the U.S. has very permissive policies on the use of deadly force by 
police, raising serious human rights questions. "Deadly Force: Police Use of 
Lethal Force In The United States" - a report released by Amnesty in June 2015 
- found that all 50 states and Washington, D.C. fail to comply with 
international law and standards on the use of deadly force by police.

Further, 9 states and Washington, D.C. have no laws on the books regarding the 
use of lethal force by law enforcement, while 13 states have laws that do not 
even comply with the lower standards for deadly force set by the U.S. 
constitutional law. Some states allow for deadly force to "suppress opposition 
to an arrest"; to arrest someone for a "suspected felony"; to "suppress a riot 
or mutiny"; to prevent a prison or jail escape, or for crimes such as burglary. 
Some states allow private citizens to use lethal force if they are carrying out 
law enforcement activities.

In recent years, the killing of unarmed Black people by police has received 
national and international attention, and has spurred the growth of a Black 
movement against police violence. According to The Counted, a database 
maintained by The Guardian, 861 people have been killed by police in the U.S. 
in 2015. Blacks are killed by law enforcement at a rate of 5.1 per million, as 
opposed to 2.08 for whites and 2.27 for Latinos.

(source: Atlanta Black Star)

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

Blind Justice Leads to Black Death


Though many of us whites have been able to rationalize away the experience that 
people of color have always reported, the recent proliferation of smartphone 
video recordings of encounters between people of color and the police makes it 
much more difficult for us to deny that the same police whom we trust so 
implicitly are, in many cases, subjecting people of color to unwarranted 
violence. The issue goes far deeper than the police/citizen encounter. A system 
that ensnares and traps people of color in a permanent underclass has been 
exposed.

Much research and critique has been done on the subject. Ta-Nehisi Coates' 
October 2015 Atlantic article offers a remarkably comprehensive view of the 
system with the brevity of a magazine article. Michelle Alexander's book The 
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is for many our 
first introduction to the issue of mass incarceration and the criminal justice 
system's disparate treatment of and destructive impact on people and 
communities of color, especially Black/African American people. Numerous other 
thinkers, researchers, and writers, many of them people of color, have 
contributed to this body of knowledge, none of whose work this blog post could 
hope to emulate.

In The New Jim Crow, Ms. Alexander devotes a chapter to Supreme Court decisions 
that act to perpetuate the disparate treatment of people of color and are yet 
considered race neutral. They are particularly clear examples of the legal 
system acting to perpetuate racial inequity and creating a societal maze from 
which there is no escape. Often it is because the Supreme Court demands that 
evidence of conscious, deliberate bias must be present for a person to seek 
relief or redress from a criminal justice system that creates blatantly 
different outcomes for different racial groups.

One of those decisions is McClesky v. Kemp. A study found that in the state of 
Georgia convictions of murder in which the victim was white resulted in the 
death penalty up to 4.9 times more frequently than when the victim was black. 
The court found that this was not enough evidence to prove that the death 
penalty was being applied unfairly. Even if there was a "racially 
disproportionate impact," no redress could be sought unless there was proof of 
a "racially discriminatory purpose." In other words, unless there is obvious, 
overt racism, the application of the death penalty, even though it was proven 
statistically to be applied differently based on the race of the victim, is 
deemed to be fair. Colorblind justice means it's a worse crime to kill a white 
person than a black person.

Another case that Alexander cites is United States v. Armstrong. In this case a 
defendant's lawyers noticed that a certain prosecutor's office assigned only 
black crack offenders to the harsher federal system. They sought the 
prosecutor's records to investigate this more fully. The Supreme Court ruled 
that the discretion of prosecutors to pursue cases as they see fit is so 
important that only evidence of conscious, intentional bias would be grounds 
enough to open prosecutors' records to that degree. With no sense of irony, the 
court ruled that in order to get the evidence needed to prove bias, one must 
first prove bias. Colorblind justice means a person can legally be prosecuted 
more harshly because of her of his race.

In Purkett v. Elem the court ruled that any reason for the use of the 
peremptory strike of a person from a jury by a lawyer doesn't need to be 
persuasive or even plausible to be accepted as reasoning for doing so, even if 
a clear pattern of racial discrimination in jury selection can be discerned. 
This ruling includes incidents when judges discern the pattern, not just 
competing lawyers. The judge in such a case has no power to address a 
prosecutor who uses her or his peremptory strikes to create all white juries. 
Colorblind justice means a black defendant can expect an all-white jury.

Blacks make up about 13 % of the US population and almost 35 % of the people 
executed. Whites are about 78 % of the population but only 55 % of executions. 
Because of decisions like the ones described by Ms. Alexander, criminal justice 
professionals pursuing the death penalty who act on unconscious biases are 
beyond censure (even though by some counts, 70 % of whites have unconscious 
bias against blacks . It also means that those who are actually acting on bias, 
as long as they are smart enough not to publically admit it, can continue to do 
so with impunity.

Personally, I have been known to get snippy if someone unwittingly joins the 
express line at the supermarket with more than ten items. We live in a nation 
where the need to fight against perceived unfair treatment of us has become so 
pervasive and powerful that we've coined the term "road rage" for the now 
commonplace violence that occurs as the result of selfish or thoughtless 
driving. I wonder if some of my white brothers and sisters, looking at these 
statistics, can put themselves in black people's shoes. I do know there are 
plenty of us who feel that we are the ones who are discriminated against, but 
in almost every measure of quality of life and justice, whites fair better 
statistically than other groups*. We mistake the loss of complete dominance for 
the loss of liberty. We mistake attempts to create parity with minority 
dominance. There is a system in place that's killing all of us, some at a 
higher rate than others.

* Except Asians, who fair slightly better in some areas. This fact is used by 
many whites as proof that white society is in no way the cause of disparities 
in other groups without any critical reflection on how the different kinds of 
common stereotypes of Asians make more room for them to be successful in 
certain ways within white society while continuing to circumscribe their 
choices in many ways -- the "model minority" phenomenon.

(source: Peter DiCaprio, Huffington Post)