[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----GA., LA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 29



GEORGIA----impending female execution

Ga. board denies clemency, Gissendaner set to die----Georgia Board of Pardons 
and Parole received a letter from Pope Francis Tuesday


The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole has denied clemency for death row 
inmate Kelly Gissendaner, it said in a news release.

The 47-year-old, convicted of a crime in which she convinced her lover to kill 
her husband, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday at 7 p.m. ET at 
the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.

The board met for hours and heard from her oldest son, Brandon Brookshire. Her 
other children, Kayla and Dakota, were present and have previously spoken out 
in support of their mother.

The hearing, which began at 11 a.m. ET, was closed to media. It was only the 
board members, attorneys and the children present. While awaiting an answer 
from the board, a representative for Pope Francis sent a letter saying that his 
Holiness wanted the board to spare Gissendaner's life.

Gissendaner would be the state's 1st female convict to be executed in 70 years. 
The board had the option to commute her sentence to life in prison.

Only 15 female inmates have been put to death in the United States since 1976, 
according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The last woman in Georgia 
was executed by electric chair in 1945.

The family of Gissendaner's slain husband, Douglas, issued a statement Tuesday.

It read, in part, "As the murderer, she's [Kelly] been given more rights and 
opportunity over the last 18 years than she ever afforded to Doug, who, again, 
is the victim here. She had no mercy, gave him no rights, no choices, nor the 
opportunity to live his life. His life was not hers to take."

"Kelly planned and executed Doug's murder," it said. "She targeted him and his 
death was intentional. Kelly chose to have her day in court and after hearing 
the facts of this case, a jury of her peers sentenced her to death."

There had been a big push to keep her from being executed.

Earlier Kayla Gissendaner said, "My dad would not want my mom to be executed, 
even knowing her role in his murder. He would not want us to endure another 
devastating loss."

The daughter has said her mother has changed over the past 18 years.

"I had to face what my mom had done and find a way to forgive her," Kayla 
Gissendaner said. "In the process, I saw that my mom had struggled through the 
years to come to grips with what she had done and face her own horror about her 
actions."

More than 90,000 people have signed a petition urging Gov. Nathan Deal to halt 
her execution, claiming the mother of three has turned her life around and 
calling her a "powerful voice for good."

"While incarcerated, she has been a pastoral presence to many, teaching, 
preaching and living a life of purpose," the petition states. "Kelly is a 
living testament to the possibility of change and the power of hope. She is an 
extraordinary example of the rehabilitation that the corrections system aims to 
produce."

Officials had previously set a date and called off the execution in February 
due to inclement weather. A few days later, the department of corrections 
indefinitely postponed Gissendaner's execution after finding "cloudy" lethal 
injection drugs.

The constitutionality of lethal injection drugs has made headlines in recent 
years and European manufacturers -- such as Denmark-based Lundbeck, which 
manufactures pentobarbital -- banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in 
executions in 2013. That meant 32 states had to find new drug protocols.

Last year, Oklahoma issued a moratorium on executions after murderer and rapist 
Clayton Lockett convulsed, writhed and lay alive on a gurney for 43 minutes 
before dying. It was the state's 1st time using a new, 3-drug cocktail for an 
execution.

On Tuesday, as the board weighed its decision, the Rev. Cathy Zappa appeared on 
CNN.

Zappa has counseled Gissendaner.

When Kelly was threatened with execution previously, the inmate "faced her fate 
with grace," the reverend said.

CNN's Ashleigh Banfield asked Zappa what her "words of comfort" would be to the 
family of Doug Gissendaner.

"That's a really hard question because I'm aware of how hard this has been" for 
them, Zappa answered.

"I don't know if they'd want words of comfort from me," she said. "I pray for 
him. I pray for them. I hope they can find healing. If this execution doesn't 
happen, I hope they find healing and closure some way and I believe it's 
possible."

(source: CNN)

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

Pope Francis urges Georgia to call off execution scheduled for Tuesday 
night----Pope writes to Georgia board of pardons and paroles in case of Kelly 
Renee Gissendaner, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7pm on 
Tuesday


Pope Francis has urged a Georgia prison board to call off Tuesday's planned 
execution of the only woman on the state's death row.

The pope's plea was addressed to the Georgia board of pardons and paroles, 
which met on Tuesday morning to hear from the children of Kelly Renee 
Gissendaner, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7pm at the state 
prison in Jackson.

The letter was sent through a representative, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano and 
was accompanied by one from Wilton D Gregory, the archbishop of Atlanta.

"While not wishing to minimize the gravity of the crime for which Ms 
Gissendaner has been convicted, and while sympathizing with the victims, I 
nonetheless implore you, in consideration of the reasons that have been 
expressed to your board, to commute the sentence to one that would better 
express both justice and mercy," Vigano wrote on behalf of the pope.

Gissendaner's execution is the 1st since the pope's address to the US Congress 
last week in which he called on the United States to abolish the death penalty. 
There are 5 other executions scheduled over the next nine days across the US, 
including that of Richard Glossip in Oklahoma, where a nun, Sister Helen 
Prejean, has been urging the state to hear new evidence of his possible 
innocence.

Gissendaner's execution "follows up so directly on what he just recommended 
last Thursday, so it's a first response to a longstanding concern that the holy 
see and the bishops of the United States have had," Gregory told a press 
conference on Tuesday.

Gissendaner, 47, was convicted of murder in the February 1997 slaying of her 
husband. She conspired with her lover, who stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to 
death.

2 of Gissendaner's 3 children asked the Georgia board of pardons and paroles 
earlier this year to spare their mother???s life. It met again on Tuesday 
morning to hear from her oldest child, Brandon, who had not previously 
addressed the board and now wants to make a plea for his mother's life, said 
Susan Casey, an attorney for Gissendaner.

The board could let an earlier denial of clemency stand, issue a stay of up to 
90 days to further consider the case, or grant clemency and commute her 
sentence. The board is expected to rule sometime Tuesday afternoon.

Gissendaner was previously scheduled for execution on 25 February, but that was 
delayed because of a threat of winter weather. Her execution was reset for 2 
March, but corrections officials postponed that execution "out of an abundance 
of caution" because the execution drug appeared "cloudy".

The parole board, which is the only entity in Georgia authorized to commute a 
death sentence, declined to spare Gissendaner's life after a clemency hearing 
in February. Her lawyers asked the board to reconsider its decision before the 
2nd execution date, but the board stood by its decision to deny clemency.

Gissendaner's lawyers last Thursday submitted a second request to reconsider 
the denial of clemency. The parole board said on Monday that its members have 
thoroughly reviewed that request. The board said the meeting on Tuesday will 
allow it to gather additional information from representatives for Gissendaner.

In the request for reconsideration, Gissendaner's lawyers cite a statement from 
former Georgia supreme court chief justice Norman Fletcher, who argues that 
Gissendaner's death sentence is not proportionate to her role in the crime. Her 
lover, Gregory Owen, who did the killing, is serving a life prison sentence and 
will become eligible for parole in 2022.

Fletcher said he has now decided he was wrong in voting to deny Gissendaner's 
appeal in 2000 when he sat on the state supreme court, the statement says. He 
also notes that Georgia has not executed a person who didn't actually carry out 
a killing since the US supreme court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. 
Gissendaner's lawyers also argue she was a seriously damaged woman, has 
undergone a spiritual transformation while in prison and has been a model 
prisoner who has shown remorse and provided hope to other inmates in their 
personal struggles. The new request for reconsideration includes testimony from 
several women who were locked up as teens and who said Gissendaner counselled 
them through moments when they felt scared, lost or on the verge of giving up 
hope.

2 of her 3 children, Dakota and Kayla, previously addressed the board and 
earlier this month released a video pleading for their mother's life to be 
spared. They detailed their own tough journeys to forgiving her and said they 
would suffer terribly from having a second parent taken from them.

Douglas Gissendaner's family said in a statement released on Monday that he is 
the victim and Kelly Gissendaner received an appropriate sentence.

"As the murderer, she's been given more rights and opportunity over the last 18 
years than she ever afforded to Doug who, again, is the victim here," the 
statement says. "She had no mercy, gave him no rights, no choices, nor the 
opportunity to live his life."

Kelly Gissendaner repeatedly pushed Owen in late 1996 to kill her husband 
rather than just divorcing him as Owen suggested, prosecutors have said. Acting 
on her instructions, Owen ambushed Douglas Gissendaner at Gissendaner's home, 
forced him to drive to a remote area and stabbed him multiple times, 
prosecutors said.

Investigators looking into the killing zeroed in on Owen once they learned of 
his affair with Kelly Gissendaner. He initially denied involvement but 
eventually confessed and implicated Kelly Gissendaner.

(source: The Guardian)






LOUISIANA:

Former death row inmate to speak at Tulane Law School


John Thompson came within weeks of being executed for a 1984 New Orleans murder 
before new evidence arose in his case. After spending 18 years in prison, he 
was tried again, acquitted and released.

1 of more than 40 exonerees in Louisiana, Thompson founded Resurrection After 
Exoneration, a New Orleans nonprofit that helps reconnect exonerees to their 
communities. On Tuesday night (Sept. 29) at Tulane University Law School, he 
will speak about wrongful convictions with John Hollway, author of a book about 
Thompson's ordeal, "Killing Time: An 18-year Odyssey from Death Row to 
Freedom."

Hollway, associate dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is 
executive director of the Quattrone Center for Fair Administrative of Justice. 
He and Thompson will discuss the book and wrongful convictions in the United 
States, where 1,660 have been wrongly convicted of crimes and later exonerated, 
according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The event is open to the public and begins at 6:45 p.m. in the Wendell H. 
Gautheir Moot Court Room 110. Tulane Law is located in John Giffen Weinmann 
Hall at 6329 Freret St. A reception will follow at 8:00 p.m.

(source: The Times-Picayune)






USA:

Scholars Discuss Role of Neuroscience in Youth Criminal Justice


A panel of legal and medical scholars and practitioners agreed in a panel 
discussion on Monday night that the American criminal justice system does not 
give adequate consideration to the cognitive underdevelopment of adolescents.

The death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the American student who carried out 
the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, served as a preface for the discussion.

A standing-room-only crowd of about 100 people packed the Wasserstein Hall 
classroom at Harvard Law School for the discussion entitled "From Troubled 
Teens to Tsarnaev: Promises and Perils of Adolescent Neuroscience and Law." The 
event, hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, 
and Bioethics, was the center's 1st of the year.

"Our country is going through a profound movement toward the punitive," said 
Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at the Law School.

In a previous editorial in the Boston Globe, Gertner cited prominent lawyer 
Clarence S. Darrow's argument that "the imposition of the death penalty made 
citizens no better than the killers on trial." She argued that modern 
neuroscience research can provide objective grounds for greater discretion in 
sentencing juvenile criminals.

Leah Somerville, director of the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab at 
the University, struck a similar note.

"The adolescent brain is structurally different from the adult brain," she 
said.

These objective differences between adult and juvenile brains, resulting in 
measurable decreases in inhibition, underdeveloped resistance to peer pressure, 
and increased attraction to risk, should be given more consideration when 
sentencing juvenile criminals, according to Somerville.

The panelists described the need to apply the findings from modern neuroscience 
and criminal justice research to programs that aim to support at-risk youth. 
They also discussed the need to strengthen programs aimed at promoting healthy 
environments for adolescents, keeping students in school, and rehabilitating 
youth offenders.

"Individual sentencing cannot solve this issue," Gertner said. "We have to look 
at this problem institutionally."

Panelist Robert T. Kinscherff, a senior visiting fellow in law and neuroscience 
at the Petrie-Flom Center, said there is a need for increased understanding of 
the very common conditions that lead to youth delinquency. He also spoke of the 
"growing political agreement" that - rather than being tough on crime - the 
U.S. Department of Justice should be "smart on crime."

The panelists were hopeful about enacting change. Describing how to implement 
these scientific breakthroughs, Judge Gertner emphasized the importance of 
objective neuroscience in strengthening the argument for programs to support 
at-risk youth and discretion when sentencing young criminals.

"It's no longer just faith and hope and some gut, common-sense solution," 
Gertner said. "You can actually look at the [neurological] differences, and we 
need to take them into account."

But some audience members left the event with mixed feelings about the 
potential for change. Takahiko Iwasaki, a Japanese judge and visiting scholar 
at the Law School, said, "I think it's very difficult for lawyers or judges to 
actually take into account these [scientific] accomplishments in specific 
cases."

(source: The (Harvard) Crimson)