[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----FLA., LA., OKLA., UTAH

[Rick Halperin]

April 28



FLORIDA:

Man convicted in sword-killing retrial


A man will face a possible death sentence for the 3rd time after a jury on 
Wednesday convicted him of 1st-degree murder for hacking and stabbing another 
man to death in 1991. It was the 3rd time James "Chico" Guzman had been 
convicted of 1st-degree murder for killing David Colvin, a 48-year-old 
businessman from Norfolk, Virginia, on Aug. 10, 1991 at what was then the 
Imperial Motor Lodge on South Ridgewood Avenue. Guzman was also convicted of 
robbery with a deadly weapon.

Guzman, who turned 52 on Wednesday, is facing a possible death sentence when 
the trial's penalty phase begins on Tuesday before Circuit Judge Terence 
Perkins at the S. James Foxman Justice Center in Daytona Beach.

The jury of 8 men and 4 women deliberated about 4 1/2 hours on Wednesday before 
reaching a verdict. Earlier they listened to prosecutor Ed Davis, who reminded 
jurors of the sword he had held up for them to see earlier during the murder 
trial.

"You saw that sword. That sword is bent. That sword's been used very vigorously 
to chop someone or something," Davis said.

According to Davis, that someone was Colvin.

Guzman has been convicted twice before. Guzman has been sentenced to death 
twice before. And Guzman's convictions have been overturned on appeal twice 
before.

Guzman had served only nine years of a 30-year sentence for killing a woman in 
Miami when he was released from prison in April 1991 and made his way to 
Daytona Beach, where he met Colvin, a businessman with a drinking problem who 
had separated from his wife.

Guzman took the stand earlier in the trial and testified that it was another 
man who gave him Colvin's expensive ring.

Guzman's defense attorneys, Junior Barrett and Randall Richardson, worked to 
prevent a 3rd conviction and a return to death row.

Richardson said during his closing that the state's main witness, Guzman's 
ex-girlfriend, Martha Cronin, was not credible because she would have told 
police anything to stay out of jail.

He said Cronin changed her testimony about the time on Aug. 10, 1991, that 
Guzman supposedly told her he had killed Colvin and showed her a ring he had 
taken from him.

Richardson told jurors that Cronin received a $500 reward the day before she 
testified before a grand jury after the murder.

Richardson said no blood or fingerprints were found on the sword. And no blood 
was found on Guzman despite the attack which left blood splattered on the wall 
of the motel room.

Davis, who is prosecuting the case along with Assistant State Attorney John 
Reid, said blood and fingerprints can be wiped away and cleaned off and someone 
should not be rewarded for cleaning up.

Davis said if Cronin was framing Guzman then she would have to be vile and 
despicable to do that in the first place and continue to do it now.

Davis also said Cronin had testified that she would not falsely accuse someone 
of murder to get herself out of jail.

Davis said Guzman began lying to police immediately after the killing and 
continues lying today. He said Guzman even denied to police that his nickname 
was "Chico."

And Davis reminded jurors that Cronin testified Guzman told her that dead 
witnesses don't talk. Davis said Guzman intended to kill Colvin.

"This isn't 1 stab wound. This is a series of stabs, slices, chops. This is a 
murder by someone intent on killing Mr. Colvin," Davis said.

(source: Daytona Beach News Journal)






LOUISIANA:

A Death Sentence in Louisiana Rarely Means You'll be Executed ---- Over the 
last 40 years, reversals have become commonplace.


4 out of 5 death sentences in Louisiana since 1976 have been reversed. And for 
every 3 executions the state carried out, 1 death row prisoner was exonerated.

These statistics are among the most notable in an analysis of the death penalty 
in Louisiana, published this week by Tim Lyman, an independent researcher, and 
Frank Baumgartner, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina 
who has crunched similar numbers in Florida, Ohio, and Missouri.

The study comes as Louisiana - which has the country's highest rates of murder 
and incarceration - faces a handful of challenges to its death penalty system. 
The state's corrections department has had trouble finding lethal injection 
drugs, and the legislature is studying the increasing expense of a death 
sentence. After a prison guard was killed during an escape, the state spent at 
least $14 million seeking death sentences for 5 men involved, and succeeded in 
only 1 of those cases. The state also faced negative national headlines last 
year after Caddo Parish prosecutor Dale Cox told a reporter, "I think we need 
to kill more people." The attention led Cox to drop out of the parish's race 
for district attorney.

The new study portrays Louisiana as an extreme example of the dynamics that 
define the death penalty nationally. Since 1976, the state has handed out 241 
death sentences. The appeals process takes years, so only 155 cases have been 
resolved. Of those, 127 have ended in a reversal, often due to errors by 
judges, misconduct by prosecutors, or "ineffective assistance" by defenders. 
That's a rate of 81.9 %, compared to 72.7 % nationally.

Though the researchers did not include data on what happened to these 
prisoners, Lyman says the "most common reversal scenario" is a plea for a life 
sentence.

At the same time, Louisiana has carried out 28 executions - meaning the state 
has executed only 11.6 % of those sentenced to death, slightly below the 
national average - while exonerating 9 prisoners from the state's death row.

Louisiana also presents an extreme version of national trends on race and 
capital punishment: black defendants face the death penalty more often, as do 
those who kill whites, regardless of their race. According to the new study, 
when the defendant is a black male, he is 30 times more likely to be sentenced 
to death in Louisiana if his victim was a white woman, as opposed to a black 
man. No white person has been executed in Louisiana for a crime against a black 
victim since 1752; in that case, the victims, 2 black women who survived being 
stabbed with a bayonet, were someone else's property.

Baumgartner has called the link between the victim's race and the likelihood of 
execution "one of the most consistent findings in all empirical legal 
scholarship relating to capital punishment" across the country.

All of this scholarship, including the new Louisiana study, has become an 
arsenal for opponents of the death penalty as they try to persuade courts that 
the punishment is unconstitutional. Last July, these efforts were given a 
boost: in a dissent to a Supreme Court decision over lethal injection in 
Glossip v. Gross, Justice Stephen Breyer invited lawyers to challenge the death 
penalty as a whole. Arguing that the system for handing down the punishment is 
unreliable and arbitrary, he cited dozens of scholarly studies, including the 
work of Baumgartner.

If the court ever takes a death penalty challenge - and some lawyers believe it 
could come from Louisiana - defense lawyers are sure to use studies like this 
one to argue that whether or not the death penalty is cruel, it is increasingly 
rare.

(source: themarshallproject.org)






OKLAHOMA:

Witness says police tortured Thacker, confessions in 2010 killing not backed up


Confessions Elvis Aaron Thacker made in the 2010 murder of Briana Ault were 
unreliable because there was no physical evidence to verify them, a private 
criminologist retained by the defense team testified Wednesday.

Brent Turvey accused the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation of 
"professional abandonment" of the physical evidence gathered by investigators 
in Ault's murder.

Thacker is charged with 1st-degree murder and forcible sodomy in the Sept. 13, 
2010, death of Ault, 22. Oklahoma is seeking the death penalty for Thacker.

Turvey said once Thacker confessed to cutting Ault's throat and leaving her 
nude body at a secluded pond just across the state line in Pocola, Okla., 
agency investigators became disinterested in the physical evidence and made no 
effort to corroborate Thacker's confessions with the evidence.

Turvey told jurors he was the 1st person to go through Ault's pockets when he 
did his assessment of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation's 
investigation.

"That's shocking," he said.

Turvey said in his assessment of the investigation, there was no evidence two 
perpetrators were involved in the murder as the state alleges. There was no 
multiple DNA found at the murder scene, no multiple use of weapons, no evidence 
Ault was restrained, and the sexual nature of the crime wasn't the type that 
would have multiple perpetrators, he said.

Turvey also accused the Fort Smith Police Department of torturing Thacker by 
letting him suffer with two gunshot wounds for more than 30 minutes without 
offering any aid while trying to get him to give a dying confession.

Turvey said he was obligated to report Thacker's treatment by police to the 
U.S. Department of Justice and to the United Nations under the Istanbul Protoco 
of 1999, which bars torture and inhuman or degrading punishment. He said he 
planned to file that report after his testimony.

Any confession Elvis Thacker made is invalid because of the torture, Turvey 
said.

According to testimony in the trial, Fort Smith detectives raided the apartment 
where Thacker and his brother Johnathen were staying Sept. 15, 2010, to serve 
an arrest warrant in a separate rape case. The brothers were also persons of 
interest in Ault's death at the time.

When detectives burst into the apartment, Elvis Thacker attacked and stabbed a 
detective, after which other detectives shocked him with stun guns and shot him 
twice, according to testimony.

The detective who was stabbed in the neck recovered. In 2011, the brothers were 
sentenced to prison in Arkansas after pleading guilty to attempted capital 
murder and a kidnapping charge in connection with the rape warrant.

Before the defense rested its case Wednesday, Elvis Thacker told Judge Jonathan 
Sullivan he didn't want to testify.

"I'm not confident I'm able to testify properly," he told Sullivan after the 
judge explained his right to testify or not.

Johnathen Thacker, also charged in Ault's death, pleaded guilty to 1st-degree 
murder in April 2014 as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty in exchange 
for testifying against his brother.

Johnathen Thacker said Elvis Thacker killed Ault after telling him he wanted to 
rob her of $1,600 he mistakenly believed she had won at a casino. Johnathen 
Thacker said he was with Ault and Elvis Thacker but didn't know that his 
brother was going to kill Ault.

First Assistant District Attorney Margaret Nicholson told Sullivan that she 
intended to call rebuttal witnesses when the trial resumes at 8:30 a.m. today.

(source: nwaonline.com)






UTAH:

Renowned photojournalist Caroline Planque visits USU


In 2005 Caroline Planque, a renowned photojournalist, interviewed her 1st death 
row inmate; on Monday she visited Utah State University to educate students 
more on capital punishment in the U.S.

Planque was born in Valenciennes, France and graduated from The University of 
Texas in 1999. In 2005 she began working with inmates who were on death row to 
discover more about the U.S. judicial system and how they handle the death 
penalty. What she discovered was the process is unfair.

"The process isn't fair. Rich people are almost never put on death row, only 
the poor," Planque said.

Planque also said when she first started investigating this topic she was only 
mildly interested, but after her 1st interview with an inmate she knew her 
curiosity had grown into something much bigger.

"I went to visit 1 inmate that I had been writing; when I did, many more of 
them wanted to talk to me ... right there I knew I had my story," she said.

Ever since that 1st interview Planque has been working to bring more attention 
to what she feels is an unjust system.

She began investigating capital punishment in the U.S. in 2005, a year when the 
number of inmates executed was at its highest. According the U.S. Department of 
Justice, a total of 60 inmates were executed in 2005, 19 of which were in 
Texas.

Since her first interview in 2005 Planque has interviewed a variety of people 
who have been affected by the death penalty in the U.S., including inmates who 
are currently on death row, attorneys who have both defended and prosecuted 
death row inmates, family members of inmates who have received the death 
penalty, wardens who have worked in prisons with inmates on death row and have 
watched them die and victims of the crimes these inmates have committed.

In these interviews Planque said she has found many people who are both for and 
against the death penalty in the U.S. One of these people includes Linda White, 
the mother of Cathy White, who was abducted, raped and murdered in 1986. Linda 
White visited the man who had killed her daughter 14 1/2 years after he was 
accused and shared with Planque her experience.

"We met (the man who had killed my daughter) ... he was very remorseful. Even 
after almost 15 years he looked more innocent than when he went to prison," 
White said.

Planque has put together several accounts similar to Linda White's, and in her 
lecture at USU, shared several of them. As with all her lectures on this topic, 
Planque hopes to change the public's opinion about capital punishment in the 
U.S.

One of the points that Planque argues is, while upper-class citizens can afford 
the best lawyers in the business, those who make a lower income only have 
access to court-appointed lawyers who rarely do a good job defending their 
clients.

"Almost all (prisoners on death row) have court-appointed lawyers ... often 
they don't get very good lawyers," she said.

Planque also pointed out that while waiting for death row many prisoners, at 
least those in Texas, are kept in solitary confinement. Their time in 
confinement can last anywhere from a few months to a couple years. For those 
who are proven innocent and released from prison, their time in solitary 
confinement can have crippling effects.

"People who come out of this normally don't do well. They aren't mentally well 
and can't get a job," Planque said.

Former death row inmate Martian Draugon gave Planque his own account of his 
time in prison.

"To most officers, we're not viewed as people - we're viewed as, 'How many cows 
do we have to feed? How many recs do we have? How many showers do we have?' ... 
It's easier to kill something than someone," Draugon said.

Though Planque admits that many officers as well as family members of the 
victims don't view inmates on death row as people, they are still affected. She 
shares the account of Carroll Pickett, a former chaplin at Walls, the 
Huntsville prison unit in Texas.

"I think if most people saw an execution they would imminently pass out. I've 
watched big tall men from the radio station collapse while observing the 
process. I've seen families, I've seen guards vomit. I've seen guards removed 
because they develop diarrhea. They just couldn't stand it," Pickett said.

Planque herself admits to having a hard time processing what happens to the 
people she interacts with, despite the fact she herself has never witnessed an 
execution.

"I always think it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen, then they 
strap them down and inject them ... it's really difficult but you have to put 
it in a place where you can handle it," Planque said.

As Planque continues to research capital punishment in the U.S. her hopes that 
the judicial system will stop being an unjust system dwindle, she said.

"The real question is can a fair system exist ... I don't think it can," she 
said.

Despite her doubt, Planque continues to investigate and work on multiple 
projects to help inform the people in both the U.S. and her birth country, 
France, about capital punishment in the U.S. One day she hopes to release a 
book that encompasses all her work.

(source: The Utah Statesman)