[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, N.Y., GA., FLA., MISS., OHIO, NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 14



TEXAS----impending execution

Texas Readies to Kill Man - Who Killed No One - for Murder ---- Jeffery Wood on 
track to be the 'least culpable person executed in the modern era of death 
penalty'


His execution is scheduled for Aug. 24, which is "just 5 days after his 43rd 
birthday, for a crime that everyone, including prosecutors, admits he did not 
commit,"Jordan Smith wrote at The Intercept.

He's been on death row since 1998. 2 years earlier, as the Austin Chronicle 
reported, he was arrested for the murder of Kris Keeran, a gas station 
attendant in Kerrville. Wood didn't fire the bullet that killed Keeran. In 
fact, he wasn't even inside the building. He was in a pickup truck in the 
parking lot when his friend Daniel Reneau shot Keeran in the face during a 
botched robbery. Wood jumped out of the car and ran inside when he heard the 
gunshot. There, Reneau pointed his gun at Wood and told him to make off with 
the Texaco's surveillance camera and VCR.

So why is Wood about to face a lethal injection of pentobarbital?

Hooman Hedayati, an attorney and a member of the Texas Moratorium Network Board 
of Directors, explained in an op-ed at the Austin American-Statesman last 
month:

Wood was convicted and sentenced to die under Texas' arcane felony-murder law, 
more commonly known as the "the law of parties" - for his role as an accomplice 
to a killing, which he had no reason to anticipate. Under the law of parties, 
those who conspire to commit a felony, like a robbery, can be held responsible 
for a subsequent crime, like murder, if it "should have been anticipated." The 
law does not require a finding that the person intended to kill. It only 
requires that the defendant, charged under the law of parties, was a major 
participant in the underlying felony and exhibited a reckless indifference to 
human life. In other words, neglecting to anticipate another actor's commission 
of murder in the course of a felony is all that is required to make a Texas 
defendant death-eligible.

Human rights group Amnesty International issued an "urgent alert" Friday to 
help stop the execution, noting that Wood "has a history of emotional and 
intellectual impairments, and an IQ consistently assessed at about 80."

An additional troubling aspecting of the case, Amnesty writes, is that A 
prerequisite for a death sentence in Texas is a jury finding of the defendant's 
"future dangerousness." At Jeffery Wood's sentencing, the prosecution called 
Dr. James Grigson, a discredited psychiatrist dubbed "Dr. Death" who regularly 
testified at Texas capital sentencings as to his certainty that the defendant 
would commit future acts of violence, a form of testimony for which by 1998 he 
had already been expelled from the American Psychiatric Association. The 
prosecution nevertheless presented such testimony at Jeffery Wood's trial, 
without informing the jury of his expulsion. Meanwhile, the defence lawyers 
made no arguments, put on no witnesses, and presented no mitigation evidence. 
They "sat mute" throughout, noted the federal judge in 2005.

The case prompted roughly 50 Evangelical leaders from across the county to 
write to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday, 
urging them to stop the execution. "Officials have a moral obligation to 
rectify this mistake and stop this execution while they still can," they wrote, 
adding, "It deeply troubles us when the criminal justice system concludes that 
some of the most vulnerable in society can be executed and disposed of."

>From the Washington Post's lengthy reporting Friday on the case: "If executed 
this month, Wood will be the 'least culpable person executed in the modern era 
of death penalty,' said Scott Cobb, president of Texas Moratorium Network, a 
group that advocates against capital punishment."

(source: commondreams.org)






NEW YORK:

How Thomas Edison powered the 1st electric chair - and totally botched the 
execution


The streets were still lit by flickering gaslights in the late 1880s and '90s; 
electricity was a developing technology, one often viewed with fear and 
skepticism by critics who worried that it was unsafe. During this same time, a 
fierce battle was being waged throughout the United States. There were no shots 
fired - just electrical sparks, fierce public safety debates, newspaper 
editorials and court cases.

It was called the "War of Currents," and it referred to the competition between 
rivals Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse and the 2 large electrical 
companies they helmed: Edison Electric Light Company and Westinghouse Electric 
Company, respectively.

While the fight was technical and wonky in nature - would the direct-current 
electricity (DC) used by Edison become the new standard or would the 
alternating current (AC) used by Westinghouse prevail? - the conflict was 
ultimately over who really invented the light bulb and who would lay claim to 
the newer, brighter world that was emerging.

This is the focus of "The Last Days of Night," Graham Moore's forthcoming novel 
based on real events. "This was a time when the night sky was lit up for the 
very first time," says Moore, who wrote the screenplay for the 2014 film "The 
Imitation Game," about code breakers during WWII. "People described it in their 
journals as if seeing a new color. What I wanted to do here was tell the story 
of a massive hinge moment."

Edison's low-voltage DC was intended for indoor business and residential use, 
while Westinghouse's AC employed a transformer that could be stepped up for 
long-distance use or stepped down for indoor lighting. The AC model was direct 
competition to the DC model; it was more efficient and less expensive than the 
model that Edison's laboratory had invented. Realizing that his own model was 
threatened with obscurity, Edison began to attack AC vigorously, claiming it 
was a safety hazard and a violation of his own patented invention, the light 
bulb.

"You had 2 similar technologies that do the same thing, and a genuine debate 
about which is better. This was the 1880s version of VHS vs. Beta, except with 
much higher stakes," Moore tells the Post.

"What they were fighting over was valuable because you were talking about who 
got to rule the American electrical system for the next century. When Steve 
Jobs and Bill Gates were fighting, no one was sure if the PC would take off. 
Everyone in the late 1880s knew exactly how much light bulbs would change 
American life."

There were 3 main players: Edison, Westinghouse, and a Serbian-American 
electrical engineer named Nikola Tesla, who worked first for Edison, then for 
Westinghouse.

All 3 were outsize personalities, arguably all geniuses.

"One of the things I wanted to tease out was the almost eerie echoes that their 
tech rivalry had with modern tech rivalries," says Moore. "Steve Jobs would say 
of Bill Gates, 'That guy's just a businessman, not a real visionary.' Which is 
what Westinghouse would say about Edison. 'That guy's not a scientist, just a 
salesman.' I liked the idea of competing industrialists, people fighting to be 
the 1st. Now we have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel."

If Edison was the salesman who sold the most light bulbs and Westinghouse was 
the consummate engineer, focused on making the best, Tesla was, as Moore refers 
to him, "the 3rd leg in the stool of invention," a man focused only on 
larger-than-life creations, not the device itself. He cared very little if the 
technology actually came to fruition; for him, the idea was the point.

"In modern terminology, we would describe him as being schizophrenic; he had 
visions, hallucinations," says Moore. "In his diary he'd talk about getting 
inspiration for his ideas in literal visions - the ground before him would open 
up and spit fire, and then he would get the idea for alternating current." (He 
would also come up with the concept for X-rays, neon signs and remote control, 
among others. Despite this wealth of ideas, he died penniless in 1943, the 
general consensus being that, while a brilliant inventor, he was a terrible 
capitalist.)

Although the 3 men are essential characters in the book, for his protagonist, 
Moore decided to focus on someone else.

"I knew I wanted to write about the rivalry of how three different guys each 
think that he was the one who invented the light bulb," says Moore. "My 1st 
question was from whose perspective I wanted to tell the story. One day I was 
reading an Edison biography and I found a single sentence that mentioned that 
after Edison sued Westinghouse for violating his patent, Westinghouse hired 
someone named Paul Cravath as his lawyer."

Cravath, it turned out, was the founder of the NYC law firm Cravath, Swaine & 
Moore, and he would go on to become one of the most influential lawyers in the 
country.

At the time, though, he was fresh out of Columbia Law School and had never 
tried a case in his life.

"Here's this 26-year-old guy with no experience, and now he's the lead 
litigator on one of the biggest cases in American history," says Moore. "I 
wanted to write about great geniuses from the perspective of a hungry young 
lawyer just trying to make sense of it all."

For Moore, writing about creation felt very personal. "When I started this book 
5 years ago, I had just become a professional writer," he says. "And I was 
asking myself questions like, 'What does it mean to have ideas for a living?' 
Looking at the way [Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla] approached it, there were 
things I could find inspiration from. Of course, I'm just writing fiction. 
Those guys invented the light bulb."

One of many interesting details in the book is the controversy that surrounded 
the execution of William Kemmler, the 1st man to ever be legally electrocuted 
using the electric chair. Kemmler was convicted in 1890 of murdering his 
common-law wife and was sentenced to death via electrocution at New York's 
Auburn prison; the electric chair, which had been invented in 1881 by a Buffalo 
dentist, was ready for use after years of development and legislation. And 
thanks to Edison, the chair was powered by AC.

"[Edison] had been against the death penalty before this event, but when he 
realized he could use the electric chair to his advantage, he began lobbying 
the state to use the electric chair and use Westinghouse's current," says 
Moore. "It was a brilliant p.r. gambit. 'Let's associate the other guy's 
product with an electric chair.'"

Westinghouse was, unsurprisingly, not pleased by this association. It wasn't 
just the optics of having one's product linked to a death instrument that upset 
him; it was the fear that it would lend credence to all the anti-AC newspaper 
editorials that decried alternating current as a safety hazard and a danger to 
the public. Many of the editorials were written by a man named Harold Brown, a 
figure about which little is known, a figure about which little is known. "He 
was secretly recruited by the Edison side and set loose on the press," says 
Moore. "Edison denied they had a relationship, but they clearly did. [Brown] 
was publishing editorials as if he was a famous electricity expert, but he 
wasn???t."

Westinghouse began to vigorously support Kemmler's appeal, which was eventually 
overturned by the US Supreme Court. Kemmler was electrocuted on Aug. 6, 1890, a 
botched event that took eight minutes and required the switch to be flipped 
twice as the voltage was increased - first with 1000 volts, then with 2000. "An 
awful odor began to permeate the death chamber, and then, as though to cap the 
climax of this fearful sight, it was seen that the hair under and around the 
electrode on the head and the flesh under and around the electrode at the base 
of the spine was singeing," reported The New York Times. "The stench was 
unbearable."

Edison's stunt, along with declining profits, led stockholders to remove him as 
head of his own company in 1892.

While the Kemmler execution really happened, Moore takes some artistic 
liberties, as with a mysterious fire set in Tesla's laboratory and credited to 
Edison's henchmen. (The mysterious fire did happen, though the cause was never 
determined.)Still, Moore says, there was nothing fictional about the rivalry 
between the 2 men. "They did have spies. They were trying to ruin each other's 
factories. The 2 people you'd think would have so much in common. I mean, how 
many people can claim to have invented the light bulb? There are 3. You'd think 
that would give them something to bond over. But because they approached what 
invention means from different perspectives, they hated each other."

(source: nypost.com)






GEORGIA:

Court date nears for man accused of killing priest----Murder suspect to make 
initial appearance


A man accused of killing a 71-year-old Florida priest will appear in court 
Monday for his initial appearance.

Steven James Murray is charged with murder in the death of a Florida priest, 
the Rev. Rene Robert, who was 71.

Steven James Murray faces charges of murder and weapon violations in Burke 
County Superior Court. The district attorney filed notice of her intention to 
seek a death sentence if a jury convicts Murray of murder.

Murray is accused of fatally shooting the Rev. Rene Robert of St. Augustine, 
Fla., sometime between April 10 and 18.

District Attorney Ashley Wright cited 4 statutory aggravating circumstances in 
her death penalty notice: the murder was committed while Murray was engaged in 
kidnapping; the murder was committed while Murray was engaged in the commission 
of an aggravated battery; the murder was committed in order to get money or 
something of value; and the murder was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible 
or inhuman in that it involved torture, depravity of mind or aggravated 
battery.

According to earlier reports, Robert allowed Murray to borrow his vehicle April 
10 and later agreed to go for a ride with him. Murray allegedly drove from St. 
Augustine to Aiken, where he unsuccessfully demanded to see his children.

In Aiken, authorities believe Murray forced Robert into the trunk while he 
committed a number of burglaries and an arson. Murray told investigators that 
he took Robert out of the trunk on River Road in Burke County and shot him.

Murray was arrested April 13 in Aiken after a police pursuit and car crash.

Charges against him are pending in South Carolina and Florida.

(source: Augusta Chronicle)






FLORIDA:

Florida's death penalty lives on, and so do court challenges


No other state has had the long, tangled history with capital punishment that 
Florida has experienced.

An appeals court in Lakeland last week gave the state a minor victory in 
refusing to let circuit judges take the death penalty off the table in 4 murder 
cases that have not even come to trial. That's how far through the legal 
looking glass we've plunged - "Did he do it?" matters less than "How you gonna 
prove it?"

The Second District Court of Appeal ruling will probably be appealed to the 
Florida Supreme Court, where death penalty litigation is already a logjam. The 
capital caseload is so great, the Legislature a few years ago passed a 'timely 
justice act," purporting to hold justices accountable for cranking these things 
out. The House even toyed with a constitutional amendment that would have 
enlarged the court and split it into 2 divisions - civil and criminal - but it 
got nowhere.

There's another constitutional amendment likely to come up in the next couple 
of sessions, setting term limits for appellate judges. That's not entirely a 
backlash against delays in capital cases, but having some clearly guilty men on 
death row more than 20 years is a provocation.

The Lakeland appellate court's consolidation of 4 murder cases hinged on a 
little grenade the U.S. Supreme Court lobbed into the opening day festivities 
of the 2016 legislative session. Lawmakers touched up the statute to make 
judges heed jury recommendations of life or death, but they balked at requiring 
unanimous votes for execution.

Like a modern-day Madame Defarge knitting beside the guillotine, the press 
likes to keep score, as if execution was an Olympic competition. The Department 
of Corrections currently lists 384 men and 4 women under death sentence, with 2 
active warrants pending in the state Supreme Court.

Gov. Rick Scott has presided over more executions, 23, than any of his 
predecessors. There have been 92 in modern times, as well as 26 "exonerations" 
- men who got off death row through various types of appeals.

Such as being proved innocent, but not always. Sometimes, evidence and 
witnesses are gone, and they just can't retry a guy.

Numbers don't tell the whole story. Every case is different in its facts as 
well as its legal precedents. And defense lawyers are pretty good at inventing 
new precedents, when existing case law doesn't suit them.

Every session, there are bills to abolish capital punishment, which rarely get 
a committee hearing. State Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, a Tallahassee 
attorney, will have to find a new sponsor for her repeal bill, now that she's 
term-limited out of the House. She makes a solid argument that capital 
punishment is not a deterrent, costs too much and takes too long - not to 
mention the danger of killing the wrong person - but Floridians like our death 
penalty.

Polls may show strong support for life without parole, which is already 
mandatory when a 1st-degree murderer doesn't get death. But nobody ever got 
defeated for being too tough on crime. To the contrary, governors from Bob 
Graham to Rick Scott have voiced varying levels of support - and legislators 
who have voted for even the most mild reforms have been battered by attack 
advertising at re-election time.

When John Spenkelink died in Florida's electric chair in 1979, we had the 
nation's 1st "involuntary" execution. Double murderer Gary Gilmore had 
dismissed his appeals and chosen a firing squad in Utah 2 years earlier, but 
the homicide case from Tallahassee was the 1st in which the condemned killer 
was still fighting in court.

The Capitol was ground zero for mass demonstrations, as well as court action, 
of a size and intensity not seen again until the 2000 post-election 
presidential merriment. Graham was hounded by protestors, but it didn't hurt 
his re-election in 1982 or his rise to the U.S. Senate 4 years later.

Spinkelink's execution didn't exactly open any floodgates, as death penalty 
opponents had predicted. There has been some momentum in the other direction, a 
handful of states repealing their death penalties and drug manufacturers 
refusing to provide the lethal chemicals now used in executions. Some governors 
have also indefinitely stayed executions, effectively spiking the law.

Florida has executed some of the nation's most notorious serial killers, like 
Ted Bundy in 1989 and Aileen Wornos in 2002. We were also among the earliest 
states to switch from electrocution to lethal injection, prodded by our own 
Supreme Court. The justices clearly signaled their readiness to unplug the 
chair as violative of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual" 
punishment.

In the courts or the Legislature, this issue isn't going away any time soon. 
Nor should it, as people on both sides obviously feel very strongly about it.

(source: Bill Cotterell, Tallahassee Democrat)






MISSISSIPPI:

Judge told to review death row inmate's disability claim


The Mississippi Supreme Court is telling a circuit judge to reconsider his 
ruling that upheld the death penalty for an inmate who says he's intellectually 
disabled and therefore ineligible for execution.

Anthony Carr was1e of 2 men convicted in the 1990 slayings of Carl and Bobbie 
Jo Parker, their 12-year-old son Gregory and 9-year-old daughter Charlotte.

Sparsely populated Quitman County had to raise taxes 3 consecutive years to pay 
for the defense of Carr and Robert Simon Jr., who both still await execution.

In May 2011, Simon's execution was only 4 hours away when a federal appeals 
court ordered a halt to consider his intellectual disability claim. The 5th 
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his appeal in March.

Carr was convicted of 4 counts of capital murder in a trial that was moved to 
Alcorn County.

During arguments before the state Supreme Court in May, attorney Alexander 
Kassoff, who works for the state Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, 
said Carr, 50, cannot be executed. Kassoff cited a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court 
ruling barring states from executing people who are intellectually disabled.

Jason Davis of the Mississippi Attorney General's Office countered that Carr's 
death sentence should be upheld even though 2 psychologists disagreed about his 
mental abilities.

In a ruling Thursday, justices said Circuit Judge Charles E. Webster dismissed 
Carr's claim of intellectual disability based on Carr's IQ score, but that the 
judge failed to consider whether Carr had "adaptive" behavior problems with 
reading, social skills or practical skills such as understanding how to use 
money or follow schedules.

"Because 'the medical community's diagnostic framework' recognizes that Carr's 
IQ between 70 and 75, coupled with 'severe adaptive behavior problems' could 
support a diagnosis of intellectual disability, the circuit judge applied an 
incorrect legal standard by treating Carr's IQ score alone as dispositive of 
this case, and by failing to balance and analyze his adaptive functioning 
deficits with his IQ score," Justice Ann Lamar wrote in the ruling.

The Supreme Court did not set a deadline for Webster to reconsider Carr's 
claim.

(source: Associated Press)






OHIO:

Ohio fugitives suspected in officer's death have criminal pasts; Jesse Hanes 
accused of fatally shooting Officer Jesse Chavez----Slain Hatch officer???s 
family: 'He didn't deserve to die'


2 fugitives from Ohio now in custody following the shooting death of a Hatch 
police officer have spent time behind bars before.

Jesse Hanes, 38, and James Nelson, 36, were apprehended Friday by Dona Ana 
County authorities after Hatch police Officer Jose Chavez was shot during a 
traffic stop.

The Dona Ana County Sheriff's Office said Hanes is accused of shooting Chavez 
during a traffic stop and has been charged with murder. Nelson was in the 
passenger seat and could face charges in Chavez's death as well.

Nelson is currently only being held on a fugitive from justice charge.

Hanes and Nelson were wanted out of Ohio in connection with the death of 
Theodore Timmons, 62, who was found dead inside his home on July 24. Timmons 
had been shot several times.

Online court records show that Nelson and Hanes have spent time in the Ohio 
prison system before.

In 2013, Hanes was convicted of 3rd-degree robbery and spent less than 3 years 
behind bars before being released early on supervised parole.

In 2014, Nelson was convicted on 2 counts of possession of drugs and spent less 
than 1 year behind bars before being released early on supervised parole.

The state of Ohio sent out a notice that the 2 had violated parole and were 
considered armed and dangerous following Timmons' death.

Since both now face charges in both Ohio and New Mexico, it's likely New Mexico 
will prosecute the t2 first.

The men could face the death penalty if convicted in Ohio.

(source: KOAT news)






NEBRASKA:

Death row inmate assaulted


A Nebraska death row inmate needed to be taken to the hospital after being 
assaulted at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution on Friday.

The prison would only confirm "that the altercation did occur on the unit where 
inmates sentenced to the death penalty are assigned. An investigation is being 
conducted at this time. In addition to the investigation, an internal critical 
incident review will be completed."

The Lincoln Journal Star has identified the inmate as 62-year-old Roy Ellis, 
who abducted and killed 12-year-old Amber Harris in Omaha in 2005. Her remains 
were later found in Hummel Park. Ellis has been on death row since 2007.

He was taken to Johnson County Hospital, treated and released.

(source: WOWT mews)






USA:

Dylann Roof's lawyer a Canadian-born crusader against death penalty----David 
Bruck, a soft-spoken Montrealer, has become one of America's foremost opponents 
of the death penalty.


The memories have faded a little in the 21 years since David Bruck saved her 
daughter from the electric chair. Linda Russell, mother of South Carolina 
murderer Susan Smith, now recalls 3 things about him.

How softly he spoke. How intensely he opposed the death penalty. And that 
photo, on his office wall, of a tiny black boy: George Stinney, a 14-year-old 
sent to the chair after a flawed trial in 1944.

"That must have been an inspiration to him," Russell said in July.

Bruck is from Montreal, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer and a 
photographer-poet. Motivated by a searing revulsion for capital punishment and 
the racist and haphazard way it has always been imposed, he has become one of 
America's foremost defenders of people facing execution.

Last year, Bruck represented Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now, 
after 4 decades largely devoted to poor black people, his career has taken a 
cinematic turn: he is representing Dylann Roof, the white man accused of 
murdering 9 black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.

There is no great irony, his friends say, in the crusader for racial justice 
attempting to protect an alleged white supremacist. Bruck wants to keep 
everybody alive, period.

"He doesn't seek out this case or any other case because he views it as 
high-profile," said John Blume, his former law partner. "He goes about doing 
what he does because of who he is at his core: someone who believes that 
neither the state nor the government should have the power to take life - and 
if we're going to give them that power, that people deserve the best possible 
representation."

What kind of monster defends these monsters? Bruck, a 67-year-old with white 
hair, is a flute-playing former anti-war activist at once so calm and resolute 
that he has been described in print as "Gandhi-esque" - by a prosecutor who 
battled him. Admirers and critics return to the same word: gentle.

"He almost comes across like a member of the clergy or something," said David 
Hoose, a Massachusetts lawyer. "He has a very soft-spoken way about him. And he 
comes across as immediately persuasive, credible, in this very understated 
way."

"If he says something, you know it's true," said Robert Dunham, executive 
director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "You may not necessarily 
agree with him, as opposing counsel often doesn't. But you know it's true."

To the conservatives of the South Carolina legal system, though, the northern 
interloper initially seemed suspicious. "He was viewed as a radical leftist," 
the former chief judge of the state's appeals court told the Charlotte Observer 
in 1994. Complained one former prosecutor: "He wouldn't want to see Hitler put 
in the electric chair."

Bruck is most renowned as a strategist, a master of the maddening nuances of 
the death machine he deplores. The magna cum laude Harvard graduate has argued 
more than 90 cases, mostly on appeal; appeared 7 times at the Supreme Court, 
winning six; and guided other lawyers through dozens of their own high-stakes 
ordeals.

"The federal death penalty has been a pretty spectacular failure, and I think 
David is one of the people most responsible for that," said Stephen Bright, 
president of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

As per usual, Bruck declined to comment for this article. He has periodically 
popped into the U.S. national news while defending an infamous murderer, like 
Pan Am Flight 73 terrorist Zayd Hassan Abd Al-Latif Masud Al Safarini. But his 
typical client, Bright said, is a poor black man "no one's ever heard of" - 
someone like Sylvester Adams, a paranoid South Carolina murderer with an 
intellectual disability who was abused by the boyfriends of his troubled 
mother.

Adams was executed in 1995, for strangling a neighbour, after 15 years of 
appeals. In his final hours, Bruck sat with him in a small cell, talking about 
heaven. Seconds before the lethal injection, Bruck offered 6 final words to the 
killer strapped to the gurney: "I'll see you. Take care, man."

"Can you imagine being as committed as he is," said friend Lee Coggiola, 
another member of the defence team, "and having to be there to say goodbye? To 
me that's just ..." She paused. "And not just once or twice. I don't know how 
many executions he???s had to be part of."

On occasion, he brings a man back from the dead. In a major case in 1994, Bruck 
convinced the Supreme Court to overturn the death sentence of Jonathan Dale 
Simmons, who murdered a 79-year-old woman, on the grounds that the jury had 
been warned of Simmons's future danger to society but not been told that he 
would actually be ineligible for parole if sentenced to life in prison.

Since 2004, Bruck has directed the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse, a 
defence clinic at Washington and Lee University. Before that, the rich Quebec 
kid traversed South Carolina for years in a tattered old sedan.

Lawyers on his side, Coggiola said, "all sort of had a crush on him." The 
condemned were just as fond. When Bruck visited death row, he seemed "at ease," 
the New York Times reported in 1995, "stopping to trade smiles and quiet words 
and grasping hands that have killed and that now reach out to him between the 
bars."

Good capital defence lawyers turn themselves into investigative biographers, 
delving into their client's history to uncover any glimmer of trauma or 
kindness to help render a murderer something more than his worst day. If such 
mitigating evidence exists, Bright said, "David is going to know more about 
that than anybody else." He has spent hundreds of hours with killers and their 
families.

"His clients loved him," Coggiola said. "He would spend time with them and 
listen to them and be there for them, and they knew, they knew, that he was 
doing everything possible."

The sensational Susan Smith trial of 1995 was typical of his style: serenity 
mixed with ferocity.

Activism fuelled by Vietnam War

With the Smith jury, he introduced evidence of mental illness and sexual abuse 
to humanize a white woman who had drowned her two sons in a lake and blamed an 
imaginary black man; in closing, he read from a Bible to plead for mercy. But 
he played hardball with an attack on the integrity of the prosecutor, alleging 
to the judge that Tommy Pope wanted a televised trial to make himself a 
celebrity.

The judge barred TV cameras from the courtroom. The trial ended in Bruck's 
peculiar kind of victory: Smith was sentenced to life in prison.

"David lives to defeat the death penalty," said Pope, now a Republican state 
legislator. "He will do anything possible to overcome a death sentence. 
Sometimes it blurs the lines for them about rules, because the ends justify the 
means."

Bruck, now a U.S. citizen, is fuelled by the outrages he outlined in a series 
of articles in the 1980s and 1990s. In a 1983 essay in the liberal New 
Republic, he wrote that the process of deciding who lives and who dies is so 
arbitrary - so dependent on race, geography, and the quality and ideology of 
the lawyers and judges - that it essentially turns the government into "the 
sniper in the tower or the gunman in the grocery store."

Lawyers like Bruck are sometimes said to represent "the worst of the worst." 
Bruck argues that the death penalty is unfair in part because the people on 
death row are not the worst - no worse, at least, than thousands of others 
criminals who never face execution.

"The horror derives not from death, which comes to us all, but from death that 
is inflicted at random, for no reason, for being on the wrong subway platform 
or the wrong side of the street. Up close, that is what capital punishment is 
like," he wrote. "And that is what makes the state's inexorable, stalking 
pursuit of this or that particular person's life so chilling."

He concluded with this: "The day when Americans stop condemning people to death 
on the basis of race and inequality will be the day when we stop condemning 
anyone to death at all."

Bruck attended the St. George's School of Montreal, a private, progressive high 
school. At Harvard, where he proposed the elimination of exams and grades in an 
essay critical of capitalism, he plunged into the movement against the Vietnam 
War.

He went to law school at the University of South Carolina because of the active 
anti-war effort surrounding the army training base nearby. He paid his tuition, 
according to the Times, by working as a construction worker and welder, not 
wanting to coast on his family wealth.

Bruck, the father of 2 adult children, spent the first 4 years of his career as 
a public defender. Then he quit to cruise around America in a 1953 Chevy. By 
the early 1980s, he had found his calling.

"A lot of David's motivation for this came out of his experience as an 
organizer against the Vietnam War," said John Blume, director of the Cornell 
Death Penalty Project. "The death penalty was in many respects just a different 
form of civil rights issue."

Bruck's early writings on capital punishment brimmed with the moral indignation 
of the civil rights movement. They were also tinged with the pessimism of a 
weary combatant who did not see the end in sight. In 1987, he lamented that the 
racism inherent to the system ???offends no political power blocs," since the 
victims are "expendable people."

"If we choose to," he wrote in the New Republic, "we can treat these prisoners 
like crickets in a fisherman's bait jar: we can casually pick 1 to impale on 
the hook while leaving 10 others, rummaging among them for no good reason at 
all, and who will care? Who will even know?"

Bruck has made an effort to let people know. In the late 1980s, he and Blume 
represented Limmie Arther, a severely impaired black man who grew up with 17 
siblings in a tin-roof shack. Before Judge John Waller sentenced Arther to 
death for murdering a neighbour, a decision later overturned, Waller and the 2 
lawyers took a drive to allow him to inspect the squalid conditions in which 
the perpetrator and victim had lived.

When they returned to the car, Waller casually remarked that the 2 men would 
have been "better off under slavery."

The judge thought, Blume said, "that he was just talking one white man to 
another." In fact, he was talking to David Bruck.

"We got back into court," Blume said, "and David said, 'Your Honour, I think 
it's very important that we put on the record what you said.'"

Waller was furious. Bruck didn't mind. It needed to be done.

6 cases

A selection of death penalty cases defended by David Bruck:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 2015: Working with prominent capital defender Judy Clarke, 
Bruck tried to convince jurors that the terrorist who bombed the Boston 
Marathon was "a good kid" manipulated into violence by his fanatical older 
brother Tamerlan, and that a life sentence at a "supermax" prison would be 
punishment enough. But they returned a death sentence.

Zayd Hassan Abd al-Latif Masud Safarini, 2004: Safarini, a Jordanian, was the 
lead hijacker in the Palestinian terrorist crew that took over Pan Am Flight 73 
on the ground at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan in 1986. In 2003, Bruck's 
team persuaded a court that the federal death penalty could not be imposed for 
a crime that occurred 8 years before the Federal Death Penalty Act was 
introduced. Safarini accepted multiple life sentences.

C. Robert Northcutt, 2003: Northcutt was sentenced to death for beating his 
4-month-old daughter to death when she wouldn't stop crying. Bruck managed to 
get the state Supreme Court to overturn the sentence because of the emotionally 
manipulative actions of the overzealous prosecutor, who staged a mock funeral 
procession for the baby, among other things. Northcutt, though, was later 
sentenced to death again.

Susan Smith, 1995: Coming on the heels of the O.J. Simpson trial, the case of 
the South Carolina mother who rolled her 2 young sons into a lake in a car - 
and went on national television to pin the blame on a black carjacker - 
received overwhelming media attention. Bruck and Clarke secured a life 
sentence.

Jonathan Dale Simmons, 1994: The jury that sentenced Simmons to death for 
murdering an elderly woman had been warned that Simmons would be a danger to 
society if he was not executed - but had not been told that Simmons would be 
ineligible for parole if he was sentenced to life in prison. Bruck took the 
case to the Supreme Court, which voted to overturn Simmons's sentence and to 
declare that defendants have a right to respond to "future dangerousness" 
claims by pointing out that "life" really means life.

James Terry Roach, 1986: Mother Teresa, Jimmy Carter and the secretary-general 
of the United Nations joined Bruck in unsuccessfully begging South Carolina's 
governor to cancel the execution of Roach, a 25-year-old who was being punished 
for the 2 brutal murders he committed when he was a juvenile at age 17. "The 
United States has no need to go on with this business of brandishing the 
electric chair at its own children," Bruck said on ABC.

(source: The Toronto Star)