[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, IND., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 20



TEXAS:

Montgomery County DA Going For Death Penalty in 2014 Double Murder ---- The 
Montgomery County DA is going for the death penalty for a 2014 double murder.


For the 1st time since 2009, the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office 
is pursuing the death penalty against someone.

The DA's office wants to give Russell Lee Ketchum the hot shot for allegedly 
killing Louis Wilkerson, 58, and Lisa McWashington, 43.

In Oct. 2014, Ketchum, 41, allegedly choked Wilkerson to death with his bare 
hands. He's accused of using a shirt to strangle McWashington. Both bodies were 
dumped in the 800 block of West Santa Fe, near downtown Conroe.

Ketchum was arrested in January 2015 and has remained in custody at the 
Montgomery County Jail without bond. Ketchum's attorney plans to claim that the 
killings were self-defense.

Although this the 1st death penalty case since 2009, it isn't the 1st capital 
murder case. The DA's office has tried multiple capital murder cases, the 
prosecutors didn't think that the circumstances of those cases rose to the 
level of the death penalty.

(source: patch.com)






INDIANA:

Attorneys argue Indiana death penalty unconstitutional


Attorneys for a man who faces charges in the deaths of 7 women have argued in 
court filings that the state of Indiana's death penalty law is 
unconstitutional.

The Post-Tribune reports that Darren Vann remains in isolation at the Lake 
County jail. His attorneys argued in an Aug. 5 filing that an Indiana Code 
statute is unconstitutional in 2 main areas.

They question how a jury is supposed to weigh factors that could influence a 
death sentence. They also say it's unconstitutional to allow a judge to 
determine a defendant's death sentence when the jury can't.

Government prosecutors have until Sept. 7 to file a response to the claim.

Lake County prosecutors requested the death penalty for Vann last year.

Lake County prosecutors requested the death penalty for Vann last year. He 
faces charges in connection with the deaths of Anith Jones 35, of Merrillville; 
Afrikka Hardy, 19, of Chicago; Teaira Batey, 28, of Gary; Tracy Martin, 41, of 
Gary; Kristine Williams, 36, of Gary; Sonya Billingsley, 52, of Gary; and Tanya 
Gatlin, 27, of Highland.

If convicted, he could join 13 other people on death row in Indiana.

Kevin Charles Isom, the other man facing the death penalty in Lake County, also 
questioned the factors a jury is supposed to weigh before sentencing someone to 
death. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled against him in 2015.

The constitutionality of capital punishment is an issue the country has 
grappled with for decades as states have altered their death penalty laws.

"Pieces of things in the statute have been pulled off and changed (in 
Indiana)," said Andrea Lyon, dean of Valparaiso University Law School. "But 
Indiana Supreme Court and, thus far, any other federal court has not said that 
Indiana, generally, has been unconstitutional."

Delaware's highest court ruled its state's death penalty law was 
unconstitutional less than two weeks ago. It said it gave judges too large of a 
role over juries in imposing death sentences.

Vann's attorneys say in the motion that the situations in Delaware and Indiana 
are similar.

[Information from: Post-Tribune]

(source: Associated press)






CALIFORNIA----female faces death penalty

Prosecutors Seeking Death Penalty For Tami Joy Huntsman In Death Of 2 Small 
Children


40-year-old Tami Joy Huntsman will be facing the death penalty when she goes to 
trial in February for the abuse and murder of 3-year-old Delylah Tara and 
6-year-old Shaun Tara in November 2015. Huntsman appeared in Monterey County 
Superior Court this week alongside boyfriend Gonzalo Curiel, 18, and she 
collapsed in her chair distraught when Deputy District Attorney Steve Somers 
announced that they would be pursuing the death penalty. Curiel, who is also 
charged with the children's murder, is not eligible for the death penalty 
because he was 17 at the time of the alleged crime.

The children, who were initially believed to be Huntsman's niece and nephew but 
may be some other relation, were in Huntsman's and Curiel's care last November 
in a Salinas apartment along with their older sister, a 9-year-old who was 
later found severely abused but alive in an apartment in Quincy, California. 
Sometime on or after November 27, the 2 smaller children were killed, and it's 
believed that Huntsman and Curiel traveled with their bodies as well as the 
9-year-old to Plumas and Shasta Counties, where on December 13 the 2 children's 
remains were found in a storage facility in Redding.

As CBS 5 reports, both defendants have pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, 
torture, child abuse, conspiracy, and special circumstances allegations.

Prosecutors say the children's father will testify in the case, as will 3 child 
witnesses, including, presumably, the 9-year-old sister. She was discovered 
first by authorities, in what was reportedly a severely abused state, on 
December 11, and she may have led authorities to the storage unit in Redding.

An earlier report in the Salinas Monterey Herald explained that the children 
had come to live with Huntsman at the request of their father after their 
mother was killed in a car accident in December 2013. Huntsman has 4 children 
of her own, but further questions were raised about the culpability of Child 
Protective Services, who had previously had to remove Huntsman's 12-year-old 
twins from her care. Both the 6- and 9-year-old were enrolled in home schooling 
as of August 2015, and therefore had not had regular contact with teachers or 
others.

She had, according to neighbors, taken up with then 17-year-old Curiel in 
January 2015 after filing a restraining order against her ex-husband. Huntsman 
also has a son who is 15 or 16 years old.

Disturbingly, as this case broke last December we learned that Huntsman is the 
sister of Wayne Allen Huntsman, who pleaded guilty this past April to arson for 
singlehandedly starting the 100,000-acre King Fire in 2014 in El Dorado County. 
He is now serving a 20-year sentence.

Tami Huntsman is scheduled for trial on February 6, and prosecutors may still 
decide to try Curiel separately.

(source: sfist.com)






USA:

Here's What It's Like To Be a Defense Investigator in a Rigged Criminal Justice 
System----A journalist turned private eye unloads.


Once upon a time I was a journalist, covering wars in Indochina, Central 
America, and the Middle East. I made it my job to write about the victims of 
war, the civilian casualties. To me, they were hardly "collateral damage," that 
bloodless term the military persuaded journalists to adopt. To me, they were 
the center of war. Now I'm a private eye. I work mostly on homicide cases for 
defense lawyers on the mean streets of Oakland, California, long viewed as one 
of America's murder capitals.

Indeed, on some days Oakland feels like Saigon, Tegucigalpa, or Gaza. There's 
the deception of daily life and the silent routine of dread punctured by 
out-of-the-blue mayhem. The city's poorest neighborhoods are sporadic war zones 
whose violence sometimes explodes onto streets made rich overnight by the tech 
boom. On any quiet day, you can drive down San Pablo Avenue past St. Columba 
Catholic Church, where a thicket of white crosses, one for every Oaklander 
killed by gun violence in a given year, crowds its front yard.

Whenever I tell people I'm a private eye, they ask: "Do you get innocent people 
off death row?" Or "Can you follow my ex around?" Or "What kind of gun do you 
carry?"

I always disappoint them. Yes, I do defend people against the death penalty, 
but so far all my defendants have probably been guilty - of something. (Often, 
I can only guess what.) While keeping them off death row may absolve me of 
being an accessory after the fact to murder, it also regularly condemns my 
defendants to life in prison until they die there.

My defendants may be guilty - but seldom of what they are charged with.

And I find spying on people their ex-spouses fantasize about killing much 
sleazier than actual murder. Finally, I'm a good shot, but I don't carry a gun 
because that's the best way to get shot. I work on the low-profile cases: poor 
people charged with murder, burglary, or robbery, who don't have the money for 
a lawyer or their own P.I. (I'm paid, if you can call it that, by the state.)

Then people invariably want to know, "How can you help defend a murderer?" The 
law school answer is: The constitution guarantees everyone a fair trial. For 
me, however, if it's a death penalty case, it's simple: I'm against the death 
penalty no matter what the accused did (or didn't do). But in this age of stop 
and frisk, racial profiling, mandatory sentencing, the death penalty, and life 
without parole - not to mention execution by cop - the real answer is: I can't. 
Defend anybody, that is. Not really.

I'm just a tiny cog in America's vast Criminal Injustice System. One of the 
lawyers I work for sometimes calls himself "just a potted plant." My defendants 
may be guilty - but seldom of what they are charged with. They are rarely 
convicted of what they actually did and are never sentenced fairly.

One day recently, I was getting ready to hit the streets in search of a witness 
to a murder when I found in my email Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the 
Supreme Court Case of Utah v. Strieff. It had been forwarded by a psychologist 
with whom I once worked on a death penalty case.

Anyone lulled into thinking the new coalition of liberals and conservatives who 
hope to reform the criminal justice system will actually get somewhere should 
read Strieff. The facts are the following: A Salt Lake City cop was watching a 
home rumored to house methamphetamine dealers. When Edward Joseph Strieff left 
the house, the cop stopped him, questioned him, and checked his record. When 
the cop found a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket, he searched Strieff, 
found meth in his pockets, and arrested him for possession.

In Strieff and other cases leading up to it, the Supreme Court has now decreed 
that evidence gathered in an illegal search isn't "the fruit of the poisoned 
tree," as Justice Felix Frankfurter put it in 1939, and so no longer must be 
suppressed. Even though gathered illegally, evidence can be used at trial 
against a defendant. In short, stop-and-frisk policing and racial profiling, 
key targets of the new civil rights movement, just got a stamp of approval from 
the highest court in the land.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also dissented. But it was Justice 
Sotomayor who sounded the alarm in an opinion evoking nothing less than James 
Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and adding quotations from W.E.B. Du Bois, 
Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Michelle Alexander for good measure. She wrote:

"The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking 
ticket will forgive a police officer's violation of your Fourth Amendment 
rights. Do not be soothed by the opinion's technical language: this case allows 
the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it 
for outstanding traffic warrants - even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the 
officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now 
excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to 
find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant. Because the Fourth 
Amendment should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent."

Sotomayor concluded:

"This case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an 
officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is 
subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It 
implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral 
state, just waiting to be catalogued.

"We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by 
police are 'isolated.' They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, 
civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere."

If you're poor, you may serve weeks or months in jail, even if you're innocent, 
before your case is heard.

Her dissent describes daily existence for my defendants. Too poor to buy car 
insurance, fix broken tail lights, pay parking tickets, or get green cards, 
they are always on high alert for the police. (Alice Goffman's brilliant study, 
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, describes just how it works in 
one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods.) My defendants have been sentenced 
to life in a war zone even before they find themselves charged in court. They 
have been sentenced to a life without parole or sometimes to death, caught as 
they are in a crossfire between cops and warring neighborhood gangstas.

A warrant for, say, unpaid parking tickets discovered in a Strieff-approved 
stop gets you a search of yourself and your car by police and maybe a bust for 
weed, the intoxicant of choice for many of the poor. If you object or run or 
the arresting officer is having a bad day, it may get you dead. (Refusing to 
pay protection money to your neighborhood punks or standing on the wrong corner 
at the wrong time may do the same.)

Once you're arrested, if you say you want a lawyer, you get a public defender 
with so many cases she or he may not even be able to meet you or read the 
complaint against you before you appear in court. You may serve weeks or months 
in jail, even if you're innocent, before your case is heard, and years before 
you are tried.

A district attorney has a whole police department to use to investigate a crime 
(although the Oakland Police Department, which I'm often up against, solves 
only 27 percent of its murder cases, and so is not exactly the most formidable 
of foes). (A recent investigation by the East Bay Express suggests that some 
Oakland cops are too busy hooking up with underage prostitutes to solve 
murders.) But if a DA needs to find a witness, the OPD's army of street cops 
can often locate him through their confidential informants. Or they can pull 
him in on a warrant for those unpaid parking tickets, threaten a drug bust or 
revocation of his parole or probation, or hold him as a material witness if he 
resists cooperating.

I have no muscle. But I have been known to find a witness who doesn't want to 
be found.

At best, a defendant gets just me - and most of the accused don't get an 
investigator at all. The landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright 
may have given poor defendants the right to an attorney, but there is no legal 
right to an investigator (except in death penalty cases). And unlike a DA, no 
one has to talk to me or face trouble with the law. I have no muscle. But I 
have been known to find a witness who doesn't want to be found and nag him or 
her into submission.

In the last 10 years, in cases mostly in Northern California, among scores of 
people I've helped defend, only 3 have been white - and they were as destitute 
as the poor blacks and Latinos who jam American jails and prisons.

Defense teams I've been on start off by guessing if and why the accused might 
have done what he's charged with. It's human nature to do so. But if the 
accused is pleading not guilty, it's better not to know. "I don't know what 
happened, I wasn't there," one death penalty lawyer I work with regularly says 
to shut off such speculation. As for the why, the shrinks often can't help, 
even if you call on them to testify. Decades of research into the criminal mind 
often comes down to: "He snapped." That's not a good line for a jury, but it's 
the kicker to many a defense meeting.

In a real trial, the truth of what actually happened doesn't matter anyway. 
Only the truth of the evidence counts.

Are poverty, racism, and a desperate childhood a defense? Prosecutors love to 
face this argument. They get on their high horses and trot out the American 
dream and all the poor people who suck up their rage and despair and don't 
murder someone. All the folks who don't snap.

California nixed the "diminished capacity" argument in 1981, after the killer 
of Harvey Milk used his notorious "Twinkie defense."

But in California, what might have caused someone to snap isn't admissible at 
trial anyway, except in death penalty cases. A "diminished capacity" defense 
was abolished in 1981 after ex-San Francisco Supervisor Dan White used one to 
beat a murder rap for killing Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. 
The jury bought his lawyer's argument - which came to be known as the "Twinkie 
defense" - that White was addled by junk food when he killed the 2 of them. It 
ignored evidence that White intended and planned the murder, taking his gun to 
City Hall, climbing through a window to avoid metal detectors, and reloading it 
after first shooting Moscone.

These days, only in the penalty phase of a death penalty case - when the jury 
decides whether the defendant they've just found guilty will face capital 
punishment or life in prison without parole - can defense lawyers present 
evidence of the tragic facts of the defendant's life. The jury may then hear of 
his years in foster care, his mom the crack addict, his dad absent in prison, 
and the older brother who initiated him into street life. Only then will the 
jury be asked to see the accused as a person with a life beyond the crime with 
which he is charged. The defense will finally replace a prosecutor's blown-up 
mug shot of the defendant and Facebook screen shots of him showing off a gun 
with family photos of him at his sixth birthday party decked out in a silly hat 
and others of his toddler and baby mama.

Most jurors don't much like this defense. They assume it's just an excuse. But 
it's not. It's an explanation.

Take Larry. He's an OG (original gangsta, or old guy), a 50-year-old African 
American man who grew up in dire poverty in Deep East, Oakland's most murderous 
neighborhood. Larry has symptoms of schizophrenia but has never been able to 
get real mental health care. He's been living, on and off, with his mother who 
is also schizophrenic in Acorn ("The 'Corn"), one of the toughest housing 
projects in West Oakland. His mother is too afraid of its gangbangers to leave 
her apartment. Larry recently told a counselor at a walk-in clinic for the poor 
that he thought he had PTSD from all the shooting and killing he's witnessed.

Like many poor Oaklanders, he makes his meager living in the underground 
economy, dealing small amounts of weed to regular customers who phone him on 
his cell. While cellphones have made it possible to sell drugs without the turf 
battles of the past, The 'Corn is ruled by a gang of young punks called the 
Acorn Mob and their rivals, the Gashouse Team. The Mob doesn't just support 
itself moving guns or drugs. It also makes money ripping off small-time dealers 
like Larry, demanding protection money from neighborhood people, and robbing 
the elderly when they cash their social security checks.

For Larry, a simple walk down the block might mean being rolled by the Mob, 
accosted by police, or caught in the crossfire.

Like many poor people living on such mean streets, Larry is always looking over 
his shoulder. A simple walk down the block might mean being rolled by the Mob, 
accosted by police, or caught in the crossfire of someone else's feud.

In early 2012, Larry's life dropped off a cliff. His brother died of cancer; 
his daughter died in a freak case of emergency room malpractice; he witnessed a 
friend gunned down in a gang battle; and he was robbed at gunpoint on a street 
near The 'Corn. Meanwhile, the Acorn Mob was stepping up pressure on OGs like 
Larry to pay them protection money.

As Larry tells it, one morning that August, two of the most vicious Mob 
gangbangers dogged him on the streets around The 'Corn, demanding to know when 
he'd take up a collection from his OG buddies to pay them off. He took shelter 
along with his crew in a friend's apartment in one of the project's towers. 
When he told his friends about the latest threats, the group debated what to 
do, damping their fears by smoking weed and drinking mai tais.

Later, near dark, Larry and his friend Arthur wandered over to the local liquor 
store to buy the cigarillos they filled with weed to make blunts. On the way, 
the same two Acorn Mob punks who had accosted them earlier that day threatened 
to kill Larry if he didn't come up with some money fast. Larry and Arthur 
sought refuge in the store, but one of the young thugs followed them inside. 
The other waited outside the door.

Even the victim's stepfather believed the young man was killed accidently by 
his own cousin. But no witness would come forward.

Larry had had enough. He snapped. He grabbed an old handgun Arthur carried for 
protection and ran out of the store. He says he fired once, hoping to scare off 
the 2 of them. That started a volley of wild shots. When Arthur's gun jammed, 
Larry ran back inside the liquor store. As soon as the shooting stopped, Larry 
and Arthur split the neighborhood. Somehow in the melee, one of the Acorn 
mobsters was shot and later died at the county hospital.

Larry and Arthur were arrested some months later. Larry was charged with murder 
and Arthur with being a felon with a gun and an accessory with knowledge of a 
crime. Word on the street was that the victim had been killed accidently by his 
own cousin, the gangsta who had followed Larry into the liquor store. Even the 
victim's stepfather told me he believed that. But no witness - and there were 
many standing outside the liquor store during the melee, including several of 
Larry's buddies - would come forward. They all had records, were doing drugs, 
and were afraid of the police.

Six cartridges from one gun and a single cartridge from another were found in 
the street near the body. Neither gun was ever found. The victim had suffered a 
"through and through" wound, which meant there were no bullet fragments to 
match to a particular gun anyway.

California's self-defense and provocation laws - unlike Florida's "stand your 
ground law," which figured in George Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin - 
are very strict. Larry's lawyer worried that a judge would rule self-defense 
couldn't be justified because Larry had fired the 1st shot (even if it was, as 
he claimed, in the air). His possible PTSD, the recent dire tragedies in his 
personal life, the pressures of Oakland's mean streets, the fact that his mind 
was addled by weed and mai tais - all would be irrelevant in a California 
trial.

Fearing the outcome of a trial, Larry took a manslaughter plea for a killing he 
may not have done, and received a mandatory 12 years in prison.

So Larry didn't have the luxury of a Twinkie defense. He feared a jury. No poor 
person gets a jury of his or her peers. Few poor people are called for jury 
duty because the lists of potential jurors are made up from voter and driver's 
license records; few poor people living the fugitive life vote and many don't 
have a driver's license. Coming to court might mean being stopped and frisked 
by the police. (I've had a defense witness arrested on a warrant while waiting 
to testify outside court and others who have been followed home by the police 
after they showed up to support a family member on trial.) No prosecutor would 
permit anyone on a jury who's led the kind of life Larry has - someone with a 
drug record (even if 20 years old), or who understood life and death in 
Oakland's war zones firsthand.

Larry feared mandatory sentencing, which severely restricts a judge's ability 
to vary a sentence by taking into consideration mitigating facts in a 
particular person's life like Larry's clean record for the last 20 years, his 
possible PTSD, or the daily grind of violence in The 'Corn. That meant he was 
facing 25 years to life if convicted of murder. For defending himself. For 
firing 1 shot when it wasn't even clear who had killed the victim.

Larry took a plea to a killing he may not have done. Voluntary manslaughter 
with a mandatory sentence of 12 years in prison.

The Acorn Mob youngster who threatened Larry in the liquor store that August 
night and probably fired the fatal round was soon arrested for many armed 
robberies and sent to prison for 15 years.

I saw Larry right before he left the county jail for prison. I apologized for 
not being able to defend him. He thanked me for trying and added, "It ain't 
just, but that's how they do."

(source: Former journalist Judith Coburn, who has written for Mother Jones and 
many other outlets, became a P.I. 10 years ago----Mother Jones)