[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----KAN., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 28




KANSAS:

Repeal the Death Penalty


The Honorable Steve Becker has been trying to get a hearing on a bill that 
would repeal the death penalty in Kansas and while many would jump to fight 
this effort, please consider that our state paid Public Defenders haven't had a 
raise since Genesis and they put a lot of work into defending these cases, all 
the way to the appeals process in our Kansas Supreme Court.

The Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty has put information together 
concerning what these cases are costing tax payers and should you get time, 
check out their 2014 findings.

For staunch advocates of the death penalty, I invite you to read the 2009 
Capital Punishment report put out by the American Law Institute, authors of the 
Model Penal Code which set the framework for our Kansas Criminal Code in 1963.

Should you feel that considerable tax payer dollars could be saved through the 
repeal of the death penalty, please contact Representative Becker at 
785-296-7196 in the upcoming session. Like many of our legislators, he is 
awesome, so don't be afraid to make the call.

(source: Topeka Capital-Journal)






CALIFORNIA:

California May Abolish the Death Penalty----California voters will get a chance 
to abolish the state's expensive and flawed death-penalty system, a step that 
could reduce America's death-row population by almost a quarter, writes 
Marjorie Cohn.


On Election Day, California voters will make a monumental moral and financial 
decision. Proposition 62 - the Justice That Works Act - is on the Nov. 8 
ballot, and if the initiative passes, it will replace the death penalty with 
life in prison without parole. It will also require convicted murderers to work 
and pay restitution to their victims' families. And it will save taxpayers $150 
million a year, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.

Among the states still part of the U.S. death penalty system, California has 
the most people on death row - 746. Florida is next, with 388, according to the 
Yes on 62 campaign. Overall, 2,943 people are on death row in the United States 
(as of Jan. 1) - meaning almost 1 in 4 people waiting to be executed are in the 
California penal system. The elderly make up 11 %, and the oldest condemned 
inmate is 86. The average stay on death row is 18 years.

Although California has spent about $5 billion administering the death penalty, 
it has executed just 13 people since 1978. This means taxpayers have spent 
about $384 million per execution.

There is no evidence demonstrating that the death penalty deters crime, 
according to a 2012 National Academy of Sciences study. Capital punishment has 
been applied arbitrarily due to inherent bias, local political pressures on 
prosecutors and judges, and lack of access to quality defense attorneys by 
those convicted. According to Death Penalty Focus, the race of the victim and 
the race of the defendant are major determinants in who is sentenced to death 
in this country.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center(DPIC), since 1973, 156 people 
sent to death row nationwide were later exonerated. A 2014 study conducted by 
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 4.1 % of all 
death row inmates are actually innocent.

But the innocence rate is more than twice the rate of exoneration. That means 
an unknown number of innocent people have been or will be put to death.

"Every time we have an execution, there is a risk of executing an innocent," 
said Richard Dieter, former executive director of the DPIC. "The risk may be 
small, but it's unacceptable."

The United States has no uniform law on the death penalty. Each state is free 
to choose whether or not to execute people. 19 states have abolished the death 
penalty. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights determined that this 
discrepancy violates the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, 
which the U.S. has signed.

And look at the company we keep. Only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia 
execute more people than the United States.

Comparing Propositions

California voters will be confronted with 2 competing death penalty 
propositions on the November ballot.

Whereas Proposition 62 would replace the death penalty with life in prison 
without parole, Proposition 66 - the Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act - 
purports to execute Californians more efficiently. The latter initiative would 
double down on the death penalty and spread the costs and burdens to local 
courts and counties.

Under the guise of efficiency, Proposition 66 would add two additional layers 
of habeas corpus review in superior and appellate courts. It would impose 
unworkable time frames for appeals and habeas proceedings. And it would require 
attorneys who may be inexperienced, unqualified or unwilling to take death 
penalty cases or face expulsion from the court's public defender panel.

Moreover, Proposition 66 would transfer 751 inmates to new death row facilities 
at local prisons built and maintained with county funds. Counties would be on 
the hook to provide separate housing, guards with specialized training, 
security level IV facilities, and unique physical and mental health 
accommodations.

The increased workload on superior and appellate courts would take up a 
significant and (in some counties) overwhelming percentage of local resources. 
Proposition 66 prioritizes death penalty cases at the expense of all other 
matters before the criminal and civil courts. The judicial system's ability to 
handle issues like business claims, family custody hearings and traffic tickets 
in a timely manner would be negatively impacted.

With a backlog of more than 150 capital appeals and habeas petitions now 
awaiting review, and hundreds more in the pipeline, the California Supreme 
Court would have to turn its full attention to death penalty cases for years, 
to the exclusion of other important matters, in order to meet Proposition 66's 
proposed timeline.

Proposition 66 adds sped-up appeals timelines that are unenforceable and 
infringe on judicial and legislative separation of powers. Constitutionally 
required court procedures cannot be changed through the ballot process. 
California's death penalty system is beyond repair.

Who Supports Proposition 62?

A diverse coalition of people and groups supports Proposition 62, including 
former death penalty advocates, victims' families, exonerated and wrongly 
convicted prisoners, retired district attorneys and judges, criminal law and 
economic experts, and faith, labor and civil rights leaders.

Ron Briggs, who led the 1978 campaign that brought the death penalty to 
California, calls it a "costly mistake." Briggs says, "Now I know we just hurt 
the victims' families we were trying to help and wasted taxpayers dollars." He 
maintains, "The death penalty cannot be fixed. We need to replace it, lock up 
murderers for good, make them work, and move on."

Franky Carrillo, who was convicted of a crime he didn't commit, was released 
after spending 20 years in prison. Witnesses recanted, and new evidence came to 
light.

"I am living proof that our justice system sometimes gets it wrong," Carrillo 
says. "If I had been sentenced to death instead of life in prison, this might 
have been a different story." An innocent man might have been put to death.

The Catholic Bishops of America supports Proposition 62, stating "capital 
punishment has repeatedly been shown to be severely and irrevocably flawed in 
its application."

Endorsers of Proposition 62 include the California Democratic Party, California 
Labor Federation, Service Employees International Union, California Federation 
of Teachers, Exonerated Nation, National Association of Criminal Defense 
Lawyers, Rainbow Push Coalition, California NAACP, Clergy and Laity United for 
Economic Justice, California Catholic Conference, and the League of Women 
Voters of California.

Proposition 62 would replace California's failed death penalty system with life 
in prison, guaranteeing that the worst criminals would never be released. It 
would provide a measure of respect to victims' families by requiring convicted 
murderers to work and pay restitution. And it would save taxpayers $150 million 
per year, money that could be spent on education and repairing California's 
crumbling infrastructure.

The United Nations Special Rapporteurs on summary executions, Christof Heyns 
(whose term recently expired), and on torture, Juan E. Mendez, have called on 
the U.S. government to initiate a federal moratorium on the imposition of the 
death penalty with a view to abolish it. They observed that more than 3/4 of 
countries around the world have abolished the death penalty either in law or 
practice.

"Despite all efforts to implement capital punishment in a 'humane' fashion, 
time and again executions have resulted in a degrading spectacle," they wrote. 
"The death penalty as a form of punishment is inherently flawed."

None of the 3 major international criminal tribunals - the International 
Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 
and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda - allow the death penalty as 
a sentencing option for the most heinous of crimes over which they have 
jurisdiction.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (quoting former Justice 
Byron White's 1972 concurrence in Furman v. Georgia) thinks "the imposition of 
the death penalty represents 'the pointless and needless extinction of life 
with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. 
A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and 
cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.'"

In a 1976 Boston Globe article, then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur L. 
Goldberg wrote: "The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the 
state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human 
personality."

When speaking to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1830, years after witnessing 
the excesses of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, said, "I shall 
ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility 
of human judgment demonstrated to me."

The premeditated killing of human beings by the state is expensive and just 
plain wrong. Californians should abolish it.

(source: Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, 
former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of 
the International Association of Democratic Lawyers----consortiumnews.com)






USA:

The end of Dylann Roof: Because some people just need to die


The wheels of justice grind slowly, and the case of mass murderer Dylann Roof 
is no exception. (I've given up on bothering to say "alleged" in reference to 
Roof so feel free to cast stones at me over that if you wish. He did it.) It's 
still a couple of months before jury selection begins in the case, but when it 
does, a group of Roof's peers from the community will not only decide on his 
guilt, but whether or not he will be put to death for his crimes. The death 
penalty will remain a bone of contention in our society for as long as it 
exists, but there's a new twist on the argument against it this week from Wade 
Henderson, the longtime president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and 
Human Rights.

Rather than arguing that Roof deserves compassion or that all life is precious, 
one of several complaints coming from Mr. Henderson seems to be that putting a 
white murderer to death would obscure the debate over how many black convicts 
face the same fate. (Washington Post)

At first glance, the notion of a white man facing the death penalty for 
murdering black people in the South - in a killing inspired by the murderer's 
racist views - may seem like a marker of racial progress.

It isn't - and those who champion civil rights should not celebrate this 
moment. Roof's crime was surely heinous, and his racism was repugnant. But 
supporters of racial equality and equal treatment under the law should support 
Roof's offer to plead guilty and serve a sentence of life without the 
possibility of parole.

How can it be that a lifelong civil rights lawyer such as myself would take 
this position? Because the death penalty cannot be separated from the issue of 
racial discrimination, especially in the South.

Henderson is tackling a thorny subject, and in rebutting him I immediately run 
into a similar set of conundra. (Yes, I know... but I just like conundra.) 
Attempting to separate race from the question of Roof's guilt is particularly 
difficult from either side of the equation given the nature of his horrific 
crimes. And for the record, Henderson is arguing against a capital offense case 
on more grounds than simply racial inequity. It may surprise the reader to 
learn that I agree with virtually each and every one of the author's 
complaints, but we still arrive at a different conclusion.

His 1st argument is that the death penalty is applied with greater proportional 
frequency to black men (almost exclusively males, anyway) convicted of killing 
white victims than to white murderers. This is true and criminal justice 
records support that fact. It's similar to how crack users (more frequently 
black suspects) receive longer sentences than snorters of powdered cocaine 
(more typically whites). Neither of these situations represents equal 
application of justice and Henderson has a valid complaint on that score.

He goes on to point out something which is hardly unique to race related 
murders such as the ones Roof committed. It will tear the community apart. 
Friends and family members of the deceased will be forced to relive something 
horrible beyond the imaginations of those of us fortunate enough not to live 
through such a monstrous event. The defense will spin tales and perhaps even 
seek to shift blame to make Roof look less despicable than he is. This, as 
Henderson correctly notes, is the way our criminal justice system is designed. 
The defense will do what they must to offer the most robust defense of their 
client possible, no matter how painful it is to the community.

So with Wade Henderson and I agreeing on so much, how is it that we arrive at 
such different conclusions? Because the reality of the world is sometimes much 
harsher than the more gentle souls among us would wish to admit. In real life, 
just as in sword and sorcery films, you occasionally come across monster and 
those monsters need to be slain. Not all murder cases merit the death penalty, 
of course. There are sudden, horrible crimes of passion which take place. 
Sometimes a non-violent criminal with no intention of killing gets caught up in 
a high tension moment of conflict and takes a life. While exceedingly rare and 
often falsely claimed by other defendants, some individuals are so badly 
mentally impaired that they honestly can't grasp the consequences of their 
actions. Other examples abound and many cases which result in a killing don???t 
automatically demand an eye for an eye from civilized society. Intent and 
circumstances need to be taken into account.

None of these scenarios apply to Dylann Roof. He is no crazier than any other 
individual who would willingly murder another and he concocted a plan, equipped 
himself to the task and set out to complete it with more than adequate time to 
reflect on his choice and turn back. Dylann Roof isn't the boy next door caught 
up in unfortunate events. He's a beast, and sometimes society has to be ready 
to just put the beast down and be done with it. As I've written here before, I 
understand that many will argue that the death penalty isn't a deterrent. My 
response is that this is a question which can never be definitively answered. 
We'll never know how many people may have considered murder but turned back for 
fear of the specter of their own mortality if they were to be caught and sent 
to the gallows. So is the death penalty a deterrent? Perhaps in many cases it's 
not, but there is one thing I know for a certainty. If the defendant in this 
case receives that sentence and it's carried out it will most assuredly be a 
100% effective deterrent for Dylann Roof.

We don't need to turn this into an argument over racial inequity in the justice 
system. There is needed work to be done in determining if and when black 
defendants are sentenced to death when a white man in the same circumstances 
would not be and everyone should support ending that pattern. But today we're 
talking about Dylann Roof. There is no room for him in civil society and 
dragging this argument off into the weeds of social justice debates does no 
service to his victims and their families, nor does it protect the rest of 
society from him should he ever escape from jail in the future.

I take no joy in this, but it's time to put the beast down and be done with it.

(source: Jazz Shaw, hotair.com)

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

Death penalty punishes survivors like me: Column


The day after the massacre of nine parishioners at the Emmanuel A.M.E. Baptist 
Church in Charleston, S.C., a judge sentenced a man to life in prison for 
killing my sister.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has said the Justice Department would seek the 
death penalty against Dylann Roof, the young self-avowed white supremacist 
accused in the June 17, 2015 killings. His lawyers say he is willing to plead 
guilty in exchange for life in prison without parole, but the Justice 
Department says it's seeking Roof's execution because of his expressed hatred 
of African-Americans and his lack of remorse. That has prompted Roof's legal 
defense team to challenge the constitutionality of the death penalty, calling 
it unreliable, excessive and undermined by lengthy delays.

To me, the death penalty also is something else - a sad reminder of how our 
justice system typically offers punishment instead of healing for the survivors 
of violent crime. The prosecution did not seek the death penalty in my sister's 
case, but I would have opposed it had they done so.

As in South Carolina, a victim's rights law in California granted me the 
opportunity to speak publicly at his sentencing hearing. After a trial that 
spanned 3 months, I was too weary and heartbroken to deliver my statement in 
person. But I did write a letter that was read to the defendant in open court.

Unlike those family members in Charleston, I did not forgive my sister's 
killer. To the contrary, I castigated him for strangling my sister so viciously 
that the bones in her neck broke. For dumping her body down a ravine like a 
sack of trash. In my letter, I recounted the pain and trauma that the murder 
had visited upon our family. I asked the judge to impose a long sentence in 
prison on the defendant, a man with a history of violent crimes.

For a growing number of victims of violence, the thought of honoring our loved 
ones by killing another human being is not only counter-intuitive, but 
abhorrent. Perhaps more than others, I understand acutely that an execution 
would just visit pain on another family.

Moreover, the death penalty typically brings the opposite of what survivors of 
crime most need: accountability, healing and closure. To me, accountability 
means an acceptance of responsibility for the crime and its impact on others. 
Healing requires some answers to why our loved ones were hurt, and letting go 
of some of the rage we've felt in losing them. Closure requires an end to a 
justice process that brings some reasonable assurance that no one else will be 
harmed at the same hands.

Roof has already tried to accept responsibility through a guilty plea to a life 
sentence. But a capital prosecution will undo all that: in order to save his 
life, his lawyers will be forced to deny their client's guilt at trial and try 
to mitigate his culpability during sentencing.

A death sentence also denies Roof's victims answers as to why this senseless 
violence occurred. One day, I would like to ask my sister's killer, "Who and 
what hurt you, as a child? Do you ever think about my sister? Do you ever think 
about her daughter, my niece?' As much as I want answers to those questions, I 
also want him to come to a place of insight and understanding about his crime. 
It might someday make it possible for us to hear the words, "I'm sorry." It 
would give me some reassurance that he won't hurt someone else in prison.

Roof is a young man. He may not feel remorse for his crime now nor have the 
maturity to yet understand what brought him to a place of rage and violence. 
But one day he might. The death penalty exempts him and other offenders from 
confronting the human impact of their crimes.

Far from bringing closure, family members of his victims will have to suffer 
through not 1 but 2 trials, because South Carolina and the federal government 
are bringing duplicative charges. And because a death sentence by law requires 
review by an appellate court, the family members of the Charleston victims will 
have to face years - most likely decades - of appeals and accompanying news 
stories that will reopen old wounds.

The death penalty also keeps us stuck in an angry stage of grief. The death 
penalty requires all of us, victims and spectators alike, to actively summon 
feelings of hatred and contempt in order to justify the murder of another human 
being. I have felt all of those things at various times towards my sister's 
killer. But I know one thing for certain: They aren't emotions I want to hang 
on to. I'm old enough to understand that hate is a cancerous emotion that hurts 
me more than it hurts him.

While not all murder victim family members feel this way, many of us do. For 
all these reasons, I say to prosecutors who seek the death penalty: Not in my 
name.

(source: Tanya Coke, a former defense attorney and distinguished lecturer at 
John Jay College, is senior program officer for criminal justice at the Ford 
Foundation----WTSP news)