[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----DEL., N.C., GA., ALA.

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 5



DELAWARE:

Judge meets with attorneys regarding death row inmate


A judge is meeting with attorneys in the case of a man sentenced to death for 
raping and killing a University of Delaware student.

The judge scheduled an office conference Monday in the case of James Cooke, who 
was convicted of the 2005 murder of 20-year-old Lindsey Bonistall of White 
Plains, New York.

The U.S. Supreme Court last year refused to hear an appeal from Cooke.

Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court declared Delaware's death penalty 
law unconstitutional because it allows judges too much discretion and does not 
require that a jury find unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt that a 
defendant deserves to be executed.

The court will hear arguments this week on whether its ruling should be applied 
retroactively to Cooke and 12 other death row inmates.

(source: The Associated Press






NORTH CAROLINA:

Convicted Asheville murderer could find out if he will stay on death row


A man sentenced to death in the gruesome murders of his aunt and cousin in 
South Asheville may be spared the death penalty.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Monday for Phillip Davis.

In 1997, a jury sentenced Davis to death. Davis, who was 19-years-old at the 
time, was convicted of hacking his aunt Joyce Miller, a local school teacher, 
with a cleaver. He also killed Miller's daughter, Caroline, who was a senior at 
T.C. Roberson.

Back then, Davis was the youngest to face execution in North Carolina.

However, nearly 20 years later, a jury matter that the defense believes 
affected the African-American defendant's sentence.

According to court documents, the state removed a prospective black juror, 
despite objections from the defense. Davis' attorney believes the juror was 
removed because of her race alone.

During the hearing that is currently scheduled for Monday, it will be 
determined whether Davis stays on death row, or if he will spend life in prison 
without parole.

(source: WLOS news)






GEORGIA----impending execution

Georgia's Dangerous Rush to Execution


Tomorrow, the State of Georgia intends to execute William Sallie, who was 
convicted of killing a man in 1990. It would be Georgia's 9th execution this 
year, a modern state record and nearly twice the previous high-water mark of 5 
executions, set 1st in 1987 and again in 2015.

I served as a justice on the Supreme Court of Georgia for over 15 years. During 
that time I participated in dozens of death-penalty cases and affirmed many of 
them. That experience, though, exposed me to some of the significant flaws in 
the system - not just the injustice of the death penalty itself, but specific 
problems with the way capital cases are handled. Mr. Sallie's case is a prime 
example.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Georgia's system, and one of the reasons the 
state carries out so many executions, is that it often fails to provide people 
with lawyers. Mr. Sallie, for example, missed a filing deadline for a federal 
review of his case by 8 days, in part because he didn't have a lawyer at the 
time to help him. And this isn't just a delay tactic; he has several strong 
claims about constitutional failings during his trial that, if proved, could 
require the reversal of his conviction. As things stand, he will be executed 
without review.

Fundamental fairness, due process and the prohibition against cruel and unusual 
punishment require the courts to provide an attorney throughout the entire 
legal process to review a death sentence. Virtually every capital-punishment 
state has this safeguard. Georgia is an outlier.

I saw this firsthand as the presiding justice on the State Supreme Court in 
1999, in an appeal of a post-conviction hearing for a man named Exzavious 
Gibson, who was 17 at the time of his crime. It was a critical proceeding, 
where a lawyer should have raised important details about whether he received 
adequate representation during his trial - except that, ironically, no 
volunteer attorney was available. Mr. Gibson, who was poor and apparently, from 
the records, intellectually disabled and afflicted by acute mental health 
problems, was forced to represent himself.

That sham of a proceeding is one of the most deplorable vignettes in Georgia's 
legal history. But a majority of my fellow justices were less moved, and the 
court decided, 4-3, that people with death-penalty convictions have no right to 
counsel at that critical post-conviction stage - a ruling still in force today.

As a result, a door that would have been open to Mr. Sallie in almost any other 
state was closed to him in Georgia. If it were open, he would be able to 
present the facts about his trial, which appear to show serious problems with 
juror bias.

Mr. Sallie's lawyers amassed volumes of public records and witness statements 
showing that one of the jurors, despite having a known bias, apparently misled 
the trial judge and the parties in order to join the jury. (She omitted vital, 
likely disqualifying information, including striking similarities between her 
traumatic history of divorce and interstate child custody fights and the 
domestic strife at the center of Mr. Sallie's case.) In 2012, after his 
conviction, she bragged to an investigator that she had persuaded the jury, 
which was evenly divided between life and death, to vote unanimously for death.

The problem is not just Georgia. The United States Supreme Court has not ruled 
that the Constitution guarantees a right to an attorney during the critical 
post-conviction review stage in state courts. Georgia continues to deny counsel 
- and denies a man like William Sallie the opportunity to defend his life.

(source: Op-Ed; Norman S. Fletcher served on the Supreme Court of Georgia for 
over 15 years and was its chief justice from 2001 to 2005----New York Times)

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

Clemency hearing to be held for inmate set for execution


Georgia's parole board plans to hold a clemency hearing for a death row inmate 
scheduled for execution this week.

William Sallie is to be put to death Tuesday. He was convicted in the March 
1990 slaying of his father-in-law in rural south Georgia.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles scheduled the hearing on Monday to give 
advocates for Sallie a chance to make a case for sparing his life. The board 
will also give those who think Sallie should be executed a chance to speak.

The hearing is closed to the media and the public.

. The parole board is the only authority in Georgia with power to commute a 
death sentence.

Sallie also has legal challenges pending in the courts.

(source: Associated Press)






ALABAMA:

The First Black Woman DA in Alabama History Wants to Shake Up the Death Penalty


For decades, 2 things have been true about criminal justice in Jefferson 
County, Alabama: The district attorneys have been white men, and a lot of 
people have been sentenced to death.

Lynneice Washington is about to change that. Washington, a judge in a 
Birmingham suburb, defeated the incumbent DA, Republican Bill Veitch, in last 
month's election. Her victory was finally certified this past week after a 
recount showed she won by 299 votes.

When she takes office next month, Washington will be the 1st black woman 
serving as a DA in the history of the state. She will also join a very small 
club nationwide: 95 % of elected prosecutors are white and just 1 percent are 
women of color, according to a report released last summer by the Respective 
Democracy Campaign.

"Thanks to the voters here, I have broken that glass ceiling," Washington told 
VICE in an interview. "It's an awesome feeling, but I also understand it comes 
with great responsibility... I stood on their shoulders to get here and I 
intend to continue to make them proud."

Washington also marks a departure from her predecessors in that she is 
personally opposed to the death penalty, and even campaigned on reining it in. 
Since 2010, Jefferson County has sentenced 5 people to death - more than 99.5 % 
of counties in the US, according to Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment 
Project found. All 5 of the people it sent to death row since 2010 were black.

While Washington has vowed to uphold the law - the state is not exactly a 
bastion of death penalty repeal sentiment - the way capital punishment works is 
"unfair and arbitrary and unbalanced," she told me. "We need to face that, and 
until we face it, things are going to get worse."

The other newly elected DA in Jefferson County (which is divided into 2 
judicial districts), Charles Todd Henderson, has also said he is personally 
opposed to the death penalty and wants to reform how it is used.

Henderson and Washington speak to a larger nationwide trend of reform-minded DA 
candidates winning elections against tough-on-crime incumbents, especially in 
some of the counties that use the death penalty most frequently. So even as 
Donald Trump won the presidency on a tough law-and-order platform, challengers 
triumphed down-ballot, offering hope for the broader criminal justice reform 
project given how much of the system's machinery operates at the local level. 
Rob Smith, director at the Fair Punishment Project, told me that just in the 
last year, reformer DA candidates won elections in at least five of the 16 
counties that sentence the most people to death.

"For a long time, we had this arms race of how punitive DAs could be," he 
explained. "Voters are paying attention now, and saying they want humanity and 
dignity in their justice system."

Washington, who is 48 and speaks with the shadow of a drawl, grew up poor in a 
Birmingham that was just starting to move past segregation. She was always 
interested in criminal justice, but when she dreamed of going to to law school, 
her mom told her that the best she could hope for was to be a teacher or a 
nurse. Being a lawyer "just wasn't one of those things that a lot of black 
people, particularly in our family, had as a career path," Washington said. "My 
mother looked at that like an impossibility,"

That only inspired her more. "I've always been one where, if you tell me that I 
can't, that ignites me to show you I can," she said with a laugh.

After graduating law school and working as a defense lawyer, Washington became 
an assistant DA in the county. For the past five years, she's been the 
presiding municipal judge in Bessemer, outside Birmingham, where the cases that 
come before her are typically misdemeanors and traffic violations. "My 
courtroom may be your first point of contact with the judicial system, so I've 
made it my goal to make it your last point of contact," she said.

On the bench, Washington has focused on young male defendants. While she likes 
to "speak to them in a stern tone," she offers to dismiss first-timers' cases 
in exchange for their attendance at a special program on Saturday mornings 
where her husband Jude (who also served as her campaign manager) and a bailiff 
lead discussions about life, masculinity, and history. Former inmates tell the 
young people their stories, and Washington personally brings them lunch from 
Chick-fil-A. "I want them to see me serve them," she said. "I want them to know 
that just because I sit on the bench in my robes does not mean that I don't 
care and I just sit there and hand down an order."

As long as the defendants attend the program and pay their court fees, their 
small charges are wiped clean, Washington told me.

She wants to bring the same spirit to her new DA gig. Among other initiatives, 
she plans to beef up the convictions integrity unit that probes possible 
wrongful convictions, launch a citizen-police advisory board, and divert 
low-level offenders from prison by creating alternatives to incarceration.

Still, it's the death penalty that likely represents the greatest challenge for 
Washington. Judges hold the final authority to sentence defendants to death in 
Alabama, but district attorneys have a lot of discretion on whether to 
recommend capital punishment in murder cases. Anthony Hinton, who served 30 
years on death row for a crime he didn't commit, was freed last year after 
prosecutors struggled to link his mother's gun to bullets used in the murder.

Washington says she will only recommend death for the "worst of the worst" 
offenders, pointing to a case where defendants burned their victim alive and 
showed no remorse as an example. "A lot of the people who are placed on death 
row are exonerated," Washington said, adding that with her in office, "death is 
not going to be the automatic charge" in murder cases.

(Veitch, her opponent and the incumbent DA, did not respond to a request for 
comment sent to his campaign.)

In addition to making state history, Washington will also be the 1st ever black 
DA in Jefferson County. It's a major milestone 53 years after Birmingham faced 
one of the worst acts of terrorism of the Civil Rights era, the 16th Street 
Baptist Church Bombing, in which KKK members killed 4 young black girls. And 
Washington isn't the only candidate breaking barriers in the county - voters 
also elected 9 black women to local judgeships, a record.

But Washington is too focused on the task ahead to dwell for long on her place 
in history. The phones in her small law office have been ringing off the hook 
since the election, Washington said, which just serves to drive home the 
stakes.

"Don't sit and talk about what a problem is," she told me, "if you're not going 
to be one of the proactive people who actually does something to change it."

(source: vice.com)