[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----N.C., ARK., KAN., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 31



NORTH CAROLINA:

N.C. Supreme Court will hear argument to overturn Mario McNeill's death penalty 
case


One of North Carolina's most infamous killers is asking the state's highest 
court to overturn his convictions because his attorneys shouldn't have told 
police where they could find his 5-year-old victim.

The state Supreme Court will hear arguments from Mario Andrette McNeill's 
lawyers on Jan. 9. They're asking the court to throw out McNeill's convictions 
and death sentence for murder and other crimes.

A Cumberland County jury deliberated for less than an hour in May 2013 before 
deciding that he should die for the 2009 death of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis.

Shaniya's body was found 6 days after her mother reported her missing from 
their Fayetteville mobile home in a remote kudzu patch. Searchers failed to 
find the girl's body until McNeill's lawyers told police where to look.

(source: WXII news)






ARKANSAS:

No refills: Last remaining Arkansas death penalty drugs expire soon


After waiting 11 years to die, 35 death row inmates in Arkansas are likely to 
be around for even longer. The state's lethal injection supply of potassium 
chloride is set to run out by January 1, 2017.

Arkansas has not had an execution since 2005, due to legal problems centered 
around their lethal drugs.

In 2015, Governor Asa Hutchinson (R) set execution dates for 8 death row 
inmates, but they were put on hold until the state Supreme Court decided on the 
legality of the state's secrecy law.

9 inmates challenged the state's secrecy law, arguing that Arkansas was 
violating the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution by not revealing the 
maker, seller and other information about the drugs used in executions. Due to 
a previous botched execution in Oklahoma, they also argued that one of the 
drugs, midazolam, failed to properly block pain receptors, which lead to "cruel 
and unusual" executions.

On June 23, the Arkansas Supreme Court voted 4-3 to uphold the state's secrecy 
policy, enabling the state to continue concealing information about the drugs 
used in executions.

However, this was just after the press discovered that the state had obtained 
lethal drugs from a subsidiary of Pfizer.

RT reported on Pfizer declaring its opposition to using their products in 
executions, citing their website at the time, which stated: "Pfizer makes its 
products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve. Consistent 
with these values, Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal 
injections for capital punishment."

Since then, many pharmaceutical companies in the US have decided to stop 
selling lethal drugs to states with capital punishment, and many regulations in 
Europe have made it hard for states to import any of the necessary drugs for 
lethal injections.

As pharmaceutical companies continue to make lethal drugs difficult to obtain, 
states have resorted to alternative sources, but they are not having much luck. 
The American Pharmacists Association came out with a statement discouraging its 
members from selling lethal drugs to states for their executions, saying, "Such 
activities are fundamentally contrary to the role of pharmacists as providers 
of health care."

Without a path to buy lethal drugs, the number of executions has reached its 
lowest point in a quarter-century, according to a year-end study from the Death 
Penalty Information Center. The study finds that executions went from a high of 
98 in 1998, to only 20 in 2016. This year also saw the fewest death penalty 
sentences since 1972, when the US Supreme Court case of Furman v. Georgia led 
to a 4-year-long moratorium on capital punishment sentencing.

(source: rt.com)






KANSAS:

2016 Top story No. 1: Ottawa man sentenced to death in quadruple homicide


Editor's Note: The Herald continues its reflection of 2016 with the top 5 
stories of the year. The stories covered a variety of topics, including an 
Ottawa man's sentencing in a quadruple homicide case, to a county commissioner 
being recalled to a fire that closed a popular Ottawa eatery. Here are the top 
5 stories of 2016:

A 30-year-old Ottawa man is sitting behind bars in the El Dorado Correctional 
Facility while his death sentence in a Franklin County quadruple homicide 
enters the appeal phase.

Kyle Trevor Flack was sentenced to death by a Franklin County district judge 
May 18, 3 years after the bodies of a mother, her 18-month-old daughter and 2 
men were discovered May 2013 at a farmstead west of Ottawa, according to Herald 
archives.

District Judge Eric Godderz said Flack committed the crimes without 
justification in a cowardly, senseless fashion, according to archived accounts.

"The one thing though, Mr. Flack, is that no one will forget what harm you have 
done," Godderz said addressing Flack. "You'll never get another chance to do it 
again."

The victims' families clapped when the death sentence was delivered in Franklin 
County District Court, 301 S. Main St., Ottawa, according to the Herald's 
accounts of the trial.

The judge's sentencing came after the jury's recommendation March 31 of the 
death penalty for the 2013 capital murder of Kaylie Bailey, 21, and her 
18-month-old daughter, Lana, for which Flack was convicted March 23, according 
to Herald archives.

Flack also was found guilty of 2nd degree murder for the killing of Andrew 
Stout, 30; 1st degree murder for the killing of Steven White, 31; and criminal 
possession of a firearm, according to archives. Godderz also sentenced Flack to 
267 months (about 22 years) on the 2nd degree murder charge; and to life in 
prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years in the 1st degree count 
and to 9 months for criminal possession of a firearm, according to Herald 
archives.

Flack's sentences will run consecutively, served at the El Dorado Correctional 
Facility. His case will automatically be reviewed by the Kansas Supreme Court.

(source: Ottawa Herald)






USA:

The Growing Gap Between the U.S. and the International Anti-Death-Penalty 
Consensus----In employing the death penalty, the U.S. insists it abides by 
international law. But it declines to make the most important international 
commitment - to reject the penalty as a violation of human rights.In employing 
the death penalty, the U.S. insists it abides by international law. But it 
declines to make the most important international commitment - to reject the 
penalty as a violation of human rights.


Last week, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution 
calling for a worldwide "moratorium on the use of the death penalty" - the 6th 
that the U.N. has approved in the past decade. Each one has gained the support 
of more of the organization's members. The latest vote was 117 countries in 
favor to 409 against. (31 abstained, and 5 did not vote.) In addition to a call 
for a halt to executions worldwide, the resolution urges countries that 
maintain the death penalty to increasingly restrict its imposition and to apply 
international laws that protect the rights of those facing the penalty. The 
rights include that a death sentence may be imposed only for the "most serious 
crimes," defined as intentional crimes that have "lethal or other extremely 
grave consequences," and that execution be carried out only after "a final 
judgment rendered by a competent court," following a legal process that insures 
a fair trial and that provides access to appeal to a higher court and the 
opportunity to seek a pardon or a commutation of the sentence.

At the General Assembly, the United States cast one of the nay votes. Stefanie 
Amadeo, the deputy representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, 
explained the country's position, which is basically unchanged since the U.S. 
opposed the 1st resolution against the death penalty, in 2007: "The ultimate 
decision regarding these issues must be addressed through the domestic 
democratic processes of individual Member States and be consistent with their 
obligations under international law," which does not prohibit capital 
punishment. The position reflects the American reality of supporting the death 
penalty in principle, but increasingly outlawing it in practice. As Jeffrey 
Toobin reported recently, the U.S. maintains the death penalty under federal 
and military law and under the laws of 31 states - even though only 5 states 
conducted executions in 2016 and executed only 20 people in total, the lowest 
number in 25 years.

The U.S. stresses the importance of observing global norms. "Just as the United 
States is committed to complying with its international obligations," Amadeo 
said, "we strongly urge other countries that employ the death penalty to do so 
only in full compliance with their international obligations." Meanwhile, in 
the past 40 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly sought to restrict 
the application of the death penalty to the worst of the worst offenders - 1st, 
to people who commit the most heinous murders and, then, only to adults who 
commit them, excluding youth under the age of 18. In addition, it generally 
takes a decade or more for a state to carry out an execution because of 
challenges to a death sentence allowed under due process of law.

Among the states with the death penalty, 12 have not carried out an execution 
for a decade or more, and another five have not executed anyone for at least 5 
years. In California, where the last execution was in 2006, there were 750 
people on death row as of December 2nd. Rather than being executed (the state 
has executed only 13 people since 1978) it is much more likely that a death-row 
inmate will die as a result of natural causes or suicide.

Roger Hood, an emeritus professor at Oxford, and Carolyn Hoyle, who directs 
Oxford's Centre for Criminology, last year published the 5th edition of "The 
Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective." Their book documents the many ways 
that people are sentenced to death in violation of international law - for 
drug-trafficking, for example, rather than for "the most serious crimes," in 
unfair proceedings and with no opportunity to ask for clemency, and while 
imprisoned in terrible conditions. These and other realities, they write, are 
moving "the debate about capital punishment beyond the view that each nation 
has, if it wishes, the sovereign right to retain the death penalty" to 
persuading "countries that retain the death penalty that it inevitably, and 
however administered, violates universally accepted human rights." Countries 
that employ the death penalty and insist that they are abiding by international 
law, including the U.S., decline to join in making the most important 
international commitment about the penalty, which is to reject it as a 
violation of human rights.

There has long been a gap between the idealism that the U.S. expresses when 
boasting of its dedication to the rule of law, especially the protection of 
individual rights, and the reality of its persistent refusal to abide by major 
international human-rights commitments. The U.S. was a leader in the 
development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the U.N. 
adopted in 1948, but stopped supporting the international system to carry it 
out because, among other reasons, Jim Crow laws directly violated the 
declaration. There is a sizable list of human-rights treaties - on the Rights 
of the Child, for example, and on the International Criminal Court - that the 
U.S. has signed but not ratified. Even when the U.S. ratifies treaties, the 
government often adds a caveat that excludes protection of some basic rights.

As a result, the U.S. has ended up in some rough company, particularly when it 
comes to the death penalty. In the past generation, the number of countries 
that have stopping using the death penalty has doubled, from about 50 to about 
100. Of the 57 member states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation 
in Europe, and of the 35 member states of the Organization of American States, 
only the U.S. carried out executions last year. The countries that executed the 
most offenders were, in order, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the 
United States. China executed thousands of people, though its secrecy about its 
use of capital punishment makes it impossible to know exactly how many. 
Excluding China, Iran (with close to 1000 or more), Pakistan (326), and Saudi 
Arabia (158) executed almost 9 out of 10 people put to death worldwide - "often 
after grossly unfair trials," according to Amnesty International, and "for 
crimes - including drug trafficking, corruption, 'adultery,' and 'blasphemy' - 
that do not meet the international legal standards for the use of the death 
penalty." In 2015, according to Amnesty International, at least 1634 people 
were executed, an increase of more than 50 % from the year before and the 
highest number in a quarter of a century. (The organization expects to release 
figures for 2016 in the spring.)

The United States, in other words, ranks with countries that conspicuously are 
not in full compliance with their international obligations. And its 
responsibility is sometimes worse than guilt by association. As Maya Foa, the 
director of the death-penalty team at Reprieve, an international human-rights 
organization, told me, "The U.S. clearly leads and influences global 
death-penalty practice. Our partners, who are lawyers and human-rights 
defenders in jurisdictions that retain the penalty, tell us that the use of the 
death penalty by the U.S., a 'developed' nation, is used to justify the 
death-penalty practice in the jurisdictions they work in." Reprieve is 
providing legal and investigative assistance to people facing execution in 11 
countries, in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, and in the 
U.S.

In August at a rally in Istanbul, after the failed coup attempt in Turkey, the 
BBC reported, the country's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said, "They say 
there is no death penalty in the E.U. ... Well, the U.S. has it; Japan has it; 
China has it; most of the world has it. So they are allowed to have it. We used 
to have it until 1984. Sovereignty belongs to the people, so if the people make 
this decision I am sure the political parties will comply." He said that the 
Turkish people might want to restore the death penalty to punish those 
responsible for killing hundreds of citizens during the attempted coup. That 
has not happened yet, but, if it does, its purpose, Erdogan suggested, will be 
a display of cold-blooded power.

The influence of the U.S. on the death penalty worldwide has sometimes been 
constructive. In 1976, for example, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was 
unconstitutional for a state to make the death penalty mandatory for any crime, 
it marked the beginning of the decline of mandatory death sentences around the 
world. "The fundamental respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment," 
the Court said, "requires consideration of the character and record of the 
individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense."

The Indian Supreme Court employed this logic when it struck down the mandatory 
death sentence in the country's penal code, in 1983. The legislature, it held, 
could not compel judges "to shut their eyes to mitigating circumstances and 
inflict upon them the dubious and unconscionable duty of imposing a preordained 
sentence of death." More recently, the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty 
Worldwide reports, 18 other countries have followed suit and struck down the 
mandatory death penalty, including almost every Caribbean nation and Uganda, 
Malawi, and Kenya.

In their latest edition of "The Death Penalty," Hood and Hoyle write 
optimistically about the U.S. example: "Those who campaign for abolition 
worldwide can hope that it will not be many years before the U.S. Supreme Court 
will be able to find that the majority of states, in line with a majority of 
countries worldwide, does not support the death penalty for anyone." Donald 
Trump has said that he will replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia - the 
Court's most vehement defender of the death penalty for almost 30 years - with 
someone in his mold. But, even when that happens, there will be a possibility 
that Justice Anthony Kennedy will join the Court's moderate liberals in 
striking down the death penalty, for reasons Justice Stephen Breyer articulated 
in 2015: "The Court in effect delegated significant responsibility to the 
States to develop procedures that would" insure the fairness of the 
capital-punishment system, he wrote. "Almost 40 years of studies, surveys, and 
experience strongly indicate, however, that this effort has failed." If the 
Court continues to uphold the death penalty, on the other hand, the gap between 
the U.S. and a large and growing majority of the rest of the world will 
continue to increase.

(source: Lincoln Caplan, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a senior research 
scholar at Yale Law School and the author of the new book "American Justice 
2016: The Political Supreme Court."----The New Yorker)

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

For Asheville attorney, a life's work fighting the death penalty


The attorney leans to her left, drawing the young man beside her out of his 
long stare, one that fixates on the wide table before him or some unknown spot 
straight ahead.

The 2 share a whispered conversation, and when they are finished, he returns to 
his gaze, never acknowledging the judge in front of him or the spectators 
behind, witnesses to an accounting of his terrible crimes against men and women 
in prayer.

The interaction in a Charleston courthouse, though small and inconspicuous, 
speaks to the rapport between the defendant and attorney Kimberly C. Stevens. 
In a career spanning more than 2 decades as a capital defender, she has 
represented defendants accused and convicted of a host of high-profile crimes, 
some that have rattled small towns or large cities or entire states.

This one, the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof and his attack on Emanuel 
African Methodist Episcopal Church, has captured the attention of a nation.

Until recently, Stevens' career was centered in North Carolina, where she 
became known among colleagues not only for her expertise in the complicated 
legal arena that is capital litigation, but also for compassion toward both her 
clients and their victims.

Last year, she left state service and Winston-Salem for a senior advisory role 
as a federal capital defender, establishing an office in Asheville.

Stevens, 49, brings to her cases a doggedness in unraveling the histories of 
her clients, men and women who often have mental health issues, developmental 
disabilities or an upbringing plagued by abuse, said Bob Hurley, who served as 
North Carolina's capital defender for 13 years until 2015.

"I would point her to the most difficult and challenging capital cases in the 
state. By that, I mean I felt there was a significant likelihood the defendant 
would receive the death penalty, either because of the heinousness of the crime 
or the prominence of the victim involved or the outrage of the community over 
the crime," Hurley said. "She would get my 1st call."

Those calls from Hurley and others have put Stevens on more than 40 capital 
cases where often, as with Roof, a possible sentence that pits life against 
death is the primary concern.

Colleagues say Stevens, who declined interview requests for this article citing 
the ongoing Roof trial, stands opposed to state execution for reasons that 
include its tendency to target defendants who are impoverished, mentally ill or 
are in minority groups, as well as concerns the condemned could be wrongly 
convicted.

Stevens is exceptional in her dedication to those clients, and that she's left 
North Carolina's roster of death penalty attorneys to focus on federal defense 
has "left a void that certainly will not be filled by anyone else in the 
state," said Victoria Jayne, an assistant capital defender based in Buncombe 
County.

"You have clients who have made bad decisions all of their lives," Jayne said. 
"Every time they make a decision, it's been a bad one and what we know is that 
on their own, we can't expect them to make the most important decision of their 
life, which is to choose a life plea over going to trial and a possible death 
sentence."

Those life sentence pleas negotiated by Stevens include some of the most 
high-profile capital cases in North Carolina's state and federal courts: Gary 
Michael Hilton in 2007 murdered an elderly couple near a popular hiking trail 
in Pisgah National Forest. A year later, Demario James Atwater kidnapped and 
shot to death Eve Carson, the student body president at UNC Chapel Hill. Quincy 
Allen, a South Carolina man, in 2002 shot to death 2 men at a Surry County 
convenience store. Eric Lorenzo Davis in 2013 beat to death his 4-year-old 
daughter in a Jackson County motel.

Twice Stevens has won bids on appeal to have condemned men removed from death 
row.

And once she did not.

Witness

It was brightly lit, the execution chamber in Raleigh's Central Prison. The 
room has not hosted a death since 2006, but in 2003, when Stevens took a seat 
its cramped gallery, 7 men died there.

Set on the other side of a windowed concrete wall stood a gurney, John Dennis 
Daniels strapped to its mattress. Beyond the prison walls, about 30 protesters 
gathered against the dark November chill for a candlelight vigil, according to 
Associated Press reports.

Hours earlier in a last-minute clemency bid, a retired psychiatrist appeared 
before then-Gov. Mike Easley, telling him she no longer stood by her original 
assessment of Daniels, one made on behalf of prosecutors amid trial.

Daniels should not be put to death for the strangulation of his elderly aunt, 
she testified.

The state's attorneys never gave her critical medical records about Daniels' 
suicide attempts, a history of depression and brain damage from alcohol and 
cocaine use, information the doctor said she learned only after Stevens 
unearthed and presented her with the missing paperwork.

The testimony failed to persuade Easley, a decision that devastated Stevens, 
the attorney told a reporter.

"John Daniels is my friend and they're about to kill him," she said, and in 
telling her client that no hope remained, they hugged and cried together. The 
lethal injection began at 2 a.m., Stevens watching as Daniels lifted his head 
from the gurney, coughed and then fell still.

Minutes later, before the official pronouncement of death, the attorney left 
the room.

Stevens was overcome with emotion.

Emotion has been there also, in a federal courtroom in Charleston, and though 
the defense team led by the venerable and storied capital defender David Bruck 
will not comment, their frustrations often have been visible.

Roof represented himself in jury selection, relegating Bruck and Stevens to the 
role of standby counsel. Unable to address the court directly, the attorneys 
attempted to use notes to guide Roof through lines of questioning.

The defendant appeared unable or unwilling to follow direction, an exercise 
that often left Bruck to raise a hand to a furrowed brow, as Stevens' 
frustration came in sagging shoulders.

At Roof's request, the counselors were reinstated in the guilt phase of trial, 
but the 22-year-old will again serve as his own attorney as a jury weighs 
sentencing, a phase that commences on Jan. 3.

The move blocks counselors from presenting evidence that Roof may suffer from 
mental illness.

That situation is most certainly devastating for Stevens and the team, said 
Hurley, the former North Carolina public defender.

"I think the worst position for a capital defense attorney to be put in is one 
in which the defendant has decided to go pro se [self-representation] and 
they're asked to sit on the sidelines and watch," Hurley said. "It's almost 
like watching someone committing suicide and you can do nothing about it."

A quiet stand

Stevens began as an assistant federal capital defender in July 2015, a senior 
position held through the Oregon-based Capital Resource Counsel Project. Its 
primary focus is to guide and train death penalty lawyers in cases throughout 
the eastern United States.

A native of Tacoma, Washington, Stevens in 1989 graduated from Washington State 
University, then accepted a full scholarship to Wake Forest University's law 
school. By 1994, she began representing death row inmates in North Carolina, 
taking on defendants facing the death penalty in the following years, work that 
later took her to the federal courts.

She joined the Roof defense team as co-counsel in July as a late addition, the 
impending trial date only months away.

The timing of that move came on the heels of a court filing that indicated 
Bruck, appointed to the case a year earlier, would pursue a mental defect 
defense at sentencing.

While Roof in courtroom interactions appears cordial and comfortable with the 
team, his own statements and filings indicate he split with Bruck's decision 
over the mental health issue.

In her defense of clients, Stevens brings a commitment to unearthing medical 
records and a personal history that might explain why they committed crimes, 
said Mark Rabil, a law professor and director of the Innocence and Justice 
Clinic at Wake Forest.

"She's somebody who works endlessly to find the good in people. In the 
mitigation phase you look into someone's background and talk to all of their 
family, their friends, get all of their records to find out, "What is it that 
created this person?'" said Rabil, who has partnered with Stevens in about a 
half-dozen capital cases, each ending with a plea deal for life.

"If anybody can help us find out why this horrible situation occurred in 
Charleston, Kim's perfectly suited to that and she's very, very sensitive and 
caring about the victims of the crime and the victim's families."

Rabil noted also that she is conscientious of the charged and difficult issues 
where race is a factor, typically involving a black defendant and a white 
victim. Roof, an admitted white supremacist, was convicted of murdering nine 
black parishioners in the Dec. 15 jury finding that included guilty verdicts 
based on hate crime laws.

Throughout the trial, about 40 or so people have gathered on the benches behind 
prosecutors. Most are African-American and family members of the slain. Seats 
behind the defense team are populated by reporters and the public, with one 
bench reserved for Roof's family. His grandparents have appeared a few times; 
his mother once, at opening statements.

At moments, wrenching testimony has dropped courtroom spectators to a silence 
burdened with grief, interrupted only by the low hum of a furnace from 
somewhere deep in the building.

It is a despair that also appears to weigh on a defense team trying to save the 
life of a client who targeted a church, a pastor, fathers, mothers, the 
elderly, the young. All of them innocents.

Among the survivors is Polly Sheppard, who appeared as the last witness for the 
prosecution on Dec. 14, delivering a steady and solemn account of praying aloud 
amid gunfire, drawing Roof's attention.

"Shut up!" he yelled, still holding the gun as the dead and dying lay around 
them. He told her would let her live to tell the story.

That story told, Bruck walked to the retired nurse, hands linked behind his 
back.

"I'm so sorry," he said quietly. "I have no questions."

Behind him, Stevens rose to stand in a silent gesture of respect.

The movement reverberated throughout the courtroom, as row by row, the dozens 
of observers took to their feet in silent ovation. Sheppard, in slow steps, 
walked into the arms of supporters.

(source: Asheville Citizen-Times)