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

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 1



NORTH CAROLINA:

Mendez scheduled for death penalty hearing


A Rule 24 hearing is scheduled today for Sebastian Mendez, 25, of Onslow 
County.

A Rule 24 hearing is held in 1st degree murder cases. The purpose is to decide 
whether the state will be seeking the death penalty in the case.

Mendez is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Shaung Liu, and 5-month-old son, 
Archer Liu back in July in the Hunter's Creek area of Jacksonville. Shaung was 
found dead in her car 3 blocks from her home, while Archer was found dead in a 
suitcase in the attic.

Last month, Mendez was charged with trying to pay an Onslow County inmate to 
kill a witness in the case. He was charged in the incident and moved to Central 
Prison due to safety concerns.

The Rule 24 hearing was originally scheduled for last Thursday, but was delayed 
and rescheduled for today.

(source: WNCT news)

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

Defendant in triple murder case has history of courtroom disruptions


When potential jurors arrive at the Cumberland County Courthouse today for the 
triple murder trial of Shawn Lee Legrand, they may encounter a spectacle in the 
courtroom.

Legrand, who has tried to fire his lawyers, gotten in trouble for throwing his 
bodily wastes at jailers, and been labeled suicidal by a psychiatrist, told the 
judge that he will disrupt the trial if he doesn't get his way.

"Thank your punk (expletive) for getting this done," Legrand said in an Aug. 26 
letter to Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons. "If not I will half 
the time not show up for trial & when I do disrupt your (expletive) courtroom."

He signed it: "Sincerely Shawn LeGrand."

Prosecutors will attempt to seek the death penalty in a trial projected to last 
up to 3 months. Indictments say Legrand, 49, killed 3 people and tried to kill 
2 others in a triplex home on Ingram Street on Nov. 26, 2011. He was arrested 
following a car chase and shoot-out with police officers who were responding to 
reports of a stabbing. Legrand was injured in the shooting.

At the residence on Ingram Street, Krystle Price Papile and Gregory Steven 
Fitzgerald were fatally stabbed. Ardell Paige Jr. was killed by a gunshot to 
his head.

Surviving victims Bennie Darwin King and Stephanie Lashaun Croom were shot in 
their faces.

Years behind bars

Prior to the homicides, Legrand had spent most of his life behind bars for 
assault, robbery and burglary charges. He was released in July 2011 when he was 
44 years old.

His time in custody since his arrest on murder charges in November 2011 has 
been troubled, court papers say.

At least 6 times, judges have signed orders that sent Legrand to the state 
prison system while awaiting trial instead of letting him stay at the 
Cumberland County Detention Center. Ammons wrote that Legrand has thrown feces 
at officers and spit on one. Superior Court Judge Claire Hill said Legrand 
endangers the other inmates and the jail staff at the county detention center.

In a letter to Ammons dated Dec. 13, Legrand asked to be moved back to the 
county jail because he wanted to consult with a woman and a man in Cumberland 
County.

It's not clear in Legrand's letter what these people do - they may be medical 
professionals as he says the woman "offered me to stay at the hospital for a 
week or 2 and I would like to do that."

Legrand said the letter is not a ploy to stop or delay his trial - he said he 
is upset it was postponed to today from a previous date.

"I give you my word I will not assault any staff at the jail," Legrand wrote.

He also said he hoped "to see the one friend I have" if he were allowed to stay 
at the jail.

Legrand said he was not talking to either of his lawyers. "My attorney's (sic) 
really don't give a damn about my well being," he wrote.

A judge on Jan. 7 signed an order to keep Legrand in the prison system.

A forensic psychiatrist wrote in September that Legrand wants to fire his 
lawyers and represent himself because he wants to be sentenced to death. 
Legrand's request to represent himself has been denied, one of his lawyers 
said.

A 1st-degree murder conviction carries 2 possible punishments: death or life in 
prison with no chance for parole.

The mother of victim Krystle Price Papile said she wants Legrand to get the 
life sentence.

"I am a very Christian woman," said Denise Oteri of Weymouth, Massachusetts.

For the past 4 years she said she has "hated him, wanted to kill him myself 
with my own bare hands for what he did to my baby, my youngest daughter."

Oteri said that hate has allowed Legrand to make her a victim.

"I'm not going to have that anymore. I'm not going to let him decide how my 
emotions, or my life is run. So I have decided that I'm going to forgive him," 
Oteri said. "And that forgiveness is for my own healing, and part of my 
grieving process."

(source: Fayetteville Observer)






GEORGIA----impending execution

Panel to Hear Clemency Request From Georgia Death Row Inmate


The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles plans to consider a clemency request 
from the state's oldest death row inmate.

The board plans to hold a hearing on the request from Brandon Astor Jones on 
Monday. The 72-year-old is scheduled for execution at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the 
state prison in Jackson.

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

Jones was convicted in the 1979 killing of Cobb County convenience store 
manager Roger Tackett.

A federal judge granted Jones a new sentencing hearing because jurors had 
improperly been allowed to bring a Bible into the deliberation room. He was 
resentenced to death in 1997.

Another man convicted in the killing, Van Roosevelt Solomon, was executed in 
1985.

(source: Associated Press)

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

A Life on Death Row----Facing Execution at 72, Georgia's Oldest Death Row 
Inmate Exposes Death Penalty's Racist Roots


The 1st time Michael Marcum saw the byline "Brandon Astor Jones," he was 
working as a jail commander in San Francisco. It was 1993; Marcum can't recall 
what the article was about. But he remembers it made an impression - and when 
he saw the author's bio, he was taken aback. Jones was a man on Georgia's death 
row.

Jones sent his articles everywhere, from newspapers in Atlanta to Australian 
political journals. His musings on politics and prison life found a 
particularly receptive audience abroad, where he had a number of devoted pen 
pals. Marcum wrote to Jones at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State 
Prison, asking permission to reprint the piece in his jail newsletter.

It was an unusual publication, produced by prisoners and staff alike. But then 
County Jail #7 was an unusual jail. In the era of "3 strikes" and the 1994 
crime bill, it was an experiment in corrections, where prisoners raised plants 
in a greenhouse and tended to buffalo. Marcum had helped design it, firm in his 
belief that if the state of California was going to build new jails, they 
should be places for education and vocational training. Instead, Marcum saw the 
country going in the other direction.

Jones wrote back to Marcum, granting his permission to reprint the article. The 
2 soon began exchanging letters. "We wrote a lot about our childhoods," Marcum 
recalled. They found unexpected overlaps in their lives: Jones had grown up on 
the South Side of Chicago, where his favorite pizza joint belonged to Marcum's 
father-in-law. Marcum continued to publish Jones' writing in the newsletter; he 
saw it have a positive influence on inmates and staff alike. "Some of the 
prisoners saw Brandon as a role model," he said.

But what really connected Marcum and Jones was the search for redemption. In 
1966, when Marcum was 19 years old, he had shot and killed his own father with 
a hunting rifle - the violent culmination of years of domestic abuse against 
Marcum and his mother. It was Marcum who called the police; later he pleaded 
guilty and got a sentence of 5 years to life. When he was released in 1972, he 
said, "I felt I had to prove my value as a human being." He was lucky. His 
parole officer helped him get into college and Marcum began an unlikely career 
in law enforcement, determined to use his experiences in prison to reform the 
system from within.

Now a retired assistant sheriff, Marcum acknowledges his journey is unique. But 
"this was California, not Georgia," he said. "And I wasn't black."

Indeed, for his friend and pen pal across the country, the future held a very 
different fate. In 1979, Jones and an accomplice, Van Roosevelt Solomon, had 
killed a white man named Roger Tackett, the manager of a convenience store in 
Cobb County, Georgia. Jones and Solomon, who was also black, robbed the store, 
then shot Tackett to death, only to be apprehended immediately by a cop on 
patrol. The forensic evidence showed that both men had recently fired a gun - 
both denied shooting the fatal bullet. Both were convicted and sentenced to 
die.

Jones remained on death row - today he is 72. He no longer publishes articles, 
and some years back, Marcum stopped receiving letters from him. Then, earlier 
this month, Marcum came home to a message I left on his landline. Georgia had 
set an execution date for Jones - the state planned to kill him on February 2.

Marcum was shaken. "I had no idea," he wrote in an email, agreeing to an 
interview. He then wrote 2 letters - 1 to his old friend, and 1 to the Georgia 
Board of Pardons and Parole in Atlanta, asking it to stop the execution.

If Jones dies by lethal injection on Tuesday, less than two weeks from his 73rd 
birthday, he will be the oldest prisoner ever executed by the state of Georgia. 
After more than 35 years facing execution, he embodies what Supreme Court 
Justice Stephen Breyer last year called the "unconscionably long" time 
prisoners spend on death row, many of them elderly and infirm. But Jones is 
also a relic of an earlier era of the death penalty in Georgia, the roots of 
which remain impossible to ignore.

To date, the oldest prisoner executed in Georgia was Andrew Brannan, a 
66-year-old Vietnam veteran with PTSD, who was killed last January. His was the 
1st of 5 people executed by the state in 2015 - among them, an intellectually 
disabled man, a man with claims of innocence, and a woman sent to die for a 
murder her boyfriend carried out and who had became a poster child for 
rehabilitation.

If 2015 reaffirmed Georgia???s reputation for controversial executions, it also 
quietly revealed an opposite trend. "Despite the relative flurry of 
executions," a Georgia legal website, the Daily Report, noted last December, 
"the other end of the death penalty process has slowed significantly." Georgia 
did not send a single person to death row in 2015 - a development the Report 
called the "newsmaker of the year." The turn away from capital punishment is 
part of a larger nationwide trend, even across the most active death penalty 
states. "The same thing that is happening in Georgia is also happening in Texas 
and Virginia," Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty 
Information Center, told the Report.

Bridging the disconnect between the "new Georgia," as Dunham put it, and the 
state's recent spate of troubling executions are people like Jones. "We have 
this very strange situation now in which these people sentenced to death a long 
time ago - and who managed to get through all the stages of review - are now 
being executed," said Stephen Bright, president of the 40-year-old Southern 
Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. "They almost certainly would not be 
sentenced to death today." (In court filings, lawyers for Jones point out that 
death sentences for killings carried out in the course of a robbery have 
"fallen into complete extinction.") Bright describes them as "zombie cases" - 
convictions that "remind us of just how unfair" the system used to be.

Indeed, it was not until 2005 that the state opened the office of the Georgia 
Capital Defender, seeking to remedy a decades-old problem: defendants on trial 
for their lives with grossly inadequate representation. "At the time of Jones' 
case and so many others," Bright said, "any lawyer who was a member of the 
Georgia bar could be appointed to represent someone in a death penalty case." 
With no meaningful funding for indigent defense - and a sloppy, ad hoc network 
of public defender offices throughout the state - death sentences were often 
handed out "not for the worst crime, but for the worst lawyer," as Bright wrote 
in a 1994 article for the Yale Law Journal.

The problem was especially pronounced when it came to race. In 1974, 5 years 
before Jones landed on death row, a Georgia man named Wilburn Wiley Dobbs was 
sent to die for a murder carried out during a robbery. His court-appointed 
lawyer made no effort to save his life - in fact, he referred to his black 
client as "boy" during trial, later admitting that, as the grandson of a 
slaveholder, he believed African-Americans to be "inferior to whites morally 
and intellectually." Dobbs' death sentence was overturned in 1997, yet he has 
never had a resentencing hearing. At 66 and sick with prostate cancer, he will 
almost certainly die behind bars.

In a different 1974 case, a Georgia man named John Young was ineptly 
represented by an attorney who not only was later disbarred, but encountered 
his former client on the prison yard at the county jail, where the lawyer had 
been sent on drug charges. "Being born black in America was against me," Young 
said before dying in the electric chair in 1985. "Y'all cry out that America 
was built on Christianity. I say it was built on slavery."

Evidence that the state's death penalty was racially biased was a major 
contributing factor that led to Furman v. Georgia, the landmark Supreme Court 
case that in 1972 suspended the death penalty across the country. (The 
plaintiff, William Henry Furman, was a black man deemed "mentally impaired" by 
a state psychiatrist, who had been convicted in a 1-day trial in Savannah.) 
Furman forced states to amend their death penalty statutes to avoid the 
"arbitrary and discriminatory" imposition of capital punishment.

Just 4 years later, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's new death penalty law in 
Gregg v. Georgia. Yet the law showed clear continuity with decades past: Of the 
1st dozen people to die in the electric chair following Gregg, 9 were black.

Bright still bristles at the "arrogance of that; to think that all of the 
problems identified in Furman - the racism, the consequences of poverty - to 
think that you could have that fixed in 4 years was just so incredibly 
preposterous."

Jones was sent to Georgia's death row 3 years after Gregg. Among the people 
there when he arrived was another black man named Warren McCleskey, who had 
been convicted of murdering a police officer in the course of an attempted 
robbery in Atlanta the year before. McCleskey went on to appeal his conviction 
all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, on the basis that Georgia's death 
penalty system was racially biased. His evidence was a now-famous 1983 
empirical survey of Georgia murder cases during the 1970s, which found that 
black defendants convicted of killing white victims were far more likely to be 
sentenced to death.

But in its 1987 ruling in McCleskey - one of its most derided and consequential 
in death penalty law - the Supreme Court concluded that racial bias in the 
application of the death penalty was not unconstitutional unless it could be 
proven to be intentional. The effect was far reaching; in the New Jim Crow, 
Michelle Alexander writes that the ruling "immunized the criminal justice 
system from judicial scrutiny for racial bias."

After 5 years facing execution, Jones got a lucky break. A federal court 
overturned his death sentence, finding that jurors had consulted a Bible during 
their deliberations. (His codefendant, Solomon, was less fortunate: He died in 
the electric chair in 1985.)

As he awaited a resentencing hearing, Jones began a life on death row. He read 
voraciously and soon began writing. His essays were both autobiographical and 
sharply political, and he wrote a lot about race, inspired in large part by his 
own upbringing.

Jones was born in Indiana and spent his childhood in Chicago, where his family 
life was unhappy and abusive, according to the findings of a defense 
investigator. Jones described "extremely violent beatings" by his uncle, as 
well as sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin when he was 5 years old. One 
friend and neighbor recalled that his "arms and face were always covered in 
bruises."

When Jones was 13, he robbed a milkman and was sent to a reformatory outside 
the city that sat on some 900 acres of farmland, where boys underwent military 
and religious training. Then at 15, he was sent to Sheridan, a state 
reformatory where he said he was beaten, which became embroiled in scandal soon 
after his release. In 1961, the superintendent and 6 staffers were fired 
following reports that boys at Sheridan were "beaten, confined naked in 
unlighted cells, and put on bread and milk rations," as described by 1 Illinois 
historian. An investigation also found that the younger boys -15 years and 
under - were preyed upon sexually by the older ones, including men in their 
20s.

Later, according to court documents, a clinical psychologist would determine 
that Jones had a "lifelong pattern of behavior consistent with childhood-onset 
bipolar disorder," and signs of PTSD rooted in "physical, sexual, and emotional 
trauma."

After an unsuccessful stint in the military at 19, Jones spent his early 
adulthood in and out of jail. He admitted to investigators that he "sometimes 
would get charged with something, make bond, change his name, and never show up 
again." He married twice; his wives described him as "unstable" and physically 
abusive, including to his children.

In his letters to people like Marcum, Jones would occasionally express regret 
at his fractured relationships with family, saying he understood why they did 
not keep in touch. In his published essays, which he often began with a passage 
or quote from a newspaper article, he sometimes shared his memories of 
relatives as part of a broader critique of society.

In 1 piece, a local report on the detrimental effect of carrying heavy 
backpacks reminded Jones of a time he went to pick cotton with relatives in the 
Mississippi Delta. His aunt suffered crippling back pain, he wrote. "My 
question is, when will a doctor in America show concern for those countless 
Black backs still bent with the pain and weight of American slavery past and 
present?"

In another essay, Jones discussed a boating program geared toward 
African-American kids from Philadelphia. As a lover of boats, he was a devoted 
subscriber to WoodenBoat ("I read every issue cover to cover"). He wondered why 
the magazine had not run an item about the Philadelphia program, which he 
considered very important.

In 1996, the Canadian New Internationalist published an essay by Jones that 
would prove particularly moving to people. It described the small ways he 
sought to ward off the intense sensory deprivation of death row: collecting 
scraps of wood to be able to feel their natural texture, picking a bay leaf out 
of 1 of his meals and taking it back to his cell, where "I washed it off," he 
wrote, and carefully stored it for months.

One reader, Sue Bond, remembers the essay vividly - it was one of the first by 
Jones she ever read. More than 20 years later, she has struggled to solicit 
support for him over Facebook. She still has all his letters, she told me over 
email. "I can't bear to open that box right now. It is too painful, knowing 
that he may be executed very soon."

The same essay prompted an artist in the U.K. "to send him one of my detailed 
textured landscapes and lead him on a 'walk' through it, encountering the 
sounds and textures along the way," as she wrote in an email. She too forged a 
friendship with Jones, as did her son, John. (This month, John set up a website 
to solicit clemency letters for the Board of Pardons and Parole.)

As his 1997 resentencing trial approached, Jones??? readers galvanized to try 
to save his life. Readers from the U.K. and Australia volunteered to testify 
via video on his behalf. In a letter to the Georgia Indigent Defense Council, 
Michael Marcum described the "value in Brandon's life and in his writing," how 
it conveyed to "young offenders who are still at risk of committing violence 
upon release from our jails into our community ... that they can retake control 
of their lives before they further harm others and themselves, and they can 
make a lawful place in our society."

But in his closing statement on the day of the resentencing hearing, the 
prosecutor said that for all of his writings, Jones had shown no remorse for 
his crime. "He's got all kinds of pen pals who apparently would do anything for 
him," he said, and yet none of them had sought out the victim's family to seek 
their forgiveness on his behalf. "So where is the remorse? Is not that the kind 
of conduct that deserves the death penalty?"

Defense attorneys asked for a mistrial, saying the statement violated Jones' 
Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But they were denied. After 
reaching an "impasse" due to the misgivings of a single juror, the judge 
ordered the jury to continue deliberating. A few hours later, Jones was once 
again sentenced to death.

or years, Jones relied more on his relationships with readers than he did on 
his family. He seldom received visits. Nor did he have many friends in prison - 
at least according to one prison guard who got to know him on death row. Bobby 
Allen was 20 when he went to work at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification 
Prison in the 1980s. He remembers Jones as well-behaved. "I never had a 
moment's problem with him," he told me. Yet Jones wasn't particularly 
well-liked among the guards or counselors, Allen says, or by his fellow 
prisoners for that matter. Spending most of his time writing in his cell, his 
attitude seemed to be that "he had a superior intellect over everybody." Part 
of what Allen found vexing was that Jones "didn't see himself as an inmate. He 
didn't see himself as a lawbreaker."

Allen was at the prison on the day the state executed Jones' codefendant, Van 
Solomon - 1 of 10 people killed by the state of Georgia during his years 
working on death row. Allen???s duties included escorting the condemned 
prisoner from his cell - 1st to the medical unit "for a full physical," and 
then down "the last mile," to the holding cell where the prisoner awaited 
execution. One of the worst parts, he remembers, was passing the electric 
chair, which prison officials covered in a white sheet. "I have nightmares 
about it even today," he said. He often struggled to reconcile the men he knew 
on death row with the crimes they had committed. "I believe that I saw some of 
these men change," he said.

Allen can't speak for Jones, he says. "I don't know the man he is now." But, he 
said, "I can say that the people that we did execute might not have been the 
same person he was when he committed the crime."

As he aged in prison, Jones lost some of his longtime supporters. In 2001 he 
cut ties with the Australian editor of a radical leftist magazine after it 
refused to publish a column following the 9/11 attacks. In it, Jones expressed 
sorrow and patriotism while condemning any retaliatory violence against Muslims 
in their homes or mosques. The essay included a drawing of an American flag he 
had hung in his cell "at symbolic half mast, midway between the floor and 
ceiling." In response, the editor, who was white, accused him of "wrap[ping] 
himself in the flag under which the white ruling elite in North America 
enslaved black people." Jones was deeply offended.

Jones' most recent writings reveal a man in decline. In a 2013 column addressed 
to the Georgia prison commissioner, he describes being told he must remain 
shackled while eating and being denied a free hand to clean himself after using 
the bathroom, policies that "rob medical prisoners of our human dignity." Other 
posts are less lucid - bitter missives about prison policies, or defective 
purchases at the prison commissary.

But last month, Jones received a visit that he never expected. His 4 children 
came to see him in prison. Now in their 50s, they barely knew him growing up. 
"It was the 1st time that all 4 of us had seen him together," his son David 
told me over the phone from Texas on Friday. The trip to Georgia included a 
contact visit - "the 1st time I ever touched his body."

For decades, David refused to visit his father. "I felt he was dead," he said. 
Jones himself seemed to have given up on life. Until his children visited, 
David said, Jones planned to reject the clemency process. He did not want to 
give the state of Georgia the satisfaction of hearing him plead for his life. 
But in the visiting room that day, David thinks his father realized "he has a 
reason to live for his own family. He stood up and walked to the end of the 
visiting area with each of his children, 1 by 1. I could see them crying and 
holding each other." In recent weeks, "My children have been talking to him for 
the 1st time in their lives," David said. If the state of Georgia kills Jones 
on Tuesday, they will lose the grandfather they have only just met.

On Saturday, David went back to Georgia to see his father again. On Tuesday, he 
will represent his family, asking once more for the state to spare his life. 
"I'm not oblivious to the pain that's been created by his crime," he says. "But 
many lives got lost in 1979, not just 1. Today, he has a lot of people who love 
him."

(source: The Intercept)






FLORIDA:

House Panel To Take Up Death Penalty Proposal


A House panel is slated to take up a death-penalty proposal Tuesday, 3 weeks 
after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida's death-penalty system giving 
judges --- not juries --- the power to impose death sentences is 
unconstitutional.

The 8-1 ruling in the Hurst v. Florida case was centered on what are known as 
"aggravating" circumstances that must be found before defendants can be 
sentenced to death. A 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in a case known as Ring 
v. Arizona, requires that determination of such aggravating circumstances be 
made by juries, not judges.

Under Florida law, juries make recommendations regarding the death penalty, 
based on a review of aggravating and mitigating circumstances, but judges 
ultimately decide whether defendants should be put to death or sentenced to 
life in prison.

Under the House proposal (PCB CRJS 16-07), death sentences could only be 
imposed if juries --- after weighing aggravating and mitigating factors --- 
unanimously decide that at least 1 aggravating factor exists. The proposal 
would also require at least 9 jurors to vote for the death penalty.

Florida is 1 of only 3 states that do not require unanimous jury decisions 
about imposing death sentences. Florida law only requires a simple majority of 
the jury to recommend death, but requires unanimous jury verdicts in other 
cases. The only other 2 states that do not require unanimous decisions --- 
Alabama and Delaware --- require at least 9 jurors to vote in favor of capital 
punishment.

The measure --- offered by the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee, chaired by 
Miami Republican Carlos Trujillo --- mirrors recommendations offered Wednesday 
by 5th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Brad King at a Senate Criminal Justice 
Committee workshop on the death penalty.

All of the other experts on a panel at the workshop --- including judges, death 
penalty experts and lawyers representing death row inmates ---suggested that 
requiring unanimous jury verdicts in death penalties would be the best way to 
fix the sentencing system, because of other cases pending before the U.S. 
Supreme Court.

The House Criminal Justice meeting is scheduled on the same day the Florida 
Supreme Court will hear oral arguments addressing the Hurst decision in the 
cases of Cary Michael Lambrix, who is scheduled to be executed on Feb. 11, and 
2 other death row inmates.

(source: WUSF news)






ALABAMA:

Supreme Court ruling could affect 2 local cases


It's been nearly 17 years since Danny Sledge was brutally stabbed to death and 
robbed at his Shoal Creek restaurant.

"Instead of trying to remember the good times and the good things about Danny, 
because of the court system we are constantly reminded how he died," said his 
sister, Mary Ann Rippey.

Last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that all teenagers convicted of capital 
murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole should 
be re-sentenced, triggered those painful memories for Rippey and her family, 
she said.

Nathan Boyd was 17 when he and his brother, Eric, were arrested and charged 
with Sledge's death. A year later, in October 2000, Nathan Boyd was found 
guilty of capital murder. With the death penalty ruled unconstitutional for 
teens, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Eric Boyd was found guilty of felony murder, and also was sentenced to life in 
prison without the possibility of parole.

Nathan Boyd, now 34, would be eligible for new sentencing under the recent 
ruling because he was a teen when he was convicted and sentenced.

There is another local case that could fall under the Supreme Court ruling.

Matthew Williams, of Muscle Shoals, was 20 when he was shot in his truck while 
driving on Woodward Avenue on March 17, 1997.

Charles Eugene Black, who was 17 at the time, was convicted of capital murder 
and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Jamie Mackey, 19 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison with the 
possibility of parole. He remains in Limestone Correctional Facility in 
Capshaw.

Ben Burt, the man Williams said ordered the killing, is serving a 20-year 
prison sentence.

Colbert County Assistant District Attorney Kyle Brown said he already has 
contacted the Williams family about the ruling.

"We wanted them to know what this is about and what could happen," Brown said. 
"Most likely, the case could be re-sentenced."

Brown said the high court's ruling points out the court must have a choice when 
sentencing teens convicted of capital murder.

"With the death penalty for a juvenile deemed unconstitutional, the court had 
only 1 option, which was life without," Brown said.

"The ruling, basically, is saying the person convicted must have a new 
sentencing hearing to reconsider the sentence for a lesser sentence, or even 
probation," Franklin County District Attorney Joey Rushing said.

Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange said there are at least 70 convicted 
murderers serving life without parole sentences who could be granted the chance 
for new sentences.

Lauderdale County District Attorney Chris Connolly said the ruling brings up 
several issues.

"In Alabama, there is no option (when it comes to sentencing a juvenile 
convicted of capital murder)," he said. "Also, if we are going to re-sentence 
them, who will make the sentencing recommendation? In a capital murder case, 
the jury makes that recommendation. So, will we have to impanel a jury to have 
these re-sentencing hearings, or can the judge do it?"

Connolly said because there is no alternate sentencing in place, the Alabama 
Legislature will have to address the issue.

Randy Hillman, executive director of the Alabama Office of Prosecution 
Services, said he expects to see the Legislature address the issue in the 
upcoming session, and come up with another option. The session convenes 
Tuesday.

"If not, these inmates will have to be brought back in and either re-sentenced, 
or make them eligible for parole down the road," Hillman said.

He said the inmates, if re-sentenced, still could be sentenced to life in 
prison without parole.

Strange said the ruling will have a "devastating effect" on the families of 
murder victims who thought they received closure in cases going back decades.

"Murder victims' families may be put through the ordeal of seeing the person 
responsible for the death of their loved one years ago being allowed to receive 
a new sentence," he said.

Rippey said it would bring old wounds.

"It's something that we don't want to go through again," Rippey said. "It's 
like we are not allowed to move on."

Nathan Boyd was up for parole last year, and it was denied. He's not eligible 
for another parole hearing until 2019.

"We are convinced as far as the Boyd case, he will never get out (of prison), 
even if he has to be re-sentenced," Connolly said.

(source: Tines Daily)






KANSAS:

Bipartisan House bill seeks to repeal Kansas death penalty


A Kansas man who spent 15 years behind bars for a killing his brother 
eventually admitted to committing says his case is a good example of why the 
state should repeal its death penalty.

Floyd Bledsoe, who was released from prison in December, was sentenced to life 
in prison for the 1999 slaying of Camille Arfmann in Oskaloosa. His freedom 
came after new DNA evidence was found and his brother, Tom Bledsoe, wrote notes 
in which he admitted killing Arfmann before he committed suicide.

On Thursday, Floyd Bledsoe urged Kansas lawmakers to repeal the death penalty. 
He said although he wasn't sentenced to death, his experience proves the 
state's laws and court system are imperfect, the Topeka Capital-Journal 
(http://bit.ly/1PWWqxi) reported.

"The death penalty is unjust. Please stop it," he said during an anti-death 
penalty rally in the Statehouse rotunda.

A bipartisan bill to repeal the death penalty was introduced in the House 
earlier this month by Rep. Steven Becker, a Buhler Republican who is a retired 
judge. 16 other representatives - 10 Republicans and 6 Democrats - co-sponsored 
the measure.

Becker said his experience in the criminal justice system solidified his 
opposition to the death penalty, arguing that the "reasonable doubt" standard 
for proof in criminal cases is paradoxical to the death penalty.

"How can we impose the absolute certainty of death when we don't require the 
absolute certainty of guilt?" Becker asked.

Under his bill, death sentences would be barred for anyone committing a crime 
on or after July 1. Defendants sentenced for a crime before that could still be 
executed, though Kansas hasn't executed anyone in more than a half-century.

Death sentences would be replaced by sentences of life imprisonment without the 
possibility of parole.

The bill also would create a "death penalty abolition fund" under the control 
of the Kansas Department of Corrections. The bill would require the state 
budget director to place any cost savings stemming from abolition of the death 
penalty into the fund for use by the corrections department.

Rep. Bill Sutton, a co-sponsor, noted the high fiscal costs of the state's 
death row and said he came to the Legislature to shrink the size of government.

"It doesn't make any sense. You get exactly nothing for your tax dollars," 
Sutton, a Republican from Gardner, said.

(source: Associated Press)