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

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 17




CALIFORNIA:

Wozniak case likely to illustrate long road to execution in California


Steve Herr assumes he won't live to see the execution of the man convicted of 
murdering and then decapitating his son in the attic of an Orange County 
theater.

"Realistically, I'm not going to be around when he's put to death," Herr, 67, 
said a few days after a jury recommended the death penalty for Daniel Wozniak. 
"I'll be dead."

Orange County Superior Court Judge John Conley is scheduled in March to render 
the official sentence for Wozniak, 31, for the slayings of 26-year-old Army 
veteran Sam Herr and his friend Juri "Julie" Kibuishi, 23, in May 2010.

Wozniak, a community theater actor from Costa Mesa, was desperate for money to 
fund his upcoming wedding, so he killed the 2 as part of a plan to steal 
$62,000 from Herr's bank account, according to prosecutors.

After his conviction last month, jurors took less than an hour of deliberation 
Monday to decide that Wozniak deserved death for the murders. Orange County 
District Atty. Tony Rackauckas said it was the fastest decision on capital 
punishment he could recall.

*

Executions take decades to be carried out

Wozniak's case took more than 5 years to go to trial, and despite the jury's 
decisiveness, its death sentence verdict is just the beginning of another long 
process that may or may not end with Wozniak's execution.

In California, where capital punishment has been on hold for a decade, it's an 
open question whether convicts sent to death row today will ever have their 
sentence carried out.

The state put a moratorium on the death penalty in 2006 when a judge ruled that 
a 3-drug lethal injection could cause inhumane suffering.

In November, officials unveiled a 1-drug injection that could restart 
executions, but the method still faces months of public vetting and possible 
legal challenges.

Even before the moratorium, however, "the reality in California is that, of 
those who are sentenced to death, very few have been executed and it's taken an 
enormously long time," said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine law 
school.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in California in 1977, juries have sent 
900 inmates to death row - 13 have been put to death, according to court papers 
authored by Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court in Orange County.

On average, there is a 25-year delay between a death sentence being handed down 
and it being carried out, and that gap is getting longer, according to the 
judge.

*

Why does it take so long?

Many factors add up to the decades of lag time between a death sentence and an 
execution, according to Chemerinsky.

To begin with, all death sentences in California are automatically appealed.

Before any work can be done on the case, a lawyer must be appointed. That in 
itself can take years.

A 2004 report commissioned by the California Legislature blamed that on budget 
cuts at the state public defender's office and on a low rate of pay offered to 
private attorneys willing to take the assignments.

Another factor is that all such appeals go directly to California's Supreme 
Court, which hears only about 20 to 25 such cases a year, according to Carney.

After years of reviewing and briefing their cases, attorneys might wait 2 to 3 
more years before the court has time to hear their arguments, the judge wrote.

Inmates who lose their appeal to the Supreme Court can appeal again for the 
court's consideration. If those appeals are exhausted, inmates can petition a 
federal court for review, further extending the process.

*

Is it cruel and unusual?

The future of capital punishment in California became even more uncertain in 
2014 when Carney ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional, saying the 
long and unpredictable waits had made the system cruel and unusual and 
undermined its effectiveness.

In November, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Carney, but the 
decision was on procedural grounds, leaving the possibility of another 
challenge at the state level based on the same arguments, Chemerinsky said.

More condemned inmates die of natural causes than are put to death, according 
to California Department of Corrections figures that Carney cited in his 
decision.

"As for the random few for whom execution does become a reality, they will have 
languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no 
retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary," Carney wrote.

But such arguments and the death penalty's murky future did not deter the 
Orange County district attorney's office from pursuing capital punishment for 
Wozniak.

"Cases like this are a perfect example of why the death penalty is 
appropriate," Senior Deputy District Atty. Matt Murphy said in a news 
conference after the jury's decision.

Prosecutors in Orange County seek capital punishment on only about 4% of 
eligible cases, but the brutality of Wozniak's crimes called out for the 
highest available penalty, Murphy said.

During the trial, jurors heard testimony that Wozniak dismembered Herr's body 
before tossing some of the parts in a Long Beach park in a failed attempt to 
throw police off his trail.

To further the coverup, Wozniak used Herr's phone to lure Kibuishi to Herr's 
apartment, then killed her and staged her body to make it seem as if Herr had 
raped her and fled, according to Murphy.

*

State's voters may play a big role

Wozniak's final fate, however, may rest with what voters decide this year.

Competing propositions, one intending to abolish the state's death penalty and 
the other to speed it up, are expected to appear on the November ballot.

Steve Herr is aware the question of Wozniak's execution may be moot for him.

But whether Wozniak lives or dies, Herr said, the jury's decision carries a 
comforting weight.

"You have 12 people from different backgrounds, different genders, different 
religious beliefs - all of them agree that this crime was so heinous, so evil, 
it warranted the ultimate punishment," he said. "That was important to me."

(source: Los Angeles Times)






USA:

Can a brain scan uncover your morals and determine whether a prisoner dies? 
Brains images are becoming standard evidence in some of the country's most 
controversial and disturbing death penalty cases


It's hard to imagine Steven Northington killing 2 people. The 43-year-old says 
he likes to make people laugh, "like a comedian". He's a loyal son to his 
troubled mother and father. He sends his younger sister birthday cards from 
prison and draws elaborate smiley faces on them. His defense team laughs with 
affection when they hear his name because he is, they say, "a character".

Between 2003 and 2004, Northington was slinging for a drug ring that flooded 
his Philadelphia neighborhood with bloodshed. The Kaboni Savage Organization 
was responsible for 9 murders during those 2 years alone, including the 
firebombing of a house that killed 2 women and 4 children.

The government was after them, and they knew it: 7 of the 9 victims were 
murdered in retaliation against witnesses who had agreed to cooperate with 
prosecutors to bring the kingpin down, according to the FBI.

It wasn't until 2013 that the federal court started its trial against 
ringleader Kaboni Savage, as well as his sister Kidada Savage, accomplice 
Robert Merritt, and Northington. The 4 were tried together for a total of 12 
murders dating back to 1998.

Northington stood apart because he was arrested a month before the firebombing, 
and only charged for two of the murders - those of Barry Parker, a corner 
competitor of the ring, and Tybius Flowers, a childhood friend. In Flowers's 
case, the execution happened hours before he was supposed to take the stand as 
the star witness against Savage in a 1998 murder case.

Northington was convicted by the state court in Philadelphia in 2007 for the 
murder of Parker. In 2013, the federal trial combined the 2 murders and found 
Northington guilty of aiding both.

And since the murders were an attempt to intimidate witnesses and in support of 
racketeering, federal prosecutors wanted him dead.

They asked for the death penalty.

--

Days before he was sentenced, one of Northington's lawyers, William Bowe, 
showed the jurors something they never saw during the 6-month trial: images of 
Northington's brain. He told them that Northington was developmentally stunted 
by homelessness, abuse and prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol.

Bowe said the deficiencies the scans revealed provided some explanation for 
Northington's actions - not an excuse, but an extenuating set of circumstances.

"What does that mean? It means that Steven Northington doesn't think like you 
and me. It means his brain doesn't function like ours. It means when he makes a 
decision, he doesn't do it like you or me. It's broken," he told the jury.

Brain images are becoming standard evidence in some of the country's most 
controversial and disturbing death penalty cases. In March, Barack Obama's 
bioethics commission released a report stating that neuroscience is used in 
about a quarter of capital cases, and that percentage is rising quickly.

Lawyers use scans in a few principal ways. Sometimes it's to explain a 
psychiatrist???s diagnosis to help a plea of insanity, or to help prove 
intellectual disability. Most often they are used to ask juries for mercy 
during the sentencing phase of the grimmest trials.

Since the inner workings of a criminal's mind are central to a case, any tool 
that might shed light on the 3-lb organ is worth considering. And brain scans 
have diagnostic credibility: they are fundamental in clinical settings for 
spotting tumors, cancer or traumatic injuries. They have been used to study 
aspects of behavior, such as decision-making, depression and impulse control. 
But in death penalty cases, the images are taken out of that medical or 
experimental context, and used to clarify nuances of criminal actions.

It remains unclear whether pictures of neural processes or of brain anatomy can 
reveal a person's morals or the substance of their character. But despite 
incomplete science, brain scans are becoming crucial arbiters of life and 
death.

--

The 1st criminal to use brain images for his defense was Jonathan Hinckley, who 
at age 25 shot president Ronald Reagan and 3 other people in 1981.

The defense team argued that Hinckley was mentally incapacitated when he fired 
the gun because of his severe schizophrenia and depression, and hence should 
not be held responsible for the crime. They contended images of his brain 
supported that diagnosis.

The judge permitted David Bear, the psychiatrist who diagnosed Hinckley, to 
exhibit a Cat scan of the outer layer of his brain.

Bear said Hinckley's sulci, the medical term for the valleys that run across 
the cerebral cortex, were wider than average; he cited a published paper 
correlating wider sulci to schizophrenia (this observation has not changed over 
time: some people with schizophrenia do indeed have wider cortical grooves - 
but so do many people who are not schizophrenic or suffering from any other 
mental disorder).

Neuropsychologist Dr Helen Mayberg of Emory University, known for her work on 
depression, said during an interview that Hinckley's case demonstrates 
fundamental problems that brain images bring into the courtrooms.

Mayberg, who is often paid by the prosecution to cripple a defense team's brain 
imaging science in high-profile cases, said that if Bear had not diagnosed 
Hinckley with schizophrenia, the scan would not have meant anything. And 
conversely, if Hinckley's brain had appeared normal, it would not have negated 
Bear's psychiatric diagnosis. "The guy was psychotic," she said, regardless of 
the scans.

If the same trial took place today, she said, the technology would be newer but 
the argument the same: a neuroscientist would say that parts of Hinckley's 
brain has traits that some scientific papers could correlate with some mental 
disorder. But unless the scan shows something like a tumor, they are never 
powerful enough to diagnose. "The irony is, using imaging evidence just 
obfuscates the issue," she said.

Hinckley's defense team used a Cat scan in 1981 - just 2 years after the 
producers of the technology had been awarded the Nobel Prize. But MRI scans 
soon replaced Cat scans: an MRI can see right through the bone of the skull, 
whereas a Cat scan cannot.

By the early 1990s, expert witnesses were showing Pet scans, which record the 
brain's metabolism. Pet maps where the brain is burning glucose for energy, 
which is interpreted as bursts of neural activity. The subject has to be pumped 
with a radioactive glucose tracer; when the brain metabolizes the glucose it 
emits photons, which are recorded in color: flaming yellow often means the 
brain is burning more glucose, blue means the opposite.

Hinckley won the insanity defense with the Cat scan, though its weight on the 
verdict is unclear. Mayberg and others argue that it was insignificant to the 
insanity plea. At the time, it was up to the prosecution to prove Hinckley sane 
- after the trial, jurors said in news reports the government had failed to do 
so.

Regardless, the verdict led to a revolution in how the courts evaluate mental 
health and changed the standards in federal court. Upheaval over the decision 
prompted Congress to alter what defendants had to prove to be acquitted on 
grounds of insanity. The federal government and many states also shifted the 
burden of proof to the defense, which raised the bar for lawyers seeking an 
acquittal based on mental incapacity. And since then, advances in 
neuropsychological science have become more attractive to defense attorneys.

Northington's lawyer said he has noticed that over the last 20 years defense 
teams are also being held to a higher standard. "What constitutes effective 
counsel has become much more rigorous," said Bowe. "As that becomes more 
rigorous, the courts are essentially telling the lawyer, 'You've got to look 
into all this stuff.' So I think there has been a natural growth and it's 
naturally going to lead to more brain imaging and scanning."

The Bioethics Commission cited a report that analyzed 1,586 judicial opinions 
that used neurological or behavioral genetics evidence between 2007 and 2012; 
40% of them were to defend the death sentence, and 28% were to compensate for 
ineffective counsel.

--

Northington and his 2 older brothers grew up nomadic; they lived in train 
stations, homeless shelters and hotels. Their mother was around, but they were 
often left on their own without food or money. In 1987, he was in 7th grade at 
age 15 and had 138 absences that school year. He had been held back in 1st, 
4th, and 6th grades.

His long relationship with the legal justice system started one year later. He 
was arrested for possessing a controlled substance, as was his mother in a 
separate case that year, but both their charges were dismissed. His mother, 
Annette Northington, recently said she started smoking crack around that time, 
and had turned to prostitution to support the habit.

"That area, when you move in there, it's like you're entrapped," she said of 
their Philadelphia neighborhood. "If you didn't know what was going on you 
would have thought they were giving out free food, that's how long the drug 
lines were. And I never thought it'd be me standing in that line, and I ended 
up one of them. So it's not a happy story and it's not a good story but it 
happened to me and I regret it."

She said she had named her son after her brother Steven Northington, who was 
sentenced to life in prison when he was a teenager. "I remember I named him the 
same name as my brother and I was thinking please don't let this be like a 
whammy or something ... and it's just like a nightmare."

At 18, Northington was convicted for the 1st time for aggravated assault and 
robbery. He was sentenced to 5 to 10 years with a chance of parole. In 1991, 
the court had ordered Northington's 1st mental evaluation. An investigator 
found that the government psychiatrist diagnosed him with Paranoid Personality 
Disorder, but did not recommend treatment because he was "particularly 
distrustful".

Instead, Northington spent most of the last 7 years of his sentence in solitary 
confinement - 23 hours a day alone in an 80-square-foot cell - as punishment 
for more than 100 disciplinary infractions. Most of them were for nonviolent 
breaches, such as refusing to take orders, spitting, cussing or outbursts, 
while some were assaults that included kicking and throwing feces.

In 2000 he maxed-out his sentence and was released to the neighborhood he knew 
best, without a home. During the next 2 years, he was rearrested twice, the 2nd 
time costing him 7 months in jail because the government had mistakenly thought 
he was violating his nonexistent parole. He was released again around May 2002, 
less than a year before Parker was shot to death.

--

By introducing brain scans, Northington's lawyers were hoping to show that he 
was intellectually disabled. If they could prove it, the court would not be 
able to punish him with death, even if he was found guilty. In 2002, the US 
Supreme Court had ruled that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to 
execute a person with such an impairment. He or she can still be found guilty 
for the crime, but not killed for it.

The ruling was left to the judge, who had to decide before the trial began 
whether Northington was intelligent enough for the death penalty.

At that time the court was using a revised version of the Diagnostic and 
Statistical Manual IV, or the DSM IV-TR, as one of a few guides to define 
someone with intellectual disability: an IQ of approximately 70 or lower, with 
trouble learning or intellectually functioning since youth (the newest version 
of the DSM puts less emphasis on IQ, but still cites a measure of approximately 
70 or below). Northington's lawyers wanted to use brain images to meet the 
criteria by showing he may have had severe mental setbacks while growing up.

They turned to Dr Ruben Gur, a leading neuroscientist at the University of 
Pennsylvania. The director of the Center for Neuroimaging in Psychiatry and 
Brain Behavior Lab, Gur testifies in many courtrooms about how brain scans 
might explain a criminal's behavior.

His wife directs the Neuropsychiatry Section of the Psychiatry department from 
an office just across the hall from him. One of her latest cases entails the 
psychiatric evaluation of James Eagan Holmes, the man who said he thought he 
was the Joker when he killed 12 people at a Batman screening in Colorado.

In 1997, Gur and his wife were asked to analyze Ted Kaczynski, also known as 
the Unabomber. It was their 1st criminal case. "We spent a nice weekend in 
Helena. I tested him and Raquel gave him a psychiatric interview," Gur said 
during an interview in his office.

Gur said he would never work for the prosecution; since he is among few doctors 
in the country who can analyze scans the way he does, he feels obliged to 
protect people who may have mental ailments, not work against them.

Mayberg is his nemesis: she thinks Gur lets his opinion about the death penalty 
cloud his scientific testimony.

Mayberg often argues that no scientific data can support what Gur says in 
court, while he often says he is not diagnosing, just emphasizing correlations 
(they both charge $500 an hour for their expertise).

Their differences are most apparent when they talk about their roles in the 
2007 Lisa Montgomery case. Montgomery had been accused of strangling a pregnant 
woman to death, then cutting the baby out of her womb. Montgomery's lawyers 
were trying to win the insanity defense. They said Montgomery could not be held 
responsible for the crime because she was so mentally unstable when she 
committed it that she could not understand it was wrong. They argued that she 
had a rare mental illness called pseudocyesis that made her believe she was 
pregnant.

Before the trial, the judge had to decide whether the lawyers could use her 
brain scans as evidence in the trial. Gur, who was testifying about their 
validity, said the scans showed that Montgomery suffered from functional 
abnormalities that could be consistent with that diagnosis. He singled out her 
hypothalamus, an almond-sized hormonal regulator in the core of the brain, 
because the PET showed that it was overactive. He cited a scientific paper from 
2006 in which a biology student had stimulated female rats. The stimulation had 
caused their hypothalamuses to release hormones and physiologically prepare for 
pregnancy.

Mayberg, for her part, said it was inappropriate for him to be relating 
Montgomery to rats. The judge agreed that the science was irrelevant and 
excluded Gur's testimony from the trial.

Montgomery was found guilty, and sentenced to death.

--

Testing the brain of a defendant is a rigorous and expensive practice that, in 
federal cases, requires the judge's permission. The scans alone can cost around 
$6,000 and then experts are paid to analyze the results and testify in court; 
Mayberg and Gur say their bills are on average about $10,000 for 20 hours. 
Northington's request was approved, but lawyers say it's not always easy: in 
their experience, it depends on the jurisdiction.

After weeks of memory, spatial, speed processing and other performance tests, 
Northington was escorted to a hospital by prison staff. Technicians there 
performed the scans in 2 machines - MRI and Pet devices.

Gur brought his analysis to the stand during Northington's 5-day pretrial 
hearing: he said Northington's brain was oversized and out of balance 
structurally and actively; flaming yellow areas were overcompensating for blue 
ones.

He walked the court through Northington's brain piece by piece, emphasizing 
each element that looked too big, too small, over or under active. He said the 
hindrances could have affected his capacity to control himself, his motivation 
at school, and his ability to read or comprehend spatial layouts. All of it, 
Gur said, was likely from a blow to the right backside of the head and exposure 
to alcohol while his mother was pregnant. Fetal Alcohol Spectrum disorders are 
the number one cause of intellectual disability.

2 doctors also testified about Northington's IQ. The defense found it was 67 
and the prosecution found it was 64, but argued that he had sabotaged the tests 
on purpose.

After that testimony, Northington told the judge he was tired of being harassed 
by the prosecutor and asked if the judge could get him out of solitary 
confinement, or "the hole". "I need to be in population. It's messing with me. 
It's messing with me. I'll do the test all over again. I don't care. I want to 
go to trial. You can give me the death penalty. I want to go to trial. I want 
to prove my innocence. That's it. I got rights," he told the court. 
Northington's defense lawyers say the judge tried to help accommodate 
Northington, but that he remained in and out of solitary.

A couple weeks after the hearing, the judge, in a 61-page statement, said that 
there was not enough evidence to convince him that Northington was 
intellectually disabled.

"With respect to the neuroimaging data, while [the Court] find[s] that the data 
demonstrates that areas of the defendant's brain are functioning abnormally, 
Dr. Gur's testimony did not convince the Court that the totality of the 
defendant's brain abnormalities would lead to a diagnosis of sufficiently 
sub-average intelligence."

The decision triggered the start of the trial with the death penalty looming.

Northington's mother said she watched almost every day of it. She traveled back 
and forth from court to the hospital because her oldest son Michael had colon 
cancer. In 2011 she had found her youngest son, Kadrice, dead at 35 from a 
drug-related heart attack. 5 years before that, her other son Jamal had been 
shot to death by a robber at 25.

Shaken by the prospect of Northington's execution, Annette Northington said she 
prayed for help when she left the court the day the jury found him guilty. "I 
was [going] home all the way with tears knowing that my son was facing the 
death penalty, thinking 'Dear God, what is it that I can do ... they gonna kill 
Steve.'"

--

If a murderer is convicted and the crime is punishable by death, the trial 
moves on to the penalty phase where the same jury hears about the defendant's 
background before sentencing. This is the most common way lawyers in criminal 
courts use brain scans: to mitigate against the death penalty.

Since the defendant has already been found guilty, the jury has to answer the 
gravest question: should he or she die? And because it is a person's life, 
lawyers bend over backwards to bring science or other evidence into the 
courtroom that might otherwise not be permitted. It is the defendant's 
constitutional right to show their arbiters every piece of evidence that could 
sway that judgment, even if the science is premature.

This phase can free scientists from the thorough peer review that otherwise 
validates their theories. When neuropsychologists, such as Gur, are asked to 
testify, it is because they are esteemed within the field and have published 
scientific papers that have been meticulously vetted by other independent 
scientists. In other parts of the trial, these experts can only testify about 
what has been published in journals, but in the sentencing phase, these same 
scientists are asked to make novel leaps or educated guesses. Gur has published 
more than 350 papers that often depict differences in people's brains, but none 
of them identify behavioral markers in criminal minds or test the hypotheses he 
makes about individuals in court.

This time, because the rules are more relaxed, Gur was able to paint a picture 
of how the damage he found might affect a person's character and intellect. 
"Such an individual can run into trouble on several counts ... It's likely to 
lead to bad decisions and difficulty to adjust behavior to the context," he 
said. "Somebody with that brain would be vulnerable to talk out of turn, tell 
off-color jokes in the wrong company, not being able to adjust...." He also 
implied Northington was vulnerable to coercion. "It turns out people with 
frontal lobe damage tend to respond very well to authority and to structure ... 
they almost naturally gravitate toward somebody who will tell them what to do."

Mayberg, who was not a part of Northington's case but read the testimony, was 
appalled by Gur's interpretations. "Clearly it's not good to have a mother that 
drinks when you're in utero. It is not good to be in a home that is poor. That 
said there are people who have those same experiences and become very 
successful. You can spin that either way," she said. "He doesn't speak to data, 
he doesn't speak to literature, he makes it up. He interprets as he sees fit in 
a given case and makes inferences that are his alone."

It's not hard to deflate testimony about behavioral brain scans in court, 
especially at the sentencing phase. Academics have written many papers that 
explain why group level data does not accurately represent an individual. 
Scientists in forensics also ask whether it is appropriate to compare a 
supposed criminal's brain to a dataset composed of the brains of healthy 
people. People with criminal records may have caused damage by doing drugs or 
getting into physical fights, while people within the control group are less 
likely. Since it's rarely clear what caused which deviations, it's also unclear 
to what extent the defendant should be held accountable.

Lawyers trained in neuroscience also argue that there is an undeniable 
difference between a hospital and the scene of the crime. They ask how 
scientists can be sure a brain scanned in a machine would look and operate the 
same way if it were scanned while the person was committing the crime. The 
defendant's brain is often analyzed years after the crime was committed - 
Northington was scanned in 2012, the murders were in 2003 and 2004.

Limitations are rarely discussed in media reports, which tend to embellish new 
brain studies. Sensational news may have a powerful influence on judges and 
juries. Executive Director of the Bioethics Commission Lisa Lee said this type 
of misleading information has the power to affect important legal decisions, 
such as who should get the death penalty. "Headlines are just crazy about what 
neuroscience can and cannot do," Lee said. "Given what's on the line, it should 
be something we pay close attention to in terms of hype."

These studies are coming from a newer, more accessible technology called fMRI, 
which is seen as less credible than PET. fMRI illustrates gushes of blood and 
is more attractive because it produces results faster and without a radioactive 
tracer, but it's unclear how blood rushes relate to brain function. Regardless, 
fMRI literature is growing so fast that if death penalty defendants bring it 
into court, there's more room for it to backfire. Defense lawyers already run 
the risk that scans will just convince juries that there's no cure, that the 
defendant will keep committing crimes.

With fMRI, prosecutors will also have access to studies that can emphasize that 
mentality, such as one that predicts recidivism by measuring blood gushes in a 
limbic system linked to impulse control. Gur only uses PET for testimony 
because it's what the court accepts, though he switched to fMRI for his own 
research many years ago. A judge in 2009 allowed an expert like Gur to testify 
about the results from an fMRI during sentencing, though he didn't let the jury 
see the images.

"This is where it's headed," said Gur. "But you need to have a brave lawyer who 
is ready."

--

When the time came for Gur to testify for the 2nd time in Northington's case, 
he did so for the jury, amid about a dozen other mitigating witnesses, 
including Northington's mother, Annette.

She told emotional stories about being poor, reckless, homeless, in abusive 
relationships and disappearing to speakeasies or crack houses while Steven and 
his siblings were growing up. She said that she never visited or wrote to 
Steven those first 10 years he was in jail, and that she didn't recognize him 
when he returned to the streets.

Another psychologist familiar with trauma also testified. He had evaluated 
Northington, his academic record, his family, history of solitary confinement 
and criminal record, concluding that Northington was a victim of trauma and 
mental health issues that were exacerbated by prison, yet never addressed. A 
special educator familiar with Northington's old school district found that it 
failed to provide Northington with special education services while he was 
there; he had not received the support he deserved.

Over 6 days, lawyers questioned many more witnesses, including Gur, helping 
them describe to the jurors a caring man who was manipulated by Savage, and was 
being held more accountable than bigger players in the drug trade despite a sea 
of setbacks.

Then the jury heard closing arguments and went to deliberate.

"When [the jury] came out...I could actually see their eyes looking directly to 
me and I knew then that they weren't sending my son to the death penalty," said 
Annette Northington. "I just touched my grandson's hand and he was really 
nervous ... and they said they sentenced him to life and then my heart just got 
like you know, I felt a little free."

They unanimously decided the death penalty was too harsh. As for Savage, he was 
sentenced to death; his sister Kidada Savage and Merritt were both sentenced to 
life.

When Gur was asked about the outcome of the case he said, "we won." But teasing 
out the role of the brain scans is tricky. None of the 12 jurors thought 
Northington had organic brain damage before the year 2000, which means they 
probably didn't think he had it in 2003 or 2004. 10 of them thought he had 
organic brain damage at the time of the verdict. And while only one of them 
thought he was mentally ill, they all agreed he had symptoms of mental illness 
and that his "brain damage and/or mental illness made him susceptible to the 
influence of Kaboni Savage."

--

Until recently, Northington remained in solitary confinement at a federal 
prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where the warden refused to let media visit 
him, saying it would be a security concern and threaten orderly operations. 
Northington was recently transferred to a prison in another state.

Nearly every letter he writes starts with Assalamu-Alaikum. He talks about 
passing the GED and writing a book. He says the scans explain why he "couldn't 
grab it" in school, that they show why he didn't perform well and that he has 
to strain the parts of his brain that are working when he's focusing. He also 
says that every day, he wonders about his appeal.

The bioethics report provides little resolution with regard to using scans - it 
states that the outcome for the defendants have been mixed while avoiding 
criticism of the science. Though Lee, the executive director of the Bioethics 
Commission, said there's an expectation now for both the prosecutors and 
defense lawyers to consider how brain scans can help them present the best case 
possible.

Meanwhile, the federal government is pumping millions of dollars into fMRI 
research on mental diagnoses, partly in anticipation of the judicial system 
benefitting from it.

Everyone who has a stake in the science is hoping the scans will some day 
provide an unbiased truth. But there is a systematic problem because the law 
needs finality, while science relies on continued research. And for now, there 
is no way to see intention in the scans - there is no record of a crime, of 
innocence, of morality, of honesty. Behavioral brain scans are as objective as 
their interpreters.

(source: The Guardian)

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

The Death Penalty Endgame


How does the death penalty in America end?

For decades that has been an abstract question. Now there may be an answer in 
the case of Shonda Walter, a 36-year-old black woman on Pennsylvania???s death 
row. On Friday, the Supreme Court met to discuss whether to hear a petition 
from Ms. Walter, who is asking the justices to rule that in all cases, 
including hers, the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel 
and unusual punishments.

Ever since 1976, when the court allowed executions to resume after a 4-year 
moratorium, the abolition movement has avoided bringing a broad constitutional 
challenge against the practice, believing that it would not succeed. In that 
time, 1,423 people have been put to death.

Yet there is no question that the national trend is moving away from capital 
punishment. Since the late 1990s, almost every year has seen fewer executions, 
fewer new death sentences and fewer states involved in the repugnant business 
of killing their citizens.

In 2015, there were 28 executions and 49 new death sentences, the lowest 
numbers in decades. Seven states have abandoned the practice entirely since 
2004, for a total of 19 that no longer have the death penalty. Many others have 
not executed anyone for years. And only 3 states - Texas, Georgia and Missouri 
- were responsible for almost all of last year's executions.

A majority of Americans still support capital punishment, but the percentage 
favoring it has dropped from around 80 % in the 1990s to about 60 % now. When 
polls offer a choice between death and life without parole, people roughly 
split evenly.

In the past 14 years alone, the Supreme Court has barred the execution of 
several categories of people: minors, the intellectually disabled, and those 
convicted of a crime other than murder. In that last case, decided in 2008, 
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court, "When the law punishes by death, 
it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the 
constitutional commitment to decency and restraint."

Taken together, these signs have led some abolitionists to conclude that the 
conditions for ending capital punishment entirely are now as favorable as they 
might ever be. That argument got a major boost last June, when Justice Stephen 
Breyer, in a long dissent from a 5-to-4 ruling that allowed Oklahoma to proceed 
with its inhumane lethal-injection drug protocol, suggested he would be open to 
a case challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.

In his dissent, which was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Breyer 
explained in detail how the death penalty was unreliable, arbitrary and 
racially discriminatory. He said it was no longer sufficient simply "to patch 
up the death penalty's legal wounds 1 at a time," because the practice as a 
whole "most likely" violates the Eighth Amendment.

Shonda Walter's case is the 1st to take up Justice Breyer's challenge. Ms. 
Walter was convicted of murdering an 83-year-old man named James Sementelli. 
Her appointed lawyers put on no defense and offered no argument that might have 
spared her from a death sentence. Pennsylvania appeals courts agreed that she 
had inexcusably bad representation, but they still upheld her conviction and 
sentence. Since Ms. Walter does not fit the special categories of defendants 
who are shielded from the death penalty, her appeal is based on the claim that 
all executions violate the Constitution.

The justices may not grant Ms. Walter's petition (others are also expected to 
be filed in the coming weeks), but they can no longer ignore the clear movement 
of history. They already have all the evidence they need to join the rest of 
the civilized world and end the death penalty once and for all.

(source: Editorial Board, New York Times)

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United States: Cruel and Unusual----There is a recent decline of capital 
punishment in one of the two remaining industrialized nations with the death 
penalty.


Among the democracies in the industrialized world, only the US and Japan 
continue to execute people.

1. The number of executions carried out each year in the United States has gone 
down over the last decade and a half. After reaching a high of 98 in 1999, 
their number declined to 37 in 2008.

2. The 35 U.S. executions that were carried out in 2014 were the 5th-highest 
number worldwide.

3. Those executions were carried out in just 7 of the 50 U.S. states.

Death Penalty: A "Just The Facts" Series

4. Moreover, 28 of those executions were carried out in only 3 states: Texas 
(10), Missouri (10) and Florida (8). Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Oklahoma were 
the other 4 states.

5. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, fewer than 2% of U.S. 
counties sentenced a majority of current death row inmates.

6. 19 U.S. states have abolished the use of the death penalty. The most recent 
state to do so was Nebraska, whose predominately Republican legislature voted 
in May 2015 to ban the practice. Nebraska had not carried out an execution 
since 1997.

7. While some states abolished capital punishment on the grounds that it 
constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, other states (such as Maryland) have 
objected to the disproportionate use of the death penalty for poor and African 
American offenders.

8. It also costs a state like Maryland 3 times as much to prosecute a death 
penalty case (through all its appeals) as a life-without-parole case.

9. The European Union has quietly applied strategic pressure and sanctions in 
recent years to deter the United States from using the death penalty.

10. Among the major democracies in the industrialized world, only the United 
States and Japan continue to execute people.

(sources: Amnesty International, Death Penalty Information Center and The 
Globalist Research Center)