[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----MO., KAN., COLO., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 20




MISSOURI:

Bill to abolish death penalty in Missouri being considered


A move to abolish the death penalty in the Show-Me State is getting a hearing 
before a Missouri Senate committee.

Senate Bill 816 is sponsored by Sen. Paul Weiland, R-Imperial. He told the 
committee on general laws that being a pro-life Republican should also include 
the end of life.

"When I got involved in public life, one of my motivations was defending human 
life," Wieland said. "So to me it made logical sense, in order for me to be 
congruent with my conscience, that I would in fact be against the death 
penalty, and even further, I would work to try to end the death penalty here in 
the state of Missouri."

Weiland also argued that the death penalty does not make Missouri, nor the rest 
of the United States, look good in the eyes of the world.

Several people testified in favor of the bill, including Nimrod Chapel, 
president of the NAACP's Missouri state conference. He told the committee that 
the death penalty in Missouri is disproportionately pronounced against African 
Americans.

"If you murder a white person, a white woman in particular, you're nearly 14 
times more likely to get executed than those who murder black men," Chapel 
said. "The slogan that you hear, that 'Black Lives Matter,' is directly in 
response to this kind of disproportionate application of state law."

Mark Richardson, prosecuting attorney for Cole County, strongly disagreed that 
racial disparities exist in the application of capital punishment in Missouri.

"As of 2005, there were 46 prisoners under sentence of death in Missouri, (and) 
of those 46, 24 were white and 22 were African American," Richardson said. 
"Based on the murders committed, not the population statistically, but who's 
committing the murders, there appears in our state to be no disparity."

Richardson, speaking on behalf of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting 
Attorneys, also testified that the death penalty not only protects the public, 
but staff members at state prisons.

"Throwing the death penalty off the table," he said, "I would be forced to tell 
the victim's family of a murderer of a young man, say, that started as a 
corrections officer, who's murdered in prison, that we will just send that 
inmate right back to the prison where he came from, and have no ability to 
deter our worst offenders from attempting and committing murders against prison 
staff, guards or other inmates."

The hearing had to recess because the Missouri Senate was scheduled to convene 
at 4 p.m., and Senate rules forbid committee meetings to occur while the full 
Senate is in session. The hearing on the death penalty abolition bill is 
scheduled to resume next week.

The bill's chances of success appear remote, as most of the Republican majority 
in the Missouri General Assembly supports the death penalty, as does Gov. Jay 
Nixon, a Democrat.

Missouri executed 6 death row inmates last year and 18 total since lethal 
injections resumed in late 2013.

(source: stlpublicradio.org)






KANSAS:

Supreme Court restores death sentences in heinous Kansas murder spree


Despite deep divisions over capital punishment, the Supreme Court ruled 
Wednesday that in the case of some particularly heinous Kansas murders, death 
was the appropriate penalty.

The court ruled 8-1 that death sentences handed down against 3 men should not 
have been tossed out for procedural reasons by Kansas' highest court. Justice 
Antonin Scalia wrote the decision, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor the lone 
dissent.

The case had exposed the same tensions and fault lines over the death penalty 
first revealed on the last day of the court's last term in June, when it ruled 
5-4 to uphold a controversial form of lethal injection. Then, 4 justices spoke 
emotionally over the relative correctness or cruelty of capital punishment, and 
Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it might be 
unconstitutional.

In the Kansas case, the state Supreme Court had struck down death sentences 
against 3 convicted murderers because of instructions given to the juries and, 
in the case of 2 brothers, the use of a joint sentencing hearing rather than 
separate ones. The state asked to restore the death sentences, and a majority 
of justices agreed.

"These defendants tortured their victims, acts of almost inconceivable cruelty 
and depravity described firsthand for the jury by the lone survivor," Scalia 
said.

Noting during oral arguments that 6 of the state's 9 death row inmates could 
win new hearings if the Kansas court's ruling remained, Scalia said, "Kansans, 
unlike our Justice Breyer, do not think the death penalty is unconstitutional 
and indeed very much favor it."

He later went out of his way to read the gory details of the Kansas murder 
case, in which 5 men and women were repeatedly raped and abused before 4 were 
murdered and the 5th shot execution-style.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the court's June opinion in Glossip v. Gross 
upholding lethal injections, called the Kansas killings "some of the most 
horrendous murders that I have seen in my 10 years here, and we see practically 
every death penalty case that comes up anywhere in the country. These have to 
rank as among the worst."

Nevertheless, the Kansas Supreme Court tossed out the death sentences for 2 
reasons. It said the juries were not told that mitigating factors such as 
troubled childhoods did not need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and it 
said brothers Jonathan and Reginald Carr should have had separate sentencing 
hearings.

Sotomayor took the lead in questioning the death sentences, as she did last 
year in criticizing Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol. She said the state 
court's criticism of the jury instructions was reasonable.

In her dissent, Sotomayor said the court never should have agreed to hear the 
case. "I worry that cases like these prevent states from serving as necessary 
laboratories for experimenting with how best to guarantee defendants a fair 
trial," she wrote.

(source: USA Today)

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

Supreme Court sides with Kansas officials in upholding death penalty for 
brothers


The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with Kansas officials who want to execute 
2 brothers who were involved in a brutal mass killing known as the "Wichita 
Massacre."

The court ruled 8 to 1 that the Kansas Supreme Court was wrong to have 
overturned the death sentences of Reginald and Jonathan Carr for crimes that 
Justice Antonin Scalia described as including acts of "almost inconceivable 
cruelty and depravity."

The justices were reviewing 2 issues from the Kansas court's decision: whether 
the jury received inadequate instructions on how to weigh evidence that might 
lead it to show mercy, and whether the men should have had separate sentencing 
trials.

The answer to both was no, Scalia wrote.

The notorious case shocked the state in 2000. The brothers' crime spree 
culminated in rape, robbery, forcing the victims to engage in sexual 
intercourse and the execution-style shooting of 3 men and 2 women. One woman 
survived when a bullet was deflected by her hair clip.

Even with such gruesome details, a jury contemplating whether to impose the 
death penalty must weigh aggravating circumstances - which must be proved 
beyond a reasonable doubt by prosecutors - with mitigating factors offered by 
the defense, such as a troubled childhood or personality disorder.

Those do not have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The Kansas Supreme 
Court said that because the jury was not explicitly informed of that lesser 
burden, the death sentences were invalid.

Scalia said that was wrong. "Jurors will accord mercy if they deem it 
appropriate, and withhold mercy if they do not, which is what our case law was 
designed to achieve," Scalia wrote.

He also said sentencing the brothers at the same proceeding did not violate 
their rights.

"Only the most extravagant speculation would lead to the conclusion that the 
supposedly prejudicial evidence rendered the Carr brothers' joint sentencing 
proceeding fundamentally unfair," Scalia wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone dissenter. She said the court should not 
have accepted the case. "I worry that cases like these prevent states from 
serving as necessary laboratories for experimenting with how best to guarantee 
defendants a fair trial," she wrote.

The case was the 1st death penalty controversy the court considered after 
Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote last term that they 
thought the court should reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty.

But the case of the Carr brothers did not raise such a fundamental question, 
and both joined in Scalia's opinion.

The case is Kansas v. Carr.

(source: Washington Post)






COLORADO:

New bill aiming to make death penalty easier to impose in Colorado


6 Republican lawmakers in Colorado are pushing to pass a bill that will remove 
the unanimous voting requirement for death sentences. If passed, the law could 
make it easier to impose death penalties during court proceedings.

The bill, called SB 64, is sponsored by State Representatives Kevin Lundberg, 
John Cooke, Vicki Marble, Laura Woods and Kevin Grantham. It is still awaiting 
to be discussed in the state's House of Representatives.

In the current judicial system, the jury can only allow a death sentence to be 
ruled by the court if all 12 of its members agree on a unanimous vote. With the 
proposed law, the politicians are aiming to change this rule and reduce the 
number of votes to 9 instead of 12, The Denver Channel has learned.

According to 9News, SB 64 was drafted by its sponsors in response to the mass 
shooting that occurred in 2012 during the midnight screening of Christopher 
Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" in a theater in Aurora, Colorado. The incident 
left 12 people dead.

The gunman, who was identified by previous reports as James Eagan Holmes, was 
supposed to receive death penalty. Instead, he receive a life sentence because 
the votes of the jury members were divided. For the sponsors of the bill, this 
law would empower the court to lay down the most serious form of punishment for 
heinous crimes.

However, the chances of the bill passing seem a bit dim given the current 
status of Colorado's House of Representatives. Currently, majority of the 
lawmakers serving the state are Democrats and most of them are against capital 
punishment. One of them, Representative Jovan Melton of Aurora, noted that the 
state should not consider loosening the requirement for death penalty.

"[The death penalty] really is an archaic practice that needs to go away," he 
said according to 9News. "By reducing the threshold and making it easier, we're 
just doing the wrong thing."

(source: lawyerherald.com)

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

Colorado law would make it easier for juries to sentence someone to death----If 
passed, only 9 out of 12 jurors would have to decide on a death sentence 
instead of a unanimous decision


A group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill today that would make it 
easier for juries to put someone to death in Colorado. Currently, all 12 jurors 
in a death penalty case must unanimously decide to call in the Grim Reaper; the 
new law would make it so only 9 out of 12 would be enough.

State Sen. Kevin Lundberg of Berthoud, Colorado, revealed the bill today in the 
Senate. You can read the full text of it here. Lundberg and another of the 
sponsors are on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the upper chamber where 
Republicans hold control by 1 seat. 6 Republicans and no Democrats so far 
support the bill they've said is a direct result of a non-unanimous jury 
verdict that spared the life of the Aurora theater shooter this summer.

Critics of the proposed law were quick to point out 1 particular irony.

"I think what's most odd about this bill is that we require unanimous juries 
for a DUI conviction," says Stacy Anderson of the anti-death penalty Better 
Priorities Initiative. "So we're going to set a lower bar to send somebody to 
death? To actually send someone to death should be the highest bar that a jury 
has to reach, and a prosecutor has to reach."

Public defenders in Colorado have argued that in recent years the state has, in 
a way, de facto abolition of the death penalty. Juries haven't put someone to 
death here since 2008. There haven't been any executions in the state since 
1997. Currently Colorado's death row rolls 3 deep.

In August, prosecutors were unsuccessful in convincing a jury to come to a 
unanimous decision to execute the convicted killer in the high-profile trial of 
the Aurora theater shooting in which 12 people were killed and 70 more injured.

Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler, who prosecuted the case, 
has said he believes the decision came down to one juror who didn't want to 
send the killer to the grave. In an interview with The Colorado Independent 
last month, Brauchler said while he's spoken to several other jurors from the 
trial who were in favor of execution he hasn???t yet heard from the one who 
opposed it.

"I keep waiting on that holdout juror to reach out to us - and I hope it 
happens - and sit down and say 'Here's what went on, here's what got me, here's 
that point in the trial or here's that piece of evidence, or something when we 
were talking that got me,'" Brauchler said.

Brauchler could not immediately be reached for comment about the proposed new 
law.

Doug Wilson, head of the State Public Defender's office, said he'd just gotten 
the bill but after a quick perusal felt it was unconstitutional.

"If it were to pass they will once again jeopardize their death convictions and 
death verdicts as they did when we had 3-judge sentencing as opposed to jury 
sentencing," he said. In 1995 lawmakers changed the law so a 3-judge panel 
could decide a death sentence, but that was deemed unconstitutional less than a 
decade later, and now only juries can deliver execution verdicts.

At the start of this year's legislative session that began Jan. 13, Democratic 
Gov. John Hickenlooper said he would not push for a repeal of the death penalty 
this year, but hopes to within the next few years. Democratic Senate Minority 
leader Lucia Guzman said she would not carry a repeal bill this year, though 
she's in favor of repeal. 2016 is an election year when many lawmakers are up 
for re-election. Efforts to abolish the death penalty in Colorado have failed 4 
times in the past, most recently in 2013.

It's possible even more might be on the legislative horizon this year for 
greasing the skids toward death row.

Douglas County Republican Rep. Kim Ransom told The Independent before the 
session started that she was looking to carry a bill that would also help 
prosecutors secure a death sentence in capital cases. The proposed law would 
give prosecutors a 2nd chance with a new jury - a mulligan, a do-over - if they 
weren't able to convince the 1st to delete someone from the Earth.

(source: The Colorado Independent)






USA:

Please find attached a recent publication on emotional language use in final 
words spoken before execution acknowledging the psychological terror associated 
with being executed which might be of interest to you. Please feel free to 
distribute the link to the publication on your webpage, facebook page and on 
twitter and I am happy to receive feedback.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01985/abstract 
[journal.frontiersin.org]

Yours sincerely

Sarah Hirschmuller

hirschmu at uni-mainz.de

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

Famous US judge admits there's a punishment that's just as bad as the death 
penalty - if not worse


Alex Kozinski, the famous former chief of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth 
Circuit, thinks solitary confinement is a punishment that's just as bad as the 
death penalty - if not worse.

"Sending hardened criminals from death row to solitary confinement is no 
triumph," writes Kozinski in a January 15 editorial for the Yale Law Review 
Journal. "It merely swaps one type of death for another."

Kozinski's sentiments are part of a broader movement to ban solitary 
confinement across the US that has had some success in recent months.

The New York state government recently agreed to a host of reforms, including 
limiting the time served in solitary confinement to three months, and allowing 
inmates monthly phone calls and group recreation, following a lawsuit brought 
by the New York Civil Liberties Union, reports The New York Times.

According to Kozinski, death penalty abolitionists are fighting the wrong 
fight. There are 3,000 prisoners on death row in the US, and while that's a 
huge number, it pales in comparison to the 100,000 suffering in administrative 
segregation (another term for solitary confinement) in prisons across the 
country, writes Kozinski, citing the Death Penalty Information Center.

"Taking prisoners off death row and putting them in supermax prisons may soothe 
our collective conscience," writes Kozinski. "But we may be condemning those 
inmates to decades-long torture that may make a swift execution look like an 
act of grace."

Indeed, some members of the public may share this view. Several potential 
jurors in the trial of Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told lawyers 
they believe "life imprisonment is the harsher of the two options while the 
death penalty is 'the easy way out,'" reports The Washington Post.

It's clear that solitary confinement does take a toll on inmates. Inmates in 
solitary confinement are 5 times more likely to kill themselves than those in 
general population, according to a study of Maine state prisons cited by 
Kozinski.

When confined to a single room with little outside contact, some inmates 
develop acute mental illness, become anxious and aggressive, and hurt 
themselves, according to a psychiatric evaluation of inmates cited by Kozinski.

"You have nothing but 4 walls and a steel door ... You end up slowly slipping," 
exonerated death row inmate Anthony Graves told Business Insider. Graves added, 
"The situation makes you hopeless."

Moreover, Kozinski argues, it's also much easier to consign someone to solitary 
confinement than it is to sentence someone to death.

Even though the outcomes are comparably horrible, a death sentence involves a 
"decades-long, multi-jurisdictional tango," while inmates can be sentenced to 
long-term solitary confinement as long as prison officials justify it through 
"some kind of hearing," writes Kozinski.

Those who want to fix the prison system, Kozinski writes, should spend their 
energy "agitating for reform in this dank corner of our criminal justice 
system."

(source: Business Insider)