[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, DEL., GA., FLA., ALA., CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 22



TEXAS:

Talking with Ivan, I found a flame of life on death row


I was finally about to meet the man I had been writing letters to for 11 years. 
Separated by glass, and unable to hug or shake hands, we would have to use 
phone receivers to talk to each other. To my right and left, others were doing 
the same, a line of tete-a-tetes happening in unison, separated by booth 
dividers. My friend Ivan Cantu is on death row in Texas.

I had left my harried life as a working mother in Washington, D.C., for 2 days 
this August to make the long-overdue trip. I considered it a pilgrimage of 
sorts.

Ivan and I started writing when I was 29 and he was 32. He was 3 years into a 
death sentence, convicted of killing his cousin and his cousin's fiancee over 
drug money. I was just married and working in international development. Right 
from the start, Ivan told me he was wrongfully convicted.

Back then, I didn't have an opinion about Ivan's guilt - it didn't matter to me 
one way or another. But I saw clearly that no one was listening to him. His 
trial attorney had refused to investigate anything. His appellate attorney 
never spoke or wrote to him before submitting the habeas corpus appeal. Maybe I 
could listen to him, I thought. Maybe that was the only thing I could do.

The Polunsky Unit where Ivan lives is an oppressive complex of barbed wire and 
low gray buildings, incongruously situated on a winding farm road one hour 
north of Houston. I had never been to a prison before and everything about it 
intimidated me.

"Washington, D.C., eh?" one guard said, eyeing my license. "Do y'all have many 
wildfires there?"

"Oh no, we don't. ... Not many," I replied, trying to sound deferential.

The invitation to write to someone on death row came through my connection to 
the Community of Sant'Egidio, a Catholic lay association that -- among many 
other activities -- supports prisoners and advocates for the abolishment of the 
death penalty worldwide.

Pope Francis' recent words to Congress summarize the inspiration behind the 
community's work and the first reason why I don't believe in the death penalty 
(there are many). "Every life is sacred," the pope said. "Every human person is 
endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the 
rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes."

(source: Dani Clark, National Catholic Reporter)






DELAWARE:

Death penalty repeal bill headed to House vote


A death penalty repeal bill that had been languishing in a House committee is 
headed to a vote by the full House next week after the committee chairman 
agreed to release it.

Judiciary Committee members voted 6-to-5 last May not to send the bill to the 
full House after it narrowly cleared the Senate on an 11-to-9 vote.

But House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. John Mitchell, D-Elsmere, who 
opposes repeal, said Thursday that he withdrew his "no" vote and signed the 
measure out of committee with an "unfavorable" endorsement, allowing the bill 
to move forward to a House vote next Thursday.

"After some long and serious consideration ... this was a tough decision for 
me," said Mitchell, a retired police officer who also has family members in law 
enforcement. Mitchell said he remains opposed to the bill but thought that 
House members should have an opportunity to vote on it.

"I have a responsibility to members of my caucus to give them the opportunity 
to speak ... what happens will happen," he said.

Rep. Sean Lynn, a Dover Democrat and chief House sponsor of the legislation, 
said he believes it has enough support to pass the House.

"I'm sure it will be a close vote," said Lynn, who had previously threatened to 
try to bypass the committee process to bring the bill to a floor vote. Lynn 
expressed gratitude to Mitchell for his change of heart.

"It's fairly magnanimous, and an act of leadership," Lynn said.

Democratic Gov. Jack Markell has said he would sign the measure if it reaches 
his desk.

The bill would abolish capital punishment for 1st-degree murder, although it 
would not apply to inmates now on death row.

The bill has drawn renewed attention in Delaware after a U.S. Supreme Court 
ruling earlier this month that declared Florida's death penalty statute 
unconstitutional. The court said Florida's death penalty system was flawed 
because juries play only an advisory role in recommending life or death, 
allowing the judge to reach a different decision.

Florida's system is similar to that used in Delaware, prompting concerns within 
the legal community that Delaware's system also could be declared 
unconstitutional.

Citing the Supreme Court's ruling, a federal judge in Wilmington who is 
presiding over a death penalty appeal case ordered attorneys Thursday to file a 
status report by Monday indicating what impact, if any, the decision has on the 
case.

On the state level, the same question is being certified to the Delaware 
Supreme Court for its opinion.

(source: Associated Press)






GEORGIA:

Death-row inmate says state should get new source for execution drug


"It is not with malice or glee that (state officials) are forced to conceal 
information. It is with forced resignation from the knowledge that those 
opposed to the death penalty will stop at no measure to thwart this 
constitutional means of punishment."

Lawyers for a condemned killer are seeking to force the state to find a new 
source for its lethal-injection drugs, contending the compounding pharmacy 
being used now produces drugs that pose too great a risk of causing needless 
suffering during executions.

Their court motion was recently filed on behalf of Brandon Astor Jones, 72, who 
is scheduled to be executed Feb. 2. As expected, Senior U.S. District Judge 
Charles Pannell dismissed the case on Thursday. Jones' lawyers had told Pannell 
their motion was foreclosed by recent precedents set by the federal appeals 
court in Atlanta, but they wanted the entire court to take a fresh look at the 
issue.

Jones, the oldest inmate on Georgia's death row, is under death sentence for 
the 1979 robbery and murder of Roger Dennis Tackett, 30, a high school teacher 
working a 2nd job as manager of a convenience store in Cobb County.

Jones's codefendant in the murder was executed 30 years ago.

In a recent court filing, state attorneys said the last 7 executions carried 
out by the state used a compounded lethal-injection drug - pentobarbital - and 
all 7 inmates were calm, fell asleep and remained still until they were put to 
death.

State attorneys also attached "execution timelines" compiled by officials who 
observed the most recent executions.

The person observing Brian Keith Terrell's execution on Dec. 9, for example, 
wrote that Terrell was "still and quiet" at 12:32 a.m. when receiving an 
injection from a 2nd syringe. At 12:37, Terrell "appears to be asleep" and 3 
minutes later was still, the observer wrote. At 12:52 a.m., after doctors 
checked for signs of life, the warden announced Terrell's execution had been 
carried out.

But Jones' lawyers note that 2 prior executions were put on hold last year 
after batches of pentobarbital that were to be used in those lethal injections 
were found to be cloudy. This translates into an unacceptable error rate of 
about 20 percent, the motion said.

Cloudiness poses a threat because the "injection of a precipitated solution 
would be akin to having small pieces of broken glass projected into your blood 
vessels," Jones' lawyers said. To avoid such a risk, the state should obtain 
its drugs from another source.

The request by Jones' legal team is an unusual tactic. In 2008, the U.S. 
Supreme Court set an important precedent when upholding Kentucky's method of 
execution. To prevail when challenging an execution protocol, inmates must not 
only show that lethal injection poses a demonstrated risk of severe pain, the 
high court said; they also must show the risk is substantial when compared to 
other, reasonably available alternative methods.

Jones' lawyers are saying that a better alternative is not another method of 
execution, just another source of pentobarbital.

The lawyers are also asking that Georgia's lethal-injection secrecy law be 
declared unconstitutional. The law shields from public view many facets of the 
execution process, such as the identities of the compounding pharmacist, the 
prescribing physician and those who carry out the lethal injections.

The law enables the state to carry out executions "with no scrutiny of any 
kind, save for their superficial and outcome-determinative self-investigation," 
the filing said. "In short, (the state carries out its) gravest duty with 
impunity and no accountability whatsoever."

State attorneys responded by saying the secrecy law has been a success because 
the state's source of pentobarbital has been protected from the "rabid 
manipulations of death penalty opponents" during the past 7 executions.

"It is not with malice or glee that (state officials) are forced to conceal 
information," the filing said. "It is with forced resignation from the 
knowledge that those opposed to the death penalty will stop at no measure to 
thwart this constitutional means of punishment."

As for the cloudy drugs detected last March, that problem "has now clearly been 
solved," the state's motion said. It added there is no evidence that inmates 
Terrell, Kelly Gissendaner and Marcus Johnson suffered any pain when they were 
injected with compounded pentobarbital during the final 4 months of 2015.

Jones' lawyers have noted that prior rulings by 3-judge panels on the 11th 
Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta sparked concern from 3 judges on the court. 
Writing either dissents or separate opinions, these judges questioned the 
legality of Georgia's secrecy law. The 11th Circuit currently has 11 judges, 
meaning 6 of its members must agree for the full court to hear Jones' appeal.

(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)






FLORIDA:

Prosecutors oppose delay in executing Jacksonville white supremacist


Prosecutors with the offices of State Attorney Angela Corey and Attorney 
General Pam Bondi are opposing any delay in the St. Patrick's Day execution of 
Jacksonville white supremacist Mark Asay.

Asay attorney Martin McClain has argued that he cannot properly defend Asay 
because the Florida Supreme Court hasn't given him enough time to review the 
case. McClain was appointed Asay's lawyer Jan. 13 and is supposed to have his 
argument on why the 51-year-old shouldn't be executed filed by Jan. 27.

In his motion to the Supreme Court for more time, McClain said many of the 
files in the case had to be destroyed after they were stored in an 
insect-infected shed by one of Asay's previous lawyers.

But in a motion opposing a delay, Assistant Attorney General Charmaine Millsaps 
said McClain has been provided all the relevant files, and those that were 
destroyed are irrelevant.

"Counsel ignores that he would be in much the same position if none of the 
files had been lost," Millsaps said in court filings. "In either case, he would 
be faced with reading thousands of pages of records regardless of the source."

McClain knew he was unfamiliar with Asay's case when he agreed to take it on, 
Millsaps said.

Gov. Rick Scott signed Asay's death warrant Jan. 9. When a death warrant is 
signed, a defendant gets one last expedited appeal before a trial court judge 
and if that judge rejects the appeal, the Florida Supreme Court reviews it.

The Supreme Court told Jacksonville Circuit Judge Tatiana Salvador to review 
the case and have a ruling by Feb. 3.

The Supreme Court will then review Salvador's ruling and hear oral arguments 
March 2. Asay is scheduled to die March 17.

During a Thursday morning status hearing, Salvador said when Scott signed the 
death warrant she had her aide call around trying to find anyone to represent 
Asay and no local lawyers were willing to take the case.

McClain, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who's handled multiple death penalty cases, 
agreed to take it on.

He has requested the Supreme Court move the Feb. 3 deadline for Salvador to 
issue a ruling.

Proceeding with the case "would be a violation of due process, equal protection 
and fundamental fairness," McClain said in his court filing.

Moving the Feb. 3 deadline also would likely delay oral arguments to the 
Supreme Court and Asay's date of execution. Salvador cannot grant a delay to 
the deadline; only the Supreme Court can do that.

A DECADE LOST

In his motion, McClain said Asay hasn't had a lawyer representing him in state 
court in a decade. Jacksonville attorney Thomas Fallis was representing him in 
federal court, but withdrew from the case.

Asay's arguments for a new trial have been rejected by judges in the 
Jacksonville-based 4th Judicial Circuit, the Florida Supreme Court and U.S. 
District Court.

According to court filings, Asay still had a right to appeal his conviction to 
the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, but instructed Fallis not to 
bother.

The Supreme Court will likely decide whether to delay the case early next week.

Asay was convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of Robert Lee Booker 
and Robert McDowell in 1987. Both victims were black and McDowell was a 
cross-dressing prostitute.

Asay was drinking with friends, and they decided to look for prostitutes after 
the bar closed.

One of Asay's friends was asking Booker about where to find prostitutes when 
Asay called him a racial epithet and shot him in the stomach. Booker ran off 
and was later found dead.

Asay and a friend continued looking for prostitutes and agreed to pay McDowell, 
who was dressed as a woman, for oral sex. But Asay then shot McDowell 6 times.

If Asay is executed, he will be the 1st inmate put to death from Jacksonville 
since Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis in July 1999. Davis was the last person to be 
executed in Florida by the electric chair. The state switched to lethal 
injection in 2000.

(source: Florida Times-Union)






ALABAMA:

What it's like to watch a man die


Arthur James Julius seemed to welcome death.

Many said it was too good for him. Too quick. Too easy. This was a guy who -- 
while free from prison on 8-hour leave - raped and killed his own cousin.

What I recall most is his hands, the double thumbs up he gave those who 
gathered at Holman Prison in Atmore in 1989 to witness his death. Thumbs up, 
like some injured athlete signaling his A-OK as he was carted off the field.

Or the earth.

They strapped his hands down on Alabama's old "Yellow Mama" electric chair. He 
gave a statement, forgiving the warden who had to kill him, and professing his 
faith in a God that would not torment him.

Julius offered a little smile, as if in farewell. And witnesses gathered in a 
little observation room adjoining the execution chamber said nothing. Nothing.

We walked quietly away. To write our stories. To tell the world that Julius was 
dead. The sentence had been carried out, and Julius was officially the seventh 
person killed by Alabama since the re-instatement of the death penalty.

It was sterile. It was clinical. It was over.

That was 27 years ago, after a U.S. Supreme Court ban on executions had ended, 
when the state rushed to make up for lost time. Alabama executed 4 people in 
1989, and 9 between 1986 and 1992. I saw a handful of them.

I saw more than I wanted to see. Then again, I saw what I needed to see. I 
don't even remember all their names.

I remember Horace Franklin Dunkins. He died in that chair 4 months before 
Julius. It would be almost impossible to turn Dunkins into a sympathetic 
character. He raped and killed a young mother from Warrior, a woman tied to a 
tree and stabbed 67 times.

But Alabama did it. It strapped Dunkins - with his IQ of 69 - down and zapped 
him with what was supposed to be enough voltage to kill a man, and it didn't 
work.

A guard scrambled over to pull the blinds down in the observation window. 
Another muttered how they'd put the jacks on wrong. Beside me in that quiet 
chamber Dunkins' father said, over and over, "they're torturing him."

They hit him again and he died about 20 minutes after the 1st jolt. I don't 
want to make it too dramatic. It was not gruesome. The 1st electricity rendered 
him unresponsive, and I believe he felt no pain.

I felt for his father, but in truth I felt little else. It was the same every 
time I witnessed an execution. I wanted to feel more. I expected to feel more. 
I felt bad, quite simply, because I did not feel bad. I was constantly 
overwhelmed by the ... nothingness.

I was neither judge nor jury. Just a witness. And he was convicted of ghastly 
crimes. Who am I to say he did not deserve a similar death?

But of late I have begun to feel. Not for Dunkins, or Julius, but for all of 
us.

For one other thing sticks with me about that botched execution. It is the 
anguish of the prison official who stood shaking after it was done.

"I regret very very much what happened,'' Alabama Prison Commissioner Morris 
Thigpen said then. "It was human error."

That makes me feel.

Because if human error can screw up the killing of a man, it can screw up 
justice, too. Alabama knows human error.

Alabama has sentenced innocents to death. Alabama is the only state left in 
which judges can ignore juries and send people to die. At least one in five 
Alabama death row inmates are there because a judge overrode a jury.

Don't misunderstand. This is not to say it is wrong for the state to kill 
people,. It's not to say it is right.

I don't know. Decide for yourself.

But I do know we can't be satisfied to feel nothing. And we can never go too 
far to be sure. Sure that we have the right men or women. Sure that we stand 
for justice, and not simply vengeance.

Vengeance is too easy. Justice is hard.

We have to be right and must be righteous. So we never look back at a human 
death and apologize. For human error.

(source: John Archibald, al.com)






CALIFORNIA:

Death Penalty Possible in Marina Del Rey's Teen Murder----Cameron Anthony 
Frazier, 21, was ordered to be held without bail while awaiting arraignment 
Feb. 3. for the shooting death of a Texas teen.


A San Diego man was charged Wednesday with capital murder for allegedly gunning 
down a teenage girl in the parking lot of a Marina del Rey shopping center in 
what may have been a botched robbery involving marijuana.

Cameron Anthony Frazier, 21, was ordered to be held without bail while awaiting 
arraignment Feb. 3 at the Airport Branch Courthouse in Los Angeles in 
connection with the Jan. 6 death of 17-year-old Kristine Carman.

The murder charge includes the special circumstance allegation of murder during 
the commission of a robbery, along with an allegation that Frazier personally 
and intentionally discharged a handgun.

Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek the death penalty against 
Frazier, who was arrested Monday by members of the FBI Fugitive Task Force 
outside his residence in Vista.

Along with the murder count, Frazier is charged with 2 counts of attempted 
2nd-degree robbery involving 2 other alleged victims.

The victim lived in Houston, Texas, and was visiting relatives in the Southland 
at the time of the shooting, according to authorities.

The teen was shot to death during a robbery attempt while she sat in an SUV 
with 2 other people at the Villa Marina Marketplace mall, according to Deputy 
District Attorney Keri Modder.

Following the shooting, the person behind the wheel drove across the parking 
lot, stopping in a parking space outside a Panda Express, where the girl was 
ultimately found dead.

The suspect fled the location in a dark-colored SUV, possibly heading toward 
the Marina (90) Freeway, police said.

Lacey Carman of Marina del Rey wrote on Facebook that Kristine was her sister. 
She said she was the one driving the vehicle her sister was in, and that "my 
sister was just murdered in front of me in a robbery gone wrong." Her sibling, 
she wrote, was "beautiful smart and undeserving" of the fate that befell her.

"I pray that God is real and holding my sisters hand right now. I pray that you 
never have to feel this pain or this self loathing," she said.

Police have repeatedly declined to comment on a CBS2 report that the shooting 
may have been prompted by an alleged attempt by Lacey Carman's boyfriend to 
sell 2 pounds of marijuana.

(source: patch.com)

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

Critics question California's single-drug execution plan


The state's plan for single-drug executions in California would give prison 
officials a choice among 4 lethal chemicals. But 2 of them are no longer 
available from the manufacturers, and the other 2 have never been used for 
executions.

The proposal by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation "is not based 
on sound research and amounts to experimentation" on human beings, said Megan 
McCracken, an attorney with the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley Law School. 
Lawyers from the clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union said the 
department has failed to disclose where the drugs would come from or how they 
would be tested.

But the department says the drugs can be produced by its own pharmacies, or by 
private pharmacies if necessary. And a leader in the campaign to resume 
executions in California said Thursday the source of the chemicals is 
irrelevant.

"If it can be confirmed that a drug is what it's supposed to be, that the 
substance in the bottle is of a given concentration and no impurities, it 
doesn't matter where it came from," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of 
the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

Scheidegger's organization filed a lawsuit on behalf of families of murder 
victims that the state settled in June by agreeing to switch from 3-drug 
executions, which it has used since 1996, to a lethal dose of a single 
sedative, the method now employed by many states.

The change is intended to satisfy concerns raised by a federal judge, who 
halted executions at San Quentin State Prison in 2006 after finding that flaws 
in injection procedures and staff training raised an unacceptable risk of a 
botched and agonizing execution.

Members of the public, who have already submitted thousands of written comments 
on the one-drug proposal, will have a chance to speak out Friday in Sacramento 
at the only public hearing scheduled on the issue. After another month of 
written comments, prison officials will have until November to respond to the 
public and submit a final proposal to a state legal office for review.

But the plan's future could be determined at the ballot box before it has a 
chance to take effect. An initiative being circulated for the November election 
would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without 
parole. A competing initiative would seek to speed up executions by imposing 
new deadlines on courts and lawyers, and would also eliminate the need for 
administrative review, or public comment, on the single-drug proposal.

In the meantime, execution drugs are in short supply nationwide, and opponents 
of the California proposal are questioning the availability and reliability of 
the 4 proposed lethal sedatives.

1 of the drugs, thiopental, which has been used in the state's 3-drug 
executions, is no longer manufactured commercially. A 2nd drug, pentobarbital, 
is produced by a single U.S. manufacturer that has prohibited the use of its 
product in executions.

The other 2 drugs, amobarbital and secobarbital, have not been used in 
executions. Amobarbital is manufactured as a powder and is the active 
ingredient in the barbiturate amytal sodium. Secobarbital is sold in pill form 
as the prescription drug Seconal.

The corrections department's proposal says the department has pharmacies that 
can produce the drugs in lethal doses, and if problems arise, it can obtain the 
drugs from private "compounding pharmacies" that would prepare them to order. 
Texas, Missouri and Georgia have carried out recent executions with 
pentobarbital from compounding pharmacies.

But Jennifer Moreno, an attorney at the UC Berkeley Death Penalty Clinic, said 
those pharmacies are lightly regulated and have produced some contaminated 
drugs, like the one responsible for an outbreak of meningitis in Massachusetts 
in 2012.

State prison officials haven't specified "how they will choose the pharmacy, 
what guidelines the pharmacy will use, what testing will be done, if any," 
Moreno said. "They haven't given any information about doses, concentration" 
and other critical details, she said.

Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton said details of the proposal are 
available on the department's website, www.cdcr.ca.gov. Scheidegger, of the 
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said he wasn't concerned about the fine 
points.

"I doubt that the level of regulation has much to do with the reliability," he 
said. The type of contamination that led to the meningitis outbreak "is 
irrelevant if the drug was intended to cause death."

"If medical knowledge about a drug tells us that it produces anesthesia and in 
a higher dose causes death, that's really all we need to know," Scheidegger 
said.

(source: San Francisco Chronicle)