[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, CONN., GA., FLA., OHIO, USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 2



TEXAS:

Texas' death penalty beyond repair so think about ending it, judge says


We welcome Judge Elsa Alcala's frank - and courageous - assessment of the Texas 
death penalty, not for what people wish the state's capital punishment system 
to be, but for what it is: Discriminatory, inefficient and immoral.

That assessment coming from an experienced judge on the Texas Court of Criminal 
Appeals - the state's highest court in criminal matters - is not easily 
dismissed.

It's true that many Texans support the death penalty as a tough, fair and 
painless way to punish those convicted of certain heinous crimes. That category 
includes crimes in which more than one person was murdered, a law enforcement 
officer was killed, or circumstances that involve murder and another aggravated 
felony. An example of the latter would be fatally shooting a store clerk during 
the course of a robbery, or killing someone during a sexual assault or 
kidnapping.

To be sure, those are horrible crimes that warrant the toughest punishment on 
the books. The problem with the death penalty is that it is final. Once done, 
it cannot be undone. As such, it requires a perfect system in which to operate 
justly and morally. An imperfect system means a killer gets away, while an 
innocent is imprisoned or executed.

It's no wonder that Alcala has growing discomfort with the Texas death penalty 
system, riddled with imperfections. She wrote about them in a recent opinion 
regarding the case of Julius Jerome Murphy, sentenced to die for the 1997 
shooting death of a man whose car had broken down along Interstate 30 in 
Texarkana.

"I think there are, as I said in that opinion, significant problems with the 
death penalty," Alcala told the American-Statesman's Chuck Lindell. "There are 
lots of problems, and I think the public is not aware of the problems."

Alcala wrote that Texas courts should study whether the death penalty is 
unconstitutional because it is arbitrarily imposed by race, disproportionately 
affecting minorities, and whether excessive delays in imposing the ultimate 
sentence results in cruel and unusual punishment because inmates are held in 
solitary confinement for years, if not decades. Those inequities are reflected 
in state figures that show 71 % of those awaiting execution in Texas are 
African American or Latino.

Alcala came to the bench in 2011, when then-Gov. Rick Perry tapped her to fill 
a vacancy. Her doubts and concerns regarding the system have been sown by cases 
that came before her, including:

-- Bobby James Moore: Alcala wrote that her court's reliance on a decades-old 
standard to measure intellectual disability, which is no longer used by medical 
professionals, "is constitutionally unacceptable."

-- Duane Buck: Alcala sharply criticized rulings allowing Buck to be executed 
despite trial testimony that he was a future danger to society because he is 
black.

Such concerns grabbed the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court, which earlier 
this month, announced it would examine the constitutionality of the death 
sentences given to Moore and Buck.

Pointing out the flaws in the state's death penalty system takes political 
guts, given the wide support it enjoys in Texas, topping 70 % on a recent 
Gallup poll. That kind of courage has been in short supply since judge Tom 
Price left the state Court of Criminal Appeals in 2014. Before his departure, 
Price called for an end to the death penalty, saying he was haunted by a 
growing fear that Texas will execute an innocent inmate, if it hadn't already. 
He worried aloud whether he had participated in executing an innocent person.

As a long-time judge on the court, Price was part of a body with a dubious 
history in death penalty matters. The court still is plagued by its unfortunate 
"sleeping lawyer" ruling more than a decade ago refusing to halt an execution 
of a death row inmate whose attorney had snoozed through major portions of his 
capital murder trial.

Following that embarrassment, there was the "we close at 5" incident in a 2007 
case.

Presiding Judge Sharon Keller closed the court clerk's office at 5 p.m., 
preventing attorneys from filing a last-minute appeal for twice-convicted 
killer Michael Richard, who ultimately was executed without his final appeal 
being heard in court. That prompted the State Commission on Judicial Conduct to 
issue a public warning to Keller, but the rebuke was later dismissed on a 
technicality after Keller appealed.

Aside from the court's well-documented missteps, there are other signs of the 
system's imperfections in the wave of exonerations of Texans, such as Michael 
Morton, who were wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for many years, while 
the true criminals went free. Oftentimes, the guilty go on to commit more 
crimes, which was true in the Morton case in which the person who murdered 
Morton's wife, went on to kill another woman.

It's worth noting that Texas led the nation in the number of people wrongly 
convicted of crimes, who were exonerated in 2015, according to figures compiled 
by the National Registry of Exonerations. In all, 54 people were exonerated for 
mostly homicide and drug cases going back to 2004. New York was 2nd with 17. 
False identifications by witnesses, misconduct by police or prosecutors, errors 
by crime labs or defense attorneys, all are among the things that can and do go 
wrong.

It's no wonder Alcala is uncomfortable remaining silent. Doing so perpetuates 
the fallacy that the state's death penalty is carried out fairly and justly. 
That might be what many wish it to be, but it is not the reality.

(source: Editorial Board, Austin American Statesman)

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

Lubbock couple indicted in murder of woman's daughter


A Lubbock County grand jury returned indictments Friday for capital murder 
against James and Debi Holland in the February slaying of their 18-year-old 
daughter.

Grand jurors met in a special session to determine if there was enough probable 
cause to charge the Hollands for the killing of Holli Jeffcoat, a special needs 
student at Lorenzo High School.

The indictment states the 2 are accused of killing Jeffcoat and her unborn 
child.

A Lubbock judge The charges come with bonds set at $2 million and carry a 
punishment of life in prison or the death penalty.

District attorney Matt Powell could not comment on the case, citing the judge's 
May 5 media gag order prohibiting officials associated with the case from 
speaking to the press.

Jeffcoat was found killed Feb. 10 in a home in the 2900 block of County Road 
3200.

Lubbock County sheriff's officials in February said Jeffcoat suffered multiple 
stab wounds. According to a search warrant, Jeffocat's throat was slashed and 
her womb was removed.

Investigators believe her killer also burned her body to conceal the crime.

Prior to her killing Jeffcoat told Lorenzo school and police officials her step 
father, James Holland, had been sexually abusing her and the abuse resulted in 
her pregnancy. Court documents state she was about 12-weeks pregnant.

Officials believe Debi and James Holland killed Jeffcoat in retaliation, the 
indictment states.

Holland, 39, has been held at the Lubbock County Detention Center since March 
10, on a felony count of continuous sexual abuse of a child. The charge stems 
from a 15-year-old family member's accusation he has been sexually abusing her 
since she was 9. The family member, who also lived with Jeffcoat in the home, 
found Jeffcoat's mutilated body Feb. 10.

At time of Jeffcoat's killing James Holland was instructed to stay away from 
the girls after Jeffcoat's outcry.

However, CPS workers believe Holland disobeyed the instruction. According to a 
search warrant, Holland had paint on his hands that was similar to paint found 
on the window in Jeffcoat's room, which investigators believe was possibly used 
by her killer to enter her room.

Grand jurors also returned an indictment against Holland in connection with the 
investigation into Jeffcoat's sexual abuse.

Debi Holland, 38, has been held at the detention center since April 29. She is 
charged with aggravated sexual abuse for allowing the abuse her husband 
inflicted on her Jeffcoat and for concealing it from authorities.

Capital murder is punishable with life in prison without parole or the death 
penalty.

Grand jurors also returned an indictment against her on similar grounds for the 
sexual abuse of the 15-year-old girl.

(source: amarillo.com)

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

Anti-execution vigil to be held July 14


On July 14, a public ecumenical prayer vigil will be held during the time when 
the state of Texas is scheduled to execute a death row inmate.

The vigil will be at 5:45-6:15 p.m. at the corner of University Avenue and 15th 
Street in front of St. John's United Methodist Church, across from Texas Tech.

The public is welcome.

The vigil is sponsored by Lubbock People of Faith Against the Death Penalty.

(source: Lubbock Avalance-Journal)






CONNECTICUT:

Death Row Inmate Who Ordered Hit On 8-Year-Old Resentenced To Life


Russell Peeler Jr., sent to death row for ordering the 1999 killings of Karen 
Clarke and her 8-year-old son Leroy "B.J." Brown in Bridgeport, was resentenced 
Friday in Superior Court to 2 consecutive life sentences without the 
possibility of release.

Peeler, 44, was the 2nd of Connecticut's 11 formerly condemned prisoners to be 
resentenced since a landmark Supreme Court ruling that spared their lives.

The latest chapter in the 17-year-old case unfolded in a nearly empty courtroom 
without family members from either side present.

Senior Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Corradino said he tried to contact 
family members of the victims but telephone numbers he had for them years ago 
were no longer working.

"Though this hearing is carrying out an order by the Supreme Court, this is 
technically a sentencing and they would want to be advised of that," Corradino 
said about the family.

Attempts by The Courant to reach family members on both sides were 
unsuccessful.

The 2 new life sentences for Peeler were added to a life sentence Peeler is 
already serving for federal drug crimes as well as a 105-year prison sentence 
he faces for a separate killing.

Peeler spoke briefly at Friday's hearing in opposition to the current 
conditions of his confinement saying, "They want to hold us in Northern 
[Correctional Institution in Somers] for no reason."

Peeler's attorney, Mark Rademacher, elaborated on behalf of Peeler saying there 
is a brewing controversy about the conditions under which the former death row 
inmates will be held, an issue he said he expects will be litigated but that he 
did not want to argue at Friday's hearing.

Corrections officials last month told The Courant they are working to adjust 
their prison housing directives to comply with a state law regarding the 
incarceration of former death-row inmates and those now convicted of the crime 
of murder with special circumstances.

The law addressing those inmates, put in place when the death penalty was 
repealed in 2012, will likely keep the former death-row inmates away from the 
general prison population and locked up in maximum-security facilities.

Cheshire home invasion killer Steven Hayes was the first of the formerly 
condemned to be resentenced. Last month a New Haven Superior Court judge 
sentenced him to six consecutive life sentences without the chance for release. 
Hayes' accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky, is scheduled for resentencing on July 
26 in Superior Court in New Haven.

Peeler was sentenced to death in 2007 after a Superior Court jury in Bridgeport 
convicted him of ordering his younger brother, Adrian Peeler, to kill Clarke 
and her son at a Bridgeport apartment. The boy and his mother were slated to 
testify against the older Peeler at an upcoming murder trial.

Rademacher had asked Judge Robert Devlin to run the sentences concurrently.

"Now, I think I agree with the defense in a sense that as a practical matter 
the relationship of the sentences probably is not going to have much difference 
given the, you know, sort of cumulative sentences that are imposed to Mr. 
Peeler," Devlin said. "But in my view, if imposing consecutive life sentences 
does nothing more than place an exclamation point signifying this community's 
condemnation of these dastardly crimes, then it's worth it."

Adrian Peeler, 38, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the 
slayings.

According to trial testimony, the Peelers ran a lucrative crack cocaine ring 
and Leroy witnessed an attempt by Peeler to shoot his mother's boyfriend in a 
drug-money dispute. Peeler went after the boyfriend a second time, killing him. 
Days before Peeler was to be tried for the slaying, Clarke and her son were 
found shot to death in their Bridgeport apartment.

Peeler was convicted of capital felony charges in 2000 but a jury deadlocked on 
whether to sentence him to death. A judge then imposed life in prison without 
the possibility of release.

Prosecutors successfully appealed the judge's decision, arguing that the judge 
should have declared a mistrial instead. Though the high court also agreed with 
a challenge by the defense of the trial court's refusal to permit disclosure of 
a witness' psychiatric records to the jury, the justices said the mistake was 
harmless and ordered a new sentencing hearing for Peeler in which jurors voted 
for death.

"Probably the lowest point in my professional career is when I stood up with 
Russell and the jury returned a death sentence," Rademacher, who has 
represented Peeler for 16 years, said after Friday's hearing. "And the high 
point of that career is today getting a ... life sentence for him. I'm sorry 
that 16 years later we're back where we started, having spent $1 million or two 
in the process."

Connecticut abolished the death penalty in April 2012 but made the law 
prospective, meaning it applied only to new cases and kept in place the death 
sentences for those already on death row. Attorneys for the death-row inmates 
challenged the law, saying it violated the condemned inmates' constitutional 
rights.

In August 2015, the justices ruled 4-3 to ban capital punishment for all 
defendants, saying in the majority decision that Connecticut's death penalty no 
longer fit with societal values and served no valid purpose as punishment.

The Supreme Court's 5-2 decision in May, which upheld its 2015 ruling, said 
capital punishment in Connecticut is unconstitutional for everyone. The ruling 
overturned Peeler's death sentences and ordered the lower court to impose a new 
punishment of life in prison without the possibility of release.

(source: Hartford Courant)






GEORGIA----impending execution

Condemned triple killer's lawyer says he's a 'peacemaker'; victims' kin fear 
he'll strike again


As an 11-year-old boy, Mark Smyth rode around with his parents, searching woods 
and ditches.

They scoured parts of rural Middle Georgia trying to find any trace of his 
older brother, Jesse, who'd disappeared after returning from a trip to New 
Orleans.

Walking to school in Milan, a small Telfair County town about 70 miles south of 
Macon, Smyth recalls looking down the street toward the house where a man named 
John Wayne Conner lived.

Smyth hoped he'd see his brother's car there.

Smyth said his parents gave up nearly everything of value that they had to hire 
investigators and to pay for information about what had become of their 
28-year-old son.

It wasn't until Conner was in jail, charged with killing another Milan man, 
J.T. White, that Jesse's 1969 Chevrolet Caprice was pulled from the Ocmulgee 
River.

Jesse's body had been in the trunk for nearly 9 months. His throat had been 
cut.

A Telfair County jury sentenced Conner to death July 14, 1982, after convicting 
him of murder in White's Jan. 9, 1982, beating death.

If he dies by lethal injection as scheduled July 14, Conner will have lived 
exactly 34 years under a death sentence. He'll also be the f1st person 
convicted in a Telfair County case put to death in more than 3 decades.

White's sister, Julia Woodard, said she never thought Conner's execution would 
be scheduled.

After seeing several of her family members die without seeing her brother's 
killer put to death, she figured Conner, 60, would die in prison.

Upon hearing recently that an execution date had been set, "I jumped up and 
clapped," the McRae woman said. "I'd gotten to the point where I didn't even 
wait for it."

Lawyer: Conner is 'intellectually disabled'

Conner's fate rests in the hands of a Butts County Superior Court judge and the 
Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles.

The board is set to hear arguments July 13 about whether Conner should be 
granted clemency. His execution is set to be carried out on the night of July 
14 at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson, home 
of the state's death row.

Meanwhile, a Butts County judge is considering a request filed by Conner's 
lawyer, Brian Kammer, to have a jury trial to determine Conner's intellectual 
status.

It has been ruled unconstitutional for an intellectually disabled person to be 
executed.

Kammer said a mental health expert has said his client has "at best, borderline 
intellectual functioning," and is just on the cut-off for being considered 
"mentally retarded."

"We think we have a very good claim that he is intellectually disabled," he 
said.

If executed, Conner would be Georgia's 6th death row inmate to be executed this 
year. 13 executions have been carried out since 2013.

Jurors who convicted Conner of murder 32 years ago didn't hear evidence of his 
mental state, Kammer said. The trial lasted just 3 days.

He said Conner also comes from one of the most violent and abusive upbringings 
he's seen in 20 years of representing inmates sentenced to death.

His father was a "violent alcoholic" who shot, cut and beat his wife and 
children, Kammer said.

Conner still has a dent in his head from when he was 8 and his father struck 
him with an ax, he said.

"When you grow up in those circumstances, you're not going to do well in life," 
Kammer said.

What's more, prosecutors these days aren't seeking the death penalty in cases 
involving fights that turn fatal such as the one between White and Conner, he 
said.

"His case is like an artifact of a bygone era," Kammer said.

He described his client as a "model inmate" who is "very well-liked in prison."

Conner is a "peacemaker" who has a calming influence on younger inmates, Kammer 
said.

'He's a threat'

Woodard and Smyth plan to attend Conner's clemency hearing to talk about their 
slain brothers, and to argue that Conner should be put to death.

Woodard described the slain White as a bashful young man who was divorced and 
raising a 5-year-old daughter when he was killed. He worked at a local saw 
shop.

"He wouldn't have done nothing against nobody," she said.

She recalls him saying how he didn't fight because he "couldn't hurt another 
human."

White was her friend. Of her 5 brothers, he was the one who was her confidant.

She said Conner being executed won't just be justice for her brother, but also 
for Smyth and another man Conner fatally shot as a teenager.

Smyth, who lives in Alabama, said he remembers his mother becoming sick from 
crying, not knowing what happened to his brother.

Nothing was ever the same. His family became torn apart, he said.

Before his mother died, she passed along information about how to stay in touch 
with the state and to be notified when Conner's execution was scheduled, Smyth 
said.

"He's a threat. He will kill and kill again if he is out," Smyth said. "There 
is no rehabilitation for people like that."

He said his brother treated Conner like a friend.

To Smyth, it doesn't seem fair that Conner - if he is executed - will be 
injected and, as Smyth put it, go to sleep.

"He'll go out quietly," Smyth said, "painlessly."

(source: Macon Telegraph)






FLORIDA:

Man seeks release on bond before retrial in notorious Broward triple murder


A man who spent 16 years on death row for 3 murders he insists he did not 
commit went before a Broward judge Friday to ask for a bond so he can leave 
jail as he and his lawyers prepare for a retrial.

Broward Circuit Judge Raag Singhal said he will need time to review volumes of 
material provided by both sides and will make a decision July 14 on whether 
Pablo Ibar, 44, should go free while he awaits trial.

Ibar was sentenced to death in 2000 for the murders of Casimir "Butch Casey" 
Sucharski, the flashy former owner of the Casey's Nickelodeon nightclub, and 
Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers, 2 women he brought home with him early on 
June 26, 1994, the same morning 2 men chose to rob Sucharski's Miramar house.

The case has proved one of the most expensive and time consuming in Broward 
history, with prosecutors going after 2 co-defendants spanning 4 trials so far, 
taking up more than 20 months in front of the juries.

Ibar and former co-defendant Seth Penalver first went on trial together in 
1997, with the jury deadlocking after 8 months of testimony. Penalver's 2nd 
trial ended in a conviction in 1999 after 6 months, and Ibar was convicted 
after a 6-week trial the following year.

But Penalver was granted a retrial, which ended with his acquittal in 2012.

Penalver was among more than 2 dozens supporters and family members who 
attended Friday's bond hearing before Singhal.

Ibar was granted a retrial earlier this year, with the Florida Supreme Court 
ruling that Ibar's defense lawyer at trial, Kayo Morgan, failed to retain a 
facial recognition expert to challenge the prosecution's evidence that Ibar was 
at the scene of the crime. The brutal beating of Sucharski and all three 
murders were captured on home surveillance video, and the man believed to be 
Ibar left his face uncovered for part of the video.

Ibar is legally entitled to bail unless prosecutors can demonstrate that the 
evidence against him is stronger than what a jury would require for conviction.

Defense lawyers, led by Benjamin Waxman and Fred Haddad, told Singhal Friday 
that the Supreme Court's decision granting the retrial contained language 
showing prosecutors cannot meet that burden. In one place, the ruling described 
the evidence against Ibar as "scant."

But prosecutor William Sinclair said the case remains strong enough to keep 
Ibar in custody.

Both sides are pushing for the trial to get underway by this fall, and 
attorneys told Singhal they expect it to last 4 months.

(source: Sun-Sentinel)






OHIO:

The priest, the exonerated death row inmate and their continued battle against 
the death penalty


156 people on death row in the United States have been exonerated since 1973. 
One of them sits on a stone walkway, between the Capitol building and the 
Supreme Court, at the feet of a Catholic priest.

"Joe and I have big disagreements about God," says the priest, Father Neil, 
who's wearing a Cleveland Cavaliers T-shirt and sitting on a bench Thursday 
afternoon. Joe says that there's a reason God put him in jail, on death row, 
for decades, but God doesn't operate that way. "That's injustice. That's sin. 
That has nothing to do with God. And Joe disagrees. He --"

"Because I think my testimony of 22 years is so much more powerful than a guy 
that was in there for a year," Joe says from the ground, jabbing the air with 
his hand-rolled cigarette. "And that's one of the reasons why I do our talks. 
Is because I think I was saved. Because I had no luck. I'm on death row! So 
it???s God's providence --"

"But 22 years?"

" -- to send me him."

"22 years, Joe."

"We do this every time. Argue back and forth."

A speaker squeals with feedback across First Street NE. The sun is setting on 
the second day of a fast and vigil to abolish the death penalty. Joe, 54, and 
Father Neil, 57, will soon address the crowd, if there is a crowd, in front of 
a banner noting that Saturday marks 40 years since the Supreme Court affirmed 
the constitutionality of the death penalty. These days it's not easy to muster 
an army of abolitionists, even though American opposition to capital punishment 
- 37 % against - hasn't been this high since the early 1970s, according to 
Gallup. The new draft of the Democratic Party platform released Friday 
envisions abolition, and says the death penalty "has no place in the United 
States of America."

Still, "it's the taboo issue," Joe says. Even though there are dozens and 
dozens of exonerees in the United States, "people don't wanna hear that, 
because that shows the giant flaw in our justice system. If they can't get that 
right, and they're willing to murder people."

America is very animated right now on the other Big Issues. Last month's mass 
shooting in Orlando brought people out into the streets to demand gun-control 
legislation. Hundreds mobbed the steps of the Supreme Court on Monday to await 
the decision on an abortion case. So far this year 14 men have been executed in 
the United States, all by lethal injection. In California alone, 743 prisoners 
await the same fate.

"People want to be right-to-life if it's innocent right-to-life, but not if it 
might be guilty right-to-life," Father Neil says. "It's a very deep 
contradiction."

They share a business card. Above their names it says "Speaking Truth to 
Power." They have a 2-man act: the former dead man walking and the man of God 
who helped set him free. In 1988 Joe D???Ambrosio was 26, just out of the Army, 
a new hire at a landscaping company in Cleveland. Within weeks he was arrested 
and charged with the murder of a 19-year-old who was found in a creek with his 
throat cut from ear to ear. By the following year, Joe, an innocent man with no 
priors, was a convicted murderer on death row, a prison within a prison. He 
spent the next 10 years teaching himself law, unaware that he was really 
waiting for God to send Father Neil.

Born into a Catholic family and raised with 7 sibilings, Neil Kookoothe first 
became a nurse, then became a lawyer, then became a parish priest who also 
ministered to death-row inmates.

"He had to be all 3 things," Joe says. "That's God's providence all day long."

If Neil weren't a lawyer, he wouldn???t have been troubled by the transcript of 
Joe's sentencing hearing, which was unusually short and glib. Because he was a 
nurse, it was easy to deduce that the victim could not have screamed for help, 
as court testimony had claimed, with his trachea slashed to bits. And if Neil 
wasn't a priest, he wouldn't have been in a prison in the '90s to hear of Joe's 
case in the first place.

The case is far more complicated than providence; it involved years of 
studying, investigation, and negligence and misconduct on the part of 
authorities, who withheld evidence. All of this has been well-documented by 
Cleveland media. All of this led - after a torturous and prolonged appeals 
process - to Joe's exoneration in 2012, after the case made it all the way to 
the Supreme Court.

Now Joe and Father Neil are back outside that court for a couple days of 
vigiling. They drove down together from Ohio, where Joe is a handyman and 
factotum at Father Neil's parish. Joe says his family abandoned him after the 
conviction, and so Father Neil became the brother he never had. They speak in 
tandem about how it's better to let 1,000 guilty people walk free than take the 
life of one innocent man. They hold banners together by the steps of the court. 
They try to talk to passersby about how several states in the last decade 
abolished the death penalty, about how DNA testing and botched executions are 
proving how unreliable and cruel the criminal-justice system can be.

It's hard to get anyone's attention on First Street. Everyone's hurrying home, 
or jogging, or their ears are plugged up with music.

Around 7 p.m., it's their turn at the microphone, in front of a banner that 
reads "40 Years of Blood on Our Hands." In the amber glow of the sunset, their 
voices echoing between the facades of the Capitol and the court, they tell 
their story. There's little hope for an innocent man condemned to death, they 
say, if he doesn't have a friend who's advocating on the outside. They get 
close to tears, but end their speech with a rehearsed joke about sharing a 
hotel room when they travel, to save expenses.

"I do sleep with 1 eye open," Father Neil says, "just to be on the safe side."

"Uh, I sleep with 1 eye open," Joe says. "He's the Catholic priest."

And the shocked laughter from the small crowd is what finally gets pedestrians 
to turn their heads.

(source: Washington Post)






USA:

14% of Death Row Inmates Are There Because of Just 5 Prosecutors ---- Report 
argues overzealous DAs are making the death penalty arbitrary


Just f5 prosecutors representing less than 0.2% of US counties are responsible 
for 14% of all people currently on death row and 5% of people sentenced to 
death in the past 40 years. That's according to a recently released report from 
Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project. The report - subtitled "How 
overzealous personalities drive the death penalty" - found the death penalty 
was more about prosecutors cultivating an "over-aggressive" and "reckless" 
style than the actual crimes, the Huffington Post reports. And, according to 
the Guardian, that leads to a "highly arbitrary" use of the death penalty. The 
5 prosecutors, who have sentenced a total of 440 people to death, are Joe Britt 
in North Carolina, Bob Macy in Oklahoma, Lynne Abraham in Pennsylvania, Johnny 
Holmes in Texas, and Donnie Myers in South Carolina. Only Myers is still 
serving as a prosecutor.

All 5 prosecutors seem to relish securing the death penalty. Myer has an 
electric chair paperweight. Macy, who got a 16-year-old sentenced to death, saw 
it as his "patriotic duty." Abraham says she's never doubted one of her death 
sentences, despite 2 of them later being exonerated. And that leads to another 
problem: the "illegal or unethical behavior" that seems to go hand-in-hand with 
a passion for the death penalty. Misconduct was found in 1/3 of Macy's 54 death 
sentences, and 3 of them were exonerated. Britt was found to have committed 
misconduct in more than 1/3 of his 38 death sentences and had 2 developmentally 
disabled teens exonerated. Myers was found to have a 46% misconduct rate, often 
for excluding jurors on the basis of race. He once referred to a black 
defendant as "King Kong" and a "beast of burden."

(source: newser.com)

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

Democratic Party Endorses Abolishing The Death Penalty - Breaking With Hillary 
Clinton----The party platform says it's time to end the practice, even though 
the presumptive nominee still supports it.


"I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the 
consideration of the death penalty," Hillary Clinton said in October.

The draft of the 2016 Democratic Party platform endorses abolishing the death 
penalty, a break with the views of its presumptive presidential nominee.

"We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual 
form of punishment. It has no place in the United States of America," reads the 
document, which the Democratic National Committee released Friday afternoon.

The 2012 platform did not call for an end to capital punishment, instead saying 
that "the death penalty must not be arbitrary."

The position in the new platform is at odds with what Hillary Clinton has said 
she supports. In October, she acknowledged significant issues with the way the 
punishment has been used, but said it should not be ended altogether.

"We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently 
applied, and too often in a discriminatory way," she said. "So I think we have 
to take a hard look at it."

"I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are certain 
egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty, but 
I'd like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed to what we've seen 
in most states," she added.

In March, she said she would "breathe a sigh of relief if either the Supreme 
Court or the states, themselves, began to eliminate the death penalty." But, 
she added, she believes it still has some value right now on the federal level.

"Where I end up is this, and maybe it is distinction that is hard to support, 
but at this point, given the challenges we face from terrorist activities 
primarily in our country that end up under federal jurisdiction for very 
limited purposes, I think that it can still be held in reserve for those," she 
said, citing the Oklahoma City bombing as an example.

More recently, the Clinton campaign told The Huffington Post that she supports 
the death penalty for Dylann Roof, the accused shooter of nine parishioners at 
a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Clinton's competitor in the primary, opposes 
capital punishment.

A Clinton campaign spokesperson emphasized that the platform "represents 
diverse views across the democratic coalition," even though in some cases, such 
as on the death penalty, the "presumptive nominee has a slightly different 
position." The platform is a compromise document between Clinton and Sanders 
supporters. Sanders received an unprecedented amount of say in the platform 
when the Democratic National Committee allowed him to name 5 members to the 
15-member committee. Hillary Clinton chose 6, and DNC Chair Rep. Debbie 
Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) picked 4.

The committee - both Sanders and Clinton appointees - approved the death 
penalty provision, with only 1 abstention by a DNC appointee.

The draft now heads to the full 187-member platform committee for approval on 
July 8 and 9 in Orlando. It will then be ratified on the floor of the 
convention in Philadelphia.

(source: Amanda Terkel, Senior Political Reporter, The Huffington Post)