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

[Rick Halperin]

June 8



NEBRASKA:

At competency hearing, psychologist says Nikko Jenkins' suicide attempts were 
sham; defense says he's mentally ill


Nikko Jenkins' 2 recent "suicide attempts" have come with a catch.

While in his fenced-in area in the prison yard, state officials say, he has 
slipped a chain that was wrapped around his waist up over his chest, hooked it 
to the fence and appeared to begin slumping his neck over it.

Prison officials intervened and have previously described this as a suicide 
attempt.

But here's the literal catch: Jenkins had his hands between the chain and the 
neck so it wouldn't strangle him, a state psychologist testified Tuesday.

In many ways, state doctors say, that "suicide attempt" is emblematic of their 
conclusion about Jenkins: that he's faking severe mental illness, just as he 
faked those suicide attempts.

The reason he stages these scenes: He wants out of solitary confinement, state 
officials say.

Jenkins said as much Tuesday in rants during his third hearing to determine 
whether he is competent to face a death penalty hearing for the August 2013 
killings of 4 Omahans.

"If you???re not going to put me in the hospital, put me in (expletive) general 
population," Jenkins said. "I just want out of the hole. That's all I care 
about."

What Judge Peter Bataillon cares about: whether Jenkins is competent to 
understand the legal process and to participate in his defense during the death 
penalty phase.

After hearing from both sides - the state says he's feigning mental illness, a 
defense doctor says he's schizophrenic and manic - Bataillon took the matter 
under advisement. Whenever Jenkins is declared competent, Bataillon will set a 
3-judge panel to consider his penalty.

Upon his release from prison after a 10-year stint, Jenkins killed Juan 
Uribe-Pena and Jorge Cajiga-Ruiz on Aug. 11, 2013; Curtis Bradford on Aug. 19, 
2013; and Andrea Kruger on Aug. 21, 2013.

In the 3 years since then, Jenkins' death penalty hearing has been delayed 3 
times.

Each hearing has been similar: testimony about whether he's delusional. About 
him cutting his face, his chest and his penis. About whether he hears voices - 
about whether he's doing those things to game the system.

Tuesday's hearing had a few twists.

Jenkins insisted on testifying - against his attorneys' advice. He talked about 
his "cruel and unusual treatment" in prison, where he says guards have watched 
him carve into his skull and done nothing about it.

But Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine used cross-examination to establish that 
Jenkins is smart, in control and knows exactly what he's doing.

"Of course," Jenkins testified. "My intellect is not affected by my psychosis."

The hearing also got heated when prosecutor Brenda Beadle confronted a defense 
psychiatrist who insists that Jenkins is delusional.

"At one point, (Jenkins) told a guard he was going to cut his penis if he 
didn't get coffee," Dr. Bruce Gutnik said. "It's not an equal trade. Cut my 
penis. Give me coffee. Who does that? What's the gain?"

"What if you're trying to prove to the world that you're crazy?" Beadle asked.

"I think you'd have to be out of your mind to do that," Gutnik said.

There were a few new details Tuesday that were different from the 2 other 
competency hearings:

--Jenkins not only has sliced his penis, he has refused pain medication as 
doctors stitched the cuts.

--Jenkins has thrown or spit bodily fluids on prison staff, leading prison 
workers to place spit masks over Jenkins when they talk to him. Jenkins has 
told prison staff that his ingesting of certain bodily fluids enhances his 
"neurotransmitters."

--Tuesday, Jenkins took that show to the courthouse. During a break in the 
competency hearing, he smeared certain bodily fluids over his face, according 
to several law enforcement officials.

Tuesday also offered a new glimpse into Jenkins' 2013 release from prison.

The release was the subject of considerable controversy, a lawsuit and a 
legislative committee probe.

One of the critical issues: Jenkins asked to be committed to a mental health 
institution, rather than released into society, telling prison officials he 
feared that he would get out and kill. Prison officials did not follow through 
with a mental health commitment.

Here's one reason Jenkins gave. He said he wanted to go to the Lincoln Regional 
Center upon his release so he could be diagnosed as disabled and receive Social 
Security disability payments, according to Jennifer Cimpl-Bohn, a Regional 
Center psychologist.

Cimpl-Bohn testified Tuesday that Jenkins is faking mental illness for 
secondary gain - to try to manipulate the court case or to try to get out of 
solitary confinement.

Jenkins' attorney, Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley, argued that the 
only doctors who have concluded that he is faking are state doctors.

Cimpl-Bohn testified that Jenkins suffers from a severe personality disorder, 
not a psychological disorder.

He's narcissistic and antisocial, she said.

The primary question isn't whether Jenkins understands the legal process; 
Jenkins often brags about his command of the law and his rights. It's whether 
he can get along with his attorneys, Cimpl-Bohn testified.

Defendants often battle with their attorneys - and the vast majority of those 
defendants aren't declared incompetent.

Jenkins may give new definition to the term "difficult defendant."

Tuesday, Jenkins entered the courtroom and immediately began attacking his 
defense team, led by Riley, the most experienced criminal defense attorney in 
the state.

"My lawyer over here is explaining things to me," Riley quipped at one point, 
in reference to Jenkins.

"It's amazing what you've done," Jenkins said. "Everything that you've done - 
you're going to be held accountable for."

He then asked Riley if he had seen a motion Jenkins filed for DNA testing.

"I told you I'm not talking about this in front of everyone," Riley said.

"Why?" Jenkins says. "I've got nothing to hide. I release my medical records 
... I talk to the press."

Riley: "And look where you are."

(source: omaha.com)






USA:

Death, and Forgiveness


Life, Death, and Forgiveness by Lisa Gensheimer

Havoc Productions

What does a nun wear to the Academy Awards?

No, it's not a riddle answered by black-and-white-and-red-all-over. It's a 
question faced by Sister Helen Prejean, whose soul-wrenching relationship with 
a death row inmate inspired her Pulitzer Prize-nominated book and the movie 
Dead Man Walking, nominated for four Oscars.

The iconic 1995 film, produced and directed by Tim Robbins, stars Susan 
Sarandon as Prejean and Sean Penn as Patrick Sonnier, sentenced to die in the 
electric chair of Louisiana's Angola State Prison for the gruesome murder of 2 
teenagers.

More than 2 decades after its release, the film begs viewers to explore the 
power of forgiveness and the moral dilemma imposed on all of us by the death 
penalty, still practiced in 31 states including Pennsylvania, which for now has 
a moratorium imposed by Gov. Tom Wolf.

After hearing Prejean's talk at Mount St. Benedict on May 25, and the anguish 
over recent murders in our own community, maybe it's time to watch that movie 
again.

Prejean spoke to a packed house at the invitation of Benedictines for Peace. 
She cracked jokes in a southern drawl about her experiences as a Catholic nun, 
but her call to action was dead serious.

The criminal justice system is "broken, broken, broken," said Prejean. And to 
fix an unjust system, we must do more than pray. We must leave our comfort zone 
and our cushioned lives of privilege and dig deep at the roots of racism and 
poverty.

"I used to pray, 'Look God, these big problems are your problems, so help all 
these poor people. Good night.'"

Or, Prejean continued, "You might say you'rre gonna go into a cave and fast for 
40 days and 40 nights. You're gonna have a little press conference 'afore you 
go in, and say 'I will come out enlightened!' Yeah. You might come out 
skinnier. But one thing you can't promise is that you're gonna be enlightened. 
Or that your soul is gonna catch fire and change your life."

Not going to happen on its own.

"It takes what Pope Francis calls the Gospel of Encounter," said Prejean. And 
that means going to sit at the feet of the poor.

Prejean's journey began when she left her job as a middle school religion 
teacher in suburban Baton Rouge for the St. Thomas Housing Project in New 
Orleans, moving into Hope House.

"It was as if I had gone to another country," Prejean said. "I witnessed the 
suffering, the violence, the drive-by shootings. I wasn't scared of the police 
- but I'm a white woman in Louisiana, and these were all black kids, and they 
all had terrible experiences with the police. In the public school, if you 
dropped out maybe you got your GED but you still couldn't read a 3rd grade 
reader. What's going to happen to an African American kid who gets out of 
school and can't read? When you need money, you sell drugs on a street corner. 
The mainstream economy is working against you. It's like a river, and these 
kids are getting caught in the eddies."

While at Hope House, Prejean was invited to write and later visit Sonnier at 
Angola's maximum-security prison. She got to know him as a human being. And it 
changed the trajectory of her life.

Prejean began to understand that "everybody's worth more than the worst thing 
they ever did in their life."

Her next revelation came from an unlikely source: the father of one of 
Sonnier's victims, Lloyd LeBlanc. LeBlanc said he pictured himself pulling the 
switch on the electric chair. He was angry. He lashed out at his wife and 
daughter in fits of rage. Everybody told him 'You have to be for the death 
penalty or it looks like you didn't love your boy.'

"All my life I've been kind, and I wasn't kind anymore. They killed my boy, but 
I'm not going to let 'em kill me," LeBlanc confided to Prejean.

"He taught me forgiveness is not about lifting the burden of guilt from the 
other, though it may do that - it's to save your own life," said Prejean. 
"LeBlanc was not going to allow his love to be breached by hatred. He was not 
going to lose himself in it."

Prejean witnessed Sonnier's execution on April 5, 1984, and from that moment 
has campaigned for fair trials, prison reforms, and the abolition of the death 
penalty. Today she fights not only on behalf of those who wait on death row - 
whether they are innocent or guilty - but also on behalf of the victims, their 
families, and others who are deeply affected by what amounts to 
state-sanctioned murder.

"The guards and the people who are paid to do the killing for us - who've had 
to take a live human being from a cell, strap him down and kill him, and be 
told it's part of your job - it???s beginning to have an effect on them, too. 
More and more of them are speaking out," Prejean said.

The woman who began her journey at Hope House still has hope after all these 
years.

In 2015, states and the federal government imposed 52 death sentences according 
to the Death Penalty Information Center, down from more than 300 death 
sentences handed down each year between 1994 and 1996. According to Amnesty 
International, last year only 28 executions were actually carried out, the 
lowest number since 1991.

More than 150 people have been released from death row since 1973 following 
evidence of their innocence.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, in dissenting opinions, has on three 
separate occasions questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty, 
suggesting it violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and 
unusual punishment.

In a direct appeal to Congress last September, Pope Francis urged abolition of 
the death penalty.

National polls in 2015 showed historic declines in support for the death 
penalty. Pew and CBS polls found support for capital punishment was 56 %; 
Gallup reported 63 %, just above the poll's 40-year low.

Numbers might be trending in the right direction, but it is people who give 
Prejean hope.

"It's not that the American people are wedded to the death penalty. It's not 
that they're evil or racist. It's just that people never reflected deeply 
because it's so out of their world. They don't know anybody on death row. So we 
must bring them close, share human stories. As the saying goes, 'What the eye 
doesn't see the heart can't feel.'"

Activists Robbins and Sarandon aren't ones to hang their hats on Academy 
Awards, but when Tom Hanks announced Sarandon had won the Oscar for best 
actress, she ascended the stage in a copper-colored dress designed for her by 
Dolce and Gabbana.

What did Prejean wear on the red carpet? She borrowed a simple black dress from 
a friend.

Resources:

Sister Helen Prejean

sisterhelen.org

Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

padp.org

National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

ncadp.org

Benedictine Sisters of Erie

eriebenedictines.org

source: Lisa Gensheimer is a doucmentary producer and writer----eriereader.com)

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

We can kill people or act humanely but not both


It would be richly ironic if we ended up with no death penalty because states 
can't find a good way to kill people, but that is where we eventually may be 
headed. This spring, Pfizer declared that the drugs it manufactured to save 
people should not be used to execute them. Therefore, it was restricting sales 
of 7 of its products to purchasers who agree not to resell them "for use in 
lethal injections."

This is not an isolated decision by a rogue corporation. With Pfizer's 
decision, pharmaceutical companies have effectively abandoned death row.

Production of sodium thiopental, the first drug used to numb the condemned (two 
other drugs were injected to actually kill them), was suspended in 2009. The 
manufacturer subsequently abandoned plans to restart production in Italy. 
Pentobarbital was substituted; but anti-death penalty advocates persuaded its 
Danish manufacturer to stop selling the drug for executions. Executioners then 
turned to midazolam, a Pfizer product, first used for an execution in 2013 in 
Florida.

Justice Samuel Alito recalled that history in his majority opinion last year 
rejecting a petition by Oklahoma prisoners awaiting execution. They argued that 
use of midazolam violated the Eighth Amendment "because it creates an 
unacceptable risk of severe pain." They referenced Oklahoma's 2014 execution of 
Clayton Lockett, who, despite being injected with midazolam, sprang awake, 
struggled against his restraints and, apparently in excruciating pain, uttered 
profanities and cried out "Something is wrong." In a dissenting opinion, 
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the current drug protocol "leaves petitioners 
exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the 
stake."

Justice Stephen Breyer believes the death penalty itself may be 
unconstitutional. Given that states can't seem to fix it, the courts may have 
no alternative but to overturn it, he argued: "(Lack) of reliability, the 
arbitrary application of a serious and irreversible punishment, individual 
suffering caused by long delays, and lack of penological purpose are 
quintessentially judicial matters," leaving the court with "a judicial 
responsibility" to consider its abolition.

Breyer is not the first justice to reject the death penalty. 40 years ago, 
William Brennan opined, "(We) should declare that the punishment of death, like 
punishments on the rack, the screw, and the wheel, is no longer morally 
tolerable in our civilized society." Still, the majority of the court has 
consistently held that the death penalty, fully accepted by the nation's 
founders, is constitutional. And if the penalty itself is constitutional, they 
argue, there must be a constitutional way to carry it out.

This is not a new discussion. In 1972, the Supreme Court ushered in a death 
penalty moratorium after finding that the sentence was applied so carelessly 
and inconsistently as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The 
moratorium ended in 1976, after the court concluded that revised state 
procedures passed constitutional muster. That is where we are today; with the 
death penalty allowed in 31 states.

Even if no new drug is found to replace midazolam, Pfizer's ban will not 
necessarily prevent states from executing people. There are virtually unlimited 
ways to kill. In the past, executioners have used hangings, firing squads, 
electric chairs and gas chambers - generally switching when a supposedly more 
humane method of death appeared. The search for a good way to kill will no 
doubt be renewed in the aftermath of Pfizer's action; and given Americans' 
support for the death penalty, an acceptable way will likely be found.

Still, support for capital punishment is weakening. It went from 80% in 1994 to 
61% today. One reason may be that we are learning that a substantial number of 
those convicted are actually innocent. To date, according to The Innocence 
Project, 342 incarcerated people have been exonerated thanks to DNA tests, 
including 20 people serving time on death row. The average time served before 
exoneration was 14 years.

Former Illinois governor George Ryan began his political career as a staunch 
supporter of the death penalty. Only as governor did he realize that many 
innocent people were being condemned to death. So he declared a moratorium on 
executions. In 2003, he granted clemency to all inmates on death row in 
Illinois. In a speech at Northwestern University College of Law, Ryan noted 
that Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions had exonerated 17 men who 
"were wrongfully convicted and rotting in the condemned units of our state 
prisons." The center's work, he confessed, forced him to ask, "Could I send 
another man's son to death under the deeply flawed system of capital punishment 
we have in Illinois?"

Most Americans may never share Ryan's indignation about the flaws in the 
system; but as problems with the death penalty continue to surface, it becomes 
increasingly difficult to ignore the underlying logic of Breyer's argument: 
that we may simply be incapable of executing people in a way that is not cruel 
or capricious. In short, either we can kill people or we can act humanely, but 
we cannot do both.

(source: Ellis Cose, a member of the board of contributors of USA Today)