[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., USA
Rick Halperin
rhalperi at smu.edu
Thu Jun 9 12:06:34 CDT 2016
June 9
PENNSYLVANIA:
Top court says judge should have stepped aside in death penalty case
The U.S. Supreme Court, siding with a death row inmate, ruled on Thursday that
Pennsylvania's former top judge should have stepped aside when his court heard
a case in which he earlier as a prosecutor had authorized seeking capital
punishment.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in favor of Terrance Williams, convicted in the
1984 bludgeoning murder of a 56-year-old man in Philadelphia. Williams, 18 at
the time of the crime, said the man had sexually abused him as a youth.
Williams will now get a new hearing before Pennsylvania's Supreme Court to
challenge his death sentence.
The justices threw out a 2014 ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that
upheld the death sentence given to Williams. Williams' appeal focused on the
actions of Ronald Castille, who served as Philadelphia's district attorney when
Williams was convicted and was Pennsylvania's chief justice and served on the
state Supreme Court when it affirmed the death sentence.
"Where a judge has had an earlier significant, personal involvement as a
prosecutor in a critical decision in the defendant's case, the risk of actual
bias in the judicial proceeding rises to an unconstitutional level," Justice
Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.
Kennedy was joined by the court's 4 liberal justices in the ruling, with
conservative justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito
dissenting.
As district attorney, Castille gave the go-ahead for the prosecution to pursue
the death penalty against Williams, who separately was convicted in a 2nd
murder. In 2014, Castille served on the state Supreme Court when it unanimously
reinstated the death penalty against Williams after a judge had thrown out
capital punishment in the case due to prosecutorial misconduct.
Castille, now retired from the bench, was elected to the state's high court in
1993 after touting his record of sending criminals to death row. Castille
refused a request by Williams' lawyers to recuse himself when the case went
before the state Supreme Court.
Williams, a former star high school quarterback, was convicted of bludgeoning
the man and later setting the body on fire. Prosecutors claimed the killing was
tied to a robbery.
During the appeals process, Williams' lawyers introduced evidence that he had
been sexually abused by the man he killed, a church deacon. A lower court then
found that prosecutors working for Castille had withheld evidence about the
man's sexual abuse of boys.
There is currently a death penalty moratorium in Pennsylvania imposed by
Governor Tom Wolf.
The justices heard arguments in the case on Feb. 29.
(source: Reuters)
USA:
A Major Latino Coalition Just Called For An End To The Death Penalty
The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), a coalition of 40 prominent
Latino organizations, this week joined the growing, bipartisan list of groups
calling for the end of the death penalty, noting that Latinos are "directly
affected by its injustices."
For the 1st time ever, the NHLA Public Policy Agenda includes positions on drug
policy and criminal justice and policing reforms. Perhaps most notably, the
groups unanimously agreed to support abolition of capital punishment, a
practice they say "disproportionately impacts people of color."
"The criminal justice system is so broken, there will never be an impartial way
to apply capital punishment to avoid the fact that the most determinant factor
in whether or not someone is put to death is the race of the victim," said Juan
Cartagena, co-chair of the NHLA Civil Rights committee and president of
LatinoJustice.
"We never had to dig any deeper into morality or issues about death in
general," he added. "The racialized aspects of the imposition of the death
penalty in the United States could not just be overlooked, and that became the
unifying piece."
According to U.S. Department of Justice statistics from 2010, Latinos make up a
growing portion of defendants on death row. That year, they constituted 13.5 %
of the U.S. death row population, up from 11 % in 2000. A recent study found
that white jurors were more likely to impose the death penalty in cases where
the defendant was Latino and poor.
The racialized aspects of the imposition of the death penalty in the United
States could not just be overlooked.
And as Cartagena noted, defendants who victimize a white person are far more
likely to be sentenced to death than those whose victims are black or Latino.
Of all the executions in the country since 1976, more than 75 % of victims were
white, while just 6.8 % were Latino and 15.4 % were black.
The racial disparities in the death penalty are one of the many reasons why a
growing list of political leaders have come out against the practice. Even
conservative organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals have
reconsidered their support for the death penalty in recent years, and support
for the practice is no longer a given in red states. Nebraska recently
abolished capital punishment and there are movements in other
Republican-controlled states including Utah and Nevada to do the same.
2 weeks after Pope Francis told Congress to eliminate capital punishment,
calling it "inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime committed," the
National Latino Evangelical Coalition, a national network of 3,000 Latino
evangelical churches, also came out against the practice for the 1st time ever.
The NHLA includes several organizations that lean conservative and Republican,
like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. But Cartagena said he never heard any
negative feedback about the decision to call for the abolition of the death
penalty.
"It was an easy lift," he said. "There was no real contentiousness about this
issue, nor the one about drug policy reform, nor the one about mass
incarceration, juvenile justice, et cetera, et cetera."
Just 56 % of Americans say they support capital punishment, a 40-year low, down
from 78 % just 2 decades ago. Yet 31 states and the federal government still
allow for the execution of certain defendants.
While Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, has said she
still supports the limited application of the death penalty, Cartagena said he
hopes that grassroots movement against it, like the coordinated decision of the
NHLA, push her to reconsider.
"We've only had sporadic movements from the bottom on justice reform and death
penalty reform," he said. "This is a long and arduous process ... Am I
concerned that the current Democratic leadership is not fully attuned to the
needs to reform the criminal justice system in all its aspects? Of course I am.
Am I surprised? Definitely not."
"The ability for us to move this particular issue is going to take a long, long
time," he added.
(source: thinkprogress.org)
More information about the DeathPenalty
mailing list