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

[Rick Halperin]

Mar. 1



TEXAS:

This Man Has Witnessed More Than 200 Executions


So far this year, the State of Texas has executed 3 death row inmates. 10 more 
are scheduled to die before the end of July. At each execution are the prison 
warden, representatives from the press and families of prisoners and their 
victims. There's also a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal 
Justice.

For years, that person was Larry Fitzgerald. It was his job to relay 
information to the public about the last moments of death row prisoners.

During his time as the department spokesperson, he witnessed 219 executions.

Fitzgerald has recently opened up about his feelings on the death penalty - and 
why they've changed. It's now the subject of a short film series picked up by 
the BBC.

When he interviewed for the position back in 1997, Fitzgerald didn't know for 
certain what his job duties would be. He was asked about his opinion on capital 
punishment and he said his feelings were "ambivalent." But he wasn't prepared 
for what the job entailed.

"I learned ... after the interview was over that I would be doing executions," 
Fitzgerald says. "It came as a complete surprise to me. It is true. I was the 
face of the executions in Texas for many, many years."

His 1st execution was a double execution - 2 men were put to death on the same 
night. He says he was "apprehensive" as he prepared to witness his first 
inmates die.

"I had no idea what to expect, what it was going to be like," Fitzgerald says. 
"Was it going to be a violent type of thing? I hate to use the term like 
somebody going to sleep because obviously they just died - but it was a very 
clinical type of situation."

As the spokesperson for the TDCJ, Fitzgerald's main job was relaying 
information about the executions to the media. Following the death of an 
inmate, he would give a statement to reporters. But Fitzgerald had to maintain 
a careful balance of impartiality when speaking with reporters about the death 
penalty. He says he was frequently asked his opinion about capital punishment, 
but would deflect the question.

"If I came out and said 'I support the death penalty,' then I alienate all the 
death row inmates and they don't want to do any more interviews," he says. "Or, 
if I go the other way, then the people who are victims of the crimes, the 
families, they'd then get mad at me, so I just tried to dodge the question 
altogether."

But years of witnessing death helped shape Fitzgerald's views on capital 
punishment. He got to know some of the inmates on death row and develop bonds 
with them. After leaving his position with the TDCJ, he became an expert 
witness in capital murder trials. His job was helping the jury understand the 
gravity of a death sentence.

"In the penalty phase, I would try to explain to the juries what it's like to 
be on death row, what's the day in the life of an offender," Fitzgerald says. 
"And I came to realize that, you know, maybe Texas uses the death penalty way 
too much."

After making the short film with a University of Texas graduate student that 
ended up featured on the BBC, he hopes speaking out will change some minds 
about capital punishment. While he admits that the abolition of the death 
penalty is unlikely in Texas, he wants to change some minds about using it so 
frequently.

"I don't think that the thinking of Texas is going to change regarding the 
death penalty," Fitzgerald says. "But I would like to have more consideration 
given by the prosecutors to go into life without parole."

(source: KUT .org)






GEORGIA:

Death penalty indictment filed against triple homicide suspect


The man accused of murdering 2 young girls and their mother will face the 
possibility of the death penalty.

A grand jury indicted Wendell Callahan on 3 counts of aggravated murder with 
intent to kill 2 or more and felony murder specifications, 1 count of murder, 6 
counts of aggravated murder and 1 count of aggravated burglary.

According to Columbus police, Callahan fatally stabbed 32-year-old Erveena 
Hammonds, 10-year-old Anaesia Green, and 7-year-old Breya Hammonds at an 
apartment on Atlantic Avenue.

Investigators told NBC4 the suspect is the ex-boyfriend of the woman who was 
killed. They said he killed all 3 people and then was surprised when the 
woman's current boyfriend walked in the residence. The two men then began to 
fight.

Both men were injured and taken to an area hospital. Police say the boyfriend 
was treated and released.

(source: WCMH news)






OHIO:

Court to hear arguments in Warren death penalty resentencing----A judge ordered 
in 2012 that Nathaniel Jackson be put to death for the 2001 murder of Robert 
Fingerhut near Warren in northeastern Ohio.


The Ohio Supreme Court plans to hear arguments next month on the death penalty 
resentencing of a man convicted of plotting the killing of his girlfriend's 
ex-husband.

The court has scheduled a hearing for April 19 on a judge???s 2012 order that 
Nathaniel Jackson be put to death for the 2001 murder of Robert Fingerhut near 
Warren in northeastern Ohio.

The 44-year-old Jackson was first sentenced to death in 2002. That sentence was 
overturned after the state Supreme Court reprimanded a judge and prosecutor for 
teaming up to write sentencing orders for Jackson and Jackson's co-defendant, 
Donna Roberts.

Authorities say Jackson shot Fingerhut twice in the back and once in the head 
after Roberts let Jackson into the home to wait for Fingerhut to return.

(source: Associated Press)






USA:

The Brain Gets Its Day in Court----A new study found that the number of 
judicial opinions referencing neuroscience as evidence more than doubled 
between 2005 and 2012.


The crime was brutal. On November 4, 1989, after a night of heavy drinking, 
David Scott Detrich and a male coworker picked up a woman walking along the 
side of the road in Tucson, Arizona. After scoring some cocaine, the trio went 
back to her place, where, according to court documents, Detrich slit the 
woman's throat and stabbed her 40 times. Later, the 2 men dumped her body in 
the desert.

A jury convicted Detrich of kidnapping and 1st-degree murder in 1995, and a 
judge sentenced him to death.

Detrich is still on death row today as the appeals process drags on, but in 
2010, his lawyers achieved a victory of sorts. They claimed that Detrich had 
received "ineffective assistance of counsel" at his trial, because his original 
legal team had failed to present evidence of neuropsychological abnormalities 
and brain damage that might have swayed the court to give him a lesser 
sentence. A federal appeals court agreed. The ruling said, in effect, that 
Detrich had been denied his Constitutional right to a fair trial because his 
lawyers hadn???t called an expert witness to talk about his brain.

That judicial opinion is just 1 of nearly 1,600 examined in a recent study 
documenting the expanding use of brain science in the criminal-justice system. 
The study, by Nita Farahany at Duke University, found that the number of 
judicial opinions that mention neuroscientific evidence more than doubled 
between 2005 and 2012.

"There are good reasons to believe that the increase in published opinions 
involving neurobiology are just the tip of the iceberg," says Owen Jones, a law 
professor at Vanderbilt who directs the MacArthur Foundation Research Network 
on Law and Neuroscience. The vast majority of criminal cases never go to trial, 
Jones says, and only a small fraction of those that do result in written 
opinions. The rest are virtually impossible to track.

She found that in cases that used neuroscientific evidence, defendants got a 
favorable outcome.

It's a trend that makes some neuroscientists uneasy, as they see the potential 
for their findings to be misused in court. But like it or not, Farahany's 
findings suggest, neuroscience is already entrenched in the U.S. legal system.

A handful of cases have made headlines in recent years, as lawyers representing 
convicted murderers have introduced brain scans and other tests of brain 
function to try to spare their client the death penalty. It didn't always work, 
but Farahany's analysis suggests that neuroscientific evidence - which she 
broadly defines as anything from brain scans to neuropsychological exams to 
bald assertions about the condition of a person's brain - is being used in a 
wider variety of cases, and in the service of more diverse legal strategies, 
than the headlines would suggest. In fact, 60 % of the cases in her sample 
involved non-capital offenses, including robbery, fraud, and drug trafficking.

Cases like Detrich's are one example. Arguing for ineffective assistance of 
counsel is pretty much a legal Hail Mary. It requires proving two things: that 
the defense counsel failed to do their job adequately, and (raising the bar 
even higher) that this failure caused the trial to be unfairly skewed against 
the defendant. Courts have ruled previously that a defense attorney who slept 
through substantial parts of a trial still provided effective counsel. Not so, 
at least in some cases, for attorneys who failed to introduce neuroscience 
evidence in their client's defense.

Farahany found 516 claims in which neuroscience evidence was used to argue for 
ineffective assistance of counsel (a claim, in the legal sense, is a formal 
demand or assertion). Only 29 % of these claims were successful, but that's 
still a surprisingly high number, she says: "The basic rap on IAC is it almost 
always fails."

Neuroscience evidence was also used in 395 competency claims, which are claims 
regarding a defendants' mental wherewithal to stand trial, waive their rights, 
or enter a plea.

In the 2008 case of Miguel Angel Ruiz, a 17-year-old accused of killing his 
mother, a jury in California apparently was unmoved by two neuropsychologists, 
who testified that Ruiz had severe language deficits resulting from a brain 
injury. The jury rejected the claim that Ruiz was not competent to stand trial, 
but the trial judge disagreed. "I'm not inclined to set aside a jury's decision 
lightly or unadvisedly," he wrote in his decision to do just that. "I just 
couldn't believe the jury could return a finding of competency based on the 
evidence I heard."

In the Ruiz case, it seems the neuroscience evidence had an impact. The effect 
on Detrich's case, which is still bouncing around the courts, is less clear. 
Overall, it's hard to know how influential this type of evidence really is, 
Farahany says. Each case is unique, which makes it difficult to do a fair 
comparison of outcomes. Even so, she found that in cases that used 
neuroscientific evidence, defendants got a favorable outcome - a reduced 
sentence, a new hearing, or some other kind of break - about 20 to 30 % of the 
time. That's considerably better than the 12 % reported in a 2015 paper that 
looked at an entire year's worth of appeals in criminal cases in the U.S. - 
nearly 70,000 of them. "Percentage-wise, people seem to do a little better with 
neuroscience than they do with out," Farahany says.

Courts have always concerned themselves with the mental states of individuals, 
says Francis Shen, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. What's 
changing is the influence of modern neuroscience on how we talk about these 
things. "The logic is the same, but the stuff a jury or judge will hear is now 
technical in a way it didn't used to be," Shen says.

"Once it becomes clinically relevant, it will become legally relevant."

The big question, of course, is whether this this growing influence will end up 
being good or bad for justice. Brain scans or other biomarkers that could more 
definitively diagnose mental illness would indeed be a boon for the legal 
system, says Shen. But while scans today can easily pick up signs of major 
brain damage, scans that reliably pick up the more subtle signs of 
schizophrenia, for example, are still a ways off. "Once it becomes clinically 
relevant, it will become legally relevant," Shen says.

It gets murkier, though, for biomarkers of legally relevant mental 
characteristics like impulsiveness. One problem is that most neuroscience 
research involves making comparisons of brain scans collected from dozens of 
people, while most court cases are concerned with a specific individual. 
"Seeing something on an individual's scan does not tell us they have 
impulse-control problems, it merely raises the likelihood by some unknown 
amount," says Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of 
Pennsylvania.

This is a tension that seems likely to grow. The scientific and legal 
communities have different methods and standards for evaluating evidence. 
Scientists have a culture of objectivity and a statistical mindset when it 
comes to uncertainty. The evidence they're dealing with often comes from 
experiments of their own design.

In the courtroom, on the other hand, the evidence comes from real life. It's 
messy and incomplete. And when someone's liberty - or life - hangs in the 
balance, there's no time to wait for more data to come in.

(source: The Atlantic)

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

Panel envisions future of the death penalty post-Scalia


As part of the National Lawyer's Guild's Student Week Against Mass 
Incarceration, a Feb. 29 Cornell Law School panel, featuring professors Joe 
Margulies '82, John Blume and Valerie Hans, discussed the future of the death 
penalty in light of Justice Antonin Scalia's death Feb. 13.

Scalia was a stalwart supporter of capital punishment, voting as a member of 
the conservative majority to uphold death sentences in a number of important 
capital cases. Scalia's death has left the U.S. Supreme Court evenly divided 
between liberal and conservative members. Thus, the Court's future approach to 
capital punishment could be strongly influenced by Scalia's replacement, which 
in turn may depend on the outcome of the November 2016 elections.

Hans opened the panel by examining the trends in public opinion on the death 
penalty. While the percentage of those in favor of the death penalty reached a 
peak in the early '90s, at approximately 80 %, the number dropped off to 61 % 
as of 2015.

"When you think about the future of the death penalty there are lots of signs 
that suggest that it's really in decline, but the fact that a majority of the 
population actually still answers yes to [the death penalty] suggests complete 
abolition may be in fact far away," Hans said.

She discussed how public opinion is closely linked to the number of death 
sentences; death sentences decrease as public support for capital punishment 
decreases.

Blume said this was due to a lack of incentive for prosecutors to seek the 
death penalty when they are not under public or political pressure to do so. He 
also cited the rise in sentences of life without parole, an alternative to the 
death penalty, as another reason for a decrease in death sentences and public 
support.

"The fact that every state now has life without parole makes it easier for 
prosecutors to tell surviving victim???s family members that they can put the 
person who killed their loved one away for the rest of their life and protect 
the public without the family having to endure a lengthy appeals process," 
Blume said.

Additionally, the panel focused on the Innocence Project, which uses DNA 
testing to prove the innocence of those who have been wrongfully convicted. 
"The innocence project collapses the relevant inquiry from 'Did they get a fair 
trial?' to 'Did we get the right guy?'" Margulies said.

As for the future of the death penalty, the panel envisioned its decline, but 
was less optimistic of complete abolition by the Supreme Court.

"I think the use of the death sentence will decline for a variety of reasons: 
cost, decline in punitiveness, concerns about innocence, concerns about racial 
impact, changing demographics, a general liberalizing trend, international 
pressure. But will the court deal the final blow? I'm very skeptical of that 
idea," Margulies said.

(source: Emily McNeill '16 is a writer intern for the Cornell (Univ.) 
Chronicle)