[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----S.C., NEV., USA

[Rick Halperin]

March 14



SOUTH CAROLINA:

Accused Emanuel AME shooter, his friend to appear in federal court next month


Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old man accused of killing nine people in a Charleston 
church, and his friend who investigators say knew of the planned attack will 
appear in federal court next month.

District Judge Richard M. Gergel scheduled a bar meeting for 10 a.m. on April 5 
at the courthouse in downtown Charleston. Gergel issued the schedule on Monday 
morning, and currently neither Roof nor Joey Meek have filed motions to not be 
present at the hearing.

While state prosecutors have said they are seeking the death penalty for Roof, 
who is accused of killing parishioners of Emanuel AME Church during a Bible 
study, federal prosecutors are still waiting on a Department of Justice panel 
to decide if the federal government will also seek the death penalty for nearly 
3 dozen hate crime charges in connection to the shooting.

Currently, Roof's state trial is set to begin on July 11.

The scheduled bar meeting comes roughly nine months after the June 17 shooting. 
Federal prosecutors said in previous hearings they thought the justice 
department would render a decision on the death penalty in that time.

It's not clear from the filing what attorneys and Gergel will discuss on April 
5, or if the hearing was requested by federal prosecutors.

The decision from the DOJ panel is a big part of the delay in scheduling Roof's 
federal trial. Roof's attorneys said their client was prepared to plead guilty 
if the death penalty was not a possible sentence.

There are also delays in Meek's trial as his attorneys go through discovery in 
the misprision of a felony case being built against him. Investigators say Meek 
lied to them and did not alert police after learning of Roof's plan.

Meanwhile, jury questionnaires are spreading across the state for the 2 men. 
Earlier this month, attorneys in the Meek case were supposed to start sorting 
through the jury surveys to whittle down the pool before selection begins ahead 
of the trial.

In Roof's case, approximately 600 jury surveys are going to residents across 
the state. There could be a court hearing for attorneys to cut down on the 
number of potential jurors days before the 1st anniversary of the shooting. 
Final jury selection will take 3 days starting on June 28.

(soruce: ABC news)






NEVADA:

Woman wants to withdraw plea in girl's death, slashing blackjack dealer


A Las Vegas woman was appointed a new lawyer Monday in her attempt to withdraw 
a guilty plea in the killing of a 10-year-old girl and slashing of a Bellagio 
blackjack dealer.

Earlier this year, Brenda Stokes Wilson, 53, agreed to a sentence of life in 
prison without the possibility of parole on a count of 1st-degree murder. But 
now she says she's "innocent of the crimes charged and seek my day in court in 
order to prove my innocence."

Pulling back on the deal with prosecutors means Wilson could face the death 
penalty if she goes to trial.

The agreement was "entered improperly, without advice of counsel and without 
understanding of the nature of the charge the, effect of the plea or of his her 
(sic) rights," Wilson wrote in a handwritten motion filed last month. She added 
that she was "in a state of shock" when her plea was entered.

District Judge Kathleen Delaney appointed defense lawyer Christopher Oram to 
further represent Wilson in the case.

Jade Morris's body was found in late December 2012 in a desert area of an 
undeveloped North Las Vegas neighborhood near Deer Springs Way and North Fifth 
Street by a person walking a dog.

A little more than 4 feet tall and weighing 102 pounds, Jade suffered 40 
sharp-force wounds across her body from a large knife, according to a medical 
examiner. Some of her injuries - the most serious on her head, chest and 
abdomen - were so severe that she was likely unconscious within minutes.

Wilson had picked up the girl from Reeve's home at 4:50 p.m. on Dec. 21, 2012, 
saying they were going Christmas shopping. Stokes was engaged to Jade's father, 
Philip Morris, and had a close relationship with the girl for several years.

Authorities have said that the same night Wilson kidnapped the girl, 
authorities say, she approached a Bellagio blackjack table and began slashing 
the face of a dealer, 44-year-old Joyce Rhone. Wilson mistakenly believed Rhone 
had started dating Jade's father.

(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)






USA:

Hillary Clinton's struggles with the death penalty date back to her Senate days


Hillary Clinton has had a long time to think about the death penalty, going 
back to her her days as a criminal law professor in the 1970s. But public and 
private comments she's made over the years suggest she's never quite fully come 
to terms with whether to support it.

Clinton's comments in a CNN town hall Sunday are some of her most definitive 
yet about where the Democratic presidential front-runner stands on this 
quintessential issue. On Sunday, Ricky Jackson of Ohio, a former death-row 
inmate who was exonerated after 39 years for a crime he didn't commit, asked 
her how she can support the death penalty when it threatens the lives of 
innocent people like him.

Clinton replied it's "a profoundly difficult question." She said she's 
skeptical of the states' abilities to dole out the death penalty fairly, but 
she explained she can't rule the death penalty out entirely for specific cases 
at the federal level -- like the Oklahoma City bombing. She went on:

Where I end up is this: Given the challenges we face from terrorist activities 
primarily in our country that end up under federal jurisdiction, for very 
limited purposes, I think it can still be held in reserve for those. ... But a 
very limited use of it in cases where there has been horrific mass killings. 
That's really the exception that I still am struggling with. And that would 
only be in the federal system.

Her comments come as the nation is trying to retool the way it approaches 
criminal justice reform after a tough-on-crime era under Clinton's husband in 
the 1990s led to high incarceration rates with racial disparities. Many 
prominent liberals, including Clinton's opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), 
wants to abolish the death penalty, and conservative-leaning states like 
Nebraska and Utah are even considering or have considered getting rid of it.

Through it all, Clinton has said relatively little about her nuanced position, 
which appears to have evolved over the years along with the nation's -- some 
would say subtly, others would argue more dramatically. We would argue her 
position on the death penalty has been much more consistent over the years than 
her position on trade. But because she's said so little on it, it's even harder 
to suss out just how much (or how little) her positions on the death penalty 
have changed.

Here's a brief history of Clinton's relationship to the death penalty, put 
together in part thanks to a thorough review of her entire history on criminal 
justice via The Marshall Project:

While her husband was in office, she "agonized" over his positions

Bill Clinton's desire to appear tough on crime -- since the days he lost 
reelection as governor of Arkansas after being attacked as too soft -- seems to 
have guided his wife's public positions on the death penalty, at least while he 
was in office.

When Clinton was a professor of criminal law in the 1970s, she headed a legal 
aid clinic at the University of Arkansas. There, her team helped save the life 
of a mentally impaired black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury. But 
Clinton left her name off the amicus brief her team filed to save the life of 
Henry Giles. The Marshall Project notes her husband was running for attorney 
general in Arkansas at the time.

While her husband was president, she lobbied for 2 tough-on-crime bills he 
signed that, among other things, expanded the kinds of federal crimes eligible 
for the death penalty and placed time limits on death penalty appeals.

But there's evidence to suggest she was conflicted with her husband's stance. 
In a 2007 book "God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life," Clinton's spiritual 
mentor tells author Paul Kengor she "agonized" over her husband's support for 
the death penalty.

In the Senate, she was an "unenthusiastic" supporter of the death penalty

When Clinton had the opportunity to comment as a politician in her own right on 
the death penalty, she caused a stir on the left. In her 2000 Senate race, 
Clinton said the death penalty had her "unenthusiastic support" (supporting the 
death penalty was officially part of the Democratic Party's platform until 
2004).

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said at the time that Clinton didn't 
"have the guts to oppose capital punishment." Writing in the New York Observer, 
journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum called her Senate campaign " a disaster" 
for liberalism, citing in part her support for the death penalty and accusing 
Clinton of pandering to voters. The New York Observer's editorial board said 
she supported a "barbaric solution."

Despite the drama, when Clinton got to the Senate, she largely stayed out of 
the debate on criminal justice. The Marshall Project reports she signed onto a 
handful of mostly failed bills to reform criminal justice.

One of those specifically mentioning the death penalty was the Innocence 
Protection Act, which aimed to reduce the chance a person gets wrongfully 
sentenced to death in part by expanding and helping pay for DNA testing for 
people sentenced to the death. It took a few years, but President George W. 
Bush signed it into law in 2004.

On the presidential trail, she eases into her current position

More years went by without Clinton explicitly addressing how she feels about 
the death penalty. In her first run for president in 2008, when she was still a 
senator, she called for "a thorough review of all the penalties" for the 1994 
crime bill she supported and her husband signed into law. News stories from the 
2008 campaign describe her as a "firm" or "staunch" supporter of the death 
penalty.

But she appeared to soften her stance during her 3nd bid for the White House. 
In an October event in New Hampshire, she responded to a question about her 
position and had this to say, via MSNBC:

We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently 
applied, and too often in a discriminatory way. 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 expand on her view-- that the death penalty should be reigned in but not 
abolished entirely -- Sunday.

But really, Clinton has said so little on the death penalty over the years, 
it's difficult to gauge just how drastically (or not) her position has changed. 
As evidenced by her use of words like "struggled" when she does talk about it, 
it seems whatever conclusions she's come to have not been easy for her.

(source: Amber Phillips, Washington Post)

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

What Hillary Clinton Is Missing About The Federal Death Penalty----Clinton 
supports a federal death penalty for terrorism, but it's almost never used that 
way.


Hillary Clinton is defending the use of the death penalty at the federal level, 
even as she criticized the capital punishment system at the state level.

The Democratic presidential candidate during a Sunday night town hall at Ohio 
State University said that while states have "proven themselves incapable of 
carrying out fair trials," a federal death penalty should remain in place for 
extreme cases.

Clinton said that "given the choices we face from terrorist activities 
primarily in our country that end up under federal jurisdiction, for very 
limited purposes, I think it can still be held in reserve for those."

Though Clinton backs a federal death penalty as a way of dealing with convicted 
terrorists, the numbers show that it's rarely used that way.

"[Clinton] made it seem, in her comments, as though the federal death row was 
filled with terrorists. In fact, out the 62 people, 1 of them is a terrorist," 
said David Menschel, a criminal defense attorney and criminal justice reform 
advocate.

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is the lone inmate on federal death 
row for a terrorism conviction.

The rest of federal death row is filled with inmates convicted of the same 
crimes as those in the state systems, but whose crimes are distinguished by a 
federal tie-in that ranges from killing a state police officer to burying a 
murder victim's body on federally owned land.

"The people on federal death row are mostly indistinguishable from state death 
rows," Menschel said.

"Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is the lone inmate on federal death 
row for a terrorism conviction.

Even in terrorism cases against the state, the death penalty is inconsistently 
applied. Menschel said many of the defendants convicted of terrorism offenses 
at the federal level get life sentences rather than the death penalty -- 
including Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center 
bombing that killed 6 and injured more than 1000 people.

In 2010, then-Attorney General Eric Holder, put the number of international and 
domestic terrorists in Bureau of Prison custody at more than 300.

Since the 1920s, the federal government has executed 37 people, according to 
the Death Penalty Information Center -- largely for murder, robbery and 
kidnapping.

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is the only federal prisoner since the 
1950s to be executed after a terrorism conviction. McVeigh abandoned his 
appeals and was put to death just four years after his conviction.

In the presidential race, Clinton is the only candidate to have a stance only 
partially approving or disapproving of the death penalty. Her rival for the 
Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), opposes the death penalty 
outright, while the four remaining Republican candidates all support the death 
penalty at the state and federal levels.

Menschel, who opposes the death penalty, said the stance gives Clinton room to 
pivot toward a more "tough on crime" stance in coming months, if need be. 
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation legal director Kent Scheidegger, who supports 
the death penalty, agrees.

"She's straddling the fence, and it's a barb-wired fence. I don't think she 
wants to come out full-bore for [the death penalty] in the primaries and 
doesn't want to come out full-bore against it in the general election," 
Scheidegger said.

Scheidegger noted that while he believes the death penalty is needed at the 
state level to both punish and deter, he's unsure of its value as a deterrent 
in terrorism cases -- "unless maybe for accomplices."

The former Secretary of State made her remarks in response to a question from 
Ricky Jackson, a man exonerated from death row after 39 years. Jackson told 
Clinton that he came "perilously close to my own execution" despite being 
innocent.

(source: Kim Bellware, Huffington Post)