[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----TEXAS, N.J., PENN., N.C., GA., FLA.

[Rick Halperin]

March 29



TEXAS:

Execution appeals rejected


The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday refused to review an appeal by 
death-row inmate John Battaglia to have his sentence for killing his 2 young 
daughters at his Dallas apartment nearly 15 years ago commuted to life in 
prison.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to review appeals by 2 other 
prisoners facing execution, including an inmate from Fort Worth who smothered 
an 89-year-old man during a robbery 12 years ago.

Battaglia is schedule to be put to death Wednesday. Execution dates have not 
been set for the 2 others.

Dallas Case

Pardons and paroles board spokesman Raymond Estrada said the board voted 7-0 
against granting Battaglia a reprieve from execution.

Battaglia, 60, was convicted and condemned for the May 2001 fatal shootings of 
his daughters, 9-year-ol Faith and 6-year-old Liberty. The girls' mother, 
Battaglia's ex-wife, was on the phone with him and heard the gunshots and cry 
of the older daughter.

Battaglia still has appeals in the federal courts seeking to block his 
punishment.

Fort Worth Case

The high court ruled without comment in the case of 36-year-old killer Tilon 
Carter. His appeals have focused on whether his Tarrant County trial attorneys 
were deficient and whether faulty instructions were given to trial jurors.

Carter was condemned for the 2004 robbery and slaying of James Tomlin. Evidence 
showed that Tomlin, a retured Bell Helicopter worker, kept cash in containers 
scattered around his home.

Prosecutors protrayed Carter as a longtime criminal and also tied him to a 
fatal shooting at a drug house.

Houston Case

The court also ruled without comment in the case of 61-year-old Jorge 
Villanueva, who raped, beat and strangled Maria Jova Monteil at her Houston 
home in 1994.

In earlier appeals, Villanueva's attorneys argued he had deficient legal help 
during his Harris County capital murder trial in 1996.

Prison records show the former landscaper also is serving life for an 
injury-to-a-child conviction.

Villanueva's case was among hundreds identified in 2003 for review of DNA 
results because of shoddy work by the Houston Police Department crime lab.

(source: Dallas Morning News)






NEW JERSEY:

Passing sentence on capital punishment


Next Sunday is International Anti-Death Penalty Day. OK, I'd better qualify 
that one: it won't actually be International Anti-Death Penalty Day, but to my 
mind it ought to be. On that date it will be exactly 80 years since an 
immigrant German carpenter was sent to the electric chair in Trenton, New 
Jersey. The previous year, 36-year-old Bruno Richard Hauptmann had been 
convicted of the kidnapping and murder in March 1932 of Charles Lindbergh jr, 
the 20-month-old son of popular aviator Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Hauptmann, 
however, did not do it. They called the murder the Crime of the Century, and 
the ensuing trial the Trial of the Century, so by right of logical exaggeration 
the frying of Hauptmann deserves the title Miscarriage of Justice of the 
Century.

Hauptmann's trial was a complete travesty of justice, in which police brutality 
and malpractice, petty politics, and a media circus combined to exact blood 
lust by killing an innocent man. To employ an over-used clich???, his was a 
case of being In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time, but also falling victim to 
bad luck and personal mistakes.

On the evening of 1 March 1932 Charles Lindbergh jr was snatched from his cot 
from an upstairs room in the family home in Highfields, New Jersey. Whoever 
took the toddler left a crudely-made ladder leaning against the house. A ransom 
note discovered by the crime scene demanded $50,000 for the child's safe 
return. Through the efforts of an intermediary, which came in the form of a 
retired school teacher called J F Condon, the ransom (consisting of 
identifiable gold-certificate bills) was paid in instalments to a member of the 
kidnapping gang, known as Cemetery John, who regularly met Condon in Woodlawn 
Cemetery in New York. Despite repeated assurances from the gang that the boy 
was alive, Charles Lindbergh jr's body was discovered just over 2 months after 
his abduction.

2 years later, in the autumn of 1934 Hauptmann was arrested in New York and 
charged with the Lindbergh baby???s kidnap and murder. Police were led to his 
home after a tip-off from a garage attendant who had received gold-certificated 
ransom money from him in return for car fuel and then noted down his car 
license plate. That, however, was as far as the evidence against Hauptmann 
went. A police search of his home found over $14,000 in gold-certificate bills. 
Hauptmann had discovered the money in a package by accident, after a business 
partner called Isidor Fisch had asked him to hang on to the package for 
safekeeping before travelling to Europe. Hauptmann later discovered that Fisch 
was a conman who had swindled him and many others out of thousands of dollars. 
Fisch later died of tuberculosis shortly after arriving in Europe. Needless to 
say, Hauptmann denied knowing anything about the Lindbergh abduction, even 
after police officers had beaten him up and threatened his wife and child.

While failing to declare swindled money to the police was obviously a crime, as 
was Hauptmann's lie to his interrogators that he had withdrawn the money from 
his bank account, being in possession of kidnap ransom money does not 
necessarily a kidnapper, much less a murderer, make. What ought to have saved 
Hauptmann from the chair was his alibi: on 1 March 1932 (the date of Charles 
jr's abduction) he had been working for the New York firm Majestic Apartments 
between 8:00am and 5:00pm - in other words, he could not have been anywhere 
near Highfields, New Jersey at the time of the abduction - and the company 
could produce timesheets to prove it. The timesheets were duly handed to the 
police, but when Hauptmann's defence team approached the police for the 
timesheets, the sheets in question somehow could not be found (of course). To 
make matters worse, in the hysterical trial in Flemington, New Jersey, that 
ensued, chief prosecutor David Wilentz (who, judging by his statements to the 
jury, would have made a better theatre actor than a lawyer) stated that 
Hauptmann had actually left work early, yet somehow got away with failing to 
produce any evidence for this claim. Moreover, the police bribed prospective 
witnesses, including the intermediary J F Condon, to go on the record to say 
that they had seen Hauptmann in the Highfields area when the crime was 
committed. Condon, for his part, initially told detectives that Hauptmann was 
not Cemetery John, to whom he had been handing the ransom; when the police 
threatened to charge him with being an accessory to the crime unless he 
identify Hauptmann as Cemetery John, Condon obligingly changed his mind. 
Virtually nobody at the time bothered to address what should have been the most 
searching question of all: how was it that the abduction of the child of 1 of 
America's most famous men, then the issuing of ransom demands and the 
subsequent collection of ransom money, could all be the work of just 1 man?

Amid the perjured witnesses and a noisy and theatrical prosecution team who 
appeared to be revelling in the international media attention, Hauptmann was 
duly convicted of Charles Lindbergh jr's kidnap and murder on 13 February 1935. 
A plea for a re-trial from New Jersey state governor Harold Hoffman, one of the 
very few major public figures at the time who could see the case against 
Hauptmann for the farce that it was, was vetoed by the trial judge on a 
technicality. It took some courage for Hoffman to voice his doubts about the 
case so publicly: one newspaper editorial at the time declared him to have 
'dishonoured himself, disgraced the state and converted New Jersey into 
national laughing stock' (Who knows, maybe the editor in question had not paid 
close enough attention to how the prosecution had behaved during the trial), 
and called for him to be impeached. His final lifeline gone, Hauptmann was 
electrocuted on 3 April the following year, tearfully protesting his innocence 
to the very end - even though he had been offered the commution of his sentence 
to a life jail term in return for admitting to the crime.

Of course, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was the not the 1st, and would not be the 
last, victim of a wrongful conviction in the last century or so. We in the UK 
have had more than our fair share of such cases: Edith Thompson (1923), Timothy 
Evans (1950), Derek Bentley (1953), Liam Holden (1973), Stephen Downing (1974), 
the Birmingham 6, the Guildford 4 (both 1975), the Maguire Seven, Stefan Kiszko 
(both 1976), Sion Jenkins (1998), and Sam Hallam (2005), to name but a few. The 
point is that in the 1st 3 cases the eventual realization that such convictions 
were wrong was obviously too late for the convicted.

The death penalty was abolished in Britain in 1965 and in Northern Ireland in 
1973. Since then, despite the claim of the pro-execution camp that most people 
in the UK want hanging to be brought back, support for the return of hanging 
has in fact spiked and dropped either side of the 50 % mark. Such peaks and 
troughs have depended on whether a murder or a miscarriage of justice has been 
making big news at the time of polling. At the very least, at a time in which 
the news is dominated by Islamic terrorism and commemorations of the Easter 
Rising in Dublin and its aftermath, there does need to be a debate on capital 
punishment, if only to shatter the myths of its effectiveness that its 
supporters repeat as if they were facts.

In an edition of BBC1's Question Time in September 2011, Private Eye editor and 
Have I Got News For You panellist Ian Hislop pronounced himself firmly against 
the return of hanging:

For 50 years Private Eye has, pretty much in most issues, exposed a miscarriage 
of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years large numbers 
of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong ... So we would have killed 
those people, and in some of those very high-profile cases which involved 
terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing 
people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved.

Doubtless that in the days after the Easter Rising, General Maxwell and his 
staff thought that executing 16 of the Rising's ringleaders would stop Irish 
republicanism in its tracks. A century on, Irish republicanism is alive and 
well, and whatever your position on the Easter Rising, Pearse, Connolly, 
MacDonagh et al are celebrated as heroes even by moderate nationalists. More 
recently, the Islamist extremists responsible for the attacks in Paris, Ankara 
and Brussels have shown themselves to revel in death. Any such jihadist who 
could be caught before blowing himself up, only to be sentenced to hang, could 
be presented by extremist imams as yet more evidence of The West Always Having 
It In for Islam.

As for the argument that the death penalty deters others from committing 
serious crimes, quite apart from the fact that the murder rate in the United 
States is still incredibly high, particularly in states that still have capital 
punishment, this argument misses the point that people who commit serious 
crimes tend not to behave rationally and so are not in a position to think 
about what awaits them if they get caught. As the satirist Charlie Brooker put 
it in his 2011 series How TV Ruined Your Life, there is a tendency to imagine 
murder cases in real-life are exactly how they appear on the small screen:

Murderers [on TV] are routinely depicted as criminal geniuses playing a 
diabolical game of cat-and-mouse with a troubled police detective wearing the 
worried expression of a bloodhound opening a court summons. Yes, according to 
Television, most killers are artisan killers, whose every offering deserves to 
be analysed for literary merit, and they are markedly more vicious than almost 
any of their real-life equivalents ... Of course, most real-life murderers 
aren't unstoppable killing machines, but somewhat pathetic individuals who have 
done something awful in an ill-thought-out panic.

Furthermore, as the late Ludovic Kennedy, a man who knew more than most about 
wrongful convictions, put it, in his book "36 Murders and 2 Immoral Earnings" 
... [I]t is a fact and not an opinion that states that exercise the death 
penalty have higher homicide rates than those that have abolished it; and it is 
also a fact and not an opinion that after an execution the homicide rate in 
that state tends to increase.

80 years on, it is obviously too late for Richard Hauptmann, but it is worth 
stopping for a few minutes next Sunday to think about his undeserved fate. If, 
as seems likely, the pro-Brexit camp win June's referendum, the next target on 
their shopping list could be the UK's adherence to the European Convention on 
Human Rights, and the death penalty could well come up again in the national 
conversation. Mahatma Gandhi's dictum about how an Eye for an Eye will 
ultimately leave us all blind has been quoted often enough. An arguably more 
apposite thought is offered by the aforementioned Sir Ludovic, who insisted 
towards his twilight years that the adversary/accusatorial system of justice, 
as practised in the UK, US, Canada and Australia (unlike in continental Europe, 
where the inquisitorial system is in place), is fundamentally flawed:

It is a system in which the accused, in one way the most important person in 
court, in that he/she has more to gain or lose than anyone else, is somehow 
seen to be the least important (the more so when not called to testify), an 
object rather than a subject; in which the prosecution often fail to supply to 
the defence, as they are obliged to, evidence that might be helpful to them; in 
which a spurious sense of drama is created which encourages counsel to strike 
postures and attitudes and even indulge in sarcasm; in which counsel see it as 
one of their tasks to destroy the credibility of the other side's witnesses, 
whether on an issue germane to the verdict or not; in which some questions 
which could provide a shortcut to the truth are not allowed to be asked and 
others which are asked are not allowed to be answered; in which the evidence of 
witnesses is shaped by what the prosecution and defence want them to say; in 
which other witnesses whose evidence might help to shape the jury's verdict are 
not called for fear they will say the wrong thing ... Is this really the best 
we can do?

(source: Dan Payne, sluggerotoole.com)






PENNSYLVANIA:

Jury selection under way for capital murder case


A Beaver County man charged in a 2013 shooting death could face the death 
penalty if convicted of 1st-degree murder.

Monday marked the 5th day of jury selection for the case against Leon Platt, 
accused of firing a gun at 28-year-old Richard Hogue at a Loop Street apartment 
in the Walnut Ridge housing project around 1:45 a.m. Nov. 16. Hogue was 
pronounced dead later in the emergency room of Ellwood City Hospital.

Lawrence County Common Pleas Judge J. Craig Cox recessed court Monday morning 
after the 1st pool of 60 potential jurors was exhausted. He called for a new 
pool of potential jurors after interviews with 57 prospective jurors had been 
exhausted last week and 10 jurors were selected. Of the 3 remaining from a pool 
of 60, an 11th juror was chosen Monday to sit on the panel.

A new pool of jurors will be seated in the courtroom Tuesday for further 
questioning of their ability to serve. The prosecuting and defense attorneys 
still have to choose 3 - 1 regular jurors and 2 alternates - before the trial 
can begin.

Cox said he anticipates opening arguments will be presented Wednesday afternoon 
or Thursday morning and that the trial could last 2 weeks or more.

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Minett is leading the prosecution, and Platt 
is being defended by attorney John Bongivengo.

Minett instructed jury interviewees that the trial will have two portions. If 
Platt is convicted of 1st-degree murder during the 1st part, the same jurors 
will be asked to decide on whether he will get the death penalty or life 
imprisonment during the 2nd phase of the proceedings, based on presentment by 
the prosecution of aggravated circumstances that warrant the death penalty, and 
by the defense attorney of mitigating circumstances.

The jury selection is slower in a capital murder trial because potential jurors 
are polled one at a time instead of as a group. In addition to the typical 
questions asked of jurors, they also are being asked whether they would have a 
problem condemning someone to death.

District Attorney Joshua Lamancusa said yesterday that the aggravated 
circumstance in the case is that Platt is accused of committing a murder while 
committing a felony, being that he was a previously convicted felon and not 
allowed to possess a firearm.

Juror selection started March 21 and commenced through Thursday. The courthouse 
was closed Friday.

Platt, 28, of Rochester, is accused of shooting Hogue in the abdomen during a 
verbal argument in front of a woman and her infant child. An eyewitness had 
told police at the time that she saw Platt pull a gun out of his pants pocket 
and covered the baby's ears. Hogue had been seated on a couch, and Platt shot 
him as he stood up, the witness told police. Another man also was seated on the 
couch. Platt ran out of the apartment after the shooting and the woman stayed 
and called 911 and helped Hogue, according to the initial police report.

Lawrence County Coroner Russell S. Noga ruled Hogue's death a homicide.

When police arrested Platt, he allegedly identified himself by a different 
name. Police noted that Platt had a previous conviction for aggravated assault 
and that he did not have a license to carry a gun.

Police said Platt had hidden the gun he reportedly used in the shooting with 
another firearm at an address in Ellwood City, and he disclosed its whereabouts 
to them during questioning. Police searched those premises and found an Air 
Jordan shoebox containing several guns. The police did not provide information 
then about whether one of those was the alleged murder weapon.

Minett informed Cox in court Monday that one witness to be called for the 
prosecution is a DNA expert, and that DNA will be a factor in the case.

Platt is charged with 1st-degree murder, criminal homicide, prohibited 
possession of a firearm, recklessly endangering another person (regarding 
others who were allegedly at the scene) and providing false identification to 
law enforcement.

(source: nenewsonline.com)

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

Rushdi attorney rules out insanity defense


Defense attorney Michael Malloy told Judge James Nilon Monday he is not 
pursuing a competency or insanity defense for an Upper Darby man facing the 
death penalty for the alleged murder of an infant in 2013.

Ummad Rushdi, 32, is charged with 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-degree murder, kidnapping 
and abuse of a corpse for allegedly killing 7-month-old Hamza Ali in August 
2013 at his parent's home in the 6600 block of Chestnut Street, Upper Darby, 
then transporting the body elsewhere and burying it at an unknown location.

Rushdi was arraigned in November 2013 and entered a plea of not guilty. Since 
that time, Malloy and death penalty counsel Scott Galloway have secured several 
continuances so that Rushdi could be evaluated by various experts to determine 
the state of his mental health.

Malloy said a specialist met with Rushdi 3 times, including 1 8-hour session of 
intense testing, and had written up a final report. Malloy said he would not 
invoke a not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetency defense based on that 
report.

Galloway said his death penalty mitigation expert is also nearly finished, but 
needed to look over the report from Malloy's specialist before filing a final 
report. He asked for an additional 30 to 45 days to have that completed.

Deputy District Attorney Stephanie Wills suggested a tighter schedule of 30 
days, arguing defense counsel has had more than a year to have these 
evaluations completed and has consistently missed the mark on deadlines.

Wills added that it was never made clear at the last listing on Feb. 1 that 
Galloway's expert would need to review the report from Malloy's expert before 
furnishing an opinion.

Rushdi has made several statements at status hearings over the past year, and 
Monday was no different.

"You know my question is the same: Do we or do we not have the right to defend 
ourselves?" he said. "No matter how much I say, 'I didn't say that, I didn't do 
that,' they have so much dirt in their ear, so much nonsense, I can't defend 
myself."

Upper Darby Detective Ed Silberstein said at a previous hearing that Rushdi 
"began blurting out he's sorry for what he did," when investigators took his 
statement at the county prison in Concord on Aug. 8, 2013, following his 
capture the day before in York.

"(Rushdi said), 'The baby, he was crying, I shook him, I took him upstairs, 
maybe a little bit too hard, he stopped breathing, I gave him CPR, I wrapped 
him in a sheet, I put him in the car, I took him to York, I buried him under 
branches," according to Silberstein.

Rushdi has not revealed where he allegedly disposed of the body. Only a 
pillowcase allegedly containing Ali's DNA was recovered from Chickie???s Rock 
Park in Lancaster.

Rushdi said Monday that the basis for American justice is "innocent until 
proven guilty," but he is being made to prove his innocence.

"Is that not correct?" he said. "Am I lying? This is the justice system. Your 
job is not for conviction - it is for justice."

Nilon set the next hearing date for June 1.

(source: delcotimes.com)






NORTH CAROLINA:

Soldier mother and boyfriend face death sentence for 'murder of two-year-old 
girl who was found covered in bruises'


A 23-year-old mother and her boyfriend have been charged in connection to the 
death of her 2-year-old daughter.

Jeanie Ditty - who has been an active soldier at Fort Bragg since 2013 - is 
charged with 1st-degree murder and negligent child abuse and inflicting serious 
bodily injury for the death of Macy Grace, according to WNCN.

Her boyfriend Zachary Earl Keefer has also been charged with the same counts 
Thursday.

In their 1st court hearing Monday, a judge told them they face the death 
penalty or life in prison if they are convicted, according to ABC 11.

33-year-old Keefer was at large but turned himself in Friday, detectives said.

The pair live in an apartment complex in the 500 block of Village Lake Court in 
Spring Lake, North Carolina.

Police were called to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center on December 2 of last 
year in relation to an unresponsive child.

2-year-old Macy Grace Ditty was found covered in bruises and medical staff 
determined the child had suffered life-threatening injuries consistent with 
child abuse.

The young child was then transferred to UNC Hospital in Chapel Hill after which 
police determined her injuries were inflicted in the 24 hours after the she was 
admitted to the medical center, said WNCN.

Police said Macy Grace died from her injuries December 4.

And on March 23, the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled 
the child's death a homicide.

Fayetteville police obtained warrants for charging Ditty and Keefer the next 
day. Ditty was then arrested Thursday evening and is now being held at the 
Cumberland County Detention Center without bond, police said.

District Attorney Billy West told ABC 11: 'It's a tough case, you know this 
child did not die of natural causes.'And it's heart-wrenching to think that 
this could happen to a young child this way and we are going to do everything 
we can to see that justice is done in this case.'

Both suspects are now both being held at Cumberland County Detention Center 
without bond. Their next court date is April 14.

Fort Bragg officials said Ditty is a member of the 525th Military Intelligence 
Brigade and that she would remain active even while she is under investigation.

Keefer is not the father of the child.

(source: Daily Mail)






GEORGIA----impending execution

Joshua Bishop asks for barbecue for last meal


A 41-year-old man scheduled to be put to death on Thursday has asked for 
barbecue for the last meal he gets before his lethal injection scheduled for 7 
p.m.

According to the Department of Corrections, Joshua Bishop's last meal request 
is a barbecue sandwich, Brunswick stew, potato chips, coleslaw, lemonade and 
purple candy.

Bishop, 41, is to be put to death for the 1994 beating death of 35-year-old 
Leverette Morrison. Bishop and his co-defendant Mark Braxley confessed to 
Morrison's murder, as well as the murder of another man, within hours of 
detectives finding Morrison's body between 2 dumpsters near Braxley's trailer. 
Investigators didn't even know Ricky Lee Wills was dead until Bishop confessed 
to killing him 2 weeks before Morrison's death.

Though Bishop, 19 at the time, confessed, he still went to trial. He was 
convicted and sentenced to die.

Braxley, however, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with the 
possibility of parole.

Bishop, Braxley and Morrison had spent much of the day on June 25, 1994, 
drinking at a Milledgeville bar and then at Braxley???s trailer. Morrison fell 
asleep and that's when Braxley decided he wanted to visit his girlfriend. 
Braxley and Bishop decided to just take Morrison's Jeep without asking. But 
Morrison woke when Bishop tried to fish the car keys from his pocket. They 
struggled and Bishop and Braxley beat him to death with a curtain rod.

After dumping Morrison's body, the 2 set fire to his Jeep in some nearby woods.

Bishop told investigators he and Braxley killed Wills because he boasted about 
sexually assaulting Bishop's mother. He said they had to bend Wills' legs in 
unnatural directions to make his body fit into a makeshift grave.

Neither Braxley nor Bishop went on trial for Wills' death even though they 
confessed. Prosecutors used Wills' death when to argue that Bishop should get 
the death penalty.

Bishops' advocates as well as those who want his sentence carried out will meet 
separately with the state Board of Pardons and Paroles on Wednesday.

If Bishop is put to death by lethal injection, he will be the 3rd man Georgia 
has executed this year.

Another execution has been scheduled for April 12.

Kenneth Fults is scheduled to die next month for the 1996 murder of his 
19-year-old neighbor. Fults was on a crime spree, hoping to get guns to kill 
his former girlfriend's new boyfriend, when he broke into the Spalding County 
house of Cathy Bounds, who was home alone. Fults pleaded guilty to placing a 
pillow over her head and firing 5 shots so he went to trial only a jury could 
decide his punishment.

(source: Atlanta Journal Constitution)

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

Fulton County DA's office acussed of prosecutorial misconduct


Lawyers for an accused killer want a judge to bar the death penalty or dismiss 
his case outright and disqualify the Fulton County district Attorney's office 
from prosecuting.

The reason: attorneys claim Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard's 
office was involved in prosecutorial misconduct.

Howard's office is seeking the death penalty against Stephen Heller, who is 
accused of gunning down 2 young men in their car in an upscale Roswell 
neighborhood.

But the case was turned upside down when the defense team learned that Howard's 
own victim witness advocate, Wesley Vann, sent sexually suggestive texts and 
Facebook messages to Heller's ex-girlfriend - Carla Aucoin. Ms. Aucoin is a key 
witness in the case.

During a hearing late last week, Ms. Aucoin and 2 other women from 2 other 
criminal cases testified that Wesley Vann made inappropriate sexual contact 
with them: ranging from flirting, sexually charged phone calls, to late night 
visits, and sexual social media messages. The earliest victim complained back 
in 2012.

After testimony from Wesley Vann's boss saying she wanted him fired for years, 
Vicki Reeves testified as to why she thought Wesley Vann kept his job.

Reeves, a crime victim who says Vann sexually harassed her, testified, Vann 
told her he wasn't worried about being fired because he had "s---" on Paul 
Howard.

Howard was asked if that was true and he testified: "I don't know, that's the 
1st time I ever heard that."

Howard also testified he always disciplined Wesley Vann and was only trying to 
help rehabilitate an employee.

Howard fired Vann last September when another woman, the fiancee of a murder 
victim, complained to his office about late night contact from the victim 
witness advocate.

(source: fox5atlanta.com)






FLORIDA:

Lawsuit blames brutal prison death on deliberate indifference


A new federal civil rights lawsuit alleges that Gov. Rick Scott and other state 
officials caused, and then covered up, the systemic failures that have led to 
widespread abuse and a record number of inmate deaths in the Florida prison 
system.

The lawsuit, in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Florida, was 
filed on behalf of the family of Ricky Martin, a 24-year-old convicted burglar 
who was fatally beaten, raped and stabbed at the Panhandle's Santa Rosa 
Correctional Institution in March 2012. The circumstances of his brutal death 
were first reported in the Miami Herald in January 2015.

Martin's family, based in Naples, contends that the agency's "deliberate 
indifference" in ignoring the vast problems of the prison agency endangered 
lives and caused illness, injury and death in violation of the U.S. 
Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"The governor is the chief executive officer of the state, and ultimately the 
buck stops at his desk,???" said civil rights attorney Devon M. Jacob, who 
represents Russell K. Sharbaugh, Martin's father-in-law and personal 
representative of his estate.

The suit alleges that the prison agency, under the direction of Scott, former 
Corrections' Secretary Kenneth Tucker, and then-prisons Inspector General 
Jeffery Beasley, knew, ignored and covered up the fact that Martin's death - as 
well as others - could have been prevented.

The Department of Corrections declined to comment, as is its policy when a 
lawsuit is filed.

Martin, a slight inmate who had less than 2 years left on his sentence, was 
attacked by his cellmate, Shawn Rogers, who at 6-4, and 250 pounds had a record 
of savage attacks against fellow inmates. The suit contends that despite having 
almost no history of violence, Martin was transferred to Santa Rosa, a maximum 
security prison, from the Northwest Florida Reception Center on March 12, 2012.

Before leaving Northwest Florida, Martin had filed several complaints with the 
inspector general's office warning that his life had been threatened because he 
had been labeled a "snitch" by corrections officers for reporting that officers 
at NWFRC were operating an inmate "fight club."

Rogers, 36, was serving 2 life sentences. He was placed in a cell with Martin, 
despite the disparity in their size, disciplinary history and length of their 
sentences.

Martin, who was married with a child, was at Santa Rosa for only 36 hours 
before he was found brain dead in a pool of blood. Martin had been hogtied, 
raped and his head was bludgeoned so badly that he was unrecognizable.

Last year, a Miami Herald investigation - based on the review of hundreds of 
pages of court and prison records, including crime scene photographs, the 
autopsy report, video from the prison's fixed-wing and hand-held cameras and 77 
digitally recorded audio interviews - showed that Martin was brutalized despite 
repeated pleas to corrections officers by inmates who heard and saw Rogers 
begin tormenting Martin.

At the time of the attack, there were racial tensions at the prison as news of 
Trayvon Martin's shooting death at the hands of a white, self-appointed 
neighborhood watchdog reached the prison population. Rogers, who is black, 
announced that he wanted to kill a white inmate to avenge racial injustices.

Inmates who had a direct view into the cell said they told officers John 
Beaudry and Jacob Denmon that Martin was in trouble and they needed to help 
him.

In all, 28 inmates said the officers shrugged off the warnings, saying some 
version of "let the next shift handle it," or "fight or f-ck," and left the 
dorm, the lawsuit says. According to the suit, "fight or f--ck" was a vulgar 
phrase that referred to the prison's practice of telling inmates who felt 
threatened to handle it themselves.

Inmates testified that they were so disturbed by the high-pitched screams, 
thuds and slapping sounds coming from Martin's cell that they shouted for 
Rogers to stop, to no avail. Rogers announced that he was sexually assaulting 
Martin and when Martin screamed in pain, Rogers snapped: "Shut up, cracker, 
shut up," the lawsuit said. Witnesses also said they saw Rogers jump on 
Martin's head from a top bunk at least 10 times, cut him with a razor and beat 
him with a makeshift slapjack fashioned from a sock stuffed with batteries, all 
while corrections officers allegedly did nothing.

"Everything could have been avoided if they would have listened," inmate 
Kenrontay Bell told senior inspector Edward White, who was the lead 
investigator for the Department of Corrections' inspector general's office, 
headed by Beasley.

White told Bell that the officers' actions "would be addressed," but, in fact, 
no investigation of the guards' actions ever occurred.

FDC conducted just 1 sworn interview with 1 corrections officer - Beaudry - and 
his questioning lasted 9 minutes. Beaudry claimed he looked inside the cell, 
saw Martin on his bunk and everything was fine.

Rogers, who said his propensity for violence was widely known, has been charged 
with 1st-degree murder and prosecutors said they intend to seek the death 
penalty. His January 2015 trial was abruptly postponed after the Herald 
published its article. There is no new trial date.

The Department of Corrections never disciplined any officers in connection with 
the case.

Subsequently, an officer, captain and lieutenant on duty that night were 
promoted, as well as the warden, Randy Tifft, who has since retired.

Michael Crews, who replaced Tucker in December 2012 as Scott's 3rd corrections 
secretary, had warned that conditions were deteriorating at Florida's prisons, 
that the prisons were dangerously understaffed and that use of force by 
officers was soaring. But the governor and Legislature continued to slash the 
FDC's budget and its staff - even after Crews pointed out that the agency's 
budget was $500 million less than it was in 2007 and had 9,000 more inmates in 
the system.

Jacob said plundering the agency's budget at a time when prison violence was 
clearly escalating led to massive civil rights abuses.

The Department of Corrections declined to comment, as is its policy when a 
lawsuit is filed.

The lawsuit contends that "the [FDC] under the ultimate supervision of [Gov.] 
Scott, continues to attempt to cover up information regarding inmate deaths, 
and continues to delay or prevent investigations into inmate deaths."

Since Julie Jones succeeded Crews in January 2014, the new secretary has 
adjusted some of the ways that inmates are classified to ensure that large, 
violent inmates aren't paired with smaller, milder ones.

David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor, said the complaint "is a further 
indictment of the deplorable conditions that exist in many of Florida's state 
correctional institutions."

(source: Miami Herald)

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

Jury selection begins for man accused in 2006 death of former beauty queen


A decade after a former beauty queen was buried alive, one of her accused 
killers is standing trial.

Prosecutors believe Darice Knowles, 22 years old at the time of her death, was 
killed because of what she knew about another Brevard County homicide.

Prosecutors said they're seeking the death penalty for Vahtiece Kirkman, 37, 
who is already serving a life sentence in prison for murdering Willie Parker. 
He was indicted in 2012.

      Knowles, a college student and former Bahamian beauty queen, was killed in 
2006. She was buried alive and encased in concrete on a wooded lot in Cocoa for 
what prosecutors believe she knew about Parker's murder.

Knowles' body was recovered in 2010.

Jury selection began Monday and jurors are likely to hear from Knowles' 
ex-boyfriend, Christopher Pratt, who was a defendant in the case. He is serving 
a 20-year sentence in the murders of Knowles and Parker.

Pratt said he saw Knowles speaking with a police officer and believed she may 
have told him about his and Kirkman's involvement in Parker's death. He also 
said Kirkman ordered him at gunpoint to dig a hole, use duct tape to restrain 
Knowles, and pour concrete and dirt over her.

As part of his plea agreement, Pratt revealed the location of Knowles' body. It 
will likely take several days to seat a jury.

(source: WFTV news)