[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ARIZ., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

March 30




ARIZONA:

Detective called to testify at hearing


The prosecutor in the trial of a man accused of killing an 8-year-old Bullhead 
City girl is calling a Bullhead City detective to testify at an upcoming 
Chronis hearing.

Justin James Rector, 27, is charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping, child 
abuse and abandonment of a dead body in the death of Isabella Grogan-Cannella 
on Sept. 2, 2014, and leaving her body in a shallow grave near her Bullhead 
City home. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Deputy Mohave County Attorney Greg McPhillips issued a subpoena last week to 
call Detective Brandon Grasse to testify at a May 6 evidentiary hearing. 
McPhillips only needs to prove 1 aggravating factor before Superior Court Judge 
Lee Jantzen to seek the death penalty.

In Arizona, there are 14 aggravating factors that can be used to determine the 
death penalty. 1 factor that would be determined is the age of the victim, 
which Grasse will testify to in this case since Grogan-Cannella was only 8 
years old at the time of her murder. A birth certificate could also prove the 
victim's age.

Factors can include that the victim was 70 years or older, a child under the 
age of 15, or a police officer. Other factors include that the murder was 
committed in a cruel or heinous manner, the defendant committed multiple 
murders, or the defendant committed murder in connection with a street gang.

Rector's 10-week trial is set to begin Oct. 17 with a pre-trial hearing set for 
Aug. 23. Rector is being held in county jail without bond. Mesa attorney Gerald 
Gavin was appointed as Rector's primary attorney in March 2015. 2 defense 
attorneys are required in death penalty cases.

Jantzen has yet to rule on several defense motions, including another recent 
motion claiming imposition of the death penalty endangers Rector's Eighth 
Amendment right to be free from suffering a painful death. Jantzen has denied 
previous motions to preclude the death penalty.

In Arizona, a jury in a death penalty case determines if a defendant is guilty 
or innocent of 1st-degree murder. If the defendant is convicted, the jury then 
determines if he or she is to be sentenced to death or to life in prison.

(source: Mohave Valley Daily News)






CALIFORNIA:

Businessman charged in 'diabolic' slaying of Santa Barbara herbalist and family


A businessman was charged Tuesday with killing a well-known Chinese herbalist, 
his wife and 5-year-old daughter inside their hillside Santa Barbara home for 
financial gain, prosecutors said.

Pierre Haobsh, 26, of Oceanside faces 3 felony counts of 1st-degree murder, 
according to the Santa Barbara County district attorney's office. Prosecutors 
further allege that Haobsh was lying in wait when he committed the murders.

Haobsh was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday afternoon in Santa Barbara.

If he is convicted of the murders, Haobsh could face the death penalty or life 
in prison without parole. Prosecutors plan to decide on whether to pursue the 
death penalty after the preliminary hearing.

The slain couple ran a popular Chinese herbal clinic on State Street in Santa 
Barbara, and Han was the author of several books on Chinese herbal medicine.

Weidong Henry Han, 57; Huijie "Jennie" Yu, 29; and their daughter, Emily, were 
found dead Wednesday night inside their gated, 7-acre ranchette off the 101 
Freeway.

Han's colleagues became concerned about his whereabouts when he didn't show up 
for a business meeting earlier that day. They went to his home and found the 
front door ajar and the family's vehicles outside.

Pierre Haobsh, 27, of Oceanside was arrested in San Diego County in connection 
with the deaths of Weidong Henry Han, his wife, Huijie Yu, and their 5-year-old 
daughter.

Deputies were notified and found the victims' bodies wrapped in plastic and 
duct tape in the garage, said Sheriff Bill Brown of the Santa Barbara County 
Sheriff's Office.

An autopsy determined all three victims died of gunshot wounds to the head, 
sheriff's Lt. Brad McVay said Tuesday.

Brown called the slayings "diabolic, premeditated."

Within the first 32 hours of the family's killings, investigators began 
interviewing friends, relatives, neighbors and business associates who led them 
to Haobsh, Brown said.

Detectives think Haobsh was recently involved in a business transaction with 
Han, the sheriff said.

They then obtained a warrant to arrest Haobsh.

Detectives began monitoring Haobsh and spotted him about 12:30 a.m. Friday at a 
gas station in San Diego County, where they arrested him.

A loaded 9-millimeter handgun and property belonging to one of the victims was 
found inside Haobsh's car, Brown said.

"This tragic case is a terrible blow to the Santa Barbara community and the 
medical community at large," he said.

(source: Los Angeles Times)

***********

Defense attorney in Oakland death penalty case says there's lack of evidence 
for fatal shootings of girl, man


The defense lawyer for an Oakland man charged with 2 counts of murder for the 
fatal shootings of an 8-year-old girl and a 22-year-old man in separate 
shootings in 2013 told jurors Tuesday that there's not enough evidence for a 
conviction.

In her opening statement in the trial of Darnell Williams, 25, who is charged 
in the deaths of 8-year-old Alaysha Carradine during a sleepover at an East 
Oakland home on July 17, 2013, and 22-year-old Anthony Medearis in Berkeley in 
an unrelated shooting 7 weeks later, defense lawyer Deborah Levy said Williams 
wasn't the shooter in either incident.

Levy said 2 key prosecution witnesses who connect Williams to the fatal 
shootings aren't credible because they are prostitutes.

"These women are not believable," she said. Levy told jurors, "Listen to the 
evidence, you have to connect the dots and there is not enough evidence, ladies 
and gentlemen."

In his opening statement on Monday, prosecutor John Brouhard alleged that 
Williams carried out a "rampage of violence."

Brouhard said Williams carried out the shooting that claimed Alaysha's life at 
an apartment in the 3400 block of Wilson Street at about 11:15 p.m. in 
retaliation for the shooting death of 26-year-old Jermaine Davis in the 1800 
block of Derby Street in Berkeley about 4 hours earlier.

Along with killing Alaysha, the shooting wounded 2 other children and a 
63-year-old woman.

Brouhard said Davis was a close friend of Williams, who allegedly wanted to 
kill Antiown York, the man he thought had killed Davis. He fired shots into the 
apartment on Wilson Street because York's ex-girlfriend, the mother of York's 
children, lived there, the prosecutor said.

The mother wasn't home when Williams opened fire but Williams fired 13 shots 
that struck Alaysha, York's 2 young children and their grandmother, according 
to Brouhard.

The prosecutor alleged that Williams fatally shot Medearis in the 1400 block of 
Eighth Street in Berkeley in an unrelated incident about 5:45 p.m. on Sept. 8, 
2013, because he thought that Medearis had "snitched" about his involvement in 
a previous robbery.

Brouhard said Williams also wanted to rob Medearis, who he confronted at a dice 
game, because he was out of money.

The prosecution is seeking the death penalty for Williams, who faces two counts 
of murder for the deaths of Alaysha and Medearis, three counts of attempted 
murder for the shooting on July 17, 2013, assault with a semi-automatic firearm 
for accidentally shooting his nephew in the face in the Berkeley incident and 2 
counts of being an ex-felon in possession of a gun.

Williams also faces 3 special circumstance allegations: committing multiple 
murders, lying in wait in the shooting that claimed Alaysha's life and killing 
Medearis during the course of an attempted robbery.

(source: KRON news)

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

Man on death row for Spring Valley murder dies


A man who spent 35 years on death row for murdering and dismembering a Spring 
Valley mother of 2 died of natural causes over the weekend, authorities 
reported.

Bernard Lee Hamilton, 64, was pronounced dead Saturday morning at a Sacramento 
medical center, according to the California Department of Corrections and 
Rehabilitation.

A San Diego County jury sentenced Hamilton to death in March 1981 for the 
slaying two years earlier of 24-year-old Eleanore Buchanan, CDCR Lt. Sam 
Robinson said.

Hamilton was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Buchanan on May 31, 1979, 
after she caught him burglarizing her vehicle in a parking lot at Mesa College, 
where she was enrolled in a night math class.

Her body, missing the head and hands, was found the next day alongside 
Interstate 8 in Pine Valley. Buchanan, who had given birth to her 2nd son 3 
weeks earlier, had been stabbed multiple times.

At the time of the crime, Hamilton lived with his parents in Linda Vista, about 
a mile from the college the victim attended. He was arrested a week after the 
killing in Oklahoma, where deputies spotted him driving the victim's stolen 
blue Dodge van.

Jurors found Hamilton guilty of murder and burglary in January 1981.

Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 70 condemned inmates 
have died of natural causes, 25 have committed suicide, 8 have died from other 
causes and 15 have been executed.

There currently are 747 offenders on California's death row, Robinson said.

(source: ABC news)






USA:

There hasn't been a criminal defense lawyer on the Supreme Court in 25 years. 
That's a problem.


It's been a quarter-century since a former criminal defense lawyer sat on the 
Supreme Court.

Since then, crime has fallen by half. Incarceration has risen, then fallen 
(slightly) again. Americans are becoming more and more critical of the 
"tough-on-crime" mindset that defined the end of the 20th century, and more 
skeptical that police and prosecutors will always use their powers for good - 
in other words, they're coming in line with how defense lawyers see the world.

But when Barack Obama made his third (and likely final) Supreme Court 
nomination last week, he nominated Merrick Garland.

Garland is a former prosecutor with a tough-on-crime record. The Court already 
has 2 ex-prosecutors.

Appellate defense lawyer Timothy O'Toole points out that the Court has veterans 
of both sides of civil cases (defendants' and plaintiffs' lawyers) and one side 
of criminal cases (prosecutors). "But the one group that seems kind of outside 
that box, particularly on the Supreme Court, are defense lawyers. And that's a 
shame."

Defense lawyers and scholars worry this isn't an accident; it's the result of 
the structure that shapes who can get nominated to the Supreme Court to begin 
with. Federal judges tend to be people who "ticked all the political checkboxes 
on their career starting from when they were 15," says Tejas Bhatt, assistant 
public defender for New Haven, Connecticut. Often one of those boxes is working 
as a prosecutor.

Even beyond any particular career experience, the system rewards "people who 
don't take controversial positions, they don't do controversial things, who 
don't issue controversial opinions, who do seem to hew more toward law and 
order and enforcement."

There's good reason to be concerned about the jurisprudence of a court that 
only understands one side of a criminal case from experience - and since the 
high-water mark of the 1960s, defense lawyers have seen the Supreme Court put 
serious restrictions on the right against self-incrimination, the right against 
unreasonable search, and even the right to a lawyer.

But to many of them, this isn't just a problem with jurisprudence. It's a 
problem with the Supreme Court in a democracy - and in an increasingly diverse 
America. They believe the politics of Supreme Court confirmations has limited 
all but a very narrow, very privileged slice of America to have a shot at a 
seat on the highest court in the land. And one of the groups who they fear are 
locked out is the people whose job it is to stand up for the rights of the 
marginalized - and those who are on the wrong side of well-intentioned laws.

The dangers of a prosecutor-friendly Court

Here's what's at stake. A large swath of the Bill of Rights is dedicated to 
protecting suspects in criminal investigations and defendants in criminal 
trials: the right against unreasonable search in the Fourth Amendment; the 
right against self-incrimination and the right to due process in the Fifth 
Amendment; the right to a jury trial and a lawyer in the Sixth Amendment; the 
right against cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment.

In theory, how far these rights really extend is a matter of constitutional 
interpretation - transcending justices' personal sympathies (for victims of 
crime, for the accused, for prosecutors) or their feelings toward the criminal 
justice system in America today.

In practice? Nah.

In 2005, Boston University law professor Ward Farnsworth suggested that how 
much a justice thought the Constitution protected defendants relied more on how 
the justice felt about defendants than how she felt about the Constitution.

By analyzing decisions in criminal law cases from 1953 to 2002 - separating 
cases in which people claimed their constitutional rights had been violated 
from other criminal cases (involving, say, the interpretation of a federal law 
or a procedural rule) - Farnsworth found a pattern.

In non-constitutional cases, where the disagreements were largely about policy, 
some justices consistently sided with the prosecution and others consistently 
sided with the defense. That's predictable enough - some judges (often 
conservative) tend to favor law and order, while others (often liberal) tend to 
be skeptical of law enforcement.

But the same thing happened in cases where, in theory, the justices were 
disagreeing about constitutional rights. Justices who sided against defendants 
in policy cases also tended to see their constitutional rights as narrower. 
Justices who sided with defendants in policy cases tended to agree that their 
constitutional rights were more expansive too.

If you're already used to thinking of Supreme Court justices as political 
actors, this correlation isn't surprising. But that doesn't mean it's not 
important. Over the past half-century, we've seen how much the Court's 
interpretation of the rights of defendants can vary - and how much it matters.

50 years ago, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court gave us the 
right to a public defender as we know it (Gideon v. Wainwright). It gave us the 
idea that a suspect must be told of his right to remain silent (Miranda v. 
Arizona). It gave us the rule that any evidence obtained under an 
unconstitutional search - even if it proves the defendant's guilt - is 
prohibited from being entered in court (Mapp v. Ohio). It gave us the 
requirement that if the prosecution discovers evidence that might prove the 
defendant wasn't guilty, it has to turn that evidence over to the defense 
(Brady v. Maryland).

But in the decades since, the Court has eroded those rights.

Defendants now have to declare that they're invoking the right to remain silent 
in order to end questioning. The right to a lawyer has been (in the eyes of 
some) compromised, as the Court has given the government more power to seize 
bank accounts that could be used to pay for defense. And the right to exclude 
illegally obtained evidence has been rendered less meaningful, as the Court has 
carved out more and more exceptions for police to engage in searches and 
surveillance without a warrant.

As Farnsworth found, ideological sympathies definitely shape constitutional 
jurisprudence ??? and personal experience shapes ideological sympathies. The 
concern of a prosecutor-stacked Court is that its members might be too likely 
to zero in on the guilt of the defendant, and forgive the methods used to catch 
him.

But working as a prosecutor doesn't automatically flip a switch and make 
someone permanently more sympathetic to prosecutors - just look at former 
prosecutor Chief Justice Warren himself. Or just look at the 2 former 
prosecutors currently on the Court - Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Sonia 
Sotomayor.

The Court's current ex-prosecutors see the law in very different ways

"Having experience as a prosecutor probably tells you something about where 
people's values were when they decided to get a job as a lawyer at the 
beginning," says O'Toole.

In the case of Samuel Alito (who's been on the Court since 2005), that's 
abundantly clear: Alito once wrote on a job application that his interest in 
the law had been inspired by his disagreement with the liberal, pro-defendant 
decisions made in the 1960s by the Warren Court.

He's certainly made his dissatisfaction felt - by helping roll back many of 
those decisions.

Alito wrote the 2013 opinion Salinas v. Texas, which said that the defendant 
had to explicitly say he was remaining silent in order for it to count. Where 
the Warren Court limited the police's ability to obtain evidence in searches, 
Alito wrote the 2014 opinion Fernandez v. California - which ruled that it was 
legal for police to search a residence even if one of the occupants objects, as 
long as that occupant isn't around (i.e., he's already been arrested).

"Alito quite clearly has a disdain for people who are on the other side of 
crime, and a lack of respect for people who are defendants in the criminal 
justice system," says appeals court defense attorney Matt Kaiser.

If Alito is evidence that "once a prosecutor, always a prosecutor," the Court's 
other former prosecutor, Sonia Sotomayor, represents an alternative that 
O'Toole and other lawyers say is common: judges whose experience as prosecutors 
leads them to have a more realistic, tempered view of law enforcement.

Thanks to what law professor Tony O'Rourke calls a "healthier appreciation of, 
let's say, the diversity of professionalism" among police and prosecutors in 
the field, Sotomayor is arguably the most pro-defendant justice on the current 
Court.

When other justices ruled that a suspect had to explicitly say, "I want to 
remain silent," to keep his Miranda rights in a 2014 case, Sotomayor pointed 
out: "The Miranda warnings give no hint that a suspect should use those magic 
words, and there is little reason to believe police - who have ample incentives 
to avoid invocation - will provide such guidance."

O'Rourke points out that while Sotomayor and Alito were both prosecutors, they 
weren't the same type of prosecutor. "Justice Sotomayor cut her teeth in the 
Manhattan District Attorney's Office," he says. "She's used to dealing with the 
realities of a relatively resource-constrained prosecutor's office, as opposed 
to, say, a US attorney's office." In other words, she's used to criminal 
investigations that are constrained not just by rules, but by the logistical 
realities of a broad caseload and a sometimes less-than-professional police 
force.

Alito, on the other hand, "was in a US attorney's office in a relatively elite 
district." His police force - the FBI - was a fairly professional one. So the 
things that kept him from doing his job the way he wanted to do it were, 
O'Rourke says, "the internal policies and practices of the US attorney's 
manual." It makes sense that he'd regard those as unwelcome bureaucratic 
constraints.

But of course, the fact of the matter is that Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito 
weren't identical people before they started their respective law careers. 
Sotomayor's experience as a prosecutor is layered on top of her experience as a 
Latina from a working-class family. Her background is more similar to some of 
the defendants than to that of other justices on the Court.

That matters. Like it or not, the justices are more concerned about 
constitutional overreach by law enforcement when they can imagine themselves, 
or people like them, as the targets.

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a privacy expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, 
argues that this explains a few recent decisions the Court has made restricting 
law enforcement's use of technology.

Previously, she says, the Court had ruled that individuals couldn't expect 
privacy from law enforcement when doing anything in public (say, driving 
around). But in 2012, the Court ruled that attaching a GPS device to a 
suspect's car qualified as a police search under the Fourth Amendment.

"One of the things that changed the justices' mode of thinking," 
Levinson-Waldman says, "is, 'Wait a minute, these GPS devices could be put onto 
our cars if the government's theory is right.' That's when it started to seem 
very personal."

Something similar happened in 2014, when the Court ruled that police couldn't 
search a suspect's cellphone without a warrant: Justices "went, 'I have a 
cellphone, I have an iPhone,'" Levinson-Waldman says.

"But these surveillance technologies don't just come into existence when they 
affect the lives of basically wealthy, highly educated, highly powerful 
people," she continues. "They are used far before that. They're used first on 
marginalized communities, they're used on communities of color." They're used 
on people in whom only Sotomayor might recognize herself.

The system that encourages would-be Supreme Court justices to start planning 
out their careers at the age of 15 doesn't allow for many Sonia Sotomayors. 
They're more likely to be "the 1 percent of the 1 percent," says Bhatt.

Only people from elite backgrounds are likely to know at a young age that 
there's a fairly established career path for the federal judiciary: "Go to a 
prestigious law school, work at some big white-collar firm, go to the US 
attorney's office, put in my time there, and then get nominated to the bench." 
And their risk-averse route doesn't allow them to come into contact with the 
people who tend to rely on the Bill of Rights' criminal protections the most.

Former prosecutors assume all prosecutors are as scrupulous as they were

The problem isn't that mediocre prosecutors get rewarded with federal 
judgeships, much less slots on the Supreme Court. It's the opposite.

Ex-prosecutors who make it to the Supreme Court - the Sonia Sotomayors, Samuel 
Alitos, and perhaps Merrick Garlands of the world - were only the best, most 
scrupulous prosecutors. That creates its own failure of empathy.

"Here's the core problem," says Kaiser, the criminal appeals lawyer. "When 
prosecutors are on the Supreme Court and they're making rules about criminal 
cases, and they're making rules about what prosecutors are supposed to do, they 
think about themselves when they think about people following those rules."

Those blind spots become most apparent when the Court is presented with a case 
where prosecutors try to use the Supreme Court's own rules as a way to gain the 
upper hand.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court took a case out of Louisiana regarding the 
Warren-era precedent Brady v. Maryland, which established that it's illegal for 
prosecutors to withhold evidence if it would change the outcome of a trial. 
When prosecutors violate Brady, and that gets found out later, the conviction 
is often overturned.

In the eyes of many Supreme Court justices, the point of Brady is to ensure 
that prosecutors see it as their job to turn over potentially exculpatory 
evidence. In the eyes of many prosecutors, though, the point of Brady is that 
it gives them a step-by-step guide to when they do and don't have to turn over 
evidence.

The Louisiana case showed just how far apart those perspectives really are. In 
oral arguments, the lawyer for the Louisiana prosecutors admitted that "a 
prudent prosecutor would have" told defenders that one of the key eyewitnesses 
at the trial had initially told police he couldn't identify the perpetrators. 
But the lawyer argued that just because the prosecutors were imprudent didn't 
mean they'd violated Brady - because the prosecutors believed that the evidence 
wouldn't have changed the case's outcome, and that meant they were in the 
clear.

As defense lawyer Bidish Sarma wrote on the American Constitution Society blog, 
"[S]everal Supreme Court justices appear genuinely shocked to hear that 
prosecutors rely upon Brady [...] to decide before trial whether to turn 
evidence over to the defendant." They assume that Brady is about a deeper 
ethical obligation - because that's the obligation they, as prosecutors, would 
feel.

"If you have a bunch of people who are assuming that prosecutors are in every 
case diligent and zealous about making sure they meet both the spirit and the 
letter of their constitutional obligations," says Kaiser, "and then you have a 
bunch of people who think Brady is a game where they can withhold evidence to 
secure their conviction, they'll just have rules that hurt defendants."

Defense lawyers are already "attuned" to the dispossessed

Obviously, the problem of Supreme Court justices seeing the law as it should be 
practiced, rather than as it actually is, is something too deep for any 
president to fix with a single appointment. But Kaiser and others point out 
that cases involving evidence under Brady, for example, might be a lot easier 
to resolve if anyone on the Court had had experience using evidence to assemble 
a defense.

"When you see former defense lawyers write on or rule on those issues from the 
trial bench, it's not an imagination game; it's an experience game," says 
Timothy O'Toole. "You've got somebody who's formulated dozens of defenses from 
information just like that."

O'Toole mentions that the Supreme Court hasn't always understood the importance 
of having separate hearings during the sentencing phase of capital trials. In 
his experience, the ability to explain the circumstances of his clients' lives 
and upbringings has been critically important to whether or not they're willing 
to put him to death.

If you haven't "looked into the juror's eyes when they see what a client has 
been through," he says, you can't understand just how important those hearings 
are to protecting the client's rights against cruel and unusual punishment.

This is a fairly straightforward diversity argument: that it's good for the 
Supreme Court to be able to draw on as broad a stream of personal experiences 
as possible. But the real asset that former defenders bring to the judiciary, 
defense lawyers believe, is that they're used to seeing the law from the 
perspective of those they represent - and thinking in terms of its flaws.

That doesn't just mean the pro-defendant viewpoint would be more strongly 
represented on the Court: Mere representation might still put a former defense 
attorney on the wrong side of a lot of 8-1 decisions. But lawyers are confident 
that having that viewpoint represented can help the other justices understand 
the principles at stake - even if they're focused on the guilt or innocence of 
particular defendants instead.

The federal bench is getting more diverse - but the Supreme Court is still a 
glass ceiling

"President Obama has actually done a very good job of my view of trying to 
diversify the federal courts" with defenders "in a way that hasn't really 
happened in my memory," O'Toole says. "There are a lot more public defenders on 
the federal bench now than 10 to 15 years ago."

When the Supreme Court rules on a criminal case, the composition of the lower 
courts matters a lot.

One example: a series of Supreme Court decisions that have restored some 
flexibility in sentencing to federal judges. In the past, Kaiser says, if 
something like that happened, the Supreme Court would "give some discretion to 
the lower courts, and they'd gum that rule to death." But the lower courts have 
been "a lot more respectful" of this line of cases, "accepting the 
defendant-friendly implications."

The impact has been enormous: From October 2014 to September 2015, slightly 
more than half of all federal sentences were shorter than the recommendations 
judges were afraid to stray from a decade ago.

But so far, that increase in former defense lawyers on the federal bench hasn't 
worked its way up to the Supreme Court.

The Garland nomination was particularly painful to defenders, because they were 
so close. One shortlisted judge, Jane Kelly of the Eighth Circuit, was a former 
public defender - who had also been a victim of crime herself. In Kaiser's 
words, she had "the best profile for a public defender candidate that you're 
likely to see for the Supreme Court." She was their best chance.

But reports in the days before the appointment suggested Obama had deliberately 
taken Kelly off the Supreme Court shortlist, because he was worried that her 
experience representing violent criminals in court would make her overly 
controversial with Republicans (who were already threatening to obstruct every 
Obama nominee).

"John Adams defended the British troops who had fired in the Boston Massacre," 
O'Toole points out. "But apparently that wasn't as big a political liability 
then." Even with emerging skepticism of tough-on-crime attitudes, though, 
today's politicians are still too cautious to emulate the founders in this 
regard.

It's a vicious cycle.

When former defenders are seen as too controversial to be nominated to the 
Supreme Court, young lawyers who might want to be Supreme Court justices one 
day get scared away from becoming defenders. When the Court doesn't have anyone 
who can relate to defendants in criminal cases, it makes decisions that aren't 
favorable to defendants.

When the Court restricts the constitutional rights of defendants, it gets 
harder for their lawyers to persuade lower-court and local judges and juries 
that their clients have rights, and that those rights are more important than 
the facts of what they did.

"Every important [criminal justice] decision came in the wake of somebody who 
did some pretty horrible things," says Bhatt. Ernesto Miranda was charged with 
kidnapping, rape, and robbery. Clarence Gideon "was a robber, and a thief, and 
a card shark."

But they still deserved the due process of law. That's the principle that the 
Warren Court upheld, and that the current Court is at risk of hollowing out.

(source: vox.com)

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

Prosecutors: Defense move would extend Rodriguez's death penalty appeal in 
Sjodin murder


Federal prosecutors in the death penalty appeal of a man who killed a 
University of North Dakota student in 2003 say a request by defense attorneys 
to withdraw from the case could be seen as a "disguised delay tactic."

Alfonso Rodriguez Jr's lawyers say a new defense team is needed because of 
staffing and personnel changes in the federal system and the Minnesota federal 
public defender's office.

Prosecutor Keith Reisenauer says in his response that he is opposed to the 
change. He says granting the defense motion will likely postpone proceedings 
for at least a year or more. The final appeal was filed more than 5 years ago.

Rodriguez, of Crookston, Minnesota, sits on death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, 
for killing Dru Sjodin, of Pequot Lakes, Minnesota.

(source: Associated Press)