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

[Rick Halperin]

May 20




TEXAS:

Nueces County prosecutors seek death penalty in store clerk shooting case


Nueces County prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty against a man accused 
of killing a store clerk owner last year.

James Elizalde, 23, faces a capital murder charge in the shooting death of 
store clerk Ignacio Rodriguez. Rodriguez, 50, was killed about 3 a.m. Oct. 4 at 
a convenience store in the 3600 block of Staples Street.

Capital murder carries 2 punishment options: life in prison without parole or 
death by lethal injection.

Elizalde was seen in surveillance footage fleeing the store with 2 other men 
after the shooting, according to an arrest affidavit. The other 2 have not been 
charged and were listed as witnesses in the affidavit.

A grand jury also indicted Elizalde on an evading arrest charge from a 2014 
incident, court officials said.

Lawyers are slated to start picking a jury on Aug. 15 in 214th District Judge 
Jose Longoria's court. Elizalde remains in the Nueces County Jail in lieu of 
more than $1 million bail.

(source: Corpus Christi Caller Times)






FLORIDA:

Dale Recinella makes a moral case to kill the death penalty


I've been a supporter of the death penalty. When I thought about it at all.

Which is to say, some crimes are so heinous that only one punishment seems 
sufficient. But to say this is to make a lot of assumptions. It's to assume, 
first off, that the person being put to death is actually guilty, which isn't 
always the case. And it's to assume the process by which they are sentenced to 
death is fair and unbiased.

And it's pretty clear this isn't always the case, either.

So there's the idea of the death penalty, and then there's the reality. Dale 
Recinella, a Macclenny attorney who has served for 20 years a volunteer 
chaplain and for 13 years as a lay chaplain for Florida's death row, says the 
reality is that in Florida and elsewhere, the death penalty is "a mess in every 
way, shape and form."

"Everyone believes this myth that it's the worst of the worst who are 
executed," said Recinella, who will speak at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in 
Stuart this Saturday night and Sunday morning. "It isn't; it's the people who 
couldn't afford lawyers."

The process itself, he said, is inconsistent, arbitrary and racially biased - 
with 85 p% of all executions since 1976 taking place in "the old Confederacy 
and the slaveholding border states."

"If you have 20 people who are charged with crimes that are almost identical, 
who will get the death penalty?" he asked rhetorically. "The poorest, the 
person of color and the guy with the worst lawyer."

The U.S. Supreme Court agrees capital punishment in Florida is less than fair. 
The court ruled in January our death penalty is unconstitutional because it 
gives judges too much say in the process, and doesn't give jurors enough. Now 
the Florida Supreme Court is deciding whether the state's 390 death row inmates 
should have their sentences commuted to life in prison.

The Legislature tried to come up with a fix, but earlier this month, a Miami 
judge struck that down.

Capital punishment in Florida could be on a death watch.

For Recinella, the end can't come too soon.

Recinella was once a Wall Street finance lawyer who in the 1980s nearly died 
after eating a raw oyster and getting infected with the Vibrio vulnificus 
bacteria. He was literally on his deathbed when he saw the light, when he said 
Jesus came to him and challenged him to stop living such a self-centered life.

"People ask, 'Did you get the music and light?' " Recinella said in a phone 
interview last week. "No, I got the lecture."

When he awoke the following morning, "shocked that I was not dead," he and his 
wife, Susan, discussed where to go from there.

They started volunteering at a Tallahassee food kitchen. That led to a stint 
working with street people who had AIDS. That, in turn, resulted in a request 
that he begin working with prisoners who had HIV and AIDS.

In 1998, that led to death row.

Recinella had once been pro-capital punishment; what he saw - chronicled in 2 
books he's written on the subject - changed his mind.

But what changed his heart was his faith and his belief in human dignity.

"Even people who have committed great wrongs still retain human dignity, and 
their life is still valuable," he said.

Dignity is in short supply on death row. Prisoners are confined in 6-by-9 cages 
in "these large boxes of steel and concrete sitting in the middle of nowhere 
between Gainesville and Jacksonville." There's no air conditioning, virtually 
no air movement at all.

"People sometimes call (death row prisoners) 'animals' - but it would be 
unconscionable to keep a dog in these conditions.

"Their crimes are horrible," he said. "But the question is, once we have these 
people secured in prison, are they animals - or are they human beings?"

Recinella speaks all over the country, and says he's not interested in 
preaching to the choir. He wants people who doubt his position to hear what he 
has to say. Maybe they'll change their minds. Some do; nationwide support for 
the death penalty is at its lowest level in 40 years.

That - coupled with the legal challenges here in Florida and elsewhere - have 
led Recinella, 65, to believe something he never thought possible:

"I really do believe that in my lifetime, we will see the end of capital 
punishment in the United States."

Hear Dale Recinella speak

Dale Recinella will speak at 5 p.m. Saturday and 7:30, 9 and 11 a.m. Sunday at 
St. Mary's Episcopal Church, 623 S.E. Ocean Blvd., Stuart.

(source: Commentary; Gil Smart, TC Palm)






ALABAMA:

Drug company's withdrawal limits death penalty options in Alabama


Pfizer's decision to ban the use of its products in executions will not 
necessarily stop capital punishment in Alabama, one expert says, but the 
state's lethal injection options are running out.

Pfizer's decision to ban the use of its products in executions will not 
necessarily stop capital punishment in Alabama, one expert says, but the 
state's lethal injection options are running out. "The sources of drugs on the 
open market are gone," said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty 
Information Center, a group that studies the death penalty. "States are going 
to have to go underground, as it were, to obtain the drugs for executions." 
Pfizer announced Friday that it "strongly objects to the use of its products as 
lethal injections for capital punishment." Pfizer joins several other major 
drug producers in a boycott that has been slowing the pace of executions in 
America for years. Alabama has executed only 2 inmates in the past 4 years, 
compared with 17 in the 4 years before that. Federal regulators seized the 
state's execution drugs, acquired through back channels, in 2011. Alabama 
switched to a new main execution drug, but its supply of that drug expired in 
2014 while lawyers debated the legality of the switch. In court records filed 
in December, state officials said they asked every compounding pharmacist in 
the state to make pentobarbital and every pharmacist turned them down.

(source: pharmacist.com)






OHIO----new death sentence

Jury recommends death penalty in Michael Madison sentencing phase


A jury recommends the death penalty for convicted serial killer Michael 
Madison. All 12 jurors made the recommendation.

Madison was convicted of killing of 3 women in East Cleveland and wrapping 
their bodies in garbage bags.

Prosecutors told jurors Madison,38, deserves execution because of the 
circumstances surrounding the killings.

Defense attorneys argued Madison's life should be spared because of 
psychological damage caused by child abuse.

The jury convicted Madison of aggravated murder earlier this month for killing 
38-year-old Angela Deskins, 28-year-old Shetisha Sheeley and 18-year-old 
Shirellda Terry. Their bodies were found near Madison's East Cleveland 
apartment in 2013.

The death penalty verdict by the jury is only a recommendation. The judge must 
decide to accept the recommendation or choose to sentence Madison to life in 
prison. Sentencing will be May 26.

(source: WOIO news)






USA:

U.S. should end the death penalty


I recently read on the internet that Pfizer, a major U.S. drug manufacturer, is 
going to ban the sale of any of its products to correctional facilities that 
had used them for lethal injection. Pfizer has joined a group of about 20 U.S. 
and European drug manufacturers that have taken the same action. Hopefully, 
this will signal the beginning of the end of capital punishment in the United 
States.

The U.S. should join the other major industrialized countries and ban all death 
sentences. Our neighboring countries to the north and south, Canada and Mexico, 
do not kill their citizens in a misguided effort to seek justice. Let's leave 
vengeance to a higher power, if you believe that a higher power exists.

For people who are already on death row, their sentences should be commuted to 
life in prison. This will finally eliminate a component of a broken system of 
justice that is biased based on ethnic, financial and religious factors. It 
also is significantly more expensive to sentence a person to death than it is 
to incarcerate that same person for 50 years.

Moses Mims

Aiken

(source: Letter to the Editor, Aiken Standard)