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

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 6



OHIO:

Anti-death penalty group wants court recommendations enacted


Ohio's largest anti-death penalty group wants more recommendations for changing 
the state's capital punishment law to be enacted.

Ohioans To Stop Executions says lawmakers have only approved 4 of 56 proposals 
made by an Ohio Supreme Court task force in 2014. The organization says in an 
annual report released Tuesday that 6 more are pending in the Legislature but 
have yet to receive support in both the House and Senate.

The report also says prosecutors sought the death penalty in 26 cases last 
year, 5 more than in 2014.

Most cases came from counties that traditionally seek the death penalty more 
often. Those include Franklin, Hamilton, Lake, Mahoning, Stark and Trumbull 
counties.

Ohio hasn't executed anyone in almost 3 years because of a lack of lethal 
injection drugs.

(source: Associated Press)






ARIZONA:

Death penalty possible in killing of BHC 8-year-old girl


A police detective has testified in a court hearing for a man accused of 
killing an 8-year-old Bullhead City girl two years ago that there was evidence 
the victim was sexually assaulted.

The Kingman Daily Miner and the Mohave Valley Daily News reported that 
Detective Brandon Grasse testified Friday during a Mohave County Superior Court 
hearing in the case of Justin James Rector.

Prosecutors said they plan to seek the death penalty if Rector is convicted of 
first-degree murder in the September 2014 killing of Isabella "Bella" 
Grogan-Cannella. Rector is also charged with kidnapping, child abuse and 
abandonment of a dead body.

The girl's partially clothed body was found in a shallow grave near her home.

Judge Lee Jantzen ruled during the hearing that prosecutors had established 
probable cause to seek a death sentence for Rector, if he is convicted of 
murder.

Circumstances cited for a death sentence included: the victim's age being under 
age 15, the death being committed in a cruel or heinous manner and the 
defendant having committed a serious offense other than murder.

"Asphyxia due to strangulation," Grasse said when asked by prosecutor Greg 
McPhillips during the hearing to comment on the autopsy and how the girl died. 
He also said there was evidence of sexual assault.

"It was cruel and it was horrible," McPhillips said.

Rector's attorney, Gerald Gavin, argued that there was no evidence of sexual 
abuse and there was no evidence the murder was cruel or heinous compared to 
other death row inmates whose victims were tortured over time. He argued that 
the girl was killed quickly, but he conceded that she was under age 15.

McPhillips countered that the girl's death was cruel because of her young age 
and that she trusted Rector, a family friend, who had stayed with her family.

(source: Associated Press)






CALIFORNIA:

Death is Different: What defenders of capital punishment get wrong


Last week, in a reactionary op-ed littered with Trump-inspired flourish, 
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert ramped up her personal, 
public, and political crusade for Proposition 66 in California (and its dubious 
promise of quick, yet somehow still accurate, state-sanctioned killings).

Schubert was responding to my column published at the end of last month, 
"California Voters can tip the balance in death penalty debate," or as Schubert 
assailed it, "Stephen Cooper's latest rant against the death penalty in 
California." Following her dismissive, Trump-style personal attack, Schubert's 
response immediately devolves into Trumpish narcissism ("Proposition 66 was 
conceived by some of the brightest legal minds in California"), followed by the 
trumpeting of a controversial and misleading poll concerning Californians 
alleged support for the death penalty.

Schubert's op-ed extols Proposition 66 - which promises to speed executions in 
California, though not hardly as much as advertised - given Schubert's 
remarkable concession that: "The initiative does not impose a rigid deadline 
that must be met in every case. Courts are allowed to go longer in 
extraordinary cases."

Schubert badly needs to brush up on Supreme Court case law because, as The New 
York Times observed 14 years ago: "The Supreme Court has long professed the 
principle that 'death is different,' that in order to deprive someone of his 
life, the state must be punctilious about providing him every procedural 
protection." Just 1 eloquent example of this is Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 
45-46 (1957) (on rehearing) (Frankfurter, J., concurring) ("The taking of life 
is irrevocable. It is in capital cases especially that the balance of 
conflicting interests must be weighed most heavily in favor of the procedural 
safeguards of the Bill of Rights.").

What Schubert troublingly fails to grasp, despite touting her background having 
prosecuted death penalty cases, is that each and every death penalty case is 
"extraordinary." In ignorance of this well-established principle, Schubert 
cheer leads for the continued arbitrary, inhumane, racist, financially unsound, 
unjust, state-sanctioned killing by California (of usually its poorest, most 
mentally ill, most vulnerable, most abused, and worst-represented citizens).

For the most part, with the exception of in a swath of states (like Georgia, 
Florida, or Alabama), the overwhelming majority of judges, thank God, rightly 
believe, and act all of the time, in accordance with Supreme Court precedent - 
that each and every death penalty case is extraordinary. They do so because of 
the irrevocable, God-like sanction involved - one that human beings, 
particularly state governments with a penchant for messing small things up, 
like fixing potholes - should never be allowed to engage in (except in war, and 
then, only when assisting the federal government in self-defense with the sober 
understanding that, "war is hell").

Accordingly, because of the "extraordinariness" that is inherent in capital 
punishment (and the law as established by the Supreme Court of the United 
States), what Schubert stubbornly eschews admitting to California voters is 
that, if Proposition 66 were to pass, this whole 5-year death penalty appeal 
business we keep hearing about is like that blob of orange "hair" atop The 
Donald's head: as fake as all get-out.

(source: Opinion; Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as 
an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015 --The 
Hill)






USA:

Execution drop makes some think death penalty is fading away


Is the death penalty in America gradually dying? There have been just 2 
executions since May 1 and the total for 2016 probably will hit a 25-year low.

Execution drug shortages, sometimes grotesque errors in death chambers and 
legal challenges to sentences imposed by judges have contributed to a dramatic 
decline in the number of states that are carrying out executions.

Just 3 states, Texas, Georgia and Missouri, are using the death penalty with 
any regularity, though Texas has not executed anyone since April. 4 executions 
are scheduled in the state before the end of the year.

The reduction in executions and in the number of states that are enforcing 
death sentences led Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to conclude 
recently, "I think the death penalty is fading away." There is not enough 
support on the court to abolish capital punishment, Ginsburg said, but added 
that may not be necessary.

"Most states don't have any executions. The executions that we have are very 
heavily concentrated in a few states and even a few counties within those 
states," she said in an interview with The Associated Press in July. Ginsburg 
joined a lengthy dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer last year that 
highlighted problems with the death penalty that led the 2 justices to conclude 
that it probably is unconstitutional.

States that have had to halt executions, though, are trying to figure out how 
to resume. Ohio and Oklahoma are among states that intend to re-start 
executions once they have corrected well-publicized problems in their death 
chambers.

Ohio, which last executed an inmate in January 2014, has set a January 12 
execution date for a man convicted of raping and killing a three-year-old girl 
in Akron. But it's unclear whether his execution, or more than two dozen others 
that are scheduled into 2020, will take place because the state lacks lethal 
execution drugs and has struggled to find a supplier, as have other states.

In Ohio's last execution, in January 2014, Dennis McGuire gasped and snorted 
repeatedly during a 26-minute execution that used a never before tried 
combination of 2 drugs. That protocol has since been eliminated and those drugs 
aren't available for executions.

Oklahoma last execution was in January 2015, amid the use of the wrong drug and 
other problems. The state's prison system is expected to adopt new execution 
procedures soon. Even then, Attorney General Scott Pruitt says he will wait at 
least another 5 months before asking a court to schedule an execution.

Oklahoma imposed a moratorium on the death penalty after two problem-filled 
executions and a third that was called off when prison officials noticed they 
received the wrong drug. The top lawyer for Gov. Mary Fallin urged officials to 
go forward anyway, telling another lawyer to "Google it" to confirm the drug 
could be used, according to a grand jury investigation.

Alabama and Florida haven't put anyone to death since January because of 
questions about the way death sentences are imposed in those states.

Even Texas has seen a reduction in executions. The state's highest criminal 
appeals court has stopped 4 executions in the past month, though each case 
raised different issues. Separately, the Supreme Court will take up 2 Texas 
death row cases in the coming months, also involving discrete issues.

California has the largest death-row population, 746 inmates as of early 
August, but hasn't executed anyone in 10 years. Voters in the nation's most 
populous state will consider separate ballot questions in November that would 
abolish the death penalty on the one hand and speed up the appeals process on 
the other.

The longer states go without executions, the harder it may be for them to 
resume, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information 
Center.

"The law of inertia is that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. A body at 
rest tends to stay at rest. There are policy parallels for that with the death 
penalty. Right now most states are comfortable not executing anybody. And for 
the most part, the public is comfortable, even in death penalty states, with 
their states not executing anybody," Dunham said.

At the current pace, there would be 19 executions this year, the fewest since 
1991, when 14 people were put to death.

The number of new death sentences also is approaching historic lows as most 
jurisdictions are forgoing costly capital trials in favor of seeking life 
sentences with no chance of parole. Texas, which has executed more people since 
the modern resumption of the death penalty in 1976 than the next 6 states 
combined, had only 2 new death sentences last year.

Many of the executions that are being carried out are for crimes committed up 
to 30 years ago, before some states enhanced the legal representation in 
capital cases, said Stephen Bright, an experienced death penalty lawyer who is 
president of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

"There are a lot of people who are getting executed who would never be 
sentenced to death today," Bright said.

(source: Associated Press)