[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, MO., N.MEX., ARIZ., CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 26



TEXAS:

HCN wins Dallas Bar Association award


The Hood County News is the recipient of a 2016 Stephen Philbin Award for 
excellence in legal reporting from the Dallas Bar Association. Winners were 
announced Friday during a luncheon at the Belo Mansion in downtown Dallas.

Since 2008, the HCN has won 5 Philbin Awards. 2 have been grand prizes.

The HCN won in the suburban category for its 2-year death penalty research 
project, which involved going through every death penalty case file at the 
Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin and working with staff at the Texas State 
Library and Archives Commission. Documents obtained through the research show 
the time between indictment and judgment, which could indicate whether a 
defendant was rushed to trial, as well as the names of individual defense and 
state attorneys involved in each case. The data was compiled into a spreadsheet 
and made available to researchers, journalists and students through the Texas 
Center for Community Journalism.

(source: Hood County News)






MISSOURI:

Pharmacy Argues There's A First Amendment Right To Secretly Sell Execution 
Drugs----Selling execution drugs "is an expression of political views, no 
different than signing a referendum petition or selling a t-shirt," an 
anonymous pharmacy argues in a new court filing.


A pharmacy whose drugs have been used in 16 Missouri executions is arguing that 
its actions are political speech protected by the First Amendment to the 
Constitution, and that its identity should remain secret.

Death row inmates in Mississippi subpoenaed information from the Missouri 
Department of Corrections - including about the drugs and supplier - months 
ago. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster has attempted to have the subpoena 
quashed, but so far has been unsuccessful.

In the past 2 weeks, the supplier has spoken up for the 1st time, under the 
pseudonym "M7." In a motion filed late Friday night, M7 said its drug sales are 
political speech.

The "decision to provide lethal chemicals to the Department was based on M7's 
political views on the death penalty, and not based on economic reasons," M7 
wrote in an affidavit.

Although the pharmacy argues its execution drug sales are not based on economic 
reasons, it has made considerable money in the process.

Missouri has paid M7 more than $125,000, all in cash, for execution drugs, 
according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. The amount they are paid per 
execution - $7,188.88 for 2 vials of pentobarbital - is well above market 
value, and experts have expressed concern that the cash deals could violate 
federal tax law.

"The fact that M7's expression of political views involves a commercial 
transaction does not diminish M7's First Amendment rights," the pharmacy's 
attorneys wrote in Friday's court filing.

Selling execution drugs "is an expression of political views, no different than 
signing a referendum petition or selling a t-shirt."

Although M7 repeatedly cites a Supreme Court case - Doe v. Reed - for the 
proposition that "compelled disclosure of signatory information on referendum 
[is] subject to First Amendment review," M7 does not mention the outcome in the 
2010 case: The Supreme Court ruled that petition signers, in general, are not 
protected by the First Amendment against having their identity revealed under a 
state's public records law.

While the court was split on whether petition signers' names could ever be 
shielded from public scrutiny, a majority of the court appeared skeptical. The 
court, however, left the possibility open, with Chief Justice Roberts writing 
for the court, "[T]hose resisting disclosure can prevail under the First 
Amendment if they can show 'a reasonable probability that the compelled 
disclosure [of personal information] will subject them to threats, harassment, 
or reprisals from either Government officials or private parties.'"

It is that possibility that M7 uses to press its case for avoiding disclosure 
here.

Mississippi death row inmates have subpoenaed the Missouri execution drug 
information to help make their case against the Mississippi Department of 
Corrections in a challenge to its current execution protocol. In order to 
succeed, the inmates have to come up with a better method of execution. Their 
attorneys have subpoenaed information from several other states who have 
carried out executions recently.

M7's attorneys say the pharmacy will not sell execution drugs to Mississippi - 
and speculated that the subpoena would be "nothing more than a sham.":

"At issue in this matter is whether the discovery process can be used to find 
out the names of lethal chemical suppliers so that anti-death penalty activists 
may harass and boycott those suppliers in an effort to coerce them into not 
supplying lethal chemicals," the attorneys wrote.

M7 argues - using the Doe v. Reed case - that it is afraid of facing boycotts, 
harassment, and even threats if its identity were revealed. The pharmacy sought 
out the opinion of a "threat assessment expert" to lay out his opinion in their 
motion.

The expert, Lawrence Cunningham, has testified about the threats to execution 
drug suppliers in Texas and Ohio as well. BuzzFeed News recently revealed that 
Cunningham's marquee example - that the FBI investigated a serious bomb threat 
to a supplier - was false. Cunningham spoke to no compounding pharmacies as 
part of his research, and based much of his opinion on social media.

M7 appears to have copied, quite literally, the evidence from the Texas and 
Ohio cases in making its argument that disclosing the information is unsafe - 
although, this time, Cunningham made no mention made of the now-discredited 
alleged FBI investigation.

"[T]here is a significant and substantial threat of physical harm to the 
compounding company/pharmacy, delivery personnel and pharmacist, as well as 
others in the vicinity of the compounding company/pharmacy if the identity of 
the compounding company/pharmacy or pharmacist is publicly disclosed," 
Cunningham wrote in an declaration.

This is the 2nd time the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has heard the case. 
Originally the court declined to quash the subpoena, arguing much of the 
state's argument was speculation. But at the request of Missouri, the court 
agreed to rehear the case.

This past week, the M7 pharmacy also attempted to intervene in an open records 
lawsuit that has been ongoing for more than 2 years in Missouri by several 
First Amendment groups, media outlets, and this reporter.

(source: buzzfeed.com)






NEBRASKA:

No wiggle room on the death penalty


Tom Venzor, the executive director for the Nebraska Catholic Conference, 
purports to summarize the church's moral guidance on the death penalty (More 
Commentary, Sept. 19 World-Herald).

While his commentary reaches the correct conclusion - that the death penalty 
should remain abolished in Nebraska - it errs in 3 respects:

--It offers Catholics (like Gov. Pete Ricketts) seeming justification for 
defying the church's teachings.

--It nowhere mentions Pope Francis' unequivocal demand for "global elimination" 
of the death penalty.

--It ignores the simple teaching of the Ten Commandments, applicable to all 
Christian faiths: Thou shall not kill.

Respectfully, the Nebraska Catholic Conference, as a teaching resource for all, 
should be as clear and unequivocal as is the pope, and it should offer no 
political cover for Catholics who reject clear church teaching.

And to the anti-big-government conservatives who are unconcerned with the 
morality of taking human life, we should ask: Why do you fear the government 
taking our guns but authorize big government to take its citizens' lives?

Tom Kenny, Omaha

(source: Letter to the Editor, Omaha World-Herald)






NEW MEXICO:

Activist shares her experience with wrongful convictions


It is possible to murder a woman without killing her - all you have to do is 
break her.

Jennifer Thompson's voice quavered slightly during her speech at the UNM School 
of Law on Thursday evening, as she described the night she lost herself.

At 3 a.m. on July 29, 1984, Thompson died while she was raped in her own bed. 
While not clinically dead, she said she had died on the inside.

Nearly every audience member's eyes filled with tears as she told listeners the 
thoughts that went through her mind while the attacker, who had broken into her 
home, violated her.

A sorrowful silence settled over the crowd as she recounted every detail of her 
attacker with no hesitation: 5-foot-11-inches tall, somewhere between the age 
of 21 to 23, light-skinned African-American male, a pencil-thin mustache and 
close-cropped hair. He wore a dark blue shirt with white stripes, white knit 
gloves that ended at his wrists, olive-green or maybe gray tight khaki pants 
and slip-on canvas boat shoes - dark blue or maybe black.

Though she survived the assault in a physical sense, the hopeful 22-year-old 
college student who aspired to become a physical therapist was gone.

"I had gone to bed Jennifer Thompson, this girl full of potential and 
possibilities, and my future was right in front of me," Thompson said. "That 
part of my life would be over in less than 30 minutes. I would never, ever see 
that girl again."

In her place would be the new Jennifer Thompson - the rape victim who had a 
duty to remember her experience, the victim who prayed to God every night that 
her attacker would be raped in prison and then murdered.

Thompson told listeners how she spent the next decade trying to find meaning in 
her life after working with police to identify and put away the serial rapist 
who had assaulted her and numerous other women - including 1 within an hour 
after Thompson had escaped him.

She told of the day everything changed in June 1995 when DNA testing proved 
that Ronald Cotton, the man who she identified as her rapist and testified 
against, was innocent.

"Here's the thing - I had been a rape victim for 11 years. I knew what to do 
with that. What do I do with this?"

Thompson then told of the start of her journey to become who she is today. She 
met with Cotton in April 1997 and told him how sorry she was for putting him in 
prison, and they became close friends after that.

"We had travelled this parallel journey of hurt and from that place, we could 
begin to build. From that place, we could begin to reconcile," she said. 
"Ronald taught me that day that love and hate cannot coexist in the same human 
heart. That you cannot be a peaceful person and an angry person in the same 
human spirit. It doesn't work like that. Ronald Cotton freed me that day."

>From there, Thompson said she went on to become an advocate for change in the 
justice system, testifying to how flawed and imperfect eyewitness accounts 
actually are.

Years later, in the summer of 2000, she would find herself in Houston, in a 
room full of exonerated men, and 1 woman, who had all been incarcerated because 
of the testimony of eyewitnesses.

She was there for a press conference about the case of Gary Graham, an inmate 
on death row who was going to be executed by the state of Texas. She was 
planning to tell her story in hopes of convincing the state to give Graham a 
new trial.

"What was really, really frightening to me was that the state of Texas was 
going to kill a man based on a single eyewitness ID," she said. "One who says, 
'I see the shooter from my rearview mirror at 10 o'clock at night, 75 feet 
away, for 2 to 3 seconds.'"

Thompson said that after the eyewitness gave the description, it took 6 months 
and several visits from police for the eyewitness to identify Graham with any 
kind of certainty - despite the fact that several witnesses who said they knew 
the real killer were positive it wasn't Graham. None of them were ever called 
to testify, she said.

Graham was executed in June 2000.

"I vowed that day for the rest of my life that I would be an advocate for the 
abolition of the death penalty," she said. "I've met a lot of innocent people. 
It's changed me and it???s challenged me to think bigger and deeper than what I 
was given by my birthright."

Thompson has spent the last 16 years doing just that - advocating for system 
changes, for those harmed by the system's failure, and for women.

"It has become beyond just my passion. I think it's now my vocation," she said

This led her to launch Healing Justice, an organization with a mission to offer 
restoration to people who have been wrongfully convicted.

"It is the only nonprofit in the country that works to heal the harm when the 
system fails," she said.

The organization works to help exonerees and their families, crime victims and 
their families, and anyone else who has suffered from a wrongful conviction.

Thompson ended her speech by telling the audience she hoped her story left an 
imprint on their hearts that will challenge them to think about the system and 
how they can help change it.

During the Q&A session that followed, Thompson emphasized her belief that even 
though people like the man who raped her shouldn't be able to walk free in 
society, she is firmly against the death penalty.

"I don't think the state has any right to kill people in my name," she said.

Many audience members, moved by her speech, lined up to buy the memoir she 
co-authored with Cotton about their experience, including Jonathan Gardner, an 
assistant district attorney for New Mexico.

Gardner said Thompson's presentation inspired him to become a better assistant 
DA, and to do his job right.

"As an assistant district attorney, I'm of course on the side that's trying to 
get convictions," Gardner said.

"Wrongful convictions are important because a wrongful conviction is a 
miscarriage of justice. And law students, as the next generation of attorneys, 
have a responsibility to uphold justice," Gardner said.

Brittany Edwards, a second year law student who worked with Innocence and 
Justice Project New Mexico, said she felt it was important for law students to 
hear stories like this while they're still learning to become lawyers.

"It's something that's very real and we're going out into this system with 
these issues that are constantly affecting so many people and even damaging 
this profession," Edwards said. "I think it's important to let (students) know, 
so that we can be the ones that try to fix it or help prevent something like 
this from happening."

Gordon Rahn, a law professor and the director of the Innocence Justice Project, 
said Thompson's presentation was the 1st of 3 in a series of speakers coming to 
UNM to talk about wrongful convictions and how they have impacted their lives.

He said he hopes audiences learn that wrongful conviction is a societal issue 
that everyone must work together to change.

"The fingers of a wrongful conviction are far-reaching, and it could affect 
anybody out there," Rahn said.

For more information about the speaker series presented by IJPNM, visit 
lawschool.unm.edu.

(source: The Daily Lobo)






ARIZONA:

Murder suspect to represent himself


A Superior Court judge last week allowed a Kingman murder defendant to 
represent himself in his criminal case.

Richard Joseph Polaski, 63, is charged with 1st-degree murder in the stabbing 
death of John Holland in July 2015. He is being held in county jail on a $1 
million bond.

Holland's body was found Aug. 29 in the backyard of Polaski's former Kingman 
home. The cause of death was found to be multiple stab wounds.

Polaski's attorney, Robin Puchek, tried to talk his client out of representing 
himself, bringing up that Polaski attempted suicide at a Laughlin casino and 
may have issues with depression.

Superior Court Judge Lee Jantzen explained the pitfalls of a defendant wanting 
to represent oneself including having to interview witnesses, file motions in 
the case and do legal research.

Jantzen also asked Polaski what his education background was, whether he is 
mentally competent and if he had represented himself in prior cases. Polaski 
said he has several years of college specializing in computers.

Jantzen also spoke of the 3 penalties Polaski faces if he is convicted of 
1st-degree murder: the death penalty, natural life in prison or life in prison 
with a chance of parole after 25 years.

Despite warnings from the judge, Polaski also said several times in court that 
he had killed Holland and said it was self-defense. He also wanted to plead 
guilty right away.

Deputy Mohave County Attorney Greg McPhillips, who is not the prosecutor in 
Polaski's case, said other charges may be filed dealing with fraud.

Jantzen allowed Polaski to represent himself and set his next hearing for Oct. 
18, giving him time to talk to the prosecutor about a possible plea agreement.

Polaski was arrested July 12 at a Laughlin casino after a failed suicide 
attempt. He reportedly confessed to Las Vegas Metro Police and a nurse at a 
Bullhead City hospital that he had killed Holland and buried him in his 
backyard of his Lass Avenue home.

On July 27, 2015, Polaski confronted Holland at his Northern Avenue home about 
money that Holland reportedly owed him. Holland reportedly had a handgun and 
knife on his desk and threatened to shoot Polaski. Polaski reportedly picked up 
the knife and allegedly stabbed Holland in the stomach several times. He then 
allegedly placed Holland's body in a trash can and drove back to his own home. 
He allegedly put Holland's body in a hole in his back yard, poured lye on the 
corpse and filled the hole in with cement.

Polaski later sold his Lass Avenue property and moved into Holland's home on 
Northern Avenue after allegedly putting the deed in his own name.

(source: Mohave Daily News)






CALIFORNIA:

Archbishop Gomez: It's time to end the death penalty


Californians should vote for Proposition 62, a ballot measure to end the death 
penalty, the Archbishop of Los Angeles has said in a reflection on justice, 
Catholic teaching and American society.

"It is time for us to end the death penalty - not only in California but 
throughout the United States and throughout the world," Archbishop Jose H. 
Gomez said Sept. 21.

"In a culture of death, I believe mercy alone can be the only credible witness 
to the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person."

His essay is part of a special issue of the Los Angeles archdiocese's 
newsweekly Angelus dedicated to the Church and the death penalty.

Rather than condemn criminals to death, he said, Christians "should pray for 
their conversion and encourage their rehabilitation and ultimate restoration to 
society."

Those who seek an end to the death penalty must not forget the victims of crime 
and their loved ones.

"We entrust them to the Father of mercies and we pray that he grant them 
healing and peace," the archbishop continued.

California's ballot measure Prop. 62, which is on the November ballot, would 
replace the death penalty with lifetime in prison without parole.

Public opinion survey results have been mixed.

A Sept. 1-8 online poll of 1,909 registered voters sponsored by the USC 
Dornslife College and the Los Angeles Times found that only 40 % of registered 
voters would approve the proposal. Another survey, run by the Field Poll, 
polled 942 likely voters Sept.7-13. It found support from 48 % of voters and 
opposition from 37 %.

Another ballot measure, Prop. 66, would limit the appeal process for death row 
inmates and shorten the time from sentencing to execution.

Archbishop Gomez cited St. John Paul II's words in his final U.S. visit in 
1999, in which the Pope called the death penalty "cruel and unnecessary."

"The reason is that every life is sacred and every person has a dignity that 
comes from God," the archbishop explained. "This is true for the innocent and 
it is true for the guilty. It is true even for those convicted of the most 
violent crimes."

He acknowledged historical Catholic support for the death penalty.

"The Catholic Church has always taught that legitimate governments have the 
right to impose the death penalty on those guilty of the most serious crimes. 
This teaching has been consistent for centuries - in the Scriptures, in the 
writings of the Church Fathers and in the teachings of the Popes," he said.

"But in recent years, there has been a growing consensus that the use of the 
death penalty can no longer be accepted."

Archbishop Gomez cited a "strange appetite for violence" in American culture, 
violent video games, demeaning music and entertainments.

"In this cultural context, I do not see how the death penalty can ever again 
express society's ultimate value for human life. In this cultural context, the 
death penalty can only function as one more killing."

Archbishop Gomez and the Los Angeles archdiocese's Office of Life, Justice and 
Peace have established a website supporting a Yes vote on Proposition 62, 
www.killingisntjustice.org.

(source: The Boston Pilot)