[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, N.H., GA., FLA., ARK., NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

March 8



TEXAS----execution

Texas killer Ruiz apologizes for '92 contract murder before execution----"Words 
cannot begin to express how sorry I am," the condemned prisoner said in his 
final statement.


After the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his last appeal, condemned contract 
killer Rolando Ruiz, Jr., was executed Tuesday night by the state of Texas -- 
its 3rd lethal injection in the past 2 months.

Prison officials at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville administered the 
lethal drugs at around 10:30 p.m., not long after the Supreme Court's decision. 
He was pronounced dead 29 minutes later.

Ruiz previously received 2 stays of execution from federal and state appeals 
courts. Monday, a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit denied 
another request for a stay and the United States' highest court followed suit 
late Tuesday.

Ruiz, 44, was tried and convicted of the 1992 contract killing of Theresa 
Rodriguez, which was orchestrated by her husband, Michael, and his brother, 
Mark, in order to collect on her $400,000 life insurance policy.

Ruiz showed remorse for the 29-year-old woman's death in his final statement 
Tuesday night.

"I would like to say to the Sanchez family how sorry I am. Words cannot begin 
to express how sorry I am and the hurt that I have caused you and your family," 
he told the woman's relatives just moments before his execution began. "To my 
family, thank you for all your love and support. I am at peace. Jesus Christ is 
Lord. I love you all."

2 of Theresa Rodriguez's sisters and 2 brothers in-law witnessed the execution, 
as did an acquaintance and half-brother of Ruiz's.

"There's never closure," the victim's father, Eddie Sanchez, said Monday. "It's 
not going to bring my daughter back."

Detectives found during their criminal investigation that Ruiz was paid $2,000 
to kill Rodriguez when she returned home from an outing with her husband and 
brother in-law, who were in on the plot, on July 14, 1992. She was shot once in 
the face by Ruiz, who ambushed her while she sat in a car in the driveway of 
her San Antonio home.

The Rodriguez brothers pleaded guilty in the case and received life in prison. 
Ruiz, who was 20 at the time of the crime, was given a death sentence after a 
jury found him guilty of capital murder in May 1995.

Michael Rodriguez was later a member of the Texas Seven, a group of prisoners 
who escaped from a prison in east central Texas in 2000. He was executed 8 
years later for killing a police officer during the escape.

The issue weighed by the Supreme Court Tuesday night was whether Ruiz had been 
subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by spending 17 years in solitary 
confinement. Ruiz's attorneys argued in their petition that he had been, which 
would constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The high court disagreed.

Ruiz's execution follows the lethal injections of 2 other convicted killers in 
Texas this year -- Christopher Chubasco Wilkins and Terry Darnell Edwards on 
Jan. 11 and Jan. 26, respectively. It is the 5th death sentence carried out in 
the United States this year.

Historically, Texas is the most active state when it comes to executing 
inmates. Nearly 550 Texas prisoners have been put to death since a nationwide 
moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in 1976. By contrast, California, 
which holds a death row population nearly 3 times the size of Texas, has 
executed 13 people. Florida, which incarcerates the nation's 2nd-largest group 
of condemned inmates (396), has executed less than 100 in that same time span. 
In 2016, though, Georgia carried out the most executions (9) in the country, 
followed by Texas (7).

Earlier this year, Texas filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug 
Administration for preventing the state from importing drugs that are used in 
lethal injections. Several other states are also having difficulty obtaining 
the drugs traditionally used in a 3-step process. Last week, Arkansas scheduled 
the executions of 8 prisoners on 4 days in April, purportedly because its 
supply of 1 drug will expire in May.

(source: UPI)

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

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----23

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----541

Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #

24---------March 14----------------James Bigby----------542

25---------April 12-----------------Paul Storey-----------543

26---------May 16-------------------Tilon Carter----------544

27---------May 24-------------------Juan Castillo----------545

28---------June 28-------------------Steven Long-----------546

29---------July 19-----------------Kosoul Chanthakoummane---547

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)

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

DA will seek death penalty in fatal beating of pregnant Corpus Christi woman


Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for a man accused of fatally beating to 
death his pregnant girlfriend, Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez 
said.

Arturo Garza has been in the Nueces County Jail since May 29, 2015. That 
morning, Susanna Eguia was found dead and half-naked in an abandoned building 
on Cheyenne Street. She was 7 months pregnant.

Garza is charged with capital murder. If convicted, he faces either life in 
prison or the death penalty.

His defense attorney, Jim Lawrence, said Garza wants to go to trial though he 
doesn't maintain his innocence. Garza confessed to the killing, according to 
Corpus Christi police reports.

"He was not going to take a plea on the life without parole," Lawrence said. 
"He wants to go forward."

When asked if his client wants the death penalty, Lawrence said, "I didn't tell 
you that."

Gonzalez indicated to 319th District Judge David Stith that Garza was offered a 
deal for life in prison without the possibility of parole.

(source: Corpus Christi Caller-Times)

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

Texas Mulls Death Penalty Exemption For People With Severe Mental Illness----At 
least 7 other states are considering not allowing people with certain illness 
to be executed.


People who can prove they were affected by severe mental illness when they 
committed a capital crime would be exempt from the death penalty under a new 
Texas law introduced Tuesday.

Mental health advocates joined state Rep. Toni Rose (D) as she introduced HB 
3380 and presented it as a humane and cost-saving measure that would still 
allow a convicted killer to be punished.

"The bill would not allow an offender to walk free," Rose said Tuesday in a 
press conference. "It doesn't prevent individuals for being held accountable 
for their actions."

The Texas bill would only provide exemptions for what Rose called "severe 
illnesses" - which include schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar 
disorder, obsessive disorder and depression - and would require proof that the 
individual had a qualifying illness or symptoms of one at the time of the 
crime.

A judge would determined before trial whether a defendant's illness merited an 
exemption.

The bill would bring Texas' death penalty into alignment with laws that bar 
executions for vulnerable groups like juveniles and the intellectually 
disabled, according to Rose and mental health advocates.

Greg Hansch, the director of public policy for the National Alliance on Mental 
Illness in Texas, said allowing the severely mentally ill to be executed is "a 
broken aspect of our criminal justice system."

"This bill is ability for us to close a clear, costly loophole," he said as HB 
3380 was being introduced.

"Pro-lifers believe we should protect the most vulnerable in our society, not 
kill them. - Marc Hyden, Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty

Among the 32 states that have the death penalty, Texas is considered the most 
aggressive: Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, the state has 
executed 540 people - almost 5 times as many people as the next highest states, 
Oklahoma and Virginia.

A growing number of states are considering laws that would prevent executions 
of people with severe mental illness. Lawmakers in at least 7 other states, 
including Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, South Dakota and Virginia, have 
introduced or announced plans to introduce such legislation.

Organizations like the American Bar Association and the American Psychological 
Association have also taken clear stances in support of such exemptions.

"This is something we're seeing across the U.S. - a lot of conservative states 
are moving in this direction and you're going to see more Republican support," 
said Marc Hyden, the ?national advocacy coordinator for Conservatives Concerned 
About the Death Penalty.

"If there's any state that should be pushing this, it is Texas," Hyden said. 
"That's where Scott Panetti was sent to die."

Panetti's case has been cited by advocates of severe mental illness exemptions 
(including a former Tennessee attorney general) as an example of why such death 
penalty reforms are needed.

Panetti had been diagnosed with "early schizophrenia" following his discharge 
from the Navy in 1978. He was hospitalized 15 times for mental health-related 
issues between leaving the military and 1992. He was convicted of killing his 
in-laws that year, and displayed bizarre behavior while representing himself in 
the trial. Panetti remains on death row in Texas after a 2014 execution attempt 
was halted.

Even conservatives who aren't ready to support full-on abolition of the death 
penalty tend to think the mental health exemption makes sense, Hyden said.

"Every single one I've met thinks it's a miscarriage of justice to execute ill 
people," he said. "I'm pro-life, and so our most of our supporters. Pro-lifers 
believe we should protect the most vulnerable in our society, not kill them. 
People with the severe mental illness are the most vulnerable in society."

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he had "no comment" on the bill.

(source: Huffington Post)






NEW HAMPSHIRE:

Death-penalty expansion is wrong


The N.H. House Criminal Justice Committee has rejected House Bill 351, a 
death-penalty expansion bill, by a strong bipartisan vote of 17-3. The bill is 
now coming to the floor of the House for debate on Wednesday, March 8.

The committee rejected this bill because they felt it unnecessary and expensive 
to broaden the existing law. Some members of the committee feel, as I do, that 
it is wrong for the state to take a human life.

HB 351 would make the killing of a child a capital offense. Barbara Keshen, a 
former state prosecutor and defense attorney, testified against the bill in 
committee. She said, "the death of any child is heartbreaking, but most child 
murders I saw were the result of overwhelmed or mentally unstable parents."

Keshen went on to say that "making the killing of a child a capital offense 
would have done nothing to prevent or deter those terrible tragedies."

The committee heard testimony from a woman who spent 3 years on death row, 
accused of murdering her 9-month-old son. She was exonerated when it was proved 
that her son died of a hereditary kidney condition. One person wrongfully 
executed is one too many.

I urge my representatives to vote against this bill. If you feel as I do, 
please do the same.

Sincerely,

DAVID BLAIR

P.O. Box 294

Dublin

(source: Letter to the Editor, Keene Sentinel)






GEORGIA:

Accused killer of Peach deputies has 1st hearing in death-penalty case


A Byron man charged with the fatal shooting of 2 Peach County deputies was in 
court Tuesday for the 1st time since the district attorney filed notice to seek 
the death penalty.

Ralph Stanley Elrod Jr., 57, is accused of pulling a handgun from his waistband 
Nov. 6 and shooting deputy Daryl Smallwood and Sgt. Patrick Sondron, who had 
been dispatched to investigate a complaint that he had threatened a neighbor's 
nephews with a firearm.

The nephews had been riding a 4-wheeler and a motorcycle in front of his 
Hardison Road home. Elrod was wounded in a shootout with police who responded 
to call of officers down.

Free of handcuffs and shackles and wearing dress pants, shirt, a coat and tie, 
Elrod was formally handed the notice to seek the death penalty against him by 
District Attorney David Cooke.

Elrod sat between the attorney he has retained, Franklin J. Hogue of Macon, and 
his court-appointed attorneys, Gabrielle Amber Pittman and Nathanial L. 
Studeska of the Middle Georgia Regional Capital Defender Office.

Judge Ed Ennis questioned the appropriateness of Elrod's having both paid and 
court-appointed attorneys. The judge said he expects to hear from attorneys on 
that issue and others at a May 22 arraignment for Elrod.

Hogue said he expects more time will be needed for preparation. Pittman and 
Studeska are due in court for 2 to 3 months this summer on another 
death-penalty case. Pittman and Studeska also represent Christopher Calmer, the 
man charged in the 2014 fatal shooting of Monroe County deputy Michael Norris.

Already, Elrod's defense team has filed 15 motions, including one that 
challenges the makeup of the grand jury that indicted him on 2 counts of malice 
murder and felony murder, 3 counts of aggravated assault on a peace officer and 
2 counts of aggravated assault. Another motion deals with the sharing of 
evidence among prosecution and defense attorneys.

The bulk of the GBI file on the case has been completed to be shared with the 
defense, but an "emergency" for the GBI delayed its completion, Cooke told the 
judge. The emergency: arrests in the 2005 disappearance of Irwin County High 
School teacher and former beauty queen Tara Grinstead, and the search by GBI 
agents from multiple field offices of a pecan field for her remains in 
neighboring Ben Hill County.

Hogue told the judge he expects "scores" of additional motions to be filed on 
Elrod's behalf.

Renee Smallwood, Smallwood's widow and the mother of their 3-year-old son, 
Wyatt, sat in the back of the courtroom, taking it all in. Smallwood, who 
declined comment, asked questions of prosecutors in the hallway after the 
hour-long hearing at the Peach County Courthouse.

(source: macon.com)






FLORIDA:

State Supreme Court may order new sentencing hearing for Orlando convicted 
murderer


A convicted murderer's death penalty conviction will be heard by the Florida 
Supreme Court on Wednesday.

In 2015, Bessman Okafor was sentenced to death in the killing of 19-year-old 
Alex Zaldivar.

The jury in the case recommended Okafor be put to death by an 11-1 decision, 
which the courts have ruled unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court in January 2016 declared the state's death penalty 
sentencing law unconstitutional because it gave too much power to judges to 
make the ultimate decision.

The victim's father is in Tallahassee for the hearing and said he expected the 
court to order a new sentencing hearing.

"It's devastating because we are going to have to go through the pictures and 
the witness impact statements and I have to see this parasite again," said 
Rafael Zaldivar. "And I don't want to see him anymore."

If Okafor is granted a new sentencing, the jury will have to unanimously decide 
on the death penalty.

(source: WFTV news)



ARKANSAS:

Bill proposes end to death penalty in Arkansas


A Pine Bluff Democrat filed legislation Monday to do away with the death 
penalty in Arkansas.

House Bill 2103, by state Rep. Vivian Flowers, D-Pine Bluff, asserts the 
state's highest form of punishment is "unfair and arbitrary."

The bill simply removes references to "death by lethal injection" in Arkansas 
sentencing statutes, replacing it with "life imprisonment."

Arkansas has not executed anyone since 2005. Gov. Asa Hutchinson has scheduled 
8 executions for April.

(source: arkansasonline.com)






NEBRASKA:

Garcia attorneys question client's competency ahead of death penalty 
hearing----Judge to order convicted killer appear for questioning in court


The attorneys for Anthony Garcia have questions about his competency for the 
next stage of the convicted killer's trial.

Garcia is scheduled to have a mitigating factors hearing in the death penalty 
phase at the end of March. Jeremy Jorgenson now wants that stalled until the 
defense team can get its client to talk to them again.

"The problem is that we cannot have a mitigation hearing with a client who has 
refused to talk to us for month," Jorgenson said during the hearing Tuesday, 
noting the stakes are high in this phase of the trial. "Our mail is turned 
away. Our client sat at the table [during trial], often sleeping, never saying 
one word to us."

Jorgenson said while Garcia is turning away his attorneys' letters, he's 
sending his own.

"It's nonsensical," he said, calling it "gobbledygook."

Judge Gary Randall questioned what changed in Garcia's behavior between the 
last time authorities evaluated him for competency. Prosecutors questioned the 
need for another evaluation as well.

"In some ways I don't know what to say," Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine 
argued. "This issue has never been raised until now by defense counsel. We 
raised it when Mr. Garcia was talking about being raped. Defense counsel fought 
that competency issue."

Judge Randall wanted to hear from Garcia himself, but he refused to come to 
Tuesday's hearing. Randall will now order him to appear to answer questions.

(source: KETV news)






USA:

40 Years Awaiting Execution----For many death row inmates, the long process 
leading to capital punishment is itself cruel - but not unusual. In 1979, 
Arthur Lee Giles, then 19 years old, was sentenced to death in Blount County, 
Alabama. Nearly 40 years later, he is still waiting to be executed. His glacial 
march to execution exposes a conundrum at the heart of America's death penalty. 
Condemned prisoners often spend decades on death row before being executed - if 
the execution ever happens at all - a fact that undermines any retributive 
value capital punishment might provide.

Approximately 40 % of the 2,739 people currently on death row have spent at 
least 20 years awaiting execution, and 1 in 3 of these prisoners are older than 
50. (This is according to data collected by the Fair Punishment Project and 
sourced from the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and 
state corrections departments.)

According to a Los Angeles Times investigation, roughly two dozen men on 
California's death row require walkers and wheelchairs, and one is living out 
his days in bed wearing diapers. In North Carolina, 9 death row prisoners have 
died of natural causes since 2006 - the same year the state last executed 
someone. These delays suggest that executions must be sped up significantly.

And yet, the process that creates those delays cannot be eliminated without a 
corresponding increase in the risk of wrongful executions. Since 1973, 157 men 
and women have been exonerated from death row. The average time from conviction 
to exoneration is nearly a decade. Glenn Ford spent nearly 30 years on 
Louisiana's death row in solitary confinement. Convicted of 1st-degree murder 
in 1984, new evidence later revealed Ford's innocence. He was exonerated in 
2014, just 16 months before he died of lung cancer. That same year, after 3 
decades on North Carolina's death row, Henry Lee McCollum was cleared by DNA of 
the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl and released from prison.

Behind this conundrum rests a profound moral and legal problem. Decades spent 
awaiting an uncertain execution inflicts an additional and nakedly cruel layer 
of punishment on the condemned. Most death row inmates are housed alone for 
years in tiny concrete cells even as a growing body of evidence suggests the 
psychological burden of solitary confinement is tantamount to torture. In 
Texas, for example, death row prisoners await their fates in the Allan B. 
Polunsky Unit, a Polk County prison where they spend 23 hours per day isolated 
in 60-square-foot cells. They exit only to shower or exercise and are 
handcuffed, stripped naked, and subjected to a full body search when they do 
leave their cells.

Decades spent awaiting uncertain execution inflicts a nakedly cruel layer of 
punishment.

In 2015, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy questioned the humanity of 
confining prisoners "in a windowless cell no larger than a typical parking 
spot." In his concurring opinion in Davis v. Ayala, Kennedy cited an 1890 
Supreme Court ruling that solitary confinement represented "a further terror 
and peculiar mark of infamy" for prisoners who've been sentenced to death. That 
kind of isolation can "exact a terrible price" and "literally drives men mad," 
Kennedy wrote.

With public support for executions at historic lows, death row delays seem 
likely to increase. Just 20 of the nearly 3,000 prisoners on death row 
nationwide were executed last year.

California is a prime example. In 2014, a federal judge wrote that the state's 
capital punishment system is actually a sentence of "life without parole with 
the remote possibility of death." The judge calculated that "just to carry out 
the sentences of the 748 inmates currently on death row, the State would have 
to conduct more than 1 execution a week for the next 14 years." That's an 
unfathomable outcome in any state, much less in one that has not performed a 
single execution in more than a decade.

This concern that the delays themselves amount to an unintended yet highly 
troubling consequence was flagged in 1995 by then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice 
John Paul Stevens, when he acknowledged in a dissent in the case Lackey v. 
Texas that executing a prisoner who had already spent more than 17 years on 
death row might violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and 
unusual punishment.

In an effort to combat these delays, California voters narrowly passed 
Proposition 66 in 2016, which promised to speed up executions by imposing more 
severe limitations on the death penalty appeals process. Yet Prop 66 has 
already faced significant constitutional challenges, and the California Supreme 
Court has stayed the initiative pending the outcome of a case filed by former 
state Attorney General John Van de Kamp and Ron Briggs, the 2 men who wrote the 
successful statewide proposition reinstating the death penalty in California 40 
years ago.

If the Constitution does not permit California's attempt to speed up executions 
at the expense of risking fairness and accuracy, the decades-long delays will 
almost certainly persist - resulting perhaps in legal grounds for relief for 
condemned inmates.

In a dissent written last year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer 
challenged the court's decision not to review the case of Henry Sireci, who has 
spent more than 40 years on Florida's death row. Noting that the Berlin Wall 
was still standing at the time when Sireci received a death sentence, Breyer 
wrote, "40 years is more time than an average person could expect to live his 
entire life when America constitutionally forbade the 'inflict[ion]' of 'cruel 
and unusual punishments.'"

Breyer, however, could not garner enough votes from his colleagues to decide 
the issue of whether these delays constitute cruel punishment. And thus the 
dilemma persists. When it comes to the death penalty, it appears we cannot 
enact the constitutional protections necessary to prevent wrongful executions 
without causing prisoners the additional harm of decades-long waits for their 
punishments to be implemented.

(source: Rebecca McCray is a writer in New York and a journalism and research 
fellow with the Fair Punishment Project----slate.com)