[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----IND., ARIZ., NEV.

[Rick Halperin]

May 8



INDIANA:

Indiana Supreme Court denies death penalty statute appeal


The Indiana Supreme Court turned down the request of a Gary man accused of 
killing 7 women to look at the constitutionality of the state's death penalty 
statute before he goes to trial.

The Post-Tribune (http://trib.in/2oLRQMT ) reported the court denied 
46-year-old Darren Deon Vann's request Thursday, following suit with rulings in 
previous challenges in other Indiana cases. Vann argued the statute possibly 
violates the U.S. Constitution's 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual 
punishment.

His defense attorneys argued in their appeal request that the issue should be 
addressed before a trial is set because "Vann should not have to wait until the 
jury is unable to recommend a penalty before he may challenge a statute that he 
believes to be unconstitutional and deprives him of his constitutional rights." 
They also argued making a pre-trial decision could save Indiana taxpayers a 
great sum of money.

The defense said the decision impacts not only Vann but "every other pending 
death penalty case in Indiana."

Between 1977 and Nov. 7, 2016, 97 people have been sentenced to death in 
Indiana, and 11 people are currently on the state's death row, according to a 
brief by an attorney with The Promise of Justice Initiative. Vann's defense 
attorneys called on the New Orleans nonprofit to provide an opinion on the 
appeal.

Any further doubts can be raised in a direct appeal following Vann's trial "so 
that this Court can decide it within an actual - and not hypothetical - set of 
facts," the court said in its ruling. Vann's appeal request delayed the case 
going to trial and any additional requests could delay it for many more months 
or years.

Vann has a status hearing Friday in Lake County to discuss pending matters in 
his case. Aside from hearings and filed documents, a gag order prohibits those 
involved in the case from commenting outside of court.

(source: WHIO news)






ARIZONA:

Trial to begin in death of girl who was padlocked inside box


Members of a Phoenix family awoke nearly 6 years ago a disturbing discovery in 
their home: A 10-year-old girl who lived there was found dead inside a 
padlocked plastic storage box, a punishment for having stolen a popsicle.

Authorities say 2 adult relatives are responsible for making Ame Deal get into 
the box the night before and had fallen sleep without letting her out.

One of Deal's cousins, 28-year-old Sammantha Lucille Rebecca Allen, goes on 
trial Monday on murder and child abuse charges stemming from the child's 2011 
death.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Allen and her husband, 
28-year-old John Michael Allen, who is scheduled to be tried on Aug. 7 on child 
abuse and murder charges. Both have pleaded not guilty.

The 10-year-old's death was the cruel culmination of a history of abuse that 
authorities say a handful of relatives heaped on her.

She was forced to eat dog feces, crush aluminum cans barefoot, consume hot 
sauce and get in the storage box on other occasions. Deal also was kicked in 
the face, beaten with a wooden paddle and forcibly dunked after being thrown in 
a cold swimming pool, investigators said.

Authorities say Deal was treated more harshly than other children at the home, 
and her family members characterized her as a liar and thief.

"Several forensic interviews were conducted on relative children," 
investigators wrote in court records. "The common theme is, Ame is bad, Ame 
lies, Ame steals, Ame is not allowed to play."

Three other relatives, including an aunt who served as her legal guardian, are 
in prison serving sentences for abusing Deal.

Child welfare authorities in Arizona said they didn't receive any reports of 
abuse before her death. Police said child welfare reports from Utah, where the 
family lived before moving to Phoenix, listed Deal as an abused child.

John Curry, one of Sammantha Allen's attorneys, and lawyer Gary Beren, who 
represents John Allen, didn't return calls seeking comment. Prosecutors with 
the Maricopa County Attorney's Office declined to comment.

Investigators say John Allen padlocked the girl in the box as a force of 
punishment for the popsicle theft. Adults at the home originally claimed she 
hid during a late-night game of hide and seek and wasn't found until 6 or 7 
hours later.

The box was less than 3 feet long, less than a foot wide and a foot deep. Deal 
stood about 4 feet tall and weighed nearly 60 pounds.

Deal's mother left the family years earlier after suffering abuse from 
relatives and moved to Kansas without taking her daughter with her.

David Deal, who is listed on Deal's birth certificate as her biological father, 
is serving a 14-year sentence after pleading guilty to attempted child abuse.

Ame Deal's legal guardian at the time of her death was her aunt, Cynthia 
Stoltzmann, who is serving a 24-year prison sentence for a child abuse 
conviction. Deal's grandmother, Judith Deal, is serving a 10-year prison 
sentence on a child abuse conviction.

Sammantha and John Allen are the only people charged in Deal's death.

(source: Associated Press)






NEVADA:

The slow death of capital punishment: Delays, costs and shifting public opinion 
riddle the system


The recent spate of Arkansas executions, which included 2 on the same gurney, 3 
1/2 hours apart - the 1st time in almost 17 years that any state has executed 2 
inmates on the same day - has returned the death penalty to the forefront of 
national consciousness.

Waves of delays and activists' outcries continue as the use of capital 
punishment has sharply declined throughout the country. Polls indicate a 
shrinking majority of Americans prefers to preserve the option to extinguish 
those found guilty of the vilest crimes in civilized society.

In Nevada, the conundrum of capital punishment is rife with subplots, starting 
with last year's expensive refurbishment of a death chamber whose application 
is far-fetched, since drugs necessary for lethal injection aren't available.

Death sentences bogged down with decades of dust enrage victims' families, some 
of whom would be satisfied with a sentence of life without parole, if, in fact, 
that were the state's top punishment.

In the movies, a governor's powers are never more dramatic than when that call 
is placed to the prison, a tick or 2 before midnight, the reprieve doled out. 
The inmate spared. In Nevada, in reality, what's in the chair today is the 
death penalty itself.

Polling the death penalty

According to Pew Research Center (2016) and Gallup (2014) polls:

-- 49% of Americans favor the death penalty for murder convictions

-- 42% oppose the death penalty

-- 9% were unsure

Asked what form of execution they consider most humane, respondents said:

-- Lethal injection: 65%

-- None (volunteered opinion: 10%

-- Firing squad: 9%

-- Hanging: 5%

-- Electric chair: 4%

-- Gas chamber: 4%

-- No opinion: 3%

Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval is a stalwart supporter of the death penalty, 
yet not one execution has been carried out during his watch, 8 years that 
expire in January 2019.

The courts have not ordered a single execution to be scheduled. By contrast, 
Ohio has 26 on its dockets from 2018 through 2021; at press time, the Buckeye 
State had no fewer than a dozen people on its 2017 execution list.

Nevada last executed a prisoner in April 2006. It's a costly system with many 
broken parts, which might be eroding the appetite for capital punishment.

Appeals that seem unending effectively keep death row inmates alive for 
decades. When 75-year-old Priscilla Ford died from natural causes in 2005, 
after 25 years of incarceration for running over dozens of people in Reno, she 
hadn't even begun to tap her federal-review options.

Last year, $858,000 of taxpayer funds was spent on refurbishing the death 
chamber - to bring it in compliance with Americans With Disabilities Act 
standards - at the maximum-security Ely State Prison, which houses the state's 
death row.

Should a court order an execution, it's debatable that it could even be carried 
out because the necessary drugs are not in supply. In 2016, Nevada Department 
of Corrections personnel sent 247 requests for proposals to drug companies but 
received no responses.

With such a court order, in theory, the Department of Corrections would have 
60-90 days to complete its directive. Its director, James Dzurenda, has 
reportedly told Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson that the drugs 
required for an execution - midazolam and hydromorphone - could be obtained. As 
1 option, Dzurenda said he might be able to ask another state for drugs it 
wouldn't anticipate using.

In the Legislature, Assemblyman James Ohrenschall and Sen. Tick Segerblom, Las 
Vegas-based Democrats, wrote Assembly Bill 237 to abolish the death penalty. 
But the bill foundered, and it expired in mid-April.

Perhaps that opposition will resurface, with more strength, in the 
gubernatorial election next year. Nationally, execution numbers are on a 
dramatic wane. In 2016, 20 prisoners were put to death, the lowest figure in 25 
years. So far this year, at press time, states had put to death only 10 
inmates.

Sandoval's successor will undoubtedly influence the future of the issue. One 
likely candidate is Steve Sisolak, the Democratic chairman of the Clark County 
Commission. At an April 21 function, he expressed staunch opposition to the 
death penalty. "More opposed," he said, due to the many ills of the system. (He 
did convey deep sympathy to family and friends of victims of heinous crimes.)

That might help or hurt him, or another candidate who espouses a similar view, 
depending on the populace tide.

Total court costs in Nevada

-- $1.3 million: Estimated cost of a case in which the death penalty is sought 
and an inmate is sentenced to death, but is not executed

-- $1.03 million: Estimated cost of a case in which the death penalty is 
sought, an inmate is sentenced to death and an execution is carried out

-- $775,000: Estimated cost of a case in which the death penalty is not 
sought, including incarceration

Costs of incarceration

-- The 12 executions carried out cost an estimated $324,000 per inmate.

-- The 16 who died in prison cost an estimated $599,000 per inmate.

-- The estimated cost per inmate for those sentenced to life without parole, 
including facility, medical and burial costs, is $598,000

The U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment in a landmark ruling in 
1976. We're the only Western country that uses the death penalty.

32 states have death penalty statutes. They are denoted in red. New Mexico has 
repealed the death penalty, but those already sentenced remain under sentence 
of death.

There were 2,905 prisoners on death row through 2016 - 2,850 male and 55 
female. Of those, 42 % were white, 42 % black, 13 % Latino, 2 % Asian and 1 % 
Native American.

In Nevada, 160 people have been sentenced to death in the past 40 years. Twelve 
executions have been carried out, 16 people died from natural causes or 
suicide), 82 are currently on death row at Ely State Prison, and 50 cases have 
been overturned.

The only woman ever executed in Nevada

Elizabeth Potts was put to death next to her husband, Josiah, on twin gallows 
after being convicted of murder and robbery in 1890. Some outlets reported that 
she was decapitated at full drop.

The last person to be executed in Nevada A pimp who had been incarcerated for 
killing a prostitute, Daryl Mack was convicted of an earlier rape and murder by 
DNA; thus, the death sentence. The worst of the worst," Washoe County Chief 
Deputy District Attorney Dan Greco called Mack. He was executed in 2006.

The most dangerous prisoner in Nevada Patrick McKenna, 70, is considered the 
nation's 3rd-most sinister criminal. In 1979, he murdered a cellmate. He has 
attempted many escapes. For court he has been strapped to a wheelchair and 
forced to wear blinders, chains around his belly, ankle shackles and mittens so 
he can't grasp anything.

Scott Dozier had been incarcerated for almost 10 years when he became fed up 
with the system. On Oct. 31, he instructed legal representatives to halt what 
seems like an infinite appeals process; he wants to be killed, and by firing 
squad.

However, unlike Andriza Mircovich, who was able to choose rifles over the noose 
in Nevada in 1913, or 15 other states that have alternative execution methods 
on their statutes, the Silver State is now limited to lethal injection.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment in a landmark 1976 
ruling, 11 of the 12 inmates executed by Nevada had relinquished appeals 
rights. Multiple murderer Richard Moran, in 1996, was the lone person to be 
involuntarily executed in that time frame.

In taped telephone conversations that have been made public, Dozier sounds 
intelligent, thoughtful and rational. He admits to his mistakes and says living 
in solitary confinement the rest of his life is no way to live, so let's get on 
with it.

It's the same tack used by Jesse Walter Bishop, the last person the state 
executed by gas. In 1977, he robbed a teller at El Morocco, shot a pit boss, 
and shot and killed a bystander. He was sentenced to death. Bishop chose not to 
appeal and forbade his court-appointed lawyers from prolonging the case with 
more petitions.

Bishop believed it comical to claim that the death penalty constituted cruel 
and unusual punishment when it???s the inmate and his attorneys who trigger 
such interminable delays that produce false starts and umpteen execution dates. 
It's a prisoner's volition, he said, to die for his crimes.

"They want to force me to appeal, to wait just so the lawyers can play their 
games," Bishop said. "I feel that is cruel and unusual punishment. ... I never 
asked for the death penalty. They gave it to me. I'm only asking that they 
either give it to me or commute it. They got me dead bang on a cold murder beef 
I can't beat. I'm not going to turn to God, or to snivelin' or snitchin' or 
rattin'. They got their gas chamber ... they should get it over with."

He was strapped to the chair on Oct. 22, 1979.

----

Brief history of capital punishment

-- Code of Hammurabi: 38 centuries old, the 7 1/2-foot stone stele - which 
lists 282 laws and scaled punishments - contains the 1st known reference to the 
"eye for an eye" tenet. It was unearthed in Khuzestan, a current province in 
Iran, in 1901 and is stored in the Louvre in Paris.

-- Electric Chair: After the chair's debut at Sing Sing in 1891, a New York 
Herald headline exclaimed "A proud day for the Empire State!" Thomas Edison 
called it "more certain and perhaps a little more civilized than the rope." But 
he'd omit, from his biography, his major role in its development, and he spoke 
little of it the rest of his life.

-- Gas: Gee Jon became the 1st person executed in such a chamber, by state 
decree, at Nevada State Prison in 1924. "100 years from now," the San Jose 
Mercury Herald opined, "Nevada will be referred to as a heathen commonwealth 
controlled by savages with only the outward symbols of civilization."

-- Guillotine: Nicolas Pelletier first perished by the blade in April 1792. 
When Hamida Djandoubi - the last, in September 1977 - pressed his executioner 
for a 3rd smoke, Marcel Chevalier said, "Ah mon, we've already lost enough 
time." A shocked Victor Hugo saw a blade drop 5 times on a criminal, who 
escaped; an assistant finished the job with a butcher's knife.

-- Hanging: Brits brought the noose to the Virginia Colony, where it was 1st 
used on convicted thief Daniel Frank in 1629. Australia fervently adopted it. 
England's last execution was in 1964, and Australia's in 1967. A U.S. hanging 
last occurred in 1996, but it's still an option in New Hampshire and 
Washington.

-- Shooting: According to the book "Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions 
and America's Death Penalty," rifles killed 34 U.S. prisoners between 1890 and 
2010; the lone flawless method. After Gary Gilmore was shot in January 1977, 
his eyes and other vital organs were harvested. It's still an option in 
Oklahoma (as is electrocution and gas) and Utah.

----

The weight on victims' families: An elegy for Nancy Griffith


Almost 38 years after he violated, beat, burned and left 16-year-old Nancy 
Griffith to die 20 miles outside of town, the existence of Robert Ybarra Jr. 9 
miles north of here continues to haunt this tiny mining town.

It grates on Robin Griffith, who is married to Nancy's brother, Alan. In her 
early 60s, she prays to live long enough to see Ybarra die - or be "put down" 
like a vicious stray, as one local put it - by lethal injection in Ely State 
Prison.

"Not because I want to watch somebody die but because I knew my sister-in-law 
... it would be, for her, an ending," Robin says.

Had Ybarra been given a life sentence without the possibility of parole, it 
would be very different, she says, not this never-ending nightmare. But he was 
sentenced to die. "If you're going to give the death penalty, give it," Robin 
says. "Don't take it away."

She mentions Javier Righetti, who raped, beat and burned 15-year-old Alyssa 
Otremba in Las Vegas in 2011. In March, a jury sentenced Righetti to die. At 
24, he will be the youngest death row inmate when he's processed into the 
system. Robin cringes about the decades of jurisprudent heartbreak that await 
Otremba's friends and relatives.

"I feel for those people," she says. "Either do it or get rid of (the death 
penalty). They don't understand what the victim's family goes through every 
time there's an appeal - every single time."

On Sept. 28, 1979, Nancy and friend Johna Cordova were listening to music, 
drinking beer and talking with Ybarra at Courthouse Park.

Both girls knew the 25-year-old itinerant worker, since they had cleaned his 
dwelling once or twice. The girls must have known the guy with the mustache and 
long dark hair dabbled in an array of drugs and drank too much. They couldn't 
have known he had attempted suicide a few weeks earlier, when his wife took 
their infant and left him.

>From what Robin would later gather, Nancy accidentally knocked over a beer, 
angering Ybarra. The outburst frightened Johna, and she made him take her home. 
Both girls got in the red pickup truck with the white camper shell. Outside her 
house, Johna slid out of the cab. Nancy remained.

Robin knows why she made that fatal decision.

10 pounds at birth, the 10th and final child of Harold and Edna Griffith 
carried some extra weight into her teens. Robin always cut Nancy's hair and 
would compliment her legs, always reinforcing a positive attitude and outlook. 
Nancy envied girlfriends who had boyfriends and yearned for such attention. She 
found that - in whatever fraction - in Ybarra.

"She was a young girl who wanted to be loved," Robin says. "That's all she 
wanted. Finally, a guy liked her. She fell for it and lost her life because of 
it."

Ybarra drove his rig west to the utter desolation of 30 Mile Road, steering 
north for 3 miles over the bumpy dirt pathway. They were making out in the back 
when Ybarra's mood and actions dramatically turned. Nancy kicked out the rear 
window and ran. He caught her, raped her, cracked her skull and kicked in her 
teeth. She was on her knees, by a gully, when he poured gasoline over her and 
lit a match. He drove away.

She remained alive and alert, enough to identify her attacker to passersby 
early that Saturday morning. One noted what looked like a glove in the dirt; it 
was the skin of Nancy???s hand, burned off with fingernails intact. She died a 
few hours later in a Salt Lake City hospital.

"Utah does have the firing squad. That seems to work; shoot 'im in the heart 
and get it over with," Robin says. "I don't love the face of death, but it 
would be the ending of Nancy's story."

(source: Las Vegas Sun)