[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OHIO, MO., NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 5



OHIO:

Jury recommends death penalty for James Worley



A Fulton County jury says James Worley should be put to death following his 
murder conviction last month.

On Wednesday afternoon, jurors unamimously decided to reccomend death penalty 
for killing UT student Sierah Joughin in 2016.

Jurors got the case on Tuesday and had the option of the death penalty, life 
without parole, life with parole after 25 years, and life with parole after 30 
years.

Fulton County court officials tell NBC24 Judge Jeffrey Robinson will render his 
final decision on April 18th.

That decision is to allow Worley to be present when the victim's family is 
making a statement.

(source: WNWO news)

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

New judge, new retrial date for Mentor-on-the-Lake death penalty case



A former Perry Township man accused of raping and murdering a Mentor woman now 
has a new judge and a new retrial date.

Joseph Thomas, now 33, was sentenced to death in 2012 after being found guilty 
in the death of Annie McSween.

The 49-year-old victim's body was found on Nov. 26, 2010, in a wooded area 
outside of a Mentor-on-the-Lake bar, where she worked as a bartender.

Thomas' 2nd trial was scheduled to begin Aug. 13 in front of Lake County Common 
Pleas Judge Richard L. Collins Jr., who presided over the original trial.

However, after attorneys requested additional time, the case was reassigned to 
Judge Eugene A. Lucci since Collins will be retiring at the end of the year.

Jury selection is now scheduled to begin Jan. 7.

Meanwhile, the records and docket will remain sealed so that prospective jurors 
cannot do online research on the case file.

Lucci held his 1st pretrial in the case April 3 to meet the defendant???s new 
attorneys, Donald Malarcik and Noah Munyer, and get up to speed on the case.

Malarcik asked that at least 250 people be summoned for jury duty, which then 
would slowly be whittled down to the usual pool of around 50 before the final 
12 - and 4 alternates - are seated.

Thomas' 1st trial began with about that same number of potential jurors.

However, Lucci said more would be necessary this time.

"When you have a retrial, you need a lot more jurors because there's a lot more 
water under the bridge," he said. "I'm thinking more like 400."

Both sides have submitted lengthy proposed juror questionnaires for the judge 
to approve, including questions on their views of the death penalty, life in 
prison and pretrial publicity.

Malarcik estimated it would take about 8 weeks to try the case from start to 
finish, while assistant county prosecutors Patrick Condon and Charles Cichocki 
said they believe the case would take about 6 weeks.

Lucci said he would rather err on the longer side, since picking a jury alone 
could take nearly 1 month, and he will set aside the 8 weeks.

The judge expressed some concern that both prosecutors are among 6 candidates 
seeking the judicial seat that will be vacated by Collins, meaning 1 of them 
could possibly not be available at trial.

"What if one of you wins the election?" asked Lucci.

Cichocki assured him there is a 3rd assistant prosecutor being prepped on the 
case.

The Ohio Supreme Court overturned the death sentence in October 2017 and 
ordered a new trial be scheduled for Thomas.

The high court determined the trial court improperly admitted into evidence 5 
knives that prosecutors knew were not used in the crime, and that there was a 
reasonable probability that the error affected the outcome of the trial.

Thomas is currently being housed in Lake County Jail on a $1 million cash bond.

(source: News-Herald)








MISSOURI:

Judge Thomas Mountjoy sentenced Craig Wood to death for the rape and murder of 
Hailey Owens



Craig Wood's sentence is being cited by opponents of capital punishment who 
want to stop Missouri judges from sending criminals to death row with a jury's 
approval.

Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty is pushing for state 
lawmakers to take away the judicial power to impose a death sentence in cases 
where juries cannot agree.

Wood was convicted of first-degree murder in November for the abduction, rape 
and killing of 10-year-old Hailey Owens in 2014. After the guilty verdict, the 
jury deadlocked on the question of his punishment

Judge Thomas Mountjoy in January handed down a death sentence for Wood; the 
other option was life in prison without hope of parole.

Wood's case is one of two cited by Missourians for Alternatives to the Death 
Penalty, which is advocating for a bill that would take away the capital 
punishment option if juries cannot agree.

A bill to do just that was unanimously approved by a legislative committee in 
late March and is another committee vote away from hitting the House floor.

The death-penalty opponents note that, as the News-Leader previously reported, 
two of the twelve jurors deliberating on Wood's fate believed he should spend 
his life behind bars. The other 10 favored death.

The other case cited was that of Marvin Rice, a former sheriff's deputy and 
prison worker who killed his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, the 
Associated Press reported. In Rice's case, a lone juror advocated capital 
punishment, putting the decision in the hands of a judge who agreed with the 
minority of one.

"In both of these cases, 2 individual judges imposed death and undermined the 
role of the juries," the Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said 
in a Tuesday night news release. "Both Wood and Rice's death sentences raise 
questions about judicial override in Missouri and its constitutionality under 
the Sixth Amendment."

The group notes that Missouri is 1 of only 2 states (along with Indiana) where 
judges can sentence criminals to death if a jury deadlocks. Other states 
default to life in prison.

Wood remains on death row. As is common, Wood's case could percolate in the 
criminal justice system for years as his attorneys explore avenues of appeal.

(source: Springfield News-Leader)








NEBRASKA:

Nebraska Supreme Court expected to issue warrant to execute death-row inmate



Any day now, the Nebraska Supreme Court is expected to issue a death warrant 
for the prisoner who has been on death row the longest. But with 5 challenges 
of Nebraska's lethal injection plans - will there be more delays in 
implementing the death penalty?

When a 3 judge panel sentenced Nikko Jenkins to die last year, we all knew he'd 
be waiting in line on death row. Not only are there 10 men in front of him, 
Nebraska hasn't executed anyone in 21 years.

When Nebraska voters in 2016 overwhelmingly supported capital punishment, 
reversing a ban from state lawmakers, many thought it would get the capital 
punishment wheels spinning again.

Now more than a year later, Attorney General Doug Peterson has asked the 
Nebraska Supreme Court to sign a warrant and set an execution date for Carey 
Dean Moore - the Omahan who killed 2 cab drivers in the late 70's.

Opponents are prepared to stop it, warning of a botched lethal injection.

"We don't know where the drugs came from or how much taxpayers paid for them - 
we don't know how the Department of Corrections came up with this protocol - 
and most importantly, we have no idea if these drugs even work. They've never 
been used before in an execution," said Matt Maly with Nebraskans for 
Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

The state argues medical experts have signed off on the four-drug lethal 
injection cocktail doing what it's supposed to do and scientists have analyzed 
the chemicals.

"We have to be absolutely careful. It's a serious thing for the government to 
do - kill its own citizens," said Maly.

Nationwide the use of capital punishment is trending downward. Last year there 
were 20 executions nationwide. So far in 2018, 7 men have been executed by 
their state. 4 in Texas - and 1 each in Alabama, Georgia and Florida. They're 
average stay in prison from sentence to lethal injection is 17.5 years. Carey 
Dean Moore has been on Nebraska's death row for 39 years. Moore has already had 
a death date set twice over the years, only to stay in his cell.

(source: WOWT news)








USA:

Kellyanne Conway calls for mandatory minimums and death penalty at influential 
drug conference----"If we want to disrupt the fentanyl trade, we need nuanced, 
careful, and sustained engagement with China. Instead the President is berating 
China on Twitter and igniting a trade war with them."



Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway is on a campaign to sell the White 
House's tough-on-crime approach to the opioid crisis.

Conway - who is for some reason in charge of the White House's efforts to 
tackle the opioid crisis - pleaded with stakeholders at the largest annual 
conference on the epidemic on Wednesday to change fentanyl sentencing laws. She 
called for longer prison time for small-time fentanyl dealers and echoed the 
president's call for the death penalty "in very special circumstances" for drug 
traffickers.

Conway's comments highlight the White House's misguided approach to the crisis. 
By demanding longer prison time for small-time fentanyl dealers, Conway may be 
criminalizing some of the drug users the White House should be trying to help. 
Addiction experts say this sort of strategy distracts from solutions that can 
actually save lives.

Fentanyl and other synthetic opiates are exacerbating the drug overdose death 
rate - one thing that Conway got right in her comments on Wednesday. But she 
said that the driving principle behind the White House's mandatory minimum 
prison sentencing push is "the people I've met who have lost their loved ones 
and the law enforcement that feels like they can't get their arms around this 
crisis."

"Some estimates say 2 milligrams of fentanyl is a lethal dose and it could kill 
1 person. So under our current sentencing guidelines, you need 20,000 lethal 
doses - 20,000 lethal doses - to trigger the mandatory minimums," Conway said. 
"People hear that and they just shake their heads, 'how can that be.' And so 
what the president is asking Congress to do is lower the threshold so that the 
sentences can start at a lower threshold."

The people she's talking about won't be helped by mandatory minimum sentences. 
But that hasn't stopped the White House or Congress from moving forward with 
the idea.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued guidance calling on U.S. 
attorneys to seek the death penalty "for certain drug-related crimes."

Also last month, 6 Republican senators introduced a bill that would reduce the 
amount of fentanyl and its analogues required for mandatory sentencing 
minimums. Under this legislation, .5 grams substance containing fentanyl would 
get a minimum of 5 years, as opposed to current law which requires 10 grams.

In effect that could incarcerate some drug users, who might sell to enable 
addiction and don't realize the substance is laced with fentanyl. That means 5 
years, for example, if "1 gram of heroin (personal use) that is cut with tiny 
speck of fentanyl," drug reporter Zachary Siegel said on Twitter.

Congress is aiming to vote on legislation that addresses the opioid epidemic by 
Memorial Day, and public health experts hope prevention, treatment, and support 
are among the priorities - not penalties.

Lawmakers should think about, for example, increasing access to the overdose 
reversal drug naloxone or eliminating archaic barriers to prescribing 
treatments, said Omar Manejwala, Chief Medical Officer of Catasys and an expert 
on addiction and the opioid crisis.

"What's sad about the national discourse is that while we split hairs over how 
to stiffen sentencing or use the death penalty that we aren't applying the same 
- or even nearly the same - effort to solving for the real drivers of this 
crisis such as untreated mental illness, inadequate prevention and treatment 
investment and workforce, social determinants of health and other structural 
barriers to care," Manejwala told ThinkProgress over email.

And even hiking mandatory minimums would have little practical effect as 
"Congress only controls federal law enforcement efforts, when almost all 
enforcement is operated by states and localities," said Keith Humphreys, a 
Stanford University researcher who has extensively written about the opioid 
crisis and this specific topic.

Alternatively, Humphreys suggests that if the White House wants to disrupt the 
fentanyl trade, they need to engage in nuanced conversations with China, which 
is where most fentanyl is produced.

"Instead the President is berating China on Twitter and igniting a trade war 
with them," Humphreys told ThinkProgress in an email. "That ensures fentanyl 
will continue to be produced at high levels in China and shipped to our 
country."

The Trump administration did announce some positive news at the drug 
conference. The National Institutes of Health launched a $500 million project 
to build on research into prevention and treatments intended to stem the 
crisis.

(source: thinkprogress.org)

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

The Exile: In Memory of Judge Stephen Reinhardt



I first encountered Judge Stephen Reinhardt as a 2nd-year law student at New 
York University, when he delivered the annual "Madison Lecture" on campus in 
1998. I had heard of Judge Reinhardt and knew that he was an important liberal 
voice in an increasingly conservative federal judiciary - the "Chief Justice of 
the Warren court in exile," as his former clerk Michael Dorf had described him. 
But I wasn't at all prepared for the bluntness of his critique of current 
trends in jurisprudence. The Rehnquist Supreme Court, he said, would be 
remembered for having erected "arcane and almost impenetrable procedural rules" 
that elevated process over substantive rights, "especially those of racial 
minorities." He continued: "One can only contemplate with dread the answer the 
current Court would have given had it been asked to overrule Plessy v. 
Ferguson."

I wanted to work for a judge like that - one who pulled no punches when 
publicly castigating his putative superiors. (I would learn soon enough, when I 
became one of his law clerks, that Judge Reinhardt pulled no punches when 
talking to anyone, and that thick skin could be a valuable attribute in his 
chambers.) My ACLU colleague Hector Villagra recounts his own path to a 
Reinhardt clerkship. "I wanted to work for the judge who wrote Gutierrez" - a 
case in which Judge Reinhardt struck down an "English-only" workplace rule in a 
Los Angeles municipal court. No doubt many of the 150 law clerks who worked for 
Judge Reinhardt during his 4 decades on the bench can describe a similar 
inspiration. We certainly didn't take the job for the hours!

Judge Reinhardt was one of the hardest working judges on the federal bench, and 
he expected his clerks to work equally hard. That work included not only a 
heavy load of bench memos and draft opinions but also a nonstop blizzard of 
email correspondence with the other judges of the Ninth Circuit. Because the 
judge lived 87 years without once touching a keyboard, there was a never-ending 
stream of law clerks going in and out of his chambers, dropping off fresh 
drafts and leaving with bruised egos and marked-up manuscripts.

While we sometimes joked that clerking for Judge Reinhardt was the price one 
paid for the lifelong privilege of being his former clerk, the truth is that we 
were all in awe of his brilliance, his drive, and his commitment to using the 
law to protect the powerless. He is best known for his opinions (and dissents) 
in landmark cases involving marriage equality, reproductive freedom, the 
separation of church and state, and the right to determine the time and manner 
of one's own death. But Judge Reinhardt treated every case in which an 
individual was at the mercy of coercive state power as a landmark case.

The federal courts hear thousands of appeals each year from immigrants facing 
deportation, prisoners challenging their convictions, and civil rights 
litigants whose complaints have been cursorily dismissed, and the sheer volume 
of judicial caseloads means that not every appeal gets searching scrutiny. In 
Judge Reinhardt's chambers, they all did. And in an era in which the Supreme 
Court had erected so many procedural barriers to the consideration of 
constitutional claims, finding the narrow pathways to relief for litigants 
whose rights had been violated required both diligence and ingenuity. Judge 
Reinhardt taught us that to succeed, we had to outwork and outsmart the 
proponents of injustice and intolerance.

Death penalty cases, in particular, showed Judge Reinhardt at his finest. He 
made no secret of his personal abhorrence about being part of a system that 
extinguished human life. Any time an execution was scheduled in any of the 
states of the Ninth Circuit, the judge and his clerks would stay in chambers 
until the final moments in case there was a last-minute appeal. He invariably 
dissented, sometimes alone, when the court failed to halt an execution. While 
he acknowledged being bound by Supreme Court precedents upholding the 
constitutionality of the death penalty, he once told me that he had "yet to see 
a death penalty case without reversible error." I regret that he didn't live to 
see that barbaric punishment abolished once and for all.

It's particularly galling that we've lost Judge Reinhardt at precisely the time 
in our nation's history when we need him most. (And it's fitting that his 
children have instructed mourners that in lieu of flowers they should send 
contributions to the ACLU, where so many of his former clerks have worked, as 
well as his beloved wife Ramona Ripston, who served as the executive director 
of the ACLU of Southern California for almost 40 years.) The Trump presidency 
is the kind of democratic stress test that demands an active and principled 
judiciary. Judge Reinhardt was no Pollyanna - he would be the very last person 
to offer bland reassurances about how everything will work out in the end. But 
he was no pessimist, either. He genuinely believed that a more just and more 
humane world was achievable, and that our work, even in the face of calamitous 
setbacks, remained vitally important. I'll close where I began, by quoting at 
length from the Madison lecture which Judge Reinhardt delivered almost 20 years 
ago. I can't think of a better tribute to him or a more pressing message for 
us.

Although we are not in a period in which we can expect . . . immediate positive 
changes, it is nevertheless the duty of the academy and the legal profession to 
make the record that will be necessary when the pendulum swings. And the 
pendulum will surely swing - not only with respect to our death penalty 
jurisprudence, and the harsh and inflexible means by which we today limit the 
historic writ of habeas corpus, but also with respect to the inimical manner in 
which the majority of today's judges view individual rights. Those of us who 
still believe in the obligation of the courts to ensure fairness and equality 
for all, who share the concerns that dominated the brightly shining 
jurisprudence of the Warren-Brennan era, who believe that we are now in a 
valley in our long legal journey towards justice, may not be around to see the 
day when our judicial system returns to its state of glory. Obviously, this is 
not one of the proudest times in our nation's history - for any of our branches 
of government. It will take time to recover, to undo the damage, to heal the 
constitutional wounds. In the case of the Supreme Court, given the nature of 
the appointive process and the practical realities of lifetime tenure, the 
period required for fundamental change is a lengthy one.

Change will not come easily. It will take hard work on the part of well-trained 
advocates and creative legal thinkers who refuse to accept the notion that the 
era of judicial progress is forever over and who will inspire those who learn 
from their words and deeds. . . .

If we have faith in the nature of humanity, if we believe that the course of 
evolution is progress, if we are truly committed to the principles of liberty, 
equality, and justice, I am confident that we can return to an era in which the 
courts serve as the guardians of the values embodied in our Constitution, to an 
era in which judicial protection of the rights of the poor and the 
disadvantaged will once again be the order of the day. If we have the will and 
the determination, we will ultimately prevail.

(source: Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology 
Project----aclu.org)

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

To end the opioid epidemic, save lives, don't take them



Last week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructed U.S. attorneys to 
seek the death penalty for drug dealers in all "appropriate" cases. This flies 
in the face of a decade of bipartisan work in Congress to address the harm 
caused by drug addiction, and threatens to make federal drug enforcement 
efforts even more pointlessly cruel than they already are.

Sessions has spent his first year as attorney general trying to turn back time 
by repealing significant Obama-era criminal justice reforms. He has moved to 
limit federal oversight of local law enforcement that was designed to reduce 
abuses and to encourage prosecutors to charge the most serious offenses 
possible.

The overdose crisis requires urgent action, but more harsh prosecutions won't 
help. Instead of calling for the death penalty, the Trump administration should 
focus on supporting and implementing proven public health strategies that will 
save lives, not take them. The Trump planrelies on 20th century attempts to 
address the overdose problem, invoking concerns of more over-policing in 
communities of color, greater disproportionate sentencing, and harmful 
criminalization of drug possession for personal use.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated more than 66,000 
died from a drug overdose in 2017. The United States can't afford to waste its 
time on tough-on-crime posturing and, instead, needs to focus on measures that 
have been shown to work. And extensive research has shown that the death 
penalty does not deter crime.

The death penalty is inhumane, not least because it is inherently irreversible. 
Most U.S. experts and state governments have recognized that its application 
has been plagued with arbitrariness, racial disparities and error. The number 
of executions in the United States, in fact, has dropped to its lowest in 25 
years, with fewer death sentences imposed last year than in any year since 
1973.

People convicted of drug-related offenses in the United States already suffer 
massively disproportionate punishment - something President Trump and Attorney 
General Sessions seem not to appreciate as problematic. Disturbingly, Trump 
repeatedly has praised the Philippines' war on drug users, a murderous 
government-sanctioned campaign that has resulted in more than 12,000 
extrajudicial killings in the past 2 years. Only a few countries, Iran and 
Saudi Arabia among them, still impose the death penalty for drug crimes.

The U.S. government and many states had been moving in a more positive and 
forward-looking direction in recent years, adopting measures that have been 
shown to work on reducing the harm caused by drug use. Congress has passed a 
series of bipartisan criminal justice law reforms. The Second Chance Act of 
2007 improved programming for prisoners' re-entry into the community. The Fair 
Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the sentencing disparity for the use of crack 
and powder cocaine, which had imposed disproportionately longer sentences on 
crack offenders and caused egregious racial disparities in the federal system.

The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016 improved access to drug 
treatment and to naloxone, the opioid overdose antidote that has saved tens of 
thousands of lives. In 2016, Congress also modified the law to make front-line 
public health and harm reduction services such as syringe exchanges eligible to 
use federal HIV/hepatitis C prevention dollars.

And in February, the Senate Judiciary Committee, under Chairman Chuck 
Grassley's leadership, reported the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, S. 
1917 (SRCA), out of committee. The SRCA bill seeks to rein in federal mandatory 
minimum sentencing laws by increasing judicial discretion in sentencing and 
reducing some mandatory minimums for drug offenses, while also expanding prison 
reentry programs for eligible prisoners to qualify for early release.

The massive loss of life in the United States as a result of drug dependence 
requires a dramatic response. But instead of looking at solutions that have 
been shown to help, the Trump administration has chosen a response that is 
cruel and full of dangerously mindless drama - the kind that will make the 
crisis worse and kill more people in the process.

(source: Human Rights Watch)