[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.H., PENN., N.C., FLA., LA.

[Rick Halperin]

April 6



NEW HAMPSHIRE:

House takes up death penalty repeal bill passed by Senate



The debate over repealing New Hampshire's death penalty statute moved from the 
Senate to the House in an emotional public hearing that brought out surviving 
family members of murder victims to testify in support of repeal.

Supporters of the death penalty urged the House to defeat the repeal measure, 
which passed the Senate in a bipartisan 14-10 vote on March 16.

The fate of New Hampshire's only convict on death row was a major issue in 
Senate hearings on the bill, and that was the case before the House Criminal 
Justice Committee at its crowded hearing on Wednesday.

The state's death penalty has not been used since 1939, and no one was on death 
row for decades until Michael Addison was convicted in the murder of Manchester 
police officer Michael Briggs in 2008.

The prospect of Addison's sentence being reduced to life in prison without the 
possibility of parole has dominated much of the debate over death penalty 
repeal.

The bill is written so that repeal cannot be applied retroactively, but that 
doesn't guarantee Addison's execution would proceed if the death penalty is 
repealed, according to attorney Chuck Douglas, a former state Supreme Court 
judge and congressman who helped write the state's current death penalty 
statute.

"It's wrong to interfere with this process by repealing the death penalty while 
the Addison case is still in the court system," he said. "You can't grandfather 
him in and say we???ll repeal it except for Addison. The courts aren't going to 
buy that."

Barbara Keshen, chairman of the N.H. Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, 
said New Hampshire statutes are clear on the question. She cited state law on 
pending prosecution: "No suit or prosecution, pending at the time of the repeal 
of any act, for any offense committed or for the recovery of a penalty or 
forfeiture incurred under the act so repealed, shall be affected by such 
repeal."

"Michael Addison's death sentence will remain in effect unless the Legislature 
specifically and affirmatively states that it intends to change his sentence, 
and I don't expect that to happen," said Keshen, a former prosecutor in the 
Department of Justice and a former attorney with N.H. Public Defenders.

Keshen has testified at death penalty hearings over the years, recounting her 
experience in 1997 defending Richard Buchanan, live-in boyfriend of the mother 
of a little girl named Elizabeth Knapp who was raped and murdered in 
Contoocook. Buchanan was charged, but was later exonerated by DNA evidence.

Ann Lyczak, who along with her son survived an attempted murder, was among 
those testifying in favor of repeal. Jonathan Sokorelis was convicted of 
2nd-degree murder in 1994, and sentenced to 60 years to life in prison for 
killing Lyczak's husband, Richard.

"I'm here as a victim of attempted murder and the widow of a murder victim to 
make clear today that if the gunman who murdered my husband had been put to 
death, this would bring no benefit to my family," she said.

Franklin Police Chief David Goldstein, representing the state Chiefs of Police 
Association, spoke in opposition to the repeal. "We believe there must be 
consequences for those most serious crimes under our statutes," he said.

Several clergy from multiple denominations testified in favor of repeal, 
including the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire and the director 
of the New Hampshire Council of Churches.

Gov. Chris Sununu has said he supports the current death penalty law and will 
veto the repeal effort if it gets to his desk. The Senate was 2 votes short of 
the 16 votes needed to override a veto.

(source: The Union Leader)








PENNSYLVANIA:

Walter Ogrod's 22-year fight to escape death row gains hope from Krasner, 
documentary



The youthful, flowing hair from his police mugshot is now turning gray, and the 
ink has long faded on the made-for-tabloid headlines about the sensational 1988 
murder case - a 4-year-old girl found naked and left for dead in a TV box on a 
Northeast Philadelphia street - that has caused him to spend more than 1/2 of 
his life behind bars, mostly on death row.

But even as the city mostly forgot all about Walter Ogrod, the inmate and a 
handful of unlikely advocates have never stopped pressing his case that he 
faces execution for a crime that he didn't commit - arrested after a coerced 
confession and ultimately convicted through by the effort of jailhouse snitches 
whose work has since been thoroughly discredited.

Now, deep into a new century, Ogrod and his supporters are feeling a new and 
unexpected sensation: Hope. Hope that for the 1st time since a prison door 
slammed behind the Northeast Philly native after his 1996 murder conviction, 
people in the right places are finally listening to his story that he had 
nothing to do with the tragic slaying of the little girl, Barbara Jean Horn.

On Sunday night, Ogrod's crusade goes national with a 1-hour documentary 
episode on the HLN (the CNN-owned Headline News Network) series "Death Row 
Stories," which presents compelling evidence that the snitch testimony that the 
Philadelphia's district attorney's office used to convict Ogrod was fabricated. 
But an even greater source of hope for Ogrod is the recent seismic shift in the 
city's criminal-justice climate.

The Inquirer and Daily News has learned that the district attorney's conviction 
review unit, or CRU - beefed up under new reform-minded DA Larry Krasner, who 
brought in a high-powered conviction-integrity specialist from Texas, Patricia 
Cummings - is now formally reviewing Ogrod's conviction, which his current 
lawyers have been appealing for more than a decade.

What's more, DA's office spokesman Ben Waxman also confirmed that prosecutors 
will no longer fight to block the long and so far unsuccessful effort by 
Ogrod's lawyers to have key evidence in the case - including fingernail 
scrapings from the victim - undergo state-of-the-art DNA testing, which they 
believe could prove their client's innocence.

"We are hopeful," said James Rollins, the Boston attorney who's been fighting 
to overturn Ogrod's death sentence since the mid-2000s. Rollins confirmed that 
he's been engaged with talks with prosecutors over what evidence - such as the 
box where Barbara Jean's body was found near Rutland Street on July 12, 1988, 
for example - will eventually be tested.

Bari Pearlman, the award-winning documentarian who produced Sunday night's HLN 
episode, entitled "Snitch Work," has been in touch with Ogrod - currently 
imprisoned in Greene County in the rural southwestern corner of Pennsylvania - 
and described his recent mood as "measured optimism." The "measured" part is 
more than understandable.

Pearlman, Rollins and others involved with the case agreed that Ogrod's 
innocence fight never would have gotten this far without the efforts of one 
highly unlikely figure - now-New Orleans-based author Thomas Lowenstein, who 
met Ogrod in 2003 while researching what he'd thought would be a book about 
capital punishment. After spending 3 days talking to Ogrod in the Pennsylvania 
state lock-up, Lowenstein left instead convinced that Philly cops and 
prosecutors had put away the wrong man - and has spent the next 15 years trying 
to prove it.

"They're going to kill this guy - and he's innocent," the author says in the 
HLN program, which hews very closely to the text of Lowenstein's riveting book 
on the case published just last year, The Trials of Walter Ogrod. The writer's 
own unusual odyssey - his interest in crime and punishment stems from the 
murder of his father, the renowned 1960s-activist-turned-U.S.-congressman 
Allard Lowenstein, killed in 1980 by a mentally ill acolyte - adds moral 
ballast to the narrative. But the core of the story is what his reporting 
turned up.

Both the book and the program raise serious doubt about the police work of the 
homicide detectives who - after the murder trail had grown cold for four years 
- took in Ogrod, a then-25-year-old neighbor who worked as a truck driver and 
is described by Lowenstein as "slow," for questioning exactly 26 years ago, 
April 5, 1992. They reportedly kept him awake for 14 hours, told him he was 
repressing memories of killing Barbara Jean and finally got him to sign a 
confession.

A year later, a jury almost didn't buy it; it filled out a slip finding Ogrod - 
never linked to any physical evidence in the case - "not guilty," but when the 
panel returned to the courtroom for the verdict reading, 1 of the jurors 
blurted out that he disagreed, causing a mistrial. At Ogrod's 2nd trial in 
1996, prosecutors presented a different theory of the case that didn't rely on 
the confession but on testimony from a jailhouse snitch who claimed Ogrod had 
told him details of the killing.

The snitch who testified at trial had been introduced to Ogrod by another, more 
experienced jailhouse informant who'd also contacted prosecutors about the case 
- the notorious John Hall, nicknamed "The Monsignor" after he'd been linked to 
so many high-profile confessions. By the late 1990s, Hall's credibility had 
been questioned by some police and prosecutors, but by then Ogrod had been 
found guilty and placed on death row.

In Sunday's telecast, Pearlman gets Phyllis Hall - widow of John Hall, who died 
in the 2000s - to go on camera with the same explosive claim that she'd earlier 
made to Lowenstein, that she'd fed information to her late husband to help him 
fabricate stories about not just Ogrod but many other criminal defendants.

Phyllis Hall says "I helped him put Walter on death row" - sending her husband 
newspaper clippings that helped him make up a story that he then fed to his 
fellow inmate who testified, Jay Wolchansky. The homicide detectives and the 
district attorney fed John the info," she said, describing her late husband's 
work in multiple cases. "He would get some of the truth and he would sit in his 
cell and make up stories - and he was darned good at it."

The lead prosecutor in Ogrod's 2nd trial, Judy Rubino, tells Lowenstein in a 
taped interview that's replayed in the broadcast that his evidence for perjury 
is lacking, unless Wolchansky himself recanted. The cops who interrogated Ogrod 
and other key figures in the case declined to be interviewed for the 
documentary.

Although Rollins and other attorneys took on Ogrod's appeal, pro bono, not long 
after Lowenstein published his preliminary findings in a Philadelphia City 
Paper series in 2004, the wheels of justice have spun in super-duper slow 
motion. That's in part because lawyers for Philadelphia's district attorneys - 
including Lynne Abraham, the "Deadliest DA" who pursued the death penalty with 
zeal and was in charge during Ogrod's prosecution, and her successor Seth 
Williams - vigorously fought Ogrod's team at every step, including the requests 
for DNA testing that wouldn't have been possible in the 1990s.

After I wrote about Lowenstein's book last year, Krasner - at the time still a 
Democratic candidate in a crowded primary field - issued a statement that while 
he could not weigh in on the specifics of the Ogrod case, "it is clear that for 
decades the practice and policy of the District Attorney's Office has been to 
win convictions at any cost, too often at the cost of justice itself." Now that 
Krasner is DA, the news of a changed stance toward DNA testing and a fresh 
review of Ogrod's conviction seems to be making good on that pledge.

"Walter feels like the stars are finally aligning," said Pearlman, who hopes 
that telling Ogrod's story on a national TV show will raise the profile of what 
she believes is a miscarriage of justice.

Then-candidate Krasner also said this back in 2017: "4-year-old Barbara Jean 
Horn was murdered. If the wrong person went to death row for it - and I specify 
that I am saying if - then the person who did murder her walked free."

Indeed, that's a point that Lowenstein and Pearlman - whose program features 
sympathetic audio with Barbara Jean's mother and step-father, Sharon and John 
Fahy, who have believed that Ogrod killed their daughter - can't stress enough. 
If it can be proved that Walter Ogrod spent 1/2 his life locked up for a crime 
he didn't commit, that's not the only huge injustice here. It also means that a 
monster who assaulted a 4-year-girl and stuffed her naked body in a box got 
away with it, and that is unconscionable.

(source: Opinion, Will Bunch----phillynews.com)

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

Murder Victim's Family Blames Philadelphia DA For Mishandling Of Case



A Philadelphia family is outraged that District Attorney Larry Krasner is doing 
away with the death penalty. It's been a painful 35 years for Samantha Jay and 
her family. Her uncle, 22-year-old David Bernstein was brutally murdered in 
July 1982.

"They beat him with baseball bats," she told Eyewitness News.

Authorities say Joseph Kindler, Bernstein's friend, killed him. Bernstein was 
set to testify against Kindler about burglaries the 2 committed in the 
Philadelphia area. Detectives say Bernstein was beaten and thrown in the 
Delaware River with a cinder block tied to him.

Kindler escaped from prison twice, once in Pennsylvania and a 2nd time in 
Canada. He was finally caught and brought back to Philadelphia and was put on 
death row, but that's all changing now. Krasner wants to do away with the death 
penalty. There was even a hearing last month to take Kindler off death row. Jay 
and her family say they never got a heads up about the change.

District Attorney Files Shortened Motion For Meek Mill's Release

"Krasner is putting my entire family in jeopardy. The guy has escaped from 
prison numerous times," Jay said.

Eyewitness News reached out to Krasner for an interview. We were given this 
statement:

"We certainly are sympathetic to the Bernstein family and the unspeakable 
tragedy that they have been dealing with since David's murder. Our chief of 
homicide has also publicly acknowledged that there was a mistake made due to an 
internal miscommunication in regards to contacting the immediate family about 
the re-sentencing.

To be clear, the end result of this case is that the killer, Joseph Kindler, 
has agreed to drop all of his appeals and will spend the remainder of his life 
behind bars. The approach taken by the District Attorney's Office in this case 
means that there is no chance that he will be released, paroled, or seek a 
successful appeal. He will die in prison."

Family Of Fallen Officer Wants Philadelphia DA Off Case

Jay says the statement is not good enough for her family. She says the man who 
has escaped twice certainly could do it again and she wants protection from law 
enforcement for members of her family.

"I know he's going to escape. There's not a doubt in my mind. He's a 
manipulator. He always has been," Jay said.

(source: CBS News)








NORTH CAROLINA:

Prosecutors to seek death penalty for Erica Parsons' adoptive father



The Rowan County prosecutor said Wednesday he plans to seek the death penalty 
for Erica Parsons' adoptive father Sandy.

Erica was reported missing in 2013 and her remains were found in 2016.

Sandy Parsons and his wife Casey are accused of physically abusing Erica, 
killing her, and then trying to cover it up for years.

The Parsons have been in federal prison since 2014. They've been serving time 
on fraud charges for accepting benefits after Erica's disappearance.

They were brought back to Rowan County earlier this year to face state charges 
in the case.

Casey and Sandy Parsons are charged with the following felonies:

1st-degree murder

Felony child abuse with serious physical injury

Felony obstruction of justice

Felony concealment of death

Prosecutors have not said yet if they plan to seek the death penalty for Casey 
Parsons.

Investigators said the child was likely dead long before she was reported 
missing and her remains were found on a property off Moore Road, near Pageland, 
South Carolina.

Family and unidentified law enforcement sources told Channel 9 that Sandy 
Parsons led investigators to the remains.

"I hope they do. That's what they deserve," Erica's aunt, Teresa Goodman, said.

Attorney Carlyle Sherrill used to represent the Parsons and said he's not 
surprised that prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

He believes that with the death penalty on the table, there is no way the case 
can be tried in Rowan County. He also believes the autopsy report gives the 
defense an opening.

"I think the autopsy lends itself to creating some of that doubt because it 
doesn't say specifically how she died," Sherrill said.

The capital defender's office appointed Parsons an attorney and Sherill thinks 
it will be a long time before the case goes to trial because the defense will 
need to do their own investigation.

"It's going to be very hard," Goodman said. "If that's what it takes to get 
some justice, I'm all for it."

(source: WLOS news)








FLORIDA:

Justices toss out death sentence in Carlie Brucia murder



A divided Florida Supreme Court on Thursday ordered resentencing for a death 
row inmate who was convicted in the 2004 sexual assault and murder of 
11-year-old Carlie Brucia --- a Sarasota County case that drew national 
attention.

The 4-3 decision vacating the death sentence of Joseph P. Smith came in one of 
dozens of appeals filed by death row inmates after a January 2016 U.S. Supreme 
Court decision that found Florida's death-penalty process was unconstitutional 
because it gave too much authority to judges, instead of juries.

That U.S. Supreme Court decision and subsequent Florida Supreme Court rulings 
have led to requirements that juries must unanimously agree on critical 
findings before judges can impose death sentences and must unanimously 
recommend the death penalty.

A jury recommended in a 10-2 vote that Smith be sentenced to death. Though that 
occurred before the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Florida Supreme Court 
has applied the unanimity requirements retroactively to many cases.

"In Smith's case, the jury did not make the requisite factual findings and did 
not unanimously recommend a sentence of death," said Thursday's majority 
opinion shared by Chief Justice Jorge Labarga and justices Barbara Pariente, R. 
Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince. "Instead, the jury recommended the sentence of 
death by a vote of 10 to 2."

The opinion said the Supreme Court has "no way of knowing if the jury 
unanimously found" what are known as aggravating factors that help determine 
whether defendants are sentenced to death and if aggravating factors outweighed 
mitigating circumstances.

"Further, this (Supreme) Court cannot speculate why the 2 jurors who voted to 
recommend a sentence of life imprisonment determined that a sentence of death 
was not the appropriate punishment," the opinion said.

Justices Charles Canady, Ricky Polston and Alan Lawson dissented. Canady and 
Polston did not explain their dissent, though they have frequently dissented in 
other cases stemming from the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Lawson also did not explain his reasons but cited a dissent he wrote in 
February in a separate case. In that case, he said the court should use a 
"proper rational jury test" and that the case involved findings that "no 
objectively reasonable jury, properly instructed, would have failed to 
unanimously make in support of a unanimous death recommendation."

The Brucia case drew widespread attention, in part, because a surveillance 
camera showed Smith grabbing the girl by the arm and leading her away from a 
carwash. Brucia's body was found 4 days later naked from the waist down except 
for a sock on her foot, and a medical examiner said she was sexually assaulted 
while she was still alive and died of strangulation, according to a brief filed 
in the Supreme Court by Attorney General Pam Bondi's office.

(source: Fox News)

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

Executive order on Markeith Loyd murder case expires----21 other death 
penalty-related orders also expire, prompting letter from Ayala



22 executive orders concerning possible death penalty cases in Orange and 
Osceola counties have expired, prompting a letter to be written by State 
Attorney Aramis Ayala. Ayala addressed the letter, obtained by News 6, to State 
Attorney Brad King of Marion County.

Gov. Rick Scott used executive orders to assign King more than 20 cases after 
Ayala announced last year that she would not seek the death penalty in any case 
in her office.

"After reviewing several Executive Orders, it is clear that 22 executive 
assignments to you have expired," she wrote. "The ramifications of expired 
Executive Orders could question your jurisdiction."

She offered a remedy.

"It appears that the most immediate fix would be for me to repeat the process I 
offered last year and cross-designate you and your team to serve here in our 
circuit," she wrote.

News 6 investigated and found out those expired executive orders include the 
murder case of Markeith Loyd, which expired on March 16.

Loyd is charged with killing Orlando police Lt. Debra Clayton when she tried to 
arrest him in the death of his 1-time girlfriend, Sade Dixon.

News 6 pulled 21 other cases that were assigned to King in April 2017, and all 
of those expired Tuesday.

"We don't want Ayala back on our case," said Stephanie Dixon-Daniels, Sade 
Dixon's mother.

She and her husband called King's office and the governor's office Wednesday 
afternoon, and they got results within hours.

"Our office received a request this afternoon from State Attorney Brad King's 
office to extend the 22 executive assignments that are being prosecuted by his 
office," wrote McKinley Lewis, deputy communications director for the 
governor's office. "Per standard procedure, these assignments will be extended. 
We appreciate State Attorney Brad King's willingness to seek justice on behalf 
of the victims of these crimes and their families. The Governor will never stop 
fighting for victims of crime and their families."

News 6 reached out to Ayala's office after normal business hours to receive a 
comment on the extensions, and expects to hear back Thursday.?

Dixon's family members said they're glad the governor extended the executive 
orders.

(source: clickorlando.com)








LOUISIANA:

Louisiana efforts to free wrongfully convicted may lose money under House bill



Louisiana public defenders said a bill moving through the state Legislature 
threatens to shut down efforts to exonerate people who were sent to prison for 
a wrongful conviction. It would also take money away from other efforts to 
appeal convictions of people who can't afford their own attorneys and whose 
cases are too expensive for local public defenders to handle.

House Bill 167 could also cut funding for death penalty case defense, which 
public defenders said would slow down those cases and possibly cost the state 
more money in the long run. But the House Committee on the Administration of 
Criminal Justice signed off on the proposal Wednesday (April 4), and it's now 
headed to the full House for consideration.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Sherman Mack, R-Albany, requires the 
Louisiana Public Defender Board to automatically send 70 % of its funding to 
local public defenders' offices every year. Currently, board is required to 
send 65 % to public defenders, a rate set in a law Mack authored 2 years ago. 
The extra 5 % in the new legislation would amount to about $1.7 million, 
according to Jay Dixon, the state public defender.

"We simply don't have the money to fund the cases." - Jefferson Parish public 
defender

In an interview, Mack said he is bringing the legislation because district 
attorneys are complaining the public defenders' offices aren't staffed well 
enough for the court to hear cases in a timely manner.

Because public defenders around the state lack resources, judges aren't able to 
get through court dockets as quickly as they should. Mack said he is hearing 
complaints about this from local prosecutors, though the Louisiana District 
Attorneys Association said it isn't endorsing his bill.

No one argues that Louisiana's public defenders are facing a funding crisis, 
but the money that would be diverted to them is already used to support cases 
that are too expensive for them to handle at the local level, public defenders 
said at Wednesday's committee hearing.

Funding would likely be cut for the Innocence Project New Orleans, which works 
to overturn wrongful convictions. The Louisiana Appellate Project would also 
likely see money taken away; it handles appeals across the state that involve 
people who aren't facing the death penalty but can't afford their own attorney.

The Louisiana Center for Children's Rights, which represents juveniles in court 
and advocates, could also lose funding. Finally, money used to provide defense 
lawyers for death penalty cases might be cut by as much as 1/3, according to 
the public defenders and other advocates opposing the bill.

Indigent inmates sue Gov. Edwards, public defense board

The class-action suit filed in Baton Rouge seeks an injunction against a public 
defenders system that it says fails to provide constitutionally adequate 
representation.

Emily Maw, director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, said the legislation 
would devastate and likely shutter her organization. Her group already can't 
keep up with demands for its services, with 3,000 outstanding requests from 
people in prison, she said.

King Alexander, a public defender who works on life without parole cases in the 
Lake Charles area, said public defenders around the state depend on nonprofits 
to handle cases that they don't have the staff or resources to handle. "If we 
got appointed on a single death penalty case, it would destroy us," Alexander 
said of his office.

Public defenders have been in crisis for a few years because of a statewide 
funding shortage. Louisiana has only 1/5 of public defenders it needs to 
properly shoulder the caseload of indigent defendants in the state, according 
to a 2017 study.

Public defenders in around a dozen judicial districts, including New Orleans, 
were refusing lower-level cases last year because they didn't have enough 
resources to handle them. At the time, no one was asking them to handle appeals 
or death penalty defense.

Orleans public defenders: Innocent imprisoned because we're overworked

"We simply don't have the time," Orleans Public Defender's Office staff 
attorney Brandi McNeil told journalist Anderson Cooper.

Unlike anywhere else in the country, Louisiana's local public defender offices 
are primarily funded through fees attached to local traffic tickets. The amount 
of revenue going to local public defenders' offices has been going down because 
fewer traffic tickets are going through the court system, according to Dixon, 
the state public defender.

In 2017, an investigative report from The Lens revealed that many traffic 
tickets weren't being settled in court anymore -- where the public defender 
fees get assessed -- because they were being diverted into a pretrial program 
where the money collected gets sent to district attorneys instead.

Still, taking money from nonprofits who handle more difficult cases and giving 
it to the local public defender offices isn't the answer, opponents of Mack's 
bill said. The U.S. Constitution requires that people who can't afford an 
attorney have adequate representation, especially in death penalty cases.

Providing representation for a person facing the death penalty costs a lot of 
money to do right -- and the bar is high for what is legally considered 
adequate representation.

In 2016, the public defender board paid $9.5 million for 30 to 40 capital 
cases. That often frustrates lawmakers, including Mack, who think the money 
should be spent elsewhere when public defenders have other needs. But indigent 
defense advocates argue if the state doesn't provide enough money upfront to 
deal with death penalty cases, it ends up costing more because the state loses 
appeals due to improper representation.

(source: nola.com)