[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., KY., NEB., NEV.

[Rick Halperin]

August 5




PENNSYLVANIA:

Death Penalty to Be Sought in 1992 Slaying of Schoolteacher


A prosecutor has announced plans to seek the death penalty against the man 
charged in the 1992 sexual assault and strangulation of an elementary school 
teacher in Pennsylvania.

LNP newspaper reports that the Lancaster County district attorney's office gave 
notice last week of intent to seek capital punishment if 49-year-old Raymond 
Rowe is convicted of 1st-degree murder.

Rowe was charged earlier this year with criminal homicide, rape, involuntary 
deviate sexual intercourse and burglary in the death of 25-year-old Christy 
Mirack in East Lampeter Township.

Prosecutors said the death penalty would be warranted because the killing was 
committed during the sexual assault and burglary felonies.

Police were unable to identify Rowe as a suspect until they uncovered 
genealogical data leading them to the professional DJ.

His attorney declined comment.

(source: Associated Press)






KENTUCKY:

My Mother Witnessed the Public Hanging of a Black Man in Kentucky


A female reporter covering the execution of a man by a female sheriff may have 
been her editor's idea of a practical joke.

Pope Francis declared last week that the death penalty is always wrong, 
challenging Catholics worldwide to put an end to state-sanctioned executions. 
The death penalty debate has raged in America for years, and this True Story 
looks back to a time - not so very long ago - when hundreds gathered for what 
would become the country's last official public execution.

The classic newspaper execution story was part of the ace reporter's repertoire 
in Depression-era Chicago. The condemned man's courage or cowardice as he's 
being strapped into the electric chair, his last words, the high-voltage jolt, 
the exact time when he was declared dead - it was all there in stark black and 
white. My father, Donald W. Newton, one of the Chicago Daily News' cadre of 
virtuosic scribes, threw himself into those beat-by-beat accounts with 
Balzacian verve.

My mother, on the other hand, though an ace for a competing newspaper, was made 
of more delicate stuff. She had covered her share of murder trials for the 
Chicago Times, but she never fit the profile of the hard-boiled reporter. She 
was more comfortable writing touching human interest stories about, say, the 
famous Radium Girls, factory workers who destroyed their health by painting the 
hands of mass-produced watches with radioactive coloring.

Mary Alfredine Doty, my mom, was never one to revel in the competing 
brutalities of ruthless criminals and a vengeful criminal justice system. One 
day in 1936, however, she was brusquely thrust into the middle of it for a 
story that hit the front pages of newspapers across the country.

What the town of Owensboro had ... was the prospect of the first-ever female 
executioner, carrying out her lethal obligations on a public stage.

She told me about this decades later, in one of her patented out-of-the-blue 
revelations of surprising things that I didn't know about my mother. The 
conversation had drifted to lynchings, capital punishment and how Black people 
fared in the criminal justice system, and my mother got a far-seeing look, 
indicating she knew a thing or 2 about the subject. Yes, there had been a time 
when she had covered something like that. The public hanging of a Black man in 
Kentucky.

It was a familiar story: A 70-year-old White widow, raped and murdered in her 
own home by a 26-year-old Black man. The local prosecutor had elected to try 
the man only for rape - not murder or robbery - because the penalty in Kentucky 
would then be public hanging. For condemned man Rainey Bethea, there would be 
no escape in his final moments from public scrutiny in an enclosed death 
chamber. The jury in Bethea's trial took less than 5 minutes to find him a 
worthy candidate for the hangman's noose on a public gallows.

What made the story more than a local issue - another Black man meeting death 
at the end of a rope - was the designated executioner. In Daviess County, 
Kentucky, the local sheriff was supposed to attend to the nuts and bolts of 
execution. But the sheriff had recently died, and taking his place, by order of 
a bighearted county judge, was the dead sheriff's wife, Florence Thompson.

"By law, it was the sheriff who had to carry out the hanging," my mother 
explained.

What the town of Owensboro had in August 1936, then, was the prospect of the 
1st-ever female executioner, carrying out her lethal obligations on a public 
stage.

It was a titillating story, and the newspapers played it for all it was worth, 
my mother said. People went nuts for the idea of this fine example of White 
Southern womanhood somehow delivering the coup de grace to a Black rapist, she 
said. The city desk felt the need for a female reporter's touch.

Little attention was devoted to the real protagonist of this drama, Bethea, a 
26-year-old farmhand. He had confessed, of course, but he soon recanted. His 
team of lawyers - local courthouse regulars - advised the condemned man to 
plead guilty and beg for mercy. They subpoenaed four witnesses but never 
summoned any of them to the witness stand. In fact, the defense was notable for 
its total absence from the proceedings, my mother said.

"It was how things were done in those days," my mother said, bowing her head. 
The big story, it seems, was Thompson. What would she do? How would she react?

By the morning of execution day, there was a garrulous, alcohol-marinated crowd 
of about 20,000 gathered in an empty field near the Ohio River around a 
makeshift gallows, some chanting for the show to begin, others hungover from 
all-night "necktie parties."

Bethea was finally brought forward, handcuffed, mounting the steps of the 
gallows under the guidance of sheriff's deputies. "Quiet and dignified," my 
mother described him.

Then came Mrs. Thompson. "She was in the back of a black limousine, and she 
stepped out wearing a hat with a thick veil." Accompanying her was a man in a 
white suit and Panama hat, a little woozy from drink, exchanging words with 
Thompson before climbing the steps himself.

The advertised gender breakthrough turned out to be a total dud. It was the man 
in white who pulled the black sack over Bethea's head, fit the noose around his 
neck and guided him onto the trapdoor on the gallows platform. The lady sheriff 
sat in the car. After a long delay, the door snapped open, and the condemned 
man plummeted to his death.

A shocked pause. Then a rush forward toward the dead man. "The crowd surged 
toward the gallows, and people started tearing off pieces of the black cloth 
for souvenirs," my mother said, still sensing the shock of the scene.

Maybe Bethea - who declined to speak any last words to the snarling crowd - 
will never get justice. But the contingent of Northern journalists reported 
fully on the ghoulish behavior of people in the crowd at the end of the 
proceedings.

It's a black mark that offends Owensboro city fathers to this day. City 
officials and defenders of Owensboro still insist that none of this happened. 
The crowd was no more disorderly than spectators at a baseball game, they said. 
It was Northern reporters who, disappointed by the sedateness of the scene, 
collectively concocted the unruly crowd story - perhaps the 1st ever alleged 
"fake news" scenario.

My mother, known by friends and relatives as an unstinting truth-teller, almost 
saintly in her honesty, didn???t talk about the civics issues. She just 
somberly shook her head, as she often did when she learned of someone's 
unspeakably repellent behavior. For me, anyway, that was incontrovertible proof 
that it happened the way my mother said it did.

The state of Kentucky, acknowledging the unseemly aspect of the hanging, soon 
called a stop to public executions (the last state to do so). Bethea's 
execution was the last official public hanging in the U.S.

(source: ozy.com)






NEBRASKA:

Church and state have collided during death penalty debate in Nebraska


As Nebraska hurtles toward a solemn moment it has not experienced in 21 years, 
its public officials - and citizens - confront what may be tension between 
their personal views and the tenets of their religious faith.

Sometimes, they conflict. Or may appear to do so.

Sometimes, they require a choice to be made.

In America, the separation of church and state has established that the 
government is sovereign in settling that argument if and when it reaches the 
governing stage.

But for individuals, including officeholders, the choice remains personal, 
individual, less clear, sometimes more unsettling and intense.

Occasionally, and sometimes dramatically, it all plays out on the public or 
political stage.

When Gov. Ben Nelson sat in the 2nd-floor family quarters at the Governor's 
Residence one July night in 1996 fielding phone calls from the State 
Penitentiary at midnight, it was a solemn and virtually solitary moment.

Nelson was alerted to each stage of John Joubert's walk to the electric chair, 
from an 11:15 p.m. call informing the governor of the contents of Joubert's 
final statement to a 12:04 a.m. call alerting Nelson that Joubert was being 
escorted to the electric chair.

At 12:16 a.m., the phone rang and the governor was told that the death sentence 
had been carried out.

Nelson, a Methodist who once considered the ministry as a career, said that 
night that his support for capital punishment fit into his understanding of the 
Bible and his Christian faith.

Yes, he said, he had prayed about it.

And, yes, he said, he would not sleep well for the 2nd night in a row.

Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Catholic and a member of St. Margaret Mary Parish in 
Omaha, said he believes the Bible and church teaching do not preclude use of 
the death penalty.

But Pope Francis changed that teaching to fully reject any use of the death 
penalty with an announcement Thursday that came 12 days before the scheduled 
execution of Carey Dean Moore. The decision to make the change had been 
approved in May, according to the Vatican.

The official teaching contained in the church's Catechism now states that the 
use of capital punishment is "inadmissible because it is an attack on the 
inviolability and dignity of the person."

Earlier, Pope Francis had described the death penalty as "contrary to the 
Gospel because it is freely decided to suppress a human life that is always 
sacred in the eyes of the Creator and, of which, in the final analysis, God 
alone is the true judge and guarantor."

That marked a departure from Pope John Paul II's declaration in 1995 that use 
of the death penalty is justified if there is no other option that would 
adequately protect society.

The 3 Catholic bishops in Nebraska recently issued a joint statement opposing 
the scheduled execution of Moore.

"Each time we consider applying capital punishment, Nebraska has an opportunity 
to respond to an act of violence with an act of mercy that does not endanger 
public safety or compromise the demands of justice," Archbishop George Lucas of 
Omaha, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln and Bishop Joseph Hanefeldt of Grand 
Island said.

The execution of Moore is "not necessary to fulfill justice and, for that 
reason, would undermine respect for human life," they stated.

Both the governor and Archbishop Lucas declined to be interviewed for this 
story.

Ricketts vetoed the 2015 bill that repealed the death penalty in Nebraska and 
fought hard to have his veto sustained by the Legislature. He fell 1 vote 
short.

And then he swiftly helped launch and fund a statewide referendum drive to 
repeal the new law.

Nebraska voters did that in an overwhelming way in the 2016 general election: 
494,151 to 320,719.

92 of the state's 93 counties voted to restore the death penalty; only 
Lancaster County voted to retain the new law.

The dramatic death penalty struggle divided Catholics, as well as other 
Christians, in the Legislature, challenging many senators to examine, or 
re-examine, their faith.

While the battle was led by Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who proclaims himself 
to be a nonbeliever while constantly challenging his colleagues with biblical 
quotations memorized when he was a younger man, it was a Catholic senator from 
Lincoln who quietly decided to systematically gather support from among his 
conservative Republican colleagues in the nonpartisan Legislature.

And as the debate to ultimately override the governor's veto neared its end, 
Sen. Colby Coash slipped into an old phone booth in the back of the legislative 
chamber with his grandfather's rosary in hand.

Sixteen senators who were Republicans ultimately would vote to override the 
veto that day.

The climactic vote on the motion to override the governor's veto was cast by 
Sen. Robert Hilkemann of Omaha, a Presbyterian, who had carefully listened to 
both sides and weighed his decision for so long that he suddenly found himself 
in the eye of the storm holding what would be the decisive vote.

"To be very honest with you, this has been a spiritual journey for me from the 
very beginning, one that reached the very depths of my soul," he said two days 
later as the tension began to ease.

For many members of the Legislature, it had been an emotionally challenging 
issue that required re-examination of both self and soul.

Perhaps the seminal moment in clearly defining the role and influence of 
religion, and particularly the Catholic Church, in political policy and 
decision-making in the United States occurred in 1960.

John F. Kennedy directly addressed the question of separation of church and 
state when his Catholicism had become an issue in his presidential campaign 
with opponents suggesting his greater loyalty inevitably would be to his church 
and ultimately to the Vatican.

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, 
where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how 
to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to 
vote," Kennedy declared in an address to an association of Protestant ministers 
in Houston.

That is an America "where no public official either requests or accepts 
instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches 
or any other ecclesiastical source," Kennedy said.

"I do not speak for my church on public matters," he said, "and the church does 
not speak for me."

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

Brother of death row inmate Carey Dean Moore: 'He would just like to die'


If the state executes Carey Dean Moore next week as planned for killing 2 men 
in 1979, his twin brother will be there with him.

"It will not be easy, no," said 60-year-old David Moore of Lincoln. "But Dean 
wants me there, so I have little choice. Sometimes none of us have a choice in 
things. Swing with the punches and come up kicking."

David Moore always has called his brother Dean, even after others started 
calling him Carey. There's nothing he wouldn't do for him, he said. Same as a 
lot of brothers. Maybe even more so with twins.

And 34 years ago, David Moore showed how far he would go when he swapped places 
with his brother and put himself on death row in a spur-of-the-moment escape 
attempt so that his brother might get to breathe fresh air again.

"Imprisoned twin brothers switch places" read the headline in the Lincoln 
Journal on Oct. 4, 1984.

It took several hours before Carey Dean Moore reported to his brother's job in 
the prison kitchen and the supervisor noticed it wasn't David.

"Back then we were both animals. We weren't fit to be allowed in society, I 
guess."

-- David Moore

They were 26 then. David Moore was serving four to six years for burglary. 
Carey Dean Moore was on death row for the murders of 2 Omaha cab drivers, Reuel 
Van Ness Jr. and Maynard Helgeland.

"Back then we were both animals. We weren't fit to be allowed in society, I 
guess," David Moore said.

* * *

In 1979, David Moore was in prison in Washington when he heard about Carey Dean 
and their 14-year-old brother, Donald Moore, getting arrested for the killing 
of Van Ness during an armed robbery, and Carey Dean for the killing of a 2nd 
cab driver, Helgeland, 4 days later.

"I was shocked and yet I wasn't shocked," David Moore recently told the Journal 
Star. "We both had a sensation that there was something or somebody coming 
after us. Me? I took off. But Dean decided to stay around, and he ended up 
serving a lot more time."

They had a pretty rough childhood in north Omaha, he said. They were 2 of 11 
siblings. There never was enough money. Lots of times they sat down to the 
table and had nothing to eat. If they stole food, they'd get a spanking from 
Mom and a beating from Dad.

They did what they had to to survive, David Moore said.

Back in those days, it seemed like everyone was against them, they just didn't 
know why, he said.

"It was get them before they can get you," David Moore said. "Unfortunately, we 
didn't learn to respect people before something really bad happened."

* * *

On Aug. 20, 1979, Carey Dean Moore bought a gun for $50 from a driver who 
shared a Happy Cab with Moore's mother. 2 days later, he called for a cab from 
a telephone booth at the Smoke Pit, planning to rob and shoot the driver. He 
hid nearby to see if the driver was old enough, telling police later it would 
be harder to shoot someone around his own age, 21.

David Moore said his brother told him when he pointed the gun at Van Ness, the 
driver reached into the back seat. They were playing a kind of deadly 
tug-of-war with the pistol when it went off.

Carey Dean couldn't really believe what he'd done, he told David Moore, so he 
asked 14-year-old Donald to look. Was the man really dead?

4 days later, Carey Dean Moore went to see if he could do it again, alone this 
time.

He called a cab to the Greyhound bus depot and asked Helgeland for a ride to 
the Benson area. Helgeland was found dead in his cab the next morning.

Every day since, David Moore said, his brother has wished he could take it 
back.

"Dean isn't like what he was," he said.

* * *

Since then, the Nebraska Supreme Court has given Carey Dean Moore 7 execution 
dates - Sept. 20, 1980; Aug. 20, 1982; Dec. 4, 1984; May 9, 1997; Jan. 19, 
2000; May 8, 2007; June 14, 2011 - before this one, Tuesday, Aug. 14.

There were delays by attorneys and the court, some that came in his own case, 
some prompted by other death-row cases. There were challenges over whether the 
aggravating factor known as "exceptional depravity" that made his case eligible 
for capital punishment was unconstitutionally vague, and whether electrocution 
was cruel and unusual punishment.

There were stays and resentencings.

In a recent email to the Journal Star from the Tecumseh State Correctional 
Institution, Carey Dean Moore said June 20 marked his 38th year on death row.

It's among the longest anyone has been on death row in the country.

"And in August it will be 39 yrs since I convinced my 14 yr old brother to go 
with me only to rob a man who drove a Omaha cab, almost 39 yrs. Are you people 
listening to me?!" he wrote.

Carey Dean Moore said the American Civil Liberties Union and his attorney at 
the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy would like to fight the execution on 
his behalf.

"But most certainly I do not (want that)," Moore said. "If they would file a 
motion for my brother, Donald, to get him off parole, which he has been on 
since forever, it seems like, that would be perfect for me."

Donald Moore got 10 years to life for 2nd-degree murder. He was released from 
prison 10 years ago, but he could be on parole forever.

A week after the email, Carey Dean Moore learned his newest execution date.

Carey Dean Moore marveled at how God is able to work in the hearts of people 
forced to grapple with pain and anger, "all because of what one man (me) had 
done - murdering 2 men. I am so sorry for what I had done to these families, 
even more than anyone can imagine."

Asked to respond, the man who found religion inside the prison walls said he 
marveled at how God is able to work in the hearts of people forced to grapple 
with pain and anger, "all because of what 1 man (me) had done - murdering two 
men. I am so sorry for what I had done to these families, even more than anyone 
can imagine."

He said he's thankful for God's forgiveness for his actions and sins, and prays 
his victims' families will forgive him.

"It is easy to cause hurt, but it takes great strength to forgive," he said.

* * *

David Moore is a couple years from retiring from Farmland, a job he's had for 
26 years. He heard about his twin brother's August execution date from his 
daughter, but he didn't really consider it to be true until his brother told 
him during a visit.

"If this happens it's a relief," he said. "Dean has almost been executed 6 or 7 
times and each time you start preparing yourself for it."

So do the families. Both Moore's and the victims'. It must be tough on them, 
David Moore said.

His brother wants the state to go through with it this time.

"He would just like to die," David Moore said.

Carey Dean Moore admitted his guilt a long time ago, stopped his appeals, even 
tried to fire his lawyers.

"There's got to be a time to say stop," David Moore said. "I just hope they 
finally do it, stop messing around and pull the switch, give him a couple of 
shots or whatever. Do it instead of talking and talking about it."

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

Family members remember men slain by Moore, say legal wrangling has gone on too 
long


Maynard Helgeland was shot and killed by Carey Dean Moore in his Omaha taxi 
cab. As the state prepares to execute Moore this month, families of the victims 
say they are having to relive the dark days. "I feel like my father and Mr. Van 
Ness have kind of been forgotten in this," Lori Helgeland-Renken said.

Lori Helgeland-Renken spent the evening of Aug. 26, 1979, reading "Amityville 
Horror" in her Council Bluffs, Iowa, duplex, turning the pages well into the 
early morning hours, oblivious of the real-life horrors to come.

The 19-year-old woman had never heard the name Carey Dean Moore, had no clue 
the 22-year-old man had gone to the Greyhound bus station in Omaha with evil on 
his mind.

She couldn't know her father would be sitting in the only cab at the taxi stand 
there, that Moore would crawl in, direct the driver she loved to a downtown 
alley and shoot him.

Not until her phone rang.

Nearly 39 years later, the memory remains vivid: The Omaha police detective 
wouldn???t tell her why he was calling, and asked her to meet him in a nearby 
high school parking lot because he was having trouble finding her apartment. 
She took her best friend with her and learned in the back of a police cruiser 
that her father, Maynard Helgeland, was dead.

She blames the state of Nebraska for causing her grief to bubble to the surface 
once more.

"It's like reliving it all over. Like it was brand-new," she said recently in a 
telephone interview from her home in Mount Vernon, South Dakota.

In 1980, Moore was sentenced to death for murdering Helgeland and - 4 days 
earlier - another cab driver, Reuel Van Ness Jr.

Moore is scheduled to die by lethal injection Aug. 14, the 1st person executed 
in Nebraska in 21 years.

He's been on Nebraska's death row longer than anyone else and is among the 
longest-serving death row inmates in the country. He's said he no longer wants 
to fight the execution.

Helgeland's children are angry and tired and not at all sure it will happen.

For the 1st decade, Helgeland-Renken said, she thought the death penalty was 
the right sentence.

"It was like, he needs to pay for what he did. It was planned and deliberate 
and just horrible," she said. "But as time goes on ... after all this time, 
what's the point? I just think if he doesn't like being on death row I'd like 
to just leave him there."

Her younger brother, Steve Helgeland, who was 13 when their father was killed 
and now lives in Rapid City, South Dakota, said he just wants Moore off the 
front page of the paper. But the state's been dragging its feet for nearly 40 
years, he said, and he's doubtful it will happen this time.

"After this long, it's as much farce as it is justice," he said.

And who's gotten lost in all the legal wrangling, say the family members, are 
the victims.

"I feel like my father and Mr. Van Ness have kind of been forgotten in this," 
Helgeland-Renken said.

* * *

Both men were fathers and Korean War veterans. They'd both worked construction 
in addition to driving cabs.

Van Ness, a native of Omaha, was married and had 13 children.

Tom Rinabarger, a stepson who lives in Omaha, works construction like his dad. 
That work, he said, makes him think of him daily.

"Everything I do in life reminds me of my dad," said an emotional Rinabarger in 
a brief interview. Other family members couldn't be reached.

Maynard Helgeland was born during the Depression in a small town near Mitchell, 
South Dakota, to a single mom.

It wasn't easy to be an unmarried mother in those days, but her father welcomed 
his grandson.

"He said there's always room at the table for one more, so she brought him 
home," said Steve Helgeland.

As a teen in the late 1940s, Maynard Helgeland took up boxing and competed in 
numerous Golden Gloves tournaments.

He joined the Air Force during the Korean War, and later married and had 3 
children - Kenny, Lori and Steve. Around 1970, the family moved to Council 
Bluffs, Iowa, so Helgeland could work construction at a friend's business.

His youngest son remembers his dad buying him bicycles and teaching him to 
shoot BB guns.

Their dad loved Billy Graham and animals and was a generous and accepting man, 
his children said.

"If he had 2 bucks and you needed 2 bucks, he'd give you 2 bucks," 
Helgeland-Renken said. "If (Moore) had just wanted money dad would have given 
him anything."

Once, in his boxing days, Helgeland went to an out-of-town tournament with 
other boxers, his youngest son said. The hotel wouldn't allow blacks to stay 
there, so one boxer had to stay at the YMCA. Helgeland stayed with him.

As the kid of a single mom in the '30s, Steve Helgeland said his dad could 
relate to being an outsider.

"He understood what it was like to be ostracized," he said.

He also battled depression and an alcoholism addiction that would cost him 
dearly. His marriage ended, and one winter night sometime later he fell asleep 
in a car and suffered such severe frostbite his feet and a portion of his legs 
had to be amputated.

But that incident was a catalyst, Helgeland-Renken said, and her father quit 
drinking.

"That's just what it took to turn his life around," she said. "Because he 
really did turn his life around."

Kenny, the oldest son, moved in with his dad and both drove cabs. The night 
Maynard Helgeland died, Kenny was supposed to be in that cab, but got an 
invitation from friends to go to the racetrack in Lincoln instead.

Helgeland-Renken was close to her dad, but lived in a duplex with 2 good 
friends and worked as a cashier at the nearby Sapp Brothers.

Steve Helgeland moved to Wisconsin with his mom and stepdad shortly before his 
dad died. He remembers clearly his mom and the school secretary pulling him out 
of class to tell him what had happened.

He never had the chance to fix things with his dad, he said.

"Mr. Moore stole that opportunity," he said. "My kids have never met their 
grandfather. Mr. Moore got another 40 years."

? * * *

After their father's death, Kenny moved back to South Dakota, and his sister 
soon followed. Eventually, their mom, stepdad and younger brother moved there, 
too. Their mom died 2 years ago.

Steve Helgeland "banged around for a while" after high school, then got married 
and earned a degree in education. Today, he has 3 children, o1 grandson and is 
director of special education at a South Dakota school district.

Much of his anger has subsided over the years, he said, but he thinks the loss 
of his dad had something to do with his interest in education.

"Growing up without a father, I wanted to help young men in the same 
situation," he said.

His older brother and sister both live across the state in Mount Vernon, near 
where their dad grew up.

Kenny is self-employed and nearing retirement, his younger brother said.

Helgeland-Renken has been married 28 years, raised 3 children and now spends 
time with 3 grandchildren.

The drawn-out legal fights over Moore's sentence have caused so much heartache, 
she said, for their family and the Van Ness family. She knows Moore's family 
has suffered, too.

In 2007, when the state came within a week of executing Moore, her husband was 
going to be a witness. He doesn't want to now, but it bothers her no one from 
the state has reached out to family members. Other than a call from a Douglas 
County official telling them the date had been set, they've heard nothing, she 
said.

But both boys will be in Lincoln for the execution, to honor their dad. Steve 
said he has no desire to witness it, but Kenny said he plans do so.

Helgeland-Renken isn't coming.

Instead, she'll be meeting her newest grandson.

When they found out her pregnant daughter was scheduled to be induced the same 
day as the execution, her daughter offered to change it.

Helgeland-Renken told her it wasn't necessary, that she'd chosen to look at it 
differently.

"What a blessing God is giving me," she said. "That's why I won't be in Lincoln 
with my brothers."

(source for all: Lincoln Journal Star)

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

What words for the victims?


If the words barbaric, heinous and inhumane are being used to describe the 
horrors of capital punishment, then what words would be appropriate to describe 
what innocent victims suffered at the hands of such predators?

What word or words come to mind after 2 Omaha cab drivers were shot to death in 
a holdup for a few lousy dollars? How would you describe what Charles 
Starkweather did to 11 people in the 1950s, including a 2-year-old child and a 
teenage couple?

Danny Jo Eberle and Christopher Walden were abducted, then hogtied, sexually 
abused and finally stabbed to death by John Joubert. Jane McManus was stalked, 
raped and then beaten to death with a claw hammer at the hands of Harold Lamont 
Otey.

What words can be used to describe such carnage? Can the words barbaric, 
heinous and inhumane be used?

Charlie Aliano, Omaha

----

Execution won't help anything

It makes my heart sad to see the governor of Nebraska work so hard to find a 
way to kill Carey Dean Moore.

Will we really find our lives better if we wake up on Aug. 15 having executed 
this man? No doubt he committed a terrible act. Must we do the same? Must we 
kill him coldly and deliberately as a way to show that killing is wrong?

Sheila Burke, Omaha

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






NEVADA:

Nevada's death penalty procedure is flawed


Regarding your Sunday story on the use of the death penalty in Clark County:

If the prosecution seeks the death penalty, the jury, during voir dire, must be 
"death qualified." Any potential juror who says his beliefs would 
"substantially impair" his willingness to impose the death penalty is 
automatically excused from the jury. This excludes about 1/4 to 1/3 of 
potential jurors.

The potential jurors most often excused are females, African-Americans, 
Catholics and political liberals. This usually results in a jury of 
predominately white males who are biased in favor of the prosecution and 
conviction. This death qualification process has been approved by the U. S. 
Supreme Court even though it results in biased juries. The death qualification 
procedure provides a powerful incentive for the prosecution to seek the death 
penalty because that will get the prosecution a jury biased toward conviction.

The Innocence Project has used DNA evidence to exonerate 358 wrongfully 
convicted persons. 20 of those innocent people were sentenced to death and 
would have been executed had the Innocence Project not investigated their 
cases. Our criminal justice system cannot always distinguish the guilty from 
the innocent.

The major argument for the death penalty is that it deters potential murderers. 
Research provides little support for the deterrence argument. Furthermore, we 
do not know which people fear more - death or life in prison. Given that 11 of 
the last 12 people executed in Nevada have "volunteered" to die, perhaps we 
should research this issue to determine what deters more: the fear of death or 
the fear of life in prison.

(source: Letter to the Editor, Joseph Boetcher; Las Vegas Review-Journal)