[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, FLA., ALA., OHIO

[Rick Halperin]

December 1







TEXAS----impending execution

Clemency denied for 'Texas 7' prisoner scheduled for execution



A day after suing the Board of Pardons and Paroles, Texas death row prisoner 
Joseph Garcia lost his long-shot bid for clemency when the 7-member board 
denied him a favorable recommendation to the governor. He is currently 
scheduled for execution Tuesday in Huntsville.

The 47-year-old was sentenced to die nearly 2 decades ago for his role in the 
state's biggest prison break, a carefully plotted scheme followed by a crime 
spree and the slaying of a suburban Dallas police officer.

Even though the 7-member parole board unanimously rebuffed his request for a 
lenient recommendation, Garcia has a number of other claims pending in the 
courts as well as a request for reprieve in front of the governor.

"We are obviously disappointed," said defense lawyer Mridula Raman. "Justice 
could be served by having Joseph spend the rest of his life in prison. It is 
unfortunate that the board puts politics over fairness and mercy."

In December 2000, Garcia was serving time for a Bexar County slaying when he 
teamed up with 6 fellow prisoners to break out of a maximum-security prison 
south of San Antonio. Fleeing canines and helicopters, the men drove to Houston 
where they pulled off 2 store robberies to stock up on supplies and money 
before heading north toward Dallas.

There, on Christmas Eve, the crew of escapees robbed an Oshman's sporting goods 
- and on their way out, killed Irving police Officer Aubrey Hawkins. The men 
drove through a blizzard and headed to Colorado, where they were caught a month 
later posing as Christian missionaries and living in a trailer park.

Though 5 gunmen fired shots and 1 of them - ringleader George Rivas - confessed 
to shooting the cop, Garcia has long maintained he never opened fire.

Still, he was found guilty and sentenced to die under the law of parties, a 
controversial statute that can hold non-shooters as responsible as triggermen.

Challenging the use of that statute has become the center of one of Garcia's 
last-ditch legal battles. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled against him 
in that appeal on Friday, but in a 17-page dissent Judge Elsa Alcala wrote that 
"evolving standards of decency" might mean it's no longer permissible to 
execute someone who never intended to kill, and that it might not serve a 
penological purpose.

Late Friday, Garcia's attorneys appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The same day, his legal team filed a federal lawsuit over the state's lethal 
injection supplier. Echoing a letter sent to the governor earlier in the week, 
the suit focuses on concerns stemming from a BuzzFeed News report on Wednesday 
that identified the Houston compounding pharmacy believed to be 1 of 2 
responsible for making up the batches of pentobarbital used in the Huntsville 
death chamber.

Since the Braeswood-area business had a track record of safety violations 
documented by the state, Garcia's attorney's asked the federal court to ban the 
state from using drugs compounded there or to simply call off Garcia's 
execution.

In addition to the new filings on Friday, Garcia has an appeal challenging the 
Bexar County conviction that originally put him behind bars; a lawsuit alleging 
the state's parole board has too many ex-law enforcement members; and a request 
for reprieve in front of the governor.

(source: Houston Chronicle)

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

State-Sanctioned Secrecy Shields Texas’ Death Penalty Machine from 
Scrutiny----New revelations about the source of Texas’ execution drugs 
underscore the risks of capital punishment shrouded in secrecy.

Shortly before he died by lethal injection earlier this year, Anthony Shore, 
Houston’s infamous “tourniquet killer,” exclaimed that he felt a burning 
sensation. Later that month, condemned killer William Rayford reportedly 
grimaced and writhed on the gurney during his final moments. Chris Young, 
executed this summer over the objections of his victim’s surviving son, was one 
of several death row inmates who said he could feel the drugs burning in his 
throat before he died.

On Wednesday, Buzzfeed News reported that Texas buys execution drugs from 
Greenpark Compounding Pharmacy in Houston, which state health officials have 
repeatedly cited for dangerous practices in recent years, including for giving 
kids the wrong medicine and forging quality control documents.

After the Buzzfeed report, lawyers for Joseph Garcia — set to die Tuesday for 
his role in a deadly 1999 prison escape — urged Governor Greg Abbott to give 
Garcia a 30-day reprieve, saying the revelation raises questions about the 
quality of Texas’ death drugs. Killing Garcia next week, his attorneys argue, 
subjects him to the “unreasonable risk of a cruel execution."

Secrecy has always been a part of the American death penalty machine. 
Executioners donned hoods when the condemned were hanged in the public square, 
and by the 19th century, pressure from death penalty abolitionists had pushed 
officials to hold executions behind prison walls. In most of the 30 states that 
authorize the death penalty, the names and qualifications of anyone involved in 
administering the ultimate punishment are withheld from the public. Laws in 
some states even threaten to punish journalists who dig up and publish such 
information.

Many death penalty states, including Texas, began to shield the identity of 
execution drug suppliers over the past decade as large drug manufacturers 
distanced themselves from state-sanctioned killing. As their supply chain dried 
up, Texas officials turned to compounding pharmacies, which aren’t subject to 
the same strict federal standards as large drug companies, and began to 
restrict what information it publicly released about the drugs used in 
executions. In 2015, after it became clear these smaller pharmacies wouldn’t 
peddle execution drugs in public, the Texas Legislature passed a law shrouding 
them in secrecy.

"Secrecy is bad practice, bad policy and bad government. It continues to erode 
public confidence in whether states can be trusted to carry out capital 
punishment."

As states veiled their shifting execution protocols and drug suppliers, reports 
of botched executions — such as prisoners who appeared to be suffocating or 
experiencing excruciating pain while strapped to a gurney — began to rise, 
according to a report by the Death Penalty Information Center released earlier 
this month. The report argues that secrecy prevents the public from having an 
honest conversation around the death penalty, while simultaneously undercutting 
inmates’ Eighth Amendment claims and increasing the risk of a painful 
execution.

“Secrecy is bad practice, bad policy and bad government,” said Robert Dunham, 
the group’s executive director. “It continues to erode public confidence in 
whether states can be trusted to carry out capital punishment.”

Until this week, Greenpark Pharmacy’s role in Texas’ death penalty machine was 
a closely guarded secret. Someone who answered the phone at the pharmacy on 
Friday refused to comment, as did a spokesperson for the Texas prison system.

The governor’s office hasn’t yet responded to Garcia’s lawyers’ request for a 
30-day reprieve. Moving forward with his execution next week, they say, 
“creates a grave risk that he will be put to death in violation of his Eighth 
Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment."

(source: Texas Observer)

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

Supreme Court saved Bobby Moore from execution once. It should do it again.



The job of a judge is to follow the law. If we are to be, as Chief Justice John 
Marshall wrote, “a government of laws, and not of men,” the lower courts must 
carefully apply the precedent of the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the top 
criminal court in my home state of Texas is not following this foundational 
constitutional principle in a matter of life and death.

Last year, in a case involving a death row prisoner named Bobby Moore, the U.S. 
Supreme Court held that Texas’ framework for determining whether a capital 
defendant had an intellectual disability — and was therefore exempt from 
execution — violated the Eighth Amendment. The rejected Texas criteria had in 
some circles become known as “the Lennie standard” because it invited the 
courts to compare the defendant with the fictional character Lennie Small in Of 
Mice and Men — a giant man with the mind of a child.

With respect to Moore, the Supreme Court ruled the Texas Court of Criminal 
Appeals wrongly relied on non-clinical criteria about intellectual disability 
to uphold his death sentence. Three justices dissented from the court’s 
reversal. But as all justices agree, the Supreme Court’s majority decision is 
the law of the land. And all justices unanimously agreed that Texas’ use of lay 
stereotypes was erroneous and unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court’s majority opinion emphasized that, as a 13-year-old, Moore 
lacked a basic understanding of the days of the week, the months of the year, 
telling time, the seasons and the concept that subtraction is the reverse of 
addition. Stressing that Moore’s serious mental and social difficulties were 
clear from early childhood, the court highlighted what it called “the 
considerable objective evidence of Moore’s adaptive deficits.” The majority 
also held that Moore’s IQ is well within the range of intellectual disability, 
an issue that is no longer in dispute. As is customary, the Supreme Court then 
sent the case back to the Texas court for further proceedings.

If the system were working as it should, Moore’s case would have been a routine 
matter of the Texas court applying the Supreme Court’s decision and current 
medical standards as directed and prohibiting Moore’s execution. Even the 
prosecutors, who had obtained the death penalty against Moore, agreed in a 
formal filing to the Texas court that, in light of the controlling medical and 
legal standards, Moore is intellectually disabled and should not be executed.

Yet in a stark conflict with black letter law, the state appellate court again 
ruled that Moore is not intellectually disabled and set him on course for 
execution. The decision made reference to the Supreme Court’s ruling but for 
the 2nd time relied on lay stereotypes and non-clinical criteria despite the 
Supreme Court’s explicit instructions.

While I have no doubt about the good faith of the esteemed judges in Texas, 
their decision deviates sharply from the Supreme Court’s prior decision. The 
Supreme Court justices should again accept review of Moore’s case and summarily 
reverse this latest ruling. The Texas court, in reaching its closely divided 
decision, rejected the consensus of the highest court in the country, the state 
trial judge who held the evidentiary hearing and all parties and amici before 
the court — including the prosecutors, prominent Texans concerned with the rule 
of law and leading medical organizations.

Reasonable minds can differ about the death penalty. Some urging the Supreme 
Court to take up Moore’s case again support capital punishment, and some oppose 
it. But these citizens supporting Moore, including leading conservatives, are 
committed to upholding the Constitution, which established “one Supreme Court.” 
In giving the court the last word, the framers intended that the Constitution 
would be applied consistently, without exceptions and regardless of the status 
of a particular litigant.

I am not an abolitionist on the death penalty. I favor it in appropriate cases. 
But I also believe we must vigilantly observe the constitutional constraints on 
this ultimate sentence. In our constitutional system, courts must carefully 
adhere to Supreme Court decisions on all issues — especially on this vitally 
important subject of life and death.

In this instance, a narrow majority of Texas judges may have believed that the 
Supreme Court was wrong about Moore. But this does not matter, as I know from 
my own experience as an appellate judge. The state judges had an inviolable 
duty to ensure that its proceedings were consistent with the court's decision. 
As then-U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Brett 
Kavanaugh put it: “As a lower court in a system of absolute vertical stare 
decisis headed by one Supreme Court, it is essential that we follow both the 
words and the music of Supreme Court decisions."

For our system to work, the Supreme Court must make sure that its rulings are 
respected and faithfully applied. In this case, I hope the Supreme Court will 
act to correct the Texas court’s fundamental error, especially since Moore 
faces the most extreme punishment our government can impose. Ignoring this 
departure from binding authority would be inimical to our bedrock 
constitutional principles.

(source: Op-Ed; Kenneth Starr served as U.S. solicitor general from 1989 to 
1993 and U.S. Circuit judge for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1983 to 
1989. He joined an amicus brief supporting summary reversal in the U.S. Supreme 
Court in the pending Bobby Moore case----Washington Post)








FLORIDA----new death sentence

Judge sentences Colley to death in 'execution' of wife, her friend----Colley 
gunned down 2 women in August 2015 rampage



A man who gunned down his estranged wife and her best friend in the couple's 
upscale St. Johns County home in 2015 was sentenced to death Friday for their 
murders.

A jury unanimously recommended the death penalty for James Colley Jr. in July, 
and Circuit Judge Howard Maltz followed that recommendation Friday, saying 
Colley's conduct deserved the "harshest penalty" allowed by Florida law.

In addition to 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, Colley was convicted of 2 counts 
of attempted 1st-degree murder, 2 burglary counts and a count of aggravated 
stalking. Maltz tacked on life in prison sentences for the attempted murder 
charges.

At a Spencer hearing in October, Colley apologized and called the killings a 
"terrible accident."

"I wish it would have been different, but it's not, and I'm sorry for all 
parties involved," Colley said.

A Spencer hearing typically is the last chance for a defendant facing the death 
penalty to persuade the court to spare his life.

Speaking in measured words Friday, Maltz scoffed at Colley's claim that the 
murders were an accident, saying Colley “executed” the 2 women “in the prime of 
their lives” and “devastated” their families.

"You characterized what happened as a horrible accident," Maltz said to Colley. 
"Nothing could be further from the truth based upon the evidence that was 
presented. The evidence presented in this case establishes that these murders 
were committed in a cold, calculated and premeditated manner."

Colley killed his estranged wife, Amanda, and her best friend, Lindy Dobbins, 
when he went on a shooting spree inside the couple’s home on Aug. 27, 2015.

A woman who survived the deadly rampage testified that Colley showed up 
uninvited at the home, looking for a man he believed was in a relationship with 
Amanda Colley, 36. Earlier that day, Colley had been ordered by a judge not to 
have contact with his wife, who had an injunction against him.

Rachel Hendricks told jurors that she and Dobbins, 39, ran and hid in a walk-in 
closet after Colley appeared in the backyard of the home carrying a gun and 
opened fire.

Hendricks said Colley forced his way into the closet and held the gun to 
Dobbins' head as Hendricks ran for her life. She said she heard a shot as she 
fled.

Prosecutors said Amanda Colley heard her best friend being shot in the closet 
before James Colley found her, wounded on the bathroom floor, and shot her 
multiple times as she begged for her life.

The grisly murders were captured on an agonizing 911 call.

Colley took off after the shooting spree and was arrested after a traffic stop 
in Virginia hours later. He has been in custody ever since.

Colley did not speak in court Friday. His mother said after the sentencing, "I 
love my son no matter what, and the whole story was not told."

Colley’s attorney told News4Jax he plans to appeal for a new trial. Colley's 
conviction and sentence will be automatically appealed to the Florida Supreme 
Court.

The Colleys had 2 children, who are now being cared for by family, and Dobbins 
had three children, who are now being cared for by their father.

State Attorney R.J. Larizza, who attended the hearing and sat with the victims’ 
families, said “[f]or those who believe the death penalty to be barbaric, how 
would they feel if they were there to witness the cold and barbaric murders of 
Amanda and Lindy? It is our hope that the family will find some peace and 
comfort now that the defendant was held accountable for his actions."

(source: news4jax.com)

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

New jury to consider death sentence for convicted killer Juan Rosario, judge 
rules



Convicted killer Juan Rosario will get a 2nd chance to avoid the death penalty, 
after a judge on Thursday threw out a jury’s recommendation that he be 
sentenced to die.

Circuit Judge Leticia Marques ruled that the attorneys who defended Rosario at 
trial last year, Roger Weeden and Luis Davila, did not represent him 
effectively in its penalty phase, during which 12 jurors unanimously 
recommended Rosario’s execution.

Rosario was convicted last year of killing 83-year-old Elena Ortega in her home 
on Turnbull Drive, near South Semoran Boulevard.

During Rosario’s trial, his ex-girlfriend told jurors that he broke into 
Ortega’s home early on Sept. 18, 2013, to commit a robbery - but Ortega woke up 
and, when Rosario realized she saw his face, he beat her until she was 
unconscious and set fires to 3 rooms in her house to try and get rid of any 
evidence.

The case went unsolved for months until Rosario was arrested in another home 
invasion and his ex-girlfriend, Janet Gutierrez, decided to tell Orange County 
deputies what she said Rosario had told her when he came home the morning of 
Ortega’s death.

Jurors recommended a death sentence for Rosario June 2, 2017. But the case 
stalled after he asked for new attorneys, who needed time to prepare for the 
hearing at which Marques was to decide whether to abide by the jury's 
recommendation and send Rosario to death row or override it and sentence him to 
life without parole.

That hearing was scheduled for Friday - but it was cancelled Thursday afternoon 
when Marques issued her ruling. The judge’s order does not overturn Rosario’s 
guilty verdict, only the jury’s recommendation for a death sentence.

“Even though Mr. Weeden had represented [Rosario] since January 2015, he and 
Mr. Davila were patently unprepared for the trial’s penalty phase,” Marques 
wrote. “They failed to conduct even a basic mitigation investigation, such as 
retaining a doctor to examine [Rosario]."

Weeden said he was “extremely pleased” that his former client will get another 
chance to avoid a death sentence.

Weeden said he had asked the court for extra time to get experts on topics 
including mental health, medical and intellectual disability and substance 
abuse to testify for Rosario - the "same experts and testing” he said were 
later granted to Rosario’s new lawyers, “through which [they] obtained this 
order for a new penalty phase trial."

A new penalty phase has not been scheduled. In her order, Marques acknowledged 
that it could take years.

"The years preceding an inevitable retrial of [the] defendant’s penalty phase 
would result in an even greater emotional toll on the victim’s family, 
additional costs to Florida taxpayers and the risk of witness unavailability 
due to the passage of time," Marques wrote.

(source: Orlando Sentinel)








ALABAMA:

Prospective gassing of human beings in Alabama is an abomination



When, in October 2016, I wrote “[d]eath row inmates in Alabama are human guinea 
pigs” because the state’s capital punishment regime - specifically its 
barbaric, often bungled lethal injection protocol - is already so dark, so 
depraved, so outrageously cloaked in lies and officious secrecy, I never could 
have predicted the situation could get worse. But it has.

In glaring contrast to the heavily circulated, smiling picture of exonerated 
former Alabama death row inmate Anthony Ray Hinton, ebullient after voting for 
the first time in a midterm election since being freed in 2015, after a 
hellacious 30 years on Alabama’s death row, it’s important to understand: the 
death penalty in Alabama has gotten far worse since Mr. Hinton’s release - not 
better. First, because of the cynically named “Fair Justice Act,” convoluted 
legislation hacksawing fundamental constitutional rights of (overwhelmingly 
indigent) death-sentenced defendants, signed into law last year - over the 
varied, vociferous, published objections of the ACLU, a highly respected 
Harvard Law School professor, defense attorneys in the state, myself, and even 
Mr. Hinton - it is far easier under current Alabama law, for an innocent person 
like Mr. Hinton, to be convicted and sentenced to death.

Second, despite a fairly recent slew of patently botched lethal injections, 
including that of Ronald Bert Smith, Torrey McNabb, and Christopher Brooks — as 
well as the bloody, horrific, and failed execution attempt of Doyle Hamm, 
during which, among other atrocities, state executioners repeatedly (and 
futilely) jabbed multiple needles into Hamm’s groin and pelvis — Alabama has 
coldly, inhumanely, and, as I wrote elsewhere in June, steadfastly continued 
“its odious tradition of ducking and dodging transparency and accountability in 
how the state puts its prisoners to death.” I’d presaged this discomfiting 
conclusion several months earlier, in October 2017, in a piece for USA Today, 
after McNabb’s shameful, gruesome torture; in it, I dubbed the Commissioner of 
Alabama’s Department of Corrections (ADOC) “‘Baghdad Bob’ of Alabama’s death 
row.”

Pouring accelerant on this already demoralizing and distasteful dumpster fire, 
a just-released report by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), “Behind 
the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States,” observes: 
“Alabama has one of the most restrictive secrecy policies in the nation, 
consistently maintaining that all documents associated with an execution are 
confidential.” (While he wasn’t focusing on the modern death penalty, in 
reviewing W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s new book “Civilizing Torture: An American 
Tradition” for the L.A. Times, author Colin Dickey recently and insightfully 
wrote: “The work of American torture has always been twofold: not just the 
violence itself, but the complex legal and rhetorical strategies that obfuscate 
it away to maintain a myth of America as a civilized place without cruel and 
unusual punishment.”)

And now, as if this wasn’t all ghastly enough - this undeniable fact Alabama 
has been torturing poor people for a long time, and that it shows no sign of 
stopping - the Montgomery Advertiser’s Bryan Lyman wrote on November 23rd that 
the state is planning to augment the barbarism involved in its executions to 
even greater and more unseemly dimensions; Lyman reports that plans are now 
underway for Alabama to develop a protocol to execute death row prisoners with 
nitrogen gas.

But, Lyman notes, because “[n]itrogen asphyxiation has never been used in 
capital punishment before,” Alabama “finds itself inventing a method of 
execution.” Soberly and pointedly, Lyman observes: “The American Medical 
Association authorizes the use of the method in animal euthanasia, though only 
for birds and small animals.” Relatedly, in March, Robert Dunham, Executive 
Director of DPIC, tweeted: “The World Society for the Protection of Animals 
lists nitrogen inhalation as ‘not acceptable’ for animal euthanasia because 
loss of consciousness is not instantaneous, and dogs euthanized by nitrogen gas 
have been observed convulsing and yelping after ‘falling unconscious.’”

Also in March, following Alabama’s vengeful killing of an 83-year-old man, I 
urged that during such dreary, desolate days for death penalty abolitionists, 
unusually sage insight, and perhaps also, the solace of understanding, can be 
gleaned from the words of writer James Baldwin. The same is true today as more 
and more developments emerge about the prospective state-sanctioned killing of 
human beings with nitrogen gas in Alabama - and even more depressingly, in 
other states like Oklahoma and Mississippi (which have approved the procedure), 
too.

In his essay “What Price Freedom,” Baldwin postulated: “I still believe when a 
country has lost all human feeling, you can do anything to anybody and justify 
it, and we do know in this country we have done just that.” Borrowing from 
Baldwin further, and speaking directly to Alabama’s Attorney General’s Office 
and the ADOC, Baldwin concluded, in yet another one of his piercing essays “The 
Uses of the Blues,” that “[i]n evading [death row prisoners’s] humanity, you 
have done something to your own humanity.”

But, last time when I wrote how James Baldwin’s writing helps us to understand 
the continued dastardly use of the death penalty, I also wrote about Dr. Martin 
Luther King, Jr., and, I let Baldwin get the last word; this time, it’s with 
the power of Dr. King that I’ll close. Because it was Dr. King who, from his 
humble pulpit on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama, began a nonviolent 
movement in this country - a movement for justice, for equality, for humanity, 
a movement for the betterment of all mankind - a movement that continues to 
this day.

In his book Why We Can’t Wait, Dr. King wrote these hallowed words, words that 
all Alabamians, and indeed all Americans, still have not fully internalized, 
accepted, and allowed to become part of our baseline morality: “Man was born 
into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. 
He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached a day when violence 
toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.”

With the prolonged picking and poking of condemned prisoners with needles, the 
“choice” of electrocution, and now, perhaps, also nitrogen gassing, we’re not 
there yet. Not even close.

(source: Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an 
assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015----Los 
Angeles Post-Examiner)








OHIO:

Dominique Swopes Indicted For Murder Of Mayfield Heights Mom----A Grand Jury 
handed down the indictment this week. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor said he 
may seek the death penalty in the case.



Dominique Swopes has been indicted for the murder of Rebecca Pletnewski and her 
daughter Olivia Schneider. Swopes could face the death penalty, Cuyahoga County 
Prosecutor Michael O'Malley announced.

A Cuyahoga County Grand Jury indicted Swopes for aggravated murder. In total, 
he faces 14 counts, including aggravated murder, aggravated burglary, 
aggravated arson, tampering with evidence, receiving stolen property, murder, 
and felonious assault.

The indictment also reserves the right to seek the death penalty at a later 
date. "We are evaluating this crime as a potential death penalty case for the 
senseless killing of Ms. Pletnewski and her young daughter," O'Malley said on 
Friday.

Bond was set at $5 million for Swopes on Wednesday, Nov. 28.

Law enforcement announced Monday they would seek an indictment for murder and 
arson.

Pletnewski's home on Longwood Road caught fire on November 20. She was found 
dead inside the house by firefighters. Her 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, was 
rushed to Hillcrest Hospital where she later died from smoke inhalation.

The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner later ruled that Pletnewski was dead 
before the fire was set. The cause of her death was "cervical compression with 
sharp force injuries." That effectively means the 41-year-old was stabbed in 
the spine.

Mayfield Heights Police Chief Fred Bittner told Fox 8 that Pletnewski's family 
said Swopes had been potentially stalking the woman. "He became our primary 
suspect at the time after talking to family," Bittner said.

(source: patch.com)

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

Closure deserved in boy’s death



We see a sad irony in the fact that one defendant in the 1985 brutal murder of 
12-year-old Raymond Fife - the one who was sentenced to serve a life term — 
died last week in prison, while the other defendant - the one sentenced to be 
executed more than 30 years ago - still lives in Ohio’s prison system.

Ohio death row inmate Danny Lee Hill, now 51, has been incarcerated with the 
Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction since 1986. That’s 32 years of 
being supported at taxpayers' expense and 32 years of using publicly funded 
defense attorneys to appeal and fight his death sentence over and over and over 
again.

The other defendant, Timothy Combs, died earlier this month while incarcerated 
at Grafton Correctional Institution in Lorain County. He was 50. He had not 
been eligible to face the death penalty in his crimes because he was only 17 
when the brutal assault and slaying of a 12-year-old boy occurred as he rode 
his bicycle home after a Boy Scout meeting.

Undoubtedly every person who ever is accused of a crime in America deserves due 
process and the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. But we, like 
most local residents who recall the heinous crime and subsequent trial, are 
growing tired and frustrated with the never-ending parade of motions and legal 
maneuvers that continue to stall Hill's execution - even after his criminal 
conviction was first pronounced and subsequent appeals have upheld it.

In the days after Combs' Nov. 9 death, his young victim's mother, Miriam Fife, 
said the killer’s death left her no cause to rejoice.

“This is not something that I celebrate,” she said, but then noted, “I will be 
able to rest in peace that he will not be able to get out and do what was done 
to Raymond to anyone else."

Miriam Fife’s words were spoken with the dignity — and profound sadness — that 
have remained all these years.

Certainly, she now deserves to have that same closure and opportunity to rest 
in peace with an end to the appeals by her son’s other killer.

Indeed, Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins and his staff have fought 
tirelessly for that closure.

Isn’t it time?

(source: Editorial, Tribune Chronicle)