[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, VA./USA, OHIO, IND., TENN., ARK., OKLA., CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

December 10




TEXAS:

Lethal injections are poison, not medicine


Texas’ preferred method for executing criminals is lethal injection with 
pentobarbital. The whole process has the look and feel of a medical procedure. 
There are protocols, medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and people in white 
coats. But don’t be fooled: This is not the practice of medicine.

This facade of professionalism is no accident. It becomes easier to execute 
people when the public regards lethal injection as a serious and sober activity 
— subject to the same safety oversight as a procedure at a doctor’s office. 
This is little more than an illusion. Any attempt to cite medical or 
pharmaceutical regulatory oversight in any aspect of lethal injection, 
including drug manufacturing, is a forgery of the truth. No pharmaceutical has 
“lethal injection” as a Food and Drug Administration-labeled indication. There 
is no medically approved way to execute someone. The result is a market of 
questionable sources for chemicals involved in lethal injections.

According to a recent piece by Buzzfeed News, a Houston-based pharmacy called 
Greenpark Compounding may be the source of pentobarbital used in Texas lethal 
injection executions. The shocking story reveals that Greenpark Compounding has 
been the subject of a number of complaints as a result of improper drug 
manufacturing.

They’re not the only ones. Compounding pharmacies have been in the spotlight 
before for bad manufacturing, most notoriously in the case of New England 
Compounding Center, (NECC). In 2012, NECC manufactured an injectable steroid 
that was later shown to be contaminated. This compounded steroid was used 
widely to treat patients and, as a direct result, 64 people died.

In Texas, pentobarbital is intended to be used as poison, not as medicine. 
Asking whether it is being prepared properly is a question better answered by 
the evil queen in Snow White — she of poisoned apple fame — than an authority 
tasked with regulating pharmacies. Greenpark Compounding may have substandard 
practices with respect to some of its medical pharmaceuticals, but as a maker 
of poison for execution, its record of success is unblemished. Yes, the inmates 
all die.

However, in several lethal injection executions in Texas, inmates have also 
been heard to declare a feeling of burning as they succumb. The Eighth 
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution unambiguously prohibits cruelty in the 
setting of punishment. Previous courts claimed there is such a thing as the 
normal pain of dying, and that lethal injection does not need to be 100 percent 
pain free to be a constitutionally valid form of punishment. That’s what the 
judges say. Doctors, however, have a different opinion.There is no such notion 
of the “normal pain” of dying in the medical field. Doctors seek to relieve all 
pain associated with death. Anything less than this is a treatment failure.

Pentobarbital is a drug known to be caustic. Texas injects a large quantity of 
this chemical into individuals to kill them. Whether it is properly assembled 
or improperly tainted, this chemical will likely burn upon injection.

This burning is not trivial. It occurs on the inside of the body as well as 
within the vein that first encounters the pentobarbital. Those watching an 
execution might think they’re seeing someone be killed by a chemical that 
induces sleep and leaves the body in pristine condition. Evidence under the 
skin tells a markedly different story. Autopsies of executed inmates show 
internal organ damage unseen by witnesses. This isn’t because pentobarbital was 
wrongly prepared. To the contrary, this is exactly how the chemical is supposed 
to work. Questions about Greenpark Pharmaceuticals’ manufacturing standards 
miss the point. To criticize them for failing regulatory marks is like 
critiquing a firing squad because its bullets weren’t properly polished.

Capital punishment is a kind of killing, whether by pharmacy or firing squad, 
and any attempt to obscure this simple fact sets the debate backwards. How we 
regard the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment requires us to own the 
fact of killing, no matter the method.

(source: Opinion; Joel Zivot, M.D., is an associate professor of anesthesiology 
and surgery at the Emory University School of Medicine----Houston Chronicle)








VIRGINIA/USA:

Jury to begin sentencing phase for James Fields Jr.



The same jury that convicted a man of 1st-degree murder for driving his car 
into counterprotesters at a 2017 white nationalist rally will now decide his 
punishment.

The jury in the trial of James Alex Fields Jr. will reconvene Monday to hear 
additional evidence and come up with a sentencing recommendation for Judge 
Richard Moore on murder and other charges.

Fields, who is from the Toledo area, was convicted Friday in the death of 
Heather Heyer during the "Unite the Right" rally organized to protest the 
planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Fields also injured dozens when he drove into a crowd of people who showed up 
to protest against the white nationalists.

Fields is also facing federal hate crime charges. If he is convicted in that 
case, he could face the death penalty.

(source: Associated Press)








OHIO:

Lawmakers OK bill creating database of violent offenders



Ohio lawmakers have approved creation of a statewide database of violent 
offenders under legislation named for a college student who disappeared while 
bicycling and was found slain.

The bill named for Sierah Joughin and known as "Sierah's Law" was approved this 
week. It will take effect if it's signed by Republican Gov. John Kasich (.

The database of people convicted of violent crimes would be for law enforcement 
use. Offenders would have to register when they're released from prison.

The man convicted of kidnapping and aggravated murder in Joughin's 2016 death 
in Fulton county had been convicted decades earlier of abducting another woman 
riding a bicycle. James Worley has been sentenced to the death penalty in 
Joughin's slaying.

The bill passed the Senate Thursday by a 24-3 vote.

(source: Associated Press)








INDIANA:

We don't need the death penalty



We don't need to kill people in order to get justice.

One solid piece of advice for anyone voyaging through the internet is to avoid 
the comments section of web posts. Occasionally you might find something witty, 
rarely you'll find something insightful.

For me, though, taking a look at the feedback to stories we post on our website 
or our social media accounts is part of the job. Admittedly, sometimes it does 
help identify questions or follow up stories for us to work on.

But the comments that typically drop below crime stories we write aren't the 
greatest.

The definition of "justice" on social media often looks more akin to a Deep 
South lynch mob than our modern day court system. That's not an exaggeration. 
One comment recently literally was, and I quote, "Hang him in the public 
square."

On a story about a man pleading guilty to a charge of murder, there was also a 
sentiment that "he got off easy!" Maybe it's just me, but doing 45-65 years in 
an Indiana prison isn't "getting off easy."

I mean, this week I am spending all day for 5 days in a Noble County courtroom 
for a jury trial in a murder case. There's going to be a lot of effort this 
week to litigate that case, meanwhile the other guy just straight up pleads to 
murder and that's not good enough? That's a murder conviction handed out on a 
platter!

There's a misguided idea that, "Well, if he admitted to killing someone they 
should just execute him right away!" But that's not how corporal punishment 
works in this state, or in this nation. The decision for the state to take 
someone's life away is a weighty, serious, very involved decision.

I've written about the death penalty in Indiana twice before in this column, 
once in November 2015 and again in December 2017. In both iterations, I raised 
the question why this state still wastes it time and resources on something so 
ineffective and wasteful.M

I spent several days of my life in 2014 covering a death penalty case when I 
worked in Franklin. At the time, Michael Dean Overstreet, convicted of criminal 
confinement, rape and murder of a 18-year-old Frankin girl, was undergoing 
Indiana's 1st-ever hearing on the matter of competency to be executed.

After spending 17 years on death row, the judge ultimately decided his paranoid 
schizophrenia was so debilitating it had broken the link between his 
understanding of his crime and the punishment he was sentenced to. Now, he 
remains in prison indefinitely.

According to the Indiana Public Defender Council, the average time an inmate 
spends on death row before execution is 16 years. But that's only the ones who 
were eventually executed. For every one person Indiana has executed since 1977, 
three more have had their death sentences overturned, commuted or otherwise 
derailed.

"Well Steve, if we just didn't waste so much time with appeals and finding 
excuses for them to get off, we could execute way more bad dudes much faster!"

I suppose we could. And I suppose we could just do away with due process, with 
courts, with the Constitution. We could have a legal system more like some 
oppressive dictatorship.

And then where is the line?

Death penalty for a drug deal gone bad where someone gets shot and killed? 
Death penalty for a domestic dispute turned deadly? Death penalty for parents 
who shake or hit a baby and it dies? Death penalty driving drunk and killing 
someone in a car accident? Death penalty for drug dealers who sell drugs that 
lead to an overdose death?

A timely reminder here as we're talking about killing more people via the legal 
system that death penalty cases are magnitudes more expensive than a regular 
trial.

Prosecuting (and later defending at appeal) a life without parole case is about 
10 times more expensive than a normal trial. A death penalty trial is about 10 
times more expensive than a life with parole case -- 100 times more expensive 
than a regular trial. That's been a consistent ratio over the years in studies 
conducted by Indiana's Legislative Services Agency.

In 2015, that cost was about $385,000 per death penalty case. That cost, by the 
way, is paid by the county that prosecutes it, aka, your tax dollars. (And yes, 
if you're wondering, incarcerating someone for life is always less expensive 
than pursuing the death penalty.)

And, lastly, I must challenge again this notion that pops up: "If we executed 
more people then maybe they'd think twice!"

No, they wouldn't.

If the thought of losing the rest of your life, spending 45-65 years in prison, 
isn't a deterrent to committing some heinous crime, why would the possibility 
of being executed stop them? If you're caught, you've basically surrendered 
your life anyway. In some cases, dying is probably less of a punishment than 
serving out a full prison term.

We, as a society, don't gain anything by seeking an eye for an eye. Executing a 
murderer doesn't bring the victim back. It doesn't stop future crimes.

It doesn't give us a justice that we can't get without it.

(source: Steve Garbacz is editor of The News Sun)








TENNESSEE:

In the Bible Belt, Christmas Isn’t Coming to Death Row----When it comes to the 
death penalty, guilt or innocence shouldn’t really matter to Christians.



Until August, Tennessee had not put a prisoner to death in nearly a decade. 
Last Thursday, it performed its 3rd execution in 4 months.

This was not a surprising turn of events. In each case, recourse to the courts 
had been exhausted. In each case Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, declined to 
intervene, though there were many reasons to justify intervening. Billy Ray 
Irick suffered from psychotic breaks that raised profound doubts about his 
ability to distinguish right from wrong. Edmund Zagorksi’s behavior in prison 
was so exemplary that even the warden pleaded for his life. David Earl Miller 
also suffered from mental illness and was a survivor of child abuse so horrific 
that he tried to kill himself when he was 6 years old.

Questions about the humanity of Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol were so 
pervasive following the execution of Mr. Irick that both Mr. Zagorski and Mr. 
Miller elected to die in Tennessee’s electric chair, which was built in 1916. 
(The state spruced it up in 1989.) Their choice says something very clear about 
Tennessee’s three-drug execution cocktail, as Justice Sonya Sotomayor noted in 
a dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Mr. Miller’s 
case: “Both so chose even though electrocution can be a dreadful way to die,” 
she wrote. “They did so against the backdrop of credible scientific evidence 
that lethal injection as currently practiced in Tennessee may well be even 
worse.” Electrocution might not be any more humane than death by lethal 
injection, in other words, but at least it offers a speedier hideous death.

Presumably this is the same thinking behind the position taken by 51 death-row 
prisoners in Alabama who want to die in an untested nitrogen gas chamber rather 
than by either the electric chair or lethal injection.

Nitrogen gas. That’s where we are in the whole ungodly machinery of capital 
punishment: Human beings are choosing to die by nitrogen gas.

Here in red-state America, the death penalty is supported by 73 % of white 
evangelical Christians and by even a solid majority of Catholics — 53 %, 
despite official church teaching to the contrary — according to a Pew Research 
Center survey released in June.

The three men Tennessee most recently executed were all convicted of especially 
brutal murders — in Mr. Irick’s case the rape and murder of a little girl left 
in his care; in Mr. Miller’s the murder of his girlfriend, a young woman with 
cognitive disabilities. Mr. Zagorksi murdered two men who were meeting him to 
buy a hundred pounds of marijuana with cash. Death-row inmates are not 
sympathetic figures.

Not that being a sympathetic figure gets you very far here in Execution Alley 
in any case. In 1998, Texas executed a woman who became a born-again Christian 
while in prison. In 2015, Georgia executed a woman who had earned a theology 
degree on death row.

It’s hard not to notice that all these inmates, sympathetic or not, were killed 
in the Bible Belt, in states where a sizable portion of the population believes 
they live — or at least believes they should live — in a Christian nation. Mr. 
Miller was the second inmate in the South to be executed last week, and 2 more 
— one in Texas and one in Florida — will die at state hands by Thursday. That’s 
a lot of killing for the thou-shalt-not-kill states and at a time of year 
that’s particularly ironic. What is Advent, after all, but a time of waiting 
for the birth of a baby who will grow up to be executed himself?

For many anti-abortion Christians, there’s no contradiction between taking a 
“pro-life” position against allowing a woman to choose whether to continue a 
pregnancy and taking a “tough on crime” position whose centerpiece is capital 
punishment. An unborn fetus, they argue, is innocent while a prisoner on death 
row is by definition guilty.

But for a true “pro-life” Christian, guilt or innocence really shouldn’t be the 
point. Cute and cuddly or brutish and unrepentant, human life is human life. It 
doesn’t matter whether you like the human life involved. If you truly believe 
that human life is sacred, right down to an invisible diploid cell, then you 
have no business letting the state put people to death in your name, even if 
those people have committed hideous crimes.

There are numerous pragmatic reasons to abolish the death penalty. It doesn’t 
deter crime. It doesn’t save the state money. It risks ending an innocent life. 
(The Death Penalty Information Center lists the names of 164 innocent people 
who have been exonerated after serving years on death row. The most recent, 
Clemente Javier Aguirre, was released from a Florida prison just last month.) 
It is applied in a haphazard and irrational manner that disproportionately 
targets people of color. It puts prison staff in the untenable position of 
executing a human being they know personally and often truly care for.

But the real problem with the death penalty can’t be summed up by setting pros 
and cons on different sides of a balance to see which carries more weight. The 
real problem of the death penalty is its human face.

A person on death row is a person. No matter how ungrieved he may be once he is 
gone, he is still a human being. And it is not our right to take his life any 
more than it was his right to take another’s.

(source: Opinion; Margaret Renkl, New York Times)



ARKANSAS:

Doctors say Perez-Lopez remains unfit for trial in murder case by Ron Wood



A Springdale man charged with capital murder in connection with a 2013 stabbing 
is still not mentally fit for trial and, according to doctors at the Arkansas 
State Hospital, he may never be.

Juan Pablo Perez-Lopez, 32, is charged in Washington County Circuit Court in 
the death of Jesus Cecilio Villalobos, 48, in Springdale on Feb. 13, 2013. 
Villalobos was stabbed multiple times.

Involuntary commitment

A procedure whereby a person is confined in a mental institution either for 
determination of competency to stand trial or after acquittal by reason of 
insanity.

Perez-Lopez has pleaded not guilty.

Results of the latest fitness examination performed on Perez-Lopez concluded he 
continues to suffer from schizophrenia.

"At the time of the examination, Mr. Perez-Lopez lacked the capacity to 
understand the proceedings against him, as well as the capacity to effectively 
assist his attorney in his own defense, due to mental disease," according to 
Dr. Lacey Willett Matthews. "Given my opinion that Mr. Perez-Lopez is not fit 
to proceed, opinions regarding criminal responsibility are deferred."

Doctors said further efforts to restore Perez-Lopez to competency are not 
likely to result in significant improvement.

An assessment of how dangerous Perez-Lopez may be was also conducted. He was 
found to pose a moderate risk of violent behavior if released into the 
community or a less restrictive setting than the State Hospital.

"This rating is contingent upon his future compliance with treatment," Matthews 
concluded. "Although Mr. Perez-Lopez has a history of violent behavior and 
severe mental illness, he has not acted violently in approximately 1 year and 
his hallucinations and delusions have responded well to medication. As a 
result, it is possible that he could maintain stability in a supervised, 
structured treatment setting. However, if he is released into the community 
without continued treatment and supervision, his risk for future violence would 
increase."

Matt Durrett, Washington County prosecuting attorney, said the findings put the 
case "kind of in perpetual limbo."

"They've been renewing 180-day civil commitments since he's been not fit to 
proceed, so they'll just keep treating him," Durrett said.

Durrett said Thursday the criminal case against Perez-Lopez has been reset to 
December 2019 and he has been moved from the State Hospital to a lock-down 
facility for ongoing treatment. Perez-Lopez will remain in that facility unless 
he's eventually found to be restored to competency.

"As long as they're still affected with mental disease, they still pose a 
danger to the community," Durrett said.

The latest examination, at least the 5th, was done in late October. Perez-Lopez 
was committed to the State Hospital for treatment and restoration for more than 
2 years.

Circuit Judge Mark Lindsay signed the original commitment order at the behest 
of Durrett. The order said Perez-Lopez is a danger to himself or others and 
should remain at the State Hospital as long as he remains unfit. Doctors 
periodically report to Lindsay on his condition.

Perez-Lopez's attorneys notified the judge 2 years ago they were having trouble 
working with him. An initial examination at the Arkansas State Hospital found 
Perez-Lopez fit for trial, but a second examination called his mental fitness 
into question, and he was again committed for treatment.

A report by Melissa Dannacher, a psychologist at the State Hospital, diagnosed 
Perez-Lopez with schizophrenia and antisocial disorder. Dannacher was hopeful 
at the time he could be restored to fitness with continued in-patient treatment 
and restoration services.

Motorists called Springdale police in February 2013 about 2 men fighting on 
Huntsville Avenue and said one of them had a knife and was riding away on a 
bicycle.

Police found Perez-Lopez on a bicycle with a knife and bloody hands, then found 
Villalobos in a parking lot with multiple stab wounds to his chest and his 
throat cut, according to a search warrant affidavit. Perez-Lopez told police he 
went to Walmart, stole a knife and returned to Latino Tires with the intention 
of stabbing Villalobos because he thought Villalobos was making fun of and 
taking advantage of him.

Perez-Lopez said he stabbed Villalobos, an auto mechanic, about 20 times at the 
business and in the street, according to the affidavit.

Capital murder, if convicted, is punishable by life in prison without parole or 
the death penalty.

(source: Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette)








OKLAHOMA:

‘The Innocent Man’: Inside the Two Gruesome Murders Haunting a Small Oklahoma 
Town----This new 6-part Netflix docuseries, based on the John Grisham book of 
the same name, re-examines two controversial murder cases in Ada, Oklahoma.



“If I wrote The Innocent Man as a novel, fiction, folks probably wouldn’t 
believe it,” says John Grisham at the outset of Netflix’s new six-part 
documentary series based on his bestselling 2006 non-fiction book. Those who’ve 
watched Making a Murderer, The Confession Tapes or any number of other recent 
true-crime offerings, however, will immediately recognize it as a familiar 
example of a criminal justice system gone awry—and, specifically, the 
difficulty of exposing false confessions and overturning unjust convictions.

Executive-produced by Grisham and directed by Clay Tweel (Gleason), and 
premiering on Dec. 14, The Innocent Man concerns Ada, Oklahoma, a rural enclave 
best known for pecans and 2 notorious murders that took place more than 30 
years ago. The 1st of those involved Debra Sue Carter, a young woman who, on 
the night of Dec. 8, 1982, left her job at the Coachlight (a “boot-scootin’ 
bar”) and returned to her apartment, where she was brutally raped and killed, 
her body and furniture scrawled with misspelled messages. Then, on April 28, 
1984, young Denice Haraway disappeared while working at McAnally’s gas station 
convenience store, the apparent victim—according to eyewitnesses—of an 
abduction.

In both cases, a pair of men was suspected of murdering the victims. Three of 
them were eventually sentenced to life in prison, with the fourth receiving the 
death penalty. But as The Innocent Man contends, none of them were guilty; 
rather, they were railroaded by law enforcement and the district attorney’s 
office, who cared more about providing the community with resolution (and, 
perhaps, with covering up their own misdeeds) than with unearthing the truth.

The Innocent Man tackles its intertwined tales with an occasionally ungainly 
hand, flip-flopping between its narratives—and their various points of focus, 
including the accused’s friends and family members—in a manner that leaves the 
proceedings feeling a bit jumbled. That fortunately doesn’t undercut its cogent 
contentions about Ada’s lead police investigator Dennis Smith, Oklahoma State 
Bureau of Investigation’s Gary Rogers, and D.A. Bill Peterson. Those men built 
their cases on the backs of dubious confessions, which were vital given that 
there was little physical evidence linking their would-be killers to the slain 
women. And alongside those admissions, they employed dubious scientific 
findings as well as testimony from a prison snitch who just happened to possess 
key information about both trials.

With regards to Carter, police took 5 years before truly targeting Ron 
Williamson—a once-promising baseball phenom with mental illness issues whose 
life had fallen apart after his athletic career flamed out—and his best friend 
Bill Fritz, who’d been on the skids since his wife was murdered in front of 
their young daughter. Primarily on the basis of testimony supplied by Carter’s 
school friend Glen Gore, who said he saw Williamson arguing with Carter at the 
Coachlight, and also a forensic report about a hair sample found at the crime 
scene, Williamson was sentenced to death, while Fritz just narrowly escaped 
that fate, instead getting life.

Not helping either man’s defense was a May 8, 1987, interrogation with 
Williamson (recorded five years after Carter’s death), during which he 
recounted a dream about killing Carter. That this account wasn’t real didn’t 
seem important to police or the D.A., who used it against him at trial. And 
they did so, to a large extent, because they knew it was a tactic that would 
sway a jury—because it already had, in the earlier case of Denice Haraway.

PURSUIT OF JUSTICE

In September 1985, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were given life sentences for 
the murder of Haraway—despite her body having not been found—thanks to matching 
confessions in which they claimed to have abducted, raped and stabbed her to 
death along with a 3rd accomplice. As it turned out, Ward’s damning statement 
(which was given 1st) was at least partly the byproduct of a dream he’d had 
in-between his 1st and 2nd interrogations. Moreover, as happened with 
Williamson and Fritz, D.A. Peterson—in lieu of physical evidence, which didn’t 
exist—used testimony from prison informant Terri Holland as part of his 
courtroom argument.

As grippingly recounted by The Innocent Man, subsequent revelations in both 
cases shined a suspicious spotlight on those who put these individuals behind 
bars. In 1999, twelve years after their conviction, Williamson and Fritz were 
exonerated by DNA evidence, which proved that Carter had in fact been killed by 
the prosecution’s star witness, Glen Gore. And even before that, on January 20, 
1986, Haraway’s body was found—in a location different from where Ward and 
Fontenot had confessed to disposing it; in a blouse that didn’t match their 
descriptions of it; and with a single gunshot to the head, rather than stab 
wounds. Which raised the obvious questions: Had Ward and Fontenot’s (wholly 
erroneous) confessions been coerced by police? And if so, why?

Marrying new on-the-ground footage (with lawyers and journalists) to 
interrogation videos, dramatic recreations and archival interviews, photos and 
home movies, The Innocent Man thoroughly dissects its related cases as well as 
the ongoing attempts to appeal Ward and Fontenot’s convictions. In doing so, it 
reveals a systematic attempt to not only coerce false confessions, but to cover 
up potentially exculpatory evidence, to ignore other leads, and—according to a 
theory promoted by numerous speakers—to protect possible killers because they 
might have damaging info on law enforcement. Like Making a Murderer, it 
suggests that reliable witnesses are often the real culprits, and that vacating 
first-degree murder convictions is an uphill battle, especially in the absence 
of a clear alternative hypothesis about what took place.

Most of all, though, Tweel and Grisham’s series is another stinging censure of 
a legal machine compelled to find answers to mysterious crimes at all costs 
(regardless of whether those answers are accurate), and then to stand by those 
findings, no matter how thoroughly they’re debunked by new evidence and 
analysis. As Grisham himself puts it, “In small towns like Ada, the prosecutors 
and the police are under enormous pressure. Winning means justice. Winning 
means everything. And along the way, if the truth gets blurred, or forgotten, 
or twisted, or manipulated, that’s too bad... It’s all about winning.”

(source: thedailybeats.com)








CALIFORNIA:

Man convicted for killing Modoc deputy


Jack Breiner, the man who killed Modoc Sheriff's Deputy Jack Hopkins in 2016 
was convicted of several charges in court Thursday including 1st degree murder 
and 1st degree attempted murder.

Breiner was also found guilty on the special circumstances of shooting a peace 
officer, and shooting from a vehicle, killing someone.

He was also convicted of numerous weapons charges.

The sanity phase of Breiner's trial starts Wednesday to determine if he is sane 
enough to be convicted for the death penalty.

There is a gag order in place for this trial, meaning most of the details of 
the case are not being released to the public at this time.

(source: KRCR news)