[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----MINN., KAN., MO., CALIF., ORE, . USA

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 12



MINNESOTA:

'Dead Man Walking' coming to Minnesota Opera----The story of a religious 
sister's relationship with a man on death row will take the stage Jan. 27-Feb. 
3 when the Minnesota Opera presents "Dead Man Walking" at the Ordway Center for 
the Performing Arts in St. Paul.



The opera is based on the 1993 book of the same name by Sister Helen Prejean of 
the Congregation of St. Joseph that describes her role as a spiritual director 
to 2 men on death row before their executions. The 1995 Academy Award-winning 
film starred Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. Since Jake Heggie's operatic 
adaptation in 2000, it has been called "the most successful 21st century 
opera." The opera's stage director, Joel Ivany of Against the Grain Theatre in 
Toronto, answered questions about the opera via email to The Catholic Spirit, 
describing the power of story. Raised in the Salvation Army, a Christian 
mission, Ivany said the Salvation Army's commitment to justice and social 
action has stayed with him and "made this personal connection to this opera 
very intimate."

Q. How did "Dead Man Walking" become an opera?

A. This opera is based on a book written by Sister Helen Prejean called "Dead 
Man Walking," about correspondence between Sister Helen and a death row inmate, 
Elmo Patrick Sonnier, in 1982. Through this experience, she was convicted to a 
life of social justice. She then agrees to become the spiritual adviser to 
Robert Willie, another man on death row. His physical likeness is whom Sean 
Penn based his character on for the film version in 1995, which was co-produced 
and directed by Tim Robbins. He adapted the screenplay from Sister Helen's book 
and chose to change aspects of it by combining the experiences of both inmates 
into 1 inmate, Matthew Poncelet. Names were fictional, as well as the execution 
method used. The opera was commissioned and performed in 2000 by Lotfi Mansouri 
at the San Francisco Opera. The characters are again made up (inmate Joseph De 
Rocher), but based on those in both the book and movie. The only real character 
is Sister Helen Prejean.

Q. Could you describe the acclaim it has received and why?

A. This is the most successful 21st century opera. I think it has received such 
acclaim because of its accessibility through its story. This opera puts poor 
people and unlikely heroes in the spotlight, and it's empowering. We see 
someone very ordinary (Sister Helen) do incredible acts, and that is extremely 
impactful. Companies all over the world are presenting this piece for its 
story, music and ability to emotionally engage with audiences. Forgiveness is a 
powerful tool.

Q. What makes it resonate with audiences?

A. The story, the text, the libretto, which was written by Terrance McNally, is 
an incredibly powerful story. McNally has had to choose which words to use and 
how much to cut from material that could be drawn from the book and also from 
the movie. Jake Heggie's music then presents itself as some of the more 
accessible and inviting music of any recent opera. He uses themes of rock, jazz 
and gospel to immediately connect the audience to the score, which then allows 
us to enter into the psychology and heartbreak of this story.

Q. What universal themes does it convey?

A. It conveys themes of forgiveness, responsibility, love, hate, pain - all the 
good ones.

Q. Does it have a particularly relevant message for 2018 America?

A. Unfortunately, capital punishment is still carried out today in 31 of the 50 
states in the United States. Referendums held in the U.S. on Nov. 8, 2016, 
reinstated the death penalty in some states, and in other states, they chose 
not to abolish it. The most recent execution in the U.S. was Ruben Cardenas 
Ramirez on Nov. 8, 2017, by lethal injection in Texas. The next execution is 
scheduled for Jan. 18 - Anthony Shore, in Texas. Outside of capital punishment, 
the message of forgiveness is incredibly universal.

Q. Why should people come and see it?

A. People should come and see this opera because it has the power to change 
someone. Its message of truth, hope and forgiveness is real and possible. It 
may be surprising that it comes from an opera, but it does. I can't think of a 
better first opera to come to than this one. It is in English, relevant with 
great music and a powerful story. Anyone with any preconceptions of what opera 
is will be blown away.

Q. Would you like to add anything about your role with "Dead Man Walking"?

A. I am just fortunate to be able to be one of the many parts to make this 
opera happen. It's a work that needs to be shown, and to have Sister Helen's 
story told time and time again is only making the world a better place. Even a 
small light is extremely powerful.

For more information about "Dead Man Walking" at the Minnesota Opera, visit 
http://www.mnopera.org.

(source: thecatholicspirit.com)








KANSAS:

New book features Kansas man who executed Nazi war criminals



John C. Woods took to the killings with morbid fascination. The Wichita 
resident had developed a career of killing bad people, badly. He was thrust 
into the world's spotlight at the end of World War II as the hangman for 10 
Nazi war criminals. Several of them died not from broken necks as would be 
expected with hangings but from slow, excruciating strangulation.

Nazi Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel was reported to have taken 28 minutes to 
die.

Woods bragged about the hangings. His face was plastered on newspapers, 
magazines and news reels.

It has been nearly 7 decades since Woods experienced his own bizarre death. He 
is now the focus of a book scheduled to come out within the next few months.

"I don'y look at him as an evil guy but as a guy who had to do something for 
which he volunteered to do," said retired U.S. Army Col. French MacLean, the 
author of "American Hangman." "I don't think he was a sick serial murderer but 
you could have fooled the Germans. He behaved like a bum. ... When Woods was 
hanging people, he was the main primary actor. It was his show."

MacLean is hopeful that there may be Kansas residents who remember stories 
about Woods that could lead to more understanding about the Nazi hangman.

What is known is that Woods was born June 5, 1911, in Wichita and attended 
Wichita High School - later named East High School. He dropped out after 2 
years.

He joined the U.S. Navy in 1929 and went AWOL after serving only a few months. 
MacLean said Woods was dishonorably discharged with a diagnosis of psychopathic 
inferiority without psychosis, a term coined in Germany in the 1880s to 
describe irredeemable criminals who had a mix of violent and anti-social 
characteristics.

Woods returned to Kansas after the Navy and worked in a variety of construction 
and farm-related jobs in Greenwood and Woodson counties during the Great 
Depression. He worked for a time for the Civilian Conservation Corps but was 
dishonorably charged from that after 6 months, MacLean said. He also worked at 
Boeing as a tool and die maker.

When the United States entered World War II, Woods enlisted in the U.S. Army 
which, MacLean said, he shouldn't have been able to do since he had already 
been dishonorably discharged from the Navy. But it was in the days before 
internet and probably no one checked his records, MacLean said.

In 1943, he was assigned to Company B of the 37th Engineer Combat Battalion in 
the Fifth Engineer Special Brigade. He may have participated in the D-Day 
landings at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.

Not long after, the Army put out word for an executioner, asking if anyone had 
experience, MacLean said. The Army had 96 U.S. soldiers tried with death 
penalty cases that were scheduled for execution in 1944, for crimes such as 
desertion, murder and rape while U.S. forces were in Africa and Europe. The 
most famous was Private Eddie Slovik, whose story was made into a television 
movie in 1974 starring Martin Sheen.

Some of those soldiers were executed by firing squad, such as Slovik. Others 
were hung.

Woods volunteered for the job, saying he had hanged two men in Texas and 2 in 
Oklahoma. No records exist showing that he did.

"The Army doesn't check to find out - and I'm sure there was the thought, 'How 
complicated could it (a hanging) be?'" MacLean said. "He did not get wounded on 
Omaha Beach but he saw a bunch of guys get killed. ... I'm sure he thought, I 
do not want to go through that experience again. He was right on the border 
with Germany and about to cross the Rhine River. He probably thought he'd get 
hammered again. He volunteers to get out of the combat engineers. He is 
accepted and promoted from private to master sergeant and his pay goes from $50 
to $138 a month."

Woods became an international celebrity in October 1946 following the 
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

He was assigned to kill 10 of the top Third Reich's Nazi military and civilian 
officials who had been convicted of war crimes against humanity.

Woods would brag in a quote that ran in hundreds of papers and magazines around 
the world:

"I hanged those 10 Nazis . and I'm proud of it . I wasn't nervous . A fellow 
can't afford to have nerves in this business."

News of Wood's participation in the hangings came as a surprise to his wife, 
Hazel Woods, who was quoted in The Emporia Gazette on Oct. 17, 1946.

"He never told me that he was doing that type of work," she told the paper. "He 
didn't mention any hangings and the first I knew of it was when I saw his 
picture in the papers."

The Wichita hangman would tell Time Magazine on Oct. 26, 1946:

"The way I look at this hanging job, somebody has to do it. I got into it kind 
of by accident, years ago in the States."

Time Magazine would call the executions at Nuremberg the "Night Without Dawn."

"This was a night which had been longed for by millions in death cells, in all 
of Europe's fearful prisons and pens. But now, in the piercing wind, victors 
and vanquished alike felt the chilling doubts that invariably attend man's 
deliberate killing in the name of justice."

Some would later claim the killings were botched - that Woods purposefully drew 
the deaths out so that the men did not hang but rather suffocated to death, 
taking 20 minutes or more to die.

One eyewitness account of the killings described it like this:

"When the rope snapped taut with the body swinging wildly, groans could be 
heard from within the concealed interior of the scaffold. Finally, the hangman, 
who had descended from the gallows platform, lifted the black canvas curtain 
and went inside. Something happened that put a stop to the groans and brought 
the rope to a standstill. After it was over I was not in the mood to ask what 
he did, but I assume that he grabbed the swinging body ... and pulled down on 
it. We were all of the opinion that Streicher had strangled," reported 
Kingsbury Smith, a reporter with the International News Service on Oct. 16, 
1946.

Some of the condemned men hit their heads on the platform as they dropped from 
the scaffolds, Time magazine reported.

"Those Nazis were bad, bad men,' MacLean said. "So if it took longer for them 
to die, maybe they should have thought of that as they were sending people to 
concentration camps."

After the hangings, Woods bragged: "10 men in 106 minutes, that's fast work."

After the Nuremberg hangings, Woods would brag to people that he had executed 
as many as 347 men. In reality, MacLean said, it was closer to 90 men.

Woods continued serving the U.S. Army after the war.

On July 21, 1950, he was stationed on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific, a testing 
ground for nuclear weapons. The island was populated with German and U.S. 
scientists and engineers working as part of Operation Paperclip in an effort to 
develop the U.S. aerospace, atomic weapons and military aircraft industries.

He was standing in a pool of water, changing light bulbs, when a current of 
electricity suddenly coursed through the water. Woods screamed and fell back 
into the water, dead.

His death was a "pedestrian end," MacLean said, for a man who once held the 
world stage.

Woods "died faster than many of the men he executed."

But his death may not have been an accident, MacLean said.

"The discussions on the internet about his death are legion," MacLean said. 
"The Army ruled it an accident but the last chapter on my book is about Wood's 
death. It will show the official Army report of investigation was flawed. It 
was wrong."

The Nazi executioner is buried in a small cemetery in Toronto next to his wife, 
who died in 2000.

(source: Associated Press)








MISSOURI----new death sentence:

Springfield Man Sentenced to Death for Killing Missouri Girl----The man 
convicted of abducting and killing a 10-year-old Springfield girl has been 
sentenced to death.



The man convicted of abducting and killing a 10-year-old Springfield girl has 
been sentenced to death.

Circuit Judge Thomas Mountjoy on Thursday sentenced 49-year-old Craig Wood for 
the February 2014 death of Hailey Owens.

Woods was convicted in November of 1st-degree murder but the jury couldn't 
decide whether to impose the death penalty or life in prison without parole.

Before sentencing, Mountjoy denied motions from Wood's attorneys for a new 
trial and calling judge-imposed death sentences unconstitutional.

Wood grabbed Hailey off the street and took her to his home, where he raped her 
and shot her in the head. Her body was found in his basement.

The case severely impacted the Springfield community. Four days after Hailey's 
death, an estimated 10,000 people marched in a candlelight vigil to honor her.

(source: Associated Press)








CALIFORNIA:

Butte County DA fights to prosecute 30-year-old Chico killings in which suspect 
was black



Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey is opposing a request seeking to 
remove his office from the retrial of a man accused in the 1987 killings of a 
Chico doctor and his wife, according to court documents.

Ramsey also opposes a request by defense attorneys seeking to bar prosecutors 
from again seeking the death penalty against the man, Steven Crittenden, 50.

Crittenden, a former Chico State University football player, was convicted in 
1989 of murder and sentenced to death in the stabbing and beating deaths of Dr. 
William Chiapella, 68, and his wife Katherine Chiapella, 67 - a crime that 
shocked the community.

But Crittenden's conviction was later overturned by a federal district court 
that found the original prosecutor at Crittenden's trial, Gerald Flanagan, was 
substantially motivated by race when he excluded the only prospective black 
juror at Crittenden's trial.

Crittenden is black.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's ruling in 
2015.

Crittenden's defense attorneys last September filed a motion in Butte County 
Superior Court asking a judge to consider kicking the District Attorney's 
Office off the case over the "egregious misconduct" allegedly committed by the 
trial prosecutor.

They also argued that keeping the death penalty off the table at Crittenden's 
retrial would be an appropriate consequence for Flanagan's "racially motivated" 
actions.

"Based on the misconduct of the district attorney's racially motivated actions 
in the 1st trial, defendant spent 26 years under a death judgment without 
benefit of a jury trial from a cross section of the community," the attorneys 
wrote in their motion. "More is needed to remedy the flagrant constitutional 
violation."

A Butte County judge is scheduled to consider the motion at a hearing 
Wednesday.

Ramsey, according to court documents filed Monday, described the allegations of 
misconduct as "hyperbole" and "insulting."

The district attorney further stated he still disputes the federal court's 
finding that Flanagan was motivated by race when he excluded the sole black 
juror at Crittenden's trial.

Ramsey said denying the prosecution's "quest for justice by seeking the death 
penalty before another fairly-picked jury is a remedy too remote from any 
factual or legal underpinnings."

The state Office of the Attorney General also weighed in on the case, opposing 
Crittenden's attorneys' request to disqualify the local District Attorney's 
Office from participating in Crittenden's retrial.

In court documents filed Dec. 29, deputy attorney general Heather Gimle argued 
that removing the District Attorney's Office from the case would only be 
appropriate if it had a disqualifying conflict of interest.

Allegations of misconduct, Gimle said, do not qualify as a conflict of 
interest.

A judge Wednesday is also scheduled to receive an update related to a reverse 
change of venue motion filed by the District Attorney's Office.

Crittenden's original trial in 1989 was held in Placer County instead of Butte 
County partly because of extensive pretrial publicity. Prosecutors have said 
enough time has passed for Crittenden to receive a fair trial in Butte County.

Crittenden's lawyers have said former Chico State professor Edward Bronson has 
been tasked with conducting a survey gauging Butte County residents' 
familiarity with the 30-year-old case.

Crittenden remains in custody at San Quentin State Prison.

(source: Daily Democrat)








OREGON:

Accused killer may avoid death penalty in murder of Bend college student



It looks like an accused killer will avoid the death penalty in the murder of a 
Bend college student.

After K-T-V-Z started asking questions, Kaylee Sawyer's mother posted on 
Facebook that Edwin Lara will plead guilty and be sentenced to life in prison.

The lawyers in the case are under a gag order, so they can't confirm the 
details.

Police say Lara kidnapped and killed Sawyer on the Central Oregon Community 
College campus as she was walking home from school.

Investigators say Lara - a former C-O-C-C campus safety officer - dumped the 
23-year-old's body in a canyon west of Redmond.

(source: mycentraloregon.com)








USA:

A Condemned Man Gets a Whopper for His Last Meal in Burger King's New Ad----And 
it's a comedy!



We sure are seeing some unusual themes in advertising in 2018. Ikea made the ad 
you pee on, and now Burger King is rolling out a spot set on death row.

The commercial, by agency Buzzman, is from France, a country that abolished the 
death penalty many decades ago. (So, perhaps they can laugh about it now?) It 
shows a condemned prisoner receiving his last meal from a prison guard.

Of course, it's a Whopper with fries. But the story doesn't end there...

Executions don't really seem like fertile ground for humor, and the payoff here 
is pretty lame, truth be told. The guard voluntarily becomes the prisoner, so 
he can have a munch on that burger? Even if the Whopper is hard to come by - 
and you do have to drive forever to get one in France - that twist still seems 
cartoonishly dumb, even within the goofy alternate reality of the spot.

Advertising has visited death row before, of course, most notably in Oliviero 
Toscani's Benetton ads from 2000 featuring portraits of actual inmates at a 
Missouri state prison. (Benetton later apologized for those ads, after Toscani 
left the company.) The BK work is obviously meant to be much more lighthearted, 
but is this really an issue you want to turn into a cheap gag?

Now, anyone else want to send us their ad about pee or death?

(source: Tim Nudd is creative editor of Adweek and editor of AdFreak, its daily 
blog. He oversees all of Adweek's creative coverage and is co-host of its 
weekly podcast, Yeah, That's Probably an Ad----adweek.com)