[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----GA., TENN., S. DAK.

[Rick Halperin]

Oct. 1




GEORGIA:

Georgia Sheriff Wants Death Penalty For Jamaican Who Murdered Wife



Clayton County, Georgia Sheriff, Victor Hill, says he will ask the judiciary 
system to consider the death penalty against Jamaican immigrant Jermaine Jones, 
who murdered and almost decapitated his wife last Thursday night, Sept. 27th.

Jones, 30, is accused of brutally stabbing his 47-year-old wife, Opal Fern 
Christian-Jones, multiple times cutting her neck so severely that her head was 
nearly severed.

Clayton County Police and Sheriff’s Deputies say the domestic incident occurred 
at Springview Drive in Forest Park, Clayton, Georgia.

A person who tried to stop Jones ended up fleeing for his life. Jones later 
called 911 from Holiday Blvd and allegedly said something to the effect that he 
had just committed a heinous crime.

Police Officers and Sheriff's Deputies responded to Holiday Blvd and took 
Jones, whose clothes were bloody, into custody without incident.

Jones was denied bond when he appeared in court on Friday and is being held at 
the Clayton County Jail on 1 charge of malice murder.

He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on October 11th.

Jones reportedly attended May Day High in Manchester, Jamaica and Fern 
Christian-Jones is a past student of Steths in St. Elizabeth Jamaica.

(source: newsamericasnow.com)








TENNESSEE:

Executions With an Extra Dose of Cruelty----Inmates on Tennessee's death row 
favor a firing squad to a torturous, deadly injection.



In August, 4 death row inmates filed a federal lawsuit in which they made an 
extraordinary argument: The state's new lethal-injection protocol is so 
inhumane that execution by firing squad would be preferable. They even pointed 
out the practicality of this plan, noting that "the Big Buck Shooting Range is 
located on the grounds of Riverbend Maximum (Security) Institution and can 
easily accommodate the equipment required for an execution."

This lawsuit is a response to the execution of Billy Ray Irick on Aug. 9, the 
1st time in nearly a decade that the State of Tennessee had killed a prisoner 
in its care. It did so using an untested execution method that it had been 
warned would almost certainly cause excruciating pain.

After Mr. Irick's death, Dr. David Lubarsky, an expert consulted by lawyers 
challenging the state's lethal-injection protocol, issued a statement: "I 
conclude to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Mr. Irick was aware 
and sensate during his execution and would have experienced the feeling of 
choking, drowning in his own fluids, suffocating, being buried alive and the 
burning sensation caused by the injection of the potassium chloride."

At the core of the legal challenge is a drug called midazolam, a sedative. In 
minor medical procedures, like colonoscopies and heart catheterizations, it is 
used to induce sleep. To prevent the patient from feeling pain during invasive 
surgeries that require true anesthesia, a painkilling drug is administered 
after midazolam.

Tennessee's lethal-injection protocol calls for the administration of midazolam 
followed not by a painkiller but by drugs that paralyze the body, including the 
lungs, and stop the heart. Because of the paralytic, the inmate's suffering 
might not be visible to onlookers without training in anesthesia, but it's 
nothing less than state-sanctioned torture. That's why Justice Sonia Sotomayor 
of the Supreme Court, writing in a powerful dissent to the court's refusal to 
stop Mr. Irick's execution, characterized the state's protocol as a descent 
into "barbarism."

Earlier this year, 33 death row inmates in Tennessee challenged the protocol as 
a violation of the United States Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual 
punishment. After a judge ruled against them in July, lawyers for the inmates 
immediately appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. The state executed Mr. 
Irick before the case could be heard. 2 more inmates are scheduled to die this 
year - Edmund Zagorski on Oct. 11 and David Earl Miller on Dec. 6 - both by the 
lethal-injection method that relies on midazolam.

Mr. Irick's crime - the rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl left in his care - 
was unimaginably hideous, a case tailor-made to challenge even the most ardent 
activist's desire to abolish the death penalty. Mr. Zagorski, by contrast, is 
on death row for something almost routine by maximum-security standards: a 
drug-related double murder. His 1984 conviction was complicated by the kinds of 
problems that so often spring up in death penalty cases: profound concerns 
about police interrogation methods, about the effectiveness of his legal 
representation and about his mental competence.

Mr. Zagorski has been a model prisoner during his 34 years of incarceration. He 
has never been cited for so much as a minor rule infraction, and a remarkable 
list of prison staffers support his request for clemency, which is now on the 
desk of Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican. According to a former warden, Mr. 
Zagorski "is a perfect example of how a man can change for the better over the 
years."

At the time of his conviction, Mr. Zagorski's jury was not given the sentencing 
option of life without parole - an option that 6 of the surviving jurors who 
decided his fate now say they would have chosen if it had been available. At 
least 20 prisoners in Tennessee have been sentenced to life without parole for 
crimes far worse than Mr. Zagorski's. As the Nashville Scene news site's Steven 
Hale reports, the application of capital punishment here is so arbitrary that 
two lawyers, Bradley MacLean and H.E. Miller Jr., writing in The Tennessee 
Journal of Law and Policy, called it "Tennessee's Death-Penalty Lottery."

There are egregious problems with the death penalty - its arbitrary 
application, its failure to deter crime, its outrageous cost to the state, its 
permanence in the face of a fallible judicial system. As it happens, Mr. Irick 
was white, as is Mr. Zagorski, but a nation committed to real justice would 
abolish the practice based solely on the overwhelming racial disparity between 
which inmates are allowed to live and which are given a death sentence.

There are many pragmatic reasons for abolishing the death penalty. There are no 
pragmatic arguments for keeping it. 31 states have the death penalty, and for 1 
reason only: blood lust. We continue to execute our fellow human beings - 
methodically, barbarically, with determination - because of a primitive desire 
for revenge.

On Wednesday, the Tennessee Supreme Court will hear opening arguments in the 
appeal of the chancery court decision permitting the state to proceed with 
executions that use midazolam. Though the introduction of new evidence is 
typically prohibited in appeals, inmates' lawyers hope to put details from the 
death of Billy Ray Irick into evidence in challenging the constitutionality of 
the lethal-injection protocol. 8 days later, unless Governor Haslam commutes 
his sentence to life without parole, or a state or federal court intervenes, 
Edmund Zagorski will be tortured to death by the State of Tennessee.

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








SOUTH DAKOTA:

South Dakota Supreme Court Hears Cases This Week



Briley Piper was charged with 1st-degree murder, kidnapping, 1st-degree 
robbery, 1st-degree burglary and grand theft in the March 2000 beating death of 
Chester Allan Poage. Piper entered guilty pleas on all 5 charges and a judge 
sentenced him to death on the 1st-degree murder conviction. Piper applied for a 
writ of habeas corpus in 2006, arguing he was not properly informed of his 
right to have a jury decide whether to impose the death penalty. On remand, 
Piper made a motion to withdraw his guilty pleas, which was denied. Piper 
appeals the circuit court's denial of his 2nd writ of habeas corpus.

(source: keloland.com)