[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ARIZ., CALIF., ORE., WASH., US MIL.

[Rick Halperin]

October 13



ARIZONA:

Aussie mum who could face death penalty fronts court



In an orange jumpsuit and shackled in chains, Australian Lisa Cunningham waved 
and mouthed the words "I love you" to her 21-year-old daughter in the public 
gallery.

Mrs Cunningham 43, was then ushered out of the courtroom, and back to jail in 
Maricopa County Jail, in Phoenix, Arizona.

The mother-of-four is awaiting trial on felony murder and child abuse charges, 
along with her American husband, former police detective Germayne Cunningham, 
over the death of seven-year-old Sanaa Cunningham.

Sanaa was Germayne's biological daughter, Lisa Cunningham’s step-daughter. The 
little girl died in February 2017, suffering a head injury, an open wound on 
her foot and a sepsis infection.

The prosecution also alleges Sanaa had injuries to her wrists consistent with 
being tied up using zip-ties.

The alleged crime, committed in Arizona, carries with it the death penalty.

The last time a woman was put to death in this state was in 1930; the Maricopa 
County Attorney believes this case fits the criteria, and the judge agrees. But 
according to Lisa Cunningham's defence team, the case is not as clear cut as it 
would seem.

Sanaa Cunningham was a troubled child, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 
age 6, and was prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

Court documents allege at times, the little girl was restrained with an 
oversized t-shirt tied behind her back.

The defence claims some of Sanaa’s injuries were self-inflicted.

Defence Attorney Eric Kessler says the parents repeatedly sought medical help 
for Sanaa, maintaining they took care of her to the best of their ability.

Mr Kessler told the court, shortly before she died, Sanaa was taken to a 
medical professional, and the parents were not given appropriate advice on how 
to help their child.

A murder trial for Lisa and Germayne Cunningham is still a long way off, 
perhaps up to 2 years.

In the meantime, defence counsel is alleging "prosecutorial misconduct" telling 
the he court, prosecutors told the grand jury "one side of the coin."

"I'm glad that the judge is taking our argument seriously. He's given them 
great thought and having taken them great thought and having taken the matter 
under advisement. That means that he is seriously considering remanding this 
back to the grand jury.

Defence Attorney Eric Kessler says the parents repeatedly sought medical help 
for Sanaa, maintaining they took care of her to the best of their ability.

Lawyers for the Cunninghams want the judge to send the case back to the grand 
jury, which in this state, has the role of determining the charges on the 
indictment.

Defence counsel is claiming a significant discrepancy in the timeline of 
Sanaa's death, an error of 3 hours, which the grand jury wasn't aware of when 
they determined Lisa and Germayne Cunningham should be charged with felony 
murder, a death penalty charge.

The 3 hours is significant according to the defence counsel, because it could 
have proved to the grand jury there was time for the child to receive medical 
treatment, and that parents didn't take her to hospital "at the last minute."

If the judge rules the case should be sent back to the grand jury for 
re-presentation, jurors have the option of coming back with different charges.

Anything less than felony murder and the death penalty comes off the table.

(source: 9news.com.au)








CALIFORNIA:

State court to hear appeal of man convicted in 1998 rape, murder of mother of 3



The California Supreme Court is set next month to hear an automatic appeal 
filed on behalf of 1 of 3 men on death row for the December 1998 rape and 
beating death of a mother of 3 attacked while walking to a store in Long Beach.

J amelle Armstrong - whose appeal will be heard Nov. 7 in Sacramento - was 
sentenced to death in 2004 for his involvement in the Dec. 29, 1998, sexual 
assault, robbery and slaying of Penny Sigler, also known as Penny Keprta.

In a 6-1 ruling in May, the state’s highest court upheld the conviction and 
death sentence of Armstrong's half-brother, Warren Justin Hardy.

An automatic appeal is still pending for the 3rd defendant, Kevin Pearson.

In a 2012 ruling that cited the trial court's "improper excusal of a 
prospective juror because of her views on capital punishment,' the California 
Supreme Court unanimously threw out Pearson's 1st death sentence. The 2nd jury 
to hear the penalty phase against Pearson recommended in April 2013 that he be 
sentenced to death, and he was formally sentenced again to death about 2 months 
later.

The 43-year-old woman was walking to a store at about 11 p.m. when she was 
attacked under an overpass to the 405 Freeway in Long Beach. She suffered 114 
injuries, including at least 10 skull fractures that appeared to have been 
inflicted before her death, according to the California Supreme Court 
majority's May 31 opinion in Hardy's case.

The woman's body was found by Caltrans workers - one of whom thought the body 
was a mannequin - on a freeway embankment on the northbound 405 Freeway near 
Wardlow Road and Long Beach Boulevard.

"The victim was moved to the embankment before being raped, from which the jury 
could infer that defendant and his co-defendants kidnapped her with the intent 
to rape in addition to the intent to kill," Justice Ming W. Chin wrote on 
behalf of the majority in Hardy's case.

The panel also noted that there was evidence that Sigler had been given food 
stamps, that an empty food stamp booklet was found at the scene of the crime 
and that food stamps bearing that serial number were used at a nearby market, 
and that the store's owner testified that Hardy had used food stamps to buy 
items around that time.

"This evidence was sufficient to support the conclusion that defendant took the 
victim's food stamps and used them. This conclusion, in turn, supported the 
robbery finding," Chin wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Goodwin H. Liu wrote that he felt the judgment 
against Hardy should be reversed.

"As a result of the prosecutor striking every black juror she could have 
struck, the black defendant in this capital case, charged with raping and 
murdering a white woman, was tried by a jury that included no black person," 
Liu wrote, adding that his inquiry "leads me to conclude that, more likely than 
not, the jury that convicted Hardy and sentenced him to death was not selected 
free of improper discrimination."

(source: Long Beach Post)








OREGON:

As Washington Scraps Death Penalty, Gubernatorial Candidate Knute Buehler 
Pledges To Bring Executions Back To Oregon----"I will follow the desires of the 
voters of Oregon," he said.



On Thursday, the Washington Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty 
law.

2 days prior, Oregon gubernatorial candidate Knute Buehler promised, if 
elected, to start executing people on death row in this state for the 1st time 
in 21 years.

In the last debate of the campaign, Buehler said he intends to bring back 
executions.

"I will follow the desires of the voters of Oregon," he said. "And I will 
enforce the death penalty."

There hasn't been an execution in Oregon since 1997. Former Gov. John Kitzaber 
issued a moratorium on enforcing the death penalty in 2011, just before a man 
was scheduled to die by lethal injection.

Gov. Kate Brown has maintained the policy and refused to execute any of the 33 
inmates on death row. If re-elected, Brown says she would not allow any 
executions to move forward.

? The Washington Supreme Court struck down that state's death penalty law, 
citing racial disparities among the men and women sentenced to die. Washington 
is the 20th state to bar capital punishment.

(source: Willamette Week)








WASHINGTON:

Statement by the Spokesperson on the abolition of the death penalty in 
Washington State, USA



On 11 October, the Supreme Court of the US State of Washington ruled to ban the 
death penalty, bringing the number of US States that have now abolished the 
capital punishment to 20.

The decision further encourages the growing trend to abandon capital 
punishment.

The death penalty is a cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. No compelling 
evidence exists to show that the death penalty serves as a deterrent to crime 
and any miscarriages of justice are irreversible.

As the European Union, we strongly oppose the death penalty and will continue 
to work for its abolition worldwide.

(source: europa.eu)

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

Social worker who served Yates' victims supports end of death penalty



Before investigators learned the name of Spokane serial killer Robert Lee Yates 
Jr., fear gripped the women who worked as prostitutes on East Sprague Avenue.

As their friends disappeared in the early 1990s, the terror grew. Yet the 
women, many of whom believed they had no other options, continued to put 
themselves in harm's way.

Every Wednesday, the women would visit a van named "Gloria" and grab a fistful 
of condoms and clean syringes. The rig was the home base for Lynn Everson, the 
needle exchange coordinator for Spokane Regional Health District. She would 
give the women a hug and advice and send them on their way.

"If you look at the victims of serial killers, prostituted people are at the 
top of their list because they have no choice but to get into vehicles with 
strangers," Everson said. "Some carried pepper spray. Some carried butcher 
knives in their pockets. They were afraid, but at the same time they had no 
other choice but to go out and work."

Everson said she personally worked with most of the women who would become the 
murder victims of Yates, who pleaded guilty in 2000 to 13 counts of 1st-degree 
murder and was sentenced to 408 years in prison. Then in 2002, he was convicted 
of 2 additional murders in Pierce County and was sentenced to death.

But on Thursday, the Washington Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, 
saying the law is applied arbitrarily and in a racially biased manner. As a 
result, Yates, and every other death row inmate, had their sentences commuted 
to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

"I am pleased that (Yates) gets to sit in 1 small, miserable cell for the rest 
of his life," Everson said. "I think the death penalty is too easy. I think the 
consequences of lifetime in prison are both cheaper and better justice."

Everson, 69, is about eight months away from retirement. She's spent more than 
29 years working with the city's most troubled clients. For 27 of those years, 
Everson maintained a "bad trick list" that included rapists and men who robbed, 
choked, beat and stabbed prostitutes.

"Yates was on there," she said of the list. "These women face hostility, anger 
and violence every single day of their lives. I admire their courage, and I'm 
very sorry about the choices that they have to make."

Everson experienced that fear one night when she realized that a "trick" had 
followed her from East Sprague to downtown Spokane. She was driving a marked 
health district car.

"I took evasive action and he came back around, so I parked the vehicle ... and 
ran into the Dead End Tavern for safety," she said of the former bar at 1121 W. 
First Ave. "In my panic, I did not get the license plate."

But her pursuer drove a black van with rainbow stripes. She later learned from 
detectives that the van was driven by Yates. "My theory was that he just liked 
to mess with people," Everson said.

For the social worker, working East Sprague was just her job. But to Everson's 
clients, the street was their life.

"I knew one woman who had gotten an insurance settlement. She used the 
insurance money to change her life," Everson said. "She was the only one we 
ever heard from who was able to leave prostitution as a means of survival."

A different woman used prostitution to support her mother until her mother 
died. "Her mother was her 1st pimp," Everson said. Most women on the street 
suffered some sort of psychological, physical or emotional childhood trauma, or 
a combination of all those ordeals, and turned to substance abuse at an early 
age.

"Some of the women could not read or write. Some had violent pimps," she said. 
"Prostitution is not a choice. They came from painful, dysfunctional places."

And some had the misfortune of meeting Yates. As a result of her interactions 
with the women, Everson testified as a witness in Yates' trial.

"It's very emotional. When I was in court testifying, (Yates) tried to stare me 
down when I was on the witness stand," Everson said. "I just remember staring 
back thinking, 'You will never walk out of here. I, on the other hand, am going 
to go enjoy my life.'"

“Knowing that he will occupy a small cell forever and ever, it works for me. 
And the women I know, it works for them, too."

(source: Spokesman-Review

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

'Disappointed,' says father of murdered 12-year-old girl on death penalty 
ruling



The Washington state Supreme Court struck down Washington's use of capital 
punishment - finding it "arbitrary" and "racially biased."

When Frank Holden got the call from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee 4 years ago he 
was stunned - the man who killed his 12-year-old daughter in 1988 wasn't going 
to be executed anytime soon.

Holden, of Pocatello, Idaho, said Inslee told him he was going to declare a 
formal moratorium on the state's use of the death penalty. Jonathan Lee Gentry, 
who was condemned to death in 1991, was already one of the state's longest 
serving inmates.

Holden told KOMO Thursday it was clear the Governor's mind was made up, so 
Holden hung up on him. But, he said, he held out a sliver of hope that the 
moratorium would be lifted after Inslee's term.

On Thursday, Holden learned that the state Supreme Court took a stronger stand 
and struck down Washington's use of capital punishment - finding it "arbitrary" 
and "racially biased."

Holden said he was "disappointed."

"This doesn't surprise me," he said. "I've been waiting a long time."

(source: KOMO news)

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

Meet the UW professor who just killed the death penalty----The state Supreme 
Court was just the scene of a 2-year-long, back-and-forth scientific smackdown, 
which ended in the death penalty being thrown out. The professor at the center 
of it all talks about the experience.



When the state Supreme Court threw out the death penalty the other day, the 
justices' opinions naturally focused on weighty constitutional questions, about 
equal rights and the proportionality of punishment in our criminal-justice 
system.

But most of the 4-year-long case that led to the landmark ruling was consumed 
by a far less lofty question: Is Katherine Beckett legit?

Who, you ask? That's what she was wondering.

"I had no idea that my work, or questions about my competence, would become so 
central to a constitutional death-penalty case," Beckett told me Friday. "So to 
have it come out the way it did ... it was exhausting and suspenseful, but in 
the end, extremely gratifying."

Beckett is the University of Washington sociology professor whose 2014 study of 
capital-murder cases in our state found that black defendants were 4 times as 
likely to be sentenced to death as defendants of other races. It's no 
exaggeration to say this single finding killed the death penalty.

"To reach our conclusion, we afford great weight to Beckett's analysis and 
conclusions," was how Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst put it in the court's 
unanimous ruling Thursday.

But it's also no exaggeration to say that Beckett, a UW prof for 18 years, was 
put on trial every bit as much as the death penalty itself.

She and her co-author, Heather Evans, who was then a grad student but is now a 
UW sociology lecturer, were blasted as unethical by a state-hired expert. He 
accused them of "opportunistically" jiggering the models to reach a 
predetermined result. The state's attorneys derisively dubbed their work 
"garbage in, garbage out."

Beckett's study "should play no part in reasoned discussion about the role of 
race in the imposition of the death penalty," wrote the University of 
California, Irvine, professor who was hired by the state, in a blistering 
116-page critique.

Little known to the public, a behind-the-scenes scientific smackdown consumed 
the case for more than two years. About halfway through, the court went to the 
unusual step of deputizing a court commissioner solely to referee the hundreds 
of pages of disputes about statistical analysis and modeling.

It all revolved around one study, based on trial reports filled out by the 
judges in aggravated-murder cases. It looked at all 297 aggravated-murder cases 
from 1981 to 2014 in our state in which the defendants were both adults and 
eligible for the death penalty.

The 2nd sentence of the study is shocking in its own right, and maybe helps 
explain why folks got so riled up: "To date, however, no published study has 
examined the role of race in capital sentencing in Washington State, where the 
death penalty was first authorized 160 years ago."

We've never even looked at the issue before? We're putting people to death and 
we didn't even want to know.

"It is surprising," was all Beckett would say about the lack of past analysis 
about race.

The findings of the study are fascinating. For starters, prosecutors over the 
33-year period showed no racial bias at all when deciding whether to seek the 
death penalty, the study showed. Prosecutors were no more likely to bring the 
death-penalty hammer down on black defendants than anyone else.

But juries were not so equitable. At sentencing, which in capital cases also 
goes to the jury, black defendants were 4 times as likely to get death, Beckett 
found.

"It really implicates the juries," she said of her study. She said it could be 
explicit racial bias or implicit, subconscious bias - it's impossible to know 
for sure.

The study attempted to correct for other factors in the cases, such as the 
number of murder victims or whether sex crimes were involved (the latter is 
much more likely to lead to a death sentence, as is killing a police officer.)

"Every possible objection they threw at us about our work, we answered," 
Beckett said. That included submitting testimony from 12 experts backing their 
methods, correcting some data errors and re-running the analysis using 
different models. "The core finding about racial bias in the death penalty 
never changed."

Here's how the court summed it up: "Where new, objective information is 
presented for our consideration, we must account for it. As a result of the 
State's challenge and ... fact-finding process, Beckett's analysis became only 
more refined, more accurate, and ultimately, more reliable."

In academia, which is dominated by caveats and gray areas, that's what's known 
as a slam dunk.

Beckett says the ruling is a landmark because it acknowledges racial bias in 
our justice system - which this story shows can be extremely difficult for us 
to do. But she was also heartened by it for another reason.

"They took the social scientific work very seriously, including in how hard 
they vetted it," she said of the court. "In this era of fact-free, 
emotion-based decision-making, I was pleased by that - to see that rigorous 
science still matters."

It turns out science is still legit. That's as good news as I've reported in 
this space in quite some time.

(source: Danny Westneat, Seattle Times)








US MILITARY:

Military Court Rules Against Accused USS Cole Bomber's Lawyers



A military court review panel sided Friday with the judge in the USS Cole 
trial, ruling that defense lawyers had no authority to quit the case over 
ethics questions raised by their discovery of a secret microphone in their 
meeting room -- developments that have stalled the war crimes trial since 
February.

A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate comment on whether, and how soon, 
pretrial proceedings would resume at Guantanamo in the death-penalty case 
against Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. The court's calendar shows the courtroom 
assigned to the USS Cole case for all of October. Nashiri, a Saudi, is accused 
of orchestrating al-Qaida's Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the Arleigh 
Burke-class destroyer that killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded dozens of others.

He has been held by the U.S. since 2002 but was first charged in 2011.

The 57-page decision by the U.S. Court of Military Commissions Review also 
ruled that the chief defense counsel, Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, did not 
have the authority to let the civilian lawyers quit the case a year ago. The 
judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, convicted Baker of contempt of court for 
doing so, fined him $1,000 and ordered Baker confined to his quarters for 21 
days in a conviction that was subsequently overturned.

The 3-member panel ruling was dated Thursday but released by the court clerk in 
the early hours of Friday morning, the 18th anniversary of the USS Cole bombing 
off Aden, Yemen.

A footnote in the ruling acknowledged the disconnect between Spath's contempt 
finding and U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth's ruling, which found a 
war court judge had no such unilateral contempt authority and overturned the 
general's conviction.

The footnote said that the White House and Congress may "may wish to consider 
legislation" that allows military commission judges to hold parties in 
contempt. The war court trying Nashiri was created in 2006 and then reformed by 
Congress in 2009 to provide defendants accused of death-penalty offenses with 
Pentagon-paid defense lawyers with expertise in capital defense, called learned 
counsel.

It was also not immediately known what the three defense lawyers who quit would 
do. Learned counsel Rick Kammen currently has a restraining order in a U.S. 
District Court in Indiana, where he practices law, preventing the Pentagon from 
taking him into war court custody without prior notice.

His co-counsel, Rose Eliades and Mary Spears, are Pentagon paid attorneys but 
have hired their own lawyers to represent them in the tug-of-war over whether 
they must defend Nashiri. A year ago, the three defense attorneys obtained an 
ethics opinion declaring their ostensibly privileged relationship with Nashiri 
compromised over the microphone discovery and other suspect monitoring episodes 
at Guantanamo.

On the discovery of the microphone -- which was kept secret from the public and 
Nashiri for months -- the court agreed with prosecutors that listening and 
recording devices discovered by the defense were a "legacy" of times in the 
past, and not used when Nashiri was meeting with his lawyers.

Kammen told McClatchy on Friday "this excuse has never been subjected to any 
adversarial hearing or scrutiny. Candidly, we do not believe this to be true 
because of other things we found that remain classified."

As for whether Kammen would return to the case, he said he was considering 
whether to pursue the question in a federal court and would "be guided by my 
ethical obligations and the best interests of Mr. al-Nashiri."

The new Nashiri case judge, Air Force Col. Shelley Schools, was assigned to 
preside in August after Spath submitted his papers to retire from service. She 
has yet to hold a hearing pending the higher court decision.

Spath froze all proceedings in the case until a higher court ruled on his 
contempt authority and other questions raised by the resignations, notably 
whether pretrial hearings could go forward without Kammen or another learned 
counsel. The review panel found it could.

When the hearings were suspended, Nashiri was defended by Navy Lt. Alaric 
Piette, a former Navy SEAL with no capital defense experience. Spath at one 
point advised him to engage in some "self-help" to get some death-penalty 
defense expertise.

The panel had earlier rejected another challenge by Nashiri's military 
attorneys that sought to have Spath's rulings in the case dismissed because he 
had pursued work as an immigration court judge before retirement. The hiring 
process takes a year or more, Nashiri's lawyers argued, meaning Spath would 
have been seeking employment from the Department of Justice while presiding in 
the case, which has both Pentagon and Department of Justice prosecutors.

Friday, a federal appellate court in Washington D.C. agreed to hear the appeal 
of the Spath conflict-of-interest question.

The Pentagon has said that Spath officially retires from the Air Force on Nov. 
1. But he is already listed as an immigration judge on the Executive Office of 
Immigration Review website, which disclosed he was sworn in on Sept. 28.

Separately, McClatchy filed a Freedom of Information Act request on July 17 for 
Spath's Department of Justice hiring record, and was notified on Oct. 2 that 
the application for the information was listed as number 10 on the Executive 
Office of Immigration Review's "complex" FOIA list.

(source: military.com)