[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., N.C., OHIO, WASH.

[Rick Halperin]

October 14




TEXAS:

Final arguments set in death penalty appeal



Closing arguments are scheduled this week in the appeal of a death penalty 
capital murder case from Hunt County.

Micah Crofford Brown was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by 
lethal injection in connection with the 2011 shooting death of his ex-wife 
Stella Michelle "Doc" Ray, a Caddo Mills Independent School District teacher.

Testimony in the evidentiary hearing regarding Brown's latest appeal ended in 
late July. Attorneys from both sides are scheduled to make their final 
arguments Wednesday morning before 196th District Court Judge Andrew Bench.

At the close of the evidentiary hearing, Bench said the attorneys would await 
opportunities to review an official transcript of the hearing, before 
presenting their "facts and conclusions of law.'"

Bench said once those documents were presented to his court, he would schedule 
a hearing for both sides to present their final live arguments before he makes 
a ruling in the appeal.

Brown, of Greenville, was convicted in May, 2013 and sentenced to death by 
lethal injection, He does not yet have an execution date scheduled.

Testimony during the trial indicated Ray was shot and killed in Greenville on 
the night of July 20, 2011 as the result of a dispute with Brown concerning the 
couple's 2 children.

After the conviction and death sentence were upheld by the Texas Court of 
Criminal Appeals, a post conviction writ was filed on Brown's behalf in 2015 by 
the Office of Capital Writs, a state agency charged with representing 
death-sentenced persons in state post-conviction habeas corpus and related 
proceedings.

The 124-page document listed multiple alleged issues with Brown's conviction 
and sentence, including ineffective assistance by the trial and appeals defense 
attorneys, improper arguments by prosecutors during the punishment phase, and 
failure to present evidence during the punishment phase that Brown suffers from 
an autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disorder that affects 
communication and behavior, which may have mitigated the jury’s decision to 
issue the death penalty.

(source: Herald Banner)








PENNSYLVANIA:

Death Penalty Sought in Toddler's Death



Prosecutors have announced plans to seek the death penalty in the death of a 
toddler in Pennsylvania earlier this year.

The (Altoona) Mirror reports that 19-year-old Drue Burd of Altoona pleaded not 
guilty Friday to homicide, aggravated assault, strangulation and related 
charges.

Police allege that he told investigators he put his hand over the mouth and 
nose of 16-month-old Angela Beard in May to make her fall asleep. She was 
pronounced dead at a Pittsburgh hospital.

Prosecutors said they will seek capital punishment if he is convicted of 
1st-degree murder.

The judge Friday barred attorneys from publicly commenting about the case, 
saying she wanted to avoid pre-trial publicity and to ensure a fair and 
impartial trial.

(source: Associated Press)








NORTH CAROLINA:

District attorney pursues death penalty despite odds



Despite the odds, a district attorney is pursuing the death penalty for the 
four prisoners charged with killing a manager, a mechanic and 2 corrections 
officers in the deadliest prison escape attempt in the state's history.

The case meets almost every standard for capital punishment, said Andrew 
Womble, district attorney for northeastern North Carolina.

But the reality is that it's been 12 years since an inmate was executed in 
North Carolina, according to the state's Department of Corrections. The state 
has 141 inmates on death row. The oldest case goes back to 1985, and the most 
recent one is from 2016, according to the state.

"The death penalty is all but extinct in North Carolina," according to a report 
by The Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a Durham, N.C. nonprofit. "It is a 
relic of another era."

For the district attorney, the effort is worth pursuing. The circumstances of 
the brutal killings, he said, are enough to justify the punishment he is 
seeking.

"These four scream for the death penalty," Womble said in an interview this 
week. "I feel incredibly confident about this case."

A year ago today, four prisoners started a fire inside the Pasquotank 
Correctional Institution north of Elizabeth City and attempted to escape. 
During the chaos, four employees were killed with hammers and scissors from a 
sewing plant inside the facility off U.S. 17 where the prisoners worked.

Mikel Brady, Jonathan Monk, Seth J. Frazier and Wisezah Buckman were charged 
with 1st-degree murder. Killed were Veronica Darden, manager of the sewing 
plant, Geoffrey Howe, a mechanic, and corrections officers Justin Smith and 
Wendy Shannon. All four prisoners were serving time for violent crimes.

The prison was short 84 positions, about a quarter of the recommended staff, 
according to a report released in January by the The National Institute of 
Corrections. One correctional officer and three staff members oversaw 30 
inmates at the sewing plant where they made high-visibility vests for highway 
workers and embroidered uniforms. Deadly tools such as scissors with 6-inch 
blades and claw hammers were distributed by inmates rather than staff, as 
required, according to the report. Prisoners were able to come and go from the 
sewing area without a search. Doors to other parts of the prison that should 
have been secured were left unlocked.

The prisoners used hammers and scissors to bash the victims in the head and 
chest, according to autopsy reports. One was stabbed more than 65 times, 
according to 1 autopsy report.

Prison administrator Felix Taylor and his 2nd-in command Colbert Respass were 
removed from their posts. Taylor was reassigned and Respass retired. Dennis 
Daniels, an experienced North Carolina prison administrator, was appointed to 
lead the Pasquotank facility.

On Wednesday, The Virginian-Pilot confirmed that the families of the victims 
have hired lawyers.

"This was a tragedy waiting to happen," Cate Edwards, of the Raleigh law firm 
Edwards Kirby, said in an email Wednesday. She is the daughter of former 
senator and presidential candidate John Edwards.

"We are working on taking broad legal action because four people needlessly 
lost their lives," she said. "These people were public servants and deserved 
better, safer working conditions from this state."

Chicago attorney Donnya Banks is co-counsel for the families of Darden, Smith 
and Shannon. Banks had no comment.

In laying out his argument for the death penalty, Womble, the district 
attorney, said that nine of 11 aggravating factors needed in such a case apply, 
though no trial date has been set. Those circumstances include that the acts 
were cruel, they endangered many people and were committed against prison 
officers, he said. A jury only needs one factor to give a death sentence, he 
said.

The deadly escape was premeditated, he said. The people killed were 
"sympathetic victims," he said, rather than criminals killing other criminals. 
The prisoners were captured on the spot just after the murders.

"This is not a 'who-done-it' case," Womble said. "We got it all."

Rep. Bob Steinburg, R-Chowan supports Womble. Steinburg, who represents 
Pasquotank County, said he has spoken extensively with family members and 
correctional officers about the escape attempt.

"These were brutal, brutal murders," he said. "One woman was nearly 
decapitated. I think as people become aware of the details of this case, it 
will change a lot of hearts and minds."

Executions in North Carolina have been stalled by lawsuits over racial bias and 
lethal injection drugs, said Gretchen Engel, executive director of the Center 
for Death Penalty Litigation.

Six capital cases await a hearing before the state's Supreme Court to decide if 
race played a role in jury selection. A study showed the state's prosecutors 
struck black jurors at roughly double the rate of others, according to the 
Death Penalty Information Center.

Additionally, a lawsuit is pending in Wake County Superior Court where several 
prisoners claim lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment, Engel said.

"There will be no executions as long as they are pending in court," she said.

While Engel acknowledges extreme murder cases, the system as a whole remains 
flawed, she said.

"You're bound to have arbitrary results," she said.

One of the primary cases cited is that of Henry McCollum, who spent 30 years on 
death row for the murder and rape of an 11-year-old girl before DNA evidence 
exonerated him in 2014.

In the 1990s, most death row inmates were sentenced under different laws, The 
Center for Death Penalty Litigation report said. Legislation passed since then 
guarantees that death row defendants get trained defense attorneys and have the 
right to see all evidence in their cases, among other things.

A 2013 survey showed 68 % of North Carolina residents supported replacing 
capital punishment with life without parole as long as the offender worked and 
paid restitution to the victim's family, according to the Death Penalty 
Information Center in Washington.

But the Pasquotank prison break attempt also raised questions about allowing 
violent offenders to work.

Another argument against executions? Defendants can be imprisoned for life and 
not harm anyone, Womble said.

"These guys can't say that," he said of those accused in the Pasquotank County 
case. "They were in prison."

(source: newsobserver.com)








OHIO:

The man who was to be executed next week: Why death row inmate was saved----2 
decades after he brutally murdered his wife and another man, a death-row inmate 
has been saved.



2 decades after Ohio man Ray Tibbetts brutally beat and stabbed his wife and 
another man to death, the 61-year-old has escaped from death row.

Tibbetts has been in prison for the past 21 years, waiting to die, after he was 
found guilty of the 2 murders and sentenced to death.

But in February, a juror that sat on Tibbetts' 1998 murder trial reached out to 
the governor of Ohio, John Kasich - the only person who had the power to save 
his life.

Juror Ross Geiger wrote to Governor Kasich saying Tibbetts' traumatic past and 
the horrific way he was treated through his childhood were never detailed at 
his lengthy murder trial.

In his letter, which was later released by Cleveland.com, Mr Geiger said 
deciding whether Tibbetts should be sentenced to death was "one of the most 
consequential decisions of my life".

Tibbetts was initially scheduled to die on February 13. Mr Geiger asked 
Governor Kasich to at least grant a temporary stay of execution.

"I had faith in the system in which I made my vote for death, but Ohio's 
criminal justice system failed me and Mr Tibbetts," he wrote.

"The system failed to provide me with the information I needed to make an 
accurate and fair determination.

"Mr Tibbetts'; crimes were terrible, and nothing excuses his guilt. But if I 
had known all the facts, if the prosecutors had been honest and forthcoming 
about the horrors he and his siblings experienced in the foster care system, 
and if we had an accurate understanding of the effects of Mr. Tibbetts' severe 
drug and alcohol addiction and his improper opioid prescription, I would have 
voted for life without parole over death."

Mr Gieger wrote the letter after reading the clemency report submitted by 
Tibbetts' lawyers.

The report claimed Tibbetts had been starved, beaten, burned and thrown down 
stairs as a child. It claimed he was tied to his bed at night.

After reading Mr Geiger's letter, the governor delayed Tibbetts' execution, 
which had been scheduled for October 17.

Tibbetts was due to die next week but the governor granted him clemency, 
permanently changing his sentence to life in prison.

"The defence's failure to present sufficient mitigating evidence, coupled with 
an inaccurate description of Tibbetts' childhood by the prosecution, 
essentially prevented the jury from making an informed decision about whether 
Tibbetts deserved the death sentence," Governor Kasich said.

THE CRIME

In November 1997, Judith Crawford threatened to kick her husband out of the 
Cincinnati home they shared with 67-year-old Fred Hicks, the sick landlord 
Judith had been caring for.

High on drugs and furious, Tibbetts lashed out at his 42-year-old wife, 
brutally beating her with a baseball bat and stabbing her with a knife dozens 
of times.

Mr Hicks, who had to permanently wear an oxygen mask because of his emphysema, 
was sitting in the living room as the brutal crime unfolded.

Tibbetts then walked to Mr Hicks and stabbed the ailing landlord with a number 
of knives, leaving him to die in his chair.

A day later, Mr Hicks' sister came to check on him realising her brother's car 
was gone.

Walking inside, she found her brother slumped in his chair with four knives 
still in his body.

Police attended and found Ms Crawford upstairs. A knife was still in her neck.

They had both been dead for hours when found.

Tibbetts and Ms Crawford had been living with Mr Hicks for less than a month 
before they were murdered.

A day later, Tibbetts checked into a mental health hospital under a different 
name in Kentucky.

But nurses at the hospital recognised him called the police.

DNA testing later revealed the clothes Tibbetts was wearing when he checked 
himself into the hospital were covered in the victims' blood and they also 
found blood inside Mr Hicks' car.

Tibbetts' execution was delayed a number of times over the years with the 
governor finally commuting his death penalty sentence in July.

THE EVER-SHIFTING DEATH PENALTY DEBATE

As Ohio grants one of its inmates clemency, other US states continue to debate 
the death penalty.

Earlier this week, Washington's Supreme Court unanimously struck down the 
state's death penalty as arbitrary and racially biased, making it the 20th 
state in the US to do away with capital punishment.

Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, with 5 prisoners put to 
death in recent decades and a governor-imposed moratorium blocking its use 
since 2014.

But the court's opinion eliminated it entirely, converted the sentences for the 
state's 8 death row inmates to life in prison without release, and furthered a 
trend away from capital punishment in the US.

"The death penalty is becoming increasingly geographically isolated," Death 
Penalty Information Centre executive director Robert Dunham said.

"It's still on the books in 30 states, but it's not being used in 30 states. 
It's becoming a creature of the Deep South and the Southwest."

Texas continues to execute more prisoners than any other state - 108 since 
2010.

Florida has executed 28, Georgia 26 and Oklahoma 21 in that time frame.

But nationally, death sentences are down 85 % since the 1990s, Mr Dunham said.

In the past 15 years, 7 states - Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New 
Jersey, New Mexico and New York - have abandoned capital punishment through 
court order or legislative act, and 3 - Colorado, Oregon and Pennsylvania - 
have adopted moratoriums.

In New Hampshire and Nebraska, politicians banned the death penalty but saw 
those decisions overturned by veto or referendum.

The concerns cited in those states have ranged from procedural matters, such as 
the information provided to sentencing jurors in New York, to worries about 
executing an innocent person or racial and other disparities in who is 
sentenced to death, as was the case in Washington.

"The death penalty is unequally applied - sometimes by where the crime took 
place, or the county of residence, or the available budgetary resources at any 
given point in time, or the race of the defendant," Chief Justice Mary 
Fairhurst wrote in the lead opinion.

"Our capital punishment law lacks 'fundamental fairness.'"

Earlier this year, the state Senate passed a measure abolishing the death 
penalty, but it failed to pass in the House.

"There is a profound shift in our state and country that the death penalty is 
below us as a civil, just and moral society," Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle, 
who had been a sponsor of those previous attempts, said in a text message. 
Republican Sen. Mike Padden, who voted against the death penalty abolition, 
said he was troubled by the ruling's impact.

"The death penalty should be rarely used, but I do think it should be an option 
in the most heinous cases," he said.

(source: news.com.au)








WASHINGTON:

How Statistics Doomed Washington State’s Death Penalty----A half-century after 
Justice Lewis Powell applied the logic of tobacco manufacturers to dismiss 
empirical studies, a state supreme court decided to accept their findings.



Last week, the American death penalty lurched on step closer to its eventual 
demise, as the Washington Supreme Court decided to fan away some of the smoke 
from Lewis Powell's cigarette.

In State v. Gregory, the state court held that the death penalty, as imposed in 
the state of Washington, was unconstitutional because it was racially biased.

How does that relate to Powell and tobacco? Fastidious and health conscious 
(acquaintances remember seeing him order a turkey sandwich for lunch, then set 
aside the bread and eat only the turkey), Powell was a non-smoker. But he also 
sat from 1963 until 1970 on the board of Virginia-based tobacco giant Philip 
Morris. Like all members of the board, he posed in the customary annual photo 
with a lit cigarette in his fingers.

Over the past half century, that cigarette has befouled the U.S. Supreme 
Court's miserable handing of capital punishment. In 1972, the Court put a 
moratorium on death sentences. It held that Georgia's capital punishment laws 
violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment." The 
justices could not agree on a rationale - but the case came to stand for the 
idea that the death penalty by itself might not be unconstitutional, but would 
be so if state systems were arbitrary or racially biased. The result was a 
15-year scramble by state legislatures to design a more consistent way of 
choosing which murderers to put to death.

That revised system was tested in a 1987 case called McCleskey v. Kemp.The 
defendant, Warren McCleskey, was an African American man sentenced under 
Georgia's new procedures to die for murdering Atlanta police officer Frank 
Schlatt. McCleskey challenged his sentence by proffering a massive statistical 
study of the death penalty in Georgia by legal scholars David Baldus and 
Charles Pulaski and statistician George Woodworth. They concluded that, 
controlling for other variables, murderers who killed white people were 4 times 
more likely to receive a death sentence than those who killed African 
Americans. In other words, it said, Georgia was "operating a dual system," 
based on race: the legal penalty for killing whites was significantly greater 
than for killing blacks.

Punishing by race seemed a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on 
"cruel and unusual punishment" and of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of 
"the equal protection of the laws."

But the Supreme Court divided. 4 justices - Justices William Brennan, Thurgood 
Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens - voted to reject Georgia's 
racist system. 4 others - Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Byron 
White, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Antonin Scalia - wanted to approve it.

Powell cast the deciding vote and wrote the majority opinion, concluding, "At 
most, the Baldus study indicates a discrepancy that appears to correlate with 
race. Apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal 
justice system."

Statistical evidence, Powell argued, could provide "only a likelihood that a 
particular factor entered into some decisions"; it could never establish 
certainty that it had done so in any individual case.

Anyone from the tobacco south recognizes the logic. In 1964, during Powell's 
service on the Philip Morris board, the U.S. surgeon general released the 
famous report, Smoking and Health. Then as now, the numbers were unmistakable: 
cigarettes kill smokers.

But Philip Morris, like all the rest of the industry, responded with denial. 
The statistical correlation, the industry said, didn't prove anything. 
Something else might be causing the cancer. In response, a member of the 
company's board stated, "We don't accept the idea that there are harmful agents 
in tobacco."

The logic Powell applied to the death penalty is the same logic Philip Morris 
employed while he served on its board. Numbers on paper don't prove a thing.

The death-penalty lawyer Anthony Amsterdam has called McCleskey "the Dred Scott 
decision of our time" - the moral equivalent of the 1857 opinion denying black 
Americans any chance of citizenship. After his retirement, Powell told his 
biographer that he would change his vote in McCleskey if he could.

But it was too late. The Supreme Court was committed to cigarette-maker logic.

Last week, the Washington Supreme Court, in a fairly pointed opinion, declared 
that, at least in its jurisdiction, numbers have real meaning. And to those who 
have eyes to see, numbers make clear the truth about death-sentencing: It is 
arbitrary and racist in its application.

The court’s decision was based on 2 studies commissioned by lawyers defending 
Allen Gregory, who was convicted of rape and murder in Tacoma, Washington, in 
2001 and sentenced to death by a jury there. The court appointed a special 
commissioner to evaluate the reports, hear the state’s response, and file a 
detailed evaluation. The evidence, the court said, showed that Washington 
counties with larger black populations had higher rates of death sentences - 
and that in Washington, "black defendants were four and a half times more 
likely to be sentenced to death than similarly situated white defendants." 
Thus, the state court concluded, "Washington's death penalty is administered in 
an arbitrary and racially biased manner" - and violated the Washington State 
Constitution's prohibition on "cruel punishment."

The court's opinion is painstaking - almost sarcastic - on one point: "Let 
there be no doubt - we adhere to our duty to resolve constitutional questions 
under our own [state] constitution, and accordingly, we resolve this case on 
adequate and independent state constitutional principles." "Adequate and 
independent" are magic words in U.S. constitutional law; they mean that the 
state court's opinion is not based on the U.S. Constitution, and its rule will 
not change if the nine justices in Washington change their view of the federal 
Eighth Amendment. Whatever the federal constitutionality of the death penalty, 
Washington state is now out of its misery.

Last spring, a conservative federal judge, Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit, 
published 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American 
Constitutional Law, a book urging lawyers and judges to focus less on federal 
constitutional doctrine and look instead to state constitutions for help with 
legal puzzles. That's an idea that originated in the Northwest half-a-century 
ago, with the jurisprudence of former Oregon Supreme Court Justice Hans Linde. 
It was a good idea then and it's a good idea now. State courts can never 
overrule federal decisions protecting federal constitutional rights; they can, 
however, interpret their own state constitutions to give more protection than 
does the federal Constitution. There's something bracing about this kind of 
judicial declaration of independence, when it is done properly.

And the Washington court's decision is well timed. It is immune to the dark 
clouds gathering over President Trump's new model Supreme Court. Viewed with 
the logic of history, capital punishment is on the sunset side of the mountain; 
but conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are likely to join 
the other conservatives in lashing the court even more firmly to the decaying 
framework of official death, no matter how much tobacco-company logic they must 
deploy as a disguise for its arbitrariness and cruelty.

Smoke may cloud the law in D.C. for years yet. But in the state of Washington, 
numbers are actual numbers. When racism and cruelty billow across the sky, that 
state's courts will no longer pretend they cannot see.

(source: The Atlantic)