[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., DEL., N.C., S.C., ALA.

[Rick Halperin]

Oct. 18




TEXAS----new execution date

Execution date set for local man who killed 3 over failing marriage



8 days after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected what could be his final appeal, a 
Waco state district judge set an execution date Wednesday afternoon for a 
Central Texas man who killed 3 members of his estranged wife's family in 1989.

Billy Wayne Coble, 70, initially refused to enter the courtroom for the 
sentencing hearing Wednesday afternoon after his appellate attorney failed to 
show up.

Waco lawyer Russ Hunt, Jr. was appointed to represent him in the hearing and 
State District Judge Matt Johnson set a Feb. 28, 2019 execution date.

Coble was convicted in 1990 of killing his in-laws, Robert and Zelda Vicha, and 
their son, Waco police Sgt. Bobby Vicha, at the family's Axtell home

After shooting the three, Coble kidnapped his estranged wife, Karen Vicha, 
threatened to sexually assault and kill her, but was injured when he crashed 
his vehicle during a police chase in Bosque County.

Coble has a list of appeals, the only 1 successful filed in 2007 with the U.S. 
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that resulted in the dismissal of the death 
sentence and an order for re-trial on punishment after the court's opinion 
stated Coble’s jury faced 2 questions that were unconstitutional.

The punishment re-trial ended with the same result, a death sentence.

A retired police officer who worked on the Coble case and a current district 
judge who back then was a prosecutor and who took Coble to trial on the capital 
murder case for the 1st time were among a few dozen people who crowded into the 
54th District Courtroom on Wednesday to watch the hearing.

After a few minutes the judge asked one of the bailiffs why Coble wasn't in the 
courtroom and the bailiff said he was refusing to leave the holding cell.

Johnson sent a squad of bailiffs to retrieve Coble, but they reported he 
refused to come to the courtroom, after which Johnson called the case, read the 
preliminary documents concerning the appeals Coble has filed since his 
conviction, and then set the date.

Truman Simons, a former police officer, sheriff's deputy and now a private 
investigator, worked on the Coble case back in 1989.

"He killed his (father-in-law) 1st and wrapped him up in a rug," Simons said.

"Then he tied up the 2 kids and shot Bobby Vicha.

"Then he ...waited in the garage where he killed Zelda (Vicha) and kidnapped 
(his estranged wife) Karen," Simons said.

Former McLennan County Assistant District Attorney J.R. Vicha, o1 of the 2 
children Coble tied up that day, was only 11-years-old at the time his family 
was murdered.

The boy, along with 2 of his cousins, were tied up inside the home while the 
killings took place.

During the 2008 punishment re-trial trial, prosecuted by retired Assistant 
District Attorney Crawford Long, Long told the jury that Coble "has a heart 
filled with scorpions."

(source: KWTS news)

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

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----37

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----555

Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #

38---------Oct. 24----------------Kwame Rockwell--------556

39---------Nov. 7-----------------Emanuel Kemp, Jr.-------557

40---------Nov. 14----------------Robert Ramos------------558

41---------Dec. 4-----------------Joseph Garcia-------------559

42---------Dec. 11----------------Alvin Braziel, Jr.---------560

43---------Jan. 15----------------Blaine Milam--------------561

44---------Jan. 30----------------Robert Jennings-----------562

45---------Feb. 28----------------Billy Wayne Coble-------563

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)

*************************************----impending execution

Kwame Rockwell Will Be the Next Disabled Person Executed by 
America----America's courts still don't have clear protections for defendants 
with severe mental illness.



Unless last-ditch appeals are successful, the next person to be executed in the 
United States of America is going to be Kwame Rockwell. The Texas Department of 
Criminal Justice has scheduled his execution for October 24th. The state had 
planned to execute Rockwell along with another prisoner, Juan Segundo, but 
Segundo's death was stayed by the Texas Court of Appeals. Together, the cases 
epitomize deep problems with enforcement of the death penalty. Both prisoners 
are people of color in a state where prosecutors overwhelmingly only seek the 
death penalty against non-white offenders, and both are disabled. Segundo has 
an intellectual disability, and last year the Supreme Court finally established 
clarity around diagnostic standards required to exempt people with such 
conditions. Rockwell has schizophrenia. His lawyers didn't bring it up at 
trial, and appeals courts refused to consider his condition.

America still doesn't have clear protections for people with severe mental 
illness. These 2 cases in Texas remind us of the unfortunate diagnostic 
limitations that protect only some people with disabilities from the death 
penalty. (Of course, it's also long past time to just abolish the death penalty 
altogether.

Last year, Arkansas announced plans to kill 8 prisoners in a rush before their 
lethal injection drugs could expire; the state actually executed 4. The 1st to 
die was Ledell Lee, an African-American man with fetal alcohol syndrome. He 
might have been innocent. After his death, I started to ask a simple question 
of experts who provide and organize legal defense for condemned prisoners: How 
many people on death row are disabled? The answer came back unanimously: pretty 
much all of them. The news last spring wasn't all bad, though. About a week 
before Lee's execution, the Supreme Court struck down the "Lennie Standard," by 
which Texan judges could issue the death penalty as long as a convicted man's 
mental capacity was higher than that of the fictional character Lennie in John 
Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. In Moore v. Texas, the court demanded instead that 
states use the best available medical experts in assessing intellectual 
disability. There's still plenty of room for bias in that medical model, but 
it's better than using literary analysis to decide life and death.

As I reported those stories, it became clear to me that many legal experts 
believe they can save lives through generating an exception for severe mental 
illness, similar to the one that Moore v. Texas grants for intellectual 
disability. The twin executions planned in Texas demonstrate precisely why 
that's needed. Segundo was initially condemned under the Lennie Standard, but 
now the Texas Court of Appeals has followed Moore by issuing a stay and sending 
the case back to the lower courts to arrive at a more accurate assessment of 
Segundo's disability. There's no guarantee that Segundo will be spared, but 
he's safe for now.

Severe schizophrenia and similar conditions are a fairly common mitigating 
factor in capital crimes, but there's no absolute standard requiring a court to 
assess mental disabilities or to take them into account during sentencing. In 
trial, Rockwell's lawyers didn't even raise the question of his mental 
disabilities, a fact that his appeal lawyers used as evidence of "ineffective 
counsel." The Texas Court of Appeals, though, turned down his appeal, and so 
far the Supreme Court has declined to intervene. I don't know whether 
Rockwell's schizophrenia should be a mitigating factor in assessing his 
culpability, but neither does the state of Texas.

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, was 
one of the experts I consulted when working on disability and the death penalty 
last year. At the time, he raised the hope that we might be close to forging a 
mental-health exemption to capital punishment, but now he says that we're in 
"pretty much the same place" as we were 15 months ago. Citing a 2014 poll, he 
tells me that 2/3 of Americans don't believe that people with severe mental 
illness should be executed, and notes that over a half-dozen different bills 
creating an exemption were introduced in state legislatures last session, but 
they all went nowhere. Meanwhile, courts also haven't ruled such executions 
unconstitutional.

"This execution is in many respects typical of the cases that end up in 
execution," Dunham says of the Rockwell case. "If the evidence of mental 
illness had been properly presented at trial, he would never have been 
sentenced to death."

The status quo is shifting: Just last week, the state of Washington abolished 
the death penalty after a compelling statistical analysis demonstrated that 
juries were 4 times more likely to condemn black defendants than white 
defendants. Eventually, either wholesale abolition or at least expanded 
exemptions will come to the remaining death penalty states, including Texas, 
but likely not in time for Kwame Rockwell.

(source: psmag.com)

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

Death Watch: Rockwell Schizophrenic or Faker?----1 execution stayed, another 
set for Oct. 24



The Court of Criminal Appeals has spared the life of Texas death row inmate 
Juan Segundo - at least for now. Segundo, who faced execution on Oct. 10, was 
granted a stay just days before in light of the Supreme Court's 2017 ruling in 
Moore v. Texas. Like Bobby Moore, Segundo asserts that he is intellectually 
disabled and, therefore, ineligible for execution. Further orders from the CCA 
are still pending.

In the meantime, another inmate faces execution on Wednesday, Oct. 24. Kwame 
Rockwell, a Fort Worth man, was convicted of killing two people during a 
botched store robbery in 2010. Though the U.S. Supreme Court denied Rockwell's 
last appeal for relief in Oct. 2017, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals approved 
a request for Rockwell's previous lawyer to withdraw, and appointed David Dow 
as substitute counsel on Oct. 2. That's often seen as a sign of impending 
legislation, but few court filings have been made since and Dow did not respond 
to requests for comment.

According to court records, the same day Dow was assigned to Rockwell's case, 
an amended motion for leave to file for reasonably necessary funds "ex parte 
and under seal" was received in a U.S. District Court. Two days later, the 
state filed their response detailing Rockwell's request for funding to 
"litigate a state competency-to-be-executed proceeding," which the state argued 
is not "reasonably necessary." Rockwell alleges that he suffers from 
schizophrenia, but the state argues that he's faking his illness, noting that 
both his trial attorneys and "own mother" believe he's malingering. The state 
also claims that Rockwell's request does not require ex parte confidentiality. 
Fort Worth federal court Judge Reed C. O'Connor filed a sealed order the same 
day that the state filed their response, but according to O'Connor's staff, 
what's in that order is not a matter of public record.

What happens next in Rockwell's case remains a mystery - court records haven't 
been updated since Oct. 4. Rockwell is expected to be the 11th inmate executed 
this year. 3 more are scheduled for this year.

There had been 6 men slated for end-of-year executions, but a Tarrant County 
trial court stayed the execution of Emanuel Kemp, scheduled for Nov. 7, to 
conduct additional forensic testing. Kemp, who landed on death row in the late 
Eighties, had since been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and was 
eventually deemed too ill for execution. But according to the Houston 
Chronicle, the D.A. unexpectedly requested the November date before approving 
an order to halt Kemp's execution pending DNA testing.

(source: Austin Chronicle)

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

Attorney: Autism diagnosis could keep killer alive



Attorneys at a Wednesday hearing differed over whether convicted murderer Micah 
Crofford Brown suffers from autism spectrum disorder and whether it would have 
saved his life before a jury sentenced him to death 5 years ago.

Brown was convicted in May 2013 of capital murder and sentenced to death by 
lethal injection for the 2011 shooting death of his ex-wife, Stella Michelle 
"Doc" Ray, a Caddo Mills school teacher.

Testimony in the evidentiary hearing for Brown's latest appeal ended in late 
July, and attorneys from both sides made their final arguments Wednesday 
morning before 196th District Court Judge Andrew Bench.

"Micah Brown deserves a new trial," said defense attorney Natalie Corvington 
with the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, which filed the appeal of 
Brown's death sentence.

But the prosecution's attorney, Tina Miranda of the Texas Attorney General's 
Office, countered that the trial attorneys may not have even considered 
presenting the diagnosis to the jury as part of the defense strategy.

"It is equally probable they could have found that harmful," Miranda said.

At the close of the hearing Bench said he would review the arguments before 
making a decision.

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 last-ditch appeal called a "post-conviction writ" was filed 
in 2015 by the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, a state public defender 
agency charged with representing convicts sentenced to death in appeals 
proceedings.

The 124-page document listed multiple alleged problems with Brown’s conviction 
and sentence, including "ineffective assistance" by the defense attorneys in 
the trial and initial appeals hearings; "improper arguments" by prosecutors 
during the punishment phase; and failure to present "evidence during the 
punishment phase that Brown suffers from autism spectrum disorder."

The condition is a developmental disorder that affects communication and 
behavior, which, Corvington argued, may have mitigated the jury’s decision to 
issue the death penalty.

Corvington said the trial defense team failed to listen to a mitigation 
specialist who suggested Brown may have the disorder. She told the court that 
the disorder "could be responsible for how he appeared as remorseless and 
unemotional during the commission of the murder, during police interviews and 
interrogations and while testifying in his own defense during trial."

"None of this is justification, of course, but it is by its definition 
mitigating," Corvington said, noting how the revelation of the condition 
potentially could have convinced "just 1 juror" against returning with the 
death penalty. "Autism explains all of it."

Miranda responded by noting that defense attorneys did present at trial other 
information provided by mitigation specialists showing that Brown suffers from 
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She said the disorder would have 
accounted for many of the same symptoms.

"I don't know what else counsel could have done," Miranda countered, adding 
that about 80 of Brown's family members and friends were interviewed by the 
defense about the case - none of whom mentioned that Brown had or might have 
autism.

"That's where the red flags [about potential autism disorder] should have come 
from," she said.

Brown, who has been in custody at the Hunt County Detention Center since the 
July hearing, was to be transferred back to the Texas Department of Criminal 
Justice-Institutional Division following Bench's final ruling in the appeal.

An execution date has not yet been scheduled for Brown.

(source: Herald Banner)








PENNSYLVANIA:

City man on death row seeks new trial----Staton claims attorney failed to 
present evidence



An Altoona man who was sentenced to death 12 years ago for the stabbing death 
of his estranged girlfriend is seeking a new trial based on his attorney's 
failure to present evidence of his alleged "diminished capacity" during his 
attack on her.

Andre Staton, 55, is an inmate at the State Correctional Institution at Greene 
County.

He was sentenced to death in May 2006 after being convicted of 1st-degree 
murder for the killing of Beverly Yohn, 26, whom he attacked on Feb. 25, 2004, 
after breaking through the back door of the home where the victim was staying 
with her 3 children.

Staton stabbed Yohn 12 times and then fled to his native Baltimore where he was 
arrested 3 days later.

An aggravating circumstance presented during the death penalty stage of his 
case was that he was under a protection-from-abuse order at the time he stabbed 
Yohn.

Since his conviction and death sentence, Staton, through multiple attorneys, 
has repeatedly attempted to obtain a new trial.

His most recent try came Thursday when he filed a petition with the U.S. 
District Court in Johnstown contending his attorney was ineffective for not 
attempting to introduce evidence of diminished capacity during the guilt phase 
of his case.

Staton contends his counsel failed to "investigate, develop and present expert 
testimony in support of the defense theory that (his) history of depression and 
fit of rage on the day in question, rendered him incapable of forming a 
specific intent to commit 1st-degree murder."

Staton stated there were many factors in his life, including brain injury, that 
"rendered him incapable of forming a specific intent on the day of the crime."

His attorney's failure to present such information until the penalty phase of 
his trial, he contended, was unreasonable.

He explained that he had been interviewed by psychologists and a psychiatrist 
who noted he had medical problems as a child and suffered throughout his life 
from substance abuse of cocaine and PCP, also known as angel dust.

Staton also stated he had several psychiatric hospitalizations over the years.

He concluded in his petition that had there been expert medical testimony 
presented during the guilt phase of the trial, "There is a reasonable 
probability that the result of the trial would have been different."

Whether the motions in Staton's petition will ever be heard remains a question 
because on Monday, U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti in Pittsburgh ruled 
that she would not consider his new petition and instructed him to continue to 
meet with his present court-appointed attorneys to prepare an acceptable 
petition for a new trial.

Court records show that Staton remains at odds with his court-appointed 
attorneys, John A. Schwab and Robert Perkins, both of Pittsburgh.

Staton was upset with Schwab for preparing a petition without consulting him, 
federal court records show.

Conti met with Schwab, Perkins and Blair County Assistant District Attorney 
Deanne Paul on Monday to discuss Staton's post-trial appeal at the federal 
level.

She denied his motion for a new attorney "without prejudice," meaning he can 
refile it if the differences with his present attorneys cannot be resolved.

The federal record shows that Staton has already had 6 attorneys appointed for 
him.

He has a history of not getting along with his attorneys and in 2013 attacked 
Ebensburg attorney Tim Burns following a hearing before Blair County President 
Judge Elizabeth A. Doyle.

Burns suffered a severe concussion in the attack.

Staton argued in his petition presented to Conti that his diminished capacity 
argument has never before been raised by his appeal attorneys.

(source: Altoona Mirror)








DELAWARE:

Delaware High Court Rejects Convicted Murderer's Appeal



The Delaware Supreme Court has ruled that a man serving life without parole for 
the rape and murder of a 68-year-old woman has failed to offer any new evidence 
to prove his innocence.

The Delaware State News reports that the court ruled against Ambrose Sykes's 
motion for post-conviction relief.

Sykes, now in his 40s, was sentenced to death for the 2004 rape and 
strangulation of retired teacher Virginia Trimnell. Delaware abolished its 
death penalty in 2016, a decision that applied retroactively.

The court said Sykes' lawyer raised "speculative and implausible theories" 
about how someone else could have been involved in the crime, and speculated 
that Sykes had a consensual relationship with the elderly woman without so much 
as a sworn statement from Sykes himself.

(source: Associated Press)








NORTH CAROLINA:

"Relic of Another Era": Most People on North Carolina's Death Row Would Not Be 
Sentenced to Die Today



In the summer of 2001, North Carolina executed 42-year-old Ronald Wayne Frye, 
convicted of stabbing and robbing his 70-year-old landlord in 1993. The crime 
was brutal and there was no question of his guilt. Yet the circumstances of 
Frye's trial and conviction would come to shock members of the public - and 
even members of his own jury - as his execution approached. 2 jurors came 
forward to say that they would not have sentenced Frye to death row had they 
known then what they had since learned.

Like many who end up on death row, Frye lived a life marked by severe abuse and 
trauma. This history was never investigated by his defense attorneys, despite 
the fact that it would have made for powerful mitigating evidence. "A 
background of neglect and abuse would have changed my decision and my vote," 
one juror told the Hickory Daily Record weeks before Frye's execution. Among 
the evidence the jury never heard was that Frye's mother had given him and his 
brother away to a pair of strangers she met at a gas station when Frye was a 
young boy. The couple beat Frye and his brother with a bullwhip and forced the 
boys to beat each other as well.

Frye was reluctant to share this history with his court-appointed lawyers. "I 
didn't want my family involved," he told one reporter. "I felt like I had 
shamed them enough already." A competent capital defense attorney would have 
navigated this challenge to save a client's life. Instead, Frye was represented 
by a man named Tom Portwood, a dentist-turned-attorney who had a severe 
drinking problem. His alcoholism would force him to stop practicing just a few 
years later. Portwood all but abandoned his client, later admitting that he did 
no work on Frye's case outside the courtroom. Portwood's co-counsel did not 
speak up until 2 weeks before Frye's scheduled execution, writing in a sworn 
statement that he "chose to believe the best about my friend for as long as I 
could."

North Carolina's legal community was moved to action by Frye's looming 
execution. "For the 1st time in its 35-year history, the 4,000-member N.C. 
Academy of Trial Lawyers asked for clemency for a death-row prisoner," the 
Raleigh News and Observer reported in August 2001. If the governor allowed the 
execution to go forward, the group's president said, "The right to counsel has 
lost its meaning in this state." Nonetheless, on August 31, 2001, Frye died by 
lethal injection.

Frye's execution came at a flashpoint for capital punishment across the 
country. In the late 1990s, the American Bar Association had recommended a 
national moratorium on the death penalty, citing unfair trials, racism, and 
wrongful convictions as pervasive problems. In North Carolina, activists, 
lawyers, and lawmakers took up the cause; in 2000, a legislative commission 
recommended a moratorium on executions in the state. A few months before Frye's 
execution, a major study examining data from 1993 through 1997 found new 
evidence of racism in North Carolina’s death penalty system.

It was in this same era that the North Carolina legislature passed the 1st in a 
series of hard-fought reforms to the state's death penalty system. Among them 
was the establishment of Indigent Defense Services, a state office that 
coordinates the representation of people facing the death penalty. Opened in 
July 2001, it imposed standards to ensure that cases were assigned to competent 
lawyers who received decent compensation - too late for defendants like Frye, 
but to the benefit of scores of defendants in the years to come.

The majority of people on death row were tried in a system that was effectively 
rigged against them.

The overhaul of indigent defense was a game-changer in North Carolina. But it 
was its combined effect with other systemwide reforms that would transform the 
landscape of capital cases in the state. This evolution is at the heart of a 
new report by the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Titled 
"Unequal Justice: How obsolete laws and unfair trials created North Carolina's 
outsized death row," it reveals how the majority of people on death row were 
tried in a system that was effectively rigged against them. Of the 141 men and 
women facing execution in North Carolina, more than 100 - 73 % - were sentenced 
before the creation of the indigent defense office. The majority were also 
convicted prior to laws that prohibit the execution of people with mental 
disabilities; impose protections against wrongful convictions; and require 
prosecutors to share evidence against defendants before trial.

The CDPL report shows how the implementation of such reforms has led to a 
precipitous drop in death sentences. "The death penalty is all but extinct in 
North Carolina," the authors write. "Juries have recommended only a single new 
death sentence in the past 4 years. Capital trials have become rare. The state 
hasn't carried out an execution since 2006." Although North Carolina's death 
row is still among the largest in the country, it "is a relic of another era."

In Catawba County, where Portwood once practiced, no one has been sentenced to 
death for 20 years. Yet his legacy lives on. In 2012, the state settled a 
federal civil rights lawsuit brought by Glen Edward Chapman, sentenced to die 
in 1994 for a double murder he insisted he did not commit. Represented by 
Portwood, Chapman spent years on death row before a Superior Court judge 
overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial. He was exonerated in 2008. 
Another one of Portwood's former clients, Nathan Bowie, remains on death row. 
Bowie was 20 years old when he was tried alongside his uncle for a double 
murder in 1993. Today he is 47.

Bowie is one of a handful of condemned men profiled in detail in the report, 
which describes his case as "emblematic of capital defense at the time." 
Portwood was appointed to represent him despite his well-known drinking problem 
and assisted by a lawyer with no experience in capital defense. Bowie remembers 
Portwood showing up to one of their 1st meetings smelling like alcohol. In the 
time he represented Bowie, the report notes, Portwood was involved in a car 
crash and found to have a blood alcohol level sufficient to kill him.

A video on the case of Nathan Bowie featured in the CDPL report.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Portwood and his co-counsel did little investigation 
into Bowie's background. As a child, Bowie had experienced poverty, abuse, and 
bouts of homelessness; he was removed from his home when he was 12 and placed 
in the custody of the Department of Social Services. At 13, he was sent to 
Sipe's Orchard Home, a facility for troubled youths, where he stayed until he 
was 19. Portwood did not review the records or interview staff from the 
facility. If he had, he would have discovered evidence of sexual abuse that 
occurred at Sipe's, where Bowie kept a stick in his possession that he called 
his "protector."

Portwood's failures were compounded by the conduct of the prosecutor in Bowie's 
case, Jason Parker. "His office had prosecuted a Sipe's staffer for molesting 
boys there," the report reveals, yet Parker cast the facility as a wholesome 
environment before the jury. Arguing for the death penalty, he also emphasized 
that no one from the facility had appeared at trial on Bowie's behalf. Yet 
Parker had actually received a letter from the head of the facility offering to 
testify on Bowie's behalf, which he never disclosed to defense.

Parker is now retired. In total, he sent seven people to death row, including 
Frye and Chapman, the two other people represented by Portwood. Parker said he 
never saw evidence that Portwood was drunk on the job in the years he tried 
cases against him. "Everybody knew he would take a drink here and there," 
Parker said, "but as far as coming to court drunk, alcohol on his breath, never 
saw it." Parker's personal feelings about the death penalty have not changed, 
he said. "In certain horrific cases, the death penalty is highly justified." 
Nevertheless, he says he would no longer seek death sentences if he were still 
working as a prosecutor today. "My reason is simple," he said. "In reality the 
death penalty does not exist in North Carolina."

Parker explained that of all people he sent to death row, only 1 - Frye - has 
been executed. 1 man killed himself. Another 2 died of natural causes. The 
remaining men - Bowie and his uncle - "have outlived the son of my co-counsel 
who was born during their trial" and died in a car accident at 24. "My position 
would be: Why waste my time?"

"Zombie Cases

More than 40 years since the start of the so-called modern death penalty era in 
the United States, it has become widely understood that most people sentenced 
to death are more likely to die awaiting execution than on the gurney. In 
California, home to the country's biggest death row population, the last 
execution was carried out in 2006; only 13 people have been executed since the 
1970s. Those who do live to see the death chamber have often spent decades on 
death row.

The result is what Stephen Bright, founder of the Southern Center for Human 
Rights, has described as "this very strange situation now, in which these 
people sentenced to death a long time ago" are coming up for execution in cases 
that would be highly unlikely to lead to a death sentence today. Bright called 
them "zombie cases" - convictions that "remind us of just how unfair" the 
system used to be.

In Georgia, Kenneth Fults was executed in 2016 despite revelations that one of 
his jurors harbored racist animus against him, telling an investigator, "Once 
he pled guilty, I knew I would vote for the death penalty because that's what 
that nigger deserved." Veteran death penalty lawyer Thomas Maher, who heads 
Indigent Defense Services, has written about this disconnect in North Carolina. 
"The question, then, that policymakers and courts should confront is this: 
Should we execute scores of inmates for crimes that would not warrant the death 
penalty if they were tried today?"

Gretchen Engel, director of CDPL, explains that the report was published to 
"ignite a conversation" about this question. "It speaks to a need for there to 
be some kind of mechanism that will account for our evolving standard of 
decency," she said. Given that most of North Carolina's death row population 
would likely not be sentenced to die today, "it's very hard to justify how we 
can execute them now."

Engel joined CDPL soon after graduating law school in 1992. "I think when I 
arrived there were maybe 75 people on the row" in North Carolina, she said. But 
the 1990s became "just a very bloody, frenzied time.' By the end of the decade, 
there were more than 175 people on death row.

Part of what drove the surge in capital prosecutions were overzealous 
prosecutors like Ken Honeycutt, who "celebrated new death sentences by handing 
out noose lapel pins to his assistant DAs," as the CDPL report notes. 
Particularly notorious was Joe Freeman Britt in Robeson County, who attracted 
national media attention and even a listing in the Guinness World Records as 
the "world's deadliest DA." Britt sent some 38 people to death row over his 
14-year tenure. Among them were 2 teenagers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who 
were famously exonerated of murder and rape in 2014.

The impact of overzealous prosecutors has been well-documented where capital 
punishment is concerned. But in North Carolina, the phenomenon was compounded 
by a perverse, lesser-known feature of the state's death penalty system. One of 
the more startling areas of the CDPL report is a section that explains how 
prosecutors were essentially coerced into seeking death sentences as often as 
possible. "In the 1990s, N.C. was the only state that required prosecutors to 
seek the death penalty for every aggravated 1st-degree murder," the report 
explains, "regardless of other factors that called for mercy."

Rooted in years of rulings by the state Supreme Court, the sentencing scheme 
was originally intended to ensure uniformity in the application of the death 
penalty. But in practice, it curtailed prosecutorial discretion to an absurd 
degree. Prosecutors were forbidden from arranging plea deals in which a 
defendant could plead guilty to 1st-degree murder in exchange for a life 
sentence. Instead, their only alternative was to reduce a charge to 2nd-degree 
murder.

In 1993, the year Bowie was tried, 33 people were sent to death row in the 
state.

Parker began handling capital cases in Catawba County in 1990. He recalls 
seeking the death penalty in numerous cases that he would not have tried 
capitally had they come later in his career. In the case of Nathan Bowie, 
Parker actually offered a plea deal for 2nd-degree murder. "That wasn't the 
world's greatest case," he explains. The witnesses were unreliable - the kinds 
of people who say one thing in a meeting, then "go out on the stands and they 
say something entirely different." But Bowie and his uncle rejected the deal. 
"So I didn't have any choice but to try them for the death penalty. Once they 
turn down that 2nd degree, it was on."

Alex Charns, Bowie's current attorney, counters that in fact, Parker did have a 
choice in Bowie's case. "It could have been tried as 2nd degree," he says, 
adding that most prosecutors would not be inclined to do that. Bowie's fate 
speaks to the utter neglect of Portwood in representing his client at every 
stage of his case, Charns says. But it is also illustrative of a phenomenon 
known as a "trial penalty," in which prosecutors come down especially hard on 
defendants who refuse their plea offers. The notion that a crime could merit a 
charge of 2nd-degree murder in 1 minute and a death sentence the next is also 
emblematic of the arbitrariness so often described by critics of capital 
punishment.

The lack of prosecutorial discretion in 1st-degree murder cases was "perhaps 
the biggest driver of a decade of excessive death sentences" in the state, the 
CDPL report says. It "propelled North Carolina to one of the highest death 
sentencing rates in the nation." In 1993, the year Bowie was tried, 33 people 
were sent to death row in the state.

In 2001, the North Carolina legislature finally passed a law to address the 
problem of prosecutorial discretion. "Some DAs were having to try capital cases 
that they really didn't want to try," remembers Rep. Phil Baddour, a Democrat 
from Wayne County who sponsored the bill. "It went through without a lot of 
opposition."

To Engel, it made sense that prosecutors would not oppose the new law. "It 
increased their power and so they didn't fight it. I think that's why it was 
really probably the least controversial of the reforms." What she and her 
colleagues did not necessarily expect was just how dramatic a change would 
follow. Death penalty prosecutions "plummeted," from an average of 50 per year 
in the 1990s to roughly 16 capital trials per year in the decade following the 
2001 law.

The drop was no doubt due to prosecutors like Parker, for whom the death 
penalty became an easy way to force a defendant to plead guilty in exchange for 
life. "Most of the cases I tried for the death penalty after the law changed 
were those who rejected the plea offer taking the death penalty off the table." 
Still, defendants were inclined to take the deal, he said. "Once you prove that 
you could put somebody on death row, it was a heck of a tool."

A Legacy of Racial Violence

"I think if you polled district attorneys, they would all say, 'Oh yes, the 
death penalty is very necessary,'" Engel says. But their actions betray the 
truth. Prosecutors are seeking fewer death sentences and are more willing to 
accept a plea to a life sentence, she points out. Indeed, as Parker recalls, 
after the law changed, "I made that offer available in the great majority of 
1st-degree murder cases."

Engel sees something similar among the general public, which seems to favor the 
death penalty more in theory than reality. "I think while public support for 
the death penalty in North Carolina has fallen just like it has nationally, 
you'd still have a fairly large number of people who would say, 'Yes, of 
course, we should execute the worst of the worst.'" Yet "jurors are not 
returning death sentences, even in really horrendous cases."

Nevertheless, the stubborn devotion to North Carolina’s death penalty has been 
on dramatic display for much of the past decade, in the ugly battle over the 
state's Racial Justice Act. Passed in 2009, the groundbreaking law provided a 
way for condemned people to fight their sentences if they could prove that 
racism played a role in jury selection at their trials.

4 people on death row succeeded in getting their sentences commuted to life 
without parole before the Republican-led legislature repealed the RJA in 2013. 
2 years later, the North Carolina Supreme Court vacated the judge's rulings, 
sending the 4 defendants back to death row. It was up to Engel and her office 
to share the wrenching news. By then, a couple of them had gone to medium 
custody, she recalls. One, Christina Walters, had completed her GED. "The 
impact on the families of those clients - to think your [child] is spared from 
execution and then 3 years later, oh no, you're back on death row - it was 
devastating."

Nathan Bowie was among those who sought relief under the RJA before its repeal. 
In a 2012 filing, Charns, his lawyer, details the history of racial violence in 
Catawba County and the surrounding area. In 1919, the filing noted, a black man 
named Tom Gwyn died in the electric chair for raping a white girl despite the 
efforts of a mob that tried to lynch him first. He was still awaiting trial 
when a local newspaper declared the guilt of the "brute" with "beast-like 
hands."

An all-white jury convicted him in 10 minutes.

Racism permeated the prosecution of black men in rape cases into the 1970s, 
Charns points out. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a group called North 
Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence tracked racial intimidation 
by the Ku Klux Klan in Catawba County. By the time Bowie went to trial before 
an almost all-white jury in 1993, the county had a black population of less 
than 9 %. Parker, who is black himself, appealed to the racist fears and biases 
of the jury in court. Although there was no evidence that the crimes had 
anything to do with gang rivalry, Parker attributed the murders to a gang war, 
invoking Philadelphia, where Bowie came from, and contrasting it with the town 
of Hickory - "your community."

Parker demurred when asked about evidence of racism in North Carolina's death 
penalty system. And he was dismissive of Bowie's RJA motion. "All I can say is 
... you had a black guy trying 2 black guys for killing 2 black people," he 
said. "So if that's injustice, fine. You know? I don't see it."

The evidence of systemic racism contained in Bowie's RJA filing - and the 
aggressive denial that such a thing exists - underscores the broader thesis 
underlying the CDPL report. It's not just that North Carolina's death sentences 
are a relic dating back to the bad laws of the 1990s. Its death penalty system 
is inextricable from a history of racial violence rooted in slavery and 
reconstruction. As in the rest of the South, the same kind of fearmongering 
propaganda once used to defend lynchings would support state-sanctioned 
executions, particularly as punishment for rape against white women. The 
bloodlust extended all across the state; in 1922, 16-year-old McIver Burnett - 
"convicted in 3 minutes and 30 seconds," according to the Daily Free Press - 
was executed for rape in Raleigh amid a crowd of spectators holding tickets to 
the execution, a mob dominated by "youths wearing the red caps that distinguish 
State College freshmen," according to the News and Observer.

Evidence of enduring racism in capital cases helped pave the way for the 
landmark 1972 Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia. The plurality decision 
held that the death penalty was arbitrarily and thus unfairly imposed. Some 
death penalty states responded to Furman by crafting new statutes that would 
provide for bifurcated trials with a penalty phase to weigh aggravating and 
mitigating evidence - the system widely in place today. But others decided that 
the solution was to make the death penalty mandatory for crimes like murder and 
rape. The first to do so was North Carolina.

One of the 1st people to face North Carolina's mandatory death penalty was a 
black woman named Joan Little. The 20-year-old had been charged with 1st-degree 
murder after stabbing a white guard to death with an ice pick while being held 
at the Beaufort County Jail in 1974. She said she had killed the man to stop 
him from raping her - his body was found naked from the waist down in her cell, 
with seminal fluid on his leg. Nevertheless, Little faced a mandatory death 
sentence if she was convicted.

As Little's trial approached, the case became a cause celebre - a symbol of the 
South's deep-rooted racism and the largely unspoken sexual abuse of black women 
by white men dating back generations. In 1975, amid demonstrations, a jury 
acquitted Little. The next year, in Woodson v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme 
Court struck down the state’s mandatory sentencing scheme.

For Jennie Lancaster, 1 of the jurors in the case, the Little trial would 
indelibly shape her perspective on the criminal justice system. As a 
25-year-old counselor at a juvenile prison facility in Raleigh, "I had this 
almost idealistic view of what you could accomplish" within prisons, she 
recalls. After the Little trial, she went on to become warden of the state's 
women's prison and eventually the Central Region director in the North Carolina 
Division of Prisons, where she supervised 12 facilities, including the prison 
in Raleigh that houses death row.

"Racism and sexism. That was prevalent in the whole judicial process within 
deep eastern North Carolina."

Among Lancaster's early responsibilities was presiding over the 1984 execution 
of Velma Barfield, a white woman convicted and sentenced to die for poisoning 4 
people. As her execution date approached, the case of the "death row granny" 
became a media circus and political lightning rod; the state set the execution 
date just days before a major election for Senate. Democratic North Carolina 
Gov. James Hunt faced incumbent Sen. Jesse Helms. Hunt, who would go on to 
lose, denied Barfield’s pleas for clemency.

"I got to know Velma," Lancaster says. "I got to know her family. I got to know 
what a positive influence she was" at the prison. She also saw the additional 
ways in which women behind bars were abused and dehumanized. Lancaster recalls 
having to fight with prison administrators to allow Barfield to wear a bra 
during her execution. "She was a big-breasted woman and she asked me, 'Miss 
Lancaster, if I've got to go through this, I would like to have the dignity of 
wearing a bra.'"

The Barfield execution would eclipse the Little case in North Carolina's death 
penalty history. But it was the latter that opened Lancaster's eyes. "The 
system was on trial," she said. "And our role in the criminal justice system 
was really on trial." While she was proud at the outcome, the case was only her 
1st look at the rampant abuse within prisons. "It ingrained a stronger sense of 
responsibility within me, about how we should be caretakers. And how we should 
not allow, if we're in a supervisory role, the taking advantage of offenders 
who are under our care."

"And also, the amount of racism," Lancaster added. "Racism and sexism. That was 
prevalent in the whole judicial process within deep eastern North Carolina."

Today Lancaster is an outspoken critic of the death penalty - and especially of 
its impact on prison staff. "There's no training for it," she says about the 
psychological and emotional effects of executions. For the public, "executions 
are out of sight, out of mind," Lancaster says. People don't want to deal with 
it - "they just want it to be over with." But people who work in the system 
"can't go home and talk about it. We can't talk about it anywhere. We can't 
really even talk about it at the prison." Over the course of her career, 
Lancaster attended 24 executions.

Parker, the former prosecutor, did not attend the execution of Ronald Frye in 
2001. "I gave my ticket to the arresting officer," he said. Parker said he had 
developed a certain level of affection for Frye by then. "I thought he has 
what's coming to him, but I wasn't gonna go watch him die."

I asked Parker if he would feel satisfied if Nathan Bowie were to be executed 
today, 25 years after he was convicted. Would he consider it justice? Parker 
paused. "I really haven't given it much thought," he said, adding, "I did my 
job." He doesn't miss it. He's happily retired, playing golf a few times a 
week, he told me. "I don't think about it much anymore. I leave it alone."

(source: theintercept.com)

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

Suspect in fatal shooting of NC state trooper identified



Prosecutors have identified the man accused of fatally shooting a North 
Carolina State Highway Patrol trooper during a traffic stop in Columbus County 
early Wednesday morning.

According to officials, Raheem Davis, 20, of Chadbourn has been charged with 
1st-degree murder in the shooting death of Trooper Kevin Conner.

First Sgt. Michael Baker with the State Highway Patrol said Conner was shot at 
approximately 12:15 a.m. while conducting a traffic stop for a speeding 
violation on U.S. 701 near Sellers Town Road in Columbus County. As Conner 
approached the vehicle, the suspect fired several shots, striking the trooper.

Conner died after being taken to a local hospital.

"At that time, the driver fled the scene and drove into Fair Bluff," Baker said 
in a media briefing. "The Fair Bluff Police Department attempted to stop the 
vehicle and a chase ensued. The driver of that white GMC became disabled on the 
railroad tracks in Fair Bluff off of Rogers Street. A foot pursuit ensued and 
he was apprehended by authorities after an extensive search."

Davis made his 1st appearance in a Columbus County courtroom Wednesday 
afternoon, flanked by 9 officers, some wearing bulletproof vests.

During the appearance, Davis was brief while answering questions from the 
judge, limiting his answers to "yes" and "yes, sir."

The judge ordered that Davis be held under no bond. He faces the possibility of 
the death penalty or life in prison without parole.

Following the court appearance, District Attorney Jon David said "this was 
cold-blooded, 1st-degree murder" and that Trooper Conner, just 15 hours prior, 
was "patrolling the streets of Columbus County, but now he's dead."

Conner's funeral services are scheduled for Sunday with visitation at South 
Columbus High School from 1-4 p.m. The funeral is scheduled after visitation.

David said Davis was driving a stolen pickup truck and speeding in the opposite 
direction on U.S. 701 prior to being pulled over by Conner in front of a nearby 
convenience store. David said the deadly shooting was caught on dashcam video 
and by the store's surveillance system.

According to David, Conner was "blissfully unaware" as he walked up to the 
truck and asked Davis why he was speeding, at which point Davis allegedly 
started firing a gun without saying anything. Conner was struck twice.

Hilton Cox lives just down the road from where the shooting occurred and was 
outside his home smoking a cigarette when he heard 4 or 5 gunshots ring out.

"When I heard the gunshots, I heard tires squeal and saw the cop car still 
sitting there with blue lights going," Cox said. "I told my wife something 
didn't seem right." Cox said he jumped in his vehicle and drove down to 
Conner's patrol car where he found the trooper lying on the highway in front of 
the car.

"I immediately called 911 and started talking to him, checking his vitals. He 
had a pulse. He was breathing and he still had a heartbeat and was gasping for 
air," Cox explained. "I held onto him until the EMTs showed up."

Other troopers responded to the scene and watched the dashcam video to identify 
Davis, who they found minutes later in the same truck in Fair Bluff.

After Davis' truck stalled on some railroad tracks on Rogers Street, he fled on 
foot and was later found hiding in a wooded area behind the tracks.

David said the gun used in the shooting has not been found yet.

David and Columbus County Sheriff Lewis Hatcher have requested the SBI 
investigate the incident.

According to online records, Davis was out on probation after serving about 3 
months in prison after he was convicted last year of firing gunshots into a 
couple's SUV as they were driving through Chadbourn on their way to Myrtle 
Beach, SC in 2015.

Conner was an 11-year veteran of the N.C. State Highway Patrol and was assigned 
to Troop B out of Columbus County.

(source: WECT news)








SOUTH CAROLINA:

Twice-convicted cop killer seeks new trial



Luzenski Cottrell, a twice-convicted death row inmate, is asking for 
post-conviction relief.

Cottrell fatally shot Myrtle Beach police officer Joe McGarry in 2002.

He was sentenced to death in April 2005.

3 years later, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the conviction 
because the jury was not allowed to consider a lesser charge of voluntary 
manslaughter.

Cottrell was found guilty again in a retrial in 2014, and was again sentenced 
to death.

According to documents filed October 12, 2018, Cottrell is seeking 
post-conviction relief.

"Mr. Cottrell's right to effective assistance of counsel... was violated when 
his trial attorneys failed to exercise peremptory strikes to remove 2 jurors 
whose views, expressed during voir dire, prevented or substantially impaired 
their ability to consider constitutionally relevant mitigating evidence," the 
documents state.

During voir dire, two jurors stated "unequivocally that they would not regard 
evidence of a defendant's 'background characteristics' as 'relevant' in 
selecting an appropriate penalty for murder... Defense counsel rightly 
recognized these statements as conclusive indicators that each juror lacked the 
capacity to perceive and give effect to mitigating evidence mandated by the 
Eighth Amendment, and objected to the jurors' qualification on the ground that 
each was 'mitigation impaired...' However, once the trial court overruled their 
objections... trial counsel deficiently failed to exercise peremptory strikes 
necessary to ensure the unqualified jurors would not be seated on the jury."

"As a result, both unqualified jurors were seated, and both participated in the 
guilt-or-innocence and penalty determinations," the document continues. 
"Because of their self-professed unwillingness to consider a broad range of 
constitutionally relevant mitigating evidence, it is at least reasonably 
probable that one or both jurors adversely affected the outcome of the penalty 
phase deliberations, and that, absent their participation, the result of those 
deliberations would have been different."

The filing seeks a new trial-- or at the very least, a new sentencing hearing.

Cottrell is already serving a life sentence in an unrelated murder case, but is 
also serving 3 10-year sentences for grand larceny, resisting arrest and 
assault with intent to kill related to the McGarry case.

Authorities say McGarry confronted Cottrell outside a Dunkin' Donuts, and the 
officer pinned Cottrell against a car as he questioned him. The 2 struggled and 
investigators say Cottrell shot the officer in the face.

Cottrell admitted to the killing.

For McGarry's parents, justice for their son means the ultimate price. "He 
(Cottrell) needs to the ultimate punishment," said Anita McGarry, Joe's mother. 
"He's a murderer. He's a gangster. You have to pay the price for what you do."

(source: WPDE news)








ALABAMA:

Shannon Gargis capital murder trial underway in Franklin County



More than 2 years after the death of a Franklin County toddler, the man accused 
is standing trial.

Shannon Dale Gargis is charged with capital murder for intentionally causing 
the girl's death.

Over the last 3 days, a jury pool of 500 people were questioned repeatedly by 
prosecutors and defense attorneys. Wednesday afternoon, 12 jurors and 2 
alternates started hearing the case.

The details of how 22-month old Serenity Renfroe died are haunting. A state 
forensics autopsy performed shortly after her death indicated Serenity died 
from blunt force trauma to the head.

During a preliminary hearing after Shannon Gargis's arrest, an investigator 
with the Franklin County Sheriff's Office took the stand. He stated under oath, 
Gargis admitted to becoming "overly aggressive" after the baby spilled cereal 
on the floor. The investigator added Gargis said he picked the toddler up by 
the throat and threw her across the room onto a loveseat, hitting her head.

Prosecutors opened their statement by saying this was one of the most serious 
cases in Franklin County history. District Attorney Joey Rushing took jurors 
step-by-step through the investigation and how they believe Gargis killed 
serenity.

Autopsy results showed she had over 100 bruises on her body - which showed 
signs of abuse.

Defense attorneys claim the death of Serenity came at the hands of her mother 
Halie Renfroe. According to investigators, Renfroe was at work until 2:30 that 
morning and returned home to find Serenity dead and laying at the feet of 
Gargis who was asleep.

In 2017, Halie Renfroe pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution after it was 
determined she was not involved in the death. She is expected to testify for 
the prosecution during the trail.

Courthouse officials expect the trail to last at least 2 weeks. If convicted, 
Gargis could face the death penalty.

(source: WHNT news)