[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----KY., NEB., WYO., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 27



KENTUCKY:

Death penalty not always best result for murder victims' families



I am writing in response to the Daily News’ editorial published April 14 about 
the death penalty. Let the legal minds argue the nuances of Eighth Amendment 
ramifications of a state performing executions, but it would be unsettling to 
me if we threw it out the window because someone is a “cold-blooded killer” 
whose life is worth less.

In expressing its support for the Supreme Court’s opinion, the newspaper 
pointed out the murderer’s victim certainly experienced cruel and unusual 
punishment in her rape and death, as well as the victim’s family, who had been 
waiting 23 years for justice to be served.

I know something about being a family member of a murder victim. My brother 
Chris, an innocent witness to three murders, was shot in the back twice while 
running away from the crime scene before the murderer put a bullet through his 
brain.

Years passed. Appeals came and went. In a somewhat swift timeline for a death 
sentence, Donald Reese was put to death by the state of Missouri one month 
short of 11 years after he murdered four people. If finding closure means that 
you don’t have to keep thinking about appeals, then the families of all of 
Reese’s victims found closure.

What I have learned over time is how destructive the death penalty system is to 
victims’ families. Some of us are torn apart in our disagreement on its use. 
Some of us spend our time in anger and confusion at the endless appeals. We 
relive our loved one’s loss with each appeal. As the decades roll by, studies 
have shown that we are less healthy, less happy, have less money and die 
earlier than those victims’ families who live in states without the death 
penalty. In those states, a family’s wait is less than two years before the 
final appeal is over.

I often hear angry arguments about all the appeals. “They should take these 
‘cold blooded killers’ to the public square and hang ‘em.” Unfortunately, we 
have too much evidence that this approach is much more prone to misuse. It is 
why our nation has evolved toward a more civil and careful approach. Even so, 
the number of former death row inmates who were exonerated now numbers 165 
since 1976, while states have executed a smidge under 1,500 people. I don’t 
think that reflects a good enough track record on our system of justice to 
speed up the process.

As I write this, New Hampshire may join 19 other states in abolishing the death 
penalty. By abolishing the death penalty, Kentucky could save money. Give the 
crowded court dockets more space. Be less prone to make a mistake that can’t be 
reversed. Help all surviving family members of murder by not dragging them 
through appeals for decades. And we won’t have to argue about how to put 
someone to death that will satisfy the Eighth Amendment provision against cruel 
and unusual punishment.

[Ben Griffith is the secretary on the Board of the Kentucky Coalition to 
Abolish the Death Penalty (kcadp.org). His brother was murdered in 1986]

(source: Letter to the Editor, Bowling Green Daily News)








NEBRASKA:

Nebraska rejects new attempt to abolish death penalty



Three years after Nebraska voters reinstated the death penalty, lawmakers have 
rejected a new attempt to abolish the punishment.

Senators who want to outlaw capital punishment fell eight votes short Thursday 
of the support needed to advance the measure through a 1st-round vote. The 
measure stalled with 17 lawmakers voting in favor of it and 25 against. Seven 
senators didn't vote.

Sen. Ernie Chambers, of Omaha, introduced the bill as he has done for more than 
4 decades.

Lawmakers passed a repeal measure in 1979 but failed to override a 
gubernatorial veto. They passed one again in 2015 and overrode Gov. Pete 
Ricketts' veto, but the issue was placed on the 2016 ballot and voters restored 
it.

Nebraska executed inmate Carrie Dean Moore by lethal injection last year.

(source: Associated Prwess)








WYOMING:

Another effort to repeal Wyoming's death penalty takes root



A Cheyenne legislator says another effort will be made in next year's 
Legislature to repeal Wyoming's death penalty.

This past session a death penalty repeal bill sponsored by Republican Rep. 
Jared Olsen passed the state House but was defeated in the Senate.

Olsen tells the Casper Star-Tribune that he will be doing all he can to ensure 
that 2020 will be the year Wyoming finally repeals the death penalty.

Olsen says that effort will begin next week when he and ACLU of Wyoming 
Director Sabrina King will kick off a statewide education campaign to gain 
support for ending the death penalty.

King says the effort would focus on educating local leaders and Wyoming 
residents from the town and county level all the way up the ladder.

(source: Associated Press)








CALIFORNIA:

DA to seek death penalty for man in deputy’s killing at Rancho Cordova auto 
parts store |



Sacramento County prosecutors will seek the death penalty for accused cop 
killer Anton Lemon Paris in the September shooting death of a Sacramento County 
sheriff’s deputy and the wounding of a second deputy at a Rancho Cordova auto 
parts store.

Sacramento County district attorney’s prosecutors announced their intent in a 
two-paragraph motion Friday morning before Sacramento Superior Court Judge 
Michael Bowman. Paris faces four counts in the Sept. 17 shooting that killed 
Deputy Mark Stasyuk, 27, and wounded his partner, Deputy Julie Robertson, 28, 
along with a store employee: felony murder, attempted murder and felon in 
possession of a firearm – a .40-caiiber handgun. Paris also faces a special 
allegation of killing a peace officer in the line of duty.

The Friday announcement, little more than two weeks after prosecutors committed 
to seeking death for East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer suspect Joseph 
DeAngelo, 73, ignores Gov. Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on capital punishment. But 
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert and other prosecutors 
have previously argued that Newsom’s moratorium has no impact on their ability 
to seek death penalty sentences.

Paris is accused of killing Stasyuk at close range after the young deputy and 
partner Robertson responded to a Rancho Cordova Pep Boys where storekeepers 
said Paris was threatening employees and knocking items off shelves.

The deputies took gunfire almost as soon as they entered the building. The 
shots came from behind a service counter, the first rounds hitting store 
employee Arturo Nolasco in the back. Nolasco and a second employee were able to 
crawl to safety.

As Stasyuk entered the store, Robertson closed in on the gunman, later 
identified as Paris, a 38-year-old convicted felon with a lengthy criminal 
history on both sides of the Sacramento River, a man who lived a chaotic life 
filled with guns.

Stasyuk was shot twice during the rapid-fire gunbattle as he tried to seek 
cover and return fire – once in the back, then in the back of the head. 
Robertson was shot in the arm but continued to return fire, render aid to her 
wounded partner and place herself between the gunman and the customers who 
couldn’t escape the store, sheriff’s officials would later say.

“This was a firefight and it was an extensive one,” Sacramento County Sheriff 
Scott Jones would say in the days after the shooting.

Paris was shot multiple times and seriously wounded in the firefight. He was 
hospitalized for a time before he was deemed well enough to be jailed and face 
a judge in a courtroom. His September arraignment, 10 days after the shooting, 
was conducted in his hospital room.

Paris is scheduled to return to Sacramento Superior Court on May 17 – exactly 8 
months after the shooting that felled Stasyuk.

(source: sacbee.com)








USA:

Caring About Mental Health Made Me Care About the Death Penalty



A mere 5 years ago, you would have found me arguing on the opposite side of the 
debate when it comes to the death penalty (decidedly pro). This was back when I 
admittedly toed the Republican Party line and did not yet approach each policy 
with a set of principles and skepticism.

Upon further reflection, I believe it was my encounter with the death penalty 
that caused me to change my approach in determining my stances. And I wouldn’t 
have challenged my stance on the death penalty were it not for my concern over 
mental health issues.

Everyone feels the repercussions of mental illness, whether they realize it or 
not. Even as these illnesses have been misunderstood, misdiagnosed, maligned, 
and stereotyped for decades, by virtually everyone, the consequences are 
glaring when you look at homelessness, healthcare costs, or violence. When I 
began working as a policy advocate for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 
I quickly realized that the realities of trying to solve the problem were much 
harder and messier than I had assumed, especially when it came to the justice 
system.

Our system is rampant with mental health issues. Countless studies and articles 
have been devoted to the overwhelming number of people incarcerated with mental 
illnesses, the multiple problems that come from asking that law enforcement act 
as first responders for those in crisis, and the ways that we have shifted what 
should be a public health matter to the justice system.

The death penalty magnifies these problems. It is estimated that 20 percent of 
those on death row have a severe mental illness. Due to HIPAA laws, and other 
illness-related factors, it is unlikely we will ever know the true number. The 
problem is that those with mental illness are at a disadvantage from the moment 
they encounter the justice system. They are more likely to be wrongfully 
convicted, and they are more likely to receive harsher sentences.

Unfortunately, universal awareness of these problems does not mean a unilateral 
agreement to fix them, much less an agreement on how to fix them.

There is still a vast lack of knowledge amongst the general public on the 
intricacies of mental health. This affects the attitudes of voters towards 
those with mental illness, the ability for lawmakers to set good policy, and 
the judgement of jurors asked to determine guilt and sentencing.

Common misperceptions on mental illness become even more detrimental, and at 
times deadly, when they run up against the justice system. There are some who 
refuse to recognize that mental illness is even an illness at all, instead 
clinging to debunked notions that these medical diagnoses are signs of a 
spiritual problem, bad character, or even a choice. Some also believe them to 
be made-up, fakeable, or an excuse. Even those who carry a more educated view 
on the actualities of these illnesses are still susceptible to believing that 
they are indicators of a threat of ongoing violence, rather than a mitigating 
factor that should be weighed as part of the legal process.

This a subject that I could pour hundreds of pages into, but for the sake of 
space, there are a few factors I wish people knew when it comes to considering 
criminal justice reforms as they pertain to those with mental illness.

First and foremost, individuals with mental illness are ten times more likely 
to be a victim than they are to be violent.

Secondly, the presence of anosognosia (a component of severe mental illness 
that prevents the victim from being self-aware of their own illness) 
drastically increases the likelihood that a person will fire their attorney on 
a whim, seek to represent themselves, or attempt to prevent their illness from 
being brought up in trial because they deny its existence. Additionally, they 
are much more likely to have difficulty understanding their Miranda rights, far 
more susceptible to police pressure, and substantially more likely to confess 
to crimes they did not commit.

Lastly, the term “severe mental illness” (SMI) is a precise medical diagnosis 
classified in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder" that 
pertains to a very specific set of conditions and symptoms. These illnesses are 
far more extreme than depression or anxiety, and include disorders such as 
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder with psychosis. These disorders by 
definition cause a “functional impairment which substantially interferes with 
or limits one or more major life activities.”

Given how serious all of these disorders are, and how much research exists 
proving their existence and consequences, it is ludicrous to suggest that these 
impairments could be faked in order to excuse a person’s culpability. 
Typically, when proponents of reform discuss mental illness, they are referring 
to this classification of illnesses.

As I came to understand these systematic problems that linked mental health 
with criminal justice, I began to realize my position on the death penalty 
might require more nuance that I initially thought. If a system cannot even 
safeguard the most vulnerable among us, it certainly should not be determining 
matters of life and death.

(source: Hannah Cox is the National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About 
the Death Penalty. Hannah was previously Director of Outreach for the Beacon 
Center of Tennessee, a free-market think tank. Prior to that, she was Director 
of Development for the Tennessee Firearms Association and a policy advocate for 
the National Alliance on Mental Illness----newsmax.com)

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

Death Can be a Slow Traveler: Peltier, Mumia and Rap Brown



When the history of our times is recorded, any volume on domestic political 
prisoners must, per force, begin with the legendary ones of conscience. To 
these icons of principle, determination and courage we owe much. It is, after 
all, not by mere default that they risked, and often paid, all to demand the 
gale of change sweep away generations of ignorance, hatred and greed that have 
long fed on communities of color and poverty, from coast to coast, in the 
United States. For them, it was never about personal risk for they knew all too 
well the price that can be exacted for such integrity. For them, the 
alternative of silence was simply an option without a choice.

Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier, a founder of the American Indian Movement, is now well into 
his fourth decade of imprisonment. Wrongfully charged and convicted for the 
defense of Wounded Knee against an FBI onslaught, his, more than any other 
continuing political persecution, lays bare the myth that the Department of 
Justice is committed to the pursuit of truth or equal application of law.

Having failed to secure a conviction in the first trial against his 
codefendants, at Peltier’s subsequent trial, the government recast, in its 
entirety, its storyline of what happened that fateful day during the firefight 
at the Pine Ridge Reservation between some 150 FBI agents, local law 
enforcement and vigilantes… and forty members of AIM.

At the first trial, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, federal prosecutors argued that two 
FBI agents were essentially “murdered” during an exchange of gunshots with 
Native activists barricaded at an AIM compound located some distance away. 
Rejecting the assertion the agents were targeted, the jury acquitted the 
defendants on the basis of self defense.

After succeeding in moving the second trial to a more favorable government 
venue in Fargo North Dakota (long a hotbed of anti-Native animus and violence), 
federal prosecutor’s concocted a new strategy. Using a patchwork of evidence 
built of altered or suppressed testimony to remake a case already soundly 
rejected, prosecutors rewrote the script to now one where the agents were 
executed by close range gun shots to their heads. Because of this dramatic 
shift, Peltier was precluded from submitting any self-defense testimony. 
Inexplicably, the new judge also prevented the defense from establishing, at 
trial, that the FBI had a proven history… in Native prosecutions… of tampering 
with evidence and witnesses.

Unlike the 1st trial, where prosecutors introduced evidence that agents had 
been pursuing a red pickup truck before the shootout, this time they testified 
they were looking for an orange and white van… such as the one that Peltier had 
been seen using on occasion. Likewise, while an FBI ballistic expert testified 
that a shell casing recovered near the agents’ bodies matched a weapon tied to 
Peltier, prosecutors suppressed a different ballistic test which proved the 
casing could not have come from his gun. These changes were part of a conscious 
effort by government prosecutors to convert the trial… of this high profile 
political and human rights activist… from a search for truth to a staged 
performance in which it withheld more than 140,000 pages of discovery from the 
defense in its desperate drive to convict Peltier no matter what the truth or 
the cost.

Nowhere is the nature and extent of the government’s misconduct in the 
persecution of Leonard Peltier better summed up than it was by one of his 
appellate attorneys, former United States Attorney GeneralRamsey Clark, who 
branded the evidence used against him as “fabricated, circumstantial … misused, 
concealed, and perverted.” Different in tenor and tone, yet, essentially the 
same in conclusion, during one of Peltier’s appeals before the Eight Circuit 
his former prosecutor conceded “… we do not know who killed those agents. 
Further, we don’t know what participation, if any, Mr. Peltier had in it.”

Ultimately, this candid admission of a government frame proved worthless when 
Barack Obama denied Peltier’s request for a sentence commutation via cryptic 
email, on January 18, 2017, as he raced out the oval office no doubt to ready 
for his first book signing tour.

Next eligible for parole in 2024, when he is 79 years of age, Leonard Peltier, 
a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who is essentially wheel chair bound and suffers 
from a potential life threatening internal bleeding condition, is likely to die 
in prison.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

The thirst for vengeance is no less voracious in state court prosecutions that 
target political dissidents. Though state substantive offenses may vary and the 
rules of evidence change, prosecutors and judges still adhere to an age-old 
obedient oath that those who forcefully confront and expose institutional power 
and authority must be called to task… and damn the truth. While examples 
abound, no clearer one exists then the decades long political feed on Mumia 
Abu-Jamal.

Much has been written by and about Abu-Jamal and his journey, over the course 
of almost 40 years of imprisonment, largely spent on Pennsylvania’s death row, 
as an ever-present thorn in the veil of institutional isolation and secrecy 
that consumes its every prison bunk. And while, for some, debate continues over 
whether he pulled the trigger in the shooting death of a Philadelphia police 
officer, no such disagreement concerns his life as a community activist and 
full-time challenge to its notoriously corrupt police department and office of 
the District Attorney.

After his beating by white supremacists, as a mere teen, Mumia found his voice 
through the Black Panther Party, a chapter of which he helped to found in 
Philadelphia eventually becoming its “Lieutenant of Information” responsible 
for writing its policy positions and news releases.

Like many others, Mumia was targeted by the FBI COINTELPRO program which in 
Philadelphia drew upon the cooperation of local police as they targeted 
community activists and dissidents. Across the country, black “radical” groups 
were infiltrated and disrupted with hundreds of their members physically 
attacked, falsely charged and imprisoned; more than a few the subject of 
outright government assassination.

Over the years, Mumia became a widely recognized and respected voice in 
alternative news while working at various local, and then national, outlets 
ranging from university radio stations to NPR… from which he was eventually 
fired because of his opinions. Ultimately, becoming the President of the 
Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, whenever controversy arose, 
Mumia was sure to be found providing a platform for dissenting views otherwise 
silenced by the long seated powerful of Philadelphia.

Mumia was a relentless criticof the Philadelphia police department… often 
citing its documented history of excessive force and corruption including 
fabricating evidence. He was no less critical of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a former 
police commissioner, accusing him of fostering an environment rife with 
systemic racial bias and police brutality.

Nowhere is that more evident than in his damning criticism of the police 
department’s repeated confrontations with MOVE, the communal Black liberation 
movement that lived in West Philadelphia promoting a revolutionary ideology 
like that of the Black Panther Party.

2 major confrontations with the police, one an armed standoff which resulted in 
the death of an officer and another where a police helicopter dropped a bomb on 
the MOVE compound causing a fire that killed eleven of its members, including 5 
children, and destroyed 65 neighborhood houses, best define the tension between 
a movement which Mumia at first supported, and then later joined, and the 
Philadelphia police.

Can it be mere happenstance that Abu-Jamal’s favorable reporting on behalf of 
the accused, during the trial of the “MOVE Nine” for the death of that officer, 
presaged his own arrest and prosecution for a like accusation not all that long 
thereafter?

While legal scholars continue to argue over the weight of evidence at Mumia’s 
trial, there can be no reasoned disagreement over the fact that it was a 
racially charged prosecution of a dynamic political dissident from the African 
American community of Philadelphia in 1982.

Indeed, in exercising 11 out of 14 peremptory challenges to eliminate 
prospective black jurors, prosecutors ended up with a jury panel comprised of 
two blacks and ten whites, all but guaranteeing the trier of fact was tainted 
with racial bias even before it heard the 1st witness. Years later, any 
question about Abu-Jamal’s trial being fueled by racial hate was further 
evidenced by an affidavit of a courtstenographer who swore that she overheard 
the trial Judge, Albert Sabo, comment outside the courtroom, “…Yeah, and I’m 
going to help them fry the nigger.”

Against this light, the trial, itself, was replete with prosecutorial 
misconduct ranging from suppression of the confession of a man who said he was 
the actual shootertothe failure to call an eyewitness who told police Mumia was 
not the gunman. Later, he testified police tore up his original statement and 
coerced him into signing another one implicating Abu-Jamal. Other witnesses 
subsequently claimed they had seen another person fleeing from the scene of the 
shooting. Though this other person’s presence at the crime was known to 
prosecutors at the time of the trial, it was concealed from the jury. Forensic 
evidence connecting Mumia to the crime was no more reliable. For example, the 
coroner testified at trial that the bullet extracted from the deceased was a 
.38-caliber round which matched the weapon recovered from Mumia. At the time of 
the autopsy he noted in his official medical examiner records that it was a.44 
caliber.

Just this past week, Abu-Jamal prevailed in his decades old battle to obtain 
justice when the current Philadelphia District Attorney withdrew his opposition 
to his de novo appeal based upon a conflict of interest by the former 
Pennsylvania Chief Justice, Ronald Castille, who oversaw Mumia’s state court 
appeals between 1998 and 2012. Castille, an avid supporter of the death penalty 
with close ties to police unions, had been Philadelphia’s District Attorney 
during the early years of Abu-Jamal’s attempt to overturn his conviction.

Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal are but 2 of the most prominent long-term 
political prisoners in the United States today. Meanwhile dozens of others now 
well into their 60s, 70s and older have also spent decades entombed in maximum 
security state and federal penitentiaries that crisscross the country.

H. Rap Brown

To many, Rap Brown is a legendary figure synonymous with revolutionary 
movements that drove generations of activists in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s to 
confront Jim Crow, the war in Vietnam and systemic class, race and gender based 
discrimination through militant action. Now 76 years of age, and known as Jamil 
Abdullah al-Amin, he sits in the United States Penitentiary in Tucson fighting 
cancer while doing a life sentence for a state court conviction for a murder 
that occurred some 18 years ago. Like so many other prosecutions of high 
profile black leaders of his day, his is one beset by nagging questions.

Thus, the prosecutor’s theory that Abdullah al-Amin opened fire on police 
officers who came to arrest him for his mere failure to appear in court for a 
speeding ticket beggars the imagination. Given his long history as an iconic 
leader in the national African American community, his then success in local 
business and prominence as a Muslim preacher and community activist speaking 
out against drugs and gambling, this inexplicable act of gratuitous violence 
reeks of intent…looking for motive.

At trial, prosecutors argued al-Amin had failed to provide an alibi for his 
whereabouts at the time of the crime. Nor did he offer any explanation for 
fleeing the state after the shooting or account for why the weapons used in it 
were found near him at the time of his arrest.

Against this entirely circumstantial evidence, the defense established that 
al-Amin was not wounded during the shootout… as the surviving deputy had 
reported. That same officer described the killer’s eyes as grey… al-Amin’s are 
brown. Most important, another man, Otis Jackson, while incarcerated on another 
charge, confessed to the shooting well before the trial but the court did not 
allow his confession into evidence. That admission matched essential, and not 
publicly known, details from 911 calls following the shooting… including a 
report that a bleeding man was seen limping from the scene. Jackson said he 
knocked on doors attempting to obtain a ride while suffering from wounds that 
he had sustained during his firefight with deputies.

So Many More

Who among us today remembers the names let alone the history of RuchellMagee or 
Álvaro Luna Hernández or Kamau Sadiki or Kojo Bomani Sababu or Bill Dunne or 
Joy Powell or Jalil Muntaqimor Russell Maroon Shoatsor Edward Poindexter or 
Romaine Chip Fitzgerald or Joseph Bowen or Fred Burton or Janet Holloway or the 
other MOVE Nine who remain imprisoned years after evidence showed that the 
officer they were convicted of killing likely died of friendly fire. Each of 
these men and women has been imprisoned for decades; victims of a rush to 
judgment… of politics and prosecutions and passion all but blinded by the hate 
and fear of the day.

While movements such as the Black Panther Party, the BLA, AIM and MOVE still 
resonate among some in a new generation of activists, many of their former 
members, nowriddled with poor health and buried in prison, have been all but 
lost to the passage of time as death can be a slow traveler.

(source: Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York 
City----counterpunch.org)