[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEV., CALIF., WASH., USA

[Rick Halperin]

February 16




NEVADA:

Nevada lawmakers introduce bill to end death penalty



Nevada lawmakers introduced legislation Friday that would abolish the death 
penalty in the state.

20 states have abolished or overturned the death penalty, while Colorado, 
Pennsylvania and Oregon have a gubernatorial moratorium on capital punishment, 
according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Where the death penalty has been abolished or overturned:

Alaska

Connecticut

Delaware

Hawaii

Illinois

Iowa

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

New Jersey

New Mexico

New York

North Dakota

Rhode Island

Vermont

Washington

West Virginia

Wisconsin

(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)








CALIFORNIA:

Brothers Charged With Murder, Possibly Face Death Penalty in Killing of Missing 
Teen Aranda Briones: DA



An arraignment for two brothers accused of killing a missing Moreno Valley 
teenager was postponed on Friday.

Owen Skyler Shover, 18, and Gary Anthony Shover, 21, have been charged with 
murder in the slaying of 16-year-old Aranda Briones, whose body still has not 
been found, the Riverside County District Attorney's Office said.

The two young men allegedly "killed the victim while lying in wait," according 
to the charging document.

The special circumstance allegation makes the defendants eligible for the death 
penalty, although a decision whether to seek a death sentence will be decided 
later by DA Mike Hestrin, prosecutors said.

Their arraignments have been continued to March 1.

Owen Shover was apparently the last person to see Briones before she 
disappeared on Jan. 13, according to authorities. Shover told police he dropped 
her off at a park in Moreno Valley that evening and saw her get into another 
vehicle before he left.

However, after reviewing surveillance cameras in the area, investigators were 
unable to find any video corroborating the 18-year-old's account, according to 
the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Sheriff's officials said there is evidence indicating Briones was killed.

The brothers were interviewed numerous times before being arrested at their 
home in Hesperia on Monday night, according to the Sheriff's Department.

Both are being held without bail, inmate records showed.

Authorities are still searching for the missing teen's body, and anyone with 
information is encouraged to call Riverside County Central Homicide 
Investigator Dickey at 951-955-2777 or Moreno Valley police Investigator 
Drexler at 951-486-6700.

(source: KTLA news)

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

He’s on California’s Death Row, But Demetrius Howard Never Killed Anyone



A February 4, 2019 article in the criminal justice newsletter, The Appeal, 
features the case of Demetrius Howard, a California prisoner sentenced to death 
for a crime in which he didn’t kill anyone. Howard was sentenced to death in 
1995 for his participation in a robbery in which another man, Mitchell Funches, 
shot and killed Sherry Collins. Howard was never accused of firing a shot and 
he has consistently maintained that he neither expected nor intended that 
anyone would be killed. But under California’s felony murder law, he was 
eligible for the death penalty because he participated in the robbery. In a 
letter to The Appeal, Howard wrote, “I am no saint or some angel. I’ve made my 
share of wrongs, but I haven’t killed no one [or] told anyone to kill someone.”

California is one of 20 states that allow the execution of defendants who 
neither killed nor intended that a killing take place. The controversial 
practice has attracted the most attention in the state of Texas, where at least 
six prisoners have been executed despite undisputed evidence that they were not 
involved in the killing itself. In Howard’s case, the man who actually shot 
Collins, Mitchell Funches, received a sentence of life without parole when the 
jury in his trial could not reach a unanimous decision on whether to sentence 
him to life or death. In 2018, California passed a law that narrowed the scope 
of the felony murder law, making defendants liable for murder only if they were 
the killer, solicited the killer, or acted with reckless indifference to human 
life. The change is retroactive, but does not apply to Howard because the jury 
found that he had “acted with reckless indifference to human life” before it 
sentenced him to death.

Howard’s death sentence is also a by-product of outlier death-penalty practices 
in San Bernardino County. San Bernardino is 1 of 5 Southern California counties 
that imposed more death sentences between 2010 and 2015 than 99.5% of U.S. 
counties, earning the region the nickname “the new death belt.” In 1993, 
shortly before Howard was sentenced to death, there were 10 active capital 
trials in the county, and then-District Attorney Dennis Kottmeier said he was 
considering seeking it in 2 other cases. At the time, Kottmeier told the San 
Bernardino County Sun, “That’s higher than I’ve ever seen it. At any given time 
in the past the number pending seemed to be about 6.” He attributed the high 
number of capital cases to a high rate of violent crime, as well as state laws 
passed in 1990 and 1993 that expanded the list of death-eligible crimes. The 
California Attorney General’s 2017 report, Homicide in California, shows that 
despite its disproportionate pursuit of capital punishment, San Bernardino’s 
higher-than-average murder rate has remained the same from 1997 to 2017, while 
murder rates have declined statewide and in many of California counties during 
that period.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)








WASHINGTON:

Washington Senate passes death penalty repeal bill



The Washington Senate on Friday approved a measure that would repeal the death 
penalty, just months after the state’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down 
capital punishment as arbitrary and racially biased.

The measure passed on a 28-19 vote, and would make that court ruling permanent 
by removing capital punishment as a sentencing option for aggravated murder and 
mandating instead a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. 
The bill now heads to the House for consideration, and Gov. Jay Inslee has said 
he will sign it if it makes it to his desk.

Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, and a governor-imposed 
moratorium has blocked its use since 2014. But the court’s October ruling 
eliminated it entirely, converting the sentences for the state’s 8 death row 
inmates to life in prison without release.

The court did not rule out the possibility that the Legislature could come up 
with another manner of imposing death sentences that would be constitutional, 
which led Attorney General Bob Ferguson to request legislation to change state 
law.

Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle of Seattle, the bill’s sponsor, said that the 
governor and court had already taken a position on the death penalty and that 
it was time for the Legislature to do the same.

“It is time to close the chapter on this particular policy in a way that is 
respectful of the judicial process that has embarked for so many years and it’s 
also respectful of the civil dialogue that the American people have embraced,” 
he said.

With last year’s court ruling, the death penalty has been overturned or 
abolished in 20 states and the District of Columbia, and several states are 
considering measures this year. An additional 3 states — Oregon, Colorado and 
Pennsylvania — currently have moratoriums.

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. A statistical analysis by 
University of Washington sociologists showed that although prosecutors were not 
more likely to seek the execution of black defendants, juries were about 4 
times more likely to sentence black defendants to death.

Senators opposed to the measure argued that the death penalty should be 
retained for the most heinous cases, and as a tool for prosecutors to use to 
gain information about other victims.

“As a society, if we value innocent human life, we need to preserve the 
ultimate message to those who have taken it or might take it,” said Republican 
Sen. Steve O’Ban of University Place.

There have been 78 inmates, all men, put to death in Washington state since 
1904. The most recent execution in the state came in 2010, when Cal Coburn 
Brown died by lethal injection for the 1991 murder of a Seattle-area woman. 
(source: Seattle Times)

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

State Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional----None of Washington’s death 
row inmates are from Clark County. The last Clark County inmate to be executed 
was child killer Westley Allan Dodd, who was hanged on Jan. 5, 1993.



The state Senate on Friday approved a measure that would repeal the death 
penalty, just months after the state’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down 
capital punishment as arbitrary and racially biased.

The measure passed on a 28-19 vote, and would make that court ruling permanent 
by removing capital punishment as a sentencing option for aggravated murder and 
mandating instead a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. 
The bill now heads to the House for consideration, and Gov. Jay Inslee has said 
he will sign it if it makes it to his desk.

Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, and a governor-imposed 
moratorium has blocked its use since 2014. But the court’s October ruling 
eliminated it entirely, converting the sentences for the state’s eight death 
row inmates to life in prison without release.

The court did not rule out the possibility that the Legislature could come up 
with another manner of imposing death sentences that would be constitutional, 
which led Attorney General Bob Ferguson to request legislation to change state 
law.

Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle of Seattle, the bill’s sponsor, said that the 
governor and court had already taken a position on the death penalty and that 
it was time for the Legislature to do the same.

“It is time to close the chapter on this particular policy in a way that is 
respectful of the judicial process that has embarked for so many years and it’s 
also respectful of the civil dialogue that the American people have embraced,” 
he said.

With last year’s court ruling, the death penalty has been overturned or 
abolished in 20 states and the District of Columbia, and several states are 
considering measures this year. An additional three states — Oregon, Colorado 
and Pennsylvania — currently have moratoriums.

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. A statistical analysis by 
University of Washington sociologists showed that although prosecutors were not 
more likely to seek the execution of black defendants, juries were about four 
times more likely to sentence black defendants to death.

Senators opposed to the measure argued that the death penalty should be 
retained for the most heinous cases, and as a tool for prosecutors to use to 
gain information about other victims.

“As a society, if we value innocent human life, we need to preserve the 
ultimate message to those who have taken it or might take it,” said Republican 
Sen. Steve O’Ban of University Place.

There have been 78 inmates, all men, put to death in Washington since 1904. The 
most recent execution in the state came in 2010, when Cal Coburn Brown died by 
lethal injection for the 1991 murder of a Seattle-area woman.

(source: The Columbian)

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

WA’s death penalty may be unconstitutional, but it’s not dead — yet----Capital 
punishment has been struck down before, but has always returned. This time 
could be different.



Back in October, Washington state made international headlines when the state 
Supreme Court declared the state’s application of the death penalty was 
unconstitutional. Everyone from The New York Times to the BBC said the death 
penalty was effectively over in Washington state, which would make it the 20th 
state to abolish it.

Yet the Washington state Legislature is in the midst of considering new 
legislation intended to eliminate the death penalty. On Friday, state senators 
passed Senate Bill 5339 by a 28-19 vote. The bill will head to the House next. 
Gov. Jay Inslee has already indicated he will sign the bill when and if it 
makes it to his desk.

But given the state Supreme Court’s decision, one might wonder why additional 
legislation is even necessary.

In January, at the request of Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, 
Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, introduced legislation that would remove the 
death penalty statute entirely. This is the third time Ferguson has proposed 
such legislation. The proposed bill specifies a particular punishment for 
aggravated first degree murder: life imprisonment without the possibility of 
release or parole.

Ferguson and other advocates of doing away with government-sponsored executions 
say new legislation is required because the state Supreme Court never ruled 
that the death penalty was inherently unconstitutional. It instead found that 
the way the death penalty was applied in the state was unconstitutional. 
Specifically, judges concluded it was “imposed in an arbitrary and racially 
based manner.”

Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst added, however: “We leave open the possibility 
that the Legislature may enact a ‘carefully drafted’ statute to impose capital 
punishment in this state, but it cannot create a system that offends 
constitutional rights.”

Joe Sprague is executive director of the Washington State Catholic Conference, 
the public policy arm of the Catholic Church in the state, which advocates for 
the “sanctity of human life.” He acknowledges that what the state Supreme Court 
did “was very powerful and nothing should take away from their action.” But, he 
says, “the underlying law that was found to be unconstitutional is still 
there.”

Sprague says he and many of the other approximately 800,000 Catholics in the 
state don’t want to leave open the possibility that the death penalty law could 
be amended somehow to conform to the court’s demands.

Hugh Spitzer, a law professor at the University of Washington, says although 
it’s difficult to imagine how the death penalty could be applied in a racially 
unbiased way in today’s world, “the court’s decision was not absolute.”

“They probably just want to clean things up and put the nail in the coffin, so 
to speak,” Spitzer says.

If the state leaves the law on the books, there is a chance that those who 
believe in the death penalty could put an initiative on the ballot in an 
attempt to revive executions in the state. Or the practice could be revived 
through legislation, as was stated in the court’s decision.

A bill attempting to do just that had been introduced by Sen. Keith Wagoner, 
R-Sedro-Woolley. That bill specifies that a prisoner charged with aggravated 
first-degree murder could be sentenced to the death penalty. The bill is named 
after Jayme Biendl, a prison guard at the Monroe Correctional Complex, who was 
strangled in 2011 by an inmate serving a sentence of life in prison without the 
possibility of release or parole. The bill, however, is no longer under 
consideration.

There is at least 1 other way the death penalty could come back to life.

King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg calls statutes that stay on the 
books after they’ve been found unconstitutional “Zombie Laws.” In a letter to 
the Senate earlier this month, Satterberg cited the example of state statutes 
that ban abortions, which still exist in 10 states, despite Roe v. Wade, the 
Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

So-called Zombie Laws, Statterberg notes, “could come back to life in the event 
that a later court reverses itself and finds the law constitutional.”

Significantly, advocates point out that this is the fourth time the court has 
found Washington’s death penalty law unconstitutional. Each time, the 
Legislature has revived the death penalty by attempting to address its 
problems.

The court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 in the wake of a 
U.S. Supreme Court decision that found it was arbitrarily imposed, in 1979 
after an initiative had reinstated the death penalty, and again in 1981, when 
the court pointed out defendants could escape the punishment simply by pleading 
guilty, violating “a defendant’s constitutional rights to plead not guilty and 
demand a jury trial.”

Death-penalty opponents say now is the time to vote for a “clean repeal” and 
end the “unproductive cycle.”

The study that killed the death penalty in Washington

Washington state Supreme Court rules death penalty is "arbitrary" and "racially 
biased." An initiative should restore the death penalty — no exceptions allowed 
— for those who murder children in particularly cruel manner.

In addition to the Supreme Court’s actions, public support for the death 
penalty in Washington state has typically been weak. The last execution in 
Washington state was carried out in 2010. A lethal injection was used to kill 
Cal Coburn Brown for the 1991 murder of a Seattle woman. Four years later, Gov. 
Jay Inslee declared a moratorium on capital punishment.

Last year, the Northwest Progressive Institute unveiled a poll that showed a 
majority of Washingtonians would rather send convicted murderers to prison for 
life than execute them. In the survey, 69 % of respondents surveyed said they 
preferred 1 of 3 life-in-prison alternatives to just 24 % who said they 
preferred the death penalty. 8 % said they were not sure.

"Washingtonians don’t need to be convinced that replacing the death penalty 
with life-in-prison alternatives makes sense,” said Andrew Villeneuve, 
executive director of Northwest Progressive Institute. “It’s what they already 
believe."

Villeneuve also argues that getting rid of unenforceable laws is a habit 
legislators should embrace.

Although the path to abolishing the death penalty in Washington state might 
seem clumsy to some, other states have followed the same pattern. North Dakota 
and Rhode Island both passed legislation to repeal the death penalty after a 
court declared it unconstitutional.

“Now that the law is unenforceable, it serves no purpose other than to confuse 
Washingtonians about the state of the law,” Ferguson said. “Removing 
unconstitutional laws from the books shows proper respect for the judiciary and 
the rule of law. Letting unenforceable laws linger, especially on matters of 
such importance, will only serve to confuse the public.”

“I’m hopeful and optimistic that they'll be able to move it forward,” Sen. 
Carlyle says of the bill. “It is absolutely essential that we close this 
chapter.”

(source: crosscut.com)








USA:

Barbaric and Excessive: 2 Books on Punishment in the United States



ON OCTOBER 11, 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down the state’s 
use of the death penalty due to overwhelming evidence of racial bias. Key 
players, including the state’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Governor Jay 
Inslee, praised this move as a distinction of humaneness. Ferguson went so far 
as to assure us, “We should act quickly to remove the death penalty from state 
law once and for all. Next session, I will again propose legislation repealing 
the death penalty, replacing it with life in prison without the possibility of 
parole.”

Washington is now the 20th state to overturn the death penalty, a trend no 
doubt tied to the difficulty of obtaining pharmaceuticals necessary for lethal 
injection. Whether it’s pharmaceutical companies’ noncompliance or the awakened 
humanity of the courts, the death penalty is increasingly unpopular today. 
This, however, does not mean that the United States’s penchant for severe 
punishment is any less strong or in force right now.

Bob Ferguson’s proclamation for a reformed criminal justice system, where life 
in prison without parole replaces the death penalty, only proves how far the 
imagination will stretch for some. 1 in 7 people in prison today are serving a 
life sentence, which is a total of more than 200,000. Some of these prisoners 
are from the 3 strikes law that nailed many nonviolent drug offenders. In any 
other developed nation, this would be considered inhumane and absurd. 2 new 
books echo this sentiment. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, authors of The Meaning 
of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences, and Alisa Roth, author of 
Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, argue that the US 
criminal justice system metes out excessive punishment at the expense of public 
safety and the humanity of those caught within its web. The Meaning of Life 
focuses on the problem of life sentences bloating the prison system and 
violating human rights, while Insane addresses mental illness and why jails and 
prisons have become the de facto institution for those suffering from severe 
mental illness. Both books expose grave injustices in a broken system and 
advance the discussion by adding new insights addressing reform, not just for 
nonviolent drug offenders, but for all prisoners.

Mauer — executive director of The Sentencing Project — and his co-author Nellis 
— a policy analyst at The Sentencing Project —would reject Bob Ferguson’s quick 
response to replace the death penalty with life without parole in Washington 
state. They cite racism as a prevailing factor in how we punish, which will not 
simply go away when we exchange one severe punishment for another. According to 
Mauer and Ellis, two-thirds of the 200,000 prisoners serving life sentences are 
people of color. Public perceptions — not always based in reality — are well 
known to influence political platforms that determine policy, which has 
historically resulted in the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws and Bill Clinton’s 1994 
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that mandated life sentences 
after “three strikes,” overwhelmingly tipping the scale toward locking up young 
black men and women. Mauer and Ellis find that “whites hold more punitive 
beliefs than other racial groups. To the extent that whites view certain crimes 
as ‘black crimes,’ their support for harsh punishment increases.” Whites also 
overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color up to 20 to 
30 percent. As a result of this biased overestimation and an overzealous 
commitment to punishment, demands for public safety are entrenched in 
retributive, vengeful gains over restorative, forgiving measures that may have 
better overall outcomes for society.

Mauer and Nellis’s central argument, based on research and case studies, rests 
on the overuse and excessiveness of the life sentence, which they claim is 
racially targeted and does not result in public safety returns. Their 
conclusion follows the logic that if the overall goal of the prison system is 
to prevent crime and to rehabilitate prisoners then the widespread use of life 
sentencing is a step away from this goal. Some of Mauer and Nellis’s most 
compelling evidence comes from their research on the diminishing returns of 
life sentencing. They find that prisoners age out of crime, noting that 
prisoners are “much less of a public safety risk at the age of forty than they 
were at twenty.” This decrease even holds for “individuals who are frequent 
offenders.” The peak age for robbery is 19 and the peak age for murder is 20, 
with these rates more than halved by the time an individual reaches their early 
30s. One explanation for this is maturity. People grow up and develop 
responsibilities that can change the course of their lives. Another 
explanation, unsurprisingly, is stable employment. With this information, we 
can assume that prisoners doing over 20 years for crimes they are not likely to 
ever commit again is a waste of resources and a waste of a life.

Another important takeaway from Mauer and Nellis’s book is that there are more 
effective methods for deterring crime than long-term imprisonment. So why not 
implement these other methods? For one, cultural attitudes toward punishment 
need to move beyond a racial mythos that supports more severe consequences for 
black and Latinx people. Attitudes shift policy. According to Mauer and Ellis 
“significant policy change” has occurred at the state level since 2000 because 
of outside pressure to reform. They note, “twenty-nine states have enacted some 
type of reform to their mandatory sentencing policies, and 10 states have 
reduced their prison population by at least 15 percent.” These gains may not be 
enough to overhaul a system premised on social control, but they are indeed a 
sign that punishment in the 21st century is under scrutiny.

Mauer and Ellis ask in earnest, “At what point does punishment become 
barbaric?” This question is the premise for Alisa Roth’s findings in Insane: 
America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, an engrossing, unsettling 
account of how the US criminal justice system deals with mental illness. Her 
book is the culmination of meticulous research into the trenches of the 
criminal justice system, where those most in need of mental health services are 
also those most likely to end up incarcerated in jails and prisons. Most 
poignant and telling of the criminal justice system’s failures to mitigate 
mental illness are the several profiles that Roth includes of people caught 
within the harmful cycle of the system. Take Bryan Sanderson, a former 
firefighter, who suffers from manic depression and psychosis, which led him to 
make impromptu road trips across the country with little to no money. His 
illness cost him his home, his wife, and his mind. His first arrest over a 
misdemeanor for streaking in an elevator and ostensibly resisting his arrest 
spiraled into an unmitigated horror that has ended in his self-inflicted 
blindness. As Roth documents, Sanderson’s level of delusion and disorientation 
only escalated during his first interaction with the police, which led to 
countless other interactions with the criminal justice system. Roth writes 
about Sanderson’s first arrest:

When the deputies handcuffed him, he got terrified and angry. He tried to fight 
back, which made him seem unruly and dangerous. […] In both cases the offensive 
took his behavior as reason enough to treat him more harshly, treatment that in 
turn aggravated his response. […] For a person with symptoms of mental illness, 
it can be nearly impossible to obey the rules. To corrections officers trying 
to maintain order, though, that may come across as insubordination, not a 
response to fear or confusion: as the officers escalate their own response, the 
prisoner is simply less likely to do what he is told.

This scenario is familiar and the backstory to many police shootings.

To be mentally ill and without access to meaningful and consistent services for 
help — lacking in this nation — overwhelmingly means you will wind up in jail 
or dead, which was the case for 18-year-old Keith Vidal: shot dead by the 
police when all his mother wanted was for the police to help calm down her 
erratic and scared son. Most often when police come into contact with someone 
suffering bouts of psychosis, the situation gets worse, as Roth demonstrates 
with ample evidence. Edgar Coleman, a Minneapolis resident who once had a 
future as an NFL player and a career as a teacher, is one example among many. 
He was arrested 200 times between 1996 and 2012 and was often picked up for 
“marginal offenses.” Rather than helping, his stints of incarceration have made 
his “illness much worse.”

We as a society must develop alternatives that prevent the interaction between 
police and a severely mentally ill person that often leads to their 
imprisonment. This vicious cycle of incarceration and even death has everything 
to do with society’s disdain for and neglect of those with severe mental 
illness. With regards to the number of mentally ill people on death row, Roth 
concludes that this is “visceral proof of our ambivalence, or worse, our 
antipathy toward people with severe mental illness […] and it speaks to our 
culture’s collective fear we have of people with mental illness: they will 
somehow attack us personally.”

Rather than develop more effective and sustainable methods of treating the 
severely mentally ill, we have fallen toward severity and even barbarity. Roth 
writes extensively about her time observing mental health units in the Los 
Angeles County Jail, which has become a de facto psych ward with 25 % of male 
prisoners needing mental health care and 40 percent of female prisoners. Roth 
rightly notes that “[j]ails and prisons are dehumanizing places.” This, after 
all her finely attuned research, seems an understatement.

Roth attempts to uncover a bit of hope, though, in an otherwise bleak system 
where effective mental health services are circumvented by the conditions of 
incarceration that lead to more violence, harmful conditions of solitary 
confinement, and overmedication. She writes about High Observation Units in 
jails that specifically separate and house prisoners dealing with severe mental 
illness, community mental health centers that try to intercept jail time, and 
diversion courts, which all attempt to recognize the challenges and differences 
posed by mental illness. This still is not enough to sustain the blow caused by 
a bloated, powerful, and violent prison system.

Roth, Mauer, and Ellis expose the excessive nature of punishment in the 
criminal justice system and how this cripples the most vulnerable in the United 
States. Even more significant, these books open a dialogue for including 
violent offenders in prison reform efforts. After all, it’s violent offenders 
who are languishing in prison for life. It’s violent offenders who are wiping 
feces on the walls in prisons, rejecting their meds, and are being locked up in 
solitary because of an untreated mental illness. This is an uncomfortable truth 
that prison reformers must account for in their attempts to improve a broken 
system where, more likely than not, a person is locked up for a violent 
offense. There will be no effective prison reform unless we confront and 
challenge a system that locks up violent offenders for far too long at an 
unseemly rate.

Notably, the current administration under Trump pushed for sentencing reform 
with the First Step Act, which reduces mandatory minimums and lowers sentencing 
(to 25 years) for nonviolent three strike offenders in federal prisons, a 
direct yet feeble backhand at former president Bill Clinton. This “first step” 
still does not address the issues at the core of Mauer, Ellis, and Roth’s pleas 
for reform, never mind the other harmful surveillance “reforms” the act 
proposes.

The prisoner accounts that Mauer, Ellis, and Roth tell lay bare the 
consequences of a system that illogically sees value and futurity in locking up 
generations of people for life. Both books propose compelling policy and 
alternatives to prison, and both move an important discourse on prison reform 
forward in a time when both sides of the political aisle are poised to act. 
Mauer and Ellis’s proposal for a 20-year sentence cap, thoroughly outlined and 
argued, and Roth’s impassioned plea to find new ways of treating people with 
mental illness do not fall on deaf ears as much as they remain suspended in an 
echo chamber. A system premised on the social control of poor people will not 
simply get better for those it targets, as time has proven.

But these books do add to a discourse of prison reform that we should not be 
ready to forfeit. As they demonstrate, for those of us who want meaningful 
change, it’s a matter of not capitulating to tired narratives that barter 
nonviolent offenses for a sliver of humanity in an inhumane system. For AG Bob 
Ferguson, a greater good might be “prison for life without the possibility of 
parole” over capital punishment, but this will continue to sink us further into 
the hell that we have made of prison. The perspective that capital punishment 
is inhumane whereas 200,000 prisoners in for life is a viable improvement is 
just as absurd as believing prison provides adequate mental health services. If 
anything, these books at least stridently remind us that change won’t come 
until we see all prisoners as humans.

(source: Sabrina Alli is a writer, activist, and educator living in Brooklyn, 
New York. Her work has been published in The New Inquiry and 
Guernica----lareviewofbooks.org)

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

Trump hails China’s use of death penalty for drug dealers



President Donald Trump on Friday praised China’s use of capital punishment for 
drug dealers, suggesting that the United States would deal better with 
narcotics trafficking if it put offenders to death.

In China, drug dealers get “a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal drug 
dealer gets a thing called ‘how about a fine?'” Trump told reporters at the 
White House.

“So if we want to get smart, we can get smart. You can end the drug problem. 
You can end it a lot faster than you think.”

It is not the first time that Trump has advocated capital punishment for drug 
related crimes.

Last March, he suggested the United States could bring in the death penalty for 
drug dealers.

Officials indicated there would be no attempt to change the law to make the 
death penalty mandatory for trafficking alone, a move that would could well run 
afoul of Supreme Court rulings on proportional punishment.

In those rulings, the high court suggested that nothing other than murder can 
be considered a capital offense.

(source: journalducameroun.com)

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

DeWitt Chili's double homicide suspect now eligible for the death 
penalty----Prosecutors pursuing death penalty for DeWitt Chili's homicide 
suspect



The man accused of shooting and killing 2 inside a DeWitt Chili's back in 
September is now facing the death penalty after being charged in federal court 
on Friday.

William Wood Jr is accused of fatally shooting 2 employees inside the 
restaurant over what police say was a robbery.

Onondaga County District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick says Wood meant to shoot 
others inside the restaurant, but his gun appeared to have jammed.

He has been charged federally with interference with commerce by robbery, use 
of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, and murder.

Wood was already facing life in prison without parole if convicted.

The federal indictment brings him one step closer to possibly being sentenced 
with the death penalty.

The death penalty is not allowed in New York State and can not be set as a 
sentence by county or state judges, which is why federal prosecutors would be 
involved.

The U.S. Attorney's Office now decides if they want to pursue the death 
penalty.

If the U.S. Attorney's Office approves it, the case would go forward for 
review.

The death penalty was last considered in New York in the case of David Renz in 
2013, who was convicted of murdering a Liverpool school librarian and raping a 
10-year-old girl after abducting them in the parking lot of Great Northern 
Mall.

4 others have been charged for their involvement in the crime.

(source: WSYR TV news)