[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide----IOWA, KAN., OKLA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

January 24



IOWA:

Death penalty back on the Iowa legislative agenda



Capital punishment would give the Iowa justice system another “tool” to use in 
prosecuting offenders who kidnap, rape and murder juveniles, according to 
proponents of reinstating the death penalty after a 54-year absence.

“It’s one of the things I ran on in ’96 and I still think it’s an appropriate 
punishment for capital murder,” said Sen. Jerry Behn, R-Boone, who plans to 
introduce a death penalty bill for the 22nd consecutive year.

He said his bill will be narrower in scope than House File 62, which was 
introduced Wednesday by Rep. Skyler Wheeler, R-Orange City, and would allow 
courts to apply the death penalty if the “aggravating circumstances established 
beyond a reasonable doubt outweigh any mitigating circumstances” in 1st-degree 
capital murder cases.

In either case, Tom Chapman of the Iowa Catholic Conference said “the state 
should not commit violence to protect Iowans from violence.”

Wheeler, Behn and Sen. Julian Garrett, R-Indianola, argue that the possibility 
of a death sentence would give law enforcement, prosecutors and courts more 
leverage in dealing with heinous crimes. Under current law, they said, the 
maximum penalty for kidnapping, rape and murder are all the same – life without 
parole.

Iowa lawmakers debate reinstating death penalty

Bringing the death penalty back to Iowa likely will get debated but probably 
not approved during the 2018 legislative session, key lawmakers say.

“So there’s a perverse incentive for someone who kidnaps and rapes to kill 
their victim so there is no witness,” Behn said.

Sen. Kevin Kinney, D-Oxford, who is retired from a career in law enforcement, 
said he has no sympathy for people who kidnap, rape and murder, “but I don’t 
know if this is the right policy.”

(source: The Gazette)








KANSAS:

U.S. Supreme Court Mulls Kansas Inmate's Appeal Regarding Insanity Defense



An appeal filed by a Kansas man on death row has caught the attention of the 
U.S. Supreme Court and could change how Kansas and other states prosecute 
people who commit crimes while mentally ill.

Nobody disputes that James Kahler murdered 4 family members in 2009. But 
Kahler’s attorneys argued at trial and in subsequent appeals that he had 
spiraled into a mental health crisis in the months preceding the murders and 
was psychotic during the attack. The murders took place in Burlingame, about 30 
miles south of Topeka.

The Kansas Supreme Court upheld Kahler's conviction. In September, his 
attorneys petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing that 
Kansas has effectively abolished the right to use insanity as a defense in 
criminal cases. That, they say, is unconstitutional because it violated 
Kahler's right to due process and resulted in excessive punishment.

3 other states — Utah, Montana and Idaho — have also banished the insanity 
defense.

>From a statistical perspective, the petition faces long odds: Only about 80 out 
of 7,000 or more such petitions filed annually with the Supreme Court are 
granted.

But last week the court requested more documents from the trial and subsequent 
appeals, which experts say may be a sign the court is ready to take on the 
case.

All states require that defendants know what they were doing when they 
committed an offense. But most states also require defendants to understand 
that what they did was wrong, said Elizabeth Cateforis, a University of Kansas 
law professor who specializes in capital punishment and criminal procedure.

If a defendant doesn't meet both conditions, he or she can invoke the insanity 
defense, which, if accepted, typically leads to mental health treatment instead 
of a prison sentence.

In Kahler's case, a Life Alert recording device worn by one of the victims 
captured sound during the attack. At one point Kahler can be heard proclaiming, 
“Oh s**t! I am going to kill her… G*****n it!,” according to court records.

In a brief opposing Kahler’s Supreme Court petition, Kansas Attorney General 
Derek Schmidt wrote that the state hasn’t abolished but rather “redefined” the 
insanity defense.

He also argued that the audio recording proves Kahler “knew at the time that 
what he was doing was both momentous and wrong.”

Such a claim “rests on a thin reed,” Kahler’s attorneys replied in their brief. 
“A psychotic person’s use of profanity hardly suggests he knows right from 
wrong and has chosen freely to do wrong.”

“For centuries, the insanity defense has protected those who cannot choose 
between doing good and doing evil,” they wrote. “Either because they cannot 
tell the difference or because they cannot control their conduct.”

It’s unclear when the Supreme Court will decide whether to take the case. But 
if it does, Cateforis thinks the justices might be more interested in the 
narrower angle of capital punishment than the broader question of the insanity 
defense.

The court in recent years has ruled that certain categories of defendants — 
such as juveniles or people with intellectual disabilities — cannot be 
sentenced to death.

It’s possible, Cateforis said, that the Supreme Court intends to extend the 
same protection to people “suffering from such an extreme mental illness that 
(they) can’t form evil intent.”

Or, she said, the court could choose to say that all defendants have a 
fundamental right to an insanity defense.

Another possibility, she said, is that the the court would rule against Kahler. 
Should that happen, Cateforis expects other states to mirror Kansas and adopt 
more restrictive interpretations of the insanity defense.

(source: KCUR news)








OKLAHOMA:

Supreme Court declines to review alleged racial bias in Oklahoma's death 
penalty



The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to consider the appeals of 2 convicted 
Oklahoma County killers who say a study showing racial bias in Oklahoma's use 
of the death penalty warranted reconsideration of their death sentences.

Without comment Monday, the nation's high court rejected the appeals of Julius 
Jones and Tremane Wood, who had made similar arguments about racial bias. Both 
cited a 2017 study that examined Oklahoma homicide cases from 1990 to 2012 and 
found cases with white victims were more likely to end in execution than cases 
with non-white victims.

“There is no question that racial bias played a role in Julius Jones' death 
penalty conviction,” said Dale Baich, one of Jones' attorneys, in an email 
Monday. Baich said the 2017 study showed Oklahoma's application of the death 
penalty “unconstitutionally applies death sentences to men of color accused of 
killing white victims.”

The state of Oklahoma successfully argued against Supreme Court review. It had 
urged the high court to agree with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, 
which determined the racial bias study did not qualify as new evidence worthy 
of review. The state cited a 1987 opinion, McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the 
Supreme Court ruled a study on racial bias in executions did not prove a black 
man's death sentence was unconstitutional.

Furthermore, the state argued, the 2017 study was flawed because it included 
both murder and non-negligent manslaughter. The data set was “far too inclusive 
to yield reliable results,” Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Crabb wrote to 
the Supreme Court.

The Oklahoma Attorney General's Office declined to comment Monday because there 
are appeals pending for both inmates.

Case details

In a case that has garnered national attention, Jones was convicted of killing 
Edmond insurance executive Paul Howell during a carjacking in 1999. Jones' 
supporters say he was wrongfully convicted and framed by an acquaintance. After 
an ABC docuseries featured his case, protesters marched to the Oklahoma 
Capitol, and the Congressional Black Caucus called on then-Gov. Mary Fallin to 
“correct this wrongful conviction.”

“The particular details of Mr. Jones' case vividly show how racial bias can 
lead to a wrongful conviction, including the words of a juror that 'they should 
just take the (racist remark) out and shoot him behind the jail,'” Baich said 
Monday.

One juror in the case has alleged to defense attorneys that another juror made 
the racist remark. Baich expects to raise that issue in a separate appeal to 
the Supreme Court.

Wood was convicted of fatally stabbing Montana migrant worker Ronald Reuben 
Wipf at an Oklahoma City hotel on New Year's Eve 2001 as part of a robbery. 
Wood's brother, Zjaiton, attempted to take the full blame but a jury convicted 
Tremane Wood as well and sentenced him to die.

Attorneys for Jones and Wood maintain that racial bias played a role in their 
trials. They cite reporting by The Oklahoman that found Oklahoma County 
District Judge Ray Elliott, who presided over Wood's trial and a pre-trial 
hearing in Jones' case, admitted to using racial epithets to describe Mexicans 
in 2011.

Executions are on hold in Oklahoma while state officials craft an execution 
protocol that utilizes nitrogen gas. Nineteen inmates have exhausted their 
appeals and are currently eligible for execution. Because they have appeals 
pending, Jones and Wood are not on that list.

(source: The Oklahoman)

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

High Court Won't Review 2 Oklahoma Death Row Cases



The U.S. Supreme Court will not review the sentences of 2 Oklahoma inmates who 
argue that people of color are more likely to be sentenced to death in Oklahoma 
when the victim is white.

The court on Monday declined without comment to review the separate cases of 
Julius Darius Jones and Tremane Wood, whose first name is spelled Termane in 
state court documents.

Jones was convicted of killing Paul Howell during a 1999 carjacking and Wood 
was convicted of killing Ronald Wimpf during a robbery. Both victims were 
white. Jones is black and Wood is biracial.

Attorneys cited a 2017 study that found nonwhites are more likely to be 
sentenced to death in Oklahoma when the victim is white.

Defense attorney Dale Baich told The Oklahoman more appeals are planned.

(source: The Associated Press)








USA:

How Netflix's Ted Bundy documentary builds an uneasy case against the death 
penalty



30 years ago today, one of America's most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy, 
was executed at the Florida State Prison. Bundy had spent the previous decade 
on death row maintaining his innocence; only when his execution became 
inevitable did he finally confess to the brutal murder of upwards of 30 women 
in 7 states between 1974 and 1978.

On Thursday, coinciding with the anniversary of Bundy's death, comes a 
four-part Netflix series, Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, 
which draws from more than 100 hours of previously unheard interviews with 
Bundy while he was awaiting execution. Yet even as director Joe Berlinger 
invites audiences into the mind of pure human evil, he builds an uneasy case 
against Bundy's 1989 execution. While never truly explicit — Berlinger also 
gives Bundy's fiercest critics a chance to justify the nature of his punishment 
— the documentary doesn't leave you with relief that Bundy was finally 
destroyed so much as it does an overriding queasiness with the violence in 
human nature.

Conversations With a Killer follows Bundy from his first verified killings, in 
Seattle's University District in 1974, through his multiple escapes from 
custody, and eventually to his capture and death in Florida. The documentary is 
unflinching in its depiction of Bundy's crimes — Berlinger includes graphic 
photographs of crime scenes and uncovered human remains — even as Bundy smugly 
maintains his innocence on the tapes. Only when asked, through a bit of clever 
flattery, to use his psychology degree to profile the kind of man who would 
murder young women does Bundy flirt with a confession — a sort of early version 
of O.J. Simpson's If I Did It.

To be clear, there is no doubt that Bundy is a monster; rather, the 
documentary's final section raises questions about the American criminal 
justice system and the use of capital punishment within it.

First, there is the initial murder case itself, which lacked proof beyond a 
trace of a doubt that Bundy was the perpetrator in the bludgeoning of Chi Omega 
sorority girls at Florida State University. The case hinged on a potentially 
unreliable witness as well as work by an odontologist who claimed Bundy's 
crooked canines matched bite marks on one of the victims, a form of dental 
forensics that is now considered to be "junk science." This isn't to suggest 
that Bundy was innocent — he certainly wasn't, as a later, much more convincing 
trial would determine — but that all it takes is "prejudicial publicity" to 
persuade a jury to deliver a guilty verdict, even if firm evidence isn't there.

Additionally there is the fact that Bundy was not only ruled competent to stand 
trial, but that he served as his own co-council. Bundy repeatedly "sabotaged" 
himself in this role, frustrating his defense team that had begged him to take 
a plea bargain for a 75-year sentence. "The most important thing was to save 
his life," emphasized Michael Minerva, the public defender assigned to Bundy's 
case. But Bundy declined, and his erratic behavior in court continued. It 
"really just confirmed to me that he did not have a rational understanding of 
the proceedings," said defense lawyer Margaret Good. Likewise, a Yale 
psychologist asked to assess Bundy "was extremely confident that there was 
something unique about Ted's brain that had led to this," said Polly Nelson, 
who was Bundy's post-conviction counsel. She goes as far as to question whether 
he could control himself at all.

Berlinger balances the questions he raises about capital punishment in Bundy's 
case with the voices of death penalty advocates. "I feel that there are some 
people who, by the enormity of their crime, forfeit the right to live," said 
George Dekle, who served as a prosecutor against Bundy and would later be a 
witness to his execution. Or, as former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez (R) is seen 
in archival footage telling the news, "[Bundy] represents why you have capital 
punishment."

At the same time, Berlinger does not flinch from the ugly details of Bundy's 
execution, either. The documentary includes footage of the celebration that 
sprouted outside the prison ahead of Bundy's electrocution, described by one 
witness as being a "carnival." "There were thousands of people outside, you 
could hear them even in the inner confines of the prison," recalled FBI Special 
Agent Bill Hagmaier. "'Burn, Bundy, burn. Burn, Bundy, burn' ... I looked at 
Ted and said, 'You hear that out there?' And he said, 'They're crazy. They 
think I'm crazy. Listen to all of them.'" And listen we do — to archival videos 
of celebrants' whooping, singing "hey, hey, hey, goodbye," and to vendors 
selling T-shirts and electric chair buttons. Other attendees held signs that 
read "Hey Ted, this BUZZ is for you," "Teddy, you're the toast with the most," 
and, simply, "Have a seat, Ted." Conversations convincingly portrays the scene 
as being as raucous and sickening as a medieval public hanging.

Just as Berlinger had shown Bundy's monstrousness over the previous three 
hours, he finds its palest reflection in the justice that is carried out in 
retribution. Bundy's mother makes the spiritual case against her son's death: 
"My Christian upbringing tells me that to take another's life under any 
circumstances is wrong," she told the news, "and I don't believe the state of 
Florida is above the laws of God." Even Dekle, the prosecutor who took Bundy to 
court "to make sure — certain — that he was executed," expressed horror at his 
own emotion over seeing a man put to death. "I'm ashamed to admit that I was 
elated," Dekle confessed. "I hope I'm never happy over the death of another 
human being ever again."

Berlinger has made his career out of interrogating what he calls the "sanity of 
the death penalty," having focused on wrongful convictions and racial bias in 
other cases as being "a wake-up call for how broken capital punishment is in 
this country." Conversations With a Killer, though, is far from a passionate 
crusade against capital punishment; featuring hours of Bundy's unimaginable 
crimes, the movie makes death seem like the only fitting option. But, if 
there's a lingering sense of unease with the electrocution of one of America's 
worst serial killers, then how can we be certain similar punishments are 
conscionable?

Conversations With a Killer never offers a simple answer. All it gives us, in 
the end, are Bundy's own words: "Vengeance is what the death penalty really 
is," he says on the tapes. "Really, it's a desire of society to take an eye for 
an eye. And I guess there's no cure for that."

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

Both Were Once on Death Row, Now They Share a Life Helping Others----Peter 
Pringle and Sunny Jacobs were both exonerated after serving time in prison. To 
help others who were wrongly incarcerated, the couple created the Sunny Center 
Foundation.



9 years ago, Sunny Jacobs and Peter Pringle were living in a seaside cottage in 
a sleepy coastal region of Ireland, when a man from Detroit who had been 
accused of murder and rape, a man they had never met, arrived at their home.

“He was a black man in his early 50s who had just spent 20 years in prison,” 
Ms. Jacobs said. “He was angry, which I will admit made me very nervous when he 
first arrived.”

Their troubled visitor, who had accepted an invitation extended by the couple, 
had been wrongfully convicted of the crimes he allegedly committed, which 
resulted in 2 decades of his life senselessly wasted behind bars.

“We both knew exactly what he had gone through,” Mr. Pringle said. “We felt his 
pain, we understood his anger.”

Ms. Jacobs, now 71, and Mr. Pringle, 80, had each lived a similar nightmare — 
she in the United States and he in Ireland — both caught in the slow wheels of 
their nations’s criminal justice systems. They were both dragged onto death 
row, where they spent a decade and a half awaiting execution, before their 
convictions were overturned for the murders that they steadfastly maintained 
they did not commit.

“It was an extremely dark time in our lives,” Mr. Pringle said.

On Jan. 29, Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle will be at the United Nations 
headquarters to attend a screening of “Fallout,” a documentary that will shine 
an investigative light on those dark times.

Mark McLoughlin, who directed and produced the film, which follows the lives of 
Ms. Jacobs, Mr. Pringle and two others in the difficult aftermath of their 
exonerations, said he was “concerned by the fact that a victim of the state 
becomes classified as an enemy of the state as they fight to establish their 
innocence.”

“I was specifically interested in the trajectory of their lives after prison,” 
Mr. McLoughlin said, “which in most longer term cases have been destroyed.”

To avoid such plight, Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle — who were married in November 
2011 in New York and were the subjects of a Vows feature — have created the 
Sunny Center Foundation, which is based at their home in Ireland and at a 
donated property in Tampa, Fla. They welcome men and women who have been 
wrongfully incarcerated, providing them with spiritual, emotional and physical 
support to ease them back into society.

When in Ireland, they also make sure to maintain “some alone time,” as Ms. 
Jacobs put it, starting with breakfast every morning together, but not before 
they feed their cat and their dog, and their goats, donkeys and hens.

“All of us live together on what you might call a little bit of a farm, with a 
magnificent view of the ocean,” Ms. Jacobs said. “As far as entertainment goes, 
we have 11 grandchildren between us spread out in Los Angeles, Ireland, 
Australia and New Zealand, so keeping up with them is entertainment enough.”

“Otherwise, Peter and I are more than satisfied with going for a long walk on a 
beautiful evening, and coming home and reading a good book,” she said. “Of 
course, things are a lot different when an exoneree is staying with us, then 
everything changes, all of our attention gets focused on them.”

Since 2010, there have been 14 exonerees who have traveled to meet the couple, 
with the man from Detroit being the first. The majority of the exonerees have 
had their spirits lifted and been given a renewed sense of purpose by Ms. 
Jacobs, Mr. Pringle and a handful of professional counselors and therapists 
affiliated with their foundation. Others, however, have not been able to return 
to the productive lives they were leading before they were wrongly convicted 
and jailed.

“When you are imprisoned, love is the first thing that disappears from your 
life,” Ms. Jacobs said. “So the first thing we do for our exonerees is make 
them a part of our family, we invite them into our home and shower them with 
unconditional love.”

The 14 exonerees, which included a woman from Holland and a man from Taiwan who 
arrived with an interpreter, stayed with the couple for anywhere from 2 to 4 
weeks, “depending on the psychological condition of each individual,” Ms. 
Jacobs said.

The 1st week, she said, “is all about them getting their stories out, so we 
mainly listen,” and the 2nd week, “is when we begin to share our own 
experiences with them.”

By weeks 3 and 4, their fellow exonerees are encouraged to meditate, 
participate in yoga and pray, and are provided with tools that the couple say 
went a long way toward their own emotional and spiritual recoveries.

“The greatest tool is forgiveness,” Ms. Jacobs said. “If you hold on to that 
anger and resentment, then there’s no room for happiness and love in your 
heart, and you start destroying your own life.”

Other tools come in the form of trauma specialists and counselors, “and that’s 
where things get expensive,” Ms. Jacobs said, “which is why we need donations 
to keep our foundation running.”

Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle are hoping to expand their base of operations in the 
United States and Europe through donations and future fund-raising events. 
Thousands upon thousands of frequent flier miles have already been donated to 
the couple’s foundation.

“We run on an extremely minimum budget,” said Ms. Jacobs, whose work has 
already taken her and Mr. Pringle to 12 countries.

“The more we can expand, the more people we can help,” she said. “Do you 
realize that there are over 2,000 exonerees in the United States alone?”

According to the National Registry of Exoneration, there are in fact 2,363 
exonerees in the United States, which total 20,045 lost years of life.

“These exonerees, who did nothing wrong in the first place and lost huge chunks 
of their lives in prison, are offered little or no compensation upon their 
release, whereas actual criminals who served their time are entitled to receive 
all the financial benefits the system will allow,” Mr. Pringle said. “It makes 
no sense.”

Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle have each written a book about their experiences, 
hers entitled, “Stolen Time” (Random House, 2007), and his, “About Time” 
(History Press, Ireland 2013).

The couple met in 1998, during Ms. Jacobs’s global campaign against the death 
penalty that brought her to a crowded pub in Galway, Ireland, to speak at an 
Amnesty International event, which Mr. Pringle had attended.

As Mr. Pringle listened to Ms. Jacobs share the horrific events of the day in 
February 1976, when her world went dark, he began to cry.

Ms. Jacobs, then 28, was a passenger in a car driven by a man named Walter 
Norman Rhodes Jr. Also in the car was her 2nd husband, Jesse Tafero, as well as 
their 10-month-old daughter and Ms. Jacobs’s 9-year-old son from her first 
marriage.

Mr. Rhodes, who had befriended Mr. Tafero during an earlier prison stint for 
both men, was giving the couple a ride from Miami to the home of friends in 
West Palm Beach, Fla., when they were pulled over by two police officers at a 
rest stop off Interstate 95 in Broward County.

The scene erupted in a hail of bullets, leaving both officers dead. The police 
captured all 3 suspects and charged them with murder. Mr. Tafero and Ms. 
Jacobs, who maintained that Mr. Rhodes had done the shooting, were sentenced to 
death, while Mr. Rhodes, who testified against the couple, plea-bargained with 
authorities, reducing his sentence to life.

In 1981, Ms. Jacobs won an appeal and the Florida Supreme Court changed her 
sentence from death to life in prison. But her spirits were crushed the 
following year when her parents, who were raising her 2 children, died in the 
crash of Pan Am Flight 759 in Kenner, La.

“It was the most devastating time in my entire life,” said Ms. Jacobs, who 
still wears her mother’s wedding ring, which was salvaged in the wreckage.

Her children were cast into the foster-care system, but Ms. Jacobs still had 
her husband, with whom she exchanged prison letters.

“Anything he touched, or that he wrote on, or that he licked with his tongue, I 
was keeping,” she said. “I existed on those letters.”

But on May 4, 1990, with Ms. Jacobs still in prison, Mr. Tafero was put to 
death in a Florida electric chair.

“The world had become a place I didn’t know anymore,” she said.

She continued to fight for her release, which came in 1992, nearly 17 years 
after her arrest, when her conviction was overturned on appeal, as Mr. Rhodes 
eventually confessed to murdering the 2 officers.

Ms. Jacobs had entered solitary confinement inside Broward Correctional 
Institution as a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” she said, and exited prison 
as “a 45-year-old orphan, widow and grandmother.”

(Her story, along with five other wrongfully convicted death row inmates, 
became “The Exonerated,” a play that had its Off Broadway debut in October 
2002, with Ms. Jacobs portrayed by the actresses Jill Clayburgh, Mia Farrow, 
Lynn Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Kathleen Turner, Brooke Shields and Marlo 
Thomas).

Mr. Pringle was accused of being 1 of 3 men who had murdered 2 police officers 
following a bank robbery in July 1980 in Ballaghaderreen, Ireland. A 
41-year-old divorced father of 4 at the time, he had been sentenced to be 
hanged after his conviction.

His lawyers won a stay of his original Dec. 19, 1980, execution, which was then 
reset for June 8, 1981. His hanging was only weeks away when, on May 27, 1981, 
Ireland’s president commuted Mr. Pringle’s sentence to 40 years without parole.

Mr. Pringle, who is originally from Dublin and dropped out of school when he 
was 13, decided to serve as his own counsel. “I became something of a jailhouse 
lawyer,” he said.

Mr. Pringle was eventually able to prove that an interrogating officer had 
written down his alleged confession before any interrogation had actually taken 
place. He said that in May 1995, “the case was quashed by the court of criminal 
appeal on the grounds that my conviction was unsafe and unsatisfactory.”

Ms. Jacobs, who was born in Rockway, Queens, and grew up in Elmont, N.Y., was 
living in Los Angeles at the time she met Mr. Pringle. She made an effort to 
remain his long-distance friend, saying she found him to be “a very honorable 
man.”

6 months after they met, Mr. Pringle invited Ms. Jacobs back to Ireland, this 
time to give a talk during a local concert he arranged in Galway.

“During that visit, we fell in love,” Ms. Jacobs said.

“We didn’t just share a past,” she added. “We had a vision for a future.”

(source: New York Times)