[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, N.C., FLA., LA., TENN., ARIZ., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 9




TEXAS----new execution date

Execution date set for ‘Texas 7’ prisoner who accused judge of anti-Semitism



A “Texas 7” escapee who filed an appeal alleging his trial judge was racist and 
anti-Semitic is now scheduled for execution this year, despite 2 pending legal 
claims still winding through the courts.

Dallas County Judge Lela Mays on Wednesday approved an Oct. 10 death date for 
Randy Halprin, a Jewish prisoner who in May accused ex-Judge Vickers Cunningham 
of routinely using obscenity-laced language and racial slurs to describe Jewish 
and minority defendants.

“In case after case, the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly and consistently 
enforced defendants’ constitutional right to a judge free of bias,” defense 
attorney Tivon Schardl said Monday in a statement. “Yet, Mr. Halprin’s trial 
judge, who presided over the death penalty trial, made critical decisions about 
what evidence the jury would hear, and sentenced Mr. Halprin to die, was biased 
against Mr. Halprin, referring to him as a ‘f****n’ Jew’ and a ‘G*****n k**e.’”

Now 41, Halprin was originally sent to death row for his role in a 2000 prison 
escape and crime spree that left dead Irving police Officer Aubrey Hawkins. 
That December, Halprin and six other men took hostages and broke out of the 
Connally Unit south of San Antonio.

They stole a prison van, then switched it out for a getaway vehicle and fled to 
Houston, where they pulled off two robberies to stock up on supplies, guns and 
money. Afterward, they drove toward Dallas, hoping to get away from the search 
teams hunting for them.

On Christmas Eve, the escapees held up an Oshman’s sporting goods store in 
Irving - and Hawkins was the 1st officer who responded to the call. In a 
chaotic scene, 5 of the men started firing at the lawman.

When it was over, Hawkins lay dead in the parking lot, shot 11 times and 
dragged 10 feet by an SUV as the panicked prisoners fled with $70,000 and 44 
guns.

Some of the men admitted to to their roles, but Halprin has consistently 
maintained that he never fired a shot and that he didn’t even want to bring a 
gun. Still, he and the other 5 survivors - 1 man killed himself before he could 
be captured - were sentenced to die under the controversial law of parties, a 
Texas statute that holds non-shooters as criminally responsible as triggermen.

After more than 15 years spent fighting his conviction and sentence, Halprin’s 
legal team learned of Cunningham’s alleged bias last year when he admitted to 
the Dallas Morning News that he’d set up a living trust that rewarded his 
children if they married a fellow white Christian.

“I strongly support traditional family values,” he told the paper in a video 
interview during his 2018 campaign for county commissioner. “If you marry a 
person of the opposite sex that’s Caucasian, that’s Christian, they will get a 
distribution.”

He lost the Republican run-off by just 25 votes. Afterward, defense 
investigators began interviewing people who knew him to find out more about his 
views toward Jewish people and minorities.

“If someone were actually African-American he would call them (N-word) and 
their 1st name,” childhood friend Tammy McKinney recounted. “It was his 
signature way of talking about people of color.”

The May appeal and attached statements detailed a slew of other alleged 
expressions of bias toward Catholics, Jews, Latinos and black people. 
Previously, Cunningham did not respond to the Chronicle’s requests for comment.

In early June, even before the federal courts ruled on that appeal, the office 
of Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot asked for the October execution 
date. A district attorney’s office spokesperson did not respond Monday to a 
request for comment.

The Texas Office of the Attorney General - which represents the state instead 
of the district attorney once a case reaches federal appeals - last month filed 
a response brief both arguing that Halprin wasn’t legally entitled to relief 
and condemning Cunningham’s alleged bigotry.

“To be clear, the details of Cunningham’s living trust and the accounts of 
those who knew Cunningham regarding his bigoted statements and beliefs are 
troubling to say the least,” state attorneys wrote. “The Attorney General’s 
Office does not condone or excuse Cunningham’s creation of his living trust, 
and the racist and religiously-bigoted statements he is alleged to have made 
are abhorrent.”

Aside from Halprin, only one other Texas 7 prisoner who’d been sentenced to die 
- Patrick Murphy - is still alive on death row. The others have all been 
executed.

(source: Houston Chronicle)

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

Texas 7 death row inmate fighting for religious freedom



Execution halted, a convicted cop killer's lethal injection on hold minutes 
after what would have been his last meal.

It's a result of a major Supreme Court decision which led to changes in how 
death row inmates die in Texas Prisons.

In an exclusive interview, Texas Seven's Patrick Murphy tells us his religious 
rights are being violated.

It was December in the year 2000.

Seven inmates escaped from a state prison south of San Antonio then committed 
several robberies and murdered a police officer in North Texas.

Aubrey Hawkins, had just left Christmas Eve dinner with his family responded to 
burglary in progress.

Gunned down, by the infamous group now known as the Texas 7.

Police eventually caught 6 of the 7 after 1 of the members killed himself, all 
but 2 have been executed.

"I regret being involved in the whole Texas 7," Patrick Murphy said.

After 17 years on death row, Murphy said he's a changed man.

He attributes his revelation to Buddhism, a way of life he took on 8 years ago 
that helps him cope with the dark reality of his eventual execution.

"Don't get me wrong," Murphy said. "There's a portion of my mind saying 'you 
fool they're fixing to kill you' but I was able to have that portion and still 
stay focused on my emotions."

In March, Murphy and his faith made national headlines.

In a last-minute ruling, the Supreme Court halted his execution on the grounds 
of religious discrimination.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice wouldn't allow Murphy to have his 
Buddhist monk inside the chamber with him because the monk isn't employed by 
the state.

Though, Christian and Muslim chaplains are and have routinely been right next 
to inmates on the gurney.

So, Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave TDCJ 2 choices.

Allow Murphy to die with his Buddhist chaplain inside the chamber or no longer 
allow any inmates too have a spiritual adviser with them.

Prison officials chose no more chaplains for anyone.

"I think it reflects badly on Texas," Murphy said. "Here they are denying men 
the right to religious counsel at their ultimate judgement."

Murphy believes the state's changes are still targeting his religious freedom.

"It's totally unfair," Revered Hui Yong said.

His Buddhist chaplain, Reverend Yong said if security is a concern, the state 
can interview and run a background check on him.

"These guys really need all the help they can get and they need to be as calm 
as they can be," Reverend Yong said.

Still, Murphy's critics said this is a tactic to delay lethal injection.

Since, he doesn't believe he should be executed to begin with because he didn't 
pull the trigger in the first place.

"I think my level of involvement should exclude me from the law of parties," 
Murphy said.

The law of parties allows the death penalty for anyone involved in a murder, 
trigger-man or not.

For now, the state hasn't scheduled his new execution date.

So, Murphy is focused on family and getting away from the Texas 7 label.

"Eventually Patrick Murphy the Buddhist is how I would like to be remembered," 
Murphy said.

He's still holding onto hope with a civil lawsuit against the prison system.

As well as a life after this one.

"What Buddhism does is the possibility of the next life, reincarnation," Murphy 
said.

(source: Fox News)

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

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----43

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----561

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

44---------Aug. 15----------------Dexter Johnson----------562

45---------Aug. 21----------------Larry Swearingen--------563

46---------Sept. 4----------------Billy Crutsinger--------564

47---------Sept. 10---------------Mark Anthony Soliz------565

48---------Sept. 25---------------Robert Sparks-----------566

49---------Oct. 2-----------------Stephen Barbee----------567

50---------oct. 10----------------Randy Halprin-----------568

51---------Oct. 16----------------Randall Mays------------569

52---------Oct. 30----------------Ruben Gutierrez---------570

53---------Nov. 6-----------------Justen Hall-------------571

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)








NORTH CAROLINA:

Books: Lethal State — A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina



The death penalty and lynching were instruments of “white supremacist political 
and social power” in North Carolina, diverging in form but not in function. So 
writes University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill American Studies Professor Seth 
Kotch In his newly released book, Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty 
in North Carolina. Lethal State tracks North Carolina’s use of the death 
penalty from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the present. Kotch summarizes the 
through line of capital punishment, saying, “The death penalty’s habits in 
North Carolina included preying on the mentally compromised, people of color, 
and people in poverty … and above all, expressing the cruelties and prejudices 
of white supremacy by asserting through its uneven outcomes the rule that white 
lives — especially educated, white lives of means — mattered most.”

Kotch’s book shines a light on the continuing patterns of racial injustice from 
the Carolina colony’s first execution — that of a Native American accused of 
killing a white woman — through the era of lynching and Jim Crow, and on to the 
disproportionate use of capital punishment against racial minorities in North 
Carolina today. In the second half of the 1800s through the establishment of 
Jim Crow apartheid in the first half of the 1900s, Kotch writes, “the death 
penalty and lynchings were symbiotic,” with lynching “provided a scaffolding on 
which to build a death penalty—one that disproportionately targeted African 
American men … until the death penalty was strong enough to stand on its own.” 
The state’s Jim Crow death penalty “felt more like an expression of state power 
than a blow against it, and that threat of racial violence, Kotch writes, “was 
fundamental to its existence.”

Experts on North Carolina’s death penalty have lauded the importance and power 
of the book. Ken Rose, a longtime death-penalty defense attorney at the Center 
for Death Penalty Litigation, said, “Seth Kotch fills his well-documented and 
exhaustively researched book about North Carolina’s history of executions with 
spectacular tales of the state’s failure to mete out justice reliably and to 
treat persons of color and the poor fairly.” Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, a professor 
of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, said, “Few historical studies have so thoroughly 
refocused my understanding of one of the foremost issues of our time: the 
criminal justice system’s persistently inequitable treatment of African 
American men.”

Kotch provides stark data to support his thesis: “Between the end of the Civil 
War and 1910, 74 percent of those executed were African Americans, although 
their proportion of the population never exceeded 38 percent. From between 1910 
and 1961, 78 percent of those executed were black men, most for crimes with 
white victims. Adding American Indians, a full 80 % of those executed were 
people of color and just 1 white person was executed for a crime against a 
person of color.” The North Carolina death penalty of the early twentieth 
century “overwhelmingly continued to punish the same people (African Americans) 
for the same crimes (murder, rape, burglary) against the same people (white 
victims) as did lynching.” First-degree burglary, he writes, made it unlawful 
for a black man to be present in a home occupied by white women, and “[t]hose 
executed for burglary in North Carolina were always black, their victims were 
always white, and the crimes that resulted in executions almost always carried 
the hint of interracial sexual violence.” North Carolina conducted 67 
executions for rape between 1910 and 1950, nearly all involving black men 
accused of raping white women. Overall, 78% of those executed in North Carolina 
between 1910 and 1961 were black men, most accused of crimes against white 
victims.

In a June 19 radio interview on WUNC, Kotch said he wrote Lethal State because 
“it seemed like this hugely important moral decision that a state…would make, 
that seemed to happen in darkness and without a good deal of discussion, and so 
I wanted to provide a little bit of light.” Kotch also discusses the state’s 
abortive implementation of a Racial Justice Act, which legislators passed to 
allow death-row prisoners to present statistical evidence of racial bias to 
challenge their death sentences and then repealed after a court found systemic 
evidence of discriminatory practices across the state. The interview also 
covers the de facto execution moratorium in place in North Carolina, which has 
not carried out an execution since 2006 because state law requires a doctor to 
participate in executions, but the North Carolina Medical Board has said it 
will punish physicians who participate because their involvement violates 
medical ethics.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)








FLORIDA:

‘I’m a homicidal maniac’: Scott Nelson tells jurors he wants death penalty 
following murder conviction



A man convicted of kidnapping a woman from her employer's Winter Park home and 
killing her testified Monday during the penalty phase of his trial.

Scott Nelson was convicted in late June of 1st-degree murder, kidnapping, 
carjacking and robbery with a firearm.

Nelson previously testified during the trial and claimed the death of Jennifer 
Fulford was his parole officer’s fault.

Nelson talked Monday about all the alleged abuse he claims to have suffered 
over the years in federal prison. He said at one point a guard dressed as Santa 
beat him up. He's tying to avoid the death penalty.

After he testified on Monday, Nelson asked the judge for a "Nelson Hearing," 
which is a hearing that is requested when a defendant feels their court 
appointed attorney is ineffective.

Nelson is told the judge that his attorneys refuse to ask him two questions 
that he feels are key. He referred to them as "landmines" and said he wants 
them asked of him on the stand.

In making the demand Nelson essentially forced his own defense attorney to ask 
him on the stand how his years in prison have affected his mental health and he 
says, "I am a homicidal maniac." The state then asked Nelson if he wants the 
death penalty and Nelson said "yes."

(source: WESH news)








LOUISIANA:

‘Worst thing you can hear’----Other troopers tell of hearing ‘officer down’ 
message



The trial of a man accused of 1st-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a 
state trooper began Sunday in Lafayette with emotional testimony from 
witnesses.

Kevin Daigle, 57, is accused in the death of Louisiana State Trooper Steven 
Vincent in 2015.

Vincent, a 13-year veteran of the Louisiana State Police force, was 44 when he 
died Aug. 24, 2015, the day after he was shot. Sgt. Ben Fox, a state trooper 
with Troop D, told the court Sunday he knew Vincent well and the two were 
partners on the force and worked together every day.

He said on Aug. 23, 2015, the department received multiple calls about a 
traffic incident on Fruge Road in the Bell City area.

Fox said Vincent was dispatched to check it out and it wasn't long before calls 
began coming in that an officer was down.

"It's the worst thing you can hear," Fox said. "I knew it had to be Steven."

He told jurors he saw Vincent on the ground and could tell his injuries were 
"pretty bad. Steven had severe head trauma, blood was everywhere, and people 
were trying to render aid."

Fox said "an older white male was on the ground with two people on top of him 
and I could tell he was handcuffed. At that point, I picked him (Daigle) up and 
read him his Miranda rights." He said a medical helicopter arrived and a team 
tended to Vincent before he was airlifted to Lake Charles Memorial Hospital.

A dash cam video from Vincent's vehicle was shown to the jury and the nearly 
45-minute video revealed the entire interaction between Vincent and Daigle 
after the trooper had been dispatched to the scene.

Vincent asked Daigle how his truck ended up in a ditch and if he had been 
drinking. Daigle told him someone else had been driving. After a lot of 
discussion and Daigle refusing to admit he was the driver, Vincent radioed his 
office and told them he would call a tow truck and let Daigle call for a ride. 
As he went to tell Daigle, the defendant got out of his truck and came toward 
Vincent and a loud "pop, pop, pop" was heard as the trooper was shot.

Trooper Joey Babineaux told jurors on the day of the shooting he had been 
working a traffic fatality in another area when he got the "officer down" 
message. He said he rushed to the scene, driving 140 mph at times.

Babineaux said he and Vincent had been very close friends and their families 
also spent time together. Becoming emotional, he said when he got to the scene 
he immediately went to Vincent to try and give aid. "There was a lot of blood 
and I observed two holes. It looked like he had been shot. I also observed 
brain matter and I didn't want the other officers to see what I was having to 
see."

Babineaux said he went with the medical helicopter that transported Vincent. "I 
sat by his side and assisted him with breathing, " he said. "I also prayed with 
him twice on the way."

The courtroom was packed with family and friends of Vincent's, including his 
wife Katherine. Robert LeDoux, a good Samaritan who arrived on scene that day 
before any law enforcement, told jurors about subduing Daigle by tackling him 
and holding him down.

Once other bystanders arrived to help, LeDoux used Vincent's vehicle radio to 
call for help. He also called 911, secured Vincent's service revolver, and got 
a towel to put on Vincent's head and tried to render aid. "That day is etched 
in my mind," he said.

The prosecution team is composed of Lea Hall, Jacob Johnson, and Charles 
Robinson of the Calcasieu Parish District Attorney's office. The defense team 
is made up of Kyla Romanach and Bruce E. Unangst.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Trial is expected to continue today in 15th District Court in Lafayette.

(source: American Press)








TENNESSEE:

The Cruel Durability of Capital Punishment----I went to Tennessee and found out 
why the last days of the death penalty may never come.



On the warm May evening when the state of Tennessee executed Don Johnson for 
having murdered his wife, Connie, in 1984, there were 2 demonstrations taking 
place outside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Prison officials fenced 
off the area around the perimeter, and in a surreal moment that is part of 
death penalty vigils whenever an execution takes place in Tennessee, a 
correctional officer, dressed head to toe in tactical gear, asked, as if he 
were separating the guests at a wedding, if we were for or against the death 
penalty. He then directed us to the appropriate part of the field.

Technically, I’m neither. I am a reporter who, for the last few years, has been 
covering the death penalty for Mother Jones. I’ve spoken to activists and 
experts. Once, I interviewed an Alabama death row inmate a few days before he 
was executed for a murder he insisted he didn’t commit. After he was put to 
death, a friend texted me: “Wow, your guy is gone,” suggesting a personal 
connection to him that I confess our conversation had created. I remember his 
thick Southern accent, the intensity with which he was making his case as if I 
could make a difference, and the haunting realization that this man who seemed 
so fiercely alive would soon be dead not from natural causes but from a state 
that administered a powerful drug combination that his lawyers insisted would 
cause undue suffering.

There have been many nights I’ve stayed up late to find out whether the Supreme 
Court would spare a man’s life. Readers have sent me emails accusing me of 
“loving black murderers,” implying something insidious about my own blackness. 
(I thank them for reading Mother Jones.) I’ve written about the herculean 
efforts that states will make just to obtain lethal injection drugs at a time 
when European drug manufacturers refuse to continue their involvement in state 
killing. I have become both intellectually engaged in the questions surrounding 
the death penalty and personally unsettled by the continued insistence in more 
than half the states in our nation that this is a reasonable punishment, even 
as nearly every other country we consider peers have eliminated it. And many of 
those countries whose values we consider inimical to ours—North Korea, Iran, 
Iraq—continue it. But I have never visited a community where an execution was 
about to take place and never stood outside a prison with a crowd of crying, 
praying people at the moment the state kills someone several hundred yards 
away.

After an identification check and a quick pat down, I walked up to about 50 
people in the middle of a solemn prayer vigil. Johnson spent half of his 68 
years on death row and during that time experienced a religious turning point 
that finally led to his ordination as an elder in the Seventh-day Adventist 
Church. As his execution date drew near, he refused any further appeals. His 
sole final and failed effort was a request to Republican Gov. Bill Lee for 
clemency. On the pro–death penalty side of the field was 1 man. Dressed in a 
long dark coat and a cowboy hat, he alternated between pacing and playing on 
his phone like someone in a crowded bar trying desperately not to look lonely. 
By the time I had arrived, Johnson had about half an hour left to live.

I decided to visit Nashville the day before Johnson’s execution because if 
there is such a thing as a “perfect” state to visit to understand the 
durability of capital punishment in America, Tennessee fits the bill. It has 
increased its rate of executions—after a 9-year hiatus—while other states, like 
Washington and New Hampshire, are abolishing the death penalty. Between 1960 
and 2000, Tennessee didn’t execute anyone, but when “tough-on-crime” policies 
intensified and red-state lawmakers felt pressured to do something, Tennessee 
revved up its death chamber in 2000 and killed Robert Coe for the 1979 rape and 
murder of 8-year-old Cary Ann Medlin. Another 6 years would pass before the 
state put Sedley Alley to death, despite the pressing questions surrounding his 
possible innocence. Between 2007 and 2009, 4 more men were executed. Johnson’s 
execution will likely be followed by 2 more this year.

There are other ways Tennessee is representative of some broader themes that 
politicians, society, and the courts have grappled with surrounding this issue. 
As pharmaceutical companies worldwide decline to sell their drugs to US 
prisons, dozens of inmates, represented by Nashville’s Supervisory Assistant 
Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry (who also represented Johnson), filed a 
lawsuit against the state to halt its plans to use a controversial sedative 
responsible for several botched executions. (They lost.) And as DNA evidence 
has resulted in scores of exonerations of people who had spent years on death 
rows across the country as the result of wrongful convictions, the family of 
Sedley Alley is trying to get DNA testing done that could prove that Tennessee 
killed an innocent man. Then there is the fact that people of color are 
disproportionately represented on death row. Tennessee is no exception. Of the 
55 men and 1 woman who are on death row there, 50 % are black; Tennessee’s 
black population stands at 17 %. But in contrast to so many death penalty 
stories, Don Johnson is white and healthy. He has admitted he was guilty of a 
terrible crime. This might have all the hallmarks of an uncomplicated 
execution.

My 1st stop was far from the bars that draw aspiring country music singers and 
the neighborhoods where future brides ride roofless buses with dozens of their 
closest friends. I drove to the far east part of town to the offices of 
Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, a nonprofit dedicated to 
ending capital punishment. With more than 10,000 supporters, the group mainly 
works out of Nashville but has chapters throughout the state. It’s similar to 
the other anti–death penalty organizations that have formed throughout the 
country.

I wanted to know what the hours before an execution were really like for 
activists so staunchly opposed to the death penalty, so I met with Stacy 
Rector, who has been executive director of TADP for the last 13 years. She’s an 
ordained Presbyterian minister with experience in ministering to death row 
inmates.

Rector is tall and speaks with a comforting Southern drawl. The statement 
“Honoring Life by Abolishing the Death Penalty” is emblazoned on a poster. TADP 
joins other organizations to educate the public about the death penalty and 
work to end it. Rector also served as a spiritual adviser to Steve Henley, who 
was convicted of the 1985 murders of Fred and Edna Stafford but insisted he was 
innocent and that his accomplice, Terry Flatt, had killed the couple. In 
exchange for his testimony against Henley, Flatt was given a 25-year sentence 
and paroled after 5 years. Rector and Henley both grew up on farms in rural 
Tennessee, so he “was very similar to many of the people I grew up with,” she 
said. “It just became a friendship.”

The system is broken,” she told me. “It is not fairly applied, it continues to 
risk executing innocent people.”

The last time Rector saw Henley was in the execution chamber. She led his 
family members in prayer as they wept. “I’d like to say that I hope this gives 
Fred and Edna’s family some peace. My experience in life is it won’t,” Henley 
said to his family before he died. “All my love to my mother and father, my 
sister and children. I’m an innocent man.” Henley’s story is replicated nearly 
everywhere that the death penalty is still practiced, Rector said.

“The system is broken,” she told me. “It is not fairly applied. It continues to 
risk executing innocent people.”

Johnson didn’t want to mount any last minute legal challenges. His clemency 
petition relied heavily on how he was transformed in prison from a violent 
murderer to a gentle person of faith. What that meant on a practical level was 
that there were no desperate last-minute appeal efforts, but there were more 
conversations about religion and forgiveness. “This is what Don wanted to do,” 
Rector said about his final request to the governor. He wanted the opportunity 
to be in front of the governor, fall “upon his knees,” and ask for forgiveness.

When a jury sentences a defendant to death, it begins a process that can take 
decades, cost millions of dollars, and require a small army of lawyers, many of 
whom end up growing close to their clients in the process of trying to keep 
them alive. Johnson was scheduled to be executed in 2006 and 2015, but both 
executions were stayed because of legal questions surrounding the methods the 
state uses to kill inmates. Kelley Henry has represented a number of death row 
inmates, including Don Johnson. I visited her at a large office building just 
across the street from the federal courthouse. Nestled in her cozy office, 
decorated with pictures of her family and comfortable chairs for lounging, 
Henry reflected on having gotten to know Don Johnson since she first became 
involved in his case in 2006. “I’ve come to care for him quite a bit,” she 
said. She’s come to think of Johnson and his supporters as her friends. “It has 
been humbling to get to know them and to see their goodness.”

“Goodness” is not a word that would immediately come to mind when looking at 
Johnson’s record. Like most people who end up on death row, he was raised in a 
chaotic household. His mother, Ruby, was only a teenager when she met James Lee 
Johnson, who was, according to the clemency petition, a “grown man.” They began 
a relationship but James Lee quickly became abusive. Ruby briefly ran away, had 
an affair, and got pregnant with Don. Worried about finances, she returned to 
James Lee. Don, who was born in January 1951, was raised to believe that James 
Lee was his biological father.

Then the cycle of abuse extended to the next generation. James Lee beat Don and 
Ruby, and Ruby, in turn, beat Don. As a teenager, Don spent time in a juvenile 
facility and an adult prison where physical violence was routine. According to 
his clemency petition, by the time Don left home for good at 18, he had learned 
little in school and was belligerent and violent; he believed women were meant 
to be abused. The petition contains scant detail about his life leading up to 
the crime that would land him on death row, but he describes himself as a liar, 
thief, and con man. In 1977, he married Connie, who had a young daughter named 
Cynthia. Together, they also had a son they named Jason. According to court 
documents, Don and Connie’s marriage was floundering, and Connie threatened to 
leave him.

A few weeks before Christmas in 1984, Johnson suffocated Connie to death, 
shoving a plastic bag down her throat. His accomplice, Ronnie McKoy, helped him 
put her body in the family van and move her to a shopping center. The next day, 
Johnson filed a missing person’s report and asked his boss to look for Connie’s 
van. Johnson’s boss discovered her body. 3 days after the murder, Johnson was 
questioned by police and arrested. At his October 1985 trial in Shelby County, 
he was sentenced to die by the electric chair. Reading the reports of this 
brutal murder makes it easier to understand why, to death penalty proponents, 
Johnson is a monster.

But “goodness” somehow appeared during his 3 decades behind bars. In February 
1985 while being held in the Shelby County jail, he heard an inmate preach, and 
converted to Christianity. While on death row, he joined the Seventh-day 
Adventists after 2 inmates introduced him to it, and in 2008 he became an 
ordained elder at Riverside Chapel, which routinely sent its members to build 
relationships with incarcerated people.

“I am heartbroken,” Henry says. “I think it’s going to be very hard tomorrow 
night to witness his execution,” That’s not only because she cares for Johnson, 
but because she has seen the effects of the drugs before.

For decades, most states used the 3-drug combination containing sodium 
thiopental to render the inmate unconscious, pancuronium bromide to paralyze 
the inmate, and potassium chloride to stop the heart. Presumed to be a painless 
and more humane alternative to the electric chair, there is no scientific 
evidence proving that lethal injection is either. When the shortages of sodium 
thiopental began, states turned to Midazolam, a drug that would prove to be 
dangerous for executions because the sedative is not strong enough to render 
the inmate unconscious before the next dose of drugs. By 2009, death penalty 
states were struggling to find drugs, since European drug manufacturers refused 
to sell their product to American prisons. In 1 case, a state received a 
“donation” from a drug supplier after the Arkansas Department of Corrections 
director drove to meet an anonymous supplier in an undisclosed location.

Tennessee was not exempt from the problems of procuring the drugs, so the state 
attempted a workaround. In 2014, 5 years after the state’s last execution, 
former Gov. Bill Haslam signed a law that, in the event that legal drugs were 
unavailable, permitted the use of the electric chair—a method widely employed 
in the 1980s and 1990s but that’s considered inhumane today. 3 years later, 
Henry represented 32 death row inmates in a lawsuit against the state over its 
3-drug protocol, alleging that their executions would amount to torture.

Henry has witnessed the executions of several clients and paints a gruesome 
picture of prisoners’ experiences. “When you hear people talking about coughing 
and gasping and snoring…that’s pulmonary edema beginning,” Henry says about the 
condition that feels like drowning. “And when you see them straining against 
the strap, grimacing, clenching their fists? That’s them starting to have that 
suffocation feeling from the paralytic.”

But still Tennessee pressed on and won its Midazolam case against the inmates. 
Executions resumed on August 9, 2018, nine years after the last one. Billy Ray 
Irick was put to death for the 1985 murder of 7-year-old Paula Dyer. According 
to media witnesses, during his execution Irick “jolted” and made a coughing or 
choking sound and briefly strained his arms against the restraints. He was 
pronounced dead at 7:48 p.m. His execution meant that after nearly a decade, 
the legal battles that were keeping Henry’s clients alive were no longer mostly 
symbolic. Her defense of her clients was literally a matter of life or death in 
Tennessee.

Connie Johnson was not the only victim of Johnson’s crime. The couple had two 
children, Cynthia (whom Johnson adopted when he married Connie) and Jason, the 
couple’s biological child. At the time of the murders, the children were 7 and 
4 years old, respectively. In the days leading up to an execution, family 
members of the victims will often ask why so much attention is being paid to 
the person who committed the crime, rather than the people who are suffering. 
It’s also common rhetoric from death penalty supporters.

Unlike abolitionist groups, there is no organized pro–death penalty movement, 
but Kent Scheidegger has made a name for himself by explicitly supporting 
capital punishment and pushing for more executions. As legal director of the 
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a right-wing think tank that opposes 
reforming the criminal justice system, Scheidegger has written more than 200 
amicus briefs supporting the harsh punishments and the death penalty. He 
believes that the documented racial disparities on death row are “smoke and 
mirrors” and that the appeals process shouldn’t be dragged on for too long 
because “nearly all death-row inmates are clearly guilty.”

A large part of Don Johnson’s clemency petition to the governor was based on 
his adopted daughter’s forgiveness, but it was not always that way. When 
Johnson was first scheduled for execution in 2006, Vaughn was pleased. “I want 
the freak to burn,” she said in the clemency petition. The execution was called 
off because of the legal implications around using the electric chair. 6 years 
later, when she was 35 years old, Vaughn decided to visit him in prison and 
confront him. As they sat together, she described what he had robbed her of, 
what it was like to go through life’s milestones—her high school graduation, 
her wedding, the birth of her child—without her mother by her side. Johnson 
cried while he listened.

And then that was it. Vaughn heard a voice telling her to let it go. “I forgive 
you,” she said to the man who killed her mother, and she meant it. In contrast, 
Jason Johnson, Vaughn’s brother, believes, like many victims, that this 
execution will bring closure, that it will somehow offer some solace for all 
the pain that was inflicted. “He’s an evil human being,” he told the Memphis 
Commercial Appeal a week before the execution. “That is all my father is. 
That’s all he’s ever been, is a con man.”

Retribution for a heinous crime, and the opportunity to offer the victims some 
consolation, has been a time-tested justification for the death penalty, as 
District Attorney Jody Pickens said when Urshawn Miller was sentenced to death 
in Jackson last year: “Justice was served and the citizens of Jackson will be 
protected from someone whose criminal history shows he is a very violent 
person.” But increasingly, victims of crimes are pushing back and asking that 
the death penalty not be an option. One such person is Charles Strobel, a 
Catholic priest who runs Room in the Inn, an organization that provides 
services for homeless people in Nashville. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, 
Strobel sits across from me at the large Room in the Inn complex. The 
76-year-old Germantown, Tennessee, native speaks slowly and softly and 
apologizes for the tremor in his hands. He has Parkinson’s disease.

In the winter of 1985, Strobel was at his parish in Nashville when he noticed a 
group of homeless people in the parking lot, looking for somewhere to stay 
warm. He decided to open the doors and let them in. A year later, several 
congregations had decided to provide shelter and food to homeless people, and 
it grew to a large organization with 7,000 volunteers that house 1,500 homeless 
men during the winter. The following year, just as Room in the Inn was starting 
to grow, his mother Mary Catherine Strobel was abducted and murdered by a man 
who had escaped a facility for people with mental illness.

When I asked him about his mother’s death and his family’s push to spare the 
life of her killer, his voice remained steady. He described the night of 
December 9, 1986, when Mary Catherine disappeared after finishing some 
shopping. The 76-year-old, who was active in the Catholic church, was well 
known in the community as someone who was always giving food, clothes, and 
supplies to those in need.

“I can think of no way that his execution would bring us satisfaction.”

William Scott Day, an inmate who had escaped from a facility for people with 
mental illness, grabbed her in the Sears parking lot, stabbed her, put her in 
the trunk of her car, and left the body at a bus depot outside of Nashville. 
Her body was found a day later. After Day was apprehended and convicted, 
Tennessee wanted to pursue the death penalty. “I already had a response in my 
head about what we needed to do going forward,” Strobel said, and organized his 
family to lobby against it. “We believe in the miracle of forgiveness. That’s 
what we said at the beginning of the grieving process and all the attention 
that came to us.” When I asked Strobel if people thought the family was “out of 
their minds” for opposing the death penalty, he chuckled. “That’s probably a 
good way of putting it.” He then opened up a folder and pulled out a document 
from 1986 and read me the statement he made on behalf of his family when 
Tennessee wanted to pursue the maximum punishment for Mary’s killer. In it he 
reiterates his belief in mercy and forgiveness, concluding, “I can think of no 
way that his execution would bring us satisfaction.”

Since then, he has met with families who can’t overcome the relentless anguish 
that comes with being the family member of a victim. “They were so close to the 
raw pain and the grief,” he says. “I didn’t feel that way. As hard as it is to 
forgive the person, it allowed us to move on and make some sense out of the 
rest of our lives.” Day died in prison.

Hearing stories like Strobel’s always brings me back to a central question: 
Would I have the capacity to forgive such a crime? The Strobel family not only 
asked Tennessee to spare his life, but also believed he was a “child of God, 
created in the image of God, and loved by God.” Too many of us struggle to 
forgive people who lie or cheat or steal. But Strobel is so steadfast in what 
he believes that forgiving the man who murdered his mother almost came as 
second nature.

Don Johnson only had a few requests at the end of his life. In lieu of a last 
meal, he wanted the money to be given to a homeless person. He also asked the 
governor to pray with him and his fellow inmates before his death. I left Room 
in the Inn and headed to the Legislative Plaza at the state capitol to meet 
with Christian faith leaders Jeannie Alexander and Shane Claiborne, who 
gathered with a small group outside the governor’s office. They wanted to 
persuade Republican Gov. Bill Lee to talk to Johnson before he died, and had 
already made a failed attempt to enter his office the day before. They’re all a 
part of a loose network of faith leaders who actively oppose the death penalty. 
Alexander and Claiborne both have developed personal relationships with Johnson 
and would regularly visit him on death row.

While someone stood outside holding a big poster with a picture of Johnson’s 
face on it, the rest of the group went through security and gathered outside 
the office where they figured the governor was. Before I arrived in Nashville, 
Gov. Lee said the execution would go forward, but they hadn’t given up. Even if 
they couldn’t get Lee to change his mind, maybe they could at least persuade 
him to give Johnson and the other death row inmates a call. After a few minutes 
that felt maddeningly long, someone from the governor’s office came out to say 
the governor wouldn’t talk to the activists or pray with Johnson and the other 
death row inmates. Claiborne’s voice begins to crack. “We can do better for the 
victims than creating new victims,” he said. The group thanked the spokesperson 
for his time, and as he started to walk away, Claiborne shouted, “It’s not too 
late!”

Their last hope had been extinguished. Don Johnson was going to die in four 
hours. We wandered down to the Nashville Public Library and sat in the civil 
rights room, surrounded by posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and the great 
Georgia civil rights leader Rep. John L. Lewis. Claiborne and Alexander begin 
to reminisce about Don Johnson not as a murderer about to be executed, but as a 
friend about to die. “I don’t know how to talk about when someone that you’ve 
known and loved is about to be killed,” Alexander says through tears. “It’s not 
like he was sick or there’s been a car wreck. There’s nothing wrong with him.” 
Claiborne is weeping as well. “We’re literally watching someone that we love, 
someone who is a living testament of God’s redemption and grace be killed by a 
fellow Christian,” he says. “In this one, that’s what feels incredibly heavy to 
me.”

I’d already met Claiborne in Lynchburg, Virginia, at a progressive evangelical 
revival. He’s well known in these circles for being anti-gun violence, 
anti-war, and, of course, anti–death penalty. While prominent evangelicals like 
Gov. Lee talk a lot about religion, Claiborne lives his life the way he thinks 
Jesus would. Alexander is a friend of Claiborne’s and was a regular on the 
prison abolitionist circuit in Tennessee, showing up to protest during 
executions.

To the outside observer or those who support the death penalty, Don is a 
criminal on death row who senselessly murdered his wife. But when talking to 
Alexander and Claiborne, a more three-dimensional man emerges. “He’s really 
funny,” Alexander says with a laugh. “He’s got a great sense of humor and he 
gives really good hugs.” Just a few days earlier, during their last visit 
together, Johnson gave Claiborne a giant hug and teased him about how thin he 
is. Claiborne asked Johnson how he was doing. “I’m too blessed to be stressed!” 
he replied. Even though he was scheduled to die in four days, he was more 
concerned about how his visitors were handling the situation. “He’s the kind of 
person who wasn’t angry or bitter,” Alexander says. “And maybe, most 
importantly, he’s just like us in most ways.”

“He’s the kind of person who wasn’t angry or bitter. And maybe, most 
importantly, he’s just like us in most ways.”

In Johnson’s clemency petition, everyone—from his spiritual advisors to his 
fellow inmates—had nothing but praise for the man he had become. “The last half 
of his 67-year life has been a journey to redeem himself and help others,” said 
Stephen Schaffer, a Methodist who’s been involved in prison ministry for more 
than 20 years. “Don is a human being whose flame for good has been reignited.” 
It’s not uncommon for incarcerated people to find religion while behind bars. 
There aren’t many statistics about just how many prisoners end up embracing 
faith, but a 2011 Pew Research survey of prison chaplains found that 73 % of 
them say religious programming is critical to rehabilitation.

While listening to Claiborne and Alexander shed tears over the impending 
killing of their friend, I forgot about how he brutally and senselessly 
murdered his wife. How was it possible that one person could embody the two 
greatest extremes of human behavior? And how is it possible for those around 
him to reconcile those two extremes? In writing about so many men—and they are 
usually men—on death row, the enormous cruelty of their crimes becomes their 
identity. Clearly, that is only part of the story.

Vigils for death row inmates on the night of their executions are about as 
common as a last meal. Capital punishment abolitionists use them as a public 
demonstration of their opposition to the execution. There were two vigils in 
Nashville for Johnson. The one at his home church at the Riverside Chapel was 
explicitly endorsed by Rector and TADP. The other was held outside the prison 
and organized by the group that Alexander and Claiborne were a part of. When I 
wondered why there were 2 different vigils, my audio producer told me about a 
metaphor for activism someone had once told her. Let’s say there are a bunch of 
babies in a river coming downstream and they need to be saved. One group will 
be preoccupied trying to immediately get the babies out of the water, while the 
other will go upstream to investigate how the babies are ending up in the river 
in the first place. Rector and TADP are the ones investigating the source of 
problem, while Alexander and Claiborne are plucking the babies out of the 
water.

Don Johnson’s execution was scheduled to start at 7 p.m. when he was led into 
the execution chamber and strapped to a gurney. An hour earlier, members of 
Riverside Chapel Seventh-day Adventist Church started gathering for a prayer 
vigil. It’s unclear how many have actually met Johnson, since he’s never been 
to the church, but Rector is there along with dozens of others. The pastor 
begins with music, first a few choruses of the “Hallelujah” medley, followed by 
the group singing Johnson’s favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace.” In front of the 
pulpit were 2 large identical posters. At the top was a photo of Johnson’s face 
and a verse from Romans, “For the wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is 
eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” On the bottom half, photos 
depicting the electric chair and the type of gurney used in lethal injection, 
with the words “Our Donnie Johnson only has 2 choices!”

I left the church at about 6:20 p.m. to head to the prison, and 20 minutes 
later I stood among the demonstrators. Everyone from the earlier action at the 
state capitol was present, as well dozens of other people who’d come out to 
support Johnson and express their opposition to capital punishment. Inside the 
prison walls, the execution had begun.

Media witnesses would later report that after being strapped to the gurney and 
while the executioner began administering the lethal drugs, Johnson asked the 
warden if he could sing. First was “They’ll Know We Are Christians” (“And 
they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love…”). Then he began the 
old spiritual “Soon and Very Soon.” His voice was strong when he starting 
singing, “Soon and very soon we are going to see the King,” but after singing 
“no more dying here,” it gave out. At this point, according to media witnesses, 
for 3 minutes Johnson made what some said sounded like gurgling and gasping 
sounds, and others compared to snoring. Then he let out a high-pitched scream.

Outside the prison, night had fallen after a colorful sunset. Someone who was 
in contact with those inside informed the crowd that Don Johnson was dead.

The group exchanged hugs and handshakes and slowly wandered back to their cars. 
On the drive back home, I wondered what it was like for the witnesses of the 
execution. Those in the viewing room are usually a combination of family 
members of the victims, or of the inmate, or sometimes both, plus prison 
chaplains and media witnesses. In Johnson’s case, Henry and a few members of 
the media were present as he died. I tried to imagine what it would be like to 
watch someone take those last, struggling breaths.

I don’t know if I could handle it.

The ever-present threat of executing an innocent person is the kind of worry 
that can keep you up at night. According to a 2014 study by researchers in 
Michigan and Pennsylvania, 4 % of defendants sentenced to die are actually 
innocent. Since 1973, 166 inmates have been exonerated from death row, and the 
Death Penalty Information Center estimates that at least 15 innocent people 
have been executed.

The next morning, I met April Alley, the daughter of Sedley Alley, who, in 
2006, was executed even though pressing questions about his possible innocence 
remained. We met at a downtown coffee shop. Alley is in her 40s now and lives 
in Louisville with her dogs. She has a slight Southern drawl and speaks with 
the soft voice of someone who’s seen enough tragedy to last a lifetime. It’s 
been 13 years since Tennessee executed her father for the rape and murder of 
19-year-old Suzanne Collins near Millington Naval Base. On July 11, 1985, at 
around 10:30 p.m., Collins, who was set to graduate from aviation school the 
next day, went for a jog and never returned. Two witnesses, Mark Shotwell and 
Mike Howard, described seeing a brown station wagon driving erratically and 
hearing Collins’ screams.

“My dad was always very gentle and protective of me,” April told me. It was her 
first time back to town after her father’s execution in 2006. She thought that 
after more than a decade she’d be more composed, but the tears started almost 
immediately. “For several years, I didn’t visit him,” she said. “I allowed a 
family member to persuade my thinking in assuming he was guilty.” But after 
reading more about the case and talking with Sedley’s lawyers, she started to 
doubt his guilt.

Sedley Alley, who was 6 feet, 4 inches tall, with light skin and long red hair, 
was driving a brown station wagon with his wife when he was pulled over by law 
enforcement, who were looking for a similar car. After some questioning, the 
officers decided that Sedley and his wife were in a domestic dispute and sent 
them home.

Collins’ body was discovered along with physical evidence including clothing 
believed to be worn by the perpetrator. The hunt for the brown station wagon 
driver was back on, and Sedley was arrested and interrogated at the naval base. 
At first, he denied killing Collins, but just 12 hours later he signed a 
statement admitting that while black-out drunk, he hit Collins with his car, 
stabbed her in the head with a screw driver, and then killed her with a tree 
branch. There was just one problem: Sedley’s confession did not match the 
physical evidence at the crime scene, which, according to the autopsy report, 
revealed Collins had been struck in the head and neck more than 100 times and a 
30-inch tree branch had been inserted into her vagina, perforating her lungs. 
Sedley took law enforcement officers to the location where he said it happened, 
but it was not the location where the witnesses had said the victim was 
abducted. Jurors heard about Alley’s confession at trial but did not know that 
he initially denied it, nor about the differences in the physical evidence, or 
his unsuccessful request for an attorney during the interrogation.

For some of us, our anger and frustration comes out loud and uncontrolled, but 
April’s voice was steady and soft. She swallowed back tears recounting a 
conversation she had with her dad in prison. “He told me that if he did it…he 
did not remember doing it. And if it [his guilt] could be proven to him with 
DNA testing, he didn’t want to fight his execution…but we never got that 
chance.”

In 2001, Tennessee passed a law allowing people convicted of crimes to apply 
for DNA testing at any time. Central to the Suzanne Collins murder was red 
underwear believed to belong to the perpetrator but was much too small for 
someone the size of Sedley. There were also other items of clothing recovered 
at the scene that could be tested for DNA. Sedley’s lawyers concluded their 
client had been the victim of a false confession. Despite filing two petitions 
to have the DNA at the crime scene tested, Sedley was denied.

On June 28, 2006, Sedley Alley was executed at Riverbend Maximum Security. His 
last words were for his son and daughter. “I love you, David. I love you, 
April. Be good and stay together. Stay strong.” It’s hard for April to contend 
with a reality in which her father was executed for a crime he didn’t commit. 
“How many other families, daughters, or sons are going to have to go through 
what I’ve gone through?” she wonders. “How many more are innocent?”

Last fall, the Innocence Project received a tip about a serial offender in 
Missouri. Thomas Bruce, who has been indicted in Missouri, could be the person 
who actually killed Collins. The Innocence Project relaunched the effort to 
test vital DNA that could prove Tennessee executed an innocent man. “I felt 
like someone punched me in the stomach as hard as they could,” April says about 
hearing from Kelley Henry that they were going to try to prove Sedley didn’t 
kill Suzanne Collins. “It ripped me apart.”

I don’t know if I expected the governor of Tennessee to immediately assemble a 
commission to discuss capital punishment, but as I drove away from my interview 
with April Alley, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of “Is that it?” Even though 
I’d spoken to so many people about Don Johnson, the family members of victims, 
and faith leaders, and attended a vigil at a prison, I felt like I had only 
scratched the surface. There was still the prosecutor who pursued the death 
penalty 30 years ago, the jury of Johnson’s peers who’d decided that death was 
a fitting punishment for his crime, and the prison staffer who injected the 
inmate with a lethal dose of drugs. A lot of those aspects about the death 
penalty are shrouded in secrecy. This is not by accident.

The day Johnson was executed, Henry went back to her office to secure her files 
on everything that had happened that evening. The strange coughing noises 
Johnson made in the execution chamber, Henry believed, indicated suffering. His 
files could be used in future challenges to the death penalty. “Don believed 
that his death must have some greater meaning,” Henry told me. At 5:30 the next 
morning, she and her team flew to Miami for a conference. At 11 a.m., Charles 
Wright, a 64-year-old death row inmate, died while awaiting execution. Wright, 
who Henry represented, had been dying of terminal cancer and was scheduled to 
die on October 10. Johnson and Wright had grown close over their decades behind 
bars. “I can’t help believe that when Don was killed, he finally gave up,” 
Henry says. She was sitting in a meeting about another case when she got the 
news about Wright’s death, and everything that had happened over the last 24 
hours sunk in. “I was just overwhelmed at that point,” she said. “I just burst 
into tears.”

Right before an execution, it’s easy to focus on the inmate or the 
anti-abortion Christian governor whose beliefs don’t quite extend to opposing 
capital punishment. But visiting Nashville, I saw vividly how an execution 
resonates far beyond the perpetrator, the criminal justice system, and perhaps 
the victim’s family. And yet, it is a system in equilibrium, with a strange 
interdependence between those opposed and those in favor. Capital punishment 
tears families apart, forces people to reckon with what they believe in, and 
affects many people: prison chaplains, local religious institutions, the legal 
community, family members, and friends of the victims. We know that the death 
penalty is racially biased, that there’s an unknown number of innocent people 
waiting to die, and that it does nothing to prevent more victims from being 
created. I keep thinking of what Jeannie Alexander said about Johnson: “And 
maybe, most importantly, he’s just like us in most ways.”

And the system grinds on in Tennessee. Stephen West is scheduled to die at 
Riverbend on August 15.

(source: Nathalie Baptiste, Mother Jones)








ARIZONA:

Death penalty hearing for man accused of 4 Arizona murders



1 of 2 men accused of killing 4 people in Casa Grande in 2017 will have a court 
hearing next month to determine if he's eligible for the death penalty.

A Pinal County Superior Court judge has set Aug. 12 for a status hearing on 
quadruple murder charges against Rodney Ortiz.

Ortiz and Alec Perez are accused of killing 2 men and 2 women at a housing 
complex in October 2017.

Prosecutors also are seeking the death penalty against Perez.

They say one of the victims, 29-year-old Crysta Proctor, was married to Perez.

According to the Casa Grande Dispatch, police reports show Perez and his 
estranged wife had a history of domestic violence.

Ortiz was 22 years old at the time of the quadruple murder while Alex Perez was 
31.

(source: Associated Press)








CALIFORNIA----death row inmate dies

San Quentin Death Row Inmate John Brown Dies At 71



An inmate who had been on death row since 1982 was found unresponsive in his 
San Quentin State Prison cell at 6:18 p.m. on Sunday.

Custody and medical staff performed CPR but the inmate was pronounced dead at 
6:47 p.m.

John George Brown, 71, was sentenced to death in Orange County for the 1980 
murder of a 27-year-old police officer and assaulting 2 other officers who had 
tried to serve him a felony arrest warrant.

Since California reinstated the death penalty in 1978, 26 inmates have 
committed suicide, 80 have died from natural causes, 13 have been executed in 
California, 1 was executed in Missouri, 1 was executed in Virginia, 12 have 
died from other causes and 6 are pending cause of death, including Brown.

There are currently 734 offenders on California’s death row.

(source: CBS News)

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

Kamala Harris Has a Distinguished Career of Serving Injustice



Kamala Harris is rising in the polls after dramatically confronting Joe Biden 
during the Democratic primary debate about his opposition to federally mandated 
busing for desegregation. The following week, however, Harris backed away from 
saying that busing should always be federally mandated, calling it just one 
“tool that is in the toolbox” for school districts to use. When asked to 
clarify whether she would support federal mandates for busing, she said: “I 
believe that any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered by a school 
district.” But Biden’s poll numbers are falling as a result of Harris’s 
theatrical attack.

Harris, who served as San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011 and 
California Attorney General from 2011 to 2017, describes herself as a 
“progressive prosecutor­­­­.” Harris’s prosecutorial record, however, is far 
from progressive. Through her apologia for egregious prosecutorial misconduct, 
her refusal to allow DNA testing for a probably innocent death row inmate, her 
opposition to legislation requiring the attorney general’s office to 
independently investigate police shootings and more, she has made a significant 
contribution to the sordid history of injustice she decries.

Harris Tried to Whitewash Jail Informant Scandal in California

For years, perhaps decades, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, in 
cooperation with the Orange County District Attorney (OCDA), planted teams of 
informants in the jail to illegally elicit confessions.

Deputy sheriffs placed informants near defendants who were represented by 
counsel to obtain statements from them. Prosecutors were aware of this program 
and explicitly or implicitly promised benefits to informants. This violated the 
defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

In People v. Dekraai, an informant in this program illegally obtained 
statements from the defendant. After the prosecutor agreed not to use the 
statements, Dekraai pled guilty to murder and was preparing his defense for a 
trial on whether he would get the death penalty. He asked the judge to find 
that the OCDA had a conflict of interest because of its involvement in the jail 
informant program.

Over a 6-month period, the judge held 2 hearings and heard from 39 witnesses.

Harris favored criminalizing truancy, raising cash bail fees and keeping 
prisoners locked up for cheap labor.

The judge found that many witnesses, including prosecutors and law enforcement 
officers, were “credibility challenged” about the nature of the informant 
program and their role in it. Some couldn’t remember, the judge determined, but 
“others undoubtedly lied.”

Thus, the judge concluded that the OCDA had a conflict of interest and recused 
the entire OCDA office, removing it from any further involvement in Dekraai’s 
case.

Kamala Harris, who at that time was serving as State Attorney General, would 
then take over the prosecution of the death penalty phase of Dekraai’s trial. 
But Harris appealed the judge’s ruling and opposed the recusal of the OCDA.

In 2016, the Court of Appeal rejected Harris’s argument and upheld the trial 
judge’s recusal of the OCDA. The appellate court wrote in its opinion:

On the last page of the Attorney General’s reply brief it states, “The trial 
court’s order recusing the OCDA from prosecuting Dekraai’s penalty phase trial 
was a remedy in search of a conflict.” Nonsense. The court recused the OCDA 
only after lengthy evidentiary hearings where it heard a steady stream of 
evidence regarding improper conduct by the prosecution team. To suggest the 
trial judge prejudged the case is reckless and grossly unfair. These 
proceedings were a search for the truth. The order is affirmed.

Attorney Jerome Wallingford represented a man who, like Dekraai, was a victim 
of the illegal Orange County jail informant program. “Harris should’ve done her 
job and investigated the informant program based on the findings of the Court 
of Appeal in the Dekraai case,” Wallingford told Truthout. “But instead, she 
tried to whitewash the scandal by protecting the DA and blaming the sheriff.”

The job of the attorney general is not to protect the DA. As chief law 
enforcement officer of the state, the attorney general’s duty is “to see that 
the laws of the State are uniformly and adequately enforced,” as mandated by 
Article V of the California Constitution. Harris violated her legal duty in 
this case.

Harris Minimized “Outrageous Government Misconduct”

Harris minimized “outrageous government misconduct” in People v. 
Velasco-Palacios. The trial court found the prosecutor “deliberately altered an 
interrogation transcript to include a confession that could be used to justify 
charges carrying a life sentence, and he distributed it to defense counsel 
during a period of time when [the prosecutor] knew defense counsel was trying 
to persuade defendant to settle the case.” After the prosecutor snuck the 
fabricated confession into the record, it caused the defense counsel to urge 
the defendant to plead guilty, which undermined the trust the client had in his 
lawyer.

The trial judge determined that the prosecutor’s action was “egregious, 
outrageous, and shocked the conscience,” and dismissed the case. Harris’s 
office appealed. The Court of Appeal affirmed the dismissal, noting that 
“dismissal is an appropriate sanction for government misconduct that is 
egregious enough to prejudice a defendant’s constitutional rights.” 
Significantly, the appellate court stated that “egregious violations of a 
defendant’s constitutional rights are sufficient to establish outrageous 
government misconduct.”

Harris opposed legislation requiring the attorney general’s office to 
independently investigate police shootings resulting in death.

But the Court of Appeal rejected Harris’s argument that if the conduct wasn’t 
physically brutal, it would not satisfy the “shock the conscience” standard 
required for dismissal.

Once again, Harris was covering up prosecutorial misconduct and ignoring the 
Supreme Court’s admonition in Berger v. U.S. that the duty of a prosecutor “is 
not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

Harris Opposed Attorney General Investigations of Police Shootings

These cases are not isolated examples of Harris’s less-than-progressive record 
as a prosecutor.

“Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice 
reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. 
Harris opposed them or stayed silent,” University of San Francisco School of 
Law Professor Lara Bazelon wrote in a New York Times article titled, “Kamala 
Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor.’” Bazelon added, “Most troubling, Ms. 
Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been 
secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false 
testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

After a federal judge ruled in 2014 that California’s death penalty system had 
become so dysfunctional it “violate[d] the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition 
against cruel and unusual punishment,” Harris appealed the decision. As a 
result, California’s death penalty was upheld and remains in place today.

Harris refused DNA testing that could exonerate Kevin Cooper, a likely innocent 
man on death row, and she opposed statewide body-worn police cameras. Harris 
favored criminalizing truancy, raising cash bail fees and keeping prisoners 
locked up for cheap labor. She also supported reporting arrested undocumented 
juveniles to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, covering for corrupt police 
lab technicians and blocking gender confirmation surgery for a transgender 
prisoner. A U.S. District Court judge concluded that withholding the surgery 
constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Many of Harris’s prosecutorial actions disproportionately hurt people of color.

Harris opposed legislation requiring the attorney general’s office to 
independently investigate police shootings resulting in death. In 2016, members 
of the California Legislative Black Caucus called on Harris to do more to 
strengthen accountability for police misconduct. Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy 
(D-Sacramento), a member of the Black Caucus, told the Los Angeles Times, “The 
African American and civil rights community have been disappointed that 
[Harris] hasn’t come out stronger on this.”

Harris Refused to Prosecute the “Foreclosure King”

Although many of Harris’s prosecutorial actions harmed people of color, a 
notable one helped the white “foreclosure king” — Steve Mnuchin, now Trump’s 
Treasury secretary.

Mnuchin was CEO of OneWest Bank from 2009-2015. A 2013 memo obtained by The 
Intercept alleges that “OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes 
by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key 
documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.”

After a yearlong investigation, the California attorney general’s Consumer Law 
Section “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct.” In 2013, they 
recommended that Harris prosecute a civil enforcement lawsuit against the bank.

“Without any explanation,” Harris’s office declined to initiate litigation in 
the case.

Mnuchin donated $2,000 to Harris’s Senate campaign in February 2016. It was his 
only donation to a Democratic candidate.

In January 2017, the Campaign for Accountability claimed that Mnuchin and 
OneWest Bank used “potentially illegal tactics to foreclose on as many as 
80,000 California homes,” and called for a federal investigation.

Harris wrote in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, “America has a deep and dark 
history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of 
injustice.” She added, “I know this history well — of innocent men framed, of 
charges brought against people without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors 
hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate 
application of the law.”

Indeed, the public record indicates that as district attorney and later as 
attorney general of California, Harris has contributed to the injustice she 
claims to abhor.

(source: truthout.org)








USA:

USA----impending/scheduled executions



With the execution of Marion Wilson Jr. in Georgia on June 20, the USA has now 
executed 1,500 condemned individuals since the death penalty was re-legalized 
on July 2, 1976 in the US Supreme Court Gregg v Georgia decision.

Gary Gilmore was the 1st person executed, in Utah, on January 17, 1977. Below 
is a list of further scheduled executions as the nation continues its shameful 
practice of state-sponsored killings.

NOTE: The list is likely to change over the coming months as new execution 
dates are added and possible stays of execution occur.

1501------Aug. 15-------------Dexter Johnson-----------Texas

1502-------Aug. 15------------Stephen West-------------Tennessee

1503-------Aug. 21------------Larry Swearingen---------Texas

1504-------Aug. 22------------Gary Ray Bowles----------Florida

1505-------Sept. 4------------Billy Crutsinger---------Texas

1506-------Sept. 10-----------Mark Anthony Soliz-------Texas

1507-------Sept. 12-----------Warren Henness-----------Ohio

1508-------Sept 25------------Robert Sparks------------Texas

1509-------Oct. 1-------------Russell Bucklew----------Missouri

1510-------Oct. 2-------------Stephen Barbee-----------Texas

1511-------Oct. 10------------Randy Halprin------------Texas

1512-------Oct. 16------------Randall Mays-------------Texas

1513-------Oct. 30------------Ruben Gutierrez----------Texas

1514-------Nov. 3-9-----------Charles Rhines-----------South Dakota

1515-------Nov. 6-------------Justen Hall--------------Texas

(source: Rick Halperin)

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

Prosecutor says death penalty warranted in Yingying Zhang’s killing



The legal battle over whether a former University of Illinois doctoral student 
should live or die for the kidnapping and slaying of a Chinese scholar began 
with a prosecutor on Monday telling jurors that the crime was so vicious that 
the death penalty is warranted.

"It was cold, calculated, cruel and months in the making," Assistant U.S. 
Attorney James Nelson told jurors on Monday afternoon.

Reminding jurors that Brendt Christensen has never revealed what he did with 
Yingying Zhang's body after he brutally killed and decapitated her in June of 
2017, Nelson spoke of what that has meant to the still-suffering family of the 
young woman.

"There will be no burial. There will be no closure," he told the jury that last 
month found Christensen guilty. "You will see the anguish."

But The (Champaign) News-Gazette reported that in the effort to convince jurors 
to spare the 30-year-old Christensen's life, a court-appointed attorney called 
by the defense attorneys tried to convey to them that a sentence of life in 
prison without the possibility is punishment enough.

Christensen "will die in prison, alone, with strangers," said Julie Brain. "The 
only question that remains is when his death occurs — at the end of his natural 
life or at a date the government chooses."

Defense attorneys were expected to detail Christensen's mental problems in the 
hopes of convincing the jury to spare Christensen's life and Brain did just 
that. She explained how Christensen has struggled with mental health issues 
such as night terrors and debilitating migraine headaches his whole life. And 
she told of how Christensen did not get the help he needed when he sought 
mental health treatment at the U of I.

The opening statements come after a morning hearing in which the judge told the 
attorneys he would allow jurors to watch videos made by Zhang's mother, several 
of her friends, as well as watch a video that shows Zhang singing.

The beginning of the penalty phase of Christensen's trial comes days after the 
same jury found Christensen guilty . During the current hearing, Christensen's 
attorneys — who acknowledged at the beginning of the trial that Christensen was 
guilty — will argue that their client's life should be spared. They are 
expected to tell jurors that Christensen knew his homicidal fantasies months 
before he killed Zhang weren't right and sought help from U of I mental health 
counselors. They have alleged the school didn't do enough to help.

But prosecutors have already during trial told jurors that Christensen in June 
2017 kidnapped Zhang from a bus stop, took her into his apartment in a duffel 
bag where he raped, stabbed and choked her before beating her to death with a 
baseball bat. They could use that information to show Christensen's meticulous 
planning of the crime and how he even seemed to express pride in what he had 
done to argue for the death penalty — something Zhang's family members already 
have said they support.

On Monday, the judge also said he would allow jurors to hear a recording of a 
phone call that Christensen made from jail. Prosecutors told the judge Monday 
that Christensen asserts his innocence — something The (Champaign) News-Gazette 
reports that prosecutors want jurors to hear because they believe it shows 
Christensen's lack of remorse.

The 30-year-old Christensen could testify during the hearing that is expected 
to last several days. If he does, one big question is whether he will reveal 
what he did with Zhang's body, which has never been found, as part of an effort 
to convince jurors to spare his life and sentence him instead to life in prison 
without the possibility of parole.

(source: WGN TV news)