[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., KY., KAN., N.MEX., ARIZ., NEV., USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 16



TEXAS:

State files a motion to set Rodney Reed’s execution for November



The state has filed a motion to schedule an execution date for death-row inmate 
Rodney Reed, calling for him to be put to death on Nov. 20, 2019.

Reed’s attorney, Bryce Benjet, then filed a motion of his own Monday afternoon 
opposing the state and asking a Bastrop District Court judge to dismiss or 
strike the state’s request to schedule the execution. Benjet argues the state 
has retaliated against Reed and his family for exercising their First Amendment 
rights. He also argues that the state falsely implied the execution date would 
not interfere with litigation in the case.

“The timing of the filing alone presents strong circumstantial evidence that 
the motion was filed in response to Mr. Reed and his family’s exercise of First 
Amendment rights, and not in a legitimate effort to enforce the judgment in 
this case,” Benjet wrote in the motion.

His family members were joined by anti-death penalty activists to protest on 
the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals 
denied his most recent appeal. Reed’s family believes he was wrongfully 
convicted and intended to plead with the Supreme Court to overturn his 
conviction.

“Being black and considered poor, they didn’t anticipate on us being in 
Washington,” said Sandra Reed, Rodney’s mother.

The state’s motion asks the court to deny Reed a hearing. If the court does 
allow Reed a hearing, the state asks that it happen as soon as possible because 
the order would need to be entered by Aug. 21, 2019, in order to set Reed’s 
execution on Nov. 20.

Reed’s legal team has fought for years to overturn Reed’s conviction and get 
him a new trial. He was scheduled to be put to death in March 2015, but the 
execution was paused just days beforehand. He was first sentenced to death in 
May of 1998.

“This trial has been a Jim Crow trial from the beginning, from the very 
beginning and we are outraged by that,” said Roderick Reed, Rodney’s brother.

Reed was convicted of killing Stacey Stites and dumping her body on a rural 
Bastrop County road in 1996. DNA from the Stites case matched Reed, but Reed 
said he had a consensual and secretive relationship with her.

Stites was set to marry Jimmy Fennell, a Georgetown police officer, at the time 
of her murder. Fennell was later sentenced to 10 years in prison for an 
unrelated crime. He was accused of raping a woman in his custody but pleaded 
guilty to lesser charges. Reed’s attorney believes new evidence shows Fennell 
was the actual killer.

Reed’s case has garnered national attention as his defense team — led by Benjet 
— has uncovered new evidence, found new witnesses and cast doubt on the state’s 
case and critical forensic evidence used at trial.

Reed had applied for relief from his 1997 murder conviction on the grounds that 
scientific expert opinions used at trial were false and have since changed. But 
on June 26, the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed that application for 
relief. The appeals court also denied Reed relief he sought in 2017 that 
included new testimony and evidence the defense presented.

Reed has unsuccessfully pushed to get pieces of evidence tested for DNA, 
including the belt used to strangle Stites.

“Our family has done nothing but asked for a fair trial from the beginning, to 
present all the evidence from the beginning,” Roderick Reed said.

(source: KXAN news)

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

"I'm not sorry": A quarter century later, Eddie Bernice Johnson stands by her 
crime bill vote----Johnson is the only Texan remaining in Congress who voted 
for the bill, which has become deeply unpopular among Democrats and is a 
contentious issue in the 2020 presidential primary.



On the afternoon of August 18, 1994, Eddie Bernice Johnson, a barrier-breaking 
freshman congresswoman from Dallas, stood on the floor of the U.S. House of 
Representatives and stumped for the most infamous legislation of that decade.

“Every day, most of the headlines have to do with crime,” she said, describing 
a desperate state of affairs in her home district. “School has been open less 
than two weeks now and already teachers have had guns in their faces. They 
found a gun arsenal underside of the building. It is overwhelming, but we must 
do something about it."

Johnson was slated to speak that morning about health care, but she held off 
for 10 minutes to weigh in on President Bill Clinton's crime bill, which looked 
to be in jeopardy despite Democratic control of both chambers of Congress.

"I cannot understand why there is so much opposition and so much rhetoric and 
so much demagoguery surrounding the bill that will address these issues," she 
said.

3 days after Johnson's speech, the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act — 
better known today as the 1994 crime bill — passed the House. The next month, 
Clinton signed it into law.

2 1/2 decades later, Clinton’s $30 billion tough-on-crime bill has become a 
flashpoint in heated debates about criminal and racial justice. A sweeping 
package, the bill included several measures that are still broadly supported by 
Democrats today: It included more than $1 billion to fight violence against 
women and remains the last time Congress passed significant gun control 
legislation. But the bill also expanded the death penalty, introduced 
controversial 3-strikes and "truth-in-sentencing" laws, and poured billions in 
funding toward the construction of federal prisons.

And today the legacy of the bill haunts many of its original champions. For a 
new generation of liberal voters, complicity with the crime bill's passage is a 
sort of political mortal sin. Many Democratic voters remember the bill as an 
engine of mass incarceration fueled by cruel and racist policing laws. Most 
notably, Joe Biden, one of the its lead authors, has faced a constant barrage 
of attacks on his racial justice record as he tries to maintain his lead in the 
2020 Democratic presidential primary.

Johnson, the first black representative elected from Dallas, is the only 
current Texas representative who was in office to vote on the crime bill back 
in 1994. She campaigned for it at the time, and voted for it when it finally 
passed the House that August.

But in an interview this month in her Washington office, Johnson was unbending 
in her defense of her record, waiving off the criticisms that have assailed 
Biden and other backers of the crime bill. A quarter century later, she 
expressed no regrets.

"I’m not sorry," Johnson told the Tribune, recalling her feeling of urgency at 
the time to eradicate the violence and drug trafficking that plagued her 
district. "If the circumstances were the same today as they were back then, I 
would do the same thing."

More than 500 murders

In the decade leading up to Clinton's inauguration, many American cities were 
reeling from crime. Year after year, cities across the country broke their own 
murder records. For black males between 14 and 18 years old in the 1980s, the 
leading cause of death was homicide. On TV, crime was inescapable. It even 
invaded children's programing, where figures as unlikely as Pee Wee Herman 
fronted alarmist PSAs about the lethal dangers of crack-cocaine.

Dallas was no exception. A 1989 PBS Frontline investigation into the city’s 
drug trade opened with a jarring declaration: "Behind the gleaming face of 
Dallas lies a war zone." In 1991, local homicides surpassed 500, giving Dallas 
one of the highest murder rates of any city in the country.

"The thing that stood out nationally was the murder rate," said former Dallas 
police Chief Ben Click, who took over the city’s police department not long 
after homicides peaked. "For a city that size to have 500 murders was amazing. 
... And those were just the murders. How many people were shot and all but 
didn’t die?"

By the early 1990s there was general consensus that something needed to be done 
about crime, but chasmic disagreement over how to address it. Democrats — under 
the leadership of familiar names like Clinton and Biden — championed sprawling 
prison expansion, harsher sentencing, and reloaded police forces. Republicans 
pushed back, wary of the unbridled federal spending needed for crime-control.

But among liberals, there was one faction that was deeply ambivalent about 
Clinton's tough-on-crime platform: black Democrats.

"Crime bills are tough votes for black lawmakers,” The New York Times observed 
days before the crime bill’s passage. “Blacks are far more likely than whites 
to be victims of violent crime, and some polls have found that they are more 
afraid than whites of being murdered or mugged.”

At the same time, harsh policing and drastic prison expansion seemed sure to 
disproportionately affect black communities.

The NAACP campaigned hard against the bill, denouncing it as “draconian” and “a 
crime against the American people,” and members of the Congressional Black 
Caucus, fearful of how Clinton’s legislation could harm black communities, 
introduced a competing bill with a heavier emphasis on alternatives to 
incarceration and billions of dollars towards drug rehabilitation and early 
intervention programs.

This uneasiness extended to Dallas' black community leaders. Diane Ragsdale, an 
activist who served as city councilwoman in Dallas during the 1980s and 1990s, 
said that she distrusted the bill’s focus on police enforcement and drastic 
sentencing laws.

"Even with the crack epidemic, many of us as activists, we didn't support that 
at all," she said.

Johnson herself recalled that her choice to support the bill was not easy. She 
was an old friend of Clinton's, dating back to the 1970s. Years later, the he 
wrote in his memoir that Johnson was “one of [his] strongest allies in 
Congress." (Johnson told the Tribune that she spoke with Clinton often during 
his presidency but said she could not recall any specific conversations about 
the crime bill.) But at the time, Johnson cited grievances with the bill’s 
expansion of the death penalty, as well as the omission of a racial justice 
component written by the Congressional Black Caucus.

She said she made her decision after being moved into action by people in her 
district.

"I had just decided that I was going to take the safe way and vote against it," 
she told the Tribune. "But when I got home and talked with constituents and 
looked at the situation being described to me in that community, I came back 
and said to the caucus members that my vote [was] going to be for the bill."

The crime bill eventually passed with the votes of 26 of 38 Congressional Black 
Caucus members.

"I don't apologize"

For 2 decades after the crime bill’s passage, debates over its legacy were 
mostly dormant. But as the bill's architects attempt to woo a new generation of 
voters who have rigid —sometimes uncompromising — political standards, power 
brokers like Clinton and Biden have had to reckon with the consequences of 
decades-old decisions. Clinton apologized for his bill's contribution to 
incarceration levels in 2016. Biden, however, has been less repentant.

"This idea that the crime bill generated mass incarceration—it did not generate 
mass incarceration," he said at a campaign event in May.

Johnson, too, pushed back on claims that the bill had damaging effects on black 
Americans. She noted that she has received "not a single complaint" about her 
vote in the decades since the bill passed and added that she sees little value 
in the tendency of younger liberal voters to resurrect bygone decisions in 
their attacks on Biden and other Democrats of their generation.

"I don’t know that you can go back and change history," Johnson said. "No 
matter how much noise you keep up, it’s not going to change."

And while Johnson conceded that the bill may have been overly aggressive in its 
enforcement prescriptions, she maintained that a softer bill would never have 
passed: "You can always look at something in retrospect and say what you could 
have done and should have done, but you’ve got to have the votes to get 
something done."

Defenders of the crime bill often point to the precipitous decline of crime 
rates across the board in the 1990s and early 2000s. They argue that the bill 
was the saving grace of formerly crime-ridden American cities.

But crime rates were already trending down across the country by the time of 
Clinton's inauguration.

"The bill itself, at least in the academic world, was not seen as any 
significant contributor to any kind of reductions in crime in the United States 
— and in the city of Dallas — because those crime rates were already 
decreasing," said Alex Piquero, a professor of criminology at the University of 
Texas at Dallas. He noted that Dallas' crime rates began to slide after their 
peak in 1990 and 1991, and had a significantly steeper drop in the four years 
leading up to the crime bill than in the 4 years after it.

Piquero said that a convergence of many factors — a booming economy, "an aging 
of the crime prone population," the stabilization of the crack market, and the 
emergence of new law enforcement technologies like CompStat policing — led to 
the sudden reversal of national crime trends in the mid-1990s far more than 
anything in Clinton's crime bill.

The bill's contribution to mass incarceration, however, may also be overblown. 
Piquero and other experts point out that, although the bill did contribute to 
an increase in prison population, incarceration levels were climbing at a 
steeper rate in the years before the bill’s passage.

For some black criminal justice reformists in Dallas, Johnson’s support for the 
crime bill came as little surprise. John Wiley Price, a longtime county 
commissioner with significant sway on Dallas' south side, had sharp words for 
her record on criminal justice.

"It’s kind of typical Congresswoman Johnson," Price told the Tribune, adding 
that he is "unaware of any reform advocacy that she has championed."

Two-and-a-half decades later, bipartisan consensus over the methods of criminal 
justice reform has shifted. Texas, long the epitome of mass incarceration and 
death row sentencing, has become a leader in certain areas of criminal justice 
reform. Last year, President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, a sweeping 
prison reform bill that was shepherded through Congress by Sen. John Cornyn, 
R-Texas, and supported by many Texans on both sides of the aisle.

Still, homicide rates are surging in Dallas again, and Price expressed 
frustration at the perennial damage levied on black Dallas residents, both by 
crime itself and by misguided attempts to reform it.

"We've seen these cycles," he said. "Whether it’s a Joe Biden or an Eddie 
Bernice, until we have somebody standing and really putting their finger to the 
dam, we’re going to see this."

Stern in her defense of her record, Johnson argued that Price's voice is not 
representative of her district.

"I've stayed in touch with law enforcement, with the police department, with 
the D.A.'s office, with mayors," she said. "You're always going to have some 
antagonists, but they can't boss you. I cannot be bossed."

For Johnson, the black incarceration boom of the last few decades is not the 
result of the 1994 crime bill, but rather the product of the broken criminal 
justice system tasked with putting its laws into effect.

"I don’t apologize for voting for the bill," she said, "What I don’t have 
control over is how the bill was implemented. I don’t have control over 
eradicating racism. If I could you know I would do something about that."

(source: Texas Tribune)








PENNSYLVANIA:

Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner Argues PA Death Penalty Is 
Unconstitutional----"Because the death penalty has repeatedly been handed out 
in an unreliable and arbitrary manner, it cannot survive the state 
Constitution’s ban on cruel punishments."



A petition before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court by 2 death row inmates could 
upend Pennsylvania's dysfunctional death penalty, and it has one extremely 
unusual supporter: the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.

In a legal brief filed Monday night in support of the petition, Philadelphia 
D.A. Larry Krasner, who ran for office promising to never pursue a death 
sentence, argues Pennsylvania's death penalty is applied unreliably and 
arbitrarily, violating the state constitution's ban on cruel punishment.

To reach its conclusions, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office reviewed 
every case where a Philadelphia defendant received a death sentence between 
1978 and 2017. The study found that 72 percent of those 155 sentences were 
ultimately overturned—more than half of them for ineffective legal assistance.

"Where nearly three out of every four death sentences have been 
overturned—after years of litigation at significant taxpayer expense—there can 
be no confidence that capital punishment has been carefully reserved for the 
most culpable defendants, as our Constitution requires," the office wrote in 
its brief. "Where a majority of death sentenced defendants have been 
represented by poorly compensated, poorly supported court-appointed attorneys, 
there is a significant likelihood that capital punishment has not been reserved 
for the 'worst of the worst.'"

The brief was filed in the case of Jermont Cox and Kevin Marinelli, who were 
sentenced to death for 3 drug-related murders in 1992 and a fatal 1994 
shooting, respectively. Their petition argues that the Pennsylvania Supreme 
Court should strike down the state's capital punishment system because of its 
"pervasive unreliability" and "systemic dysfunction," citing the scores of 
reversed death penalty sentences, as well as 6 death row exonerations.

Cox and Marinelli's petition has attracted amici briefs from groups like the 
Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the NAACP 
Legal Defense Fund.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania attorney general, the Philadelphia chapter of the 
Fraternal Order of Police, and several groups of Republican state lawmakers 
filed briefs opposing the petition. But it appears to be the first time, at 
least as far as several criminal justice experts can tell, that a district 
attorney has argued broadly in court against a state death penalty.

"There have been individual cases where a particular defendant challenges the 
death penalty and a prosecutor who reviews the case on appeal decides, you 
know, we can't defend what happened here," says David Rudovsky, a professor at 
the University of Pennsylvania Law School. "I don't know of any case of a 
broad-scale attack like this on the whole system, where a prosecutor agreed 
that the death penalty, at least in application here in Pennsylvania, is 
unconstitutional."

Krasner, a former civil rights attorney, was elected in 2017 and is one of the 
most high-profile members of a wave of progressive candidates who have run for 
prosecutor offices in major cities in recent years, promising to roll back 
policies they say contribute to mass incarceration.

Krasner pledged during his campaign to never seek the death penalty. That 
decision, along with others, has led to intense opposition from police unions 
and critical local news coverage.

Although Pennsylvania is 1 of 30 states where the death penalty is still on the 
books, there have only been 3 executions in the state since 1978. The last took 
place in 1999. 4 years ago, Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced a 
moratorium on the death penalty that still remains in place.

Nationwide, the use of capital punishment has steadily declined and become more 
geographically isolated over the past few decades. Only a handful of counties 
in the U.S. are responsible for the majority of new death penalty sentences. 
Last year, the Washington Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty 
"because it is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner"—much the 
same argument that Cox and Marinelli, as well as Krasner, make.

However, the extraordinary cost of death penalty trials and near non-existence 
of executions have not stopped Pennsylvania prosecutors from pursuing capital 
punishment. A 2016 analysis by the Reading Eagle found that the state had spent 
$816 million on the death penalty since 1978.

(source: reason.com)

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

The death penalty punishes PA’s corrections workers, too | Opinion



Graterford Prison is where I started my corrections career over 20 years ago. 
When I retired in 2018, I was its superintendent, responsible for the safety 
and well-being of hundreds of employees and 3600 prisoners.

My work was deeply rewarding, but nothing prepared me for the level of human 
suffering I experienced in the restricted housing unit where death-sentenced 
prisoners are held. Few outside of my profession realize how difficult capital 
punishment is for the staff; even when executions are not being carried out, 
housing death row prisoners can be profoundly damaging.

The corrections profession learned long ago that working with death row 
prisoners causes trauma, and officers working on death row today are regularly 
monitored for mental health concerns. No officer is permitted to work there 
longer than 2 years, and most “tours of duty” on the row are much shorter. 
Although staff members leave the environment, psychological effects can persist 
for years.

The work hardens you in order to survive it. It can make you frozen inside – 
sometimes to a point where even your loved ones’ own tears won’t move you. Some 
officers indulge in alcohol, drugs or other dangerous behaviors to find relief. 
Some isolate and leave their families. Some have even taken their own lives 
when it becomes too overwhelming. The stress on death row staff is 
seldom-discussed but undeniably real. Each tour of duty on death row makes you 
feel less human.

It hurt to be unable to help colleagues harmed by death row conditions, but I 
could do even less for the death row prisoners themselves. Politics, policy and 
post order often kept us from providing professionally prudent care. Condemned 
prisoners are not permitted to participate in programs, religious ceremonies or 
work opportunities. By the end of my career, some of them had not been outside 
of their cells in years.

Death row was designed to provide temporary housing prior to an execution, but 
today’s death-sentenced prisoners live inhumanely for many years or decades 
while staff struggle to help them survive their “temporary” stay. 
Pennsylvania’s last execution was in 1999. For the condemned men, decades pass 
with no human touch except when being handcuffed and shackled.

Death row prisoners live in small, barren cells. Open bars allow zero privacy. 
Toileting, personal care, meals and all of the activities of daily living occur 
in constant view of others. Phone calls are limited. Visits occur in modules. 
Each time a prisoner leaves his cell he is subjected to a strip search.

Although death row was not designed as an asylum for the mentally ill, that’s 
often how I remember it . . . the cacophony of the Restricted Housing Unit for 
inmates with severe adjustment problems in the prison – the screaming, the 
yelling, the banging. All of that was imposed on the condemned men, most of 
whom lived at times in deathly silence.

During the last few years of my career, we were preparing to move to the newly 
built prison at Phoenix, a much more modern corrections facility. Graterford, 
built in 1929, was already old when I began working there. Cell doors creak and 
stick, staircases have fallen away from the concrete walls, the roofs leak, and 
the age-old plumbing is in constant need of repair.ically broken and in tears 
for his critically-ill child, who had been unable to contact his family for 
days.

The Department of Corrections has thousands of highly professional and deeply 
committed staff. But nearly all of their training and expertise are cast aside 
when it comes to maintaining condemned prisoners in their tiny boxes for 
decades.

During the last few years of my career, we were preparing to move to the newly 
built prison at Phoenix, a much more modern corrections facility. Graterford, 
built in 1929, was already old when I began working there. Cell doors creak and 
stick, staircases have fallen away from the concrete walls, the roofs leak, and 
the age-old plumbing is in constant need of repair.

Prisons eventually outlive their usefulness and turn into relics of an 
unfamiliar past. Maybe the death penalty is a relic that can also be replaced. 
I know that doing so would remove a huge burden from the lives of corrections 
staff.

As government officials in Harrisburg contemplate what to do about the death 
penalty, I urge them to factor in the human toll it takes on Pennsylvania’s 
corrections profession. Death sentences punish them, too.

(source: Opinion, Ms. Cynthia Link served as the Superintendent of Graterford 
Prison from 2015-2018----pennlive.com)








KENTUCKY:

KY Judge Rules Death Penalty Protocol Unconstitutional



A Franklin County judge has ruled the state's protocol for carrying out the 
death penalty is unconstitutional. The ruling by Judge Phillip Shepherd came in 
response to a case filed by a group of death-row inmates, who argued 
corrections department regulations don't protect people with intellectual 
disabilities.

Nearly 20 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of people with 
intellectual disabilities. Aaron Bentley, chair of the Kentucky Coalition to 
Abolish the Death Penalty, said the judge's decision highlights one of the many 
flaws in the state's system.

"What Kentucky is asking us is to trust that a person not only deserves - in 
their estimation - to be executed, but is fit to be executed,” Bentley said. 
“And what the decision from the Franklin circuit court shows is that we can't 
trust that."

Bentley pointed out the state once relied on IQ testing to determine whether or 
not a person could be considered intellectually disabled. In 2018, Kentucky's 
Supreme Court ruled IQ alone is not sufficient to determine mental competency. 
Bentley said corrections departments should be performing comprehensive 
psychological testing to ensure defendants have the ability to understand why 
they are being sentenced to die.

Litigation over Kentucky's execution protocol has been ongoing for more than a 
decade. Republican State Rep. Chad McCoy of Bardstown said Kentuckians should 
be aware that legal fees and other costs involved in death-row cases are 
draining state funds.

"Right now with the death penalty in Kentucky, since 1978, I think we've had 33 
people sentenced to death, but we've only actually executed 3. And of those 3, 
one of them voluntarily said 'I'm not going to do any appeals; go ahead and do 
it.' And the other 2 actually went through the system,” McCoy said. “We waste 
just a ton of money on the appeals, that last literally for years, and years 
and years, and years."

The state spends an estimated $10 million per year on death-penalty court 
proceedings, according to the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy.

(source: publicnewsservice.org)








KANSAS:

US Supreme Court sets Oct. 7 for appeal in Osage County murder case Featured



3 Kansas court cases will be heard by the United States Supreme Court this 
fall, including one from Osage County.

The case of Kansas v. James Kraig Kahler will be heard Oct. 7. Kahler does not 
argue killing his wife, 2 daughters and his wife's grandmother in November 
2009. However, he says state law did not let him assert an insanity defense and 
that prevention was unconstitutional.

Kahler was convicted of capital murder in 2011. Last year, the Kansas Supreme 
Court affirmed both the conviction and resulting death penalty sentence in 
Kahler's case. The US Supreme Court has granted Kahler's request to have that 
decision reviewed.

(source: KVOE news)








NEW MEXICO:

New Mexico Supreme Court Vacates Death Sentences Of The Last Inmates On Death 
Row



The State Supreme Court has set aside the death sentences of the only inmates 
awaiting execution in New Mexico, concluding that their sentences were 
unlawfully disproportionate in comparison to the penalties imposed in similar 
murder cases.

In a divided decision, 3 justices sent the cases of Timothy Allen and Robert 
Fry back to a District Court in San Juan County to impose sentences of life 
imprisonment.

New Mexico repealed the death penalty a decade ago for murders committed after 
July 1, 2009. However, the death sentences of Allen and Fry remained in place 
because they were convicted and sentenced years before New Mexico abolished 
capital punishment.

The 1979 law under which Allen and Fry were sentenced requires the state’s 
highest court to review capital punishment cases and prohibits a sentence of 
death when it is “excessive or disproportionate” to the penalties in similar 
cases. The requirement for a “comparative proportionality” review was adopted 
by the Legislature to protect against the death penalty being arbitrarily 
imposed in violation of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual 
punishment.

“In comparing Petitioner’s cases to other equally horrendous cases in which 
defendants were not sentenced to death, we find no meaningful distinction which 
justifies imposing the death sentence upon Fry and Allen. The absence of such a 
distinction renders the ultimate penalty of death contrary to the people’s 
mandate that the sentence be proportionate to the penalties imposed in similar 
cases,” the Court said in a majority opinion written by Justice Barbara J. 
Vigil.

Retired Justices Edward L. Chávez and Charles W. Daniels joined in the majority 
decision and each wrote specially concurring opinions. Chief Justice Judith K. 
Nakamura dissented and Retired Justice Petra Jimenez Maes joined in the 
dissent.

“The Majority misstates the governing law and has done what our Legislature 
would not: repeal the death penalty in its entirety for all defendants in New 
Mexico,” Chief Justice Nakamura wrote in the dissenting opinion.

Justices Chávez, Daniels and Maes remained assigned to the death penalty case 
after their retirement last year. The 3 justices were on the Court when Allen 
and Fry brought their legal challenge more than 5 years ago.

Until 2009, New Mexico allowed the death penalty only for first-degree murders 
with certain aggravating circumstances, including a killing during a kidnapping 
and the murder of a police officer. Allen was convicted of kidnapping, 
attempted rape and murdering 17-year-old Sandra Phillips in 1994. Fry was 
sentenced to death for fatally stabbing and bludgeoning Betty Lee, a mother of 
5, in 2000. He also was convicted of kidnapping, attempted rape and evidence 
tampering. In other cases, Fry was sentenced to life in prison for three 
murders in 1996 and 1998 in San Juan County.

The state’s highest court had previously affirmed the convictions and death 
sentences of Allen and Fry. Each of the men had post-conviction legal 
challenges pending when the state repealed the death penalty. They appealed to 
the Supreme Court after a district court rejected arguments that their death 
sentences were unconstitutional because New Mexico had abolished capital 
punishment.

In today’s decision, the Court did not address the issue of constitutional 
violations and instead concluded that the death sentences were invalid under 
statutory safeguards established by the Legislature for death penalty cases.

The Court initially heard arguments in the combined cases in 2014, and later 
asked attorneys for additional written briefing on whether to modify its 
approach for determining whether a death sentence is excessive or 
disproportionate to sentences in similar cases. The Court’s majority expanded 
the cases reviewed for an assessment of the death sentences of Allen and Fry, 
and concluded that “a death sentence is disproportionate if juries do not 
generally impose a death sentence in similar cases and there is no real 
justification for the death sentence.”

In more than half a century, the only person executed in New Mexico was Terry 
Clark. He was put to death by lethal injection in 2001 for the murder, 
kidnapping and rape of a nine-year-old girl. The execution occurred after Clark 
dropped all appeals of his death sentence.

>From July 1979 through December 2007, juries imposed a death sentence in 15 
cases and 12 of those were vacated — seven reversed on direct appeal or 
post-conviction proceedings and five were commuted in 1986 by then Gov. Toney 
Anaya. One inmate died in prison while awaiting execution. During that time, 
prosecutors sought the death penalty in 211 cases but only 52 cases advanced to 
a separate proceeding for jurors to decide on imposing a death sentence.

Allen and Fry will be eligible for parole after serving 30 years under a 
sentence of life imprisonment. But if paroled, they would immediately begin 
serving additional sentences for their other convictions, Justice Chávez wrote 
in his concurring opinion. Allen, who soon turns 56, faces an additional 25 
years after serving his murder sentence. Fry, 45, will never be eligible for 
release from prison, the Justice said, because he faces 120 years for the life 
sentences of his 1st-degree murder convictions.

Justice Daniels, in a concurring opinion, said “when the collective result of 
all the actions taken under authority of our state justice system is that 1 or 
even 3 cold-blooded murders out of hundreds are executed by the state while the 
equally culpable majority are spared, our state cannot honestly claim it has 
imposed the death penalty in a proportionate manner.”

“A killer’s crimes reflect who he is. What we do to the killer reflects who we 
are,” Justice Daniels wrote. “Can we really look anyone in the eye and say that 
executing these 2 defendants would be proportionate when compared to non-deadly 
punishment our state has overwhelmingly meted out in virtually all equally 
serious 1st-degree murder cases, and specifically in similar cases, since 
enactment of the Capital Felony Sentencing Act in 1979? I, for one, cannot 
honestly do so.”

In the dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Nakamura wrote: “The legislative 
command that this Court assure that Fry’s and Allen’s death sentences are not 
‘disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases’ should not be 
construed in the way embraced by the Majority. They perceive in the language 
authority to conclude that, because so few offenders in New Mexico have ever 
been sentenced to die, no offenders shall ever again be sentenced to die in New 
Mexico. I respectfully contend that the Majority’s judgment is error.”

Previous New Mexico Supreme Court decisions in death penalty cases correctly 
interpreted the law, the Chief Justice wrote, “to require us to do no more than 
evaluate whether there is some precedent for the death sentence and to assure 
ourselves that the sentence is not excessive in light of the nature of the 
crime. To do anything more than this intrudes upon the capital-sentencing 
jury’s rightful, constitutional authority to extend mercy or impose death.”

(source: Los Alamos Daily Post)








ARIZONA:

Books: “Arbitrary Death” Reveals a Prosecutor’s Evolution on Capital Punishment



Rick Unklesbay served as a prosecutor in the Pima County Attorney’s Office in 
Arizona for nearly four decades, prosecuting more than 100 homicides, including 
sixteen in which death sentences were imposed. He put Don Miller on death row 
and, in November 2000, watched as Arizona put Miller to death. In Arbitrary 
Death: A Prosecutor’s Perspective on the Death Penalty, Unklesbay tells the 
story of nine of those death-penalty cases and how the arbitrary nature of the 
U.S. justice system has changed his mind about the death penalty. “Who lives 
and who dies,” he writes, “is a decision that becomes the arbitrary application 
of convoluted statutes and conflicting and inconsistent court decisions.” He 
has concluded that the system cannot fix these problems and that “the effort to 
eliminate arbitrariness in capital cases, while preserving fairness is … 
plainly doomed.” As a result, he has come to believe that “the randomness 
inherent in capital punishment should lead us to rid it from our statutes.”

Unklesbay’s book explores how a capital prosecutor in what had been one of the 
nation’s most aggressive death-penalty jurisdictions now finds life in prison a 
better sentencing option than the death penalty. In an interview with Arizona 
Public Media, he said, “seeing how these cases proceed, it strikes me that if 
people really knew what the system was about they would say: ‘We don’t need 
this. We have an alternative of natural life.’”

Each chapter in Arbitrary Death focuses on a capital case that Unklesbay tried 
during his time as a homicide prosecutor. It includes some cases that resulted 
in death sentences and others that he believed should have, but for various 
reasons did not. “Despite the effort, expense, and time that goes into 
prosecuting and defending these cases, the ultimate decision as to whether such 
a murderer lives or dies is … dependent upon the ‘vagaries of the criminal 
justice system’” — vagaries that caused him to question the purpose and 
fairness of the death penalty.

By the end of the book, Unklesbay has addressed some of the other problems 
associated with the death penalty, including its exorbitant costs, its long 
history of racial disparities, and the fact that our justice system is not 
perfect. He suggests, “The question one must answer then is, if our system 
allows for wrongful convictions, are we willing to continue to execute 
convicted murderers?” In his very last section, aptly titled “Final Words” he 
explains the procedures that go into an execution. The process that can 
sometimes take over thirty years ends the same way that it started, with death. 
However, he says that it is “anticlimactic” because “[t]he execution has not 
brought back the victim of course and, with few exceptions, has not brought 
anyone any satisfaction.”

Rob Warden, a co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern 
University Pritzker School of Law and now co-director of Injustice Watch, calls 
Arbitrary Death a “compelling” book “that ought to be required reading by every 
prosecutor, every attorney general, every governor, and every legislator” in 
those states that still authorize capital punishment. In assessing his own 
work, Unklesbay writes, “I doubt that opponents of the death penalty will find 
any surprises here and will feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface of 
the problems associated with capital punishment. Some ardent supporters will no 
doubt feel I have betrayed them by writing that we should rid ourselves of a 
punishment we simply don’t need. Still others will think me a hypocrite for 
expressing these views while still prosecuting these cases. They are probably 
all correct.”

(source: Death Penalty Informatino Center)








NEVADA:

Nevada Supreme Court rejects killer’s bid to get off death row



The Nevada Supreme Court has denied a Reno man’s latest bid to get off death 
row for the 2008 rape and killing of a 19-year-old college student that became 
one of the highest-profile cases in the city’s history.

The high court rejected James Biela’s motion for a rehearing of the appeal it 
denied in April seeking a new penalty phase of his trial in the kidnapping and 
murder of Brianna Denison and sexual assault of 2 others near the University of 
Nevada, Reno.

Biela’s lawyers argued the jury wouldn’t have ordered Biela’s death if his 
public defenders had tried to block jurors from hearing improper evidence about 
his history of domestic violence and animal abuse.

The justices agreed the defenders were legally ineffective but ruled it 
wouldn’t have affected his sentence because of all the other overwhelming 
evidence.

(source: Nevada Appeal)








USA:

Being Pro Life: Capital Punishment: Is It Truly Justice?



The story below are summaries of 2 powerful personal interviews.

Part I

Joe D’Ambrosio was getting ready for work on September 26, 1988.

Suddenly, 2 police officers kicked in his door, pointed pistols at him, threw 
him on the ground, handcuffed him and arrested him for murder. A few months 
later his case made it to trial, and after the shortest capital trial in Ohio 
history (just over two days), he was sentenced to death for a crime he did not 
commit.

An honorably discharged sergeant from the U.S. military with no criminal 
record, Joe had no idea he would spend the next 22 years of his life on death 
row, desperately searching for someone to take up his case for a battle he was 
too poor and uneducated to fight the first time around. He had two 
court-appointed attorneys in that first trial. One was preoccupied running for 
mayor, and the other just didn’t seem to care. They both presumed he was guilty 
and made no effort to look into the facts of the case.

Ten years into his sentence, he finally found the break he needed when he was 
visited by Father Neil, a Catholic priest who also happened to be a nurse and 
an attorney. A short investigation convinced Father Neil that Joe was innocent, 
and prosecutors had just been in a hurry to convict the easiest target.

His nursing and law backgrounds gave him the insight he needed to see how 
contradictory the evidence was in Joe’s case. It took 12 more years, but Father 
Neil was eventually able to turn over crucial evidence to some attorney 
friends, got Joe an evidentiary hearing, and the case was overturned.

Joe is not alone. To date, there have been 165 exonerees from death row in the 
United States since 1973. That is about 1.6 percent of all death row 
convictions. But a 2014 study by the National Academy of Sciences estimated 
that over 4 % of death sentences in the United States are for false 
convictions. No matter how you feel about the death penalty for the guilty, 
that’s a high percentage of error in our legal system for a punishment that 
cannot be undone.

The story below is Part II of 2 powerful personal interviews.

On the other side of the courtroom, Bill Pelke stands with those who have lost 
loved ones to violent crime. Bill’s grandmother, Nana, was attacked by a group 
of teenage girls who skipped school one afternoon, looking for money to play 
arcade games. They entered her home, stabbed her to death, but only found $10 
and the keys to her car. The trial ended with one of the young women, Paula, 
being sentenced to death with tears streaming down her face. Bill watched 
stone-faced as her grandfather was led out of the courtroom for his outbursts 
of, “They’re going to kill my baby.” Three months later, Bill was unable to get 
that image out of his head. He realized that Nana would never have wanted a 
grandfather to watch his own grandchild die. Nana loved Jesus. She would have 
chosen love and forgiveness over more death.

Forgiveness was a way of life for his grandmother, so it needed to be a way of 
life for Bill as well. He changed his opinion of the death penalty, and credits 
God’s intervention in Paula’s case to ultimately get her off of death row. He 
later founded an organization called Journey of Hope, led by murder victims’ 
family members, who share their stories and go on speaking tours about how 
healing comes through love and forgiveness, not vengeance and further death. 
You can learn more about their work at journeyofhope.org. Ohioans to Stop 
Executions fights to end capital punishment, and to help overturn questionable 
convictions like Joe’s right here in Ohio. You can learn more about them or 
donate at otse.org.

(source: thecatholictelegraph.com)