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

[Rick Halperin]

March 3




NEBRASKA:

Prosecutors: Boswell, Trail began looking for someone to murder months before 
meeting Loofe



Prosecutors now allege Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell began conspiring to 
commit murder more than four months before they met Sydney Loofe, according to 
court documents.

The allegation arose in a court filing Friday afternoon in the prosecution of 
Trail, who is accused of strangling the 24-year-old Loofe in Wilber on Nov. 15, 
2017.

Assistant Nebraska Attorney General Sandra Allen filed a conspiracy to commit 
murder charge in Trail's case and alleged he and Boswell began plotting July 1 
to kill someone.

In their conspiracy, Boswell "solicited" young women on social-networking 
sites, Allen said in the filing.

Together, they selected Loofe as their victim and bought tools to kill and 
dismember her, the amended information said.

Boswell and Loofe connected on the dating app Tinder, where Boswell used the 
name "Audrey," according to investigators.

Loofe's family reported her missing Nov. 16, the morning after she went on a 
date with Boswell and then failed to report to work at the north Lincoln 
Menards.

Her body was found Dec. 4 in rural Clay County.

Prosecutors charged longtime persons of interest Trail and Boswell in June 2018 
and alleged they were recorded on surveillance cameras at the north Lincoln 
Home Depot buying unspecified supplies used in Loofe's killing and 
dismemberment hours before Boswell's date with Loofe, according to court 
documents.

No motive for killing Loofe has been made public.

But a court hearing requested by prosecutors may reveal evidence the state 
believes would show Trail's motive.

Trail has told investigators and reporters Loofe died at his hands in an 
accident, and that there were other people in the room when she died.

Trail has said that the items purchased at Home Depot on Nov. 15 were needed 
for his antiques business and for Thanksgiving.

Trail's attorney, Ben Murray, said the new charge wasn't unexpected but didn't 
have further comment Friday.

In addition to the conspiracy to commit 1st-degree murder charge, Trail faces 
counts of 1st-degree murder and improper disposal of human remains. Boswell is 
charged with 1st-degree murder and improper disposal of human remains. No 
additional charges had been filed against her as of late Friday afternoon.

Her case hasn't been set for trial.

Boswell's attorney, Todd Lancaster of the Nebraska Commission on Public 
Advocacy, declined to comment on the state's newest allegation.

In both cases, the state is seeking the death penalty.

Trail was being held Friday at the Lincoln Correctional Center, while Boswell 
remained at the Saline County jail in Wilber.

(source: Lincoln Journal Star)








COLORADO:

Colorado lawmakers will consider whether to repeal the death penalty again, as 
factors align for passage----The Colorado legislature has debated getting rid 
of capital punishment four times since 2000. The bill being brought this year 
wouldn’t send the question to voters, as proponents of lethal injection want.



Democrats are pushing to abolish the death penalty in Colorado for the 5th time 
in a dozen years, reviving a conversation that has ebbed and flowed for more 
than a decade at the Capitol but which now appears to have more momentum toward 
passage than ever before.

Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, supports abolition and his party controls the 
state’s House and Senate. Those 3 factors, which have not lined up for at least 
the past 2 decades, give the measure an open lane toward becoming law.

But capital punishment is a moral question on which public opinion is 
ever-shifting and crosses party lines. 2 prominent Democrats in the Colorado 
General Assembly this year are the closest in the statehouse to the issue and 
are also among the death penalty’s most compelling advocates.

Death Penalty in Colorado

Of the 3 men on Colorado’s death row, 2 were convicted of killing state Sen. 
Rhonda Fields’ son and his fiancée in 2005. State Rep. Tom Sullivan’s son was 
killed in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, a case that led to the gunman’s 
conviction, but no death sentence.

So even with the wind at their backs, proponents of abolishing the death 
penalty in Colorado should still expect their bill to lead to an emotional and 
complex debate. There’s also disagreement about whether repealing the death 
penalty is something state lawmakers should decide or whether it should go to a 
vote of the people.

Even one prominent opponent of capital punishment, Boulder County District 
Attorney Michael Dougherty, would like to see citizens make the decision.

“I don’t want to pretend that I have any of the solutions to address what has 
happened, what has been done or what has taken place in the past,” said state 
Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who is among those leading the repeal 
effort. “What I am asking for is an opportunity to think about: What are we 
going to do as a state moving forward, in terms of whether or not we still 
believe that the state of Colorado should be allowed to punish people by death? 
That’s the question on the table.”

Year after year, the Colorado legislature has answered that question with a 
“yes.” Efforts to abolish the law failed in 2007, 2009, 2013 and 2017.

In that span, however, Colorado juries have repeatedly rejected sentencing 
murderers to death. And, the one man who was slated to die by lethal injection, 
Nathan Dunlap, was indefinitely spared in 2013 by then-Gov. John Hickenlooper, 
who called for a statewide conversation on the issue. Dunlap remains on death 
row.

Whether the debate Hickenlooper called for has really happened is a matter of 
opinion, but capital punishment likely will be forced back into the spotlight 
in Colorado once more in the coming days and weeks.

The history of capital punishment in Colorado

The bill to take the death penalty off the table as a form of punishment in 
Colorado is expected to be introduced at the legislature as soon as this week.

Whether the measure would be retroactive to the date a crime is committed or 
when charges are filed has not been announced, but it appears the repeal would 
go into effect some time over the summer.

What the legislation would not do is impact the pending death penalty cases in 
Colorado — there are at least three — or the three men who are currently on the 
state’s death row.

Those 3 waiting to die by lethal injection include Dunlap, who shot and killed 
4 people at an Aurora Chuck E. Cheese in 1993, and Sir Mario Owens and Robert 
Ray, who in 2005 killed Javad Marshall Fields and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe. 
The appellate hearings for Owens and Ray are still ongoing.

Prosecutors have tried in recent years to seek capital punishment in a handful 
of cases, but juries rejected their efforts. Not since June 2009, when Ray was 
sentenced, has a Colorado jury signed off on death.

Three cases since then have made it to a death penalty sentencing hearing: 
James Holmes, who in July 2012 killed 12 people and injured 70 more in an 
attack on a movie theater in Aurora; Dexter Lewis, who in October 2012 killed 
five people in a robbery of Fero’s Bar & Grill in Denver; and Glen Galloway, 
who killed his ex-girlfriend in Colorado Springs in May 2016 the day after 
murdering his friend.

But juries could not unanimously decide on death sentences in those cases, 
meaning the defendants received life in prison, instead.

There are questions, as well, about whether Colorado could even carry out the 
death penalty since it appears to lack the combination of drugs needed to 
complete lethal injection as prescribed in state law. Unlike other states, 
Colorado does not allow for capital punishment to be carried out in any way 
other than lethal injection.

The last execution in Colorado was in 1997, when Gary Lee Davis died by lethal 
injection for the 1986 kidnapping, rape and murder of Virginia “Ginny” May in 
Arapahoe County.

Before Davis, the last person to be executed in Colorado was Luis Jose Monge in 
1967. He was convicted of killing his pregnant wife and three of his 10 
children. There have been 103 people executed by legal order in Colorado, 
dating back to before it was even a state.

“So fundamentally wrong”

If lawmakers decide to abolish the death penalty this year, they would follow 
five other state legislatures that have repealed their capital punishment laws 
in recent years. Altogether, there are 19 states in the U.S. that don’t allow 
the death penalty.

Polis declined an interview with The Colorado Sun through a spokeswoman, but in 
a statement he said he’s “been clear that if the legislature passed a bill to 
abolish the death penalty, I would sign it.” In an interview with Colorado 
Public Radio, he suggested that if a bill abolishing capital punishment were to 
pass he “certainly take that as a strong indication that those who are 
currently on death row should have their sentences commuted to life in prison.”

The arguments against the death penalty fall along the lines of race, judicial 
mistakes, morality and cost.

“To me, the entire criminal justice system has been built on a legacy of 
controlling too often the lives of people of color,” Gonzales said. “The entire 
criminal justice system is so intertwined with the issues of racism and the 
legacies of racism. The issue that has been, to me, sort of the most concrete 
demonstration of that control of the criminal justice system: Whether the 
system itself can actually take your life. Not just your liberty, not just your 
opportunity, but life itself.”

She added: “I’ve just been struck by that as so fundamentally wrong, 
particularly when you zoom out from an individual case and you start to look at 
systematically — the fact that so many of the people who are actually sentenced 
to the death penalty are more often than not black men.”

All 3 men on Colorado’s death row are black. A University of Denver law school 
study in 2015 found that Colorado prosecutors were “more likely to seek the 
death penalty against minority defendants than against white defendants.” 
Studies in other states have also shown defendants of color are more likely to 
be sentenced to death.

More than 150 death row inmates across the nation have also been released from 
prison after new evidence showed their innocence since 1973, according to the 
Death Penalty Information Center. None of those were in Colorado, however, 
though there are people in the state’s history who have been removed from death 
row upon appeal.

“I think the death penalty is an absolutely permanent determination,” said Rep. 
Adrienne Benavidez, an Adams County Democrat who is also leading the repeal 
charge. “Judges and juries can make mistakes.”

She’s also bothered by the morality of the state putting someone to death.

“We’re one of the few more industrialized countries that have the death 
penalty, which I think is a statement in and of itself,” she said. “To me, life 
imprisonment is sufficient punishment. I don’t believe in an eye for an eye 
because it’s never an eye for an eye.”

And then there is the cost. The Aurora theater shooting trial, alone, cost at 
least $3 million and likely more. According to various fiscal analyses, the 
estimated cost of the death penalty on Colorado taxpayers — for lawyers 
prosecuting and defending cases and litigating appeals — is $700,000 to $1 
million per year.

Proponents of repealing capital punishment in Colorado point to those numbers, 
which mount up over years of appeals, as clear economic reasons against the 
practice.

“The death penalty is costly. It is applied unevenly and it is basically 
immoral,” said state Sen. Lois Court, a Denver Democrat who cast 1 of the votes 
preventing a repeal bill from passing in 2013. She said her decision then came 
after then-Gov. Hickenlooper indicated he would veto the measure, but that as 
public opinion has changed so have her beliefs.

She will be a “yes” vote for repealing the death penalty this year.

“Is it right for the state to do what we would be punishing the individual for 
having done? No,” she said. “To me that’s a very basic equation. It’s not the 
right thing to do.”

Republican Sen. Kevin Priola, of Henderson, says he will support the repeal for 
all of the reasons others oppose it. But he says primarily his opposition is 
faith-based. He is Catholic.

“I think there’s a lot of arguments to repeal it and there’s not many really 
good arguments, in my opinion, to keep it,” he said.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat, and some of the state’s top 
prosecutors also support abolishing the death penalty. Among them are Denver 
District Attorney Beth McCann and Dougherty, the Boulder County district 
attorney.

Dougherty wants the death penalty repeal to go to a vote of the people and be 
placed into Colorado’s constitution. That would mean it couldn’t be undone by 
state lawmakers should political circumstances change at the Capitol.

“I’ve seen horrific things in my career,” Dougherty said, “but I’ve never been 
a supporter of the death penalty.”

And that belief has never really been in question, he says, even through 
witnessing carnage — in-person — like after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on New 
York City. “I’ve certainly given it a lot of thought,” Dougherty said. “But I 
would not say I’ve wavered, no.”

“It is truly saved for the worst of the worst kind of cases”

The 18th Judicial District is where all 3 men on Colorado’s death row were 
sentenced to die by lethal injection. It’s also where Holmes was prosecuted and 
a handful of other potential death penalty cases were heard in recent years.

Ask District Attorney George Brauchler, a Republican whose term has been 
dominated by his support for capital punishment, why he supports its use and he 
produces a list of reasons. Among them: It saves taxpayers money because it 
drives plea agreements in first-degree murder cases, helping victims avoid 
reliving their experiences during grueling trials.

“That’s real cost savings,” he said. “That’s real savings to victims.”

Brauchler is also chief among those who think the issue should be sent to the 
ballot for voters to decide. Anything less, he says, sends a message that 
Colorado lawmakers don’t trust the people to decide. After all, they’ve been 
given tough decisions before: marijuana, taxes, and oil and gas regulation.

“Why can they be trusted with all of these issues, none of which are more 
complicated or more serious?” he said.

Brauchler predicted if the repeal passes in the legislature, a ballot 
initiative will be brought to reinstate it. That’s what happened in Nebraska, 
where the state legislature abolished capital punishment in 2015 but voters 
brought it back in a statewide vote the next year.

Recent polling on capital punishment in Colorado is sparse. But in 2015, a 
Quinnipiac University poll showed that 67 % of the state’s voters thought the 
death penalty should continue to be law, while 26 % said it should be 
abolished.

Colorado voters rejected a ballot measure to repeal the death penalty in 1966.

Jim Bullock, the district attorney for several counties in southeast Colorado, 
agrees that the people should make the determination. The Republican points out 
that capital punishment is used sparingly in the state because of the strict 
rules governing when it’s allowed.

In Colorado, the death penalty can only be sought in a first-degree murder case 
against someone who has killed in an “especially heinous, cruel, or depraved 
manner.” The penalty also is available in cases where the victim is a police 
officer or other first responder, a judge, an elected official or a witness to 
a crime. If a defendant kills a pregnant woman, multiple people at once, or 
more than one person in multiple criminal episodes they are also eligible for 
capital punishment.

“It is truly saved for the worst of the worst kind of cases,” Bullock said. 
“The morality issue — that’s for each and every individual to determine. You 
cannot legislate morality, it’s what the overall sense of justice is for all of 
the community and all of the citizens.”

Bullock’s office is pursuing a death penalty case against Miguel 
Contreras-Perez, who is accused of killing Arkansas Valley Correctional 
Facility corrections officer Mary Ricard in 2012. At the time of the attack, 
Contreras-Perez was serving 35 years to life in prison for the kidnapping and 
rape of a teenage girl.

Cases like that one are why Sen. Bob Gardner, a Colorado Springs Republican, 
has voted again and again to keep the death penalty.

“I believe that the death penalty is appropriate for the most heinous sorts of 
crimes, and I believe it is a deterrent for certain types of crime when there 
is no other deterrent, in particular those who are already incarcerated for 
lengthy sentences really have no deterrent for committing a murder of a 
corrections officer,” he said.

Gardner says he has asked himself if a Colorado jury would ever sentence a 
defendant to death given the number of recent cases where they’ve refused to do 
so. But that’s not the point, he said, “the possibility of the death penalty is 
as important as the imposition of the death penalty.”

“It was within the first month that I was in the General Assembly that I 
debated this issue,” said Gardner, who first became a state lawmaker in 2007 
and is the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary committee. “It’s 2019 and 
this issue is still being debated. I think the debate is fair enough. We should 
always ask ourselves as a society: Does it continue to be right? Does it 
continue to be appropriate? For me, that answer will always be ‘yes.’”

Democratic Sen. Nancy Todd, of Aurora, is among those who have also been part 
of the debate at the Capitol for many years. She’s voted for and against bills 
to repeal the death penalty. She hasn’t made up her mind about this year’s 
version.

“As a Christian, it’s troubling to say that we will make that final call,” she 
said. “At the same time, I also live in Aurora and lived through the Chuck E. 
Cheese massacre and I do believe there are consequences for your actions. All 
of those different angles are the things that I take into consideration.”

The parents at the legislature

In January, Sen. Fields took to the podium on the Senate floor and began a 
speech that immediately captured the attention of everyone in the room.

“Today my heart is heavy,” she began. “On this day, Jan. 29, 1983, I gave birth 
to my only son. He turns 36 years old in heaven. I can tell you that living 
without him has been a very lonely journey. I can still remember what it was 
like to carry him for nine months. I can remember what it was like when I saw 
him and met him for the first time.”

Fields’ son, Javad, was 22 when he and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe, were gunned 
down on June 20, 2005, in Aurora. Javad was assisting police as a witness in 
the murder of his best friend, who had been killed by Sir Mario Owens.

Owens later opened fire on the couple, targeting Javad for his cooperation.

Since then, Fields has entered politics and risen to a top position in the 
Colorado Senate as Democrats’ assistant majority leader. She is against 
repealing the death penalty and said she plans to be vocal about her 
opposition.

“It’s going to be a difficult conversation, but it’s one that we have to have,” 
she said. “I think that’s how we get at good public policy, when we talk 
through it and we don’t push through it without having a full debate. I’m 
looking forward to having that debate and that discussion on the floor if it 
makes it that far. I’m not afraid of it. It’s not hurtful for me because it’s 
something that we have to talk about. For me to shy away from it or to shrink 
from it is just not something that I can do. I’m going to speaking out and 
address the issue as it’s confronted to me with.”

Fields, who is black, rejects arguments made against the death penalty on the 
basis of race and cost.

“What price do you put on justice?” she said. “What value do you want to put on 
my son’s life and his fiancée life? I don’t know if there is a price tag that 
you can put on justice. Justice is very expensive. I know how much we spend 
down here on the Department of Corrections and our judicial branch.”

She is joined in her opposition by Sullivan, a fellow Democrat who is in the 
House. His son, Alex, was murdered in the Aurora theater shooting. Sullivan 
spent roughly three months watching the death penalty prosecution of his son’s 
killer unfold in an Arapahoe County courtroom.

Sullivan says he understands the problem with the death penalty, but still 
feels that “as a society, we should be able to do that.” He says he would 
rather fix capital punishment in Colorado this year rather than do away with 
it.

“I’m not going to be counting votes against it. I’m not going to do that,” he 
said. “I will tell my story and leave it at that. But I have some very poignant 
stories to tell. I mean, it is very vivid in my memory — several instances 
during that trial that I will relay to the people that are sitting here that 
they have not heard from anyone else. And that they wouldn’t hear from anybody 
else.”

One conversation with prosecutors in particular stands out for Sullivan, the 
one when he had to say aloud that he wanted them to seek the death penalty for 
the gunman. He compared it to the questions flight attendants ask those who sit 
in an exit row on an airplane about being willing to assist in an emergency. 
Federal rules mandate that passengers have to verbally respond.

“The only thing even comparable, that maybe you can understand, is if you get 
in those three (exit) rows of seats in the middle of the airplane where you get 
the extra legroom and they come and ask you those questions,” Sullivan said. 
“When they look at you, you actually have to say to them that you understand 
the questions that they asked. This was exactly the same type of thing. You 
couldn’t nod your head, you couldn’t, you know, mumble or just give them a head 
shake. No, you actually had to say the words across from them. ‘Yes, I want 
that person put to death.’"

(source: The Colorado Sun)








CALIFORNIA:

Newsom right to order fuller review of Kevin Cooper’s death penalty case



The doubts about Kevin Cooper’s guilt in a 1983 killing in Southern California 
would justify re-examining his conviction even if his life weren’t at stake. 
That Cooper faces the death penalty makes thorough reconsideration even more 
crucial.

Gov. Gavin Newsom noted as much in a recent executive order requiring 
additional DNA testing of the evidence against Cooper, who was nearly executed 
in 2004. “Especially in cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate 
punishment of death,” Newsom’s order says, “I need to be satisfied that all 
relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined.” It’s an imperative that 
California officials have been too slow to recognize.

On his way out of office, nearly three years after he received Cooper’s 
clemency petition, Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, ordered new DNA testing 
of four pieces of evidence: a shirt, a towel, and the handle and sheath of a 
hatchet used in the crime. Newsom’s order expands the testing to blood and hair 
samples collected from the victims and the crime scene along with a button 
alleged to be from the killer’s shirt.

Cooper, who had escaped from a nearby prison shortly before the crime was 
committed, was convicted of the horrific killing of a San Bernardino County 
couple, their 10-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old boy staying with them, as 
well as the near-killing of the couple’s 8-year-old son. He has maintained his 
innocence, however, and discrepancies in witness accounts and forensic evidence 
have persuaded a federal appellate judge, a New York Times columnist and others 
that Cooper was wrongly convicted. Sen. Kamala Harris, who as state attorney 
general rebuffed requests for a review of the case, endorsed Cooper’s call for 
new DNA testing last year.

California voters rejected a repeal of the state’s death penalty in 2016 while 
approving a measure to speed up capital punishment, which hasn’t been carried 
out here since 2006. Cooper’s case could raise more questions about the wisdom 
of that course. (source: Editorial Board, San Francisco Chronicle)








USA:

How Trump set back the death-penalty fight



Campaigners against the death penalty are now mulling other strategies to bring 
an end to the practice in the United States and they are focusing on 
state-level politics.

Since his appointment, President Donald Trump has appointed two 
pro-death-penalty judges to the United States Supreme Court, a development 
abolitionists call a major setback.

So now, they are proposing trying to convert governors of the states where the 
death penalty is carried out and they want to reach out to district attorneys, 
too.

In October, Washington became the 20th American state to abolish the death 
penalty, but it remains on the books in 30 other states although some do not 
actually carry out executions.

Bill Pelke and the Reverend Jack Sullivan Jr are both relatives of murder 
victims. They were among 1,500 participants at the 7th World Congress Against 
the Death Penalty in Brussels, Belgium.

Today, Pelke is the president of Journey of Hope, a non-profit group made up of 
families of murder victims, promoting restoration and rehabilitation, and 
Sullivan, a board member.

They see Trump’s presidency as a setback in the death-penalty fight and have 
been trying to figure out how to get around him.

“Trump wants the death penalty for drug dealers. He is applauding China saying 
they are stopping drugs by executing,” the Journey of Hope president said. “The 
southern states are very hard to reach, but we are making progress.”

In Florida, for example, there has been a suspension on executions.

Sullivan agreed that the task of seeking to abolish the death penalty in 
America has become harder with Trump as president.

“We have the commander-in-chief asking people to turn off their rational 
abilities, to accept a formal punishment that has no moral legitimacy, no power 
to restore lives, no power to give healing to broken families who have lost 
loved ones to murder, no power of redemption,” Sullivan said.

He said the families of murder victims, like those in Journey of Hope, have a 
moral weight on their side to turn people’s minds away from the death penalty 
and consider the rehabilitation of murder convicts.

“It cost three times more to execute somebody than it does to keep them in 
prison for a lifetime,” Pelke interjected, saying the legal process is lengthy 
and very costly.

It’s a turnaround for Pelke, who supported the death penalty before his 
78-year-old grandmother, Ruth Pelke, was stabbed 33 times by 4 teen girls on 
May 14, 1985, in Indianapolis.

Upon conviction, the ringleader, 15-year-old Paula Cooper, was sentenced to the 
electric chair.

That’s when Pelke decided that his slain grandmother would never want to see 
anyone killed, and so he prayed for leniency.

Committed suicide

As fate had it, Cooper would spend 4 years on death row and a total of 30 years 
in prison before she was released on parole.

During the period of her incarceration, Pelke exchanged letters with Cooper and 
she promised to join the non-profit group on her release.

A condition of her parole was that she could not have physical contact with the 
victim’s family for 2 years after her release, and within that period Cooper 
committed suicide.

The 2nd co-convict, Karen Corde, died from kidney-related issues after serving 
12 years of her 60-year prison term.

The 3rd, April Beverly, was killed by her boyfriend 2 years after completing 12 
1/2 years in prison, while the 4th is now ailing after 17 1/2 years behind 
bars.

In contrast, the killer of Sullivan’s 21-year-old sister, Jennifer, was never 
brought to justice.

Jennifer was murdered in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1997 in front her 2-year-old 
daughter. The matter is now filed as a cold case.

The pastor said although the murder left the family feeling angry, they never 
once wished revenge.

“We did want the person to be accountable, but we saw no victory for our family 
in the execution of the convicted person if we had ever found the person,” 
Sullivan said.

It’s a conviction Sullivan had even before his sister’s murder when he would 
stage vigils and protest outside penitentiaries on nights when executions were 
slated to be carried out.

(source: Jamaica Gleaner)