[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.H., GA., OHIO, USA

[Rick Halperin]

May 13



NEW HAMPSHIRE:

I will vote to overturn Gov. Sununu’s veto of death penalty repeal



May 10 -- To the Editor:

On May 23, the Legislature will meet to vote to overturn Gov Sununu’s veto of 
the repeal of the death penalty.

This is a conscience vote and no one should feel political pressure for their 
vote.

I have been writing letters to the editor for decades to repeal the death 
penalty from NH law. As a member of the NH General Court at this time in my 
life, each time I have had a chance to vote to repeal, I have and will continue 
to vote to repeal.

The arguments against the death penalty have been made over and again. I hope 
all in the House and Senate who have another chance to vote to repeal this law 
will do it again.

I do not want to be part of state-sanctioned killing of anyone.

Rep. Christy Dolat Bartlett

Concord

(source: Letter to the Editor, seacoastonline.com)








GEORGIA:

Pre-trial hearings scheduled for 1987 killing



Another round of pre-trial hearings are scheduled in Judge Billy Sparks’ 
courtroom Monday concerning Floyd County’s lone death penalty case.

Timothy Tyrone Foster, who is now 51, was sentenced to death in 1987 for the 
murder of retired school teacher Queen Madge White during a burglary at her 
home at Highland Circle — he was 18 at the time of the incident.

The 79-year-old woman had been attacked and molested before being strangled to 
death.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction 2 years ago, on the grounds of 
black jurors being excluded from his original trial.

Once his conviction was overturned, Foster was moved back to the Floyd County 
Jail from Georgia’s death row in Jackson. In 2018 the state expressed its 
intent to seek the death penalty and the lengthy process began again.

Another round of hearings took place in October 2018 which is part of a process 
called the Unified Appeal, essentially a checklist designed to protect a 
defendant’s rights.

The bevy of motions discussed in Floyd County Superior Court in October covered 
a wide range of topics including attempting to suppress Foster’s comments after 
his arrest to general challenges to the constitutionality of the death penalty 
and lethal injections.

While other men currently in prison had been sentenced to death, their capital 
sentences have been reduced to life without parole for various reasons. James 
Randall Rogers, now 57, is the only man currently sentenced to death from Floyd 
County. Rogers raped and murdered his 75-year-old neighbor in 1980. The Georgia 
Department of Corrections does not list any date for Rogers’ scheduled 
execution.

(source: northwestgeorgianews.com)








OHIO:

Vermilion City Council president appointed to Ohio Parole Board



Vermilion City Council President Steve Herron was 1 of 3 people appointed May 2 
to the Ohio Parole Board.

Herron was appointed to a 6-year term by Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and 
Correction director Annette Chambers-Smith, according to a news release from 
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's office.

Herron said he had the opportunity to meet DeWine and his legal team following 
his appointment to discuss the direction and make-up of the board.

"I'm excited and humbled about the governor's appointment," Herron said.

Mayor Jim Forthofer also applauded Herron's appointment during a May 6 City 
Council meeting.

"This appointment not only recognizes president Herron's distinguished 
professional career, but demonstrates to the residents of Vermilion that we 
have recognized quality leadership steering our city's Council," Forthofer said 
during the meeting.

In addition to his Council president position, Herron is an assistant state 
public defender for the Ohio Public Defender Commission and has worked as a 
public defender for the past 19 years.

DeWine also announced reforms to the board that include matters of the board's 
operations, efficiency, transparency and commitment to victim rights.

"It is important that we have a parole board that reflects a variety of 
professional backgrounds," DeWine said in the release. "Our new board members' 
diverse perspectives will enhance the board's ability to make responsible 
parole decisions that take victim rights, public safety and inmate 
rehabilitation into account."

The board, consisting of 12 members, is required to undergo training on legal 
updates, interviewing skills and effective communication, according to the 
release.

Board members will assist in making decisions regarding the conduct and 
rehabilitation of inmates eligible for parole.

Herron said the board will review clemencies for death penalty cases and will 
send recommendations to DeWine.

In part of these reforms, offenders eligible for parole will have the 
opportunity to take part in their hearings through video conferencing, in which 
live stream board hearings are made public.

A new reentry program focusing on life skills will be created by the 
rehabilitation and correction office's Office of Reentry Services.

(source: morningjournal.com)

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

How many more innocent people are on death row?



It has happened again. A defendant who was tried, convicted and sentenced to 
death has been exonerated after decades on death row. Andre Jackson of 
Cleveland becomes the 10th Ohio death-sentenced defendant to be exonerated 
since the Ohio General Assembly passed the current death penalty law in 1981.

That is 10 out of 138 now on death row, or over 7%. These are folks who have 
been exonerated, meaning that they did not and someone else did commit the 
crime. It means the crime has gone unpunished.

It means the public has been left at greater risk than before the crime was 
“solved.” It means the criminal justice system has utterly failed its purpose 
and continued to fail for years after the conviction as the government worked 
feverishly to deny the truth and execute the innocent. These things have 
happened in every exoneration case.

Most folks, particularly those in favor of the death penalty, generally shrug 
it off as a “cost of business” — the death penalty business. And it is exactly 
that.

Those of us who have represented citizens charged with capital crimes know that 
the innocent are convicted and executed. On rare occasions they are exonerated 
and set free, but that is the exception and not the rule.

If we are to continue to have a death penalty, then we should seriously 
consider removing the immunity police and prosecutors have when they are 
involved in convicting innocent people. Those who are willing to remain 
involved in the prosecution of this morally bankrupt system should take 
personal responsibility for their negligent acts and reckless misconduct 
contributing to conviction of the innocent.

Harry Reinhart, Columbus

(source: Letter to the Editor, Columbus Dispatch)








USA:

Dr. Arthur Zitrin, Bioethicist and Death Penalty Foe, Dies at 101



Arthur Zitrin, a leading bioethicist who sought to discipline doctors who 
administered lethal injections to condemned prisoners, died on Saturday at his 
home in Great Neck, N.Y. He was 101.

The cause was chronic lung disease complicated by a stroke, according to his 
son, Richard, a lawyer and a professor of legal ethics at the University of 
California Hastings College of the Law.

In 2005, after a state board dismissed his complaint against an individual 
doctor who had performed an execution, Dr. Zitrin filed a lawsuit demanding 
that the Georgia Composite State Board of Medical Examiners punish any doctors 
who help carry out capital punishment.

The Georgia courts dismissed his lawsuit, arguing in 2007 that Dr. Zitrin was 
not an aggrieved plaintiff. But the issue, which developed only when states 
sought more humane methods of applying the death penalty, percolated.

Just last year, the American Medical Association filed a brief, reminding the 
United States Supreme Court: “Physician participation in executions falsely 
suggests to society that capital punishment can be carried out humanely, with 
the endorsement of the medical profession. Physicians should not further such a 
charade.”

As a mainstay of bioethics education at New York University Medical Center for 
four decades and director of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital Center, Dr. Zitrin 
weighed in on a wide range of social and moral issues that changing social 
standards and technology had thrust into the public arena.

The New York University Center for Bioethics was established in 2007 with a 
professorship endowed by Dr. Zitrin.

When inmates sentenced to death were hanged or shot by firing squads, for 
example — forms of execution that were considered to be more cruel — doctors 
had not been enlisted to participate directly.

In 2006, New York City’s Board of Health withdrew its proposal to let 
transgender people change their birth certificates without explicit medical 
proof after some doctors and psychiatrists expressed skepticism about the 
looser requirement.

“They should not change the sex at birth, which is a factual record,” Dr. 
Zitrin, a member of an advisory panel convened by the city, said at the time.

In 2014, the City Council put forward a similar proposal to allow alterations 
to birth certificates on the basis of a person’s identity, rather than anatomy, 
with the blessing of a health care professional confirming that the change 
“more accurately reflects the applicant’s sex.”

Dr. Zitrin also criticized doctors for not being more forthcoming about a 
presidential candidate’s health.

During the 1992 Democratic primary campaigns, Paul E. Tsongas, a former United 
States senator from Massachusetts, sought to demonstrate his return to good 
health after surviving cancer by displaying advertisements showing him swimming 
the strenuous butterfly stroke. He and 2 of his doctors, Dr. Tak Takvorian and 
Dr. George P. Canellos, said he had been cancer-free since a bone-marrow 
transplant in 1986.

But in April 1992, Mr. Tsongas’s doctors acknowledged to The New York Times 
that he had been treated in 1987 for a recurrence of the lymphoma. And, months 
after he suspended his campaign following losses in several primaries, Mr. 
Tsongas said he had erred in not disclosing the recurrence.

He died in 1997 of pneumonia, the final complication from his cancer treatment. 
He was 55.

Public accounts of Mr. Tsongas’s health, Dr. Zitrin said then, demanded an 
inquiry to determine whether his doctors had committed “ethical improprieties.”

Arthur Zitrin was born in Brooklyn on April 10, 1918, to William, a house 
painter, and Lillian (Elbaum) Zitrin, a homemaker, both Eastern European 
immigrants.

After graduating from New Utrecht High School, he earned a bachelor of science 
degree from City College of New York in 1938, and a master’s and doctor of 
medicine degree from New York University in 1941 and 1945. He served as a 
captain in the Army Medical Corps after World War II. In 1953 he became a 
diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

He married Dr. Charlotte Marker, who died in 2013. In addition to their son, he 
is survived by their daughter, Elizabeth, who is the president of the World 
Coalition Against the Death Penalty; four grandchildren; and 2 
great-grandchildren.

An N.Y.U. School of Medicine faculty member since 1949, Dr. Zitrin became a 
full professor of psychiatry in 1967. From 1955 to 1968, he was director of 
psychiatry at Bellevue. (He was also responsible for salvaging the remnants of 
4 Corinthian columns from the Medical College at Cornell University, which was 
built in 1900. The columns from the building, which was razed in 1968, now rest 
in a courtyard of the former Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.)

Dr. Zitrin was director of psychiatry of the New York City Department of 
Hospitals from 1962 to 1964.

Collaborating with Daniel Klugherz, a childhood friend, he also made 
documentary films, including several on social issues that focused on women and 
on pioneering doctors.

In his more than four decades as a bioethicist, he witnessed the emergence of a 
growing number of ethical issues, as people lived longer, science advanced and 
social mores changed. One issue people were confronting more was how long to 
prolong the life of a terminally ill patient.

“Advances in biomedical technologies makes these ethical issues more complex,” 
he told The New York Times in 1982. “Should we continue to provide treatment 
that is painful to the patient and yet does not prolong life?”

“For the average family,” Dr. Zitrin said, “there isn’t a philosopher 
available.”

(source: New York Times)