The StandDown Texas Project

Life Sentence in Angelina County Capital Trial

Today's Lufkin Daily News reports, "Jury sentences Saenz to life in prison for killing patients with bleach."  It's written by Jessica Cooley who has covered the month-long trial daily.

After being sentenced to life in prison without parole, Kimberly Saenz was addressed by family members of the DaVita Dialysis patients she killed by injecting them with bleach in April 2008.

And:

In the sentencing phase, jurors heard testimony from a series of character witnesses to help them determine if the 38-year-old Pollok woman should be sentenced to life in prison without parole or death by lethal injection. She leaned her head to one side, listening intently as criminal defense attorney consultant Frank Aubuchon outlined for the jury what prison life will be like for Saenz. Aubuchon, a 26-year Texas Department of Criminal Justice retiree, said she will become one of 28 women serving life in prison without parole. Defense attorney Steve Taylor said the only way Saenz is coming out of prison is in a box, as Aubuchon nodded in agreement.

As a highly supervised inmate on a maximum security unit, Saenz will share a cell with another woman serving at least 60 years. There are also restrictions on what type of prison job she can have, Aubuchon said, adding she can only work in the kitchen, laundry or industrial factory.

"Life in prison for ex-nurse in 5 bleach deaths," is the AP filing by Michael Graczyk.  It's via the Dallas Morning News.

"She's never getting out no matter what you do," Saenz's lawyer, Steve Taylor, said in his closing remarks, urging jurors to choose a life sentence. "Society is protected. You will never see her again."

Prosecutors failed to show Saenz would present a future danger for violence, one of the questions they must answer in deciding the death penalty, Taylor said. He reminded jurors she'd been free since her arrest and indictment and during trial.

"Kimberly Saenz has been out of jail for the last one, two, three, four years," Taylor said. "You've passed her on the stairs. ... If there was any possibility to create a future criminal act, the state would have her butt in jail. In the last four years, she has behaved herself."

Saenz's lead attorney, Ryan Deaton, indicated in court he would file for a new trial and seek appeals.

Earlier coverage of the case begins at the link.  Related posts are in the trial index.

Federal Death Sentence of Female Overturned

AP reports, "Judge removes 1 of 2 women on federal death row."  It's written by Ryan J. Foley, via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

A judge removed one of the two women on federal death row Friday, saying lawyers for the Iowa woman convicted in the 1993 execution-style murders of five people failed to present evidence about her troubled mental state that could have spared her from capital punishment.

In a 448-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett threw out Angela Johnson's death sentence, saying her defense lawyers were "alarmingly dysfunctional" during the 2005 trial that made her the first woman to be sentenced to death in the federal system since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the punishment in 1976.

Attorney General Eric Holder and aides must determine within 60 days whether to appeal or continue seeking the death penalty for the 48-year-old mother of two, said assistant U.S. Attorney C.J. Williams, who prosecuted the case. If they do not appeal, there will be a trial to determine whether Johnson will be sentenced to death. In that trial, her lawyers would be allowed to present evidence about her mental health that was omitted in 2005. If they decline to seek the death penalty, Bennett could sentence Johnson to life in prison without parole.

Bennett's ruling doesn't throw out her convictions _ he said evidence of her guilt was overwhelming.

"Judge: Iowan may not belong on death row," is by Jeff Eckhoff for the Des Moines Register.

Government lawyers could appeal Bennett’s ruling, make a second push for the death penalty or drop the effort to execute Johnson and leave her with a life sentence in prison.

Iowa does not have the death penalty. However, Johnson and Honken were tried in a federal court, and the U.S. allows the death penalty in certain types of cases.

Johnson, who now resides in a Texas prison hospital, was the first woman sentenced to death after the federal government began seeking capital punishment in 1988. Until Thursday, she had been waiting with Skidmore, Mo., resident Lisa Montgomery to see who would become the first woman put to death by the U.S. government since 1953.

A January report by retired Ohio Northern University law professor Victor Streib shows a total of 58 women were on death row across the country at the end of 2011, 18 of them in California, which hasn’t executed a woman since 1962.

"Judge throws out death sentence," by Nick Hytre in the Quad City Times.

Assistant U.S. Attorney C.J. Williams, who prosecuted both Johnson and Honken, said Friday the decision on how to proceed in the case will be made by Department of Justice officials in Washington, D.C.

Honken, 44, of Britt was convicted in a separate trial and also sentenced to death and is incarcerated in Terre Haute, Ind.

Johnson had filed 64 claims for postconviction relief of her death sentence. Evidence on the motion was heard in four phases of hearings in 2011 that included 19 days of testimony from 58 witnesses and thousands of pages of legal briefs.

Bennett found four instances in which decisions made by Johnson’s defense team were prejudicial, involving errors regarding psychological evidence of Johnson’s mental health.

Related posts are in the federal death penalty and female indexes.  Law Professor Victor Streib's latest edition of Death Penalty for Female Offenders is available at the link in Adobe .pdf format.  It was updated earlier this year.

Innocence at Issue in Angelina County Case

"TX nurse faces death penalty for patient deaths," is the AP post, via KTRK-TV.

Paramedics were making so many trips to a dialysis clinic in the East Texas city of Lufkin, a top fire department official wrote an anonymous letter to state health department inspectors pleading for somebody to take a look at the place.

"In the last two weeks, we have transported 16 patients," the mid-April 2008 note said. "This seems a little abnormal and disturbing to my med crews. Could these calls be investigated by you?"

State medical surveyors within days showed up at the DaVita Dialysis clinic in the Texas Piney Woods community about 125 miles northeast of Houston. By then, EMS had been called as many as 30 times that month, including seven for cardiac problems, and made at least 19 runs. Four people had died. Over the previous 15 months, there had been two calls, according to the Texas Department of Health Services.

On Monday, Kimberly Saenz, a 38-year-old nurse who worked at the clinic, was set to face trial for one count of capital murder that accuses her of killing as many as five patients and five counts of aggravated assault for injuring five others.

And:

She has pleaded not guilty and has been free on bail.

A motive was unclear.

"She has no motive to kill anyone," one of her lawyers, T. Ryan Deaton, has said.

All parties involved in the case were under a gag order from State District Judge Barry Bryan that blocks them from speaking about it outside the courtroom.

I cannot think of another Texas case in which death was sought and the defendant remained free on bail pending trial.

"Former nurse facing capital murder charges in deaths of five to begin trial," is by Jessica Cooley for the Lufkin Daily News.

A nurse accused of injecting 10 dialysis patients with bleach, a defense attorney claiming she is the scapegoat for a business with deadly practices, and a prosecutor looking to prove her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Those are all elements in play at the Angelina County Courthouse this week as former Davita Dialysis nurse Kimberly Saenz, 37, is tried on five charges of capital murder.

During the next three weeks, 12 jurors will hear evidence from both sides before determining if Saenz knowingly injected bleach-filled syringes into 10 dialysis patients, resulting in the deaths of at least five. If found guilty, she faces life in prison or death by lethal injection.

Since the allegations came to light in April 2008, Deaton has maintained that his client is a scapegoat for DaVita Dialysis, where she worked for eight months.

Federal health officials became involved in a massive health investigation in late April 2008 after a series of patient deaths and illnesses at the Lufkin dialysis center. The center closed for nearly two months as investigators combed through patient documents and preserved dialysis equipment for forensic testing.

Texas Observer on the Linda Carty Case

Alex Hannaford takes a lengthy examination in the current issue of the Texas Observer, "Did Death Row Inmate Linda Carty Get a Fair Trial?"  Here's the introduction:

Trafalgar Square, just a stone’s throw from the very center of the British capital, is an expanse of paved sidewalk, pretty fountains and, most notably, five statues. The central statue is of Admiral Lord Nelson, after whose infamous 1805 sea battle the square is named; King George IV stands in one corner; two historical army generals in the others. The 'fourth plinth', as it's known, remained empty for 150 years, but for the last decade or so it has been used to showcase a series of artworks. For one day in September 2009, though, it carried a cardboard cut-out of an African-American woman, while beneath it, a portable PA system broadcast her voice — calm, and with a slight Caribbean lilt — to passers-by.

“Hello Trafalgar Square,” she said. “My name is Linda Carty and I'm speaking to you from death row in Texas in the United States.”

Her name will mean little to most Texans: the arrests, charges and then sentences in the case were reported locally -- but briefly -- in the Houston Chronicle and a longer piece appeared in the same paper in 2010 following the Supreme Court's refusal to review Carty's case. But the British press had been on it for a long time. In fact, over the last eight years, thanks to news reports (in everything from broadsheets like the Independent and Guardian to tabloids like the Daily Mail and Express), magazine features, a prime time television documentary and a sustained campaign by a London-based human rights group, Carty has become something of a cause célèbre in the UK — and not just for those opposed to capital punishment. Many feel that, irrelevant of her guilt or innocence, Carty simply didn’t get a fair trial.

From the Trafalgar Square plinth, Carty’s disembodied voice continued: “I'm sorry I sound like a desperate woman but I am desperate. The British people may be my last hope. If they ask for my life to be spared, maybe Texas will listen.”

But why has a little-known inmate on Texas’s death row — one of 10 women and 311 men — got the British all a fluster?

Carty was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts when it was still a British colony. As such, Carty holds British citizenship, and under the terms of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, when she was first arrested, the British consulate in Houston should have been informed. But it wasn’t.

Earlier coverage of Linday Carty's case begins at the link.

Support Is Waning for Death Penalty

That's the title of an OpEd in today's Richmond Times-Dispatch written by two noted conservatives, Richard  Viguerie and Brent Bozell.  LINK

We lifelong conservatives and Tea Party supporters recently urged the death sentence for Teresa Lewis in Virginia be commuted to life in prison without parole instead.

We are among a growing number of conservatives who have questions and reservations about the death penalty, believe it is no longer a necessary form of punishment based on either Lockean or biblical principles, or oppose it outright.

Around the country death sentences are dropping, and support for the death penalty is waning. This trend is not limited to bleeding-heart liberals and criminal coddlers.

We urge our fellow conservatives to at least consider some issues when contemplating the death penalty.

The Old Testament required the death penalty for certain sins and a litany of offenses. In John 8 of the New Testament, the Pharisees confronted Jesus about a woman ready to be stoned for adultery. Jesus, sensing a trap they laid on a conflict between the Old Testament and Roman law, said: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

We believe John 8 of the New Testament shows that Jesus did not consider the death penalty mandatory punishment for sins, and certainly not unless the process complied with God's law. Deuteronomy 17:6 requires more than one witness to convict.

We also believe conservative Lockean principles do not compel the death penalty.

John Locke's Second Treatise on Government offers a justification of the State's taking the life of someone who is guilty of a heinous crime. Locke, on whose principles conservatism is built, believed the death penalty was a justifiable punishment for two reasons: protecting society (self-preservation) and deterrence.

And:

We now, however, have maximum security prisons that were incapable of being built in Locke's time. Society may protect itself without putting a human to death as it would a wild animal. Since we believe each person has a soul, and is capable of achieving salvation, life in prison is now an alternative to the death penalty.

Under Locke's other reason, deterrence, punishment should be severe enough to discourage criminal acts. We certainly agree. However, some data show the death penalty does not act as deterrence.

In fact, the data seem to indicate murder and other heinous crimes may be lower in jurisdictions that do not have the death penalty. That's not proof, of course, but we believe death penalty proponents bear the burden of proof that the ultimate punishment is in fact a deterrence.

From our conservative perspective, there are other reasons we oppose the death penalty. It is an expensive government program with the power to kill people. Conservatives don't trust the government is always capable, competent, or fair with far lighter tasks.

In a news article by Frank Green and Reed Williams, the Times-Dispatch reports, "Many factors figure in death-penalty cases."

A smiling Sam McCroskey was led from Prince Edward County Circuit Court last month after a plea deal won for him a life sentence instead of execution for bludgeoning four people to death -- three while they slept.

Three days later, Teresa Lewis, a Pittsylvania County grandmother, was executed by injection for a double murder-for-hire in which she did not pull the trigger.

The different outcomes were the latest to confound and upset Virginians who support or oppose the death penalty.

Experts say many factors, not all of them apparent, figure in death cases, including the sentiments of jurors in the 120 jurisdictions that elect commonwealth's attorneys, the wishes of the victims' families, the strength of evidence, and the abilities of the prosecutor and defense lawyers.

From the initial decision by a prosecutor to seek the ultimate sanction to the 11th-hour call by a governor on whether to intervene, discretion plays a huge role.

And:

Even geography is a factor. A capital murder on one side of a county or city line can result in a death sentence and, on the other, life in prison.

In 2001, the General Assembly's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission studied 215 capital punishment-eligible cases in Virginia from 1995 to 1999.

In that study, suburban prosecutors sought the death penalty in 45 percent of the cases, while city prosecutors sought execution in 16 percent. In rural areas, the death penalty was sought in 34 percent of the cases.

Howard said it is not surprising that in a federal system of government, some states have the death penalty and some do not.

"But it comes as a little more of a jolt when you find that statistically, the prosecuting decision to ask for the death penalty varies quite substantially from one county or one city from another within a state," he said.

"I'm not sure that makes it unconstitutional, but it adds one more, if you like, arbitrary element to the mix -- the same taking of life in two different places but quite disparate decisions."

The quote above is from A.E. Dick Howard, a University of Virginia law professor and constitutional scholar.

 

Virginia Executes Teresa Lewis

There is a great deal of national and international press on the Virginia execution of Teresa Lewis, last night.

"Va. puts woman to death; rare US female execution," is the AP report via Google News.  It's written by Steve Szkotak. 

Lewis appeared fearful, her jaw clenched, as she was escorted into the death chamber. She glanced tensely around at 14 assembled corrections officials before being bound to a gurney with heavy leather straps.

Moments before her execution, Lewis asked if her husband's daughter — her stepdaughter — was near. She was. Kathy Clifton was in an adjacent witness room blocked from the inmate's view by a two-way mirror.

"I want Kathy to know that I love her and I'm very sorry," Lewis said.

Then, as the drugs flowed into her body, her feet bobbed but she otherwise remained motionless. A guard lightly tapped her on the shoulder reassuringly as she slipped into death.

More than 7,300 appeals to stop the execution had been made to the governor in a state second only to Texas in the number of people it executes.2

Texas held the most recent U.S. execution of a woman in 2005. Out of more than 1,200 people put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, only 11 have been women.

Carol Williams writes, "Virginia's execution of a woman may signal shift in national thinking," for today's Los Angeles Times.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Virginia put to death a 41-year-old woman Thursday night, the first execution of a female in the country in five years and the first in that state for nearly a century.

The lethal-injection death of Teresa Lewis, convicted of the 2002 contract killing of her husband and stepson, broke with a tradition of societal "queasiness" about executing women, one legal expert said. It could also psychologically clear the way to carrying out death sentences on others among the 60 condemned women in the nation — including 18 in California, according to some capital punishment observers.

Lewis' death sentence was only the 12th carried out against a woman prisoner in the 34 years since capital punishment was restored as a sentencing option. In that same period, 1,214 men have been put to death.

Legal scholars attribute the "gender bias" in executions to women's lower propensity to kill and the tendency of those who do to kill a husband, lover or child in the heat of emotion, seldom with the "aggravating factors" states require for a death sentence. Lewis pleaded guilty to having arranged the killings to collect $250,000 in insurance money on her stepson.

"The way capital punishment statutes are written inadvertently favor women. They make it a worse crime if a homicide is committed during a felony, like robbery or rape, which are rarely involved in women's homicides," said Victor Streib, a Northern Ohio University law professor who has spent 30 years researching condemned women. "It's also easier to convince a jury that women suffer emotional distress or other emotional problems more than men."

Still, Streib added, "there are some cases that can't be explained by anything except a queasiness at executing women. We just seem to be reluctant to do that."

Lewis was the first woman to be executed in Virginia since 1912, when a 17-year-old African American maid named Virginia Christian was sent to the electric chair for killing her employer after being accused of stealing a locket.

Lewis was the only woman on death row in a state that is second in the number of executions since 1976, with 107 compared with Texas' 463.

Texas carried out the last female execution in the United States on Sept. 14, 2005. Frances Newton was put to death by lethal injection for the murders of her husband and two children. Prosecutors said she wanted to collect $100,000 in insurance money.

A British national convicted in Texas of hiring men to kill a neighbor and steal the victim's newborn son also is likely to face execution this year. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied review of the conviction of 51-year-old Linda Carty, despite appeals by the British government to spare her life.

California has the nation's largest death row, with 708 condemned inmates. Nationally, there were 61 condemned women at the start of this year, compared with more than 3,200 men, according to the Death Penalty Information Center database.

University of New Mexico law professor Elizabeth Rapaport explains the death-sentence disparity with the kinds of crimes women tend to commit.

"Two thirds of the homicide crimes by women are domestic," she said, usually committed in the heat of argument or under impairment by drugs or alcohol, seldom with the premeditation or other aggravating circumstances that draw capital charges.

The New York Times carries, "Woman, 41, Is Executed in Virginia," by Anahad O'Connor.

Ms. Lewis received support from an unlikely cast. The novelist John Grisham published an op-ed piece calling for leniency, and the European Union sent a letter to Robert F. McDonnell, the governor of Virginia, asking him to commute Ms. Lewis’s sentence to life because of her mental capacities. The case was also cited by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a speech to Islamic clerics during a visit to New York this week.

Shortly after her execution, a lawyer for Ms. Lewis, Jim Rocap, called her death "a tragic loss."

“Tonight, the machinery of death in Virginia extinguished the beautiful, childlike and loving human spirit of Teresa Lewis," he said. "Teresa asked that I send her thanks and love to all of those who have supported her in this fight for her life. In her words, ’It’s just awesome.’ It is our hope that Teresa’s death will cause a re-examination of the badly broken system of justice that could allow something as wrong and unjust as this to happen.”

Maria Glod reports, "Virginia executes Teresa Lewis for role in slayings of husband, stepson in 2002," for the Washington Post.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has, "Teresa Lewis executed for 2002 slayings of husband, stepson," by Frank Green and Zachary Reid.

The European Union's U.S. delegation, concerned about Lewis' mental capacity, sent a letter this month to Gov. Bob McDonnell asking that he commute the sentence to life. Iranian officials, stung by criticism over a woman convicted of adultery there and sentenced to death by stoning, blasted the West this week for hypocrisy.

The governor's office had no comment.

Earlier coverage of her case begins here.