The StandDown Texas Project

Resentencing in Federal Death Penalty Case

"Death Penalty Sentence Overturned," is the title of the news release, via Business Wire.  It's datelined Chicago.

Almost 16 years after being sentenced to death following his conviction in a federal criminal case, Darryl Johnson was resentenced on Tuesday to life imprisonment.

U.S. District Court Judge Ruben Castillo remarked that the record of Johnson’s behavior over the past 16 years of incarceration shows that he is a changed man since his conviction and suggested the mandatory life sentence he was required to impose might well be too severe in light of Mr. Johnson’s demonstrated post-offense rehabilitation.

In 1997, Johnson was convicted of having been part of a large drug distribution conspiracy and having directed the murder of two gang members who he believed were cooperating with the government’s investigation of the Gangster Disciples street gang. Even though he was not the shooter, Johnson was sentenced to death for his involvement in those murders.

In December 2010, U.S. District Court Judge William Hibbler ruled that testimony at Johnson’s 1997 sentencing hearing from Bureau of Prisons Warden John Vanyur about Johnson’s supposed “future dangerousness” was false and misleading. Judge Hibbler concluded that had Warden Vanyur’s inaccurate testimony been corrected at the trial, Johnson would likely not have received the death penalty. Judge Hibbler vacated the death sentences and ordered a new sentencing for Johnson.

In fact, Johnson has been a model prisoner for the past 16 years. In an affidavit submitted by the government in response to a request by Judge Hibbler, a Bureau of Prisons Death Row Case Manager said that during his years in prison, Johnson has proven to be a well-adjusted, quiet and civil individual who has not caused problems for the prison staff. He has also maintained a close and loving relationship with his family throughout.

Terry Campbell, a partner at Cotsirilos, Tighe, Streicker, Poulos & Campbell who has represented Darryl Johnson since 1998, said, “In light of his record of conduct over the past 16 years, the government made the proper decision to not seek to re-impose the death penalty against Darryl Johnson, and I commend them for that decision. Darryl’s case is a lesson in how dangerous and unwise it is to allow juries to make irreversible, life-and-death decisions based on highly speculative guesswork – and in this case, entirely inaccurate guesswork – about what someone might do in the future.”

Felated posts are in the federal death penalty category index.

Ohio AG Issues Annual Capital Crimes Report

The Ohio Attorney General's 2012 Capital Crimes Annual Report is available in Adobe .pdf format.

"Annual report: more than third of death row inmates have avoided sentence since 1981," is the AP filing, via the Republic.

An annual report that looks at Ohio's capital punishment system says 128 inmates sentenced to death over the past three decades have avoided their sentence through court action, commutations or dying of natural causes.

The report by Attorney General Mike DeWine says the state sentenced a total of 316 inmates to death from 1981, when Ohio's current death penalty law was enacted, through 2012.

Eighteen inmates have been spared by Ohio governors, 24 died in prison and eight were found ineligible for execution because they are mentally disabled.

The report released Tuesday says six inmates face re-sentencing and 72 others had their death sentence reversed by various courts.

The state has put 50 inmates to death since executions were resumed in 1999.

"Capital punishment: Four slated for execution this year," is by Alan Johnson for the Columbus Dispatch.

The case of Ohio Death Row inmate Warren Waddy of Columbus illustrates why some people are frustrated with capital punishment.

Waddy, 59, has been on Death Row for 9,300 days — more than 25 years — since his conviction for strangling 22-year-old Paula Mason of Columbus with a jump rope after breaking into her apartment, tying her up, and beating her. Ronald Reagan was president at the time.

But Waddy’s case appears to have no resolution in sight. It is one of four cases cited in Attorney General Mike DeWine’s annual Capital Crimes report, released yesterday, as being held up in court due to claims that they should not be executed because of mental retardation. The case has cleared state courts, but layers of federal appeals remain untapped after a quarter-century of litigation.

DeWine’s report, which must be submitted by April 1 to the governor and state legislators, noted that five new death sentences were handed down in Ohio courts last year, including one for Caron E. Montgomery of Franklin County.

And:

The report said there have been 18 commutations since 1991, including four by Kasich, five by former Gov. Ted Strickland, one by Gov. Bob Taft, and eight by Gov. Richard F. Celeste. In recent years, 23 Death Row inmates died of natural causes while awaiting execution.

Recent coverage from Ohio includes a stepped up search for lethal injection drugs following an execution and a meeting of the state's Joint Task Force to Review the Administration of Ohio's Death Penalty.

Coverage of the 2012 AGs report is at the link.

Friday

I'll be out of the office Friday afternoon.

The University of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Center is sponsoring a symposium, "Mass Incarceration and the Death Penalty."  Here's more:

The Capital Punishment Center’s symposium, “Mass Incarceration and the Death Penalty,” will provide a rare opportunity for scholars, lawyers, and interested members of the public to engage in an extended dialogue about some of the most pressing, nuanced, and timely criminal justice issues in a setting that is both rigorous and relaxed. Thanks to the generosity of the Center’s sponsors, the symposium is free and open to the public. Please join us on March 22-23, 2013 in the Law School’s Eidman Courtroom.

Keynote address by Erwin Chemerinsky.

Virginia's Shrinking Death Row

"Va.'s death row population down to 8," is the AP report, via the Bristol News.

Virginia's death row population has dwindled to eight from a peak of 57 in 1995, and it's not just because of the state's efficiency in carrying out capital punishment.

A couple of death sentences have been erased recently — one because of the inmate's mental health issues, another because a star witness changed his story and prosecutors withheld key evidence. Another inmate's innocence claim based on recanted testimony was revived last year by an appellate court and is in a judge's hands.

But another major reason for the declining population is that fewer death sentences are being handed down. David Bruck, director of the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse at Washington and Lee University School of Law, noted that Virginia's death row has received only two new inmates in nearly five years. Last year, there was not a single death sentence handed down in the state that ranks second only to Texas in the number of executions since the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment in 1976.

And:

Bruck said one of the reasons for the shrinking death row population in Virginia is an increased acceptance of life without parole as a reasonable alternative. He said the 2000 exoneration of Earl Washington Jr., who came within nine days of being executed for a killing he did not commit, awakened the public to the justice system's fallibility. Before that, he said, people seemed focused solely on mistakes that allowed the guilty to go free.

The article notes that a statewide capital public defender's office was created in 2003.

Virginia carried out this year's first execution in an American death penalty state.  Prosecutorial misconduct in the Virginia case of Justin Wolfe is also an active issue.

Remembering a Death Row Exonoree

That's the title of David Protess' latest essay at Huffington Post.  He's the president of the Chicago Innocence Project.

"Dennis Williams, a former death-row inmate whose exoneration became a rallying cry for opponents of the death penalty in Illinois, died on Thursday at his home. He was 46. An autopsy has not yet been performed..." -- The New York Times: March 25, 2003

To outsiders a decade ago this month, Dennis Williams had it all. He was vibrant and gregarious, with a sharp wit and infectious laugh. Women were drawn to him, and his latest "fiancee," Alicia, was as bright as she was beautiful.

Related posts are in the exoneration, innocence, and wrongful incarceration indexes.

George Ryan Released From FCI

Today's Chicago Tribune reports, "Ryan returns home to finish sentence under house arrest."  It's by Jason Meisner, Annie Sweeney, and Angie Leventis Lourgos.

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan was let out of a federal prison in Indiana in the dead of night early Wednesday and checked briefly into a Chicago halfway house before he was released — in a surprise decision — to his home to finish out his 61/2-year sentence on home confinement.

The quick turn of events allowed Ryan, who turns 79 next month, to elude a horde of media gathered at the prison in Terre Haute, Ind., and then slip from the halfway house on the Near West Side undetected several hours later.

By 10:30 a.m., Ryan had an emotional reunion with 17 of his children and grandchildren at his longtime Kankakee home, according to his attorney, former Gov. Jim Thompson. Later in the day, Ryan's daughter, Jeanette, smiled as she left through a rear entrance. "We are very happy he's home," she said.

Home confinement for Ryan means he won't have to face weeks or months at the Salvation Army halfway house where many of the state's other disgraced politicians have had to take up residence.

And:

Ryan is home for the first time since wife Lura Lynn died, and his oldest grandson will be staying with him, Thompson said.

"I imagine it's very hard," Thompson said. "Just as I imagine it's been very hard ever since she died and it's been very hard ever since he left her (for prison). At least he's got closure now with his family."

"Ex-Ill. Gov. Ryan released from halfway house," is the AP filing by Michael Tarm, via the Frankfort State-Journal.

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan was back at his longtime home on Wednesday following his pre-dawn release from a federal prison after serving more than five years for corruption.

He first reported to a halfway house in Chicago but in a development that took observers by surprise was allowed to go to his spacious home in Kankakee, where he'll be under home confinement for at least several weeks, his attorney Jim Thompson said.

Speaking from Ryan's living room, Thompson said Ryan was beaming and surrounded by his smiling grandchildren

"If you could see his and his grandkids' smiling faces," Thompson, himself a former governor, said by phone from Ryan's home. "He is surrounded by happy faces."

Thompson said officials decided Ryan didn't require the services halfway houses provide, which include ensuring ex-cons can use a checkbook.

Ryan will still be subject to strict rules, including prohibitions against speaking to the media or leaving the house. Thompson added that Ryan was granted retirement status by authorities, so he won't be required to find a job.

Ryan was sentenced to 6 ½ years on Nov. 7, 2007, and his term officially ends July 4 after compiling 305 days credit for good conduct, said Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke.

Looking relaxed and thinner than before prison, Ryan walked past throngs of reporters into a Chicago halfway house earlier in the morning.

Ryan, 78, left the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., at around 1 a.m. on Wednesday -- five months before his prison term officially ended, having qualified for early release to the Salvation Army-run Freedom Center.

The Chicago Sun-Times publishes the editorial, "Ryan's redemption."

Former Gov. George Ryan probably isn’t making any big plans just yet.

Hugging his grandchildren, sitting with his children and enjoying the quiet of his own home after more than five years in prison are, we’re quite sure, more than enough for now.

But when it’s time, Ryan likely will get re-involved with death penalty issues, his lawyer, former Gov. Jim Thompson, said Wednesday after Ryan’s release to home confinement.

That sounds just right to us.

For all of Ryan’s misdeeds, Illinois’ former governor did right when it came to the death penalty.

And he did right, we think, for the right reasons.

"George Ryan's restitution," is the Chicago Tribune editorial.

In 2006, federal jurors convicted George Ryan on 18 felony corruption counts: racketeering, mail fraud, tax fraud, filing false tax returns, lying to FBI agents. Nine people, six of them children named Willis, lie dead because of the crime spree on Ryan's watch: When he was secretary of state, as many as 2,000 truckers bribed his employees to get driver's licenses. Some of that blood money flowed to his political fund — and some of those truckers caused crashes that killed those nine and injured dozens more. As U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had said when the ex-governor was indicted: "Ryan is charged with betraying the citizens of Illinois for over a decade on state business, both large and small. ... Defendant Ryan sold his office."

And:

George Ryan, ex-con, is free to vanish. But he's also free to make at least partial restitution to his victims. There is much he can say to the people of Illinois. Much he can teach to politicians of today, and tomorrow. Much he can do to renounce — to help reform — the Illinois culture of political sleaze.

If Ryan in the past didn't want to speak remorse for his crimes lest he undermine appeals of his verdict or sentence, that excuse is moot. If pride kept him from admitting guilt, he's now liberated to speak from the heart. If the native Iowan is embarrassed that four of his adopted state's last nine governors went to prison, he can demand better of the political class in whose grievous sins he wallowed.

"Welcome Home, Governor Ryan," is David Protess' essay at Huffington Post.  He's President of the Chicago Innocence Project.  Here's the beginning:

On a frigid February evening in 1999, I called home to check my messages. "Gov. Ryan just called you," my teenage son Ben claimed. I laughed at the seemingly obvious prank. "No, Dad, it really was the governor. I recognized his voice. He wants you to call him at home."

What could this be about, I wondered? Perhaps the Anthony Porter case? Porter was a condemned inmate who had come within 50 hours of execution, only to be freed earlier that week when my journalism students and a private investigator uncovered proof of his innocence.

As it turned out, the Illinois Republican governor and his wife, Lura Lynn, had watched Porter's dramatic release on WGN-TV. The governor was stunned. "How does an innocent man sit on death row for 15 years...?" he asked his wife in disbelief.

When I returned Ryan's call, he had a more practical question: "What can I do to help that poor guy?"

I explained that a gubernatorial pardon would guarantee Porter restitution for his 17 years of wrongful incarceration. The governor promised to promptly take care of it.

The business part of our conversation concluded, the governor stayed on the line, musing about the case. He was horrified that Porter had almost been executed on his watch. "I would have been responsible for the death of an innocent man," Ryan whispered.

Earlier news of former Governor Ryan begins at the links.

A Novel Take on Death Row

The Canadian Press posts, "Ronald Smith's Lawyer Don Vernay Writes Book About Fictional Death Row Inmate," by Bill Graveland.  It's via Huffington Post Canada.

It wasn't much of a stretch for death row lawyer Don Vernay to put himself into the mind of a killer.

Vernay, 69, has spent more than two decades of his life defending those headed to the gallows — one of the most notable being Canadian Ronald Smith, who has spent the last 30 years fighting a death sentence in Montana for the murder of Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey Madman Jr. in 1982.

In his novel "Today and Tomorrow," Vernay gives a glimpse into the mind of a young man about to be executed for the Christmas Eve murder of his parents and chronicles the chain of events that brings him to the last day of his life.

The story takes place totally inside the head of the unidentified and remorseless protagonist and takes the reader on a journey that is both dark and humorous from his birth to his death.

"Because I've been doing this work so long I wanted to convey what trauma can do to somebody — how someone can just shut down, which is what happens with this kid. He causes an accident that kills his brother, his parents just heap the blame on him and he just shuts down," said Vernay, who now practises law out of Albuquerque, N.M., but deals primarily with death penalty cases in nearby Texas.

Related posts are in the books category index.  Coverage of Ronald Smith's case begins at the link.

 

California Commentary

"California's Death Penalty Vote: It's Time to Reconsider 'Justice'," is Gabriel Daniel Solis' essay at Huffington Post.  He's with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

On Election Day, 52 percent of California voters cast ballots to keep the death penalty.

Such a small margin suggests that voters may be inching closer to abolishing capital punishment in the state. Advocates ran a well-coordinated, anti-death penalty campaign that offered compelling moral, legal and fiscal arguments that did not take hold of the electorate. So why did the majority vote to keep the death penalty?

Some commentators have noted that voters' decision to keep the death penalty was based more on their conception of "justice" than these other arguments. They suggest that the vote indicates a belief that "justice" for a murder victim can be only achieved when the murderer's life is taken away -- an "eye for an eye."

And:

A complete concept of justice should more fully consider and understand the suffering of all those affected by crime. Justice should not be narrow, but expansive. It should consider all the contributing factors and consequences of crime and violence. It should go beyond simple reactionary instincts to punish, but instead focus on shared humanity and shared suffering. Justice should never be satisfied with incomplete narratives about crime that lead to harsh punishment, but should instead always strive toward fairness, equality and inclusion.

Those seeking to reform the criminal justice system should work to educate the public about the stories of all those who suffer at the hands of the criminal justice system.

Earlier coverage and commentary on the California ballot initiative begins at the link.

South Dakota Roundup

Today's Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports, "Death penalty pending request for stay," by John Hult.

A federal judge said he will decide soon whether to stay the execution of twice-convicted murderer Donald Moeller after an attempt by an acquaintance to intervene in his case.

Donna Nichols, a woman who is not related to Moeller but refers to herself as a stepsister, filed a motion to be appointed “next friend” to him in an effort to continue an appeal Moeller chose to end earlier this month.

If appointed “next friend,” Nichols could act on behalf of Moeller and continue the appeal, which challenges the state’s execution protocol.

Moeller is scheduled to die by lethal injection during the week of Oct. 28 for the 1990 rape and murder of Becky O’Connell.

Judge Lawrence Piersol heard arguments Monday morning from Robert Van Norman, Nichols’ lawyer, as well as Moeller’s lawyer, Mark Marshall, and Attorney General Marty Jackley.

Marshall and Jackley both said Nichols lacks standing to intervene on behalf of Moeller, whom Piersol ruled was competent to end his appeal after a lengthy verbal exchange in court.

Regarding last week's South Dakota execution, the Argus Leader reports, "Death penalty called incentive for Robert," also by Hult.

The lawyer for a man executed this week says the death penalty created an incentive for his client to murder corrections officer Ronald “R.J.” Johnson.

Mark Kadi, who represented 50-year-old Eric Robert in the capital case, wrote a letter to the Argus Leader saying his client devised an escape plan that involved murder to ensure a death sentence in the event his escape failed.

“The availability of the death penalty encouraged rather than discouraged Robert to commit this crime,” Kadi wrote. “I know this because Eric told me so.”

After the murder in April 2011, Robert quickly pleaded guilty and insisted the judge issue a death penalty, then strongly objected to a mandatory Supreme Court review, which delayed his execution. He wrote a letter to Attorney General Marty Jackley earlier this month encouraging revisions to state law to guarantee a speedy death for a death row inmate who was not fighting it.

Jackley, who prosecuted the case, rejects the notion that Johnson’s murder was anything but a failed, “poorly executed” escape attempt.

Attorney Mark Kadi's letter to the Argus Leader is available in Adobe .pdf format.

"Lawyer: Death penalty gave SD inmate Robert incentive to kill guard during escape attempt," is the AP report, via the Republic.

A man executed for killing a South Dakota prison guard wanted to commit suicide and saw the death penalty law as an incentive, the man's attorney says.

Eric Robert was put to death last week for killing the guard, Ronald "R.J." Johnson, when he and fellow inmate Rodney Berget tried to break out of the prison in April 2011.

Robert pleaded guilty in September 2011 to killing Johnson, asked for a death sentence and objected to a South Dakota Supreme Court review of his case.

Robert was serving an 80-year prison term for kidnapping at the time of his attempted escape. His lawyer, Mark Kadi, said Robert wanted to end his own life rather than languish in prison, and planned his escape so that he would be eligible for a death sentence if unsuccessful.

"The availability of the death penalty encouraged rather than discouraged Robert to commit this crime," Kadi wrote in a letter to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader newspaper. "I know this because Eric told me so."

Earlier coverage from South Dakota begins at the link. 

Volunteer is the term applied to inmates on death row who waive their appeals.  Related posts are in the volunteer category index.

Prison-Crime Witness Now on the Defensive

That's the title of a report in the Texas edition of the New York Times, by Maurice Chammah of the Texas Tribune.  "Death Penalty Witness Condemned by Courts," is posted at the Tribune.

A. P. Merillat has spent two decades investigating crimes in Texas prisons, and his testimony about the violence that inmates serving life sentences can inflict has helped send at least 15 murderers to death row.

Now the credibility of Mr. Merillat — a go-to expert for prosecutors seeking the death penalty — has been condemned by the state’s highest criminal court, after judges determined that Mr. Merillat gave false testimony. Two death sentences were reversed to life sentences, the most recent in June. Mr. Merillat said he was close to being devastated by those decisions. “A guilty capital murderer was removed from the punishment a jury, according to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, determined he deserved,” Mr. Merillat said.

Mr. Merillat says he believes the court has unfairly jeopardized his standing and that he is facing an uphill battle to repair it.

“I am currently attempting to rebuild my reputation for honor and integrity that was so unjustifiably destroyed by our own Court of Criminal Appeals,” he said.

Mr. Merillat, 56, began his career as a police officer in Huntsville and Houston, and for years, he said, he assumed that anyone who committed a “heinous capital murder” would be closely watched by the prison.

“I was very mistaken,” he said.

For the last 20 years, Mr. Merillat has been an investigator with the Special Prosecution Unit, an independent agency financed by the governor’s office to investigate and prosecute crimes that occur in prison.

And:

For a Texas jury to sentence a murderer to death, it must find that he or she will be a continuing threat to society. For decades, prosecutors relied on psychiatrists to testify that the accused would commit violent crimes again if given a sentence less than death.

Many of those psychiatric experts, like James Grigson (popularly known as Dr. Death), Richard Coons and George Denkowski, have since been discredited for their predictions of future likelihood of causing harm. Instead, prosecutors have turned to prison experts for testimony about the opportunities for violence behind bars — but outside death row.

Also:

But in 2010, the Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals threw out the death sentence of Adrian Estrada for the 2005 stabbing of 17-year-old Stephanie Sanchez. Judge Barbara Hervey found Mr. Merillat erred by testifying that a convicted capital murderer would have more freedom in prison than would ever be possible.

Then, earlier this year, the court threw out the death sentence of Manuel Velez, a death row inmate convicted of killing his girlfriend’s infant son, after his lawyers found Mr. Merillat had given similar testimony in his Cameron County trial.

Earlier coverage of Manuel Velez' case and Adrian Estrada begins at the links.

Related posts are in the expert witnesses and future dangerousness catagory indexes; also available, coverage of George Denkowski.

Life Sentence for Long-Serving Harris County Death Row Inmate

Today's Houston Chronicle reports, "DA's office plans to not seek execution of man on death row since 1978."  It's by Allan Turner.

After three convictions and death sentences, all of which were at least partially overturned on appeal, the Harris County District Attorney's Office plans to drop efforts to execute Anthony Pierce, who has been on death row since 1978.

"I expect he will get a life sentence," Assistant District Attorney Lance Long said of a hearing set for Thursday in state District Judge Denise Collins' court.

That sentence would be applied under state laws in force at the time of Pierce's August 1977 murder of fried chicken restaurant manger Fred Johnson, 40, meaning that he could be eligible for parole consideration.

And:

Pierce, 53, who has spent more time on death row than all but two of its current residents, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death on three occasions, most recently in 1986.

Appeals courts tossed the first two convictions because of jury selection problems. Two years ago, a three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit threw out the last trial's punishment phase because jurors were kept from hearing mitigating evidence as required by law.

A new punishment phase was set for Collins' court  on Sept. 10.

Pierce's attorney, Robert K. Loper, hailed the decision to drop efforts to execute his client, noting that the one-time Houston laborer consistently has proclaimed his innocence. Loper said seating a jury for a new punishment trial likely would have taken about three weeks, and prosecutors would have had to present evidence regarding the crime.

"Harris County DA's office won't seek new death sentence for killer on death row 34 years," is the AP report, via the Republic.

Prosecutors in Houston say they won't seek the death penalty again in the case of a man who first went to death row 34 years ago and whose sentence has been thrown out by an appeals court.

And:

Pierce was convicted and condemned three times and appeals courts found problems with all three trials. Pierce ranks third in seniority on Texas death row.

Related posts are in the mitigation index.

Problems with Texas' jury charge in death penalty cases were first ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1989 case, Penry v. Lynaugh.  That ruling was more fully applied following the 2007 case, Abdul-Kabir v. Quarterman; more on both cases via Oyez. Juries must be able to consider all mitigating evidence that might lead them to issue a life sentence rather than a death sentence.  Texas' 1975 death penalty law did not allow jurors to do that.

The Living Death of Solitary Confinement

That's the title of a New York Times Opinionator blog post by Lisa Guenther of Vanderbilt University.  She's the author of the soon-to-be-published, Social Death and Its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement.  Here's the beginning:

There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement.  Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged. They experience intense anxiety, paranoia, depression, memory loss, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this cluster of symptoms SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units of many supermax prisons. Prisoners have more direct ways of naming their experience.  They call it “living death,” the “gray box,” or “living in a black hole.”

In June the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, headed by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, held the first Congressional hearing on solitary confinement.  Advocates and experts in the field were invited to submit testimony on the psychological, ethical, social and economic issues raised by punitive isolation.  Among the many contributors was Anthony Graves, who spent over 18 years on death row in Texas, most of them in solitary confinement, for a crime he did not commit. Graves describes his isolation as a form of “emotional torture.”  Two years after his exoneration and release, he still feels trapped in isolation: “I am living amongst millions of people in the world today, but most of the time I feel alone.  I cry at night because of this feeling.  I just want to stop feeling this way, but I haven’t been able to.”

We tend to assume that solitary confinement is reserved for “the worst of the worst”: violent inmates who have proved themselves unwilling or unable to live in the general population.  But the truth is that an inmate can be sent to the hole for failing to return a meal tray, or for possession of contraband (which can include anything from weapons to spicy tortilla chips).  According to the Bureau of Justice, there were 81,622 prisoners in some form of “restricted housing” (code for solitary confinement) in 2005.  If anything, these numbers have increased as isolation units continue to be built in prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers across the country. 

Earlier coverage of the solitary confinement issues begins at the link.  Related posts are in the incarceration index.

For those interested in the topic, Solitary Watch is a must-read.

Are Lengthy Execution Delays Cruel?

Reuters posts, "In U.S. executions, decades of delay, last-minute stays called cruel," by Jim Forsyth.  The article references John Balentine's stay last week from the U.S. Supreme Court.

While three stays of execution for one person is unusual, some Americans say the slow grind of legal justice, sometimes followed by appeals that result in last-minute stays of execution, are cruel both to inmates and the families of their crime victims.

"Preparing for death is torture, and I cannot fathom having to go through it three times," said Randy Steidl, who served 12 years on death row in Illinois before being exonerated of murder and released in 2004. "That's inhuman, that is truly torture. That is not justice. If we are truly a civilized society as all of America claims to be, we should not do anything like this."

Efforts to contact Balentine through his lawyer for comment were not successful.

The U.S. Supreme Court suspended the death penalty through a 1972 decision then reinstated it in 1976. Since 1976, the number of executions in the United States has gradually declined to 43 in 2011 from a peak of 98 in 1999 because of concern about the possibility of killing an innocent person and the fairness of the system.

There have been 27 people put to death so far this year which suggests an end-year figure of around 40, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said.

The increasing scrutiny of each case is resulting in more stays of execution. There have been 37 stays to date this year, which suggests an end-year figure around 55, compared with 41 in all of 2011, the information centre said.

Fewer executions and more delays also mean longer periods between sentencing and execution. For those executed in 2010, the latest year available, the average time on death row was 14.8 years, the longest for any year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The average for all cases since reinstatement was 10.9 years, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Gary Alvord in Florida, who according to the Florida Department of Corrections has awaited execution since 1974, is believed to be the nation's longest-serving death row inmate.

And:

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has several times in recent years expressed concern about long delays in executions. He dissented from a decision in 2011 to allow the execution of Manuel Valle in Florida after 33 years on death row.

"I have little doubt about the cruelty of so long a period of incarceration under sentence of death," Breyer wrote.

The Reuters report is also available via HuffPost as, "John Balentine, On Texas Death Row, Has Execution Delayed 3 Times."

Earlier coverage of John Balentine's case begins at the link.  Coverage of Justice Breyer's written dissent in the Valle case is also avaiilable.

Wanting to Kill

That's the title of Matthew Parker's OpEd in the New York Times Sunday Review, published August 5th.  He'ss the author of Larceny in My Blood, a graphic memoir.  It's a must-read.

My brother had been stabbed numerous times, his throat slashed. The crime occurred in a park in South Phoenix. An ex-con from Oklahoma was later found guilty of first-degree murder.

Overnight, I became a believer in the death penalty. Before John’s murder, I thought that killing a person in any form was wrong. “I want closure,” I would rant to anyone who’d listen. “I want justice.” But what I really wanted was blood and vengeance.

A few years after John died I moved to Arizona and, several years after that, was sentenced to prison. I was a junkie and a petty thief, the latter a direct result of the former. Between 1987 and 2002 I was constantly being locked up. Aside from time in the county jail, I also served roughly 10 years in both federal and state institutions.

In the summer of 1991 I was being held in a Maricopa County jail on three felonies: third-degree burglary, possession of narcotics and possession of drug paraphernalia. The judge sentenced me to two years in an Arizona state prison, the same state prison system that housed my brother’s murderer. After being transferred to the Arizona Department of Corrections I was taken to an office for classification.

“You have a D.N.H. in your jacket,” the administrator told me.

D.N.H. is an abbreviation for “do not house,” as in: “Do not house prisoner Parker with his brother’s murderer.” Jacket is slang for a prisoner’s criminal record. The administrator had my jacket in his hand, and he was leafing through it as he sat behind his desk in the cramped office. My jacket contained such things as the specifics of my convictions, my criminal history and security threat, as well as any propensity for violence or, as was the case with me, the lack thereof.

I knew that my brother’s killer was serving a life sentence in an Arizona state prison. I didn’t want to confront him; I was in truth scared to death at the possibility, however remote. Here I was being sent to the same prison system as the man I wanted killed. My thoughts were roiling. What if there wasn’t a D.N.H. in my jacket? What if there was a screw-up — not unheard of in prison bureaucracies — and I was sent to the same prison as him? What if I ran into him? What would I do? What would he do? That D.N.H. in my jacket made me instantly realize just how close I was to an actual death penalty — so close that I could personally administer it. One little mistake on the part of the Arizona Department of Corrections and all my wishes for bloody vengeance would have become a reality. “Here’s your death penalty, son. We’re gonna accidentally (wink, wink) put you in the same prison with this dirt bag, where you can stab him in his sleep with a homemade shank. Slash him to ribbons with a razor blade in the shower. Bash his brains out on the ball field with a baseball bat.”

It’s easy enough to think about vengeance, even to declare a desire for it, but being confronted with the mechanics of murder is a different matter entirely. It forced me to examine my motives more closely, and to think about the sheer intimacy inherent in acts of violence. I’d been in fistfights in jail and prison — fighting is just a fact of life on the inside — but they were relatively harmless and over quickly. Now I was forced to contemplate actual murder, and decided that it just wasn’t in me to attack another human being with intent to kill or, a distinct possibility, be killed. It took that D.N.H., that rote product of penal bureaucracy, to teach me that I didn’t want to kill anybody, and from there it wasn’t much of a mental leap to conclude that I didn’t want the state do it for me, either.

Related posts are in the incarceration, OpEd, and victims' issues category indexes.

Texas Death Row Inmate Selwyn Davis Dies

Mike Ward posts, "Selwyn Davis dies while on death row," at the Austin American-Statesman.

Authorities said they are investigating the death — a rarity on Texas death row — as a possible suicide.

Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said Selwyn Davis, 30, was found unconscious during a routine security check shortly after 9 p.m. last Friday at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, east of Huntsville.

“He was unresponsive on the floor,” Clark said. “Staff began life saving measures, called 911, and took the offender to the unit infirmary.”

Davis was rushed by ambulance to Livingston Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 10:04 p.m., Clark said. An autopsy and cause of death are pending, he said.

Clark said the agency’s Office of Inspector General is investigating the death.

The Oregon Hearing

"Oregon death row inmate fighting reprieve," is the AP report, via the Las Vegas Sun.

An Oregon death row inmate and the state's governor are at the center of an unusual legal battle _ the governor has granted the twice-convicted murderer a reprieve, even though the inmate did not ask for it and does not want it.

Gov. John Kitzhaber blocked Gary Haugen's scheduled execution last fall, saying no executions would be carried out on his watch.

Haugen has sought to reject the governor's clemency. He's voluntarily waived legal appeals that could delay his execution for years and has fought to speed his punishment in protest of a criminal justice system that he says is broken.

Their dispute was heard in court on Tuesday.

Oregon voters reinstated the death penalty in 1984, and the state has executed two people since then. Both occurred while Kitzhaber served as governor between 1995 and 2003. Both inmates had volunteered for execution, waiving their appeals.

After Kitzhaber was again elected in 2010, he announced he wouldn't allow any more executions while he was in office, saying he was haunted by the previous two. The governor has said he has no sympathy for Haugen but opposes capital punishment and believes Oregon's death penalty laws are "compromised and inequitable."

Haugen's attorney argued in court on Tuesday that Kitzhaber's reprieve places an "onerous condition" on the death row inmate because it leaves Haugen in the dark about whether he will ever be granted his wish to be executed, since a different governor could take a different position.

"It could be a day, could be seven years," Harrison Latto said of the reprieve. "During that indefinite period of time, they're saying, `sit tight and we'll tell you at the end of that period whether you'll be executed or not."

And:

Kitzhaber's attorney, Tim Sylwester, said Haugen can only decline the reprieve if it comes with strings attached. He cited the case of a man who refused to admit guilt as a condition of a commuted sentence. In Haugen's case, Sylwester said no such conditions apply.

"He has a death sentence he can't challenge," Sylwester said. "Right now (with the reprieve) you're serving a life sentence, it's unconditional . so you can't refuse it."

The Oregonian reports, "Gary Haugen reprieve challenge: Judge appears receptive to death row inmate's argument."  It's by Helen Jung.

Gov. John Kitzhaber faces some obstacles in proving that his reprieve of Gary Haugen's planned execution is legally valid based on past Oregon Supreme Court cases, a judge said Tuesday.

Senior Judge Timothy Alexander quizzed a state attorney about the governor's argument that Haugen doesn't have to accept the reprieve for it to be effective.

Haugen, who has waived his appeals and volunteered for execution, is pushing for his execution to go forward.

Haugen's attorney, Harrison Latto, argued that in past cases before the state's highest court, Oregon has adopted an 1833 U.S. Supreme Court interpretation authored by Chief Justice John Marshall that suggests inmates must agree to pardons and similar acts for them to take effect.

The judge seemed receptive to the argument and asked if state Assistant Attorney General Tim Sylwester could point to any decisions showing that the Oregon Supreme Court had adopted an alternative view. Sylwester said he couldn't, noting the rarity of cases when someone rejects a pardon or reprieve.

"If the Oregon Supreme Court is still in favor of Justice Marshall's acceptance theory, then you've got a problem on (the governor's) side of the case," Alexander said.

Sylwester argued that past court decisions show pardon recipients must accept clemency only if it comes with conditions placed on them. The reprieve in Haugen's case doesn't carry any such conditions, he said. He also has maintained that the governor's power to grant reprieves has no constitutional limits and that the Circuit Court lacks authority to review the reasons for the reprieve.

"Haugen renews bid to reinstate death warrant,"  by Peter Wong in the Salem Statesman Journal.

Although he was barred Tuesday from speaking on his own behalf, Gary Haugen renewed his bid to reinstate his death warrant and reject a reprieve issued by Gov. John Kitzhaber.

Judge Timothy Alexander asked lawyers for Haugen and Kitzhaber to submit additional written arguments on one point relating to a 1957 decision of the Oregon Supreme Court that did not get considered earlier. He set no date for a decision, which he acknowledged likely is to be appealed.

When his lawyer requested that Haugen be allowed to make a statement at the end of an hourlong proceeding in Marion County Circuit Court, Alexander said no.

“This is a legal argument,” said Alexander, a senior judge from Washington County assigned to the case, who denied the request by Harrison Latto of Portland.

And:

Although there are 36 men and one woman on Oregon’s death row as of mid-2011, Haugen is the only one who has waived appeals.Haugen was within two weeks of his execution date when Kitzhaber issued a reprieve Nov. 22.

Earlier coverage from Oregon begins at the link.

Daugaard Could Oversee Three SD Executions

That's the title of a KELO-TV report by Brady Mallory, datelined Pierre, South Dakota.

There are decades between two high profile South Dakota murder cases.  But the three convicted criminals could be put to death in the same time span.  Eric Robert, Rodney Berget and Donald Moeller are all on death row.  This could be the first time in more than 100 years multiple criminals are put to death under one governor.

Governor Dennis Daugaard understands it is the most extreme form of punishment.

"Participating in the death penalty is not something one looks forward to but it is not something I am going to shrink from," Governor Dennis Daugaard said.

But Daugaard says he believes in the death penalty when life in prison is not enough.

And:

Daugaard says he is not going to be an advocate for the death penalty beyond extreme criminal cases.

"South Dakota citizens deserve to be protected from them in a permanent way,"  Daugaard said. "It doesn't mean we are becoming Texas."

Two other men are also on South Dakota's death row.  The last criminal to be put to death in the state was Elijah Page in 2007.  He was the first execution in 60 years.  The last time a governor oversaw multiple death penalties was in 1902 when death by hanging was still legal.

The Ivan Cantu Case

BBC News Magazine posts, "Texas death row prisoner clings to hope."  It's by Paul Adams.  There is audio at the link.

The Allan B Polunsky Unit just outside Livingston, Texas, is an intimidating place.

As a maximum security facility housing all the state's death row prisoners, that is hardly surprising.

But the watch-towers and razor wire are only part of it. It is the buildings themselves: bleak, other-worldly boxes, apparently windowless, that are really scary.

Look more closely and you see that there are, in fact, windows but they are narrow, horizontal slits more like something from a medieval castle than anything to be gazed out of.

Again, hardly surprising.

The reception, when I arrive to interview an inmate on death row, is friendly, polite and extremely thorough.

No mobile phones, computers or weapons, of course, but also no money - including cash, credit cards and chequebooks.

Nothing that could remotely be of use to a prisoner, if you were somehow able to make contact. Which, of course, you cannot.

After being accompanied through several electronically controlled doors to the visitation centre and handing over the microphone that would be used to record his leg of our conversation, I looked around, wondering where Ivan Abner Cantu was.

Continued Miller v. Alabama Commentary

"The Roberts Court’s Liberal Turn on Juvenile Justice," is David S. Tanehaus' OpEd in the New York Times.  He's the author of The Constitutional Rights of Children: In re Gault and Juvenile Justice., and teaches law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

THE Supreme Court’s decision this week to ban mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for offenders younger than 18 is an emphatic rejection of the “get tough” juvenile justice policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which punished children as if they were adults. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan’s clear statement not only recognized the political and biological principle that children are different from adults but at last also inscribed it into constitutional law.

Treating children differently from adults may be a radical idea, but it’s also an old one, predating the American Revolution. The political philosopher John Locke argued that children’s lack of reasoning capacity, which disqualified them from participating in government, also made them less culpable for their criminal acts. By the turn of the 20th century, progressive child advocates embedded the principle that children are different from adults — and thus require individualized handling of their cases — into the foundation of the world’s first juvenile courts.

Today, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have juvenile justice systems that divert youthful offenders from the criminal justice system at large. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, in response to mounting concerns about juvenile crime, many states changed their laws to give prosecutors, instead of juvenile court judges, the authority to determine which court system would handle a particular child’s case. As a result, prosecutors now make the vast majority of decisions to transfer juveniles to criminal court. This dramatic departure from past practices threatened to undermine the longstanding principle that children’s cases should not be handled like those of adults. By the late ’90s, some critics even called for the abolition of the juvenile court.

"Sentencing policy," is the title of this week's Democracy in America column at the Economist.

AMERICA locks up too many people for too many things for too long, largely due to the prevalence of mandatory-minimum sentencing laws. These laws have eroded judicial discretion, rigged America's criminal-justice system in the prosecution's favour and produced wildly unjust results. Opponents of mandatory-minimums are no doubt cheering the Supreme Court's ruling last week, in Miller v Alabama, that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of capital murder violate the eighth amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. This ruling will have significant effects: some 28 states, and the federal government, have such statutes on the books; nearly 2,600 juveniles are currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole; most of those sentences were mandatory. The court split along partisan lines, with Justice Kennedy siding with the liberal quartet.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama begins at the link.

Editorial Support for Juvenile Ruling Continues, Coast-to-Coast

California's Stockton Record carries the editorial, "Mandatory sentences unjust."

That minors sometimes commit evil, hideous crimes goes without saying. That those convicted should always receive life in prison without the possibility of parole is another matter.

So said the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling Monday that saw swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy join the liberal wing of the court.

The justices said that, yes, juveniles can be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole but such a sentence cannot be automatic.

In Florida, "Mandatory Judgment," in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

The ruling strengthens a series of precedents recognizing that juveniles may have less "moral culpability" for crimes because their brains — unlike those of adults — are not yet fully developed. Furthermore, they may be more capable of reform.

Quite consistently over the past decade, a majority of the high court has adopted this stance — correctly, in our view. Yet the nine justices stand sharply divided on the issue, as the 5-4 split this week shows.

The Evansville Courier & Press in Indiana has, "Don't put justice system on auto pilot."

The law cannot fly on automatic pilot, which is what state legislatures periodically try to do by taking certain decisions out of the hands of judges and juries, particularly with mandatory minimum sentences.

A particularly egregious example of bypassing judicial discretion are laws requiring youths younger than 18 convicted of murder to be sentenced to life without parole, regardless of the circumstances of the crimes or such factors as a brutally dysfunctional home life.

Framingham, Massachusetts" MetroWest Daily News, "New rules for young murderers."

In declaring mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenders unconstitutional, the Supreme Court this week reaffirmed two important principles.

The first is one every parent knows well: Children are different from adults. In recent years, science has confirmed those differences, including some that bear directly on crime, culpability and punishment.

The adolescent mind matures more slowly than the body, and among the last to develop, scientists say, are impulse control, empathy and the ability to foresee the consequences of actions. There’s a reason adolescence is associated with thoughtlessness, recklessness and aggression. The other thing both parents and scientists know about adolescence is that eventually, most people outgrow it.

This distinction has always been the foundation of juvenile law. Children are not expected to be as responsible as adults, so they can’t be as guilty. Because they are still growing, the law is quicker to forgive children for crimes committed and is more likely to assume they can be rehabilitated for re-entry to society as responsible adults.

The second principle affirmed Monday is that every situation is different, and that judges should be empowered to make sure the punishment fits the crime and the criminal.

The Detroit News editorial is, "Juvenile lifers deserve a chance."

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling banning mandatory life sentences with no parole for youthful offenders was the right decision. Such a sentence for each young offender ought to be the result of a careful and thoughtful examination of his or her circumstances by the sentencing judge — rather than the rote application of a sentencing formula. The Michigan Legislature must revise the law to take account of the High Court's ruling.

Michigan is one of the states that has required mandatory life imprisonment to be imposed on all — including juveniles over 14 — who are found guilty of murder. The Supreme Court's ruling still allows for such a sentence for a juvenile offender, but making life sentences mandatory with no parole for youths has been deemed unconstitutional.

We have supported uniform sentencing. The cost of committing the same crime under similar circumstances shouldn't be drastically different in Detroit and Kalkaska.

But the sentencing of juveniles is different. Much more individual consideration is required.

"Decision on juvenile convictions brings flexibility," in Durham, North Carolina's Herald-Sun.

A few important points need to be made in discussing what is a well-reasoned decision. Juveniles will not automatically be freed as a result. The ruling in a case such as that of Laurence Lovette Jr., who was 17 when he killed Eve Carson, University of North Carolina student body president, in Chapel Hill, could mean many things.

He might still be sentenced to life without parole, after a sentencing hearing, or a jury might have to find aggravating circumstances in order to issue a life-without-parole sentence.

Lovette also faces a number of other sentences related to convictions for kidnapping and armed robbery, meaning that any possibility for parole in his case would be remote and far off.

Also up in the air is what happens to juveniles in the state who have been charged with first-degree murder but have not yet gone to trial.

We hope that legislators act to address these issues in an evenhanded way. Discretion in sentencing is a worthy outcome of the Supreme Court’s action.

"Justice with heart: Top court strikes down cruel sentences for juveniles," in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

When it comes to mercy and common sense, one doesn't typically think of the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, the high court has displayed unusual amounts of both with recent rulings.

The latest sign that the Supreme Court is capitulating to reality on some fronts is its move to strike down mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles, one of the cruelest and most mindlessly punitive planks in the American patchwork of criminal justice.

"Death behind bars shouldn’t be automatic for juveniles," in the Tacoma News Tribune of Washington.

Life without parole is an important sentencing option. Many supporters of capital punishment fear that depraved killers will eventually be released if they are not executed. Some jurors will opt for life in prison instead of execution if they are assured that the killer will actually remain behind bars.

But the court majority Monday rightly struck down an Alabama law that ordered judges not to factor in circumstances or chances of rehabilitation in juvenile cases.

To state the obvious, adolescents are not adults. By definition, they lack maturity and have had less opportunity to rise above what may have been hellish childhoods. The moral compasses of many teenagers aren’t fully operational. As a rule, they are more emotional and impulsive, and much less likely to think through the consequences of their action.

Earlier coverage of the juvenile sentencing ruling begins at the link.  More commentary from individuals and columnists coming next.  The Supreme Court's ruling in Miller v. Alabama is available in Adobe .pdf format.

Commentary on the Juvenile Sentencing Ruling

Andrew Cohen posts, "If You Think Monday Was Bad at the Supreme Court ...," at the Atlantic.  As usual, Cohen analysis is a must-read.  Here's an excerpt:

It is a shame on many levels that Miller came down on a day when it was overshadowed by other news from the Supreme Court. For in Miller v. Alabama, we see both the clear continuation of a trend on the Court -- and the passing of a torch. Even though Justice Kagan wrote the majority opinion in Miller, it was largely Justice Kennedy's precedent that she was following. More than that, it was Justice Kennedy (as senior member of the majority) who assigned the opinion to Justice Kagan to write.

Justice Kennedy is central to this story because he's literally written the law upon which Miller is based. In the beginning, there was Atkins v. Virginia, a 2002 case in which Justice Kennedy signed on to Justice John Paul Stevens' 6-3 ruling outlawing the execution of mentally retarded capital defendants. Next came Roper v. Simmons, in 2005, in which Justice Kennedy, writing for a 5-4 majority, outlawed capital punishment for murderers who committed their crimes before age 18.

Next came Graham v. Florida in 2010, in which Justice Kennedy, writing for another slender majority, outlawed life sentences for juvenile offenders who committed non-homicide crimes. "By denying the defendant the right to reenter the community," Justice Kennedy wrote, "the State makes an irrevocable judgment about that person's value and place in society. This judgment is not appropriate in light of a juvenile non homicide offender's capacity for change and limited moral culpability."

The Miller case was designed to explore one step further -- could mandatory life sentences for convicted murderers also run afoul of the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the Eighth Amendment? When I wrote a piece about the oral argument in the case back in March, I was struck by how many of the justices have children. I wondered at the time whether, in some way, their roles as parents would impact their perceptions of the issues raised in the case. Now I have my answer.

The essence of all these cases, including Miller, is that criminal defendants, especially those who are mentally, intellectually, and emotionally vulnerable, ought to be afforded a level of "individualized sentencing" that eschews "mandatory'' sentences. It's neater and more politically popular for state legislators to sentence offenders in broad categories. But as we have seen in so many capital cases, as we have seen in so many other cases, just because these classifications are convenient doesn't make them constitutional.

"Shall we lock up a child and throw away the key?" is George Will's Washington Post and syndicated column.

Because of their offenses, both Jackson and Miller were automatically tried as adults. Both were sentenced under mandatory sentencing laws.

On Monday, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits such sentences when they are mandatory. Previously, the court had held that, regarding children, such sentences are akin to the death penalty, which the court said requires individuation — consideration by sentencing authorities of each defendant’s characteristics and crime.

This ruling extends two others, one holding that the Eighth Amendment bars capital punishment for children under 18, the other that it bars life without parole for a juvenile convicted of a non-homicide offense. These decisions held that regarding culpability, and hence sentencing, children are constitutionally unlike adults. The decisions came in the context of accumulating scientific evidence about increased impulsivity and diminished responsibility because of adolescent brain development.

And:

The dissenters were right that a practice can be both constitutional and reprehensible. Even if sentencing 14-year-olds to die in prison is the latter — and it is — whether it is the former depends largely on the infrequency of such sentences. It is, however, to be hoped that the case the court decided Monday might prompt changes in social thinking that will give other cruel punishments, such as protracted solitary confinement, the infrequency requisite for making them sufficiently unusual as to be unconstitutional.

At the Dallas Morning News Views Blog, editorial writer Jim Mitchell posts, "High Court ruling presents a juvenile justice issue — even in Texas."

The Supreme Court has said life-without-parole is unconstitutional. But about three years ago, Texas abolished mandatory life without  parole for anyone under  age 17. So it would seem that Texas was ahead of the curve. However,  there are 27 people in Texas prisons who were sentenced to life without parole  before they turned 18, and the High Court ruling makes those cases problematic.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that death penalty for juveniles violated the Constitution, Perry commuted the death sentences for 28 prisoners on death row who were 17; those sentences were rolled into life sentences.

It is pretty clear that some sort of re-sentencing is necessary. The question is how it should be done.

"'Elite' Supreme Court sides with science and juveniles," by Jonathan Zimmerman at the Christian Science Monitor.  Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.

Did the Supreme Court embrace an “elite vision” on Monday when it struck down state laws mandating life imprisonment for juvenile murderers?

That’s what Justice Samuel Alito said, in an angry dissent from the bench. By invalidating such laws, Mr. Alito fumed, the court’s 5-4 majority assumed that it knew better than the 28 state legislatures that have authorized mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for killers younger than 18.

But the court’s majority really does know better. And there’s a simple reason for that: It relied on science – in particular, the science of adolescent brain development.

"A special status for violent children," is by Jessica S. Henry for the Bergen (NJ) Record.  She is associate professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University.

Although the court did not foreclose the possibility of life-without-parole sentences for children, it recognized that “appropriate occasions for sentencing juveniles to this harshest possible penalty will be uncommon.”

A sentence of life without parole reflects the belief that there are offenders who are so dangerous or who have committed a crime so heinous that they can never and should never be released. When a life-without-parole sentence is imposed on a child, particularly when it is imposed as a mandatory sentence, we make the determination at the time of sentencing that this child is forever beyond redemption.

Miller permits us to question that presumption because it requires children to be recognized as not yet fully formed people who carry the potential for change.

Slate features an exchange between Emily Bazelon and Judge Richard Posner as part of it's Supreme Court Year in Review series.  Bazelon writes, "The justices seem to understand that juveniles aren’t like the rest of us."

I see this as a fairly small but still significant step in expanding the definition of cruel and unusual punishment—the Eighth Amendment standard for declaring a sentence off limits. It’s incremental because two years ago, the court ruled unconstitutional mandatory LWOP for teenagers who commit crimes other than murder. Today, the court simply extended the reasoning of that ruling, Graham v. Florida, to teenage killers. Not surprising, right? Especially since the whole idea behind Graham was that minors are less culpable than adults in part because their brains aren’t fully developed. Once again today, the court relied on the research of Laurence Steinberg at Temple University, whose studies of the adolescent brain have been crucial to this line of cases. Steinberg has found that teenagers tend to have less impulse control and more proclivity for risk, and as Kagan says, these findings mean the court’s decisions rest “not only on common sense—on ‘what any parent knows’—but on science and social science as well.”

I don’t want to imply, though, that Miller was a slam dunk. At oral argument, it seemed far from clear that five justices were willing to rule out mandatory LWOP for everyone up to age 18, no matter how brutal their crimes. It’s one thing to say that the judge should have had a more merciful option than life in prison for Kuntrell Jackson, who was 14 when he was convicted and sentenced for robbing a video store where a clerk was fatally shot, when Jackson didn’t fire the gun himself. It’s another to worry about the fate of Evan Miller, who Kagan acknowledges committed a “vicious murder” at 14, when he and a friend beat a neighbor and set fire to his trailer after drinking and getting high. But Kagan makes the best of these facts by noting Miller’s history of abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents.

The Slate conversation continues with "Justices should use more than their gut and “brain science” to decide a case," by Judge Posner.

I am struck by the court's reference to "brain science." The court has learned from brain science that teenagers are immature! But we knew that. The problem with using it as a basis for distinguishing between murderers of different ages is that many adult murderers have problems with their brains, too. Why is it not cruel and unusual to sentence them to life in prison? A categorical distinction between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old seems arbitrary, and in any event a reflection of feelings about children (if teenagers can be called children) rather than of the teachings of brain science. If the court had said—what I imagine the justices in the majority feel, that emotion dictated the outcome—that a sentence of life imprisonment (with no parole of course) imposed on a 14-year-old is extremely distasteful, it would have the considerable virtue of candor.

"Supreme Court ruling on juveniles is a partial victory," by James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, and a regular contributor to the Globe.

MONDAY’S 5-4 Supreme Court decision disallowing mandatory life sentences without parole for defendants convicted of murder perpetrated before their 18th birthday moves us significantly closer to a rational system for punishing young offenders. It provides hope for hundreds of prisoners around the country, including more than 60 in Massachusetts, who until now saw no chance of ever walking free.

Massachusetts is one of 28 states affected by the court’s decision in not considering mitigating factors and special circumstances that might warrant parole eligibility. Belying the undeserved reputation for being soft on crime, the Commonwealth arguably has the nation’s stiffest sanction for juvenile murder. Anyone as young as 14 charged with murder is automatically tried as an adult, and if convicted of first-degree murder, receives a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

And:

For the growing network of legal experts and child advocates, the ruling is a partial victory, but falls short of the ultimate goal of bringing laws more in line with evolving standards around the world and developing science concerning adolescent brain development. In this struggle, change has come gradually.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama and juvenile sentencing begins in the preceding post.

News Analysis of Miller v. Alabama

"Sentencing Ruling Reflects Rethinking on Juvenile Justice," by Ethan Bronner at the New York Times.  For those following juvenile justice issues it's a must-read.  Here's the beginning:

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday barring mandatory life sentences for juveniles convicted of murder was the sharpest indication to date of a shift in how the American judicial system views young felons — from irredeemable predators to victims of circumstance with a potential for rehabilitation.

The change, manifest in court decisions starting in 2005, is a result of a confluence of factors: a drop-off in the crack-related crime wave that began in the late 1980s and that led states to move violent juveniles into the adult system and create mandatory prison terms for some crimes; an explosion in scientific research on adolescent brain development; a desire to cut costs by reducing prison populations; and the frustration of juvenile judges with mandatory sentencing.

Together, experts say, the developments seem to be opening a new chapter in juvenile justice only two decades after a markedly different approach took firm hold.

“What we are seeing is a very stark and important rethinking of how we treat juvenile criminal offenders,” said Marsha Levick, who co-founded the nonprofit Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia in 1975. “For years we were trying to convince the courts that kids have constitutional rights just like adults. Now we realize that to ensure that kids are protected, we have to recognize that they are actually different from adults.”

That sense of difference has fueled the Supreme Court decisions of the past seven years — first a ruling that barred the death penalty for juveniles in 2005; one that banned life in prison for juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide in 2010; and now Monday’s ruling that rendered invalid state laws requiring youths convicted of homicide as well to die in prison. That decision will lead to resentencing hearings for about 2,000 convicts — some of them now well into middle age — in more than two dozen states.

"Life-Without-Parole for Juveniles Is Struck Down," is by Tony Mauro for the National Law Journal and Law.com.

Justice Elena Kagan announced the decision in Miller v. Alabama, 10-9646, for a 5-4 majority, asserting that juveniles' "lesser culpability" makes it unconstitutional for them to be sentenced under a scheme that does not give the judge the ability to consider factors such as the defendant's age, maturity and upbringing in determining the sentence. "Youth matters," Kagan said from the bench.

The ruling paves the way for roughly 2,000 inmates nationwide to seek reversal of their life sentences, according to Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the lawyer for the two inmates whose cases were ruled on by the high court.

Said Stevenson, "This is an incredibly important step forward in recognizing one of the great tragedies of our time," namely the large-scale incarceration of juveniles under sentences that give them no hope of release after rehabilitation.

But Stevenson warned of a coming crisis in finding enough lawyers to represent the inmates who are entitled to relief because of ruling. Many are in states that do not provide lawyers for indigent defendants on appeal.

The ruling marked the growing clout of Kagan on the Supreme Court, as well as the continuing importance of Justice Anthony Kennedy as the court's swing justice. He provided a fifth vote to the liberal-wing justices Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer. As the senior justice in the majority, Kennedy gave the job of writing the decision to Kagan, a major assignment for a relatively junior justice. Kagan joined the court in 2010.

Reviewing the court's recent precedents, which have struck down the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for nonhomicide juvenile offenders, Kagan wrote, "imposition of a state's most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children."

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama begins with the preceding post; commentary, next.  The Court's ruling in Miller v. Alabama is available in Adobe .pdf format.

Continued Editorial Support for Miller v. Alabama

There's continued support for the Suprme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama, and lots of commentary.  In this post, editorials; followed by analysis in the next post; then, columns and commentary.

"Children in Prison for Life," is the New York Times' editorial.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this week prohibiting mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder is a measured and important step in a trend in juvenile justice begun more than two decades ago. The court left open the possibility that minors under age 18 could be sentenced to life without parole — but only if the sentencing judge has made an individualized finding that such a penalty is appropriate, weighing the defendant’s characteristics and the details of the crime.

The 5-to-4 majority opinion by Justice Elena Kagan, with Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the moderate liberals, held that the mandatory punishment is unconstitutional because it fails “to take into account how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison.”

The Christian Science Monitor editorial is, "Supreme Court ruling on life sentences for young criminals."

Is a child more capable of character reform than an adult?

In a string of rulings since 2005, the Supreme Court has accepted this popular perception in lessening harsh sentences for juveniles who commit crimes.

In its latest decision issued Monday, the court banned mandatory life sentences with no chance of parole for minors who commit murder. The ruling still allows such sentences. But judges and juries must first assess a minor’s capacity for reform. Only a small percentage of adolescents develop entrenched patterns of problem behavior, the court stated.

"Justice for juvenile criminals," in the Denver Post.

We've long opposed sentencing juveniles to life without any possibility of parole. That's why we supported changing state law in 2006 to ensure that juveniles convicted of murder become eligible for parole after serving 40 years in prison.

But what about the 50 Colorado inmates who are serving life sentences right now without any possibility of parole because the 2006 law wasn't retroactive? This week the U.S. Supreme Court provided an answer: They too cannot be ignored. It is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment to impose mandatory life-without-parole sentences on juvenile murderers.

The court's decision doesn't mean inmates in Colorado convicted as juveniles under this state's prior harsher standard will be freed anytime soon — or necessarily ever. Becoming eligible for parole doesn't mean you actually will be released.

"Court gets it right," in the Buffalo News.

The Supreme Court issued two smart rulings on Monday, one striking down most of Arizona's constitutionally reckless immigration law and the other prohibiting automatic sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder.

And:

In the other ruling, decided in a 5-4 vote - closer than it should have been - the court decided that it is cruel and unusual to impose automatic sentences of life without parole on murderers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes.

State and federal courts generally have moved too far in removing discretion from judges who are, after all, supposed to judge. The Supreme Court struck down laws in 29 states that prohibited judges from considering mitigating circumstances.

"Court's decision sensible on teen killer sentences," is the Ventura County Star editorial.

The law cannot fly on automatic pilot, which is what state legislatures periodically try to do by taking certain decisions out of the hands of judges and juries, particularly with mandatory minimum sentences.

A particularly egregious example of bypassing judicial discretion are laws requiring youths younger than 18 convicted of murder to be sentenced to life without parole, regardless of the circumstances of the crimes or such factors as a brutally dysfunctional home life.

This week, by a 5-to-4 decision the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court said such mandatory life sentences for juveniles under 18 violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

And:

The court's majority made a sensible ruling, though one that won't force any changes in California. Here, state law already allows discretion in sentencing juveniles for murder.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama and juvenile sentencing begins at the link; continued coverage in the next two posts.  Related posts are in the juvenile category index.

Additional Miller v. Alabama Coverage

The Washington Post has an interview with Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who argued the juvenile cases decided in Miller v. Alabama.

The intervew, "Bryan Stevenson, the man behind the juvenile justice cases decided by the Supreme Court," is conducted by Eva Rodriguez.  Here's a brief excerpt from this must-read:

Why did you get involved in these types of cases? Why do you feel so strongly?

Stevenson: I started representing children on death row 20 years ago, and I was struck by how desperately they wanted and needed mentoring, parenting, guidance. They were in every sense of the word “kids,” and that surprised me initially. . . . What I saw was that not only were they vulnerable and disabled and exposed in ways that adult clients weren’t, but they were also responsive in ways that adult clients weren’t. . . . The second thing was just seeing how exposed kids are in the adult system, how victimized, how brutalized.

Have you ever come face to face with a victim of one of your clients?

Tragically, I know more about victimization than I wish I knew. My grandfather was murdered when I was 16 by juveniles, four kids in a low-income project in south Philadelphia. Members of my immediate family have dealt with very serious crimes. It’s not a lack of awareness. We spend a lot of time with victims of violent crime. . . . I think we should be doing something radically better by people who are victimized by violent crime. But what we’ve done in the last 30 years is promised them revenge, mostly; we promised them blood and executions and extreme punishments.

We do very poorly in providing them with counseling and support and recovery or the promise of a new society where there’s going to be less crime because we’re doing something constructive to help people who are at risk or hopeless or marginalized.

I also think that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. And if we don’t commit in a complete way to justice for everybody, we risk perpetuating the dynamics that have been so injurious to American progress. And I do believe we should spend a lot more time thinking about how we treat people who are disadvantaged and disfavored in evaluating our progress, our decency, our character, because, ultimately, that’s how we’re going to be judged.

If a juvenile has committed the most heinous of crimes and the jury has adjudicated that individual guilty, why is it offensive to the Constitution for that juvenile to be subjected to a mandatory life without parole?

Children are different than adults. We recognize that children need extra protection. Their maturity, their judgment, their development doesn’t permit us to treat them like adults. That’s the reason why we don’t let even the smartest kids smoke or drink or vote or drive cars before they’re eligible.

We protect children under the law except in the criminal justice system, and in the last 30 years, we have essentially dropped the protections for kids, put them in the adult criminal justice system, where I think many of them have been really unfairly sentenced and condemned. . . . We do it mostly to kids who are poor and kids of color, and that makes this sentence “unusual.”

I believe that to say to any child that you’re only fit to die in prison is “cruel.” It’s true that some of these crimes are very disturbing, but it’s also true that the lives that many of these children have lived are also disturbing. They’re in many ways some of the most vulnerable kids in society, and we owe them more than to simply throw them away.

You can view Bryan Stevenson's Ted Talk, "We need to talk about an injustice," noted in this post.

There is additional news coverage of the ruling in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Courthouse News Service, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.

What Miller v. Alabama Means for Texas

The Texas Tribune posts, "Decision on Juvenile Sentences Stirs Questions in Texas," by John Wayne Ferguson.

Twenty-eight states currently allow mandatory life without parole for juveniles and will now have to change their laws to accommodate the rulings. The decision still allows for such sentences, but judges must now consider the age of the convicted individual.

Texas already abolished mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles in 2009. But the Texas law stipulated that no one under the age of 17 could receive the sentence.

There are currently 27 individuals incarcerated in Texas who were sentenced to life without parole before they were 18. All 27 were convicted of capital murder, and all but two are male. Seventeen of them were 17 years old at the time of their offense. The others were 16 or younger. Nationwide, 2,300 individuals are serving life without parole sentences for murders committed before they were 18. Only about 79 were under the age of 14. Ninety percent of them are serving mandatory life sentences.

And:

After the Supreme Court in 2005 decided that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, Gov. Rick Perry commuted the sentences for 28 17-year-olds on death row. All 28 were given life sentences with the possibility of parole in 40 years.

After Monday's ruling, the state is still determining what action to take. “The Governor’s Office is working with the Attorney General, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, prosecutors and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to determine how many individuals may be affected by this ruling and what the appropriate steps will be for Texas going forward,” Josh Havens, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said in a statement.

Jason Clark of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said his office began preparing soon after the court’s announcement, and identified the 27 convicts in anticipation of any requests from the attorney general or governor’s offices.

Earlier coverage of the Supreme Court ruling on juvenile sentencing begins with the preceding post.

Editorial Support for Miller v. Alabama Ruling

Newspaper editorial boards across the country are praising yesterday's Supreme Court ruling on sentencing for juvenile offenders, Miller v. Alabama.

"Juvenile murderers and justice," is the Los Angele Times editorial.

In a 2005 ruling prohibiting capital punishment for juveniles, the court, reflecting the findings of psychologists and neurologists, cited three differences between younger teenagers and adults: Adolescents are likelier than adults to display a "lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility"; they are more susceptible to negative influences and peer pressure; and "the character of a juvenile is not as well formed as that of an adult." Using the same reasoning, the court in 2010 ruled that states could not sentence juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole for non-homicide crimes.

In her majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan cited the 2005 and 2010 cases, but she also based her ruling on precedents in which the Supreme Court outlawed mandatory death sentences for adults and required that sentencing judges take into account possible extenuating circumstances. She concluded that "the confluence of these two lines of precedent leads to the conclusion that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the 8th Amendment." It is not unconstitutional, however, for judges to impose such sentences at their discretion (though Kagan predicted legitimate uses of that authority would be "uncommon").

Perhaps this limited approach was necessary to win the vote of JusticeAnthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in the 2005 and 2010 decisions. In those cases he cited trends against imposing the death penalty on juvenile murderers and sentencing adolescents to life in prison without possibility of parole for non-homicide offenses.

"A welcome vote of compassion for teen offenders," in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Supreme Court's landmark ruling Monday barring mandatory life sentences for teenage criminals offers the welcome glimmer of hope for parole for thousands of lifers across the nation.

In Pennsylvania prisons nearly bursting with inmates who were locked away as teens, the mandatory-term ruling poses a major challenge in righting a potential wholesale injustice.

No other state has thrown away the key on so many juvenile offenders — with around 480 serving life terms for crimes committed before age 18. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has been asked to order the review of hundreds of those cases, and the court has a duty to move decisively in that direction now.

Every sentence should be reviewed as a result of the high court ruling, even if the state courts eventually conclude that the life sentences should stand under the narrow discretion the Supreme Court allowed.

"Juvenile life sentence ruling is wise," in the Austin American-Statesman.

Sentencing children to die in prison is cruel and unusual and therefore unconstitutional.

So said the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday when it ruled that state laws mandating that defendants younger than 18 who are convicted of murder be sentenced to life in prison without parole violated the Constitution's Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

It's a decision that reflects an ongoing evolution in our understanding of the juvenile brain and an appreciation for limits on juvenile justice. Mandating life without parole for juveniles takes away a court's discretion, can lead to punishment that is not proportional to a defendant's role in a crime and fails to account for the profound differences between adolescents and adults.

Texas legislators wisely banned life without parole of juvenile defendants in 2009, but the state's law failed to make the prohibition retroactive.

Thus, 27 juveniles who were convicted of capital murder as adults between 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles, and the passage of the new 2009 law are sitting in prison without any chance for parole. Monday's ruling should lead to new punishment hearings for these individuals.

There will be more on the ruling's application in Texas in the next post.

"Supreme Court rules wisely on immigration, juveniles," in the Kansas City Star.

The court helped build a fairer, more compassionate society with its 5-4 ruling that will stop courts from sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison without a chance of parole.

The decision, written by Justice Elena Kagan, builds upon previous rulings banning death sentences for juveniles and life sentences for young people convicted of crimes other than homicides.

“Mandatory life without parole for a juvenile precludes consideration of his chronological age and its hallmark features — among them, immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences,” Kagan wrote. “It prevents taking into account the family and home environment...”

The decision doesn’t mean that juveniles who commit the most serious crimes should escape justice. But it correctly rejects the notion that lives at 14 or 15 years of age are beyond redemption.

Detroit Free Press columnist Jeff Gerritt writes,"Supreme Court strikes down Michigan's barbaric juvenile lifer law."

A Wayne State University survey found that, when given alternatives, only 5% of state residents support forcing judges to give some kids as young as 14 life sentences, without possibility of parole. Michigan’s juvenile lifer law contradicts science, legal tradition, public opinion and plain common sense. It’s also immoral, a symptom of a society that has all but given up on the idea of redemption and second chances.

Brain imaging research shows what every parent knows: Teenage brains are more impulsive and unstable than adult brains — even without the abuse and neglect that many of these young people have faced. Juveniles don’t have the same legal rights and responsibilities as adults because they lack the maturity and judgment to handle them. Nor should they suffer the same punishments.

Without the courage or compassion to strike down the state’s draconian juvenile lifer law, Michigan's politicians have left it to the Supreme Court to drag the state into the 21st Century.

Earlier coverage of Miller v. Alabama and juvenile sentencing begins at the link.

Supreme Court Bars Mandatory LWoP for Juvenile Offenders - UPDATED

The Supreme Court. ruling in Miller v. Alabama is available in Adobe .pdf format.

The New York Times posts, "Justices Bar Mandatory Life Terms for Juveniles," written by Adam Liptak and Ethan Bronner.

Some 2,000 juvenile offenders serving life sentences without parole were given hope of eventual release by the Supreme Court on Monday. The court ruled that laws requiring youths convicted of murder to be sentenced to die in prison violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The 5-to-4 decision divided the court along ideological lines, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the four members of the liberal wing. Justice Kennedy also provided the decisive vote in two other decisions issued Monday — on Arizona’s immigration law and on a sequel to the court’s decision in the Citizens United campaign finance case.

Writing for the majority in the decision concerning juvenile offenders, Justice Elena Kagan said the Constitution forbids “requiring that all children convicted of homicide receive lifetime incarceration without possibility of parole, regardless of their age and age-related characteristics and the nature of their crimes.”

In barring the punishment for killings committed before age 18, Justice Kagan drew on two lines of precedent, both rooted in the court’s death penalty jurisprudence.

The first concerned harsh penalties imposed on juvenile offenders. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the court eliminated the juvenile death penalty. In 2010, in Graham v. Florida, the court ruled that sentencing juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole was also unconstitutional, but only for crimes that did not involve killings. That decision affected about 130 prisoners convicted of committing, before they turned 18, crimes like rape, armed robbery and kidnapping.

The new decision did not draw a categorical line. Instead, the majority looked to a second line of cases, these barring mandatory death sentences and insisting instead that judges and juries, in Justice Kagan’s words, “consider the characteristics of a defendant and the details of his offense before sentencing.”

The cases before the court concerned two men who were involved in killings when they were 14.

"Supreme Court: teen murderers must get parole chance," is by Jim Vicini for Reuters Legal.

The ruling could affect nearly 2,500 prisoners serving sentences of life in prison without parole for murder committed under the age of 18. The United States has more than 2.2 million inmates in prisons or jails.

The decision does not mean the prisoners must be released, only that they get the chance for parole.

The ruling is the court's latest at a time when juvenile sentencing trends are reflecting get-tough efforts by states to abolish parole and to prosecute juveniles in the regular criminal justice system for especially heinous crimes.

The Supreme Court in 2010 declared unconstitutional sentences for juveniles of life in prison without parole for crimes other than murder, and in 2005 abolished the death penalty for juveniles.

Opponents of harsh sentences for juvenile offenders have argued they are less responsible for their crimes than adults are due to their emotional immaturity and that they can change and be rehabilitated while in prison.

Bloomberg posts, "Life Sentences for Young Murderers Limited by High Court," by Greg Stohr.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can’t impose mandatory life-without-parole sentences on juveniles who are convicted of taking part in a murder.

The justices, voting 5-4, said states violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment when they don’t allow for the option of a shorter sentence.

Juvenile sentencing has been an area of concern for the nation’s highest court over the past decade. In 2005, the court outlawed the death penalty for juveniles, saying their lack of maturity made them “categorically less culpable than the average criminal.” In 2010, the court extended that reasoning to bar life-without-parole sentences for youths convicted of a crime other than murder.

And:

Thirty-eight states, along with the federal government, have laws that permit life-without-parole sentences for youthful murderers. Even so, those sentences are rare for the youngest offenders. Miller and Jackson are among 79 people serving life- without-parole sentences for crimes committed at age 13 or 14, according to their lawyers.

"Court: No more life without parole for juveniles," is the AP filing via USA Today.

The Supreme Court says it's unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole for murder.

The high court on Monday threw out Americans' ability to send children to prison for the rest of their lives with no chance of ever getting out. The 5-4 decision is in line with others the court has made, including ruling out the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for young people whose crimes did not involve killing.

The decision came in the robbery and murder cases of Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson, who were 14 when they were convicted.

"SCOTUS: Alabama juvenile wins ban against life-without-parole sentences," is Mary Orndorff's Birmingham News post.

Life-without-parole sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional, according to a 5-4 opinion this morning from the U.S. Supreme Court that involved a 14-year-old convicted of murder in Alabama.

Evan Miller was convicted of arson and murder in Lawrence County, but his life without any possibility of parole sentence violates the Constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment, according to the justices.

The opinion was written by Justice Elana Kagan.

The ruling, which also includes a case from Arkansas, is another in a line of decisions that don't allow the criminal justice system to give up hope that the youngest criminals can be rehabilitated.

"By requiring that all children convicted of homicide receive lifetime incarceration without possibility of parole, regard- less of their age and age-related characteristics and the nature of their crimes, the mandatory sentencing schemes before us violate this principle of proportionality, and so the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment," according to the opinion that was just released this morning.

Earlier coverage of the two juvenile cases begins at the link.  Related posts are in the juvenile category index.

Coverage of the Senate Hearing on Solitary Confinement

"Senators Start a Review of Solitary Confinement," is the  New York Times report by Erica Goode.

Solitary confinement “is inhumane and by its design it is driving men insane,” a former inmate who spent 18 years in prison in Texas, a decade of that time in isolation on death row before being exonerated, told a Senate panel in a hearing on Tuesday.

“I lived behind a steel door that had two small slits in it, the space replaced with iron and wire, which was dirty and filthy,” said Anthony Graves, whose conviction for involvement in multiple murders was overturned in 2006. “I had no television, no telephone and most importantly, I had no physical contact with another human being.”

The hearing, held before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, represents the first time lawmakers on Capitol Hill have taken up the issue of solitary confinement, a form of imprisonment that many human rights advocates believe violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” and that has drawn increasing scrutiny in recent months in the United States and internationally.

The practice, which is widespread in American prisons, has also been the target of a growing number of lawsuits, including a class-action suit filed on Monday on behalf of mentally ill inmates held in solitary at ADX, the federal super-maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.

Last month, civil rights lawyers representing prisoners held for more than 10 years in isolation at Pelican Bay State Prison in California filed suit in federal court, arguing that solitary confinement is unconstitutional.

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the assistant majority leader, began the hearing — which he said had the support of both Democratic and Republican committee members — by noting that more prisoners are held in isolation in the United States than in any other democracy and that about half of all prison suicides occur among inmates in solitary confinement.

"Solitary confinement 'is driving men insane,' exonerated convict testifies," is Jamie Goldberg's report for the Los Angeles Times and Tribune News Service.

For most of his 12 years on death row, Anthony Graves lived in what he called an 8-by-12 "cage." To see outside he would stand on top of his rolled-up plastic mattress and look through a small window at the top of the concrete wall in the back of his cell. He spent 22, sometimes 24, hours a day in this room.

"Solitary confinement does one thing: It breaks a man's will to live and he ends up deteriorating. He's never the same person again," said Graves, who served over 18 years in a Texas prison before being exonerated of all crimes in 2010.

Speaking at what was described as the first congressional hearing about solitary confinement, Graves told a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee that the practice was "inhumane and by its design is driving men insane."

Psychological studies indicate that approximately a third of prisoners in solitary confinement suffer from mental illness and 50% of prison suicides occur in solitary confinement, said Craig Haney, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz.

This month, the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the state of California for its practice of isolating prison inmates suspected of having gang affiliations. The lawsuit focuses on 300 inmates who have been held at Pelican Bay State Prison's Security Housing Unit for more than a decade.

Charles Samuels, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, told the committee that inmates were only placed in solitary confinement to protect the safety of the prison population. The bureau attempts to limit time spent in solitary confinement, which is not supposed to be used for seriously mentally ill inmates, he said.

"Sen. Richard Durbin urges revamping prison solitary confinement," by Annika McGinnis for McClatchy News.  It's via the Charlotte Observer.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., repeatedly asked the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Charles Samuels, whether he thought there were any negative effects to such treatment. Samuels said it wasn’t the “preferred option,” and cited a 2010 Colorado Department of Corrections study that he said had found no negative effects from solitary confinement.

Haney, who helped lead the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, which demonstrated the psychological impact of confinement on prisoners and guards, said that living in what he called extreme, inhumane and “zoolike” conditions often caused serious mental illness and was a danger to public safety.

About 95 percent of prisoners in solitary confinement ultimately are released back to society; Haney charged that the system lacks meaningful transitional services and formerly isolated prisoners are more prone to violence after they’re released.

Prison officials are supposed to monitor prisoners’ mental health and move them to psychiatric wards if they exhibit signs of illness. Samuels said the system had an extensive network of such officials and an intensive psychological screening process before prisoners were placed in solitary confinement. He said that only the most dangerous prisoners, who posed a threat to other inmates or guards, were placed in solitary confinement and that the number was very small.

Christopher B. Epps, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, said his efforts to revamp that state’s prisons had reduced the number of segregated inmates by 75 percent.

Durbin’s legislation, which has yet to be introduced, would cut the number of prisoners in solitary confinement, improve mental health screenings and give prisoners greater opportunities to challenge decisions.

Texas exoneree Anthony Graves has posted, "An Innocent Man’s Tortured Days on Texas’s Death Row," at the ACLU.  Here's the beginning of this must-read:

On November 1, 1994, I heard the gavel fall and the judge announce, “Anthony Graves, I hereby sentence you to death by lethal injection.” The jury had already convicted me of murdering six people and burning down their house down to cover up the crime. I was completely innocent: they had the wrong guy. I was scared of dying for a crime I did not commit, but I believed in my innocence and hoped someone, somewhere would make it right.

What I didn’t know then was that this wrongful death sentence was only part of the torture I would experience for the next 18-and-a-half years. I didn’t know that I would be forced to live in an 8x12 cage. I didn’t know I would have to use a steel toilet, connected to my steel sink, in plain view of the male and female corrections officers would walk the runs in front of my cell. I didn’t know that for years on end I would have no physical contact with a single human being.

I didn’t know that guards would feed me like a dog, through a slot in my door. Instead of providing basic nutrients, the food sometimes contained rat feces, broken glass, or the sweat of the inmate who cooked it. This diet caused me health problems that continue today. The prison gave me no phone to call my loved ones, no television to keep up with the world and local events, and no real medical care. I lived behind a steel door, with filthy mesh-covered windows looking out to the run; my only window to the outside world was a tiny one on the top of the back wall of my cell. With its peeling, old, and dull paint, my cage was the image of an abandoned one-room project apartment. If I had known when I was sentenced all I would have to go through before I would win my freedom, I don’t know if even my faith in my own innocence would have been enough to sustain me.

Earlier coverage of the U.S. Senate hearing begins at the link.  Related posts are in the incarceration index.

Solitary Confinement Gets Senate Attention

The Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights holds a hearing this morning in Washington, DC.  It begins at 10:00 am (EDT/9:00 am (CDT); about 10 minutes from now.

Texas exoneree Anthony Graves is one of the witnesses.

“Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal and Public Safety Consequences," will be webcast.  You can view the hearing at the link.  Here's a list of the witnesses:

Witness List

Panel I
The Honorable Charles Samuels, Director
Federal Bureau of Prisons; Washington, DC

Panel II
Commissioner Christopher Epps, Mississippi Department of Corrections
Jackson, MS

Stuart M. Andrews, Jr., Partner
Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP; Columbia, SC

Anthony Graves, Founder
Anthony Believes; Houston, TX

Dr. Craig Haney, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz; Santa Cruz, CA

Pat Nolan, President
Justice Fellowship/Prison Fellowship Ministries; Leesburg, VA

Thanks to Solitary Watch, which has more.

Death Row Suicide Highlights Executions' Delays

That's the title of a California AP report written by Paul Elias.  It's also available via the Washington Post.

When James Lee Crummel hanged himself in his San Quentin Prison cell last month, he had been living on Death Row for almost eight years — and he was still years away from facing the executioner.

California's automatic death penalty appeals take so long that the state's 723 condemned inmates are more likely to die of old age and infirmities —or kill themselves — than be put to death.

Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1978, California has executed 13 inmates, and none since 2006. But 20 have committed suicide, including Crummel, who abducted, sexually abused and killed a 13-year-old boy on his way to school in 1979. Another 57 inmates have died of natural causes. The ponderous pace of this process has helped make the state's death row the most populous in the nation, and it has generated critics from all quarters.

Victim rights groups say the delays amount to justice denied. Death penalty opponents say the process, like execution itself, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

And now the state's voters will get an opportunity this November to vote on a measure that would abolish the death penalty, which critics deride as an inefficient and expensive system for a financially troubled state.

It took the Supreme Court four years to appoint Crummel a public defender, and it took his attorney almost that long to file his opening brief after several time extensions. Crummel's appeal was expected to consume a few more years before the high court decided the case.

Earlier coverage of the SAFE California ballot initiative begins at the link.

TX BPP OK's Parole for Eroy Brown

Today's Austin American-Statesman reports, "Storied Texas prisoner approved for parole."  It's written by Mike Ward.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Eroy Brown, whose acquittal on murder charges involving the deaths of a prison warden and a farm manager in the 1980s shook Texas' corrections system to its roots, has been approved for parole after nearly three decades behind bars.

Officials confirmed Thursday that Brown, 61, who has served 27 years for robbing a Waco convenience store of $12 and some candy bars, will be sent to a supervised pre-release rehabilitation program in California.

No date for the release has been set.

In 1985, Brown was sentenced to 90 years as a habitual criminal; he had two previous felonies — a burglary and a robbery dating back to the 1970s.

In recent years, Brown has been serving his time in a South Carolina prison because a federal judge thought his safety could not be guaranteed in a Texas lockup.

"This has been a long time coming," said Bill Habern, a Huntsville attorney who represented Brown in both the murder and parole cases. "Twenty-seven years for a $12 robbery is a lot of time. ... This way, he'll be under supervision when he gets out.

"The board deserves credit. The right thing to do was to grant this parole, and they did that."

Had Brown been denied parole again, as he had seven times since he went to prison, he would have been released within five years anyway without any supervision under controversial early release policies enacted in the 1970s to ease prison crowding in Texas.

The vote for parole was 2-0, said Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Thomas Leeper, an attorney, and Pamela Freeman, a former prison guard, voted in the case, he said.

Once before, several years ago, Brown was approved for parole, but officials changed their vote, and he was never released.

And:

Habern credited a 2011 book by Houston journalist Michael Berryhill — "The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Case That Shook the Texas Prison System" — with raising awareness of the details of the case and Brown's long term of incarceration.

Earlier coverage of Eroy Brown's case begins at the link.

Expense and Execution

That's the title of an Alabama report in today's Florence Times Daily written by Dennis Sherer.  It's subtitled, "Death-penalty cost issue resurges as state struggles."  Here's the beginning of the lengthy report:

As many states look for ways to reduce spending, a battle is brewing between supporters and opponents of the death penalty.

Opponents contend states could save millions of dollars by abolishing the death penalty. Proponents argue the death penalty is needed to punish defendants convicted of heinous homicides, even when it means decades of paying attorneys to argue the merits of a death sentence and for housing an inmate, such as former Sheffield resident Tommy Arthur.

Assistant Attorney General Clay Crenshaw, chief of Alabama's death penalty litigators, said he is unsure how much the state has spent attempting to carry out Arthur's execution, which was first ordered in 1983.

"It's been so long, I'm not sure if anyone knows how much the state has spent keeping Tommy Arthur on death row all these years," Crenshaw said.

Arthur, 70, has been on death row for 29 years for the 1982 murder-for-hire killing of Muscle Shoals resident Troy Wicker. His conviction was overturned twice on technicalities. The state Supreme Court has set an execution date for Arthur five times only to have it halted when defense attorneys raised legal issues, most recently in March when they objected to Alabama's use of the drug pentobarbital in executions.

Arthur continues to maintain his innocence.

Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said the agency does not keep tabs on the amount of money spent on legal fees for death row inmates, only the cost of housing them, which is now about $43 per day. He said the department does not separate the cost of housing inmates on death row from the expense of keeping them in other areas of a prison.

Alabama has 101 men and four women on death row. The average age of the death row inmates is 41 and they have been there an average of 11 years and 7 months, Corbett said.

Richard Deiter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, said states typically do not keep track of the amount of money spent on a single inmate from the time they are sentenced to death until an execution takes place.

"There's probably not anyone in Alabama who knows exactly how much money has been spent keeping Mr. Arthur on death row, but there is no doubt it has been very expensive," Deiter said. "All states need to take a serious look at how much they are spending on death penalty cases and decide if it is money well spent."

Earlier coverage of Tommy Arthur's case begins at the link.  Related posts are in the cost index.

Montana Clemency Hearing for Canadian on Death Row

"Convicted murderer to plead for life at clemency hearing," is the Great Falls Tribune staff report.

Tomorrow morning convicted murderer Ronald Smith will walk into the Powell County Court House in Deer Lodge and plead for his life.

Almost 30 years earlier, Smith ignored the pleas of his two victims. He and another Canadian hitchhiker forced two young Blackfeet men into the woods near Marias Pass and shot them both in the head. It was a chilling crime — one Smith has never denied responsibility for.

During a hearing in 1983, Smith told the court that he killed Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey Mad Man because he wanted to steal their car and because he wanted to know, "what it would feel like to kill someone." Then, in a surprise move that caught both state prosecutors and his own attorney off guard, Smith rejected an already negotiated plea agreement and requested the death penalty. At a sentencing hearing in March 1983, the court granted his request.

A few weeks later, Smith changed his mind. Since then, he and his attorneys have appealed his sentence seven times, variously arguing that Montana's method of execution is unconstitutional, that he received ineffective legal council and that a variety of mitigating circumstances warrant the commutation of his sentence. He has now exhausted that appeals process.

On Wednesday, Smith is scheduled to appear before the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole one last time. The parole board does not have the authority to commute Smith's sentence, but Smith will ask the three-member panel to recommend to the governor that his death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Only the governor can grant such clemency.

The CBC News reports, "Canadian on death row in U.S. hoping for clemency."

The only Canadian facing the death penalty in the United States hopes to persuade the people who will decide his fate he's not the same man he was 30 years ago.

Ron Smith, 54, has been on death row in a Montana prison since 1982 after he and an accomplice were convicted of killing two men in Montana.

Beginning Wednesday, he'll ask for clemency at a two-day hearing before the state's Board of Pardons and Parole.

"The person that committed those crimes isn't sitting here," the Red Deer, Alta., native told CBC's Mark Kelley in an interview to be aired on CBC News Network Tuesday night. "And again, I'm not trying to downplay the crime.

"I had a moment where emotions and anger got the best of me and I committed a horrible crime. That doesn't define me. If you want to define me, then take a look at the 30 years," he said.

"Canadian on death row to plead for his life," by the Canadian Press is via CP24.

His is the final name on the list of 16 witnesses put forward by his attorneys for the two-day clemency hearing before the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole beginning Wednesday in Deer Lodge, Mont.

The hearing is being held near the federal penitentiary where Smith, originally from Red Deer, Alta., has spent the last three decades locked up.

"I've always wanted an opportunity to step outside of all of this and to be able to apologize to the family and explain to them just everything about me at that point in time. I was a completely different person," Smith said in an interview last month with The Canadian Press. "It's who I am, who I've become and what I've got going into the future."

The decision to speak at the hearing before the three-member panel was entirely up to Smith, said Don Vernay, co-counsel for Smith who works out of Albuquerque, N.M.

"What we want to do is wait until everything is done and then have the last word," he said. "He's got to speak to the board. These are the people who are going to decide if he lives or dies. He's going to express his remorse and his desire to live."

A flood of support has been flowing into the office of the Board of Pardons and Parole asking it to spare Smith's life.

"Our office has received and continues to receive a colossal amount of support for the commutation from around the world based on individuals' moral beliefs against the death penalty rather than a personal investment or opinion with this particular case," writes a board staffer in a leaked report obtained by The Canadian Press last month.

"Executing Ronald Smith is simply not moral," is Naomi Lakritz' column for the Calgary Herald.

When the Montana parole board meets Wednesday to discuss the fate of death-row inmate Ronald Smith, it will consider his conduct in prison, his remorse for his crime, the feelings of his family, and the feelings of the families of the two men he murdered almost 30 years ago.

But one thing I'm willing to bet the board won't discuss is the only thing that matters — whether executing Smith for the killings of Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey Mad Man is in itself, a moral thing to do. The answer, clearly, is no. Killing is not moral.

To say that killing Smith is immoral is not to deny or minimize the anguish that the two victims' families continue to suffer. Rather, it means that when meting out punishment, the justice system should never stoop to the level of the criminals who come before it, for then it is just as guilty as they are and has just as much blood on its hands as they do.

I don't know how Smith can live with himself after what he did, but I also don't know how members of the parole board can live with themselves if the board recommends to Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer that Smith should die. Is the U.S. a civilized society, or not? I would have to say that when a state governor holds the power of life or death in his hands, the answer is a loud "not." How does that work?

Earlier coverage of Ronald Smith's case begins at the link.  Related posts are in the clemency and foreign citizen indexes.

Show Death Penalty the Door

That's the title of an OpEd by former President Jimmy Carter in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

For many reasons, it is time for Georgia and other states to abolish the death penalty. A recent poll showed that 61 percent of Americans would choose a punishment other than the death penalty for murder.

Also, just 1 percent of police chiefs think that expanding the death penalty would reduce violent crime. This change in public opinion is steadily restricting capital punishment, both in state legislatures and in the federal courts.

As Georgia’s chief executive, I competed with other governors to reduce our prison populations. We classified all new inmates to prepare them for a productive time in prison, followed by carefully monitored early-release and work-release programs. We recruited volunteers from service clubs who acted as probation officers and “adopted” one prospective parolee for whom they found a job when parole was granted. At that time, in the 1970s, only one in 1,000 Americans was in prison.

Our nation’s focus is now on punishment, not rehabilitation. Although violent crimes have not increased, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 7.43 per 1,000 adults imprisoned at the end of 2010. Our country is almost alone in our fascination with the death penalty. Ninety percent of all executions are carried out in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

President Carter's OpEd is part of a Journal-Constitution discussion about capital punishment that includes, "End the death penalty?"  It's by Rick Badie of the Opinion staff.  It also publishes an OpEd by Dudley Sharp, "Enforcing penalty saves lives."

Connecticut House Passes Repeal 86-62; Bill moves to Governor Malloy

"Death Penalty Repeal Goes to Connecticut Governor," is the New York Times report by Peter Applebome.

After more than nine hours of debate, the Connecticut House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to repeal the state’s death penalty, following a similar vote in the State Senate last week. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, has said he will sign the bill, which would make Connecticut the 17th state — the 5th in five years — to abolish capital punishment for future cases.

Mr. Malloy’s signature will leave New Hampshire and Pennsylvania as the only states in the Northeast that still have the death penalty. New Jersey repealed it in 2007. New York’s statute was ruled unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 2004, and lawmakers have not moved to fix the law.

The vote, after more than two decades of debate and the 2009 veto of a similar bill by the governor at the time, M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, came against the backdrop of one of the state’s most horrific crimes: a 2007 home invasion in Cheshire in which Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, were held hostage and murdered, two of the three raped, and their house set afire by two habitual criminals who are now on death row. Ms. Hawke-Petit’s husband, Dr. William A. Petit Jr., who was badly beaten but escaped, has since been an ardent advocate for keeping the death penalty.

The bill exempts the 11 men currently on death row, including Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven J. Hayes, the men convicted of the Petit murders.

The measure was approved by a vote of 86 to 62, largely along party lines.

The legislation will make life in prison without possibility of parole the state’s harshest punishment. It mandates that those given life without parole be incarcerated separately from other inmates and be limited to two hours a day outside the prison cell.

The AP post is, "Connecticut House approves repeal of death penalty," by Shannon Young.  It's via the Norwich Bulletin.

The legislation, which would make Connecticut the 17th state to abolish the death penalty, awaits a signature from Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who has said he would sign the bill into law.

"Going forward, we will have a system that allows us to put these people away for life, in living conditions none of us would want to experience," the Democratic governor said in a statement following the vote. "Let's throw away the key and have them spend the rest of their natural lives in jail."

"House Votes To Repeal Death Penalty," by Daniela Altimari for the Hartford Courant.

The Connecticut House of Representatives late Wednesday gave final legislative approval to a measure repealing the state's seldom-used death penalty after more than 9 1/2 hours of often gut-wrenching debate.

Senate Bill 280 cleared the House 86-62, a vote that broke largely along party lines. The bill now goes to Gov.Dannel P. Malloy, who has pledged to sign it, ending a form of punishment in the state that dates back to Colonial times when those convicted of being witches were sent to the gallows.

"This vote tonight ... allows Connecticut to break with a centuries-old tradition of executing people and rejoin the rest of the Western world, which has long since cut bait with the death penalty,'' said Benjamin Todd Jealous, the national president of the NAACP, who watched the back-and-forth from the House gallery. "It also moves our nation forward."

And:

Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, one of the most vigorous supporters of the repeal effort, didn't dispute Cafero's view that the prospective part of the bill was born as a compromise. "But the reality is I am in a room with 150 other people and I'm not so young that I believe … I know everything,'' said the New Haven Democrat. "Part of what we do here is, we figure out how do we make things happen."

Holder-Winfield said he favors complete abolition, even for the 11 occupants of death row. But, he said, "If I can't get the state to stop executing people that are already on death row, at least I can stop the state from executing people that may be on death row in the future."

"House passes death penalty repeal bill," by JC Reindl in the Day.

The 151-member House took up the repeal bill at about 1:20 p.m. and lawmakers debated for more than 9½ hours.

The final vote tally was largely along party lines, with most Democrats in favor of repeal and Republicans opposed to it. The vote was closer this year than three years ago, when the House passed a similar repeal bill, 90 to 56.

Death penalty supporters tried unsuccessfully to attach amendments to retain the death penalty for certain offenses. There were proposed exceptions for a lethal act of terrorism, murder of a state trooper or local police officer, and murder committed in the course of a rape or a deadly home invasion.

"State House votes to repeal death penalty," by Ken Dixon of CT Post, for the Danbury News Times.

In the future, capital felons -- the state's worst killers -- would face a new charge of murder under special circumstances, with a penalty of life in prison without the possibility of release from maximum-security conditions.

The legislation passed after nine-and-a-half hours of debate and 11 Republican amendments, which would have forced the bill back to the Senate, failed. The GOP amendments would have retained the death penalty for a variety of offenses, including terrorism, killing cops, prison guards and residents during home invasions.

At the nine-hour mark, Republicans proposed a final amendment to allow for a non-binding statewide referendum on the death penalty. It failed 93-54.

"Death Penalty Repeal Headed to Governor’s Desk," by Hugh McQuaid of CT News Junkie in the New Haven Register.

But the brutal murder of a Cheshire family in 2007 loomed large over Wednesday’s debate. The sole survivor, Dr. William Petit, has been a vocal advocate of the death penalty. Last year, he convinced enough state senators to withdraw, at least temporarily, their support of a repeal bill so that it was never called for a vote.

This year, the repeal measure was revived and cleared the Senate on a 20-16 vote last week after a handful of senators visited two prisons. They decided they could go along with repeal as long as murderers serve their life sentences in the starkest conditions — conditions that at least one Connecticut columnist described as “isolation torture.”

Although Petit did not make an appearance at the Capitol on Wednesday, many lawmakers focused on the fate of Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, the two men sentenced to death for killing Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke Petit, and their two daughters, Hayley and Michaela.

And:

Although their cases weren’t mentioned as prominently as the Petit case, hundreds of family members of murder victims have called for the repeal. Several appeared at a press conference with the bill’s main proponent, Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, Wednesday morning.

Holder-Winfield attempted to make sure their voices were heard when he made his remarks on House floor Wednesday night.

“If you look up in the gallery, there are people who had very terrible things happen to family members, who come to this building asking us to repeal the death penalty,” Holder-Winfield said. “And the reality is, some of them have not had an audience.”

"With House vote, Malloy to sign death penalty repeal," by Keith M. Phaneuf for CT Mirror.

The bill passed with votes from 78 of 99 Democrats and eight of 52 Republicans. Senate Democrats passed the bill 20-16 last week, with two Democrats joining all 14 Republicans in opposition.

And:

"Despite having the death penalty in oiur society here in Connecticut for several hundred years ... it certainly hasn't eradicated evil from our society," said House Majority Leader J. Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden. "If we as human beings created laws that reciprocate the evil that's perpetrated on society, are they really protecting us? ... Our laws more project our better selves."

Though Connecticut imposes the death sentence on only the most horrific of crimes, Rep. Terry Backer, D-Stratford, noted that there have been nearly 290 post-conviction exonerations of death row inmates in the United States since the late 1970s.

"I am torn in two," he said, "but it is my innate feeling that government makes mistakes."

"We must always be aware that government makes mistakes and the death penalty is irreversible," said Rep. Mary Mushinsky, D-Wallingford. Recounting the tale of Kenneth Ireland Jr., Mushinksy noted how the resident of her town served 21 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared him in 2009 of a wrongful murder conviction.

Earlier coverage of Connecticut's road to repeal begins at the link.

Connecticut Senate OKs Repeal, 20-16

The vote came shortly after 2:00 a.m. (EDT) this morning, and there is extensive coverage on Connecticut news sites.  The bill will next be heard in the Connecticut House of Representatives, where it's widely expected to pass.  Governor Dannel Malloy has already said that he will sign the repeal legislation into law.

The Hartford Cournt reports, "Death Penalty Repeal Clears Biggest Hurdle; Senate Passes Bill, 20-16."  It's by Daniela Altimari and Jon Lender.

Connecticut is poised to become the 17th state to abolish the death penalty after the Senate passed a bill early Thursday morning repealing capital punishment.

And:

The fate of the repeal drive was sealed earlier this week, when several one-time supporters of capital punishment indicated they were switching their stance. Several of them spoke, often in bluntly personal terms, in the floor of the chamber.

"It's no secret I have agonized over this issue,'' said Sen. Edith Prague. A one-time supporter of the death penalty, the Democrat from Columbia has changed her position twice since 2009.

But in the early hours of Thursday morning, Prague explained why she is now backing a bill that would abolish capital punishment in Connecticut and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of release.

"I cannot stand the thought of being responsible for someone being falsely accused and facing the death penalty,'' Prague said, speaking slowly and deliberately as her colleagues listened. "For me this is a moral issue...I don't want to be part of a system that sends innocent people..to the death penalty."

Like Prague, Sen. Gayle Slossberg, D-Miford, said she has spent many sleepless nights wrestling with the moral implications of capital punishment. "Does a moral society execute people?'' she asked. "Haven't we then become the evil we're trying to eliminate?"

Slossberg had been a defender of the death penalty but she, too, has come to reassess her position. "For me, the most compelling reason to reject the death penalty is to set ourselves on the path to the kind of society we really want for our future,'' she said.

"I want something better for our future,'' Slossberg added. "We cannot confront darkness with darkness and expect light."

The bill would replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of release. It stipulates that the 11 men currently on Connecticut's death row would still face execution; capital punishment would only be abolished for those convicted of capital offenses in the future.

"Senate Passes Death Penalty Repeal With A Little Breathing Room," at CT News Junkie by Christine Stuart And Hugh McQuaid.

Clearing its biggest hurdle, a bill repealing the death penalty passed the state Senate on a 20-16 vote shortly after 2 a.m. Thursday, with two Democrats and all 14 Republican voting against it.

The chances of repeal were so unlikely last year  that the bill wasn’t even raised for a vote after a strong lobbying effort by Dr. William A. Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a brutal 2007 triple-homicide at his Cheshire home.

Petit, his sister, and their lawyer were able to convince Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, not to vote for repeal last year, but Wednesday afternoon they were unable to even get an audience with the Senate Democratic caucus where it had been thought several other lawmakers may still be on the fence.

As the debate over the death penalty stretched into Thursday morning, prospects for its repeal looked promising as one lawmaker who had previously opposed repeal said she had changed her mind.

Sen. Gayle Slossberg decided to support repeal after some soul searching. She said she’d come to the conclusion that a moral society couldn’t execute people, because it risks becoming the evil it strives to eliminate.

“Before Gov. Perry even had a chance to answer, the crowd cheered,” she said. “What kind of society cheers death?”

"Connecticut's Senate rejects a rarely used death penalty," by Mark Pazniokas at CT Mirror.

Democrats in the state Senate voted at 2:05 a.m. Thursday to repeal the death penalty for future crimes, placing Connecticut on a path to become the 17th state to step away from capital punishment.

On a 20-16 vote, the Senate approved and sent to the House a measure that would make life in prison without possibility of parole the state's harshest punishment, while leaving undisturbed the sentences of 11 men now awaiting execution.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat who says he turned against capital punishment after seeing the limits of the criminal justice system as a prosecutor in New York, is committed to signing the bill. Passage in the House is expected as early as next week.

And:

After 10 hours of debate, that effort was rewarded with a relatively strong vote: two more than the bare minimum. Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, a longtime opponent of capital punishment, was prepared to break an 18-18 tie with a vote for repeal.

Some senators cast their votes for repeal based on a long-held belief that capital punishment is wrong.

"I don't see how we make the point that killing is wrong by killing," said Sen. Eric D. Coleman, D-Bloomfield, a lawyer who led the debate as co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Others seemed ready to end the state's frequent debates about a form of punishment imposed only once in recent decades, when serial killer Michael Ross was executed at his request in 2005. The last person involuntarily put to death was Joseph Taborsky in 1960.

"Senate votes to abolish the death penalty," by JC Reindl for the Day.

After 10½ hours of debate that stretched into the early morning, the state Senate on Thursday approved legislation that would end capital punishment in Connecticut for future crimes.

The 2 a.m. vote was 20 to 16 largely along party lines in the Democrat-majority chamber. Democratic Senators Edith Prague of Columbia, Andrew Maynard of Stonington, Andrea Stillman of Waterford and Eileen Daily of Westbrook all voted yea.

The "prospective" bill calls for abolishing the death penalty for future convictions, but not for the 11 inmates now on death row. The measure replaces execution with life imprisonment without the possibility of release.

The Senate had been the last high hurdle for those wanting to end the death penalty since last year when Gov. Dannel P. Malloy replaced Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who vetoed a 2009 repeal bill. Malloy says he will sign this year's bill.

The bill is still subject to approval in the House, where it is expected to pass. State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, a chief proponent of the legislation, said he hopes the House could vote within a week or so.

Early in the day Wednesday, Senate Pro Tem Donald Williams, D-Brooklyn, announced that he and other pro-repeal Democrats had finally rounded up enough votes to assure passage.

"We intend to take a historic step," he said. "We intend for Connecticut to become the 17th state to repeal the death penalty."

"We need to move forward as a state to embrace what other states have done," Williams said, "what almost every other state in New England has done, what almost every other country throughout Europe and countries that we look to as allies in the world, what they have done."

"After lengthy debate, Senate OKs repeal of state death penalty," by Ken Dixon at the Westport News.

Former opponents of repeal, including Sen. Gayle S. Slossberg, D-Milford, Sen. Joseph J. Crisco Jr., D-Woodbridge, and Sen. Edith G. Prague, D-Columbia, voted for repeal.

"It plagues me to think we could put an innocent person to death," Slossberg said as the debate reached its ninth hour. "By eliminating the death penalty, we're not letting any innocent person go free. We will have a very severe punishment."

Earlier coverage of the Connecticut repeal legislation begins at the link.

Florida Death Warrant Challenged

"Will Florida serial killer get lethal injection next week?" is the AP filing, via the Orlando Sentinel.

The Florida Supreme Court is hearing an appeal from a serial killer, who is set for execution next week.

Lawyers for 58-year-old David Gore plan to ask the justices to block the April 12 execution during oral argument Wednesday.

One contention is that Gov. Rick Scott was unconstitutionally influenced to sign Gore's death warrant by a meeting with a newspaper editorial board.

And:

Gore also contends his execution would be cruel and unusual punishment because he's already spent nearly 30 years on death row.

The issue of prolonged incarceration on Florida's death has been an issue in two recent cases.  Last year, Florida executed Manual Valle after more than 33 years on death row.  Supreme Court Justice Breyer's dissent to a rejected stay motion discussed the lengthy incarceration of death sentenced inmates.  Earlier this year Florida executed Robert Waterhouse after 31 years on death row.

An Update From Connecticut

The Connecticut Senate is currently debating SB 280, which would repeal the state's death penalty.  You can watch streaming video of the Senate floor debate at the link.  Observers in Connecticut expect that the floor debate is likely to last for some hours, perhaps even into Thursday morning.

Earlier today, Senate Democrats announced a newly amended version of the bill.  "Living conditions of death row inmates questioned in repeal bill," is Ken Dixon's post for CT Post.

After majority Democrats in the Senate revised a bill to attract more votes for repeal of the state's death penalty, Republicans and several supporters of capital punishment charged Wednesday that the fate of the 11 killers on death row is at stake.

Led by Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield and Dr. William Petit, whose wife and two daughters were killed in the infamous Cheshire home invasion of 2007, death-penalty supporters claimed that if the repeal goes through, the 11 men sentenced to death will never face the executioners.

Proponents of the repeal, however, who planned on an early afternoon debate stretching late into the night, stressed that the legislation is "prospective" for future capital felonies and would not spare death row inmates.

Indeed, it was the only way that veteran Sen. Edith G. Prague, D-Columbia, who opposed the bill last year, would support the legislation this year.

During a mid-morning news conference, majority Democrats announced a "game-changing" rewrite of the death penalty repeal bill that would assure those on death row-- and those future murderers convicted under so-called special circumstances -- would stay segregated from other inmates for as long as they live.

They would be kept in conditions similar to current death row inmates in the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, where those facing eventual execution are escorted everywhere, housed away from the general population and confined to their cells for 22 hours a day.

Christine Stuart and Hugh McQuaid post, "Senate Democrats To Amend Death Penalty Repeal," at CT News Junkie.

As the state Senate prepared for a vote on the prospective repeal of the death penalty Wednesday, Democratic leaders announced their intention to amend the bill to keep inmates convicted of capital murder in conditions mirroring death row.

The amendment is similar to one proposed by Sen. John Kissel, R- Enfield, last week when the bill was voted out of the Judiciary Committee. Kissel’s amendment called for solitary confinement for the inmates on death row.

Though that amendment was voted down, the committee’s co-chairs said they were open to considering the concept. Sen. Eric Coleman, D-Hartford, said Wednesday’s amendment avoids some of the constitutional concerns raised over Kissel’s proposal.

Correction Department Commissioner Leo Arnone said if adopted and passed, the amendment would create a program very similar to how death row is currently run.

Under the amendment, inmates convicted of capital felony will be housed in units separate from other inmates and will be continuously escorted or monitored when they are moved.

Inmates in the program will only be allowed out of their cells for two hours a day, will only be allowed non-contact visiting rights, and will never be allowed work assignments. They will also be subject to cell searches at least twice a week and will be required to change cells every 90 days.

MSNBC posts, "Connecticut poised to abolish death penalty," by Miranda Leitsinger.

If the legislation passes, Connecticut would be the fifth state in five years to repeal the death penalty, joining 16 others. In California, voters will decide in November whether to also do away with it.

“The upcoming Connecticut vote is in line with a clear trend away from the use of capital punishment across the country. As significant concerns about executing the innocent, the high cost of the death penalty and its unfair application continue to grow, more states are turning to alternative punishments,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), said in a statement.

"Connecticut Senate set to vote on repeal of death penalty," is the latest from Reuters, via WTAQ-AM/FM.

A similar bill was defeated last year in Connecticut, just as the high-profile trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky was getting underway for his role in a 2007 home invasion in Cheshire in which a mother and her two daughters were brutalized and killed.

Komisarjevsky and another man are on Death Row for the murders.

The only survivor of the Cheshire attack, Dr. William Petit Jr. - the husband of the murdered woman and the father of the murdered girls - has spoken out against repeal.

Illinois, New Mexico and New Jersey have voted to abolish the death penalty in recent years. New York's death penalty law was declared unconstitutional in 2004, and the legislature has repeatedly rejected attempts to reinstate capital punishment.

Other state legislatures are considering bills to abolish the death penalty as well.

"The upcoming Connecticut vote is in line with a clear trend away from the use of capital punishment across the country. As significant concerns about executing the innocent, the high cost of the death penalty and its unfair application continue to grow, more states are turning to alternative punishments," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Earlier coverage of the Connecticut repeal debate begins at the link.

Oregon Prosecutor Back's Inmate Request for Execution

Today's Oregonian reports, "Marion County DA backs Gary Haugen's argument to override Kitzhaber on execution."  It's by Helen Jung.

Gary Haugen may have found a courtroom ally in his unprecedented quest to override Gov. John Kitzhaber's reprieve of his execution : the prosecutors who put Haugen on death row in the first place.

Haugen has asked the Marion County Circuit Court to issue a new death warrant, saying he doesn't accept the reprieve, making it "legally ineffective."

"That's the legal issue that needs to be explored in a court of law," Beglau said in a telephone interview. "That really is the central issue."

Haugen, 50, is challenging Kitzhaber's decision last November to indefinitely postpone his death sentence. Kitzhaber, who is personally opposed to capital punishment, announced he would allow no executions while he's governor, saying Oregon's death penalty system is costly and flawed. The governor urged Oregonians to debate whether the state should retain capital punishment.

And:

The Oregon Justice Department will defend the reprieve. A Justice spokesman did not comment on Beglau's concerns, but insisted that the governor acted within his constitutional authority.

In a filing last week, the department acknowledged its difference of opinion with Marion County prosecutors.

The Justice Department has requested that a Marion County circuit judge recognize Kitzhaber as a legal party to Haugen's criminal case so it can defend the reprieve, noting that "it appears that the district attorney intends to appear but not defend the Governor's actions."

The circumstances are unique: The governor would almost never have a role in a criminal case -- except in cases where he exercised his constitutional authority. Also, never before has an Oregon governor halted an execution against the wishes of the inmate to be executed.

The articles notes that no court date has been set in the matter.

The AP report is, "Prosecutor agrees with OR death row inmate," via the Albany Democrat Herald.

As Oregon death row inmate Gary Haugen fights a reprieve, he has a supporter in Marion County District Attorney Walt Beglau whose office won the death penalty conviction.

Haugen wants to be executed and has asked a circuit court to rule that Gov. John Kitzhaber's reprieve is legally ineffective because Haugen doesn't accept it.

Earlier coverage from Oregon begins at the link.  Related posts are in the moratorium index.

Michael Morton's Conversation With Chuck Lindell

Austin American-Statesman journalist Chuck Lindell broke the story of new developments in Michael Morton's case that led to his exoneration.  He's still covering the story, and the Statesman has published a two-day series, "Free to Speak;" a wide-ranging conversation between Morton and Lindell.  There is video at the links below.  It's a must-read.

"Morton can look back on pain and prison, but lives in peace," is the first part of the interview

Morton's arrival in prison immediately drove home the seriousness of his new situation.

Standing in a line of inmates wearing only prison-issued boxer shorts, Morton said he counted 13 stab wounds on the back of the man in front of him. Suddenly, the advice imparted from a longtime inmate at the county jail made perfect sense: "Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open."

Morton had to learn to stand up for himself. There were confrontations, but nothing worth discussing today, he said.

"It had its rougher moments. But most of prison is boring and monotonous and stupid and disrespectful," he said. "That's not me being some kind of elitist. Everyone inside complains about it."

Knowing he was innocent added "a little bit of emotional baggage," Morton said. "But I was no different than a guy who was completely guilty, because prison is prison. ... You go through the same stuff, deal with the same people.

"I'm not saying I didn't feel crushed. In the early days when I was new, I admit there were some nights," he said, his voice trailing off. "I heard some guys weeping, almost howling like dogs. I never had that. I wasn't that uncontrollably devastated. But there were nights when I silently wept.

"When everything has been taken away, or what you think is everything at that point, it can feel awfully brutal."

"Morton describes painful fight for freedom, how he started anew," is the conclusion.

Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, at the time convinced of Morton's guilt, opposed his bid for DNA tests on evidence that had been preserved, including a bloody bandanna discovered behind the Mortons' house.

It would take an appeals court order in 2010 to move the testing forward.

And:

Morton became eligible for parole in 2007, 20 years after entering prison, and again in 2010. Both times Bradley opposed his release, and both times Morton was denied.

In prison, Morton said, everybody knows that the key to parole is to admit your guilt and show remorse.

A 2009 letter from Bradley to the Parole Board drove the point home. "Ask Michael Morton if he has accepted responsibility for the murder of his wife by mercilessly beating her to death. If he tells you that he now acknowledges he committed that crime, please notify me and I will reconsider my opposition to his parole," Bradley wrote.

But Morton said making up a confession was never an option. Almost everything of value had been taken away from him. All that remained, he said, was his innocence.

"I was not going to lie to get out," he said.

Earlier coverage of Michael Morton's exoneration and what has followed begins with this post.

In This Timeless Time

In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America is the title of a new book by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian.  It's published by the University of North Carolina Press.  The book is also available from Amazon.

In this stark and powerful book, Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian explore life on Death Row in Texas and in other states, as well as the convoluted and arbitrary judicial processes that populate all Death Rows. They document the capriciousness of capital punishment and capture the day-to-day experiences of Death Row inmates in the official "nonperiod" between sentencing and execution.

In the first section, "Pictures," ninety-two photographs taken during their fieldwork for the book and documentary film Death Row illustrate life on cell block J in Ellis Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. The second section, "Words," further reveals the world of Death Row prisoners and offers an unflinching commentary on the judicial system and the fates of the men they met on the Row. The third section, "Working," addresses profound moral and ethical issues the authors have encountered throughout their careers documenting the Row.

Included is a DVD of Jackson and Christian's 1979 documentary film, "Death Row."

Publishers Weekly provides a review of In This Timeless Time. 

In this comprehensive, well-crafted book, published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, SUNY-Buffalo professors Jackson and Christian build upon the photographs and interviews from death row in Texas that yielded their 1979 book and documentary Death Row (DVD included). Here, photos and text reveal inmate life, discuss capital punishment, and share the fate of each man: execution, a commuted sentence, parole, or after more than two decades, an innocent verdict. Organized into three sections (“Pictures,” “Words,” “Working”), 113 duotone photos form the bulk of the book: Jackson’s original black-and-white images from the 1970s show mealtime, exercise rituals, and inmates socializing in the dayroom and passing time in their cells, with detailed captions about the procedures and inmates’ lives.

The University at Buffalo, where Jackson and Christian teach, has issued a press release, "After 32 Years, Buffalo Authors Revisit the Tragic World of Death Row."  Here's an excerpt:

In its pages, Jackson and Christian also discuss how they completed the book, the access problems they encountered more recently with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and their stance on ethical issues and studies related to the death penalty, prison reform and relevant Supreme Court decisions.

The couple describes the treatment of the prisoners as "remedial torture." They recount dehumanizing conditions death row inmates were -- and often are -- forced to endure, in a state proud of the number of people it executes every year. The replacement of the cells' glass windows with frosted glass illuminates this treatment. It not only prevented prisoners from seeing the outside world, but caused the development of chronic optical myopia because they could not exercise their distance vision

Jackson's and Christian's work has been influential in many quarters. An investigating officer in the notorious Gary Gilmore case was pleased to witness his execution, for instance, but changed his mind after seeing the film "Death Row." The late French President Francois Mitterand used it to explain and justify his abolition of the death penalty in France, and it has been praised by many other scholars, legislators and political activists for decades.

Related posts are in the books and documentary indexes.

An Update From Oregon

Reuters posts, "Convicted Oregon killer seeks to lift governor's death row reprieve," by Teresa Carson.  It's via the Chicago Tribune.

A convicted killer spared lethal injection when Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber stopped all executions in the state last year is challenging that reprieve, saying he doesn't want to be a pawn in the governor's campaign to repeal the death penalty.

A lawyer for Gary Haugen, whose scheduled December 6 execution was halted by Kitzhaber's moratorium, told the governor in a letter released on Wednesday that he intends to ask for a new death warrant.

"While you have every right, of course, to lead a campaign to repeal the death penalty in Oregon, Mr. Haugen should not be forced to serve as a pawn in that effort," Haugen's attorney Harrison Latto said in the letter.

The letter stopped short of saying Haugen wanted to die but said that he no longer wanted live in legal limbo under an indefinite but impermanent reprieve, uncertain of whether or when he might be put to death.

Kitzhaber said in November he would allow no more executions in Oregon on his watch because he believed the death penalty was morally wrong, in a move that marked the latest salvo in the nation's long-running battle over capital punishment.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have no death penalty, and there has been a gradual trend away from capital punishment in the country, with the number of executions falling slightly in recent years.

Earlier coverage from Oregon begins at the link.  The article notes that there are 36 death row

Robert Towery's Death Row Writings

Towrey was executed in Arizona last week.  His Death Watch Diary is now available in a free Kindle edition from Amazon.  This description is from Amazon:

For the last 35 days of his life, Robert was placed on “Death Watch” where his every move was recorded and chronicled by prison officials.

Robert also kept a diary which he gave or mailed to his attorneys as installments.  He detailed the ironies and absurdities of life in prison. He reveled in simple pleasures, such as a good meal or a sports event on television. He longed for human contact from his last visitors, and he touchingly tried to comfort his pod-mate, who doesn’t really understand that he was going to his death.

"Arizona executed inmate's diary details final weeks," is by Michael Kiefer for the Arizona Republic.

Beginning Feb. 2, the day he was taken from his regular cell at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Eyman in Florence and put on "Death Watch," Towery chronicled his life for his attorneys. There, he was housed with fellow Death Row inmate Robert Moormann, who was executed Feb. 29.

On March 7, his last night on Earth, Towery was taken a few miles down the road to "Housing Unit 9," in the main prison, where Arizona carries out executions by lethal injection. He made his last diary entry the next morning.

These are excerpts from that diary - Towery's words, his descriptions of the tedium, the rituals, the security, the indignities and the humanity, precisely as he wrote it - right up to the morning of his execution.

"Dear Diary: Arizona inmate wrote of the days before his execution," is by Ashley Powers for the Chicago Tribune.

In the weeks before he was executed for strangling a man to death, Arizona inmate Robert Towery kept a diary.

His writings began Feb. 2, when he was transferred to a “death watch” cell in state prison, and ended Thursday, shortly before he was put to death by lethal injection at 11:26 a.m. The Associated Press described the execution -- and the events leading up to it.

Towery, 47, had been convicted of killing Mark Jones during a robbery in 1991; he was the second inmate put to death in Arizona in a two-week period.

Towery’s entries, some of which the Arizona Republic published, are striking in their banality.  He asked prison officials for conditioner, and there was none. A brush or comb? Nope. He couldn’t find the motivation to work out, either.

Towery looked for bits of humor, such as when he saw two correctional officers doze off. “Exactly who is watching whom?” he wrote. He joked about his new living quarters being cleaner than his old ones. “I have not seen a single roach, water bug, scorpion, stink beetle or spider. Woo-hoo!!”

Towrey's execution is noted at the link.  Related posts are in the books index.

Life Sentence in Test of Maryland's Revised Death Penalty

Today's Baltimore Sun reports, "No death penalty for man convicted of killing prison officer."  It's by Andrea F. Siegel.

Members of an Anne Arundel County jury were certain that Lee Edward Stephens was guilty of murder, but prosecutors could not convince them that the inmate — already serving a life sentence when he killed a correctional officer in 2006 — should be put to death.

The jury decided Wednesday that Stephens will get another life sentence, this time without possibility of parole, for fatally stabbing Cpl. David McGuinn as he made his rounds at the now-closed House of Correction in Jessup.

Death penalty opponents said the outcome of the seven-week trial reflects public sentiment about executions. Supporters of capital punishment said they were pleased that the state can put the option on the table. McGuinn's family was satisfied that his killer would never be set free.

Crystal D'Amore, McGuinn's sister, said she respects the jury's verdict as she is sure he would have.

"I feel like either way, [Stephens] would sit in jail," said Shayna McGuinn, the officer's daughter. The positive aspect, she said, is that he can "sit there and think about it."

That has long been a complaint about the death penalty, as inmates spend decades on death row while cases work their way through a complex system of appeals, hearings and possible retrials.

Executions in Maryland have been on hold for six years, amid wrangling over state regulations on the procedure, repeal attempts and a measure making it harder for prosecutors to seek capital punishment. Five men are on death row.

Hearings on death penalty repeal are scheduled this month in House and Senate committees. But the General Assembly is expected to spend the rest of the session on pressing financial issues, making prospects for legislation on capital punishment unclear.

The (Annapolis) Capital reports, "Inmate spared from death penalty," by Heather Rawlyk.

The jury agreed prosecutors had proved the aggravating factor that Stephens was serving a sentence in prison when he committed the murder.

But, the dozen jurors unanimously agreed Stephens was raised in a culture of poverty, drugs, chaos and violence, did not have any positive male role models in his life, is a product of a broken system, and is a person whose life has value. Some, but not all jurors, also agreed that Stephens had an unaddressed learning disability and low IQ, was exposed to excessive violence in prison and in juvenile services, was sexually abused as a child, was exposed to racism his whole life, and that the Maryland House of Correction failed to provide a secure and safe prison, which ultimately contributed to McGuinn's death.

In the end, the jury determined those 16 mitigating circumstances far outweighed the state's single aggravating factor.

"The mitigators really do say it all in this case…" defense attorney Gary E. Proctor said after Wednesday's hearing. "This was a jury who knew they had an independent duty to assess all evidence and decide what the appropriate sentence should be, and they went about it exactly that way."

The weeks-long murder trial, beginning Jan. 11 before Circuit Judge Paul A. Hackner, was the county's first murder case in more than five years that could result in the death penalty. If Stephens was sentenced to death, it would have been the first time since Maryland's law changed to reserve capital punishment for murders in which there is a videotaped confession or biological evidence linking the defendant to the crime.

Earlier coverage of Maryland capital punishment issues begins at the link.

The Connecticut Repeal Debate

"Seize chance to end state's death penalty," is the Day's editorial in its Sunday edition.

Once again we call upon the General Assembly to approve and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to sign legislation abolishing the death penalty in Connecticut.

There is no evidence to back claims that the existence of a death penalty reduces murders. The 10 highest states in per capita murders all have the death penalty. Conversely, of the 10 states with the lowest murder rates, six prohibit capital punishment.

Death penalty opponents also argue that taxpayers don't want to pay to support killers in prison. But the reality is that the long appeals process is more expensive than life imprisonment. An analysis of death penalty cases in Texas found the average cost from trial to execution to be $2.3 million. A recent Connecticut Office of Fiscal Analysis review concluded the state would save $4 million annually in defense, prosecution and court costs due to a repeal of the death penalty.

Eliminating deterrence and savings leaves revenge as the only argument for executing murderers. Vengeance as public policy demeans us as a society, lowering the state to the level of the killer rather than taking the higher moral road.

The United States is consistently among the top five countries in the number of executions, joining China, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen. That is hardly proud company to keep when it comes to respecting human rights.

The Day carried the OpEd, "A son murdered, a hard lesson on the use of the death penalty," yesterday.  It's written by Rae Giesing, whose son and his stepbrother were murdered in May 2006.

It is absolutely impossible to describe what it feels like to lose a child, much less to lose a child to violence. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Now that I have been thrown into a world where murder and trials are no longer distant or abstract notions, I have paid close attention to the efforts in Connecticut to repeal the death penalty. My personal experience has provided me with many reasons why I think Connecticut will be better off without the death penalty.

For starters, I wouldn't wish the death penalty process on any grieving family. I'm incredibly grateful my family wasn't put through the ordeal that comes with the death penalty. Capital cases nearly always take longer to go to trial and then last longer. When the trial is over, with its separate guilt and sentencing phases, and a death verdict is handed down, the journey for the families of victims just begins.

In Connecticut, only one person has been executed in the last 50 years. When someone is sentenced to death, a myriad of constitutionally mandated safeguards go into effect and the actual execution is a distant blip on the horizon. So the family members wait vigilantly for the day when the offender's punishment will finally be carried out.

In our case, prison was the punishment and we were able to see that punishment carried out immediately. We know that the young man is suffering dearly for taking the life of my son and won't be a threat to anyone else. I can't imagine how my life would be stuck on pause if I were still waiting for the "real" punishment of an execution to take place.

Earlier coverage of the Connecticut repeal debate begins at the link.

More From Montgomery County

Today's Houston Chronicle reports, "Montgomery County tries team approach to help mentally ill."  It's by Renée C. Lee.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Montgomery County has begun providing mentally ill defendants with a professional team to help them with legal and personal needs in an effort to keep them out of jail.

The county's Managed Assigned Counseling Mental Health program, launched last month, is the second in the state. Lubbock County started its program, which handles all indigent defendants, a few weeks earlier.

State lawmakers authorized the new model of indigent defense last year. It enables judges to remove themselves from assigning and paying attorneys to represent the poor.

Instead, managed assigned counseling pairs defendants with a specially trained attorney, a case manager coordinator and a case worker. Together, they walk defendants through the criminal process and assist them with obtaining community services, such as counseling, housing and other services.

The team continues to work with defendants for up to six months after their case ends.

"Our goal is to keep them from reoffending and to give them whatever skills or assistance they need," said state District Judge Cara Wood, who helped develop the program.

In fast-growing Montgomery County, courts and attorneys have little time to spend on mental health cases, Wood said. The program gives the county a way to ensure the mentally ill are treated fairly.

The county received a $487,000 grant from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission and matching funds from Commissioners Court to develop the program. The grant also will fund a new mental health court docket to monitor defendants who are on probation. Wood and Montgomery County Court at Law Judge Mary Ann Turner will oversee the docket.

A managing attorney, Sara Forlano, oversees legal education requirements, court appearances and performance evaluations for the attorneys who participate.

Earlier coverage of the Montgomery County program is at the link.  Related posts are in the mental illness index.

Another Florida Execution Date for Long Term Death Row Inmate

Florida Today carries the AP report, "Inmate on death row since 1980 set to die."  It's by Mitch Stacy.

A twice-convicted murderer who has lived on Florida’s death row for more than three decades is scheduled to die by lethal injection this week for killing a St. Petersburg mother — but like many executions, why he is being killed now and why it didn’t happen years ago are both something of a mystery.

If 65-year-old Robert Brian Waterhouse is executed Wednesday at Florida State Prison near Starke, he will have lingered on death row longer than any of the previous 276 people executed by the state, according to the Department of Corrections. He’s spent more than 31 years mostly by himself in a 6-by-9-foot cell as his various appeals worked their way through the courts.

Just 18 of the 395 people currently on death row have been there longer than Waterhouse, who was sentenced in September 1980 for raping and killing 29-year-old Deborah Kammerer.

No one in Gov. Rick Scott’s office would talk in detail about the process that led him to pick Waterhouse over others whose appeals have run their course. It’s the third death warrant Scott has signed since taking office in January 2011.

And:

The attorney general’s office is charged with keeping track of the status of cases, and generally responds to requests from the governor regarding individual inmates who’ve been through their major appeals and the clemency process, and would likely be unsuccessful with any appeals filed after the death warrant is signed. Typically, they’re inmates who haven’t initiated any new litigation in years.

Craig Trocino, who handled death row appeals for years before going to work for a University of Miami law school clinic, said the “incredibly secretive” nature of the governor’s selection process has always disturbed death penalty opponents.

“There was no logic to any it, as far as we could tell, and nobody was speaking about it,” Trocino said.

“If it’s really above-board, the governor would open his book and say, ‘This is the procedure I take in determining this.’”

Last year, Florida executed Manual Valle after more than 33 years on death row.  Supreme Court Justice Breyer's dissent to a rejected stay motion discussed the lengthy incarceration of death sentenced inmates.

California Roundup - Victim's Family Speaks Out

"California's death penalty law: It simply does not work," is the title of Ron Briggs' OpEd in the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times.  It's subtitled, "We believed the Briggs initiative — the death penalty measure we wrote in 1977 — would bring greater justice. We were wrong."  Here's the beginning of this must-read:

In 1977, my dad, former state Sen. John Briggs, my brother-in-law and I got together to discuss California's death penalty. We agreed it was ineffective and decided a ballot initiative was needed to expand the number of murder categories eligible for capital punishment. We felt such changes would give prosecutors better tools for meting out just punishments, and that a broadened statute would serve as a warning to all California evildoers that the state would deliver swift and final justice.

We thought we were creating a national model for capital punishment.

On a shoestring budget we collected more than 1 million signatures to put the proposition on the ballot. Half the signatures came via first-class business reply mail, which my wife, Kelly, and I manually processed. We didn't have laptops or self-adhesive stamps then, although we did have a bomb scanner, which we'd been trained to use by the FBI after they discovered a terrorist plot to kill my dad.

On Nov. 7, 1978, California voters passed the Briggs initiative on the death penalty.

Back then, my future brother-in-law was Dad's district chief of staff and I proudly served as my father's personal aide. Today Dad is retired, my brother-in-law is a California Superior Court judge and I am in my second term as a county supervisor representing rural District IV in the county of El Dorado, east of Sacramento.

Recently, the three of us sat together under a rose trellis in the quiet cool of morning to talk politics. Each of us remains a staunch Republican conservative, but our perspectives on the death penalty have changed. We'd thought we would bring California savings and safety in dealing with convicted murderers. Instead, we contributed to a nightmarish system that coddles murderers and enriches lawyers. Our initiative was intended to bring about greater justice for murder victims. Never did we envision a multibillion-dollar industry that packs murderers onto death row for decades of extremely expensive incarceration. We thought we would empty death row, not triple its population.

Each of us, independently, has concluded that the death penalty isn't working for California.

I want to also note several California items from last week.  The National Catholic Reporter has a profile of Jeanne Woodford, "As warden, she oversaw executions; now she fights to stop them," written by Jacqueline Gilvard Landry.

The woman who oversaw four executions by lethal injection is fighting to make sure it never happens again.

Jeanne Woodford served as warden of San Quentin State Prison in California from 1999 through 2004. Now she is the chief law enforcement spokesperson for SAFE California, a ballot initiative that would replace the state’s death penalty with life in prison without parole, require inmates to pay into a victims’ compensation fund, and allocate $100 million over three years to solving crime.

Capital punishment “isn’t effective, it’s costly, it isn’t efficient,” Woodford said. Evidence shows that the death penalty costs more than housing prisoners for life, steals resources from solving other crimes, and hurts victims’ families who wait for executions that may never happen, she explained.

“I think there’s something about [the death penalty] to hate by everybody, whether conservative or liberal or somewhere in between,” Woodford said.

KTXL-TV posts, "The High Cost of Death," by Sabrina Rodriguez.

In prison, time is money and death row is the most expensive.

California has had a working death penalty since 1978, but you wouldn’t know it.

There are currently 722 inmates on death row, but the number actually about to be executed is zero.

"The Fate of California's Longest Standing Death Row Inmate Could Change," is by Christina Lusby for KSEE-TV News.

The fate of California's longest standing death row inmate, Douglas Ray Stankewitz, could change. Stankewitz was convicted of murder in 1978.

Stankewitz’s case was the first to be tried after the death penalty was reinstated back in 1978 and the jury handed it to him.

Monday, nearly 30 years after the crime, Stankewitz is asking for a reversal of the decision to be upheld. Now, he may be no closer to death than he was when he was first convicted.

Earlier coverage from California begins at the link.

Texas Scrambling for Treatment Space for Mentally Ill Defendants

"Texas Officials Seeking Room for Mentally Ill Inmates," is the title of Brandi Grissom's report for the Texas Tribune.  It's a must-read for those following the links between mental health and the criminal justice system.

State officials are trying to figure out what to do with about 400 mentally incompetent local jail inmates across the state ahead of a state district judge’s expected ruling to require state hospitals to find beds to treat them. 

“It boils down to space,” said Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. 

Judge Orlinda Naranjo of Austin is poised to finalize a ruling this week that will require jails to send mentally incompetent inmates for treatment at a state hospital within 21 days of the time they are ordered committed.

She said in a letter last week outlining her expected ruling that the current average wait of six months for a spot at a state mental hospital violates the constitutional rights of inmates who have been found incompetent to stand trial and are awaiting psychological assessment and treatment. To comply with her ruling, the cash-strapped Department of State Health Services, which runs the hospitals, will have to find the room and the resources for all those inmates. 

“These economic decisions made by the state do not outweigh the incompetent detainees’ liberty interests,” Naranjo wrote.

It's important to note that these are individuals who have not been convicted of a crime.  They have been charged with a crime, but found to be incomeptent to assist in their own defense and stand trial.  The defendants are being detained for treatment in order be tried. 

Earlier coverage the shortage of treatment space for mentally ill defendants begins at the link.

"Montgomery County launches two new mental health programs for incarcerated," is by the editor of the Paper, based in Montgomery.

This week, Montgomery County launches two new programs to address the growing number of defendants with mental health issues incarcerated in the county jail.

The county will be only the second in Texas to have a managed assigned counsel program for indigent defendants. Montgomery County’s program will focus on representing defendants with mental health issues. The program will be led by Sara Forlano, a former assistant county attorney for Montgomery County, who recently left private practice to start up the new program. The County will also have a mental health court docket that closely monitors probationers with serious mental illness. The programs were created through a $487,000 grant from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, and supported by matching funds from Montgomery County Commissioners Court.

“The goal of this program is to lower the rate of recidivism,” said Judge Cara Wood of the 284th District Court. “There is a high rate of recidivism among this population.”

The programs also have the support of the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and Tri-County Services and other agencies and departments who have direct contact with the indigent mentally ill defendants.

“Finally, we are seeing something to help folks with mental health issues,” said Montgomery County Sheriff Tommy Gage. “One of the worse things is to see someone locked up in jail and it’s the last place they need to be. Through this grant, we can get help for the people that need it.”

The program will identify indigent adult defendants at the Montgomery County Jail who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, major depression, or schizophrenia and refer those cases to private attorneys who have been trained to deal with clients with mental health issues.

Earlier coverage of problems dealing with mentally ill defendants begins at the link.

Earlier coverage of the Montgomery County plan begins at the link.

Travis County was the first jurisdiction in the nation to have a specialized public defender office to deal with mentally ill defendants.  Bexar County has a special mental health court for dealing with mentally ill defendants.

Related posts are in the mental illness index.

More Calls for Kentucky Moratorium

Today's Lexington Herald-Leader carries the OpEd, "Suspend state's death penalty lottery."  It's by Ernie Lewis, the former Kentucky public advocate, now with the Kentucky Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

When I became Kentucky's public advocate in 1996, one of the first things I did was to call on policy makers to follow the American Bar Association's call for a moratorium on executions. I'd been a public defender for 19 years and, after handling numerous capital cases, had seen firsthand that the death penalty was broken beyond repair.

In 12 years as public advocate, everything I saw reinforced that view. I saw the death penalty was being used against the poor, people with mental retardation and mental illness, as well as people of color. I saw that many lawyers defending capital defendants were not qualified and that the death penalty was used in some counties but not in others.

The problems with the death penalty are once again staring us in the face. A group of prominent Kentuckians, including two former Supreme Court justices, has spent the last two years conducting an in-depth study of how the death penalty works in our state.

What they found has to undermine significantly any confidence we have in this system of life and death.

And:

The Kentucky assessment team recommended "a temporary suspension of executions until the issues identified in this Report have been addressed and rectified."

Gov. Steve Beshear, Attorney General Jack Conway, and Kentucky legislators cannot ignore this report and continue down the road toward another execution. A moratorium should be declared immediately.

AP's Brett Barrouquere files, "Age catching up with Ky. death row population, state's prison medical bills rise."  It's via the Republic.  Here's the beginning of the report:

Randy Haight wakes every morning to sore hands and a creaking body. The 59-year-old blames the pain on arthritis — something that he describes as rampant at his home for the last 17 years — Kentucky's death row.

"It gets a lot of these guys," Haight told The Associated Press in an interview at the prison in Eddyville.

Other than the recreation time, Haight and the 33 other men housed in the Kentucky State Penitentiary's unit for condemned inmates spend their days in cells that are 6 1/2-feet wide, 13-feet long, and 12-feet high. It's a forced lifestyle that, inmates and experts say, has accelerated age-related health problems for the condemned population — causing hands to ache, knees to pop and hips to degenerate.

Kentucky's 35 death row inmates (including one woman held in a different prison) are an average age of just more than 50 years old — an average of 14 years older than the 23,000 inmates in the Kentucky prison system. Condemned inmates have waited more than 16 years for execution, three years longer than the average prison sentence in the state, and 15 have been on death row for two decades or more.

All that time has been spent living a sedentary life in close quarters in a setting that doesn't change much.

"They don't get any kind of stimulus," said Ronald Aday, a sociology professor at Middle Tennessee State University who has studied death row inmates. "They're aging in place with very little interaction."

Some states are using hospices or medical parole to tackle the aging inmate population. Across the country, Human Rights Watch found, 8 percent of the prison population in 2010 was 55 or older, compared to 3 percent in 1995. That's not an option for inmate sentenced to die in Kentucky, so the state is left housing them and paying increasing medical expenses.

While the state doesn't keep separate statistics for the death row population, medical expenses for the Department of Corrections have risen each year since 2008, from $49.1 million that year to $54.8 million in fiscal year 2011. Corrections Department spokeswoman Lisa Lamb said death row inmates get the same level of care as the other 23,000 inmates in state custody — regular access to doctors and medications when necessary.

Earlier coverage from Kentucky begins at the link.