defendant is significantly more likely to get the death penalty. In fact, a convicted black defendant is a better predictor of a death sentence than a conviction involving multiple stab wounds, or a murder committed in conjunction with another felony. of the death penalty and race is the influence of the race of the victim. In most states, defendants convicted of killing white people are quite a bit more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants convicted of killing black people. That suggests that, whether intentionally or not, the criminal justice system puts a higher value on white lives than black lives. Moreover, studies that combine the race of both defendant and victim have found that a black defendant with a nonblack victim is by far the most likely to be executed, followed by a black defendant and black victim, a nonblack defendant and nonblack victim, and, far behind, a nonblack defendant and a black victim. These are percentages, by the way, not raw numbers. So they account for the fact that some of those categories have a larger sample size than others. (The Death Penalty Information Project has a summary of all of the aforementioned research, with footnotes, here.)
There have been too many doubts raised about capital punishment. There are too many flaws in the system. And when the ultimate decision is death, there is too much at stake to accept an imperfect system.
The costs associated with prosecuting a capital case far outweigh the price of locking someone up for life without the possibility of parole.
Jurors in the Jodi Arias murder trial told the judge Wednesday they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on whether the convicted murderer should be sentenced to life in prison or death for killing her one-time boyfriend, prompting the judge to instruct them to continue deliberations and try to work through their differences.
The jury reported its impasse after only about two and a half hours of deliberations that began Tuesday afternoon.
"I do not wish or intend to force a verdict," Judge Sherry Stephens told the jurors before sending them back to continue discussions. She instructed them to try to identify areas of agreement and disagreement as they work toward a decision.
Under Arizona law, a hung jury in the death penalty phase of a trial requires a new jury to be seated to decide the punishment. If the second jury cannot reach a unanimous decision, the judge would then sentence Arias to spend her entire life in prison or be eligible for release after 25 years.
Steven Alexander stood before the jury, looked up at a family picture and grimaced and cried as he ticked off the list of problems that have befallen him in the five years since his brother was murdered: ulcers, depression, a separation from his wife, nightmares.I blame Arizona. If only she didn't have such easy access to that gun, her boyfriend would be alive today.
The dreams consist of someone coming at him with a knife then going after his wife and daughter. Other times, he has nightmares about his brother, "curled up in a shower, thrown in there, left to rot for days, all alone." He feels like a child, unable to sleep alone in the dark.
"I don't want these nightmares anymore. I don't want to see my brother's murderer anymore," he said.
Arias, 32, acknowledged killing Alexander at his suburban Phoenix home after a day of sex on June 4, 2008. She initially denied any involvement and later blamed the attack on masked intruders. Two years after her arrest, Arias said she killed Alexander in self-defence.
The victim suffered nearly 30 knife wounds, had his throat slit from ear to ear and was shot in the forehead. Prosecutors say the attack was fueled by jealous rage after Alexander wanted to end his affair with Arias and prepared to take a trip to Mexico with another woman.
A convicted murderer who killed two fellow inmates while serving a life sentence and vowed to keep on killing unless he was put to death was executed Wednesday night in Virginia.I admit it's a dilemma what to do with guys like this. But, even a regular Otto Delaney should not receive state-sanctioned per-meditated murder just for the asking. It's barbaric.
Robert Gleason Jr., 42, originally of Lowell, Mass., was pronounced dead at 9:08 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, the Associated Press reported.
Gleason pleaded guilty to strangling his cellmate, Harvey Watson, with a bedsheet at the Wallens Ridge State Prison in 2009, saying under oath that he timed it to coincide with the anniversary of the killing for which he was sent to prison in the first place, according to court documents.
Gleason later told the court that he “already had a few [other] inmates lined up, just in case I didn’t get the death penalty, that I was gonna take out.”
In 2010, he strangled another inmate through a wire fence in a recreation pen at the Red Onion State Prison, a “supermax” facility, according to court records. Prosecutors said he mocked the prison staff as they tried to revive Aaron Cooper.
Gleason also pleaded guilty to that slaying and was sentenced to death in both killings. Gleason was given a life sentence for the slaying of Mike Jamerson in Virginia’s Amherst County in 2007. Prosecutors said he carried out that killing to cover up his involvement in a drug gang.
California voters have decided to retain the death penalty for the state’s worst criminals, rejecting the argument that too few death row inmates are executed to justify the cost.A sad day for California, that's what I say. Fear and vengeance have clouded their normally progressive vision.
Nearly complete returns Wednesday showed Proposition 34 defeated with 52 percent voting against it. The initiative asked voters to repeal capital punishment in the state with the nation’s largest death row, with 726 inmates awaiting execution.
The initiative, backed by the ACLU, would have made life in prison without parole the state’s toughest sentence.
Proposition 34′s defeat comes despite its supporters outspending opponents by more than 5 to 1.
Supporters argued that ending the death penalty and shuttering California’s death row could save as much as $130 million a year. Opponents said it would allow the worst offenders to escape justice.
A poll published recently shows that 42 percent of likely voters in California favor Proposition 34, which would replace the death penalty in California with life-without-parole. Roughly the same percentage supports the death penalty. Thirteen percent are undecided.Anumber of States have already abolished the death penalty, It's about time California did so. Its reputation as the progressive leader of the US is in jeopardy.
If those 13 percent have heard any of the debate about California's death penalty, they already know that the state has the largest death row in the country and that those inmates are more likely to die of old age and natural causes than execution. If they've heard anything about Proposition 34, they know that it will save the state $1 billion in the next five years and direct millions of dollars to solving unsolved rapes and murders.
But when we hear the stories of injustice -- defense attorneys arriving at court in an alcohol-induced stupor, men being executed despite grave doubts that they are actually guilty, prosecutors suppressing evidence -- we still associate them with that death penalty down there -- the one that the Southern states carry out.
Not only does California's death penalty have its own problems, but its very existence lends support to death rows in other states. For its own share, California's death penalty is obscenely expensive -- it costs $130 million more per year than life in prison without parole. Meanwhile, a shocking 56 percent of reported rapes and 46 percent of homicides go unsolved every year in this state. We know that innocent men like Franky Carillo, who spent 20 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of a shooting by mistaken eyewitness testimony, have fallen prey to the system's flaws.
What do you think? Is this a national disgrace, or what?Marvin Wilson, with an I.Q. of 61, is scheduled to be put to death in Texas on Tuesday. His execution would directly contradict the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia that “the mentally retarded should be categorically excluded from execution” because of “their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment and control of their impulses.” The court should accept Mr. Wilson’s case for review and end Texas’s illegal defiance of its explicit holding that the death penalty for the mentally retarded is unconstitutional.
Sister Helen sees death row inmates as human beings. It's harder to justify killing them that way. What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.Sister Helen Prejean filled up Hartwell's dance ballroom with her stories about her experiences with prisoners facing the death penalty. Many attendees resorted to sitting on the stairs and floor to hear her speak Wednesday, Feb. 29.
Prejean, a nun from Baton Rouge, La., has worked closely with the death penalty over the past two decades, counseling and walking murderers on death row in their final moments. She became involved in thiswhen she moved to the St. Thomas projects and was asked to be a pen pal to an inmate on death row. Prejean explained she agreed because she thought simply writing would be easy enough. Yet she never expected to get so involved.
The execution happened just a minute's drive away from the Blue Mist Motel, where on Jan. 13, 1984, he beat, stabbed and suffocated his adoptive mother, Roberta Moormann, 74, who sexually abused him into adulthood, according to defense lawyers.
He cut off her head, legs and arms, halved her torso, and flushed all her fingers down the toilet. He then went to various businesses asking if he could dispose of spoiled meat and animal guts before he threw most of her remains in trash bins and sewers throughout the dusty town, about 60 miles southeast of Phoenix.
Moormann was captured after he asked a corrections employee to dispose of what he said were dog bones.
He killed the woman while on a three-day "compassionate furlough" from the prison in Florence, where he was serving nine years to life for kidnapping and molesting an 8-year-old girl in 1972.
From MSNBC.com and the AP:Judge denies DNA tests before Texas execution
By JUAN A. LOZANO
Hank Skinner, 49, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday for the 1993 deaths of his girlfriend and her two sons. Skinner's attorneys had asked for testing of DNA evidence that was not tested before his 1995 trial.
But Judge Steven R. Emmert denied Skinner's request in a brief order issued Wednesday and made public Thursday. The order did not explain the judge's decision.
Skinner's attorneys say they plan to appeal the decision to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
"The stakes in this case are too high to allow Mr. Skinner to be executed before he has a fair chance to make his case that the trial court made a grave mistake in denying his request for DNA testing," said Robert Owen, an attorney for Skinner.
A spokesman for the Texas Attorney General's Office, which is handling appeals in the case for prosecutors, said his office was reviewing whether it would have any comment on the judge's ruling.
Prosecutors have called the DNA testing request merely an attempt by Skinner to delay his execution.
Skinner was sentenced to death for the 1993 deaths of his girlfriend, 40-year-old Twila Busby, and her sons Elwin "Scooter" Caler, 22, and Randy Busby, 20. The victims were strangled, beaten or stabbed on New Year's Eve at their home in Pampa in the Texas Panhandle.
Skinner also has filed a federal lawsuit claiming Texas violated his civil rights by withholding access to the evidence. That lawsuit is pending.
