NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Tennessee Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a death sentence for a man convicted of murdering a Scott County couple in their bed and ordered that a new jury decide whether to execute him.

The state’s highest court cited numerous problems with both the evidence and sentencing phase of the murder trial of Hubert Glenn Sexton, including prosecutors making inappropriate statements to jurors and the admission of prejudicial evidence.

A Scott County jury convicted Sexton of two counts of first-degree murder for the May 2000 murders of Stanley and Terry Sue Goodman. The Goodmans were shot to death as they slept in their Huntsville home days after Sexton was accused of sexually abusing one of Stanley Goodman’s children.

In spite of the problems during the trial, the Supreme Court refused to overturn the murder convictions.

“Aside from the unfairly prejudicial nature of the inadmissible evidence and the inappropriate argument by the prosecution, however, the proof of guilt for each of the two murders was simply overwhelming,” the opinion, written by Justice Gary Wade, said. The court noted that the evidence included Sexton telling at least three of his friends that he had murdered the Goodmans.

The court said problems started even before the trial began when some people were improperly excluded as jurors. The court said jurors never should have heard allegations about the sexual abuse because Sexton had not been charged. The opinion noted that prosecutors could have elected to charge Sexton separately in the matter.

And the court said that jurors may have been prejudiced by hearing that Sexton initially agreed to take a polygraph but then changed his mind and refused. Prosecutors were also said to make inappropriate comments to jurors during opening statements and closing arguments.

Attorneys for a Fayette County man on death row for the 2004 slaying of his former girlfriend say they have found witnesses who contradict the testimony of a key prosecution witness.

The discovery is just one reason James W. VanDivner deserves a new trial or sentencing hearing, according to a petition filed by his attorney, Brent Peck of Uniontown.

In 2007, VanDivner, 63, was found guilty of the July 5, 2004, shooting death of his former girlfriend, Michelle Cable, 41, outside her home in Grindstone. VanDivner also shot Cable’s teenage son, Billy, who survived a bullet wound to his spine.

VanDivner received the death penalty.

“That issue is phenomenal; the eight witnesses we interviewed who were there, who said (Jessica Cable) was not,” Peck said.

Jessica Cable, who is the victim’s daughter, testified at trial she saw VanDivner grab her mother’s hair, shoot her at close range and tell her, “There, you (expletive), I said I was going to kill you and smile and walk away,” according to Peck’s filing.

Peck and his wife, Mariah Balling-Peck, also an attorney, on Tuesday said they spoke with eight witnesses who indicated Jessica Cable was not present when her mother was shot.

The witnesses, none of whom were called to testify at trial, told the attorneys Jessica Cable arrived shortly after the shooting, according to the petition.

In addition, the Pecks said they found a retired school administrator who backs up earlier defense claims that VanDivner likely was diagnosed with mental retardation prior to age 18.

By law, such individuals cannot be sentenced to death, Brent Peck said.

VanDivner attended special-education classes while enrolled in the Frazier School District, according to the Pecks.

At trial, prosecutors said the placement resulted from behavioral issues, and was not based on tests for mental retardation.

Although the school has no records of any intelligence tests being given to VanDivner, Brent Peck said he has found a retired administrator who indicated only students with an IQ of 75 or less were placed in special-education classes.

Behavioral problems were not taken into consideration, according to the former administrator, Peck said.

“Their argument he was in special education because of behavioral issues was completely unfounded and completely off the wall,” Brent Peck said.

With the mental retardation threshold pegged at 70, plus or minus 5, VanDivner would have fallen into that category as a child, Brent Peck said.

A hearing has not yet been scheduled on the petition. VanDivner is on death row at the State Correctional Institution in Greene County.

In June 2010, former Gov. Ed Rendell had signed an execution warrant for VanDivner, but a stay was issued.

At 3:25 a.m. on May 2, Anthony Bartee was eating breakfast, not knowing if it would be his last.

That evening, Bartee, 55, was to be strapped to the gurney in the death chamber in Huntsville for the 1996 robbery and slaying of his friend David Cook, 37.

Bartee’s attorney David Dow started his day scrambling to get his client a second stay — the first was granted within a week of Bartee’s original Feb. 28 execution date. In addition to the usual appellate route, Dow took an atypical one.

He filed a federal lawsuit against the Bexar County district attorney’s office, claiming that Bartee’s civil rights were violated by prosecutors withholding evidence for DNA testing that could prove his client’s innocence.

The DA’s office doubted the attempt would work because Bartee had 15 years to make evidence claims. And besides, he wasn’t convicted based on DNA. But with Bartee’s death imminent, Chief U.S. District Judge Fred Biery granted the temporary stay to allow more time to examine Dow’s civil rights claims.

The ruling was rare, experts said, and speaks to an ever-increasing scrutiny of death penalty cases as exonerations from post-conviction DNA testing continue to mount.

“The courts are more cautious, and most people think they should be if there is a question about it,” said Cornell University Law School Professor John H. Blume.

Juries, too, are handing down fewer death sentences, nationwide and locally.

Local prosecutors have noted the trend and are taking a harder look at whether to seek death.

“We don’t go get the death penalty just because we can,” First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg said. “It’s a very serious decision-making process.”

Dow did not return phone calls or emails.

A majority of Texans, 73 percent, either strongly or somewhat support the death penalty, according to a University of Texas at Austin and Texas Tribune poll published Thursday. The number drops to 53 percent when asked about the option of life without parole.

A majority of Americans also support the death penalty, according to a 2011 Gallup Poll. But at 61 percent, that support is at its lowest point in 39 years, the poll concluded.

Since the state adopted life without parole in 2005 as an alternative to death, it “definitely changed the dynamics” in Bexar County, Herberg said.

Exonerations also have affected the entire criminal justice system, including jurors who must decide if someone lives or dies, said John Schmolesky, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law.

“I think it’s moved the pendulum to at least introduce an element of skepticism in capital cases,” Schmolesky said.

The last death sentence in Bexar County came in 2009, a year when only one person was condemned to die although prosecutors had sought the death penalty more often than that.

Given that at least 24 people were sentenced to die in the 11-year period that ended in 2006, Bartee being one of them, that’s a dramatic decrease.

Death sentences in the United States also have dropped, by 65 percent in the past 12 years, with 78 handed down last year, compared with 224 in 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Prosecutors here, in deciding whether to seek the death penalty, weigh the cost of the litigation, the circumstances of the crime and the accused killer’s history of violence, among other factors, Herberg said.

“The future danger aspect of it has always been an issue with the jury,” he added. “If they can’t get out of prison, (communities) are safer.”

Bartee’s own violent past wasn’t known to Cook, his friends or family.

He was sent to prison for raping at knifepoint a girl, 15, and a woman, 20, in separate incidents in 1983, according to court records. At the time Cook was killed, Bartee had been out on parole for only 15 months.

The DNA factor

At 9:35 a.m. on May 2, Bartee was eating lunch and visiting with family. His father and sister planned to witness his execution. So did the father, two sisters and brother-in-law of Cook.

n San Antonio that day, district attorney’s office investigator George Saidler, a retired homicide detective who worked on Cook’s case, was searching the police property room for glasses and cigarettes collected 16 years ago from Cook’s house.

What prompted him was Dow’s new request for DNA evidence testing. Prosecutors needed to know if authorities still had the evidence, especially if a court ruled in Bartee’s favor.

Biery’s decision to stay the execution was a move in the right direction, said civil rights attorney Jeff Blackburn, who heads the Innocence Project of Texas.

“We have to err on the side of finding out every fact that we can,” he said. “I think that if we’ve learned anything, it’s that it’s hard to trust the government when they say (DNA’s) not involved in this case.”

Nationwide, DNA testing has been instrumental in exonerating more than 280 people, the majority in the past 12 years. Of those, 17 spent time on death row, according to The Innocence Project.

Still, that’s just a fraction of the more than 2,000 people falsely convicted in the past 23 years, according to the first national registry of its kind, which was released last week.

In response to the growing number of exonerations and advances in DNA testing technology, the Texas Legislature made changes regarding DNA evidence that could help someone wrongly convicted prove their innocence.

Two changes occurred late last year. Lawmakers made it less difficult for someone convicted to get DNA testing introduced in court. Also, judges now have the power to order that DNA profiles be sent through national and state databases, presumably to find out whether someone else committed the crime.

Bartee, so far, has benefited from the new laws.

“I think you do see the courts are saying, no matter what let’s test it,” Herberg said. “We’re certainly seeing that. That’s the reason for this delay (in Bartee’s case).”

The new evidence laws have ushered in debates about what to test and when. Advocates of testing argue that every avenue needs to be explored, while some prosecutors contend that more DNA testing can be used as a stalling tactic.

“DNA evidence isn’t the silver bullet that’s going to solve every single case,” Schmolesky said. “If the (person) admits he was present, he may have left fingerprints, saliva on cups for example, or things that result in DNA testing but don’t show he committed a crime.”

Local prosecutors haven’t wavered in their belief that further testing for Bartee’s case is a waste of time.

“He wasn’t convicted with DNA evidence but by his own behavior,” Assistant District Attorney Rico Valdez said.

A cautious approach

At noon on May 2, Bartee finished visitation. He was transferred that afternoon from death row in Livingston to Huntsville. He had his final meal before his scheduled 6 p.m. execution and waited to see if Biery’s stay would be overturned.

Just after 7 p.m., when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Bartee’s execution, he thanked his family, his supporters, God and his legal team.

With the execution stalled, prosecutors also opted for caution. They sent for testing the glasses and cigarettes Saidler had found in the property room, though no court had ordered it.

They didn’t want lingering unanswered questions about a conviction, if it could be helped.

“We don’t want anyone thinking we just want someone executed,” Valdez said.

Last week the Bexar County crime lab’s testing found on the evidence the DNA of three people — two men and one woman so far unidentified. The results will now be sent through the state and federal databases. As prosecutors hunt for DNA matches, the civil rights case lingers in federal court.

To Valdez, the results so far haven’t changed a thing.

And almost three months to the day Bartee was first scheduled to die, he remains on death row with no new execution date set.

Related articles

• TEXAS – Anthony Bartee execution scheduled for today (claimyourinnocence.wordpress.com)

DETROIT  - There has been another setback for a man serving life in prison for a Mother’s Day murder he says he did not commit. A judge has denied Justly Johnson’s fourth appeal, despite a new witness uncovered by the 7 Action News investigators.

Johnson’s lawyers from the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan said they are disappointed but determined to press forward to the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Last December, the 7 Action News Investigators tracked down a new witness in the 1999 Mother’s Day murder of Lisa Kindred , the crime Johnson is serving a life sentence for.  Investigator Scott Lewis located her son, C.J. Skinner, who was with his mother in her minivan when a man walked up and shot her.

Skinner, who was eight years old at the time, talked with Lewis in a phone interview from Pennsylvania, where he is also serving time in prison. Skinner told Lewis that he saw what happened the night his mother was murdered and he would never forget the gunman’s face.

Did the police ever question you?” Lewis asked Skinner.

“Never,” he replied.

“Never looked at a photo line-up?” Lewis asked.

“Never,” Skinner said.

Skinner described a lone gunman who looked nothing like Justly Johnson or the second man convicted, Kendrick Scott.

Lawyers from the Michigan Innocence Clinic took that information and other new evidence they uncovered to Judge Prentiss Edwards asking for a new hearing. But the judge rejected their request as he has three times in the past.

Judge Edwards has declined to be interviewed about the case.

“Suffice it to say we don’t think the judge gave any legally adequate reason to not at least hold a hearing on all of the evidence, and especially the new testimony from C.J. (Skinner),” said attorney David Moran, co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic.

Lawyers from the Innocence Clinic have stated in court records that police overlooked the most likely suspect back in 1999, Lisa Kindred’s husband Will who had a history of domestic violence and threats against his wife and kids.

Detroit police never discovered Kindred’s history of violence.  It was uncovered years after Johnson and Scott’s convictions by lawyers from the Wisconsin Innocence Project. The Wisconsin lawyers originally took on Johnson’s case and are still involved in efforts to win a new trial for him.

Will Kindred has denied any involvement in the murder during conversations with 7 Action News Investigator Scott Lewis.

In their latest appeal lawyers from the Michigan Innocence Clinic also argued Johnson’s conviction was tainted by what is known as a Brady violation. A Brady violation occurs when the prosecution withholds important information from the defense during a trial.

In this case, attorneys argued, police were given information by Lisa Kindred’s sister that pointed toward Will Kindred as a suspect, but that information was not passed on to Johnson’s defense attorney.

Judge Edwards rejected that claim as well, saying that while police did not turn the information over to defense attorneys they did not share it with the prosecuting attorney either.

“That’s a mistake because under the law if the police have the information it has to be turned over to the defense even if they haven’t turned it over to the prosecutor,” Moran said.

Innocence lawyers from Michigan and Wisconsin have been on this case for years and have now taken on an appeal for Scott , the second man convicted. Both men were convicted primarily on testimony of two young men who later recanted and said they were pressured by police to implicate Johnson and Scott in the murder.

A series of reports in the Detroit Free Press documented how police were using pressure tactics to solve homicides during the 1990’s and the news reports became a factor in the U.S. Justice Department taking control of the Detroit Police Department in a consent decree that is still in place to this day.

Moran said the evidence of Johnson and Scott’s innocence is compelling and he believes the two men deserve a judicial review of new information that has come to light.

“We just want to get a hearing in some court so we can present this new evidence and let a judge, any judge, decide whether this merits a new trial,” Moran stated.

Moran said if the Innocence Clinic eventually exhausts all of its appeals in state court they will take the case to the Federal District Court for a last-ditch effort known as a habeas petition.

Meanwhile, 7 Action News Investigator Scott Lewis, who has been looking into the case for nearly two years, continues to search for new evidence.

Lewis is currently trying to locate a man who lived on the Bewick Street where Lisa Kindred was shot and killed back in 1999 .  The man is known only by his street name, Tone.

Witnesses told Lewis that Tone was on the street shortly before Kindred was shot telling people to get back in their houses because “something was about to go down.”

According to witnesses, Tone was related to Antonio Burnette, one of two

prosecution witnesses who implicated Johnson and Scott in the murder. There is no evidence in the hundreds of police records reviewed by 7 Action News that Detroit Police ever questioned Tone.

Lewis was told by people who lived in the neighborhood that the man known as Tone left the State of Michigan shortly after the murder and never returned. 

The 7 Action News Investigators are trying to find out Tone’s first and last name hoping to track him down and find out what, if anything, he knows about the 1999 murder.

If you have any information on this case, contact The Investigators by calling 248-827-9252, or send an email to tips@wxyz.com .

SAN JOSE, Calif.—The state Supreme Court is set to hear a death row inmate’s appeal for a new trial after a judge found that prosecutors had withheld key evidence.

Miguel Bacigalupo was convicted in the 1983 slayings of two brothers, Jose Luis Guerrero and Orestes Guerrero, at their jewelry store in San Jose.

Bacigalupo, now 50, had argued that he was ordered to kill the brothers by the Colombian mafia and risked endangering his family if he did not comply. A judge three years ago found that a Santa Clara County prosecutor and her lead investigator had failed to disclose information that might have supported Bacigalupo’s claim.

The San Jose Mercury News reports (
http://bit.ly/L8hK2P
) that the Supreme Court will take up the case on Wednesday. It must decide whether to accept the judge’s findings.

Prosecutors have said the Colombian drug connection was deemed speculative.

HOUSTON – A man on death row for an East Texas robbery a decade ago where three people were shot, one fatally, has lost a federal court appeal. The decision moves 28-year-old Richard Cobb a step closer to execution.

Cobb argued to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that letters from a jailhouse informant to Cherokee County prosecutors improperly were withheld as evidence in Cobb’s trial.

The informant also testified against Cobb at his capital murder trial for killing 37-year-old Kenneth Vandever during the robbery of a store in Rusk in 2002 and abducting, shooting and wounding two female clerks. The New Orleans-based appeals court ruled late Friday the letters were immaterial in the trial outcome.

Cobb’s companion in the robbery, Beunka Adams, was executed last month.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Rodney Berget lives in a single cell on South Dakota’s death row, rarely leaving the tiny room where he awaits execution for bludgeoning a prison guard to death with a pipe during an attempted escape.

For Berget’s immediate family, his fate is somewhat familiar. He is the second member of the clan to be sentenced to death. His older brother was convicted in 1987 of killing a man for his car. Roger Berget spent 13 years on Oklahoma’s death row until his execution in 2000 at age 39.

The Bergets are not the first pair of siblings to be condemned. Record books reveal at least three cases of brothers who conspired to commit crimes and both got the death penalty. But these two stand out because their crimes were separated by more than 600 miles and 25 years.

“To have it in different states in different crimes is some sort of commentary on the family there,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks death penalty trends.

The siblings’ journey from the poverty of their South Dakota childhood to stormy, crime-ridden adult lives shows the far-reaching effects of a damaged upbringing — and the years of havoc wrought by two men who developed what the courts called a wanton disregard for human life.

Rodney Berget is scheduled to die later this year, potentially ending the odyssey that began when the two boys were born into a family that already had four kids.

A former prison principal described Rodney as a “throwaway kid” who never had a chance at a productive life. A lawyer for Roger recalled him as an “ugly duckling” with little family support.

The boys were born after the family moved from their failed farm in rural South Dakota to Aberdeen, a city about 20 miles away. Roger arrived in 1960. Rodney came along two years later.

His farming dreams dashed, patriarch Benford Berget went to work for the state highway department. Rosemary Berget took a night job as a bar manager at the local Holiday Inn.

The loss of the farm and the new city life seemed to strain the family and the couple’s marriage. When the family moved to town, “things kind of fell apart,” Bonnie Engelhart, the eldest Berget sibling, testified in 1987.

Benford Berget, away on business, was rarely around. When he was home, he drank and become physically abusive, lawyers for the brothers later said.

By the 1970s, the couple divorced, and Roger and Rodney started getting into trouble. Roger skipped school. Rodney started stealing. Soon, they were taking cars. Both went to prison for the first time as teens.

Roger Berget enjoyed a rare period of freedom in 1982 and met a woman while hitchhiking. The two started a relationship, and the woman gave birth to a child the next year. But Roger didn’t get to see his son often because he was soon behind bars again, this time in Oklahoma. And for a far more sinister crime.

Roger and a friend named Michael Smith had decided to steal a random car from outside an Oklahoma City grocery store. The two men spotted 33-year-old Rick Patterson leaving the store on an October night in 1985. After abducting him at gunpoint, they put Patterson in the trunk and concluded he would have to be killed to prevent him from identifying his captors.

They drove the car to a deserted spot outside the city and shot Patterson in the back of the head and neck, blowing away the lower half of his face.

A year later, Berget pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to death on March 12, 1987. An appeals court threw out a death sentence for Smith, who was later sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Less than three months after Roger was sentenced to death, Rodney Berget, then 25 and serving time for grand theft and escape, joined five other inmates in breaking out of the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls.

The men greased their bodies with lotion, slipped through a hole in an air vent and then cut through window bars in an auto body shop at the prison. Berget was a fugitive for more than a month.

Thirteen years passed before Roger Berget was executed by lethal injection on June 8, 2000. His younger brother was still in prison in South Dakota.

Then in 2002, the younger Berget was released. His sister and her husband threw Rodney his first-ever birthday party when he turned 40.

But the good days were numbered because a year later, he was sentenced to life in prison for attempted murder and kidnapping. He headed back to the South Dakota State Penitentiary — this time for good.

Then Rodney got to talking with a fellow inmate named Eric Robert about a goal they shared: to escape — or die trying.

The plan was months in the making. The inmates figured they would corner a solitary guard — any guard would do — and beat him with a pipe before covering his face with plastic wrap.

Once the guard was dead, Robert would put on the dead man’s uniform and push a box with Berget inside as the prison gates opened for a daily delivery. The two would slip through the walls unnoticed.

On the morning of April 12, 2011, the timing seemed perfect. Ronald “R.J.” Johnson was alone in a part of the prison where inmates work on upholstery, signs, custom furniture and other projects. Johnson wasn’t supposed to be working that day — it was his 63rd birthday. But he agreed to come in because of a scheduling change.

After attacking Johnson, Robert and Berget made it outside one gate. But they were stopped by another guard before they could complete their escape through the second gate. Both pleaded guilty.

In a statement to a judge, Rodney acknowledged he deserved to die.

“I knew what I was doing, and I continued to do it,” Berget said. “I destroyed a family. I took away a father, a husband, a grandpa.”

His execution, scheduled for September, is likely to be delayed to allow the State Supreme Court time to conduct a mandatory review.

Rodney Berget’s lawyer, Jeff Larson, has declined to comment on the case outside of court. Rodney did not respond to letters sent to the penitentiary.

The few members of the Berget family who survive are reluctant to talk about how seemingly normal boys turned into petty criminals and then into convicted killers of the rarest kind: brothers sentenced to death.

Dieter, of the Death Penalty Information Center, said some families of the condemned remain involved in appeals. But others see no reason to preserve connections.

“There’s no light at the end of it,” he said. “What happens at the end is execution.”

Richard Leavitt, 53, was pronounced dead at 10:25 a.m. at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution.

He offered no final statement, and the only time he spoke was to decline to have his head covered. 

JUNE 12 8.00 a.m 

BOISE — Idaho Dept. of Corrections Director Brent Reinke spoke to members of the media in a short briefing prior to convicted murderer Richard Leavitt’s Tuesday execution.

Reinke addressing those gathered outside the Idaho Maximum Security Institution just after 8 a.m.

Idaho’s top prison official began by emphasizing the serious nature of the execution, saying prison staff “take no joy in this duty.”

Reinke went on to explain that preparations for the State’s second execution in the last seven months have seen few changes since the execution of Paul Ezra Rhoades in November 2011.

The prison chief also took several questions from reporters.

Reinke described Leavitt’s current mood as “resolved,” and said the convicted murderer had been meeting with family members throughout Monday night.

Reinke said Leavitt did not meet with a spiritual adviser.

Reinke also explained that Leavitt had been offered, and had subsequently taken several sedatives in preparation for his 10 a.m. execution.

Leavitt is also actively meeting with his attorney, and will continue to do so until the final minutes of his life, according to Reinke.

SCHEDULE OF EXECUTION

6 a.m. — Demonstration areas open

9:35 a.m. — Witnesses enter viewing rooms

10 a.m. — Warden reads death warrant to Leavitt and witnesses

10:03 a.m. — Warden asks Leavitt if he wishes to make final statement

10:10 a.m. — Lethal injection begins

10:35 a.m. — Warden declares execution complete

- Source: Idaho Department of Correction

June 11, 2012 Source : 
http://www.therepublic.com

BOISE, Idaho — Convicted killer Richard Leavitt was calm and spending what was expected to be his last full day alive meeting with his team of lawyers and a handful of approved visitors at his cell on Idaho’s death row, prison officials said Monday.

Leavitt, 53, is scheduled to be put to death Tuesday morning by lethal injection at Idaho Maximum Security Institution, south of Boise. He was convicted in 1985 for the brutal stabbing death of Danette Elg, a 31-year-old woman from Blackfoot.

Leavitt, along with members of his family, insists he didn’t commit the crime. But barring any last-minute reprieve from federal judges, Leavitt will be just the second Idaho inmate put to death in 17 years.

He was calm as he met with visitors and lawyers, state prisons spokesman Jeff Ray said.

Leavitt declined to disclose the identity of his approved visitors. Ray said Leavitt will have baked chicken, french fries and milk for his last meal.

Tuesday’s execution will be different in two ways from the execution last November of Paul Ezra Rhoades.

The state’s execution team will administer a single, lethal dose of pentobarbital, a drug used as a surgical sedative. Last fall, Rhoades was given a lethal injection of three chemicals.

If the execution goes forward, it will mark the first time state and media witnesses will view Idaho’s lethal injection process in its entirety. Last fall, witnesses were barred from seeing the execution team escort Rhoades into the chamber, strap him to a gurney and insert the IV catheters into his arms.

Prison officials had blocked that portion of the execution to protect the identity of the execution team members. But more than a dozen news organizations sued the state, alleging that the Idaho Department of Correction policy limiting access to an execution from start to finish violated the First Amendment and the public’s right to know.

The news groups, led by The Associated Press, sought to expand access to bring Idaho policies in line with a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled on a 2002 case that the public has a right to view executions in their entirety. The portion of the execution process blocked by Idaho prison officials has been subject to legal challenges by death row inmates nationwide, claiming the insertion of the catheters can be botched in a way that causes pain, other medical complications and raises questions about the dignity of the process.

On Friday, a three-judge panel from the San Francisco-based court sided with the news groups and ordered IDOC to modify its policy.

The same federal appeals court on Monday rejected two requests by Leavitt’s team of lawyers to rehear appeals in his case.

Late Monday, they U.S. Supreme Court rejected a motion Leavitt filed Sunday seeking a stay of the execution.

June 10, 2012 Source : 
http://www.kivitv.com

36 Hours before his scheduled execution, Richard Leavitt maintains his innocence 

For more than a quarter century Richard Leavitt has called Death Row home.

Leavitt is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday morning for the brutal July 1984 murder of 31-year-old Danette Elg of Blackfoot.

A jury convicted Leavitt of stabbing Elg 15 times and cutting out her sexual organs.

Leavitt never confessed to the murder. And, he tells Today’s 6 News and FOX 9 News at 9:00, he is innocent.

“They [the State of Idaho] are killing an innocent man,” Leavitt said.

Police linked Leavitt to Elg’s murder after finding the condemned killer’s blood on her underwear. However, Leavitt claims he had a nose bleed and used Elg’s clothing to wipe the blood.

“It was dark,” Leavitt said. “I didn’t know what I was grabbing if it was panties or a T-Shirt or a blanket…”

Leavitt claims Thelma Wilkins, who he says was Danette’s lover, killed her.

Police and prosecutors argue Leavitt led them to Danette’s body. But, Leavitt says he was one of several people at Elg’s home when Blackfoot Police discovered her mutilated body.

“We were all there when they broke into the house, not just me,” Leavitt said. “There were probably five or six or seven of us there. They called me back two or three hours later and asked if I could identify Danette. I wlaked into the house holding my breath, seen what I seen and said all I can say is that it looks like her hair.”

Over the decades, the Death Row inmate passed two polygraph tests.

But, every appeal at every level failed.

Leavitt’s execution is scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday in Boise.

His attorneys are drafting one final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court which will be reviewed Monday.

June 8, 2012 Source : 
http://www.nwcn.com

Final preps underway for Leavitt execution

BOISE — On Tuesday, Richard Leavitt will be executed for the 1984 murder of Danette Elg in Blackfoot. The Idaho Department of Correction is making the final preparations for his death by lethal injection.

The maximum security prison is now in Incident Command Mode, which means heightened alert and heightened security. It will stay that way until after the execution.

Leavitt is in a cell in F Block, the same building that holds the execution chamber where he is scheduled to be put to death on Tuesday. He’s being monitored 24 hours a day by two officers.

“For an individual who’s looking at, what we’re looking at on Tuesday, he’s anxious but in fairly good spirits,” said Brent Reinke, the Director of the Department of Correction.

He says Leavitt has had regular visits from his attorney, but has not requested a spiritual advisor.

“Other than that, he’s been waiting and watching, and watching legal procedures, legal actions like we all have been,” said Reinke.

Leavitt is expected to have visitors through the night on Monday, his execution is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. Tuesday.

Reinke says he’s expecting members of the victim’s family and Leavitt’s family to be there, but can’t yet say who or how many might be witnesses to the execution. A handful of law enforcement and government officials and some media will be allowed to witness the execution.

Leavitt will be allowed to make a statement, then given a single lethal injection.

“As we move forward, it will be the one drug of pentobarbital,” said Reinke.

This new protocol is a departure from the three injections of three different chemicals used in the past. The other chemicals became harder to obtain, and according to one lawyer representing death row inmates, the one injection reduces the risk of excruciating pain for the prisoner.

Reinke is also expecting protesters.

“This is a very polarizing event. So we’ll be having both pros and cons,” said Reinke. “We have lots, areas set aside for individuals who want to come out and express their freedom of speech.”

But Reinke says no matter how you feel about this man or the process, his department has a job to do on Tuesday.

“We want to make sure that this is carried out with as much professionalism, dignity, and respect as we possibly can,” said Reinke.

After the execution, Leavitt’s body will be handed over to the Ada County coroner.

Reinke also says the escort and medical teams have been training for this day for months, and their mental well being is one of his biggest priorities.

June 7, 2012 Source : AP

News organizations appeal Idaho execution case

BOISE, Idaho  — A legal challenge seeking full viewing access to Idaho executions will go before a federal appeals court Thursday, with The Associated Press and 16 other news organizations saying the process is unconstitutionally restrictive.

The lawsuit comes as lethal injections have drawn greater scrutiny, from whether the drugs are effective to whether the execution personnel are properly trained.

The news organizations filed a federal lawsuit last month seeking to strike the portion of Idaho’s regulations that prevent witnesses — including reporters acting as representatives of the public — from viewing executions until after catheters have been inserted into the veins of death row inmates.

The news organizations also asked a judge to prevent next week’s execution of Richard Leavitt from moving forward without the changes, but a federal judge denied that request Tuesday.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge said that while the news organizations had presented a strong case in arguing that the execution limits run afoul of freedom of the press provisions, the timing of the claim fell too close to Leavitt’s execution date and could cause a delay.

Lodge didn’t rule on the merits of the lawsuit, only denying the request for a preliminary injunction. The news organizations now are want the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse Lodge’s decision. The hearing is set for Thursday morning in Pasadena, Calif.

The hearing comes five days ahead of Leavitt’s scheduled execution. He was convicted of murder in the 1984 killing of Blackfoot resident Danette Elg.

In a brief filed in support their appeal, the news organizations argue the reasons given by the Idaho Department of Correction for closing a portion of the execution process do not pass constitutional muster.

The news organizations also took issue with Lodge’s finding that the lethal injection protocol could be altered in the future without harm to the parties involved.

Chuck Brown, an attorney for the news organizations, argued this represented a “profound event.”

“The lower court is essentially finding that a First Amendment right can be violated today as long as it is possible for First Amendment rights to be reasserted at some date in the future. Such a finding flies in the face of what our constitutional rights are all about,” Brown said in court documents.

Additionally, the news organizations targeted Lodge’s finding that their claim was filed too late and if granted could force a delay in Leavitt’s execution. The public has an interest in viewing the whole execution process, Lodge said, but it also has an interest in seeing the judgment enforced without disruption.

“Perhaps the department would need to reschedule the execution of Mr. Leavitt for a later date,” Brown said.

He added, “perhaps the department could simply draw open the curtains on the preparatory stage and proceed as scheduled with only minor adjustments.”

The news organizations have cited a 9th Circuit ruling in a 2002 California case that found every aspect of an execution should be open to witnesses, from the moment the condemned enters the death chamber to the final heartbeat. The ruling established what was expected of the nine Western states within the court’s jurisdiction.

The news organizations filed their case after talks were unsuccessful with prison officials, who took the position that the 2002 ruling was based on facts unique to California, Brown said, citing letters from Idaho correction director Brent Reinke.

Deputy Attorney General Michael S. Gilmore, on behalf of state officials, has asked the 9th Circuit to affirm Lodge’s ruling.

Gilmore said in court documents that the lower court reviewed the case “under applicable procedural and substantive law. It engaged in a reasoned, record-based analysis that weighed competing factors for and against a preliminary injunction in a measured, articulate manner.”

June 4, 2012  Source : 
http://www.kivitv.com

The attorney for death row inmate Richard Leavitt argued for a stay of execution today before the state supreme court.

Attorney David Nevin says the courts have changed procedures in the past year in ways that affect this case, and there are still significant issues that need to be heard before Leavitt’s scheduled execution in just over a week. The state says it’s just a stalling tactic. Attorney David Nevin says Leavitt should get a stay because of significant blood evidence that wasn’t heard during the first trial.

He says that issue is important enough the state should hear it before allowing next Tuesday’s execution.
Nevin says evidence existed to counter the prosecution’s key argument that blood from Leavitt and Danette Elg were mixed indicating they were spilled at the same time.

“It was the last argument by the prosecution who said it was conclusive proof of leavett’s guilt. Well the defense was in posession of a report by an expert that said they weren’t mixed,” says Nevin.

Nevin says the report was witheld for tactical reasons because the expert witness might also have provided other evidence harmful to Leavitt’s case. The prosecution says all this is just a stalling tactic to allow all sorts of last minute appeals.

“This rule, if we interpret it the way counsel would like us to would allow for third party top come along minutes before an execution, file a motion to cause a review and then we have to start over,” says assistant Attorney General LaMont Anderson.

Decisions from the court can sometimes take weeks, but in this case will likely be expedited because of the execution timeline.
Leavitt was convicted of murder in 1984 and his case has been going through the appeals process for the past 28 years.

The 9th circuit court will hear an appeal this thursday on whether Leavitt’s original counsel was ineffective.

June 1, 2012 Source : 
http://www.spokesman.com

The Idaho Supreme Court has set oral arguments for Monday at 3 p.m. on a series of last-minute issues raised by condemned murderer Richard Leavitt, who is scheduled to be executed June 12. Late yesterday, the high court dismissed a major filing by Leavitt’s attorneys, a petition to vacate the death warrant and conduct a new hearing. The remaining issues, including a notice of appeal first filed May 21 in Bingham County, will be argued on Monday.

The Supreme Court has posted a link here on its website to all the last-minute filings in the capital murder case, which also include federal court filings; you can read its Thursday order here. Leavitt’s death warrant was issued May 17 for the July 1984 murder and mutilation of Danette Elg in Blackfoot; his final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected on May 14. Idaho completed its first execution in 17 years in November, putting triple murderer Paul Ezra Rhoades to death by lethal injection.

May 25, 2012 Source : 
http://www.kboi2.com

BOISE, Idaho  — The attorney representing a death row inmate scheduled to die in two weeks says he has passed a polygraph test that proves he’s innocent.

Richard Albert Leavitt was convicted of the 1984 stabbing murder of Blackfoot resident Danette Elg. Proseuctors said he stabbed her repeatedly and then cut out her sexual organs. He is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on June 12.

But Leavitt has long maintained his innocence in the case, and now his attorney, David Nevin, is asking the federal court to accept a polygraph test as proof of that claim. Polygraph tests are typically not admissible as evidence in court.

Nevin is also asking for the court to allow DNA testing on some evidence from the crime scene. The judge has previously turned down the request, saying he doubted the “proposed testing would bring favorable results.”

But Nevin contends that it’s not possible to know what, if anything, the DNA testing will reveal until it’s completed. If the blood of a third person were found at the scene, that would be exculpatory, Nevin said.

“The state is rushing headlong into executing an innocent man. Surely it is not too much to ask that important evidence in the case be tested at no expense and no risk to the state,” Nevin wrote to the court.

He also said a renowned polygraph expert, Boise State University psychology professor Charles Honts, examined Leavitt and found him to be truthful when he denied involvement in Elg’s murder.

Honts asked Leavitt three questions, according to court documents: “Did you stab Danette Elg?“, “Did you remove Danette Elg’s internal genitals?” and “Were you present when Danette Elg was stabbed?”

Leavitt answered “no” to all three, according to the filing. Honts also found that Leavitt’s breathing, heart rate and other physiological signals were consistent with those expected when someone is telling the truth. Honts concluded that Leavitt’s answers had a high statistical possibility of being truthful.

“Mr. Leavitt’s passing the polygraph examination provides eloquent confirmation that he is not Danette Elg’s killer, and that he is, on the contrary, innocent,” wrote Nevin.

Leavitt was arrested after authorities discovered Elg’s body in her blood-spattered bedroom four days after her June 18, 1984 murder. Just a day or two before her death, Elg called 911 and reported a prowler had tried to enter her home. When police arrived they found signs of attempted entry but nothing else, and Elg told them she suspected Leavitt was the culprit.

Prosecutors also say that during the four days between Elg’s murder and the discovery of her body, Leavitt was exceedingly interested in her whereabouts, finally getting permission to enter the home with police who discovered the body.

Additionally, Leavitt’s blood was found in the bedroom. He later claimed that he’d gotten a nosebleed while in the room several days before Elg’s death.

And prosecutors claimed that one of the strangest elements of the murder — that Elg’s internal sexual organs were removed in a way that would be difficult to accomplish without some knowledge of anatomy — were explained when Leavitt’s ex-wife testified that during a hunting trip she had once found Leavitt removing the female sexual organs of a deer and playing with them.

Related articles

• IDAHO – Out of appeals; death row inmate learns of execution date-Richard Leavitt (claimyourinnocence.wordpress.com)
• IDAHO – Richard Leavitt – Execution – June 6 2012 (claimyourinnocence.wordpress.com)

An Alabama appeals court on Friday denied the appeals of two death row inmates, one from Montgomery County and the other from Jefferson County.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the death sentence of 33-year-old Shonelle Andre Jackson in the 1997 slaying of Lefrick Moore during a carjacking in Montgomery.

Jackson was accused of shooting Moore after a traffic accident, and then two other men took Moore’s car.

In his appeal, Jackson claimed misconduct by jurors. The appeal cited one juror whom Jackson’s appeal claimed did not inform the court during jury selection that he owned two guns.

Jackson also cited that another juror did not say during jury selection that she had several friends in the Montgomery Police Department.

Jackson also said in his appeal that the trial judge erred in overturning the jury’s sentencing recommendation that Jackson be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He also claimed that his attorney was ineffective in one phase of his trial.

The appellate court also upheld the death sentence given to 42-year-old Willie B. Smith III. Smith was convicted of the October 1991 slaying of Sharma Ruth Johnson, who was abducted while waiting to use a Birmingham ATM machine. She was later shot execution-style in a cemetery.

The court rejected Smith’s claims on appeal, including that he shouldn’t be executed because he is intellectually disabled and that his lawyers provided ineffective assistance at trial.

Both Smith and Jackson are on their second round of appeals.

USCALOOSA, Ala. — A federal court has rejected the appeal of an Alabama death row inmate convicted of killing a Fayette County minister.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down arguments by Christopher Lee Price. The Tuscaloosa News reports (
http://bit.ly/LcLrCh
 ) that Price argued that his attorney was ineffective and the prosecutor made prejudicial statements during the sentencing phase of his capital murder trial in 1993.

The 49-year-old Price from Winfield was convicted of the stabbing death of Bill Lynn, who was pastor of the Natural Springs Church of Christ.

He was killed with a sword and knife during a robbery at his home in the Bazemore community on Dec. 22, 1991. Lynn’s wife, Bessie Lynn, was injured when she went to help her husband.

Twenty-five years after the victim was raped and murdered, the Kentucky Supreme Court ordered a judge Thursday to hold a hearing on whether Gregory Wilson, who was convicted of the crimes, should be exempt from the death penalty because he is mentally retarded.

The court ruled 5-2 that a Kenton Circuit Court judge improperly rejected Wilson’s claim without a hearing.

The Supreme Court also ordered the judge, Gregory Bartlett, to rule on whether Wilson is entitled to DNA testing of semen found in the automobile of the victim, Deborah Pooley.

In a heated dissent, Justices Bill Cunningham and Wil Schroder, who sits in Covington, argued that the case has gone on long enough and that Wilson should have raised the issues long ago.

“Don’t forget after all these years that an innocent person named Deborah Pooley was ruthlessly murdered and her killer is still in the courts of this state,” Cunningham wrote.

Wilson was convicted in the 1987 murder, kidnapping, rape and robbery of Pooley. His conviction came after a raucous trial in which he represented himself at times while at other times was represented by two lawyers who volunteered to try the case for $2,500, after the trial judge begged for somebody to handle it.

One of the lawyers had never tried a felony case while the other listed a local pub as his office and was described later by his co-counsel as a “burned-out alcoholic.”

Wilson was scheduled to die by lethal injection on Sept. 16, 2010, but the execution was halted by Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, who cited questions about Wilson’s mental status and new state regulations for carrying out executions.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Minton said that Wilson, who moved for a new trial in 2010, presented enough evidence that he was mentally retarded to justify a hearing.

Kentucky law bars the execution of an offender considered “seriously mentally retarded,” which is defined as having an IQ of 70 or below combined with “substantial deficits in adaptive behavior” exhibited as a child.

Wilson submitted school records showing that, at 14, he had an IQ of 62 and was “easily influenced by delinquent peers.”

But the same evaluation said he was only “mildly retarded” and that his adjustment to school “should be no problem.”

Cunningham also noted in the dissent that Wilson was able to write pleadings in his own case that were “articulate, organized and possessed of writing skills and vocabulary that many college students do not possess.”

The court rejected part of Wilson’s appeal, saying he wasn’t entitled to a jury determination of whether he is mentally retarded, and it also reiterated a previous holding that there is no constitutional right to DNA testing.

Wilson’s current lawyer, chief Jefferson County public defender Dan Goyette, said he was reviewing the opinion and did not have an immediate reaction.

Allison Martin, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, noted that Wilson, as Cunningham’s dissent points out, was found competent to stand trial and his lawyers have failed to produce that report. “We are hopeful that the upcoming hearing in Kenton Circuit Court will result in an order from the court to obtain the competency report,” she said.

Pooley was abducted and forced into her car at knife point, then taken to a secluded location on Covington’s floodwall, where her hands were tied and she was raped in the back seat.

Wilson’s girlfriend, Brenda Humphrey, who also was convicted of murder, testified that Wilson strangled Pooley, despite her pleas for her life, and that they later dumped her body in a remote thicket before using her stolen credit cards on a shopping spree.

The trial captured state and later national attention when no lawyers would defend Wilson because of the minimal fee that was provided in capital cases. Chief Circuit Judge Raymond Lape Jr. posted a plea on his courthouse door saying he was “desperate” for somebody to come forward.

One of the lawyers who finally volunteered, William Hagedorn of Newport, a semi-retired lawyer, volunteered to serve as lead counsel for free, though he had no office, no staff, no copy machine and no lawbooks.

It also turned out that on each day of the trial bailiffs took Humphrey to have sex with one of Lape’s colleagues on the bench. That judge and Hagedorn are now deceased.

These days, it’s not shocking to hear about an innocent person on death row, so it won’t be surprising to learn that Rodney Reed is just such a person.

Rodney has been caged on Texas death row for the past 14 years. He was convicted by an all-white jury in 1998 of raping and killing 19-year-old Stacey Stites in the town of Bastrop, Texas. But it seems that the only thing Rodney is guilty of is being Black and daring to have a relationship with a white woman, who was engaged to a white police officer, Jimmy Fennell. 

Early on the morning of April 23, 1996, Stacey failed to show up for work. That afternoon, her body was found in a wooded area. She had been strangled to death with a belt, and her body lay partly clothed in the grass. Several beer cans were found at the site. The pickup truck she usually drove to work, which belonged to Jimmy Fennell, was found miles away in a high school parking lot.

The only physical evidence linking Rodney to the crime was semen found in and on Stacey’s body. No hair, skin or fibers connecting Rodney to the crime scene or the truck were found anywhere. Rodney says that he was seeing Stacey off and on, and the two were intimate in the days before she was killed.

At Rodney’s trial, the state presented evidence not challenged by his lawyers that Stacey had been raped at or near the time of the murder. But prominent forensic experts have since confirmed that there is essentially no evidence of rape—and that the evidence merely suggests that Rodney and Stacey had sex within a week of her death.

In the small Texas town where Rodney lived, people were likely to take notice of the relationship between Rodney and Stacey. In fact, 11 people were prepared to speak at Rodney’s trial or had written affidavits attesting to the fact that they had seen the two together. But only two of these witnesses were heard from at the trial.

The state claims that Rodney abducted Stacey and drove her in the pickup truck to the wooded area where she was found. But none of Rodney’s fingerprints were found in or on the truck. Only prints for Stacey and her fiancé Jimmy were found. Rodney’s fingerprints likewise weren’t found on the murder weapon, nor on Stacey’s name badge nor anything else found at the crime scene.

There are huge holes in the state’s case against Rodney. For example, Jimmy Fennell, a former Giddings, Texas, police officer, has failed two lie detector tests when asked the question “Did you strangle Stacey Stites?” Yet Fennell was never pursued as a suspect. “Why wasn’t he?” asks one of Reed’s first lawyers, Jimmy Brown. “It makes no common sense…It was clear he’d failed the polygraph—not once, but twice. My question to the state was, how is that? Why do you not consider him a suspect? There was no answer.” 

The pickup truck that Stacey is believed to have driven the morning she died was given back to Fennell just six days after the crime, and Fennell promptly sold it. Police never searched the apartment Stacey and Jimmy shared, the last place she was known to be alive.

A friend of Stacey’s, Ronnie Reveal, told investigators, he talked with Stacey shortly before her death. “… She seemed quite a bit down. She told him that her and her boyfriend were having problems and also that the boyfriend had a violent temper.” Reveal was never called to testify at trial.

Police never searched the apartment Stacey and Jimmy were living in, which is the last place she was known to be alive. According to other police officers this would be standard practice.

When Stacey’s body was examined by investigators, they saw that her nails had been cut to the quick, but not filed—something a police officer would know to do to lessen the chance of being identified by fingernail scrapings. This was never presented to the jury.

Since his conviction, Rodney has won an evidentiary hearing where he was able to present evidence never heard during his original trial. For example, prosecutors had withheld from Rodney’s lawyers the fact that the two beer cans found at the crime scene were tested for DNA. The report excluded Rodney, but stated that the cans contained a mixture of DNA that might have come from Stacey and two police officers. One of these officers committed suicide before Rodney’s trial, and the other was a good friend, co-worker and neighbor of Jimmy Fennell.

Subsequent DNA testing of the beer cans ruled out Stacey and one of the officers, but the other officer couldn’t be ruled out as a DNA match. 

Had this information been presented at trial it would have been devastating to the state’s case.

Also not presented at Rodney’s original trial was the testimony of two important witnesses. One, Mary Barnett, saw Stacey and Jimmy in the midst of an argument in the parking lot of a convenience store in the early morning hours on the day she was murdered. This was at a time when Fennell testified he was at home and asleep. This eyewitness account was conveyed to the district attorney before Rodney’s trial, but never disclosed to the defense.

Another witness, Police Officer Mary Blackwell, said she heard Fennell, in a police academy class, say that if he ever found out that his girlfriend was cheating on him, he’d “strangle her, and would avoid leaving fingerprints by using a belt.” As it turned out, Stacey was killed with a belt. Blackwell also witnessed Fennell being abusive toward Stacey. Again, this information was transmitted to law enforcement, but was never followed up, nor disclosed to the defense.

Despite this compelling evidence presented at Rodney’s evidentiary hearing in 2006, Judge Reva Towslee Corbett, the daughter of the original trial judge in the case, ruled against Rodney. She signed a lengthy ruling that was copied verbatim from a document prepared by the state, denying all of Rodney’s claims and saying, in essence, that the evidence wouldn’t have affected the jury’s decision.

In 2008, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals denied Rodney again, sending his case back into the federal courts, where it remains.

“I hope and pray for his freedom everyday,” says Rodney’s mother Sandra Reed, who is an active abolitionist, “ He’s tired. I’m tired. We’re all tired. It has caused a strain across the board, not just for Rodney, but also for all of us because we are a family. It’s hard.” She goes on to say, “I never dreamed that the truth would be covered up for 14 years. There is such corruption in the justice system.

If they had just let the truth be told, Rodney would have been home a long time ago.

I am someone that always believed in the justice system. I thought, well, nothing is perfect, but that the good outweighs the bad. But, it appears that the bad outweighs the good when it comes to the justice system. Now I see, it’s all about greed, money and power.”

The Reed family along with activists from the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and other abolitionist groups have marched in Bastrop and participated in the annual Texas abolition marches. Sandra Reed speaks on panels and at marches to try to help her son, but also to advocate for an end to the death penalty. The Reeds have a banner hanging outside of their house that reads, “Innocent man on death row, Free Rodney Reed.”

One person who noticed the banner in front of the Reed’s house is Caitlin Adams. She moved to Bastrop in 2010 and, curious about the sign, approached family members one day when she saw them on the porch. Since then, Caitlin has written about the case and visited Rodney many times. She has created a blog that brings to life the humanness behind the prison walls where Rodney is unjustly imprisoned.

Caitlin does this even as her own health deteriorates from ALS, a neuromuscular disease that is weakening her muscles, making it difficult for her to walk and speak. But she feels she was meant to meet Rodney, and the encounters with him have given her a fresh outlook on life:

“I’m reminded with every visit what the important things are in life,” she says. “I’ve visited Rodney, almost weekly since September, and I can only tell you he is inspiring to me, a good person and friend. I’ve spent a lot of time researching his case, and I am convinced he is completely innocent.”

Activists in Austin and Bastrop have plans to show the excellent documentary about Rodney’s caseState vs. Reed in the community center in Bastrop. “We have to keep the pressure up, we can’t leave it up to the courts, because they have failed Rodney for the past 14 years,“ says Lily Hughes.

While activists are convinced of Rodney’s innocence, there are those who are not. Rodney’s detractors point to several allegations of abuse toward women. But Rodney was never prosecuted for any of these allegations, except one, where Rodney was acquitted at trial.

Nevertheless, the facts of this case speak for themselves: the many instances of misconduct by police, the botched investigation, the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors, and the inadequate defense during the original trial. All of this at the very least should mean a new trial for Rodney—something that Rodney, his family, friends, and activists are still hoping for. 

In fact, there is mounting evidence pointing to Jimmy Fennell as the likely suspect, an avenue that Rodney’s defense team continues to pursue. In 2008, Fennel pled guilty after being charged with kidnapping and raping a woman in 2007 while on duty as a police officer in the city of Georgetown, Texas. He is currently serving a 10-year sentence. 

Bryce Benjet, one of Rodney’s current lawyers, says, “We have developed a trove of evidence that shows that Rodney is innocent and suggests that Jimmy Fennell, assisted by others, murdered Stacey and dumped her body in the woods. Based on his racist and violent nature, Jimmy Fennell certainly had motive and opportunity to kill Stacey. Further, his leaving her body in a remote location matches his conduct in two other attacks on women. We are confident that the federal courts will listen to the hard facts of the case and give Rodney the new trial he so clearly deserves.”

Rodney remains hopeful that “justice for all” will one day include him and is thankful for the efforts of activists on his behalf.

For more information about this case, read the comprehensive articles written by Jordan Smith for the Austin Statesmen.

How you can help:

1. Sign and circulate the online petition for Rodney.

2. Join Rodney’s Facebook page.

3. For more information or to download a fact sheet about Rodney’s case, visit the Get the Factssection of our website.

4. Read and share this new blog about Rodney on our website

Tales from Death Row: Justice for Rodney Reed

Recently, the CEDP began publishing a regular blog by Bastrop, Texas, resident Caitlin Adams. After meeting the family of Rodney Reed outside of their home in 2011, Caitlin began visiting Rodney, and continues to do so on a regular basis. Her blog posts are incredibly moving; filled with humor and pathos. Caitlin brings Rodney’s spirit beyond the prison walls.

Cathy Lynn Henderson, once two days from execution for the 1994 death of an infant she was baby sitting, should have her murder conviction and death sentence overturned, a Travis County judge has recommended.

District Judge Jon Wisser said scientific discoveries into the nature of head injuries — and a change of heart from the prosecution’s star witness, former medical examiner Roberto Bayardo – means no reasonable juror would convict Henderson if presented the new evidence at trial.

“Testimony of the state’s chief experts was, at bottom, scientifically flawed,” Wisser wrote in findings dated May 14 and delivered to the appeals court Tuesday.

After reviewing new evidence via testimony and briefs, Wisser recommended that the Court of Criminal Appeals dismiss Henderson’s conviction and return her case to Travis County, where she may face “any indictment or charges” that prosecutors choose to pursue in the death of 3-month-old Brandon Baugh.

Henderson claimed that Brandon died after slipping from her arms and falling about four feet to the concrete floor in her Pflugerville-area home. She said she panicked, burying the boy’s body in a Bell County field before fleeing in Missouri, where she was found and arrested 11 days later.

The search for the boy’s body and hunt for Henderson dominated headlines in February 1994.

At Henderson’s 1995 trial, Bayardo testified that it was “impossible” to attribute the boy’s extensive head injury to an accidental fall. The only explanation, he said, was a deliberate and forceful blow struck by Henderson, adding that Brandon would have had to fall “from a height higher than a two-story building” to sustain a similar injury.

But in a 2007 affidavit and in testimony before Wisser, Bayardo said recent advancements in the understanding of pediatric head injuries indicates that relatively short falls onto a hard surface could produce similar injuries to those he found on Brandon during a 1994 autopsy.

“Based on the physical evidence in the case,” Bayardo said, “I cannot determine with a reasonable degree of medical certainty whether Brandon Baugh’s injuries resulted from an intentional act or an accidental fall.”

Bayardo, now retired, also said his autopsy report, which concluded that the child was a homicide victim, would today list the manner of death as undetermined “because of the new information” about pediatric head injuries.

The Court of Criminal Appeals will determine whether to accept Wisser’s recommendation. It can rule on his submission, request further briefing or schedule oral arguments. A final decision on Henderson’s fate is likely to be months away.

JACKSON, Mississippi — Three men have asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to stop them from being executed in June.

State Attorney General Jim Hood asked earlier this month that justices set execution dates for Henry Curtis Jackson Jr., Gary Carl Simmons Jr. and Jan Michael Brawner on June 12, 13 and 14, respectively.

Lawyers for Simmons and Brawner told the state court, in briefs filed Monday, that they should get fresh shots at proving earlier lawyers hadn’t done enough to pass legal muster. Jackson’s lawyer said Monday that he needs more time to prepare a petition asking to Gov. Phil Bryant to spare Jackson’s life.

Hood’s office replied that Brawner’s arguments all have been previously rejected, and that he shouldn’t be allowed to restate them. Hood hasn’t yet replied to Simmons and Jackson.

BOISE - Notorious multiple murderer Joseph Duncan was back in a Boise courtroom on Friday morning, as lawyers and a federal judge wrangled over setting a date for a new hearing into whether Duncan was mentally competent when he waived appeals of his triple death sentence for torturing and murdering a 9-year-old North Idaho boy.

Duncan, brought to Boise from federal Death Row in Terre Haute, Ind., his hair close-cropped and graying and wearing a baggy white T-shirt, left all the talking to his attorneys on Friday morning. But in December of 2010, he submitted a hand-written, two-page letter to the court saying he now wants to appeal after all.

Duncan in the past has strongly opposed contentions that he wasn’t mentally competent to make that decision in 2008. He underwent two lengthy mental evaluations before U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge ruled him competent and allowed him to dismiss his lawyers in that sentencing trial and represent himself; he already had pleaded guilty to all charges. The lawyers filed an appeal to the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals against Duncan’s wishes, arguing he was mentally incompetent.

“I have been very stubborn about not appealing my death sentence,” the condemned killer wrote. “My belief is that if I appeal, then I am acknowledging the system’s authority to commit murder.”

But he wrote that more recently, his younger brother had died, making Duncan his mother’s only surviving son. “It would be utterly cruel, and indeed, inhuman, for me not to consider my mother’s love when deciding what to do in regard to my own life,” Duncan wrote. “So I hereby inform you, and any others concerned, that I withdraw my waiver of appeal, and consent fully to all efforts and advice given by my attorneys to appeal.”

He added, “I love my mother, and if I could only regret one thing, it would be how I have hurt her. I am the biggest fool that I know.”

In 2008, a federal jury sentenced Duncan to death for the kidnap, torture and murder of 9-year-old Dylan Groene. He also received nine life sentences for a murderous rampage in 2005, in which he killed three members of Dylan’s family in order to kidnap and molest the family’s two youngest children; only Dylan’s then-8-year-old sister, Shasta, survived.

Since then, Duncan also has been convicted of kidnapping and murdering a 10-year-old California boy, drawing two more life sentences; in that case, after weeks of expert testimony, the court ruled him mentally competent.

In the Idaho case, however, the judge never held a competency hearing in open court, meaning all the information on Duncan’s mental competency remained secret. The 9th Circuit ruled that without such a hearing, there was “reasonable doubt” about Duncan’s competency, and ordered Lodge to hold a “retrospective” competency hearing on Duncan’s mental state in 2008.

If, after the hearing, Lodge rules that Duncan was competent when he waived his right to appeal, the death sentence stands. But if not, Lodge would then have to hold another hearing to determine if Duncan was mentally competent when he waived his right to an attorney in his 2008 sentencing trial and instead represented himself. That could force a replay of the whole sentencing trial.

In his closing statement in that trial in 2008, Duncan told the jury, “You people really don’t have any clue yet of the true heinousness of what I’ve done.” While on the run from a child-molesting charge in Minnesota in 2005, Duncan said he’d plotted terrible crimes targeting random children, from invading day-care centers to kidnappings at campgrounds. “I was not searching for a child but rather I was on a rampage,” he said. “My intention was to kidnap and rape and kill until I was killed, preferring death easily over capture.”

He traveled across eight states looking for child victims before attacking the Groene family in their home along I-90 at Wolf Lodge, just east of Coeur d’Alene.

On Friday, federal defender Dick Rubin told the court that Duncan now wants to be represented by an attorney for the competency hearing, and said Duncan shouldn’t answer any questions until his new attorney is appointed. He asked the court to appoint Michael Burt of San Francisco, a death penalty defense attorney who specializes in cases involving mental health.

However, Burt told the court Friday that he has another trial in the fall, and wouldn’t be available for Duncan’s competency hearing until December. Lodge had asked the attorneys to be ready for the hearing by this July, but prosecutors said they had other cases and wouldn’t be ready until October.

“The court’s not going to agree to that,” Lodge said. “This … has drug on. Memories get faulty.” He told the attorneys for both sides, “October-November is the latest. How you work that out is up to you.”

Calling a two-week recess, Lodge said, “We’re going to get the matter resolved.”

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A condemned killer’s fight to receive surgery for agonising hip pain has pushed Kentucky officials into an uncomfortable debate over security and politics.

Eighteen years after Darold Stenson was sentenced to die for the killings of his wife and business partner in Clallam County, the Washington Supreme Court has overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial.

In an 8-1 ruling, the court said Stenson’s rights were violated because prosecutors “wrongfully suppressed” favorable evidence. At the crux of the reversal was possibly tainted gunshot residue found on the jeans Stenson wore on the night in March 1993 when his wife, Denise, and business partner, Frank Hoerner, were killed at the Stensons’ exotic-bird farm, said his attorney Sheryl Gordon McCloud.

McCloud said she was “gratified” by the ruling, which was announced Thursday morning. She said she spoke with Stenson by phone.

“He was crying,” she said.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court said two crucial pieces of evidence linked Stenson to the shootings — the gunshot residue on the front pocket of his jeans and blood spatter on the jeans. The spatter was found to be “consistent” with Hoerner’s blood, according to court filings.

McCloud said the defense argued that a Clallam County sheriff’s investigator handled the jeans after the slayings, possibly getting residue from his own handgun on them. When the defense discovered this possible evidence tainting, more than 15 years after the murders, they had what McCloud describes as an “Oh, my God moment.”

“We’re gratified that the court agrees that you cannot execute a man based on evidence this unreliable,” McCloud said.

Justice Pro Tem Gerry Alexander, who authored the majority decision, wrote that Stenson claimed his due-process rights were violated because evidence, consisting of photographs and an FBI investigative file, did not end up in the hands of the defense until 2009.

The justices were asked to review the photographs, which showed Detective Monty Martin wearing Stenson’s jeans with the right pocket turned out and showing Martin’s ungloved hands. They also reviewed an FBI file indicating an agent who testified during the trial actually did not perform a gunshot residue test, something that had been implied during Stenson’s 1994 trial.

Stenson had claimed that he knelt next to Hoerner’s body, accounting for the blood on the jeans.

But an expert witness called by the prosecution had testified that was not possible.

“Had the FBI file and photographs been properly disclosed here, Stenson’s counsel would have been able to demonstrate to the jury that a key exhibit in the case — Stenson’s jeans — had been seriously mishandled and compromised by law-enforcement investigators,” Alexander wrote.

Stenson argued that his due-process rights were violated under Brady v. Maryland, in which the U.S. Supreme Court determined that prosecutors violate a defendant’s constitutional rights by not turning over evidence that could prove a person’s innocence. The state Supreme Court on Thursday said that those rights were violated.

Speaking by phone Thursday morning, Clallam County Prosecutor Deborah Kelly said, “I don’t think anyone was prepared for this.”

Kelly defended the actions of investigators and said she’s “deeply disappointed in the decision to force a retrial.”

Kelly said it will be a few weeks before Stenson returns to Clallam County. She plans to prosecute him herself, again for murder. But, Kelly said, she is undecided on whether she will seek the death penalty.

Kelly said she will consult the victims’ families, try to track down the witnesses and put the case back together.

“It’s a very complicated decision. Does cost figure into the calculus? I don’t think it should, but certainly any prosecutor knows it will cost a great deal,” Kelly said. “To retry it is not as simple as people might think it is.”

Kelly added that staff from her office discussed the Supreme Court decision with relatives of the two victims who were “upset and disappointed.”

“It’s an utter tragedy for the victims’ families that this is the outcome,” she said.

Stenson, 59, was an exotic-bird dealer living near Sequim when he allegedly shot his wife at their home in what prosecutors called an effort to collect $800,000 in insurance. He allegedly shot and killed Hoerner to get out from a debt he owed the man, and to make it look like Hoerner killed Denise Stenson as part of a love-triangle murder-suicide.

Stenson’s three children were asleep nearby when the slayings occurred.

Stenson and Hoerner had been embroiled in a dispute over the cost of ostriches, which Stenson handled on his 5-acre Dakota Farms, prosecutors claimed.

Hoerner’s widow testified that Stenson persuaded the couple to invest their life savings of $48,000 in ostriches, but the big birds never materialized.

In his dissent, Justice James M. Johnson said the majority opinion failed to take into account the “totality of evidence” against Stenson and “exaggerates the potential prejudice of a late-discovered photo of Stenson’s pants.”

Denise Hoerner, the slain man’s wife, could not be reached Thursday, but she has been in support of Stenson’s execution.

“He needs to freaking die,” she said during a 2010 interview with the Peninsula Daily News.

In 2010, while making an episode of Fault Lines on the death penalty in the US, Josh Rushing interviewed death row inmate Michael Selsor. It was the only interview Selsor ever granted.

Two years later, Rushing returned to watch Selsor die.

In this special report, he takes an unflinching look at an American execution.

Read the full article and Selsor’s interview : click here 

A death row inmate convicted in a brutal stabbing death in a motel room in 2005 now must do what probably is familiar to him: wait.

James Daniel Turner was in court Wednesday for the second day of an evidentiary hearing in which his attorneys asked for a new trial. They said Turner’s former attorneys didn’t make the jury aware of significant mental health illnesses he had when Renee Boling Howard, 37, a mother of five, was stabbed to death at a Comfort Inn.

The hearing concluded before noon, and now Circuit Judge Wendy Berger will think over the matter before making a decision.

No date has been set for a decision.

On Tuesday, an expert witness for the defense said Turner suffers from bipolar and borderline personality disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and that the jury was not made aware of those diagnoses.

On Wednesday, an expert witness for the state said he does not believe Turner suffers from bipolar or borderline personality disorders.

Dr. Jeffrey Danziger, a Maitland-based psychiatrist and medical doctor, said the symptoms that led to those diagnoses were induced by Turner’s dependence on powdered methamphetamine, cocaine and alcohol and did not appear in the seven years he was in prison.

Danziger said Turner “does not suffer from bipolar disorder because he hasn’t had a manic episode that I am aware of.”

He said accounts of manic activities such as Turner’s spending of a $25,000 settlement in one week and unstable romantic relationships, including three failed marriages, could be attributed to the effects of the substances.

Rather, “he has some situational unhappiness, and that’s to be expected” because he is in prison and sentenced to death, Danziger said.

He said Turner had not exhibited borderline behavior while in prison, such as cutting himself, banging his head against a wall or attempting suicide.

And the ADHD?

“Maybe,” Danziger said. But even if he does suffer from that disorder, “it has little to do with (the murder) in 2005.”

Danziger agreed with several previous diagnoses that found that Turner has frontal lobe damage.

He said those findings were “not surprising for someone who has a history of heavy substance abuse and maybe suffered some knocks to the head,” including head trauma in substance-induced car accidents.

A jury in 2007 found Turner, then of Silverstreet, S.C., guilty of stabbing Howard on Sept. 30, 2005, at the St. Augustine motel off State Road 207 and Interstate 95 after escaping from a South Carolina prison and stealing a police car.

Prosecutors said he stabbed Howard several times before turning to see her crawling toward the door and stabbing her again.

Two of Howard’s children, a 10-month-old and a 2-year-old, were in the room, as was her 10-month-old grandchild. They weren’t injured, but Howard’s friend Stacia Raybon was attacked twice before locking herself in the bathroom.

If Berger grants a new trial, it would be the third for Turner.

Berger declared a mistrial during Turner’s first trial in July 2007 when a juror had a seizure during consideration of the fifth and final charge against the defendant.

Jurors found him guilty Nov. 29, 2007, during his retrial and later recommended the death penalty.

Dr. Miguel Mandoki, a Jacksonville psychiatrist, said during the first trial that he believed Turner was insane when Howard was killed in St. Augustine.

In addition to the death sentence, Berger sentenced Turner to life in prison for home invasion robbery with a deadly weapon, five years for the grand theft of Howard’s Ford F-150 pickup truck and 15 years for aggravated assault on a police officer.

St. Johns County Deputy Graham Harris had testified that he chased Turner south on State Road 207 at speeds between 90 and 100 mph. He said Turner put the pickup truck in reverse and rammed his patrol car before jumping off the Deep Creek bridge.

PIERRE (AP) — South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a death row inmate’s plea to overturn his conviction for raping and killing a Sioux Falls girl 22 years ago.

Donald Moeller last month petitioned the court to overturn his conviction based on what he described as incomplete jury instructions. Moeller maintains that the jury that sentenced him to death for the 1990 rape and murder of 9-year-old Becky O’Connell should have been told he would not have been eligible for parole had jurors sentenced him to life in prison. He contends that he might have received the death penalty because jurors falsely thought he could eventually be released on parole if given a life sentence.

Jackley on Monday said that the brief filed by the state in response to Moeller’s claim says jury instructions “fully comply with settled law and constitutional standards.”

Moeller was convicted and sentenced to die in 1997. The state Supreme Court affirmed the sentence, and Moeller has lost appeals on both the state and federal levels.

Moeller was convicted of abducting the girl from a convenience store, driving her to a secluded area, then raping and killing her. Her body was found the next day with a slashed throat and stab wounds.

Moeller initially was convicted in 1992 but the state Supreme Court ruled that improper evidence was used at trial and overturned the conviction.

“Two juries of South Dakota citizens have heard the facts of this case and both unanimously decided that Moeller’s crime warranted a death sentence,” Jackley said in a statement. “Twenty-two years and seven appeals to hold Moeller accountable and to await justice for Becky and her family is clearly too long.”

for the inhumane and unconstitutional conditions under which the men on death row must live.

Allegations include taking away wheelchairs from those who cannot walk, denying mental and physical health care, being held in solitary confinement for over ten years without any legal justification based on their conduct, dangerously unsafe living conditions, inadequate nutrition, inadequate exercise, denial of adequate access to telephones, destruction and loss of necessary legal documents, denial of religious freedom, denial of fair administrative process, failure to timely deliver mail including legal correspondence, and other abuses. 

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 Ronald  Smith  is the only Canadian on death row in U.S

It happened along the highway that cuts through a picturesque mountain pass in northwest Montana, not far from the Canada-U.S. border south of Lethbridge, Alta., in a roadside stand of trees located almost exactly on the Continental Divide.

The place where 24-year-old Albertan Ronald Smith murdered two young Montana men in August 1982 was, looking back over nearly 30 years, a portentous setting: Smith’s cold-blooded killing of Blackfeet Indian cousins Thomas Running Rabbit, 20, and Harvey Mad Man, 23 — whose fatal mistake was kindly offering a lift to the drunk and drugged-up Canadian hitchhiker and his two friends from Red Deer, Alta. — has underscored North America’s deep continental divide over capital punishment, which is still in use throughout much of the United States but was abolished in Canada in 1976.

Now 54, Smith is the only Canadian on death row in the U.S. He has finally exhausted his legal appeals to avoid execution for his horrific crimes, but is seeking executive clemency — and a new sentence of life imprisonment — at a Montana parole board hearing to be held on Wednesday in Deer Lodge, a city in the Rocky Mountain foothills where the state’s maximum-security prison is situated.

The three-member parole panel — which will make its recommendation to Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who ultimately decides Smith’s fate — will hear arguments from state justice officials, members of the victims’ families and others who believe Smith should, as originally sentenced three decades ago, be put to death by lethal injection in the prison’s execution chamber.

“This is the first time that we get to, as a family, sit in the judicial system to face the guy that murdered our boys,” Gabe Grant, uncle to both Running Rabbit and Mad Man, told Postmedia News this week. “We intend to go down there (to Deer Lodge) and be strong. We intend to be adamantly and unitedly joined in denying his clemency.”

The 62-year-old Grant, a housing administrator with the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Mont., said he will speak at the clemency hearing to describe how his nephews’ deaths were “devastating” for members of their large extended family and led to the “early deaths” of his two sisters — the mothers of Mad Man and Running Rabbit.

“It drove them to break down. They were seemingly normal people back then. But when this happened, it completely devastated their lives,” he recalled.

“We used to do all kinds of family things — the sisters and brothers. Our mother was the hub of our family, Cecile, and when this happened, it put a screeching halt to family activities because of the impact of what happened. We eventually recovered to a certain point, but never to the fullest extent of the good times that were enjoyed prior to that.”

Montana state attorneys will lean heavily on the family’s anguish in arguing to parole officials that Smith does not deserve clemency.

The Alberta-born killer “remorselessly took the lives” of two cousins, Montana’s justice department states in its written submission to the clemency panel, obtained this week by Postmedia News.

Running Rabbit and Mad Man “were loved by countless family members and friends,” the document states, noting how the victims’ “loved ones have suffered the pain and agony of their deaths for over a quarter of a century, a pain that never ends. They can never be replaced.”

Smith confessed to the gunshot murders of the two men. And he initially asked for the death penalty before changing his mind and launching what became a decades-long legal struggle to avoid execution for a crime he claimed was carried out in a haze of drug- and alcohol-fuelled “foolishness.”

Smith’s legal team — including Montana-based defence attorney Greg Jackson and Texas human rights lawyer Don Vernay — will argue that the Canadian inmate is a model prisoner and a transformed human being, a man so filled with regret and remorse over his murderous actions 30 years ago that the state should give Smith what he so brutally denied Mad Man and Running Rabbit: a chance to keep living.

“We would never, ever question the horrendous nature of the crime and the horrendous impact it had on the community,” Jackson said Friday. But echoing several points made in the 19-page clemency application he filed on Smith’s behalf in January, Jackson highlighted the “tremendous growth and rehabilitation” and “exemplary behaviour” the Canadian inmate has exhibited during his incarceration, as well as “the remorse and repentance” he has shown.

“He’s a changed man,” the lawyer said.

Others will address the hearing, possibly Smith’s daughter and sister — both of whom recently told Postmedia News that they’ve nurtured close relationships with Smith despite his long incarceration — as well as advocates on both sides of what has become a lively death-penalty debate in Montana and the broader United States.

But conspicuously silent during the proceedings will be the Canadian government, which recently — and only reluctantly — sent a letter to Montana officials seeking clemency for Smith.

The letter, signed by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, stated that while the Canadian government “does not sympathize with violent crime,” it is seeking clemency for Smith “on humanitarian grounds.”

Baird’s letter also noted that the government’s backing of the clemency bid “should not be construed as reflecting a judgment on Mr. Smith’s conduct,” and stipulated that his department was, in fact, “ordered” by the Federal Court of Canada in 2009 “to support Mr. Smith’s case for clemency.”

In effect, the Conservative government has made clear that if its court-forced request to spare Smith’s life is ignored by Montana officials, it won’t be terribly miffed.

“Ultimately, decisions regarding Mr. Smith’s case lie with the relevant U.S. authorities,” a Foreign Affairs spokesperson told Postmedia News earlier this month. “Mr. Smith pleaded guilty and was subsequently convicted of murdering two people. These were admitted crimes.”

Jackson called the Canadian government’s grudging, quasi-backing of Smith “a tremendous disappointment,” adding: “The statement they’ve made (in the letter) is the statement we’re stuck with.”

Opposition critics have condemned the government’s lukewarm efforts in support of Smith’s clemency bid as a “deplorable” indication of the Conservative party’s ambiguous stance on capital punishment and as a “cynical” strategy that could, in fact, “sink” Smith’s petition to avoid execution.

Nevertheless, obtaining even Canada’s nominal endorsement for the clemency initiative was a significant achievement for Smith’s legal team after the Conservative government’s previous decision, in October 2007, to halt diplomatic efforts to prevent Smith’s execution.

That move was prompted by a Postmedia News story that detailed fresh efforts by Canadian diplomats to convince Schweitzer to commute Smith’s sentence and transfer him to a prison in Canada.

At the time, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his government’s decision to abandon Smith was driven by concerns that lobbying for the killer’s life would “send the wrong signal” to Canadians about violent crime.

“We have no desire to open the debate on capital punishment here in Canada — and likewise, we have no desire to participate in the debate on capital punishment in the United States,” Harper stated at the time. “The reality of this particular case is that were we to intervene, it would very quickly become a question of whether we are prepared to repatriate a double-murderer to Canada. In light of this government’s strong initiatives on tackling violent crime, I think that would sent the wrong signal to the Canadian population.”

But the Federal Court ruling in a lawsuit later launched by Smith’s legal team said the government’s withdrawal of support for clemency was “unlawful.” The decision compelled Canadian officials to restart talks with Montana — and eventually forced Baird’s hand in the December letter that officially, if not insistently, asked the state not to put Smith to death.

Grant acknowledged that critics of capital punishment have a point when they say innocent people are sometimes executed in the United States.

“It’s not that in this case,” he said. “Ronald Smith, right from the get-go, said ‘I did it.’ He boasted about it. He jumped up and down and said, ‘Take me — give me the death penalty.’ So it’s not a case of executing somebody innocent.

“He was not remorseful then. I don’t believe he’s ever been.”

In 35 years on Florida’s death row, Tommy Zeigler’s cries of innocence have swayed a former newspaper editor, the daughter of a police chief who helped put him behind bars and an assortment of others who have come to believe that he didn’t commit one of the state’s most notorious mass slayings of the 1970s.

A reporter wrote a book about him called “Fatal Flaw,’’ and national TV programs — including “Unsolved Mysteries’’ — turned a skeptical eye on the evidence. His many supporters now range from a former sheriff’s deputy who helped investigate the slayings to celebrity civil rights activist Bianca Jagger. A private investigator believes in the 66-year-old Zeigler’s innocence so strongly that she picked up his case last year and has worked on it almost full time for free.

On April 11, Zeigler’s longtime lawyers tried again to get the appeals courts to re-examine his case. A new motion claims evidence turned up recently by the investigator pokes more holes in the case against Zeigler and creates enough new reasonable doubt to tip the scales in favor of a new trial. The document claims prosecutors lied and withheld information from Zeigler’s lawyers — including the existence of a key witness.

Prosecutors then and now have portrayed Zeigler as a calculating monster who slaughtered his wife, her parents and another man in the family furniture store on Christmas Eve 1975 to collect insurance money.

Of Florida’s 399 condemned prisoners, only 11 have been on death row longer than Zeigler. Having already survived two death warrants, he can’t help but wonder how soon his time will come now that the state’s death chamber is humming again. Four men have been executed in the past seven months under Gov. Rick Scott — the latest on April 12. Two of them had been there three decades or more. Zeigler knew them well; they were as close to friends as anyone gets in “P-Dorm’’ at Union Correctional Institution.

“When I left on July 16, 1976, and came to death row, my lawyers told me not to bother to unpack, they’d have me out in six months,’’ Zeigler said in an interview at the prison recently. “It’s been a long six months.’

From the beginning, it wasn’t just his defense team that doubted William Thomas Zeigler Jr. was capable of committing the awful crimes.

At 30 he had more than a million dollars in assets thanks to his family’s furniture store, and was a well-liked and prominent figure in the small town of Winter Garden, just west of Orlando. He and his wife Eunice lived in a nice house not far from the store, doted on their many Persian cats and seemed to get along just fine. He’d never been arrested.

That’s why it is still so hard for many to believe that he was responsible for the bloody, confusing scene at the W.T. Zeigler Furniture store on Dec. 24, 1975. Prosecutors say it happened like this: Zeigler lured Eunice to the store to kill her, and her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards, got in the way. A fruit picker Zeigler knew named Charlie Mays was killed, too. Then Zeigler shot himself in the stomach to make it appear as if they’d been the victims of a robbery. He staged it all so he could collect on a $500,000 life insurance policy he took out on his wife just months before. All the victims were shot.

Neither side disputes that Zeigler, at 9:20 that night, called the house of a municipal judge who was hosting a Christmas party with many prominent people in attendance and reported that he’d been shot at the store.

The story Zeigler told that night is the same story he tells today. He says he went to the store to do some last minute Christmas deliveries. Unbeknownst to him, his wife and in-laws, who had come to look at a recliner that was to be her father’s Christmas present, were already dead in various places in the store when he arrived. After finding the lights shut off at the breaker box, he was hit over the head and beaten by two men. He lost his glasses but managed to find and fire one of the guns he kept in the store. He believes Mays — who had cash from the store stuffed in his pocket — was one of the attackers and was killed in the gunfight. Zeigler says that when he came to after being knocked out, he was the only one left alive in the store. Whoever else attacked him had fled.

Zeigler had a reputation in town for sticking up for minorities and migrants who worked picking fruit in the area. He and others believe he was attacked and then framed in a law-enforcement conspiracy because he was about to uncover corruption involving high-ranking local officials, including a loansharking operation that preyed on the migrant workers.

Zeigler was found guilty on July 2, 1976, amid allegations of juror misconduct. One of the jurors, now dead, said in media interviews after the trial that she believed Zeigler was innocent and that she was harassed and coerced into voting guilty by other jurors who wanted to finish up in time for the nation’s Bicentennial celebration two days later. The jury then voted to recommend a life sentence for Zeigler, but the judge — in an exceedingly rare move in Florida — overruled the panel and sentenced him to death.

full article : click here