Rick Halperin
2018-11-05 14:56:51 UTC
November 5
PENNSYLVANIA:
Pittsburgh mayor says he ended call with Trump after complaints over death
penalty laws
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (D) said he quickly ended a call with President
Trump shortly after the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue because Trump
started complaining about death penalty laws.
Peduto spoke with The Washington Post on Saturday about dealing with the
aftermath of the shooting late last month that killed 11 people — the deadliest
attack on Jews in U.S. history.
He told the newspaper that he was standing outside of the synagogue in
Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood when he received a call from the
president.
Trump offered thoughts and prayers and vowed to help Peduto with anything he
needed, the mayor said. The president even offered a direct line to the White
House.
The president quickly veered into discussing the need for harsher death penalty
laws as a method of deterring mass murderers, Peduto recalled to The Post.
Peduto said he was so stunned, he could not respond to Trump’s remarks.
“I’m literally standing 2 blocks from 11 bodies right now. Really?” Peduto
thought at the time, he told the Post. He noted how he felt numb.
The mayor thought that talking about the death penalty wasn’t “going to bring
them back or deter what had just happened."
"I ended the conversation pretty quickly after that," he added, saying the
conversation only lasted about three minutes.
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
Peduto’s recollection of the phone call mirrors what Trump told reporters hours
after the shooting while he was heading for a campaign rally in Illinois.
“Anyone who does a thing like this to innocent people … they should really pay
the ultimate price," Trump said, referring to the gunman as a “wacko.”
The president also insisted that an armed guard inside the synagogue would have
prevented the shooting.
Peduto did not meet with Trump when he visited the synagogue last week.
The mayor had asked the president to postpone his trip so that it would not
overlap with the funerals for the victims. Trump was met by hundreds of
protesters.
“It could have been avoided,” Peduto told the Post of the protests. “He could
have chosen to go to the Holocaust Museum and lay a wreath with his wife. Or
put together a fund in order to memorialize the 11 people whose lives were lost
for perpetuity, in the museum.”
A group of progressive Jewish leaders penned an open letter telling the Trump
he is not welcome in Pittsburgh until he denounces white nationalism.
Over 86,000 people signed on to a petition from the group, the Pittsburgh
affiliate of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, telling the
president he is not welcome in the city.
(source: thehill.com)
VIRGINIA:
He’s sent more killers to death row than any Va. prosecutor. But not this
time.
In the final days of what may be his final death-penalty case, the
81-year-old Virginia prosecutor ambled into the courtroom on an October
morning, halting midway down the aisle.
Paul Burns Ebert, the Prince William County commonwealth’s attorney for
the past 50 years, shifted to his right, closer to the pews. He clutched
his cane. And he turned to greet the mother of the slain police officer
whose murderer was facing life in prison or execution.
Sharon Guindon wrapped her arms around Ebert. Her eyes welled up as she
patted the prosecutor wearing a patterned suit that drooped over his large
frame. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”
Two days later, in a county that has long embraced the death penalty, a
jury of 10 women and two men refused to recommend the ultimate punishment
for Ronald Hamilton, who had killed his wife, Crystal, and then Ashley
Guindon, who was working her first shift as a Prince William police
officer.
For Ebert, who had sent more killers to death row than any other
prosecutor in Virginia, it was a loss that stung. Prince William once
ranked in the top 2 % of jurisdictions across the country responsible for
the majority of executions in the modern era, according to a 2013 study by
the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
Ebert said he thinks the Hamilton case is the 1st time his office has
failed to persuade a jury to recommend a death penalty.
It was particularly grating to prosecutors and relatives of the victims
because the judge, Steven S. Smith, refused Ebert’s request that the jury
continue debating life or death after they had reported a 6-6 split on the
third day of deliberations for one of Hamilton’s 2 capital murder
charges. On the other charge — for the killing a law enforcement officer —
jurors unanimously agreed to give Hamilton life in prison without parole.
The loss in Smith’s courtroom was also deeply symbolic: Smith was once a
prosecutor on Ebert’s team. His father, H. Selwyn Smith was Ebert’s
predecessor and boss. When the elder Smith became a Prince William judge,
he imposed the death sentence on a Woodbridge man based on a jury’s
recommendation, giving Ebert his 1st death-penalty victory in 1982 — the
county’s 1st in 60 years.
At his age, Ebert does not speak as volubly or clearly as he did when he
first took office on Jan. 1, 1968. He left most of the arguing in the
Hamilton case to three other prosecutors on his team.
But his presence in the Prince William courthouse signaled his insistent
belief in the death penalty, a sentence that is banned in the District,
Maryland and 19 other states, and that has fallen in public approval since
the 1980s, Gallup polls show. The last time someone in Virginia was
sentenced to death was in 2011, according to Virginians for Alternatives
to the Death Penalty. 3 people remain on the state’s death row.
Ebert acknowledged that winning death-penalty cases — which has given him
national prominence, particularly after he secured an execution for
Washington sniper John Allen Muhammad — is a lot tougher these days in
Prince William County.
Once rural and overwhelmingly white, the county is now approaching a
half-million residents, and the majority are minorities. The jury in the
Hamilton case included 5 people of color.
Prince William was so small a half-century ago that the position of
commonwealth’s attorney was not a full-time job yet. There was no police
department — just a sheriff’s office.
“The demographics of Prince William were relatively conservative all those
years and much more pro-death,” Ebert said. “And I always knew someone on
the jury. Now, I seldom know someone on the jury.”
He estimates he has had about 30 capital-murder cases, half of which he
has sought the death penalty for.
The life-without-parole verdict for a cop-killer was deeply disappointing
for Ebert: The two other times he had sought the death penalty for the
murder of a law enforcement officer, he won.
Ebert’s ties to the police department, established in 1970, are deep. He
proposed its creation. Inside his office, he keeps in a frame his
typed-out application asking a Prince William judge to appoint the
department’s first 37 officers, all men.
“It was personal,” Ebert said of the Hamilton trial. “It was clear [he]
deserved the death penalty. .. Police officers need to know they’re
going to have someone stand up for them, and they’re devastated when they
think the court system can’t do justice for them.”
'Gives them solace'
Ebert was still a part-time prosecutor when the Supreme Court reinstituted
the death penalty in 1976. It put a new tool at his disposal — one he
believes deters would-be killers.
He dismisses the idea that life in prison without parole is worse than a
death sentence.
“No defendants choose death,” Ebert said.
And when he talks to victims’ relatives, they tell him that the death
penalty provides closure. “It gives them solace,” he said. “They know the
person who took away their loved one is getting their life taken.”
His 1st death-penalty victory came in 1982, when he persuaded a jury to
recommend the execution of John Joseph LeVasseur, a 19-year-old from
Woodbridge who stabbed a woman with a fork and ice pick more than 40
times.
Besides John Allen Muhammad, who terrorized the Washington area during a
2002 shooting rampage , Paul Warner Powell was perhaps the most heinous
murderer in Ebert’s history. Powell stabbed Stacie Reed, a 16-year-old
girl, to death in her heart and waited for Kristie Reed, her 14-year-old
sister, to come home, before raping her and slitting her throat. Powell
got the death sentence, but the Virginia Supreme Court threw it out on a
technicality. But then, Powell wrote a bragging letter to Ebert — later
published in Harper’s magazine — admitting he had tried to coerce Stacie
to have sex with him before killing her.
Now Ebert had the evidence to prompt a second prosecution. In 2010,
Powell’s execution in an electric chair made the front page of The
Washington Post.
'Blindly shot my gun'
Hamilton, 34, was a Pentagon information-technology specialist when he got
into a violent argument with his wife on the night of Feb. 27, 2016, in
their Woodbridge home. With their 11-year-old son in the house, Hamilton
shot her with a handgun 4 times.
When police arrived, Hamilton, who served in the Army and deployed to Iraq
twice, grabbed his AK-47. Prosecutors said that the move showed his intent
to kill cops with a high-powered rifle and with bullets that could pierce
through their ballistic vests.
“I blindly shot my gun,” he told detectives the night he was arrested,
according to a transcript of their interview of him that jurors did not
see. “I never, never wanted ... to hurt anybody, hurt [the police
officers]. I wanted them to just back off and let me go ... inside of my
house.”
When Hamilton told cops he had “panicked” and expressed remorse, the
officers pressed him to acknowledge that he had intentionally killed his
wife and Guindon, 28. Otherwise, one detective warned, they would tell the
prosecutor, judge and jury that he was “a [expletive] coward and killed
2 people and didn’t say a [expletive] word about.”
Hamilton’s attorneys tried multiple times to avoid a lengthy, expensive
death penalty trial. They offered plea deals in which Hamilton would take
life in prison without parole, but Ebert would not budge.
“He killed a police officer. That was the sticking point from when the
case came in,” said Ed Ungvarsky, one of Hamilton’s defense attorneys.
“And it was always the sticking point.”
During the trial, which began in September, Hamilton did not testify.
Prosecutors did not admit into evidence the recording of his interview
with police. They believed his statements were too “circuitous” and
self-serving, especially if jurors saw them without a chance for
prosecutors to cross-examine Hamilton on the witness stand, said Richard
A. Conway, the chief deputy commonwealth's attorny.
'Trying our best'
On the day of closing arguments in the sentencing phase of the Hamilton
trial, police officers filled the pews.
“Put him in the grave,” prosecutor Matthew B. Lowery urged the jury,
“because that’s where he belongs after what he’s done.”
After the jury began deliberations, Sharon Guindon waited in the courtroom
hallway, clutching a wooden cross and reading from a prayer book.
[‘You killed me too’: Mother of slain police officer addresses her
murderer]
“I asked Paul, ‘What do you think?’” Guindon recalled, “and he said, ‘We
don’t know. We’re trying our best.’”
The next day, the jurors reported that they were split. When Judge Smith
refused to allow them more time to deliberate, Guindon was crushed. She
went back to Ebert’s office, where he and others tried to console her.
“Paul said he’d never seen anything like that,” Guindon said. “Everyone
was like, ‘What happened? I just felt so drained. I felt so lost.”
Prosecutors were furious. They considered the jury divided but not
hopelessly deadlocked, as Judge Smith had declared. Conway, the chief
deputy commonwealth’s attorney, told The Post he felt like Smith rushed a
decision, denying the victims’ relatives a thorough process.
The deliberations were so heated that the jurors’ raised voices could be
heard in the hallways, Ebert said.
“I am disappointed. I don’t think justice was done,” Ebert said. “But I am
willing to accept the jury. They are the voice of the community.”
Whether it was his final capital-murder case, Ebert will not say. He is on
his 13th term as commonwealth’s attorney and could decide to run for a
14th next year. When told that some people believe he might pass the baton
to another prosecutor on his team and not run for reelection, Ebert smiled
and asked, “Who said that?”
(source: Washington Post)
TENNESSEE:
Attorney: More inmates could choose electric chair for death penalty
The state of Tennessee executed Edmund Zagorski by use of electric chair
earlier this week.
Zagorski was the first inmate executed using this option in over a decade.
This raises the question as to whether or not we could see more inmates opting
for electric chair executions moving forward.
.
Nashville attorney David Raybin believes more inmates who committed crimes
prior to 1999 may shy away from lethal injection, citing the debate over
whether the chemicals used in lethal injection may torture inmates during an
execution.
Tennessee is only 1 of 6 states that allow inmates whose crimes occurred before
1999 to choose the electric chair.
(source: WTVF news)
MISSOURI:
In death penalty case, executioners urge US Supreme Court to hear their side
The Supreme Court is set to consider on Tuesday the fate of a death row
prisoner who says the government’s plan to execute him by lethal injection
could cause him to choke on his own blood due a rare medical condition.
Missouri death-row inmate Russell Bucklew, 50, was sentenced to death for rape
and murder — but says execution via lethal injection would violate the
Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because of his condition.
He has backing from more than a dozen former prison wardens and directors, who
have written to the top US bench asking that the justices consider their
suffering as well.
“When you have a botched execution, the ones who suffer are the ones who have
to carry it out,” said Jerry Givens, who was an executioner in Virginia from
1982 to 1999.
“It’s like a scar,” he said. “When you have executions in the future, it will
continue to open up that wound and people will have to live with this.”
Bucklew asked the Supreme Court, which already twice has stayed his execution,
to let him die by suffocation in a gas chamber instead.
“Participating in executions places a tremendous weight on the shoulders of the
execution team,” read the letter from Givens and other former prison system
workers.
“When as here, an execution is unlikely to go smoothly, and is likely to result
in unnecessary pain and suffering, the burden of participation becomes
unbearable.”
Givens carried out 62 executions during his career, using methods of lethal
injection and electrocution.
Even when everything went as planned, the 65-year-old told AFP he disliked
administrating injections “because I felt too attached.”
“I had my hands on this guy because I was administrating the drug through the
syringe,” he said. “So I was pushing it versus hitting a button.”
At the time, Givens said he felt he was simply a cog of justice.
But in the 1990s, he found himself linked to a complex case of stolen cars —
and believed he was unjustly condemned.
Givens lost confidence in the justice system and became a fierce opponent of
capital punishment.
“The system is corrupt — until you fix it you need to discontinue” executions,
he said.
“As long as Americans have executions, the scar for me can be opened anytime.”
Givens is one of only a few former executioners to talk openly about his
experience.
But in recent years, Sarah Turberville, director of the The Constitution
Project that is defending Bucklew, said corrections officers have started
becoming “vocal about their discomfort in being involved executing prisoners.”
“When a case like Mr.Bucklew’s made its way to the Supreme Court, we reached
out to them to see if they would be interested in sharing their experience with
the high court,” she said.
“As the brief’s signatories illustrate, many were eager about sharing their
unique perspective.”
Allen Ault supervised 5 executions in the 1990s in Georgia.
“Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very
much like post-traumatic stress,” he told the court. “Many turn to alcohol and
drugs.'
“For me, those nights that weren’t sleepless were plagued by nightmares.”
But James Willett, who did not sign the letter, said he never lost a wink over
supervising nearly a hundred executions in Huntsville, Texas before retiring in
2001.
Willett found that he hardened somewhat over time — but “it never got easy.”
For him, the hardest part was “watching an otherwise healthy person die,
especially the younger men, and considering how they ruined what could have
been a productive life for themselves.”
(source: arabnews.com)
CALIFORNIA:
San Quentin’s ‘death row ministry’ forges unlikely bonds
Despite San Quentin’s alluring waterfront location with views of San Francisco
Bay, the world inside the walls of California’s oldest prison, and the lives of
the men who inhabit it, remain a curiosity that few have the gumption to
satisfy.
Among the exceptions is a small group of Marin County residents who make
regular trips to the visitor chambers inside the most heavily guarded part of
the prison: death row.
For some, those visits are acts of service. But for others, like Brigitte
McCulloch, the two-and-a-half-hour ventures into the home of those condemned to
death are the only way to maintain close and meaningful friendships.
McCulloch, an 81-year-old Marin County resident who immigrated to the U.S. from
Germany, was first introduced to her friend inside San Quentin 12 years ago,
shortly after she noticed a watercolor piece he had painted that was hanging
inside St. Paul’s Episcopal Church near her home in San Rafael.
“I was so taken by the beauty and the scope of it, and the quality of the
craftsmanship, that I bought the painting,” she said. “I then wrote to the
prisoner and, shortly after, I started visiting him.”
McCulloch wasn’t the first parishioner at St. Paul’s to visit that inmate, who
was sentenced to death more than two decades ago. Heeding a request from the
prisoner’s mother, a former pastor at the church began conversing with the man
in the late 1990s, and the tradition was later upheld by Christopher Martin,
who took over leadership of the parish in 2004.
According to Martin, St. Paul’s has a long history of involvement with San
Quentin because of its proximity to the prison. The church has been forthcoming
about its opposition to the death penalty, and parishioners prior to 2006 — the
last year the state put a condemned inmate to death — often held vigils outside
the prison when inmates on death row were being executed.
Martin, whose time is sought after by elderly and ill church members who can’t
make the trip to St. Paul’s for services, is often stretched too thin, he said.
He regularly writes letters to inmates on death row, but relies heavily on
members of his church to visit the 11 San Quentin prisoners who have requested
communication with the outside world.
Many inmates, he said, come from low-income families that don’t live near the
Bay Area and can’t regularly make the trip out to San Quentin.
“Some of them haven’t had anybody visit them almost the whole time they’ve been
there,” he said. “Sometimes a connection and an outside ear can make a huge
difference in their lives.”
The pastor acknowledges that critics might be skeptical of the church’s effort
to connect with people who have committed serious crimes and have caused
suffering to their victims, but he says his faith teaches him the importance of
reaching out to the most marginalized groups in society.
According to Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation, inmates on death row don’t have access to some of the
resources other San Quentin prisoners do, including job training programs,
academic classes and discussion groups.
“Whether they’re on death row or any other part of our prison system, they’re
still people, and any kind of contact with someone has the potential to give
them a lift, and to help them gain a better understanding of themselves,” he
said.
Over the years, the tradition of St. Paul’s parishioners visiting inmates has
expanded. When Richard Olive first began attending services at the church five
years ago, he felt called to get involved with what he now calls the “death row
ministry.”
“The inmates started telling each other about the program, and then we’d find
out that another one of these men would like a visitor,” he said.
As word got out among the prisoners, Olive stepped up to meet the need. He has
become the “matchmaker” of the operation, he said, pairing willing parishioners
from churches around Marin County with inmates who say they could use a friend.
There are now 15 members in the death row ministry, including those who
regularly visit the prison and others who write letters.
“What they receive from us is the recognition that they are human beings, that
they’re not forgotten, and that we’re there for them,” Olive said.
The San Rafael resident has visited most of the prisoners who have asked to get
involved, but he also meets consistently with one inmate.
“All he wants to do is talk football and play chess,” he said. “If that’s what
he wants, that’s what I do for him.”
Olive’s motivation for visiting is largely based on his faith, he said. Raised
in a Catholic family in New York and educated in Christian schools, the former
Navy sailor and retired newspaper journalist has always valued service. Though
his spirituality is what first led him into San Quentin, the topic of faith
isn’t a guiding part of the conversations he has with the inmate he visits.
“He asked me at one of our first visits why I’m doing this,” Olive said. “I
told him, quite frankly, that my faith calls me to visit the imprisoned. He
hasn’t chosen to go any deeper than that about exploring my faith or what it
means to me, and I haven’t force-fed him any.”
When Olive connected Don Smith with an inmate 2 years ago, Smith agreed to
visit once a month. Through that commitment, he’s gained insight into a person
who he otherwise would never have understood, he said.
“We’ve talked about his art, about some of his health challenges, his
friendships, about faith,” Smith said. “And sometimes we just talk about
movies.”
Though the prisoner has consistently expressed his gratitude for having a
friend on the outside willing to speak with him, Smith said the benefit of the
visits is mutual.
“At this point, I certainly get as much out of it, if not more, than he does,”
he said.
McCulloch, now one of the longest-remaining members of the death row ministry,
visits her friend twice each week and speaks with him nearly every evening over
the phone. They often discuss faith, art and the intricacies of their lives.
She said the routine has become as meaningful for her as she knows it is for
him. She considers the inmate her closest friend, in part because the nature of
their visits promotes deep conversations.
“You sit in this little cage, about the size of a dog kennel, and for
two-and-a-half hours, you have nothing to do but come face-to-face with another
human being,” she said. “There’s no interruption, there’s no distraction,
there’s just two people meeting.”
She acknowledges that the friendship is unconventional — “I’m an unconventional
person,” she said — but, for her, that’s just the point.
“Would I have such a relationship with him outside in the world? No, our
circles probably would never have overlapped,” she said. “There are many ways
of describing what brings people together. It can be fate, it can be god. But
whatever it was, I now have something valuable in my life, and it’s very
beautiful.”
(source: Marin Independent Journal)
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PENNSYLVANIA:
Pittsburgh mayor says he ended call with Trump after complaints over death
penalty laws
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (D) said he quickly ended a call with President
Trump shortly after the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue because Trump
started complaining about death penalty laws.
Peduto spoke with The Washington Post on Saturday about dealing with the
aftermath of the shooting late last month that killed 11 people — the deadliest
attack on Jews in U.S. history.
He told the newspaper that he was standing outside of the synagogue in
Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood when he received a call from the
president.
Trump offered thoughts and prayers and vowed to help Peduto with anything he
needed, the mayor said. The president even offered a direct line to the White
House.
The president quickly veered into discussing the need for harsher death penalty
laws as a method of deterring mass murderers, Peduto recalled to The Post.
Peduto said he was so stunned, he could not respond to Trump’s remarks.
“I’m literally standing 2 blocks from 11 bodies right now. Really?” Peduto
thought at the time, he told the Post. He noted how he felt numb.
The mayor thought that talking about the death penalty wasn’t “going to bring
them back or deter what had just happened."
"I ended the conversation pretty quickly after that," he added, saying the
conversation only lasted about three minutes.
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
Peduto’s recollection of the phone call mirrors what Trump told reporters hours
after the shooting while he was heading for a campaign rally in Illinois.
“Anyone who does a thing like this to innocent people … they should really pay
the ultimate price," Trump said, referring to the gunman as a “wacko.”
The president also insisted that an armed guard inside the synagogue would have
prevented the shooting.
Peduto did not meet with Trump when he visited the synagogue last week.
The mayor had asked the president to postpone his trip so that it would not
overlap with the funerals for the victims. Trump was met by hundreds of
protesters.
“It could have been avoided,” Peduto told the Post of the protests. “He could
have chosen to go to the Holocaust Museum and lay a wreath with his wife. Or
put together a fund in order to memorialize the 11 people whose lives were lost
for perpetuity, in the museum.”
A group of progressive Jewish leaders penned an open letter telling the Trump
he is not welcome in Pittsburgh until he denounces white nationalism.
Over 86,000 people signed on to a petition from the group, the Pittsburgh
affiliate of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, telling the
president he is not welcome in the city.
(source: thehill.com)
VIRGINIA:
He’s sent more killers to death row than any Va. prosecutor. But not this
time.
In the final days of what may be his final death-penalty case, the
81-year-old Virginia prosecutor ambled into the courtroom on an October
morning, halting midway down the aisle.
Paul Burns Ebert, the Prince William County commonwealth’s attorney for
the past 50 years, shifted to his right, closer to the pews. He clutched
his cane. And he turned to greet the mother of the slain police officer
whose murderer was facing life in prison or execution.
Sharon Guindon wrapped her arms around Ebert. Her eyes welled up as she
patted the prosecutor wearing a patterned suit that drooped over his large
frame. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”
Two days later, in a county that has long embraced the death penalty, a
jury of 10 women and two men refused to recommend the ultimate punishment
for Ronald Hamilton, who had killed his wife, Crystal, and then Ashley
Guindon, who was working her first shift as a Prince William police
officer.
For Ebert, who had sent more killers to death row than any other
prosecutor in Virginia, it was a loss that stung. Prince William once
ranked in the top 2 % of jurisdictions across the country responsible for
the majority of executions in the modern era, according to a 2013 study by
the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
Ebert said he thinks the Hamilton case is the 1st time his office has
failed to persuade a jury to recommend a death penalty.
It was particularly grating to prosecutors and relatives of the victims
because the judge, Steven S. Smith, refused Ebert’s request that the jury
continue debating life or death after they had reported a 6-6 split on the
third day of deliberations for one of Hamilton’s 2 capital murder
charges. On the other charge — for the killing a law enforcement officer —
jurors unanimously agreed to give Hamilton life in prison without parole.
The loss in Smith’s courtroom was also deeply symbolic: Smith was once a
prosecutor on Ebert’s team. His father, H. Selwyn Smith was Ebert’s
predecessor and boss. When the elder Smith became a Prince William judge,
he imposed the death sentence on a Woodbridge man based on a jury’s
recommendation, giving Ebert his 1st death-penalty victory in 1982 — the
county’s 1st in 60 years.
At his age, Ebert does not speak as volubly or clearly as he did when he
first took office on Jan. 1, 1968. He left most of the arguing in the
Hamilton case to three other prosecutors on his team.
But his presence in the Prince William courthouse signaled his insistent
belief in the death penalty, a sentence that is banned in the District,
Maryland and 19 other states, and that has fallen in public approval since
the 1980s, Gallup polls show. The last time someone in Virginia was
sentenced to death was in 2011, according to Virginians for Alternatives
to the Death Penalty. 3 people remain on the state’s death row.
Ebert acknowledged that winning death-penalty cases — which has given him
national prominence, particularly after he secured an execution for
Washington sniper John Allen Muhammad — is a lot tougher these days in
Prince William County.
Once rural and overwhelmingly white, the county is now approaching a
half-million residents, and the majority are minorities. The jury in the
Hamilton case included 5 people of color.
Prince William was so small a half-century ago that the position of
commonwealth’s attorney was not a full-time job yet. There was no police
department — just a sheriff’s office.
“The demographics of Prince William were relatively conservative all those
years and much more pro-death,” Ebert said. “And I always knew someone on
the jury. Now, I seldom know someone on the jury.”
He estimates he has had about 30 capital-murder cases, half of which he
has sought the death penalty for.
The life-without-parole verdict for a cop-killer was deeply disappointing
for Ebert: The two other times he had sought the death penalty for the
murder of a law enforcement officer, he won.
Ebert’s ties to the police department, established in 1970, are deep. He
proposed its creation. Inside his office, he keeps in a frame his
typed-out application asking a Prince William judge to appoint the
department’s first 37 officers, all men.
“It was personal,” Ebert said of the Hamilton trial. “It was clear [he]
deserved the death penalty. .. Police officers need to know they’re
going to have someone stand up for them, and they’re devastated when they
think the court system can’t do justice for them.”
'Gives them solace'
Ebert was still a part-time prosecutor when the Supreme Court reinstituted
the death penalty in 1976. It put a new tool at his disposal — one he
believes deters would-be killers.
He dismisses the idea that life in prison without parole is worse than a
death sentence.
“No defendants choose death,” Ebert said.
And when he talks to victims’ relatives, they tell him that the death
penalty provides closure. “It gives them solace,” he said. “They know the
person who took away their loved one is getting their life taken.”
His 1st death-penalty victory came in 1982, when he persuaded a jury to
recommend the execution of John Joseph LeVasseur, a 19-year-old from
Woodbridge who stabbed a woman with a fork and ice pick more than 40
times.
Besides John Allen Muhammad, who terrorized the Washington area during a
2002 shooting rampage , Paul Warner Powell was perhaps the most heinous
murderer in Ebert’s history. Powell stabbed Stacie Reed, a 16-year-old
girl, to death in her heart and waited for Kristie Reed, her 14-year-old
sister, to come home, before raping her and slitting her throat. Powell
got the death sentence, but the Virginia Supreme Court threw it out on a
technicality. But then, Powell wrote a bragging letter to Ebert — later
published in Harper’s magazine — admitting he had tried to coerce Stacie
to have sex with him before killing her.
Now Ebert had the evidence to prompt a second prosecution. In 2010,
Powell’s execution in an electric chair made the front page of The
Washington Post.
'Blindly shot my gun'
Hamilton, 34, was a Pentagon information-technology specialist when he got
into a violent argument with his wife on the night of Feb. 27, 2016, in
their Woodbridge home. With their 11-year-old son in the house, Hamilton
shot her with a handgun 4 times.
When police arrived, Hamilton, who served in the Army and deployed to Iraq
twice, grabbed his AK-47. Prosecutors said that the move showed his intent
to kill cops with a high-powered rifle and with bullets that could pierce
through their ballistic vests.
“I blindly shot my gun,” he told detectives the night he was arrested,
according to a transcript of their interview of him that jurors did not
see. “I never, never wanted ... to hurt anybody, hurt [the police
officers]. I wanted them to just back off and let me go ... inside of my
house.”
When Hamilton told cops he had “panicked” and expressed remorse, the
officers pressed him to acknowledge that he had intentionally killed his
wife and Guindon, 28. Otherwise, one detective warned, they would tell the
prosecutor, judge and jury that he was “a [expletive] coward and killed
2 people and didn’t say a [expletive] word about.”
Hamilton’s attorneys tried multiple times to avoid a lengthy, expensive
death penalty trial. They offered plea deals in which Hamilton would take
life in prison without parole, but Ebert would not budge.
“He killed a police officer. That was the sticking point from when the
case came in,” said Ed Ungvarsky, one of Hamilton’s defense attorneys.
“And it was always the sticking point.”
During the trial, which began in September, Hamilton did not testify.
Prosecutors did not admit into evidence the recording of his interview
with police. They believed his statements were too “circuitous” and
self-serving, especially if jurors saw them without a chance for
prosecutors to cross-examine Hamilton on the witness stand, said Richard
A. Conway, the chief deputy commonwealth's attorny.
'Trying our best'
On the day of closing arguments in the sentencing phase of the Hamilton
trial, police officers filled the pews.
“Put him in the grave,” prosecutor Matthew B. Lowery urged the jury,
“because that’s where he belongs after what he’s done.”
After the jury began deliberations, Sharon Guindon waited in the courtroom
hallway, clutching a wooden cross and reading from a prayer book.
[‘You killed me too’: Mother of slain police officer addresses her
murderer]
“I asked Paul, ‘What do you think?’” Guindon recalled, “and he said, ‘We
don’t know. We’re trying our best.’”
The next day, the jurors reported that they were split. When Judge Smith
refused to allow them more time to deliberate, Guindon was crushed. She
went back to Ebert’s office, where he and others tried to console her.
“Paul said he’d never seen anything like that,” Guindon said. “Everyone
was like, ‘What happened? I just felt so drained. I felt so lost.”
Prosecutors were furious. They considered the jury divided but not
hopelessly deadlocked, as Judge Smith had declared. Conway, the chief
deputy commonwealth’s attorney, told The Post he felt like Smith rushed a
decision, denying the victims’ relatives a thorough process.
The deliberations were so heated that the jurors’ raised voices could be
heard in the hallways, Ebert said.
“I am disappointed. I don’t think justice was done,” Ebert said. “But I am
willing to accept the jury. They are the voice of the community.”
Whether it was his final capital-murder case, Ebert will not say. He is on
his 13th term as commonwealth’s attorney and could decide to run for a
14th next year. When told that some people believe he might pass the baton
to another prosecutor on his team and not run for reelection, Ebert smiled
and asked, “Who said that?”
(source: Washington Post)
TENNESSEE:
Attorney: More inmates could choose electric chair for death penalty
The state of Tennessee executed Edmund Zagorski by use of electric chair
earlier this week.
Zagorski was the first inmate executed using this option in over a decade.
This raises the question as to whether or not we could see more inmates opting
for electric chair executions moving forward.
.
Nashville attorney David Raybin believes more inmates who committed crimes
prior to 1999 may shy away from lethal injection, citing the debate over
whether the chemicals used in lethal injection may torture inmates during an
execution.
Tennessee is only 1 of 6 states that allow inmates whose crimes occurred before
1999 to choose the electric chair.
(source: WTVF news)
MISSOURI:
In death penalty case, executioners urge US Supreme Court to hear their side
The Supreme Court is set to consider on Tuesday the fate of a death row
prisoner who says the government’s plan to execute him by lethal injection
could cause him to choke on his own blood due a rare medical condition.
Missouri death-row inmate Russell Bucklew, 50, was sentenced to death for rape
and murder — but says execution via lethal injection would violate the
Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because of his condition.
He has backing from more than a dozen former prison wardens and directors, who
have written to the top US bench asking that the justices consider their
suffering as well.
“When you have a botched execution, the ones who suffer are the ones who have
to carry it out,” said Jerry Givens, who was an executioner in Virginia from
1982 to 1999.
“It’s like a scar,” he said. “When you have executions in the future, it will
continue to open up that wound and people will have to live with this.”
Bucklew asked the Supreme Court, which already twice has stayed his execution,
to let him die by suffocation in a gas chamber instead.
“Participating in executions places a tremendous weight on the shoulders of the
execution team,” read the letter from Givens and other former prison system
workers.
“When as here, an execution is unlikely to go smoothly, and is likely to result
in unnecessary pain and suffering, the burden of participation becomes
unbearable.”
Givens carried out 62 executions during his career, using methods of lethal
injection and electrocution.
Even when everything went as planned, the 65-year-old told AFP he disliked
administrating injections “because I felt too attached.”
“I had my hands on this guy because I was administrating the drug through the
syringe,” he said. “So I was pushing it versus hitting a button.”
At the time, Givens said he felt he was simply a cog of justice.
But in the 1990s, he found himself linked to a complex case of stolen cars —
and believed he was unjustly condemned.
Givens lost confidence in the justice system and became a fierce opponent of
capital punishment.
“The system is corrupt — until you fix it you need to discontinue” executions,
he said.
“As long as Americans have executions, the scar for me can be opened anytime.”
Givens is one of only a few former executioners to talk openly about his
experience.
But in recent years, Sarah Turberville, director of the The Constitution
Project that is defending Bucklew, said corrections officers have started
becoming “vocal about their discomfort in being involved executing prisoners.”
“When a case like Mr.Bucklew’s made its way to the Supreme Court, we reached
out to them to see if they would be interested in sharing their experience with
the high court,” she said.
“As the brief’s signatories illustrate, many were eager about sharing their
unique perspective.”
Allen Ault supervised 5 executions in the 1990s in Georgia.
“Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very
much like post-traumatic stress,” he told the court. “Many turn to alcohol and
drugs.'
“For me, those nights that weren’t sleepless were plagued by nightmares.”
But James Willett, who did not sign the letter, said he never lost a wink over
supervising nearly a hundred executions in Huntsville, Texas before retiring in
2001.
Willett found that he hardened somewhat over time — but “it never got easy.”
For him, the hardest part was “watching an otherwise healthy person die,
especially the younger men, and considering how they ruined what could have
been a productive life for themselves.”
(source: arabnews.com)
CALIFORNIA:
San Quentin’s ‘death row ministry’ forges unlikely bonds
Despite San Quentin’s alluring waterfront location with views of San Francisco
Bay, the world inside the walls of California’s oldest prison, and the lives of
the men who inhabit it, remain a curiosity that few have the gumption to
satisfy.
Among the exceptions is a small group of Marin County residents who make
regular trips to the visitor chambers inside the most heavily guarded part of
the prison: death row.
For some, those visits are acts of service. But for others, like Brigitte
McCulloch, the two-and-a-half-hour ventures into the home of those condemned to
death are the only way to maintain close and meaningful friendships.
McCulloch, an 81-year-old Marin County resident who immigrated to the U.S. from
Germany, was first introduced to her friend inside San Quentin 12 years ago,
shortly after she noticed a watercolor piece he had painted that was hanging
inside St. Paul’s Episcopal Church near her home in San Rafael.
“I was so taken by the beauty and the scope of it, and the quality of the
craftsmanship, that I bought the painting,” she said. “I then wrote to the
prisoner and, shortly after, I started visiting him.”
McCulloch wasn’t the first parishioner at St. Paul’s to visit that inmate, who
was sentenced to death more than two decades ago. Heeding a request from the
prisoner’s mother, a former pastor at the church began conversing with the man
in the late 1990s, and the tradition was later upheld by Christopher Martin,
who took over leadership of the parish in 2004.
According to Martin, St. Paul’s has a long history of involvement with San
Quentin because of its proximity to the prison. The church has been forthcoming
about its opposition to the death penalty, and parishioners prior to 2006 — the
last year the state put a condemned inmate to death — often held vigils outside
the prison when inmates on death row were being executed.
Martin, whose time is sought after by elderly and ill church members who can’t
make the trip to St. Paul’s for services, is often stretched too thin, he said.
He regularly writes letters to inmates on death row, but relies heavily on
members of his church to visit the 11 San Quentin prisoners who have requested
communication with the outside world.
Many inmates, he said, come from low-income families that don’t live near the
Bay Area and can’t regularly make the trip out to San Quentin.
“Some of them haven’t had anybody visit them almost the whole time they’ve been
there,” he said. “Sometimes a connection and an outside ear can make a huge
difference in their lives.”
The pastor acknowledges that critics might be skeptical of the church’s effort
to connect with people who have committed serious crimes and have caused
suffering to their victims, but he says his faith teaches him the importance of
reaching out to the most marginalized groups in society.
According to Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation, inmates on death row don’t have access to some of the
resources other San Quentin prisoners do, including job training programs,
academic classes and discussion groups.
“Whether they’re on death row or any other part of our prison system, they’re
still people, and any kind of contact with someone has the potential to give
them a lift, and to help them gain a better understanding of themselves,” he
said.
Over the years, the tradition of St. Paul’s parishioners visiting inmates has
expanded. When Richard Olive first began attending services at the church five
years ago, he felt called to get involved with what he now calls the “death row
ministry.”
“The inmates started telling each other about the program, and then we’d find
out that another one of these men would like a visitor,” he said.
As word got out among the prisoners, Olive stepped up to meet the need. He has
become the “matchmaker” of the operation, he said, pairing willing parishioners
from churches around Marin County with inmates who say they could use a friend.
There are now 15 members in the death row ministry, including those who
regularly visit the prison and others who write letters.
“What they receive from us is the recognition that they are human beings, that
they’re not forgotten, and that we’re there for them,” Olive said.
The San Rafael resident has visited most of the prisoners who have asked to get
involved, but he also meets consistently with one inmate.
“All he wants to do is talk football and play chess,” he said. “If that’s what
he wants, that’s what I do for him.”
Olive’s motivation for visiting is largely based on his faith, he said. Raised
in a Catholic family in New York and educated in Christian schools, the former
Navy sailor and retired newspaper journalist has always valued service. Though
his spirituality is what first led him into San Quentin, the topic of faith
isn’t a guiding part of the conversations he has with the inmate he visits.
“He asked me at one of our first visits why I’m doing this,” Olive said. “I
told him, quite frankly, that my faith calls me to visit the imprisoned. He
hasn’t chosen to go any deeper than that about exploring my faith or what it
means to me, and I haven’t force-fed him any.”
When Olive connected Don Smith with an inmate 2 years ago, Smith agreed to
visit once a month. Through that commitment, he’s gained insight into a person
who he otherwise would never have understood, he said.
“We’ve talked about his art, about some of his health challenges, his
friendships, about faith,” Smith said. “And sometimes we just talk about
movies.”
Though the prisoner has consistently expressed his gratitude for having a
friend on the outside willing to speak with him, Smith said the benefit of the
visits is mutual.
“At this point, I certainly get as much out of it, if not more, than he does,”
he said.
McCulloch, now one of the longest-remaining members of the death row ministry,
visits her friend twice each week and speaks with him nearly every evening over
the phone. They often discuss faith, art and the intricacies of their lives.
She said the routine has become as meaningful for her as she knows it is for
him. She considers the inmate her closest friend, in part because the nature of
their visits promotes deep conversations.
“You sit in this little cage, about the size of a dog kennel, and for
two-and-a-half hours, you have nothing to do but come face-to-face with another
human being,” she said. “There’s no interruption, there’s no distraction,
there’s just two people meeting.”
She acknowledges that the friendship is unconventional — “I’m an unconventional
person,” she said — but, for her, that’s just the point.
“Would I have such a relationship with him outside in the world? No, our
circles probably would never have overlapped,” she said. “There are many ways
of describing what brings people together. It can be fate, it can be god. But
whatever it was, I now have something valuable in my life, and it’s very
beautiful.”
(source: Marin Independent Journal)
_______________________________________________
A service courtesy of Washburn University School of Law www.washburnlaw.edu
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