Rick Halperin
2018-11-19 14:47:28 UTC
Nov. 19
TEXAS:
Supreme Court turns down appeal from British woman on Texas death row
The Supreme Court last week turned down an appeal from a British woman
sentenced to die for a Harris County murder-kidnapping, moving the case one
step closer to a possible execution date.
Linda Carty was sent to death row in 2001 after she was convicted of
masterminding a plot to murder her 20-year-old neighbor and steal the woman's
baby in order to save her own common-law marriage.
In the years since the killing of Joana Rodriguez, Carty has consistently
professed her innocence, insisting she was railroaded by prosecutors who failed
to turn over evidence and coerced witnesses to win a conviction.
Yet the nation's highest court has now turned down her most recent appeal
without comment, refusing to review the argument that the combination of bad
lawyering and "egregious prosecutorial misconduct" was enough to make a
difference in the outcome of the case.
The now 60-year-old had lived in the Houston area for more than a decade at the
time of the slaying, but was born on St. Kitts. At the time, the Caribbean
island was a British protectorate, so Carty holds British citizenship - a fact
that's brought her case celebrity attention, spawned a documentary film and
landed her on the front pages of papers in the U.K.
During her 2002 trial, prosecutors argued that the former schoolteacher and
erstwhile DEA informant had directed 3 men to storm the victims' apartment,
steal $1,000 and kidnap the mother and her 3-day-old child at gunpoint.
Afterward, authorities found Rodriguez asphyxiated, bound and gagged, in the
trunk of a car linked to Carty. Using witness statement, phone records and
evidence from cars at the crime scene, Harris County prosecutors persuaded a
jury to find her guilty and vote for a death sentence.
For the past 16 years, the now-grandmother has been fighting her conviction.
Carty's trial was handled by a famously overworked lawyer who never won a death
penalty trial, and a federal appeals court decided some of his work on the case
was "objectively unreasonable." But, the court said, it wouldn't have made a
difference in the outcome - even though it was a "close case."
Later, a Texas state court decided that prosecutors had failed to hand over
potentially exculpatory evidence and neglected to reveal information that could
have called into question some of the witnesses who testified against her. But,
again, the court said it wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome and
wasn't enough to overcome the evidence against her.
Now in the latest Supreme Court appeal, Carty's current counsel - a team from
Baker Botts led by Michael Goldberg - argued that those things combined would
be enough to sway a jury to a different verdict.
And, they said, courts have offered different opinions as to how and when the
legal system should handle "cumulative error" claims alleging different types
of Constitutional violations all at once.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, a group of criminal
justice experts including Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu, and the United Kingdom
all filed briefs supporting Carty's appeal.
Now, after the Supreme Court's rejection, Goldberg says he plans to file
another appeal.
(source: Houston Chronicle)
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
A to-do list for state's Democrats
To move the state forward, New Hampshire Democrats, who will assume control of
the House and Senate in January, will have to find areas of compromise with
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu. The provision of prompt mental health care for
those in crisis is, we believe, one of those areas. Paid family medical leave
is another. Replacing the partisan redistricting of the state following the
decennial census with a nonpartisan, independent commission, as some states
already have, could be another.
But in other areas, Democrats will have to use their newfound muscle to push
their agenda past the governor. The first thing they should do is take New
Hampshire out of the "only" column, as in the only New England state to retain
the death penalty and the only New England state that lacks a minimum wage.
A bill to abolish capital punishment passed both houses of the Legislature
again this year, then succumbed to a Sununu veto. The effort to override the
veto fell 2 votes short in the Senate, primarily because two Manchester
Democrats, Lou D'Allesandro and Kevin Cavanaugh, broke with their party's
platform and opposed repeal. Both were re-elected, but so were enough returning
Republicans who voted in favor of abolishing state-sanctioned killing to
override a veto when a repeal bill is inevitably filed.
Establishing a state minimum wage, given Sununu's vehement opposition, could be
a heavier lift. If the increase above the long-outdated federal $7.25 per hour
minimum is modest, say to $9 or $10 with increases in subsequent years, a bill
might garner the 2/3 vote needed to override a veto.
Democrats should also attempt to repeal the obstacles to voting enacted by
Republicans ostensibly to combat voter fraud, which is virtually nonexistent.
Like their counterparts around the country, the bills were thinly veiled
attempts to suppress the vote of people likely to favor Democrats.
The unnecessary and unrequested cuts to the state's business profits tax should
be rolled back and the money raised used to increase funding for public
education, funding that could slow the steady increase in local property taxes.
A Democratically controlled Legislature should put an end to the downshifting
of state responsibilities to local government and begin to restore state
contributions to public employee retirement costs.
The next session will likely see an attempt to redirect revenue from keno
gambling away from kindergarten funding to school building aid. The suspension
of that aid has doomed students in property-poor districts to an education in
antiquated and often substandard facilities.
Years of Republican control of the Legislature, and more recently of the
governor's office, means Democrats will have to go backward to move the state
forward. The so-called constitutional carry law that permits anyone over age 18
to carry a concealed weapon without a police background check and permit should
be repealed. That would be progress. The next step: a red flag law that permits
police to temporarily impound the firearms of people who present a credible
threat of committing a violent act.
The misguided decision, again supported by the governor, to rebate revenue
raised by New Hampshire's participation in RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas
Initiative, to utility customers rather than use it to fund energy conservation
efforts should be reversed. New Hampshire has fallen behind other states in its
efforts to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. Similarly, the
bill that would have raised the cap on the amount of solar power a utility must
purchase at a higher price should be resubmitted and any veto overridden.
Much more needs to be done, but that list should do for a start.
(source: Editorial, Concord Monitor)
GEORGIA:
Hearing Monday for Augusta man on death row
10 years after an Augusta man murdered a pregnant teen and her parents - crimes
for which a Richmond County jury voted unanimously to sentence him to death - a
hearing will be held Monday to begin the 1st stage of the appellate process.
Adrian Hargrove, 41, was convicted of beating and fatally stabbing 18-year-old
Allyson Pederson and her mother and stepfather, Sharon and Andrew Hartley, on
Feb. 9, 2008. According to trial testimony, Pederson was the girlfriend of
Hargrove's best friend but Hargrove barely knew her parents.
That morning, Hargrove tricked Pederson into leaving her home with him. He
took her to a trash-filled, abandoned trailer on Horseshoe Road and stabbed
and cut her 21 times with a butcher knife. Then Hargrove returned to her
Bennock Mill Road home and stabbed her mother at least 12 times before he
attacked her stepfather, stabbing him 21 times and hitting him with an ax
handle 17 times, breaking both weapons, as then-District Attorney Ashley Wright
told the jury in closing arguments.
The Hartleys were found in their Bennock Mill Road home. Pederson's body was
found set on fire at the Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam.
"This is no scuffle, this is not a fight (as Hargrove told doctors who examined
him), it's a slaughter," said Wright, who is now a Superior Court judge.
(source: The Augusta Chronicle)
ARIZONA:
His Conviction Was Overturned. Why Is Arizona Doing Everything in Its Power to
Keep Barry Jones on Death Row?
Rather than allow its case against Jones to withstand the scrutiny of a new
trial, the state is determined to undo the order that threw out his conviction.
Elishia Sloan was 15 years old when her mother's ex-boyfriend went to death row
for a crime he swore he didn't commit. It was 1995; Barry Lee Jones was
convicted of raping and murdering a 4-year-old girl at the Desert Vista trailer
park in Tucson, Arizona. Sloan had previously lived there with Jones and her
mom, Joyce Richmond, who went by Rose at the time. The couple was hooked on
drugs - all the adults at the trailer park seemed to be. But Sloan trusted
Jones, who was like a father to her. "It's weird, because usually as a
pre-teen, you're like, 'You're not my dad,'" she recalled. "But it wasn't like
that." She did not believe Jones had killed that little girl.
Jones wrote letters to Sloan and her mother while awaiting trial in the Pima
County Jail. He tried to be upbeat, using envelopes illustrated with cartoons.
But after he was found guilty and sentenced to die, Sloan and her mom
eventually fell out of touch with him. Sloan married a boy from the trailer
park, later divorcing him, and settled with her mom in Montana. Richmond got
clean while Sloan worked on raising her three kids. As the years passed, they
would periodically look for information about Jones's status on the website of
the Arizona Department of Corrections. "It's a scary feeling, looking at that
page," Sloan said. "But thank God it always said 'Active.'"
Sloan and Richmond moved back to Tucson last year. Early last month, Sloan
Googled Jones's name and found the series of articles on his case published at
The Intercept. They laid out the myriad problems behind Jones's conviction:
tunnel vision and sloppy police work by the Pima County Sheriff's Department;
unreliable evidence, from dubious eyewitness testimony to junk science; and a
medical examiner who appeared to have shifted his conclusions to support the
state's case.
When Sloan got to the third story in the series, she called out to her mother,
who was in another room. "I was like, 'Oh my God, they overturned his
conviction.'" Sloan sought out Jones's legal team and spoke to Andrew Sowards,
an investigator with the Arizona Federal Public Defender's Office in Tucson. As
it happened, he said, Jones was due in court the next day, October 12.
It was a gray, rainy morning as Sloan and her mother drove their black Ford
truck to the U.S. District Court downtown and went up to the sixth floor.
Richmond, 68, wore jeans, a coral top, and a gold chain. Sloan, 38, wore a
shirt that said "Rock 'n' Roll Forever." At 9:20 a.m., Jones was escorted into
the courtroom and seated just a few feet in front of them. He wore orange
prison garb and looked almost unrecognizable, his remaining hair thin and gray.
U.S. marshals walked in and out of the courtroom as Sloan and Richmond tried to
follow the back and forth between the attorneys and U.S. District Judge Timothy
Burgess.
It was Burgess who had overturned Jones's conviction, after presiding over an
evidentiary hearing that exposed fatal flaws in the case. In his July 31 order,
Burgess said Arizona prosecutors had to either retry Jones or release him,
within a strict timeframe. But the Arizona Attorney General's Office, which has
spent years fighting to keep Jones on death row, filed a notice of appeal
before the 9th Circuit Court to reverse the order and reinstate Jones's
conviction. Prosecutors also sought a stay from Burgess to waive the
fast-approaching deadline to retry Jones. "We could be up in the 9th Circuit
for a long time," Jones's attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Cary
Sandman, told me. In the meantime, Jones would remain in prison.
Speaking before the court on October 12, Sandman pushed back on the state's
request for a stay. "The fact of the matter is that Mr. Jones has spent nearly
24 years on death row on a premise that's completely faulty," he said. That
premise was that Jones had fatally assaulted the victim the day before she
died. "And we now know there's no reliable medical evidence to support that,"
he said.
"When did it happen? Who did it?" Sandman went on. "We're left now with no
answers to those questions." He added, "The time has arrived for him to get a
fair trial."
At around 10:30 a.m., Burgess declared a 20-minute recess and said he would
hand down his decision when he returned. There was a quiet stir in the
courtroom - federal judges rarely rule from the bench. When Burgess returned,
he put on his glasses and read his decision aloud. The state's motion for a
stay was denied, he said. Prosecutors would have to move forward with a
retrial, to begin by March 13, 2019. Jones was quickly whisked from the
courtroom.
At a nearby McDonald's afterward, Sloan and her mother processed what had
happened. It was hard for Richmond to comprehend why the state insisted on
fighting Jones's release. "How do they sleep at night?" she asked. "They think
he's guilty," her daughter replied. Neither of them believed it was true. In a
2002 affidavit filed by Jones's legal team, Sloan wrote, "Barry would never
hurt a child, especially not sexually. In fact, Barry was the one who always
tried to protect the girls in the park from all the perverts who lived there."
Sloan and her mother could think of plenty of other people in the trailer park
who might have hurt that little girl. "If [detectives] had investigated right,
they could have investigated everybody," Richmond said. "There was a lot of
weird men there. I'd be the first to admit that. They had just as much
opportunity to do anything as anybody else."
For a brief moment over the summer, it seemed possible the state of Arizona
would be open to some kind of mutual resolution in Jones's case. The Pima
County Conviction Integrity Unit - an office founded in 2015 to review
questionable convictions - had signaled it was open to examining it. In an
August email, Supervising Deputy County Attorney Rick Unklesbay, who is in
charge of the CIU, told me that "once the case comes back to this office we
will be reviewing it." But he backtracked in a more recent email, writing that
"it's a bit premature to have a discussion about where the case is going."
The notion that the state must not be too hasty carries a cruel irony for
Jones. At 60, he has spent much of his adult life on death row, struggling with
depression and thoughts of suicide. After his conviction was overturned, "there
was a sense of relief in Barry's voice I've never heard," Sowards told me.
Sandman hoped to secure Jones's release pending the appeal; Jones's older
brother, Otis, an Army veteran retired from law enforcement, signed an
affidavit offering to let Jones stay at his home south of Tucson. But
prosecutors cast Jones as a danger to the public, warning in filings that "any
release from custody will be brief," since Pima County law enforcement would be
poised to re-arrest him in advance of a retrial.
If it was hard to imagine how the state could retry Jones given the dismantling
of its case, a retrial nevertheless seemed to be on the horizon after Burgess's
October 12 ruling. Jones was appointed a trial attorney and a hearing was
scheduled in Pima County Criminal Court. But on the eve of the hearing, his
future was thrown into doubt once again. The state had asked the 9th Circuit to
grant the stay denied by Burgess - the hearing was canceled. A week later, the
9th Circuit ruled for the state. It ordered that the appeal proceed as quickly
as possible. Rather than allow its case against Jones to withstand the scrutiny
of a new trial - and rather than face the likelihood of an acquittal - the
attorney general's office is determined to undo Burgess's order overturning
Jones's conviction.
For Jones, the setback was compounded by his temporary transfer to Pima County
Jail. According to Sandman, prison officials did not send any of the medication
Jones takes for anxiety and depression. It was "very traumatic," Sandman told
me. Jones is faring better now, back among his old neighbors at the
maximum-security prison in Florence, Sandman said, where Burgess's order has
made the rounds on death row. "It helps quite a bit that most people recognize
he shouldn't be there."
It has now been more than a year since the evidentiary hearing in Jones's case.
7 days of testimony in the fall of 2017 revealed how badly the Pima County
Sheriff’s Department had botched the investigation into the death of 4-year-old
Rachel Gray. The child's lifeless body was carried into the hospital by her
mother, Angela Gray, shortly after 6 a.m. on May 2, 1994. Angela, Jones's
then-girlfriend, had been living with Jones in his trailer along with her three
children; it was Jones who dropped her off with Rachel at the hospital, then
came under suspicion when he did not return.
In an aggressive interrogation later that day, Sheriff's Detective Sonia
Pesqueira accused Jones of killing Rachel, although it was not at all clear yet
how she had died. Pesqueira never investigated the timing of Rachel's fatal
injury - a tear in her duodenum, part of her small intestine, caused by some
sort of blow to her stomach. At the evidentiary hearing, it became clear that
Pesqueira merely assumed the injury had occurred the day before Rachel died and
tailored her investigation accordingly. But medical experts reiterated what
they have said for years: that the injury could not have occurred in the window
presented by the state.
To prevail at the evidentiary hearing, Jones's attorneys had to show that his
trial lawyers had provided ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of
his Sixth Amendment rights. Burgess found that they had proved their case. In
his 91-page order overturning the conviction, Burgess concluded that if not for
the failures of Jones's original defense attorneys, "there is a reasonable
probability that his jury would not have convicted him of any of the crimes
with which he was charged and previously convicted." He sharply criticized
Pesqueira for her failure to interview alternative suspects, and Dr. John
Howard, the former Pima County medical examiner, whose estimates about the
timing of Rachel's fatal injury had inexplicably shifted from his pretrial
interviews to his testimony to the hearing decades later. Had Jones's defense
attorneys done their job properly, Burgess wrote, "the jury would likely have
found Dr. Howard's testimony not credible or persuasive."
Burgess's decision validated the feelings of at least two jurors who had served
on Jones's trial, both of whom told me that they had been troubled by the
weakness of his defense representation. Hildegard Stoecker remained especially
disturbed by the case. She had followed news of the evidentiary hearing and was
glad to hear that Burgess had overturned Jones's conviction. Had she known
about the issues brought up at the hearing, she wrote in an email this past
August, "I know I would never have voted to convict Barry Jones."
On November 14, prosecutors filed their appeal to the 9th Circuit. It was
accompanied by thousands of pages of case records and exhibits - a daunting
amount of material to review, especially given the expedited schedule ordered
by the court. In their opening brief, prosecutors confidently reasserted
Jones's guilt, while rehashing arguments they have made before.
They insisted the medical evidence presented at the evidentiary hearing
actually supported the state's case against Jones. They argued that Jones's
trial lawyers had been perfectly adequate in investigating Rachel's fatal
injury, for example, by consulting with an independent pathologist. (Just
because there was no indication the expert had ever reviewed the evidence
necessary to provide an opinion didn't mean it never happened.) Moreover,
prosecutors said, even if the medical evidence did not prove that Jones had
raped and fatally beaten Rachel, jurors would have found him guilty of
endangering her health by failing to take her to the hospital the night before
she died. Under Arizona law, this would still make him guilty of murder - and
eligible for the death penalty.
Above all, the appeal invoked the powerful procedural barriers that routinely
prevent people like Jones from winning challenges to their convictions. Under
the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Strickland v. Washington, which governs
ineffective assistance claims, courts must show considerable deference to the
decisions made by defense lawyers. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that there
must be a presumption that their actions were undertaken "for tactical reasons
rather than through sheer neglect," prosecutors wrote, arguing that Burgess was
wrong to find Jones's defense unconstitutionally inadequate.
More confusing was the state's continued insistence that Burgess should never
have granted the evidentiary hearing in the first place. Prosecutors invoked
the most reliable bulwark against revisiting questionable convictions: the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Passed in 1996, a year after
Jones was convicted, the sweeping law known as AEDPA drastically raised the bar
for overturning convictions in federal court, in part by forcing judges like
Burgess to show significant deference to rulings by state courts. When it came
to ineffective assistance claims, AEDPA also bolstered rules shutting out such
claims from federal review if a defendant had previously failed to bring them
in state court.
For most people in Jones's position, AEDPA is indeed the last word. But Jones
got back into federal court thanks to a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that
carved out a limited exception, at least in Arizona. Martinez v. Ryan held
that, if the failure to bring an ineffective assistance claim in state court
was itself due to the ineffectiveness of a state post-conviction attorney, a
federal court could consider the claim. For Jones, Martinez opened the door to
de novo review - a fresh consideration with no need to defer to a lower court.
Crucially, this meant Burgess was not beholden to the strictures of AEDPA when
considering his case.
Yet prosecutors insist the law still controls Jones's fate. "Congress
specifically intended AEDPA to limit federal evidentiary development," they
wrote, "and to restrict the general availability of habeas relief." In other
words, it was enough for Burgess to have reviewed Jones's claim at all, they
argued - Jones was not entitled to actually prove it in court.
In Sandman's view, the AEPDA argument is "absurd." Among other things, he
pointed out that all the Supreme Court rulings prosecutors used to support it
predate the Martinez ruling. "I'm not sure why they're doing that," he said.
"Then again, I'm not sure why they're doing anything that they are doing.
Because if they were the least bit fair-minded, they would get on to either
retrying Jones or let him go."
Apart from dubious legal arguments, the state's appeal to the 9th Circuit is
perhaps most striking for its highly selective narrative about what happened at
the Desert Vista in the spring of 1994. Whereas prosecutors once argued that
lead detective Sonia Pesqueira followed the evidence of guilt for Rachel's
injuries "directly to Jones," there is no mention of her now. Instead the state
constructed a circumstantial case against Jones, starting with the claim that
4-year-old Rachel was afraid of him in the weeks leading up to her death. But
this assertion rests heavily on testimony from Rachel's sister, Becky, who was
10 years old when her sister died and whose statements evolved significantly
over time to further implicate Jones. For a reader intimately familiar not only
with Jones's case but also with the trial of Angela Gray, who was convicted of
child abuse but acquitted of murder, it is not hard to notice such things. It
is far less clear what the 9th Circuit will make of them.
In our conversation at McDonald’s, Sloan remembered being glad when Jones would
return to the trailer at the end of the day. "It wasn't like, 'Oh God, he's
home,' the way it would be if he was an abuser," she said. Like Jones's own
daughter, Brandie, who told police that her father never hit her, Sloan said
Jones never laid a hand on her. She was just a few years older than Brandie;
the girls used to sneak out of the trailer to hang out with the kids in the
trailer park, which sometimes got them in trouble. Jones disciplined them but
never harshly. "Barry caught me in the laundry room, kissing a boy, and I got
grounded for, I swear, he said my 'whole life,'" Sloan said. "But it ended up
being a day." Richmond remembered how if Brandie and Sloan wanted to smoke a
cigarette, "they had to come inside and sit down in the room and read a book
for an hour."
"I hated it so much," Sloan chuckled.
Sloan says she barely remembers anything from the time Jones went to death row.
But she recalls being questioned by Pima County sex crimes prosecutor Kathy
Mayer back in 1994. Sloan said Mayer tried unsuccessfully to get her to
implicate Jones by showing her graphic photos from Rachel's autopsy. "She's
like, 'Look at these pictures. This could have been you,'" Sloan said. In her
2002 affidavit, Sloan wrote, "The prosecution wanted me to say how mean he was,
but I would not lie." Mayer, who retired earlier this year, did not return
messages seeking comment.
In retrospect, Sloan says, the way they lived at the Desert Vista seems
shocking. They didn't always have food to eat; she remembers getting fresh
fruit from a man who would bring produce in a truck from a food bank. Sometimes
they got bags of leftover hamburgers that were thrown out by a nearby
McDonald's. "You look at it from the outside, and you're like, 'Wow. These poor
kids,'" Sloan said. But she doesn't remember her childhood as unhappy.
Richmond says that for all the problems at the trailer park - and despite what
happened to Rachel - the community there tried to look out for one another,
especially for the kids. Jones was particularly well-liked, Sloan remembered.
"He would give you the shirt off his back," she said. "Barry was a very
nice-looking guy when we met," Richmond says. She was "head over heels."
Richmond and Sloan passed by the Desert Vista when they returned to Tucson last
year. "It looked the same, but it wasn't the same, you know?" Richmond said.
Sloan felt guilty about falling out of touch with Jones. "It's weird to see how
he's aged so much," she said. She became emotional when I mentioned the letters
he sent her from jail, which she did not remember now. Richmond said Jones
wrote her a letter at one point and said, '"If you're not gonna be consistent
about writing me, don't write me anymore.' And I didn't. And I should've. But
24 years is a long time to write letters every day or every week, you know?"
(source: theintercept.com)
CALIFORNIA:
Gang member eligible for death penalty after his conviction in shooting death
of Hemet man
A documented gang member who opened fire on 7 people outside a San Jacinto
home, killing one, was convicted of murder and 6 counts of attempted murder
last week, including a gang allegation that could have him facing the death
penalty later this month.
Salvador Venegas, 36, was found guilty Thursday in the Feb. 5, 2014, killing of
Runar Claus, 37, of Hemet, who was shot in the driveway of a residence where
the victim was talking with a group of friends.
Along with the murder and attempted murder counts, jurors convicted Venegas of
a special circumstance allegation of committing the murder to benefit a
criminal street gang, triggering a 2nd phase of the trial in which the panel
will weigh whether he will face death or life imprisonment without parole. The
"penalty phase" of the trial is slated to begin Nov. 26.
Prosecutors allege that Venegas and an unidentified 2nd person approached the
group, asked "Where you from?" then began firing on the group before anyone
could answer. Claus was struck in the abdomen and taken to Hemet Valley
Hospital, where he later died.
Venegas was arrested in Hemet about 3 weeks after the killing following a short
pursuit of a vehicle in which he was a passenger.
Investigators said Venegas was placed at the shooting scene through data
recovered from a GPS ankle monitor, which he was required to wear as part of a
bail agreement stemming from a gun possession case.
The criminal complaint alleges that Venegas was previously convicted in 2000 of
attempted murder and sentenced to 15 years and four months in prison in a case
out of Los Angeles County. Details on that case were not available through
Riverside County court records.
(source: The Press-Enterprise)
OREGON:
Readers respond: Capital punishment normalizes violence
12 additional lives have been tragically taken in another a painful and
troubling mass shooting, this one in Thousand Oaks, California ("California
mass shooting: 13 dead including gunman," Nov. 8). What can be done to create
resistance to these horrors among all Americans?
In recent elections, Washington state voters admirably enacted a modest gun
control initiative. Unfortunately, such things are a heavy lift given
prevailing views about firearms. That said, the ongoing shame and terror of
these crimes calls on us to do hard things.
One such advance would be to abolish the death penalty. It cheapens the value
of human life. Capital punishment promotes acceptance of violence as part of
our collective experience. Some might say it's wrong to use the deaths of
innocent people to further a political agenda. Fair enough. In any event, basic
morality demands we act to become our better selves.
Matthew Sproul, Portland
(source: Letter to the Editor, oregonlive.com)
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TEXAS:
Supreme Court turns down appeal from British woman on Texas death row
The Supreme Court last week turned down an appeal from a British woman
sentenced to die for a Harris County murder-kidnapping, moving the case one
step closer to a possible execution date.
Linda Carty was sent to death row in 2001 after she was convicted of
masterminding a plot to murder her 20-year-old neighbor and steal the woman's
baby in order to save her own common-law marriage.
In the years since the killing of Joana Rodriguez, Carty has consistently
professed her innocence, insisting she was railroaded by prosecutors who failed
to turn over evidence and coerced witnesses to win a conviction.
Yet the nation's highest court has now turned down her most recent appeal
without comment, refusing to review the argument that the combination of bad
lawyering and "egregious prosecutorial misconduct" was enough to make a
difference in the outcome of the case.
The now 60-year-old had lived in the Houston area for more than a decade at the
time of the slaying, but was born on St. Kitts. At the time, the Caribbean
island was a British protectorate, so Carty holds British citizenship - a fact
that's brought her case celebrity attention, spawned a documentary film and
landed her on the front pages of papers in the U.K.
During her 2002 trial, prosecutors argued that the former schoolteacher and
erstwhile DEA informant had directed 3 men to storm the victims' apartment,
steal $1,000 and kidnap the mother and her 3-day-old child at gunpoint.
Afterward, authorities found Rodriguez asphyxiated, bound and gagged, in the
trunk of a car linked to Carty. Using witness statement, phone records and
evidence from cars at the crime scene, Harris County prosecutors persuaded a
jury to find her guilty and vote for a death sentence.
For the past 16 years, the now-grandmother has been fighting her conviction.
Carty's trial was handled by a famously overworked lawyer who never won a death
penalty trial, and a federal appeals court decided some of his work on the case
was "objectively unreasonable." But, the court said, it wouldn't have made a
difference in the outcome - even though it was a "close case."
Later, a Texas state court decided that prosecutors had failed to hand over
potentially exculpatory evidence and neglected to reveal information that could
have called into question some of the witnesses who testified against her. But,
again, the court said it wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome and
wasn't enough to overcome the evidence against her.
Now in the latest Supreme Court appeal, Carty's current counsel - a team from
Baker Botts led by Michael Goldberg - argued that those things combined would
be enough to sway a jury to a different verdict.
And, they said, courts have offered different opinions as to how and when the
legal system should handle "cumulative error" claims alleging different types
of Constitutional violations all at once.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, a group of criminal
justice experts including Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu, and the United Kingdom
all filed briefs supporting Carty's appeal.
Now, after the Supreme Court's rejection, Goldberg says he plans to file
another appeal.
(source: Houston Chronicle)
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
A to-do list for state's Democrats
To move the state forward, New Hampshire Democrats, who will assume control of
the House and Senate in January, will have to find areas of compromise with
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu. The provision of prompt mental health care for
those in crisis is, we believe, one of those areas. Paid family medical leave
is another. Replacing the partisan redistricting of the state following the
decennial census with a nonpartisan, independent commission, as some states
already have, could be another.
But in other areas, Democrats will have to use their newfound muscle to push
their agenda past the governor. The first thing they should do is take New
Hampshire out of the "only" column, as in the only New England state to retain
the death penalty and the only New England state that lacks a minimum wage.
A bill to abolish capital punishment passed both houses of the Legislature
again this year, then succumbed to a Sununu veto. The effort to override the
veto fell 2 votes short in the Senate, primarily because two Manchester
Democrats, Lou D'Allesandro and Kevin Cavanaugh, broke with their party's
platform and opposed repeal. Both were re-elected, but so were enough returning
Republicans who voted in favor of abolishing state-sanctioned killing to
override a veto when a repeal bill is inevitably filed.
Establishing a state minimum wage, given Sununu's vehement opposition, could be
a heavier lift. If the increase above the long-outdated federal $7.25 per hour
minimum is modest, say to $9 or $10 with increases in subsequent years, a bill
might garner the 2/3 vote needed to override a veto.
Democrats should also attempt to repeal the obstacles to voting enacted by
Republicans ostensibly to combat voter fraud, which is virtually nonexistent.
Like their counterparts around the country, the bills were thinly veiled
attempts to suppress the vote of people likely to favor Democrats.
The unnecessary and unrequested cuts to the state's business profits tax should
be rolled back and the money raised used to increase funding for public
education, funding that could slow the steady increase in local property taxes.
A Democratically controlled Legislature should put an end to the downshifting
of state responsibilities to local government and begin to restore state
contributions to public employee retirement costs.
The next session will likely see an attempt to redirect revenue from keno
gambling away from kindergarten funding to school building aid. The suspension
of that aid has doomed students in property-poor districts to an education in
antiquated and often substandard facilities.
Years of Republican control of the Legislature, and more recently of the
governor's office, means Democrats will have to go backward to move the state
forward. The so-called constitutional carry law that permits anyone over age 18
to carry a concealed weapon without a police background check and permit should
be repealed. That would be progress. The next step: a red flag law that permits
police to temporarily impound the firearms of people who present a credible
threat of committing a violent act.
The misguided decision, again supported by the governor, to rebate revenue
raised by New Hampshire's participation in RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas
Initiative, to utility customers rather than use it to fund energy conservation
efforts should be reversed. New Hampshire has fallen behind other states in its
efforts to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. Similarly, the
bill that would have raised the cap on the amount of solar power a utility must
purchase at a higher price should be resubmitted and any veto overridden.
Much more needs to be done, but that list should do for a start.
(source: Editorial, Concord Monitor)
GEORGIA:
Hearing Monday for Augusta man on death row
10 years after an Augusta man murdered a pregnant teen and her parents - crimes
for which a Richmond County jury voted unanimously to sentence him to death - a
hearing will be held Monday to begin the 1st stage of the appellate process.
Adrian Hargrove, 41, was convicted of beating and fatally stabbing 18-year-old
Allyson Pederson and her mother and stepfather, Sharon and Andrew Hartley, on
Feb. 9, 2008. According to trial testimony, Pederson was the girlfriend of
Hargrove's best friend but Hargrove barely knew her parents.
That morning, Hargrove tricked Pederson into leaving her home with him. He
took her to a trash-filled, abandoned trailer on Horseshoe Road and stabbed
and cut her 21 times with a butcher knife. Then Hargrove returned to her
Bennock Mill Road home and stabbed her mother at least 12 times before he
attacked her stepfather, stabbing him 21 times and hitting him with an ax
handle 17 times, breaking both weapons, as then-District Attorney Ashley Wright
told the jury in closing arguments.
The Hartleys were found in their Bennock Mill Road home. Pederson's body was
found set on fire at the Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam.
"This is no scuffle, this is not a fight (as Hargrove told doctors who examined
him), it's a slaughter," said Wright, who is now a Superior Court judge.
(source: The Augusta Chronicle)
ARIZONA:
His Conviction Was Overturned. Why Is Arizona Doing Everything in Its Power to
Keep Barry Jones on Death Row?
Rather than allow its case against Jones to withstand the scrutiny of a new
trial, the state is determined to undo the order that threw out his conviction.
Elishia Sloan was 15 years old when her mother's ex-boyfriend went to death row
for a crime he swore he didn't commit. It was 1995; Barry Lee Jones was
convicted of raping and murdering a 4-year-old girl at the Desert Vista trailer
park in Tucson, Arizona. Sloan had previously lived there with Jones and her
mom, Joyce Richmond, who went by Rose at the time. The couple was hooked on
drugs - all the adults at the trailer park seemed to be. But Sloan trusted
Jones, who was like a father to her. "It's weird, because usually as a
pre-teen, you're like, 'You're not my dad,'" she recalled. "But it wasn't like
that." She did not believe Jones had killed that little girl.
Jones wrote letters to Sloan and her mother while awaiting trial in the Pima
County Jail. He tried to be upbeat, using envelopes illustrated with cartoons.
But after he was found guilty and sentenced to die, Sloan and her mom
eventually fell out of touch with him. Sloan married a boy from the trailer
park, later divorcing him, and settled with her mom in Montana. Richmond got
clean while Sloan worked on raising her three kids. As the years passed, they
would periodically look for information about Jones's status on the website of
the Arizona Department of Corrections. "It's a scary feeling, looking at that
page," Sloan said. "But thank God it always said 'Active.'"
Sloan and Richmond moved back to Tucson last year. Early last month, Sloan
Googled Jones's name and found the series of articles on his case published at
The Intercept. They laid out the myriad problems behind Jones's conviction:
tunnel vision and sloppy police work by the Pima County Sheriff's Department;
unreliable evidence, from dubious eyewitness testimony to junk science; and a
medical examiner who appeared to have shifted his conclusions to support the
state's case.
When Sloan got to the third story in the series, she called out to her mother,
who was in another room. "I was like, 'Oh my God, they overturned his
conviction.'" Sloan sought out Jones's legal team and spoke to Andrew Sowards,
an investigator with the Arizona Federal Public Defender's Office in Tucson. As
it happened, he said, Jones was due in court the next day, October 12.
It was a gray, rainy morning as Sloan and her mother drove their black Ford
truck to the U.S. District Court downtown and went up to the sixth floor.
Richmond, 68, wore jeans, a coral top, and a gold chain. Sloan, 38, wore a
shirt that said "Rock 'n' Roll Forever." At 9:20 a.m., Jones was escorted into
the courtroom and seated just a few feet in front of them. He wore orange
prison garb and looked almost unrecognizable, his remaining hair thin and gray.
U.S. marshals walked in and out of the courtroom as Sloan and Richmond tried to
follow the back and forth between the attorneys and U.S. District Judge Timothy
Burgess.
It was Burgess who had overturned Jones's conviction, after presiding over an
evidentiary hearing that exposed fatal flaws in the case. In his July 31 order,
Burgess said Arizona prosecutors had to either retry Jones or release him,
within a strict timeframe. But the Arizona Attorney General's Office, which has
spent years fighting to keep Jones on death row, filed a notice of appeal
before the 9th Circuit Court to reverse the order and reinstate Jones's
conviction. Prosecutors also sought a stay from Burgess to waive the
fast-approaching deadline to retry Jones. "We could be up in the 9th Circuit
for a long time," Jones's attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Cary
Sandman, told me. In the meantime, Jones would remain in prison.
Speaking before the court on October 12, Sandman pushed back on the state's
request for a stay. "The fact of the matter is that Mr. Jones has spent nearly
24 years on death row on a premise that's completely faulty," he said. That
premise was that Jones had fatally assaulted the victim the day before she
died. "And we now know there's no reliable medical evidence to support that,"
he said.
"When did it happen? Who did it?" Sandman went on. "We're left now with no
answers to those questions." He added, "The time has arrived for him to get a
fair trial."
At around 10:30 a.m., Burgess declared a 20-minute recess and said he would
hand down his decision when he returned. There was a quiet stir in the
courtroom - federal judges rarely rule from the bench. When Burgess returned,
he put on his glasses and read his decision aloud. The state's motion for a
stay was denied, he said. Prosecutors would have to move forward with a
retrial, to begin by March 13, 2019. Jones was quickly whisked from the
courtroom.
At a nearby McDonald's afterward, Sloan and her mother processed what had
happened. It was hard for Richmond to comprehend why the state insisted on
fighting Jones's release. "How do they sleep at night?" she asked. "They think
he's guilty," her daughter replied. Neither of them believed it was true. In a
2002 affidavit filed by Jones's legal team, Sloan wrote, "Barry would never
hurt a child, especially not sexually. In fact, Barry was the one who always
tried to protect the girls in the park from all the perverts who lived there."
Sloan and her mother could think of plenty of other people in the trailer park
who might have hurt that little girl. "If [detectives] had investigated right,
they could have investigated everybody," Richmond said. "There was a lot of
weird men there. I'd be the first to admit that. They had just as much
opportunity to do anything as anybody else."
For a brief moment over the summer, it seemed possible the state of Arizona
would be open to some kind of mutual resolution in Jones's case. The Pima
County Conviction Integrity Unit - an office founded in 2015 to review
questionable convictions - had signaled it was open to examining it. In an
August email, Supervising Deputy County Attorney Rick Unklesbay, who is in
charge of the CIU, told me that "once the case comes back to this office we
will be reviewing it." But he backtracked in a more recent email, writing that
"it's a bit premature to have a discussion about where the case is going."
The notion that the state must not be too hasty carries a cruel irony for
Jones. At 60, he has spent much of his adult life on death row, struggling with
depression and thoughts of suicide. After his conviction was overturned, "there
was a sense of relief in Barry's voice I've never heard," Sowards told me.
Sandman hoped to secure Jones's release pending the appeal; Jones's older
brother, Otis, an Army veteran retired from law enforcement, signed an
affidavit offering to let Jones stay at his home south of Tucson. But
prosecutors cast Jones as a danger to the public, warning in filings that "any
release from custody will be brief," since Pima County law enforcement would be
poised to re-arrest him in advance of a retrial.
If it was hard to imagine how the state could retry Jones given the dismantling
of its case, a retrial nevertheless seemed to be on the horizon after Burgess's
October 12 ruling. Jones was appointed a trial attorney and a hearing was
scheduled in Pima County Criminal Court. But on the eve of the hearing, his
future was thrown into doubt once again. The state had asked the 9th Circuit to
grant the stay denied by Burgess - the hearing was canceled. A week later, the
9th Circuit ruled for the state. It ordered that the appeal proceed as quickly
as possible. Rather than allow its case against Jones to withstand the scrutiny
of a new trial - and rather than face the likelihood of an acquittal - the
attorney general's office is determined to undo Burgess's order overturning
Jones's conviction.
For Jones, the setback was compounded by his temporary transfer to Pima County
Jail. According to Sandman, prison officials did not send any of the medication
Jones takes for anxiety and depression. It was "very traumatic," Sandman told
me. Jones is faring better now, back among his old neighbors at the
maximum-security prison in Florence, Sandman said, where Burgess's order has
made the rounds on death row. "It helps quite a bit that most people recognize
he shouldn't be there."
It has now been more than a year since the evidentiary hearing in Jones's case.
7 days of testimony in the fall of 2017 revealed how badly the Pima County
Sheriff’s Department had botched the investigation into the death of 4-year-old
Rachel Gray. The child's lifeless body was carried into the hospital by her
mother, Angela Gray, shortly after 6 a.m. on May 2, 1994. Angela, Jones's
then-girlfriend, had been living with Jones in his trailer along with her three
children; it was Jones who dropped her off with Rachel at the hospital, then
came under suspicion when he did not return.
In an aggressive interrogation later that day, Sheriff's Detective Sonia
Pesqueira accused Jones of killing Rachel, although it was not at all clear yet
how she had died. Pesqueira never investigated the timing of Rachel's fatal
injury - a tear in her duodenum, part of her small intestine, caused by some
sort of blow to her stomach. At the evidentiary hearing, it became clear that
Pesqueira merely assumed the injury had occurred the day before Rachel died and
tailored her investigation accordingly. But medical experts reiterated what
they have said for years: that the injury could not have occurred in the window
presented by the state.
To prevail at the evidentiary hearing, Jones's attorneys had to show that his
trial lawyers had provided ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of
his Sixth Amendment rights. Burgess found that they had proved their case. In
his 91-page order overturning the conviction, Burgess concluded that if not for
the failures of Jones's original defense attorneys, "there is a reasonable
probability that his jury would not have convicted him of any of the crimes
with which he was charged and previously convicted." He sharply criticized
Pesqueira for her failure to interview alternative suspects, and Dr. John
Howard, the former Pima County medical examiner, whose estimates about the
timing of Rachel's fatal injury had inexplicably shifted from his pretrial
interviews to his testimony to the hearing decades later. Had Jones's defense
attorneys done their job properly, Burgess wrote, "the jury would likely have
found Dr. Howard's testimony not credible or persuasive."
Burgess's decision validated the feelings of at least two jurors who had served
on Jones's trial, both of whom told me that they had been troubled by the
weakness of his defense representation. Hildegard Stoecker remained especially
disturbed by the case. She had followed news of the evidentiary hearing and was
glad to hear that Burgess had overturned Jones's conviction. Had she known
about the issues brought up at the hearing, she wrote in an email this past
August, "I know I would never have voted to convict Barry Jones."
On November 14, prosecutors filed their appeal to the 9th Circuit. It was
accompanied by thousands of pages of case records and exhibits - a daunting
amount of material to review, especially given the expedited schedule ordered
by the court. In their opening brief, prosecutors confidently reasserted
Jones's guilt, while rehashing arguments they have made before.
They insisted the medical evidence presented at the evidentiary hearing
actually supported the state's case against Jones. They argued that Jones's
trial lawyers had been perfectly adequate in investigating Rachel's fatal
injury, for example, by consulting with an independent pathologist. (Just
because there was no indication the expert had ever reviewed the evidence
necessary to provide an opinion didn't mean it never happened.) Moreover,
prosecutors said, even if the medical evidence did not prove that Jones had
raped and fatally beaten Rachel, jurors would have found him guilty of
endangering her health by failing to take her to the hospital the night before
she died. Under Arizona law, this would still make him guilty of murder - and
eligible for the death penalty.
Above all, the appeal invoked the powerful procedural barriers that routinely
prevent people like Jones from winning challenges to their convictions. Under
the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Strickland v. Washington, which governs
ineffective assistance claims, courts must show considerable deference to the
decisions made by defense lawyers. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that there
must be a presumption that their actions were undertaken "for tactical reasons
rather than through sheer neglect," prosecutors wrote, arguing that Burgess was
wrong to find Jones's defense unconstitutionally inadequate.
More confusing was the state's continued insistence that Burgess should never
have granted the evidentiary hearing in the first place. Prosecutors invoked
the most reliable bulwark against revisiting questionable convictions: the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Passed in 1996, a year after
Jones was convicted, the sweeping law known as AEDPA drastically raised the bar
for overturning convictions in federal court, in part by forcing judges like
Burgess to show significant deference to rulings by state courts. When it came
to ineffective assistance claims, AEDPA also bolstered rules shutting out such
claims from federal review if a defendant had previously failed to bring them
in state court.
For most people in Jones's position, AEDPA is indeed the last word. But Jones
got back into federal court thanks to a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that
carved out a limited exception, at least in Arizona. Martinez v. Ryan held
that, if the failure to bring an ineffective assistance claim in state court
was itself due to the ineffectiveness of a state post-conviction attorney, a
federal court could consider the claim. For Jones, Martinez opened the door to
de novo review - a fresh consideration with no need to defer to a lower court.
Crucially, this meant Burgess was not beholden to the strictures of AEDPA when
considering his case.
Yet prosecutors insist the law still controls Jones's fate. "Congress
specifically intended AEDPA to limit federal evidentiary development," they
wrote, "and to restrict the general availability of habeas relief." In other
words, it was enough for Burgess to have reviewed Jones's claim at all, they
argued - Jones was not entitled to actually prove it in court.
In Sandman's view, the AEPDA argument is "absurd." Among other things, he
pointed out that all the Supreme Court rulings prosecutors used to support it
predate the Martinez ruling. "I'm not sure why they're doing that," he said.
"Then again, I'm not sure why they're doing anything that they are doing.
Because if they were the least bit fair-minded, they would get on to either
retrying Jones or let him go."
Apart from dubious legal arguments, the state's appeal to the 9th Circuit is
perhaps most striking for its highly selective narrative about what happened at
the Desert Vista in the spring of 1994. Whereas prosecutors once argued that
lead detective Sonia Pesqueira followed the evidence of guilt for Rachel's
injuries "directly to Jones," there is no mention of her now. Instead the state
constructed a circumstantial case against Jones, starting with the claim that
4-year-old Rachel was afraid of him in the weeks leading up to her death. But
this assertion rests heavily on testimony from Rachel's sister, Becky, who was
10 years old when her sister died and whose statements evolved significantly
over time to further implicate Jones. For a reader intimately familiar not only
with Jones's case but also with the trial of Angela Gray, who was convicted of
child abuse but acquitted of murder, it is not hard to notice such things. It
is far less clear what the 9th Circuit will make of them.
In our conversation at McDonald’s, Sloan remembered being glad when Jones would
return to the trailer at the end of the day. "It wasn't like, 'Oh God, he's
home,' the way it would be if he was an abuser," she said. Like Jones's own
daughter, Brandie, who told police that her father never hit her, Sloan said
Jones never laid a hand on her. She was just a few years older than Brandie;
the girls used to sneak out of the trailer to hang out with the kids in the
trailer park, which sometimes got them in trouble. Jones disciplined them but
never harshly. "Barry caught me in the laundry room, kissing a boy, and I got
grounded for, I swear, he said my 'whole life,'" Sloan said. "But it ended up
being a day." Richmond remembered how if Brandie and Sloan wanted to smoke a
cigarette, "they had to come inside and sit down in the room and read a book
for an hour."
"I hated it so much," Sloan chuckled.
Sloan says she barely remembers anything from the time Jones went to death row.
But she recalls being questioned by Pima County sex crimes prosecutor Kathy
Mayer back in 1994. Sloan said Mayer tried unsuccessfully to get her to
implicate Jones by showing her graphic photos from Rachel's autopsy. "She's
like, 'Look at these pictures. This could have been you,'" Sloan said. In her
2002 affidavit, Sloan wrote, "The prosecution wanted me to say how mean he was,
but I would not lie." Mayer, who retired earlier this year, did not return
messages seeking comment.
In retrospect, Sloan says, the way they lived at the Desert Vista seems
shocking. They didn't always have food to eat; she remembers getting fresh
fruit from a man who would bring produce in a truck from a food bank. Sometimes
they got bags of leftover hamburgers that were thrown out by a nearby
McDonald's. "You look at it from the outside, and you're like, 'Wow. These poor
kids,'" Sloan said. But she doesn't remember her childhood as unhappy.
Richmond says that for all the problems at the trailer park - and despite what
happened to Rachel - the community there tried to look out for one another,
especially for the kids. Jones was particularly well-liked, Sloan remembered.
"He would give you the shirt off his back," she said. "Barry was a very
nice-looking guy when we met," Richmond says. She was "head over heels."
Richmond and Sloan passed by the Desert Vista when they returned to Tucson last
year. "It looked the same, but it wasn't the same, you know?" Richmond said.
Sloan felt guilty about falling out of touch with Jones. "It's weird to see how
he's aged so much," she said. She became emotional when I mentioned the letters
he sent her from jail, which she did not remember now. Richmond said Jones
wrote her a letter at one point and said, '"If you're not gonna be consistent
about writing me, don't write me anymore.' And I didn't. And I should've. But
24 years is a long time to write letters every day or every week, you know?"
(source: theintercept.com)
CALIFORNIA:
Gang member eligible for death penalty after his conviction in shooting death
of Hemet man
A documented gang member who opened fire on 7 people outside a San Jacinto
home, killing one, was convicted of murder and 6 counts of attempted murder
last week, including a gang allegation that could have him facing the death
penalty later this month.
Salvador Venegas, 36, was found guilty Thursday in the Feb. 5, 2014, killing of
Runar Claus, 37, of Hemet, who was shot in the driveway of a residence where
the victim was talking with a group of friends.
Along with the murder and attempted murder counts, jurors convicted Venegas of
a special circumstance allegation of committing the murder to benefit a
criminal street gang, triggering a 2nd phase of the trial in which the panel
will weigh whether he will face death or life imprisonment without parole. The
"penalty phase" of the trial is slated to begin Nov. 26.
Prosecutors allege that Venegas and an unidentified 2nd person approached the
group, asked "Where you from?" then began firing on the group before anyone
could answer. Claus was struck in the abdomen and taken to Hemet Valley
Hospital, where he later died.
Venegas was arrested in Hemet about 3 weeks after the killing following a short
pursuit of a vehicle in which he was a passenger.
Investigators said Venegas was placed at the shooting scene through data
recovered from a GPS ankle monitor, which he was required to wear as part of a
bail agreement stemming from a gun possession case.
The criminal complaint alleges that Venegas was previously convicted in 2000 of
attempted murder and sentenced to 15 years and four months in prison in a case
out of Los Angeles County. Details on that case were not available through
Riverside County court records.
(source: The Press-Enterprise)
OREGON:
Readers respond: Capital punishment normalizes violence
12 additional lives have been tragically taken in another a painful and
troubling mass shooting, this one in Thousand Oaks, California ("California
mass shooting: 13 dead including gunman," Nov. 8). What can be done to create
resistance to these horrors among all Americans?
In recent elections, Washington state voters admirably enacted a modest gun
control initiative. Unfortunately, such things are a heavy lift given
prevailing views about firearms. That said, the ongoing shame and terror of
these crimes calls on us to do hard things.
One such advance would be to abolish the death penalty. It cheapens the value
of human life. Capital punishment promotes acceptance of violence as part of
our collective experience. Some might say it's wrong to use the deaths of
innocent people to further a political agenda. Fair enough. In any event, basic
morality demands we act to become our better selves.
Matthew Sproul, Portland
(source: Letter to the Editor, oregonlive.com)
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