Results matching “troy davis”

ICE Nabs Illegal Charged With Killing 3:  A previously deported Mexican national charged last weekend with vehicular manslaughter and felony DUI, was arrested by ICE Tuesday while free on bail.  Lloyd Billingsley of the California Globe reports that Ismael Huazo-Jardinez was drunk when he lost control of his pickup truck and slammed into a mobile home late on May 4th in Knights Landing, CA,  killing a married  couple and their 10-year-old son, and critically injuring their 11-year-old daughter.  Danielle Wallace of Fox News reports that the crash also destroyed the neighboring home of the children's grandparents, who escaped uninjured.  According to a neighbor awakened by the crash, "He (Huazo-Jardinez) was so intoxicated I could smell the alcohol from 10 feet away."  The defendant had been deported after a 2011 arrest in Arizona, but had reentered the U.S. illegally and was currently living in Yuba City.  The day after his arrest Huazo-Jardinez was released on $300,000 bail by Sutter County Judge Davis Ashby, although the CHP had asked that bail be set at $1 million or denied.  While ICE was not notified at the time of his release, agents located Huazo-Jardinez at his residence and took him into custody.  Let's hope Judge Ashby is not presiding over the trial. 

The "sentencing reform" movement is mis-named.  It's actually a movement for widespread reduction of sentences for felons, and aims to achieve this objective in significant measure through one particular mechanism  --  scaling back or eliminating mandatory minimums.

Baltimore leaders on Friday proposed changing city law to require a mandatory one-year sentence for illegal gun possession in much of the city -- within 100 yards of a school, park, church, public building or other public place of assembly.

The bill would prevent any part of the one-year sentence from being suspended, and preclude those with such convictions from receiving parole.

Mayor Catherine Pugh said she'd like to do more to restrict guns, but "this is what we can do locally" without changing state law.

Pugh acknowledged that there is a church or a school "on nearly every corner" in the city, and said "as it relates to this legislation, that's a good thing."

Police Commissioner Kevin Davis praised the bill as a much-needed change to help the city address its soaring violence. Baltimore is on pace to surpass 300 homicides for the third year in a row. Before 2015, that mark hadn't been reached since the 1990s.

With large numbers of people getting their information primarily from alternative media, mostly on the Internet, the prosecution side of criminal law may need to rethink how it approaches cases and public opinion.  Tony Saavedra writes in the Orange County (CA) Register:

It's a standard line in almost any Hollywood legal drama: A prosecutor tells a herd of reporters he won't answer a question because "I don't want to try this case in the court of public opinion."

In real life, that premise might be changing.

Go to YouTube this week and punch in the words "Orange County District Attorney and Kenneth Clair" and you'll find a legal drama playing out almost exclusively in the court of public opinion.

On one side is the first in a series of short videos from the District Attorney's Office explaining why it thinks there should be no new trial, or any leniency for Clair, who in 1987 was convicted of the murder three years earlier of Linda Faye Rodgers, a Santa Ana nanny.

Note the important distinction that this is a long-ago trial in which the judgment is being collaterally attacked.  This is not a case presently going before a jury, and it never will go to a jury again if the DA and AG can help it.

Advocates for death row inmates regularly whip up public opinion on the net with misleading characterizations of the case.  When Georgia sought to execute cop-killer Troy Davis, there was a national furor.  The U.S. Supreme Court took the extremely rare step of entertaining a habeas corpus petition filed directly in that court and transferring it to a district court for hearing and findings.  The district court judge, after hearing the witnesses in person, held that Davis's case was "largely smoke and mirrors" and "not credible or lacking in probative value."  The bottom line was, "Mr. Davis is not innocent."  Would the case have gotten that far if the PR campaign for Davis had been met with a PR response?  Would that be a better result?

From the OK Gov:

I, Mary Fallin, Governor of the State of Oklahoma, pursuant to Section 10 of Article 6 of the Oklahoma Constitution, hereby grant a stay of the execution of Richard Eugene Glossip of thirty-seven days from the current scheduled date of execution, September 30, 2015. This stay is ordered due to the Department of Corrections having received potassium acetate as drug number three for the three-drug protocol. This stay will give the Department of Corrections and its attorneys the opportunity to determine whether potassium acetate is compliant with the execution protocol and/or to obtain potassium chloride. The execution for Richard Eugene Glossip is therefore scheduled for Friday, November 6, 2015.

Technically that is a reprieve, not a stay.  The referenced section of the state constitution says, "The Governor shall have power to grant after conviction, reprieves or leaves of absence not to exceed sixty (60) days, without the action of the Pardon and Parole Board."

Glossip's petition to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied today with only Justice Breyer noting a dissenting vote.  They evidently were not impressed with his actual innocence claim, in contrast to Troy Davis, where they sent the case to a federal district judge for a full evidentiary hearing (at the conclusion of which he declared Davis's innocence claim to be "smoke and mirrors.")

Odd that potassium chloride would present a problem.  That is nothing fancy, just a simple salt.  Non-sodium table salt substitute (yuck) is often potassium chloride.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has dueling op-eds on the death penalty.  Unfortunately, they are securely behind the paywall.  The pro argument by yours truly is here, if you have a subscription.  The con argument is by David Burge.  That's pretty nervy, charging people to read an article that was handed to you for free.

I will paste mine after the break. (Thanks, Sabrina.)  It is somewhat Georgia-centric, considering the venue.

According to multiple sources, including this ABC News piece, the sensational story of a sadistic gang rape by (white, let's not forget that) frat boys is unsupported by any substantive evidence.  In other words, after searching for months, the police couldn't find a single witness or a single piece of forensic evidence to support the story.  Zip. The ABC article begins (emphasis added);

A five-month police investigation into an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, described in graphic detail in a Rolling Stone article, showed no evidence the attack took place and was stymied by the accuser's unwillingness to cooperate, authorities said Monday.

The article entitled "A rape on campus" traced the story from a student identified only as "Jackie," who said she was raped at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on September, 28, 2012. Police said there were numerous discrepancies between the article and what they found in their investigation.

"All I can tell you is that there is no substantive basis to conclude that what was reported in that article happened," Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo said.

Longo said Jackie first described a sexual assault in May 2013 when she met with a dean about an academic issue, but "the sexual act was not consistent with what was described" in the Rolling Stone article. When she met with police, she didn't want them to investigate the alleged assault.

She also refused to talk to police after the article was printed in November and ignited the national conversation about sexual assaults on college campuses. 

Ah, yes, our old friend the "national conversation."

The pattern is becoming all too familiar.  There is a claim of a gross injustice with inflammatory allegations.  Then there is a media firestorm.  When a full investigation reveals the actual facts, there has been no injustice, yet a substantial segment of the population will continue to believe there was, continuing to believe the original, discredited, inflammatory allegations.

First Troy Davis, then Trayvon Martin, now Michael Brown.  Different cases, different underlying facts, but the same overall pattern.

No, Michael Brown was not shot in the back.  The autopsy conclusively refutes that allegation.  Yet the witnesses who claimed to have seen that still said it, and maybe they really believed it, as explained in this article in the WaPo.

These incidents have a deep, corrosive effect on our society.  They add to polarization and alienation.  What can be done?  Well for starters, all of us, but especially those in the media, need to be a bit less prone to jumping on claims such as the ones made in these cases.  Lets get the real facts first.

Is a claim that a convicted prisoner is actually innocent of the crime, by itself without any claim that the trial was procedurally unfair, a ground for relief in habeas corpus?  That question remains unanswered.  Today in Jones v. Taylor, No. 13-36202, the Ninth Circuit reversed a district court's grant of relief to an Oregon prisoner convicted of intrafamily sexual abuse.  As sometimes happens in such cases, the witnesses (who are family of the defendant) recanted.  The opinion by Judge Tashima skips the question of whether a sufficient showing of actual innocence can be a ground for habeas relief and says that this showing doesn't make it.

This is a common outcome in such cases.  The Supreme Court seemed poised to decide the "actual innocence" question in Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993), but when it took a good, hard look at the evidence it saw that it fell "far short" of anything that might conceivably warrant overturning a conviction.  In the infamous Troy Davis case, the high court took the extraordinary step of sending an original habeas petition to a district court for fact-finding on innocence, where the district judge found that Davis's claim of innocence was "smoke and mirrors." 

Ann Coulter has a second column in two weeks focused on how the media reports death penalty cases.  This week she goes after the New York Times and its touting of a study which found that 4% of condemned murderers have been falsely convicted.   The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science used statistical analysis to come up with the 4% estimate.  As Coulter notes the media takes this estimate and transforms it into "4% of people on death row are innocent" and if you disagree you must hate science.  She also talks about the remarkably biased reporting surrounding the 2011 execution of Troy Davis, which suggested that he was "very possibly innocent."     

The Death Penalty Information Center is out with its usual annual report on the death report.  As is standard for DPIC, it contains some useful information along with heaping doses of spin and with any facts that might point in a direction contrary to their agenda omitted. 

Last year at this time, I noted:

The number of death sentences imposed in the U.S. has been dropping for the last 11 years.  Those interested in spinning can claim a single cause consistent with their viewpoint, e.g., (1) the American people are turning away from the death penalty; or (2) sentences are down because murder is down because the death penalty is working.  Reality is a bit messier, as it usually is.

That remains true.  As noted in last year's post, the drop in the murder rate accounts for a substantial portion of the long-term drop in executions.  That effect predominated in the early years of the decline, while other factors, more difficult to determine, have predominated in more recent years.

A popular feature on newspaper websites is a "fact checker" page, which purports to check the statements of public figures against the facts.  These features have been controversial, as they are frequently alleged to have a political bias or to get the facts wrong themselves.

The Oregonian and PolitiFact have this page on a statement by Clatsop County, Oregon DA Joshua Marquis that opponents of the death penalty are "in a minority of about 25 percent."  They rate that statement as "half true."  See also this post by Ryan Kost.  How do the assertions of fact justifying this rating stand up to scrutiny?

Christopher Thomas Johnson, a killer discussed here, was executed tonight in Alabama.

His crime was that, in order to get revenge on his wife and to avoid having to pay child support, he killed his six month-old son by beating and suffocating him.  The evidence showed that he struck the child not fewer than 85 times.

The sheer evil of something like this is beyond my capacity to describe.  I notice that the crowd that was raising the roof about Troy Davis  --  to make the case that the death penalty should never be imposed  -- is notably quiet tonight.  I  would like to ascribe this  to an embryonic sense of decency, but more likely it's just because they're shrewd enough to shut up. 

I noted previously that a Rasmussen poll  taken shortly after the Troy Davis execution showed no statistically significant drop in support for the death penalty, finding that 60% approved.  Today, Gallup came out with its survey, showing a nearly identical 61% approval.  That is, however, a small drop from last year's poll, which showed 64% approval.  It is also the smallest number since the Furman case, which for practical purposes temporarily abolished the death penalty in 1972.  (Unlike DPIC, C&C declines to spin either news or numbers.  A drop is a drop).

That said, Gallup  finds that two-thirds of the public believes the death penalty is imposed either the right amount or not often enough, with the latter view considerably outweighing the former.  The specific numbers are:  Not enough  --  40%; about right  --  27%; and too often  --  25%.  And at 61%, the death penalty continues to have the highest approval of any contentious issue in public life.

The US Supreme Court this morning released the orders list from last Friday's conference.  Only two cases were taken.  The criminal case is Blueford v. Arkansas, No. 10-1320, dealing with the double jeopardy implications when a jury deadlocks while considering various degrees of the charged offense.  Petitioner claims the jury announced it had acquitted on the greater offense.  The State's Brief in Opposition says there was no verdict to that effect but only "an informal exchange between [the] foreperson and the trial judge...."

The Court turned down two high-profile cases.  One is Wetzel v. Abu-Jamal, No. 11-49.  The Third Circuit stretched to overturn Abu-Jamal's death sentence, adopting an expansive interpretation of Mills v. Maryland, 486 U. S. 367 (1988).  The Supreme Court itself took a limited view of Mills in Smith v. Spisak, 130 S. Ct. 676 (2010) and sent the Abu-Jamal case back to the Third for reconsideration.  The decision after remand is here.

I think the Third is wrong, and on top of that the Supreme Court has such a dim view of Mills at this point that they might even be persuaded to overrule it altogether.  So why did they turn the case down?  I suspect that after the Troy Davis circus they just don't want another high-profile capital case at this point.

The other high-profile denial is Ryan v. Doody, No. 11-175, the Phoenix Buddhist Temple massacre case.  The case is not capital because Doody was a bit under 18 at the time of this horrific crime, illustrating the problem with sharp age cut-offs. This case was also a do-over, sent back to reconsider the Miranda issue after Florida v. Powell, 130 S. Ct. 1195 (2010).  The decision on remand is here.  Judge Tallman wrote a 38-page dissent.  Justice Alito dissented from denial of certiorari, apparently without an opinion.  So Doody gets a new trial without the confession.  If he walks, that will probably be the worst injustice ever perpetrated under the Miranda rule.

The two juvenile LWOP cases, noted here, have apparently been relisted again.

David Ingram has this post, with the above title, at BLT.

She is right, to that extent, of course.  While the elder Justices all appear to be healthy enough, Father Time eventually comes for us all, and the President elected next November could have multiple appointments.  That would have important implications for criminal law.

According to this ABC piece, it did:  "...the country appears to be revisiting its stance on the death penalty, in light of Troy Davis' execution last week."

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that the story adduces no evidence to support this statement.  It's simply an article of faith in some quarters that Event X or Study Y always "re-ignites questions about capital punishment," or some such thing.  For example, the title of every article I have ever seen on the DPIC site is roughly, "New survey shows declining support for the death penalty."  I have yet to see a single one that says, "New survey shows increasing support for the death penalty," even though DP support has remained stable or shown occasional slight increases over the last seven or eight years.

Still, given all the massively slanted coverage of the Davis case, it's a fair enough question.  Did his execution decrease DP support?

Well, there's a way to find out:  Ask.  While such an enterprise was apparently too much for ABC, it was not too much for the quite reliable pollster Rasmussen.  The topic sentence of his report is, "The execution of Troy Davis last week for murdering a Georgia policeman prompted controversy here and abroad, but it did little to shift opinions on the death penalty."  Specifically, he finds that support had previously been at between 61%-63%, and is now at 60%, a statistically insignificant difference.  And in Rasmussen, as in every other poll I've seen, DP support remains at better than 2-1. 

Ken Jost of Congressional Quarterly has this post at his Jost on Justice blog, with the above title. Jost is definitely not one to shade his assessments in favor of the law enforcement side of things.  He tends to lean the other way.

Although I cannot agree with CNN's geographer that England (together with France and Germany) constitutes the entire world, the English are our forebearers and largely gave us our law.

This weekend, an astute English writer  --  and a death penalty abolitionist, no less  --  took an unvarnished look at the Troy Davis protest crowd.  What he saw was not pretty:

There are few subjects that provoke as much smug condescension and shallow anti-Americanism as the death penalty in the United States. And the "debate" over the execution in Georgia last Wednesday of Troy Davis, 42, convicted of the 1989 murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, marked a new low.

The sheer emotionalism and partisanship of much of the coverage of the case in Britain was an embarrassment. On virtually no other subject could you find facts presented so selectively, conclusions so sweeping and reasoning so simplistic.

He decided to present some of the facts selectively swept under the rug:

Unfortunately, little about the Davis case fits this [the protesters'] picture. A jury of seven blacks and five whites found that Davis, who had a street name of "Rah", standing for "Rough As Hell", had been pistol-whipping a homeless man in a Burger King car park and had shot MacPhail dead when he intervened.

Again and again, courts confirmed the Davis conviction as being on legally solid ground. Lynchings [the word used by the protesters] were carried out by racist mobs rushing to judgement, dragging their quarry out to string them up from a tree. To describe a two-decade legal process that twice went to the highest court in the land as a "lynching" is to try to strip the word of all meaning.

With very, very few exceptions, I have yet to read in the American press anything remotely as honest at this British piece.

Hat tip to TarlsQtr.

The effort is underway to portray the execution of cop killer Troy Davis as a worldwide outrage.  We can hardly be surprised that the usual abolitionist outlets are lathered up, but might have hoped that allegedly mainstream networks like CNN would do some fact-checking before joining the party.

Oh well.

Here's the CNN headline:  World shocked by U.S. execution of Troy Davis

There's only one thing wrong with the CNN story, that being that it says absolutely nothing about "the world."  It notes that an EU official learned "with deep regret" of the execution, and that there were protests in England, France and Germany.

That's it. Three countries.  I had not previously been aware that the "world" consisted of three countries, or of all Europe for that matter.  Some of us thought the "world" consisted of other places including Africa, the Mideast, the Subcontinent, the Orient and North America -- every one of which, unlike Europe, has and uses the death penalty, and some of which use it much more frequently than we do. 

 Maybe I should send CNN a globe.

P.S.  There are actually 196 countries in the world, and the four largest of them  --  China, India, the United States and Indonesia  --  all use the death penalty.