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Despite Evidence From Discredited Medical Examiner, Mississippi's Jeffrey Havard Nears Execution


By: Radley Balko
The Huffington Post
Thursday, November 29, 2012

Last year, NPR looked at two dozen cases in which adults had been convicted of killing infants or young children, then later exonerated or given commutations. The investigation found a number of common themes in those cases. One of them was that prosecutors often relied on the subjective opinions of a medical examiner. Another was the understandable sorrow and anger a community feels when a child dies, which can nudge law enforcement officials and forensic specialists to see crimes in what may have only been accidental deaths.


Marching Against the Death Penalty in Texas


By: Liliana Segura
The Nation
Friday, November 16, 2012

On a Tuesday last March, the state of Mississippi executed Larry Matthew Puckett, a 35-year-old man convicted of sexually assaulting and killing his boss’s wife, 28-year-old Rhonda Hatten Griffis, in 1995. Matt, as his family called him, was an Eagle Scout at the time; he had just graduated from high school and was days away from leaving for basic training with the Navy before he was arrested. From the beginning he insisted on his innocence, claiming that his former employer had killed his wife in a rage upon discovering her and Matt together in her mobile home. Although his story contained inconsistencies, there were red flags. Griffis was beaten to death with a club, yet her blood was nowhere to be found on Puckett’s clothes, just on her husband’s. Nor was Puckett’s semen found on her body.


Defeat of Proposition 34: California's death penalty battle will continue


Credit: AP Photo/Eric Risberg
Reporters tour the new lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif., Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010.
By: Howard Mintz
San Jose Mercury News
Wednesday, November 7, 2012

California's first ballot-box attempt in more than three decades to repeal the death penalty may have failed on Tuesday, but it is likely to inflame the debate over the hot-button issue as the state tries once again to kick-start its indisputably clumsy capital punishment system.


Execution changes occur without public scrutiny, input


By: Mike Ward
Austin American Statesman
Thursday, October 18, 2012

On July 9, when Texas switched from three drugs to just one to execute its most heinous criminals, Rick Thaler, the state’s No. 3 corrections official, signed off on the change without fanfare after consulting with prison officials in other states.


Death Row inmates oppose Prop. 34


Credit: Michael Macor, The Chronicle / SF
By: Bob Egelko
San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, September 24, 2012

Like other state prisoners, the 725 inmates on California's Death Row can't vote. But if they could, there's evidence that most of them would vote against a November ballot initiative to abolish the death penalty.

It's not that they want to die, attorney Robert Bryan said. They just want to hang on to the possibility of proving that they're innocent, or at least that they were wrongly convicted. That would require state funding for lawyers and investigators - funding that Proposition 34 would eliminate for many Death Row inmates after the first round of appeals.

Bryan has represented several condemned prisoners in California as well as Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical activist and commentator whose death sentence for the murder of a Philadelphia policeman was recently reduced to life in prison. The attorney said California inmates have told him they'd prefer the current law, with its prospect of lethal injection, to one that would reduce their appellate rights.


Will Pennsylvania Execute a Man Who Killed His Abusers?

By: Liliana Segura
The Nation
Thursday, September 13, 2012

Eighteen-year-old Terrance Williams “did not fit the mold of a typical street criminal,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September of 1984. “He was a bright, talented college student, former star quarterback of the Germantown High School football team. His friends, teachers, coaches and neighbors could not believe that he would be involved in murder, or any sordid activity.”

Yet Williams, who is African-American, had committed two grisly killings. One victim, the Inquirer reported, was 50-year-old Herbert Hamilton, who had been found naked, with a knife through his throat, on his kitchen floor. The other, Amos Norwood, who led the altar boys and directed the Youth Theater Fellowship at Philadelphia’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, had been beaten with a tire iron, set on fire, and left in a cemetery.


Why can't torture victims get justice?


Mother of Chicago police torture victim Marcus Wiggins speaks at a protest
By: Mark Clements
Socialist Worker
Wednesday, August 15, 2012

NEARLY A million people lined up between 39th Street and 55th Street along Martin Luther King Drive in Chicago to watch the annual Bud Billiken Day parade. As usual, political figures such as Rev. Jesse Jackson participated in the parade. One of the officeholders was Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who appeared, waving from the stage of a float.

I was there to ask her why victims of Chicago Police have not been able to win justice.

Former police Commander Jon Burge and his subordinates tortured Black and Latino suspects at Area Two and Three violent crimes for two decades, starting in the early 1970s. More than 200 men were physically and psychologically abused with tactics such as electroshock to their genitals, suffocation with plastic typewriter covers, Russian Roulette, beatings with telephone books, waterboarding, hanging suspects out of police station windows and sticking theirs heads in toilets.


Medical Examiner: Testimony Misconstrued in Rodney Reed Case

Explosive information filed in federal court


Credit: Open Image Gallery
Stacey Stites was murdered in April 1996. Medical experts, including former Travis County ME Roberto Bayardo, say state's theory of her death is wrong.
By: Jordan Smith
The Austin Chronicle
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Former Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo says his testimony in the 1998 capital trial of Rodney Reed for the sexual assault and killing of Stacey Stites was misconstrued by prosecutors to suggest a solid timeline for Stites' death, and to prove that Reed had sexually assaulted Stites. But that, he now says, is not at all what he found.


Supreme Court must not allow executions of the mentally impaired


Marvin Wilson was executed Tuesday in Texas for a 1992 murder. His IQ was 61, meaning he had the mind of a first-grader.
By: Laura Moye
CNN
Thursday, August 9, 2012

Texas slapped the U.S. Supreme Court in the face, and the justices just took it.

On Tuesday night, Texas executed Marvin Wilson, whose IQ score was 61 -- low enough that it should have met any standard for "diminished mental capacity." Shockingly, the court did not intervene to stop the execution despite its 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia barring the execution of the "mentally retarded" as "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Eighth Amendment.


Adding insult to injustice

The injustice system has again victimized Anthony Porter


Anthony Porter (left) in front of the Cook County Courthouse
By: Noreen McNulty
Socialist Worker
Tuesday, August 7, 2012

A CHICAGO man who 10 years ago came within days of being murdered by the Illinois execution machine before he was proven innocent is going back to jail--for taking sticks of deodorant from a South Side drugstore.

Anthony Porter was arrested at a Walgreens drugstore just blocks from his house last fall. He pled guilty to retail theft and was given a prison sentence of one year--even though the value of what he took amounted to a few dollars.

Such a sentence would be a cruel injustice no matter who got it, but it's especially grotesque happening to Porter.

In 1999, after spending 17 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit, Porter became the 10th person released from Illinois' death row in about as many years. With the state's execution system coming under growing scrutiny, his case came to stand for everything that was wrong with capital punishment in Illinois.