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- "Sentenced to death at 17: too young to die?" (EXTRAtv)
- "Napoleon Beazley, the high school football star, the promising student, and the future Marine. But now the only time they see Napoleon is in the Huntysville Texas Prison. Now 23, he's been on death row since the age he was condemned to die at age 17. Die by lethal injection.
- "Napoleon spoke to EXTRA through visiting room mesh during a break from his 22-hour day inside his cell. Six years ago he and two older friends carjacked John Luttig and his wife. Nearly killed her and then murdered Luttig himself. Luttig's son says justice was done."
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(Added: 24-Feb-2000 Hits: 8 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Texas: They kill 'em all, guilty or not
- According to this Houston Press article, the great state of Texas plans to execute Odell Barnes on March 1. He's a robber, a rapist, and a thief, which he admits. However, it's also becoming clear that he did not commit the murder that placed him on death row. And the great state of Texas, under the lovely Killer George Dubya, doesn't give a damn.
- Perhaps if a state murders a demonstrably innocent man, the Supremes will decide that the death penalty has no place in this country.
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(Added: 5-Feb-2000 Hits: 7 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- "America's romance with the death penalty"
- "The death penalty is also capricious, a problem often explained by racism. Even though 50% of all murder victims nationwide are black, almost 85% of the victims in death-penalty cases are white, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, only four white defendants have been executed for killing blacks, yet 75 black defendants have been executed for murdering whites.
- "Blacks who kill whites are 19 times as likely to be executed as whites who kill blacks.[...]
- "A 1994 staff report by the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights found that in cases where the [federal] government decided to seek capital punishment under the drug-kingpin statute, 89% of the defendants were either black or Latino. More recent statistics show little improvement. Of the 133 defendants authorized for death-penalty prosecution from 1988 to 1998, 76% were members of racial minorities.
- "Recently, Attorney General Janet Reno has sought the death penalty in a brutal multiple murder at a Washington, DC Starbucks but not for the similar case at an area McDonalds. Was it because the alleged Starbucks killer is black and two of the victims were white while all of the McDonald's victims and the perpetrator were black?"
(Added: 22-Feb-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- "Cry for justice": Texas vs the (possibly) innocent
- "The story of Roy Criner was first reported in the Houston Press ["Hard Time," by Bob Burtman, September 10, 1998]. At the time, DNA evidence had apparently cleared him of guilt in a brutal Montgomery County rape-murder 12 years earlier. But the state refused to let him go, saying the DNA results didn't prove that Criner hadn't committed the crime. He could have been wearing a condom, said Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller, who rejected calls for a new trial."[...]
- "If the state's unwillingness to accept DNA evidence were the only miscarriage of justice in Criner's case, it would be bad enough. But the case has been marked by police and prosecutorial mistakes -- possibly malfeasance -- from the start."
(Added: 22-Feb-2000 Hits: 2 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- "Getting Inside a Teen Brain"
- "Hormones aren't the only reason adolescents act crazy. Their gray matter differs from children's and adults'." (from wetlog)
(Added: 24-Feb-2000 Hits: 2 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- "Killing with Prejudice: Race and the death penalty in the USA"
- Produced by Amnesty International
- "Beyond any reasonable doubt, the US death penalty continues to reflect the deeply-rooted prejudices of the society that condones its use. Amnesty International cannot find any evidence that current legal safeguards eliminate racial bias in the application of the death penalty."
(Added: 22-Feb-2000 Hits: 2 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- "Some victims more equal than others"
- An editorial on how and why the death penalty sometimes gets administered differently, having little to do with the crime and everything to do with the victim's family.
(Added: 22-Feb-2000 Hits: 3 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- "Trial and Error": Illinois vs the innocent
- " A Tribune investigation found hundreds of homicide cases where prosecutors violated their oath by hiding evidence or twisting the truth. Innocent people went to prison, some to Death Row."
(Added: 22-Feb-2000 Hits: 2 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Actual Innocence
- To be sure, this is a promo site for the book. But there's actual information in the promo materials. And the authors were on "The Charlie Rose Show" tonight, talking about their book.
- For some reason, the authors are actually surprised that prosecutors resist testing evidence in cases where it seems that an innocent person may have been executed. They suspect that most of this is due to emotional aspects--the people have a lot invested in believing that a given person has done it, and people who have identified a given person frequently can't conceive that they could have made such an egregious mistake.
- Police and prosecutorial misconduct, forced or false confessions, incompetent or corrupt lawyers ... It's all horribly depressing.
(Added: 17-Feb-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Another Death Row Inmate Cleared
- Perhaps it's me ... but when you've cleared more convicts than you've executed in a given state, surely that says that there's something desperately wrong with your judicial system.
- In this case, prosecutors relied on a jailhouse informant known to tell lies.
(Added: 20-Jan-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Court orders retrial for death row inmate
- "A new trial is necessary in order to preserve the trustworthiness and reputation of the judicial process," Justice Mary Anne McMorrow wrote.
- Just curious: is there anyone out there that actually believes in the trustworthiness of the judicial process?
(Added: 31-Jan-2000 Hits: 0 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Death row watch: Texas vs the (possibly) innocent
- "That's supposed to be the point of an appeal: a chance to revisit the case and make sure that if a serious mistake was made at the trial, that mistake can be corrected. But short of exoneration by DNA evidence or identification of another perpetrator, the condemned have a tough time getting relief."
(Added: 22-Feb-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Death unqualified, part 9,678
- another Illinois man will probably have his death sentence vacated. Due, yet again, to prosecutorial incompetence and possibly, prosecutorial malfeasance.
- So, in the past decade, more or less, that's 14 exonerated, 12 executed. Perhaps it's just me, but I don't think this record speaks at all well for the crime-and-punishment system. It doesn't suggest that those twelve died for any good reason.
(Added: 26-Jan-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Death Unqualified: Nobody wants to know
- Nobody in power wants to know how or why so many, more than half, of Illinos' death penalty cases unravel quite so badly. Nobody wants to investigate the police. Nobody wants to investigate the lawyers.
- Nobody wants to know.
(Added: 26-Jan-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Death unqualified: the minimum
- Illinois is moving toward having minimum standards for defense attorneys in capital cases. In other words, they'll be "death qualified".
(Added: 31-Jan-2000 Hits: 0 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- DNA and innocence and the law
- Senator Leahy has proposed that the federal government allow DNA evidence to be used to prove innocence. Similar proposals are on tap in several states, though at present, Illinois and New York are the only ones that allow it--as long as the inmate or his lawyers or family can pay for it. (The minimum cost of DNA testing of this type id $5000.)
- State prosecutors are, of course, resisting strenuously.
(Added: 22-Feb-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Executioner's swan song
- It seems that the country may--slowly--be considering alternatives to the death penalty.
(Added: 8-Feb-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Feds review federal death sentences for racial bias
- You know, this article is another one of those namesake things. I mean, the feds are looking at whether or not the federal death sentence has been applied excessively or unfairly to minorities, right? Later in that article, the author notes that 2/3 of the 21 inmates on federal death row are minorities.
- Hmm. The country is 20% minority, but 66% of those facing the death sentence are minorities. Gee, I wonder if this sort of disparity might be ... oh, say an indicator or something? You think?
(Added: 10-Feb-2000 Hits: 1 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Human Rights Watch urges the Shrub to stay Betty Lou Beets' execution
- Not that it has a ghost of a chance, of course. And even if it did, at this point, he can only stay it for 30 days, and that only once.
- I hadn't realized the extent of her attorney's malfeasance, however; I'd thought it was just plain old incompetence. However, according to Human Rights Watch, "He failed to present mitigating evidence of spousal abuse at Beets' sentencing. In addition, Beets' trial attorney did not disclose evidence indicating Beets had not killed her husband for financial gain, an aggravating factor that led to her death sentence. Had the attorney testified on Beets' behalf to present this evidence, he would have been forced to excuse himself from her case and relinquish media rights Beets had agreed to give him to pay for his legal services. Beets' attorney was subsequently convicted for criminal actions in another death penalty case and sentenced to federal prison."
(Added: 24-Feb-2000 Hits: 5 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
- Illinois governor orders executions moratorium
- HA!
- "I can't support a system which in its administration has proven to be so fraught with error and come so close to the ultimate nightmare -- the state's taking of innocent life."
- Wake up and smell the blood, gov: chances are pretty damned good that the state HAS taken innocent life, and done so repeatedly.
(Added: 31-Jan-2000 Hits: 0 Rating: 0 Votes: 0) Rate It
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