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Thread: Mississippi Capital Punishment News

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    Mississippi Capital Punishment News

    The Mississippi Senate today passed a bill that would authorize the death penalty for anyone convicted of raping or sexually battering a child under the age of 13.

    Under current law, the maximum penalty for such a crime is imprisonment for life.

    “There are two reasons this is a good piece of legislation,” said Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ellisville. “One of them obviously is retribution. The other is simply that this could be a deterrence.”

    The principal author of Senate Bill 2596 was Senate Judiciary A Chairman Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, but McDaniel handled it on the floor.

    Asked whether he believed the new law could hinder prosecution, McDaniel said: “We didn’t mandate this. It’s simply an option for prosecutors to consider.”

    The bill passed unanimously among those senators present without discussion.

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    May 19, 2010

    Death Row Prisoners Sue State

    Read the complaint and supporting materials

    Steve Knox has been on Mississippi’s death row for murder since 1999. In a lawsuit filed May 6, Jackson attorney Jim Craig says that the state’s legal system has repeatedly failed Knox and 15 other death-row inmates. The problems with Knox’s representation began with a woefully underprepared lawyer in his original trial and continued when a state-funded agency failed to thoroughly investigate the original trial for later, post-conviction petitions, Craig alleges.

    Charles Press, now a senior attorney with the California Innocence Project, tried to help Knox’s trial attorney. Along with Debra Sabah, now his wife, Press provided pro bono assistance on death penalty cases in Mississippi from 1998 to 2001. The two met with Knox’s attorney the weekend before his trial and drafted several pre-trial motions for the attorney to use, including motions for DNA evidence and a psychiatric evaluation. The trial attorney, who had not prepared for the trial before meeting Press and Sabah, filed only one of the motions, however.

    “That was a startling lack of preparation,” Press said. “Even by Mississippi standards, I hadn’t seen someone going to trial in a death penalty case who did that little. It was doomed.”

    Evidence of Knox’s ill-prepared trial lawyer may have helped Knox obtain a lighter sentence, but the state-appointed lawyers who represent death-row prisoners after conviction never raised the evidence in their 2003 petition on his behalf. They also did not seek new DNA testing, which, in the case of Knox’s federal lawyers, has raised doubts about whether Knox’s blood matches that found on the victim. In 2005, the state Supreme Court denied Knox’s petition and reaffirmed his death sentence.

    Knox is one of 16 death-row prisoners suing Mississippi for failure to adequately staff and fund the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, which represents death-sentenced prisoners after they have exhausted the state appeals process. The lawsuit, filed May 6 in Hinds County Chancery Court, alleges that the Mississippi Supreme Court, which appoints the office’s executive director, prevented successive directors from hiring private attorneys to help shoulder a rapidly growing caseload. In the suit, Craig alleges that the state Legislature compounded the office’s staffing shortage by repeatedly slashing its budget.

    State law requires prisoners sentenced to death to raise any complaints of government misconduct, ineffective representation or jury issues their in post-conviction petitions. Developing a petition for post-conviction relief takes an enormous amount of time, however: attorneys must trawl through trial and appeals records, as well as re-interview witnesses.

    The American Bar Association provides a guideline for workload on capital post-conviction cases of 800 to 1200 hours per case. Work on post-conviction cases often extends well beyond the ABA guideline, Press said.

    “By the time someone gets a case in post-conviction, it can be seven, eight years after trial,” Press said. “If it wasn’t tried very well, it’s just that much harder to try to find the evidence that you need to present. … You have to present everything as sworn testimony through affidavits. It’s a really time-consuming process.

    Created in
2000, the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel started with a staff of three attorneys and one investigator. The state Supreme Court began assigning cases to the office almost immediately, handing the office 16 cases in an eight-week span from November 2009 to January 2001. Faced with a daunting workload, then-director C. Jackson Williams tried to hire private attorneys to help prepare petitions in the cases, which were due in 180 days. Chief Justice Edwin Pittman blocked Williams’ efforts, though, and in a December 2001 confidential order charged him with “improper” actions for attempting to hire the outside attorneys, Craig says in the lawsuit. Williams resigned Dec. 31, 2001.

    “It started off somewhat slow, and then it became very clear that the court was just going to pile every case that they had on them,” Press said. “When Jack Williams was head, it just collapsed under the weight of the cases, and he resigned, which I think was actually the ethical thing to do given what his caseload was.”

    After Williams’ departure, the office declined further. Two staff attorneys resigned, leaving new director Bob Ryan as the office’s only attorney for several months. At the same time, state support for the office decreased. In 2001, the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel received $987,285 in state appropriations. The next year, its budgets dropped 27 percent, to $719,289. In 2003, the Legislature cut the office’s funding by another 10 percent, 
to $647,702.

    http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/index.php/site/comments/death_row_prisoners_sue_state_051910/

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    Miss. AG: State ‘Likely’ to Use New Execution Drug

    Mississippi will likely switch to a different drug for its next execution due to a nationwide shortage of one of the chemicals it has used in the past, authorities said Tuesday.

    Attorney General Jim Hood said Mississippi "most likely will" use pentobarbital in the state's next execution. Hood asked the Mississippi Supreme Court this week to set an execution date for Robert Simon Jr. The court didn't immediately act on the request.

    Mississippi has used a three-drug mixture for its lethal injections in the past, but one of those chemicals, an anesthetic called sodium thiopental, is in short supply. Sodium thiopental is one of the most common execution drugs used in the U.S., but the nationwide shortage has forced states to consider other options.

    Some states have already decided to use pentobarbital, a surgical sedative that is commonly used to euthanize animals.

    Texas and Oklahoma recently announced the switch to pentobarbital, and plan to use it along with two other drugs. Ohio became the first state to use pentobarbital alone when it executed an inmate with the drug March 10.

    Mississippi officials said they're still working out the details of handling executions with pentobarbital instead of sodium thiopental.

    Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tara Booth said state statute "provides that a lethal quantity of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate or other similar drug in combination with a chemical paralytic agent will be used."

    Hood said Mississippi is still trying to get sodium thiopental from other states, but so far that hasn't happened.

    "We're still looking into using this other substance (sodium thiopental), but we aren't really confident that we're going to get some," he said.

    Hood said his staff is studying other states' use of pentobarbital in hopes that Mississippi won't get bogged down in legal challenges if it begins using the drug. Court rulings in favor of pentobarbital in other states could be used as the basis for legal arguments in Mississippi.

    It's not clear how soon Mississippi's next execution will happen. Hood filed the request Monday for an April 20 execution date for Simon, who was sentenced to death for the 1990 killing of a married couple and their 12-year-old son. The U.S. Supreme Court had denied Simon's appeal earlier in the day.

    Meanwhile, the shortage of sodium thiopental is raising legal questions in other states.

    Attorneys in Kentucky, Georgia and Arizona want the U.S. Justice Department to investigate how those states got supplies of sodium thiopental. Drug Enforcement Administration officials said about a week ago they had seized Georgia's supply of the drug. A public defender for a Kentucky death row inmate also wants the Justice Department to determine if the state's contacts with a pharmaceutical company in India were handled properly.

    Just weeks before Mississippi's last executions - the first back-to-back executions in nearly 50 years - officials were scrambling to find enough sodium thiopental to carry out the sentences. The executions were carried out as scheduled, but only because the state found a pharmacy willing to give it the drug.

    Hood wrote a letter to Hospira Inc. last April, asking if he could do anything to help expedite a shipment of sodium thiopental because the state didn't have enough for two executions, scheduled the following month.

    The company declined, saying it doesn't support the use of its products in capital punishment and that manufacturing had halted in 2009 because of "manufacturing difficulties."

    The Mississippi Department of Corrections eventually got the drug from a pharmacist who doesn't want to be identified, officials said.

    http://www.wkrg.com/crime/article/mi...-2011_2-52-pm/

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    Mississippi plans to switch to new drug

    Mississippi criminal-justice officials are planning to administer a new drug in executing three men at the end of April, a law enforcement source told the Public Safety Examiner on Wednesday.

    The state plans to use the powerful sedative pentobarbital a drug used to "put down" large animals. Currently Mississippi uses sodium thiopental to carry out death sentences.

    Part of the reason for the switch is the belief it is a more humane drug to use in executing criminals, and part is the fact that the European Union has continued pressuring a United States company to cease production of sodium thiopental.

    According to the U.S. Justice Department, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas, have already switched to pentobarbital in executing those sentenced to death. Other states are expected to follow the trend.

    In March, Georgia's use of sodium thiopental was disputed by death row inmates and anti-death penalty activists when prison officials released documents showing the state obtained the drug from the United Kingdom firm Link Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Archimedes Pharma Limited.

    The drug was administered to Emmanuel Hammond in January. Hammond was a 45-year-old man convicted for the 1988 shotgun slaying of an Atlanta preschool teacher. His attorneys claimed in court documents the drug came from a "fly-by-night supplier operating from the back of a driving school in England." They claimed the drug was likely counterfeit. The U.S. Supreme Court, as well as lower courts, rejected Hammond's argument.

    The Mississippi Attorney General James Hood requested the state's highest court to allow the scheduling of three executions for April 20, April 27 and May 4. The first to be executed would be Robert Simon, who was sentenced to die by lethal injection for the vicious killings of a married couple and their 12-year-old son in 1990.

    Hood also requested execution dates be set for Rodney Gray, convicted of murdering an 80-year-old woman in 1994, and Benny Joe Stevens, sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of four people.

    Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps said the state has ordered the new lethal injection drug and already began practicing for the expected executions.

    http://www.groundreport.com/Business...exec_3/2937974

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    Mississippi high court rejects death row inmates' claims of inadequate legal representation

    The Mississippi Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of a lawsuit that sought to halt executions in the state.

    The suit was filed on behalf of more than a dozen death row inmates who claimed they received inadequate legal representation in their post-conviction appeals.

    A Hinds County chancery judge dismissed the suit in May 2010, and the inmates quickly appealed to the Supreme Court.

    On Wednesday, the Supreme Court rejected the inmates' appeal and said the case is "fully and finally denied."

    http://www.therepublic.com/view/stor...ction-Lawsuit/

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    South Mississippi death row cases

    After Thursday’s execution of William Mitchell, 53 inmates will remain on Mississippi’s death row. Of those, 12 were convicted of capital murders in South Mississippi counties. Those 12 are listed here by date of conviction:

    Jan. 13, 1976: Richard Gerald Jordan kidnapped and shot Edwina Marter, 32, of Gulfport in Harrison County. At 65, he’s the state’s oldest and longest-serving inmate on death row.

    Nov. 26, 1981: James Billiot used an 8-pound sledgehammer to beat to death his mother, stepfather and 14-year-old stepsister, in Hancock County.

    March 4, 1987: Roger Eric Thorson kidnapped and shot his former girlfriend, Gloria Jean McKinney, 29, in Harrison County.

    Sept. 8, 1990: Alan Dale Walker kidnapped, raped and drowned Konya Rebecca Edwards, 19, of Long Beach, at Crystal Lake in Harrison County.

    May 5, 1996: Blayde N Grayson stabbed Minnie Smith, 78, during a burglary in George County.

    Aug. 13, 1996: Gary Carl Simmons Jr., a supermarket butcher, shot and dismembered his roommate, Jeffrey Wolfe, 21, and tossed his remains in a bayou in Jackson County.

    Oct. 12, 2001: Fred Sanford Spicer struck his roommate, Edmond Hebert, 32, in the head with a sword as he slept and stole his vehicle in George County.

    Nov. 3, 2001: Thong Le and an alleged accomplice robbed Minh Heiu Thi Huynh, 46, of $1,300 and strangled her and her daughters, Thuy, 11, and Than, 15, in Jackson County.

    Aug. 27, 2004: Joseph Bishop Goff mutilated and set afire Brandy Stewart Yates, 29, of Irvington, Ala., in a hotel room in George County.

    June 21, 2007: Jason Lee Keller shot and robbed Biloxi store clerk Hat Nguyen, 41, in Harrison County.

    Aug. 26, 2008: Timothy Robert Ronk stabbed, robbed and set afire the home of Michelle Craite, 37, in Harrison County.

    Dec. 5, 2008: Leslie Galloway beat, raped, cut, set afire and ran over Shakeylia Anderson, 17, in Harrison County.

    http://www.sunherald.com/2012/03/17/...#storylink=cpy
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    Bill would allow Miss. to move death row inmates

    A bill to let the state move death row inmates away from Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman is headed to the governor's desk.

    Lawmakers say the Department of Corrections intends to shift some death row inmates to Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, a 1,000-bed private prison run by Corrections Corp. of America. The Woodville prison includes a maximum-security unit.

    The House gave final passage Monday to Senate Bill 2606 by a vote of 118-1. The bill earlier passed the Senate.

    The Corrections Department supports the bill, a spokeswoman said, adding that executions would still take place at Parchman.

    House Corrections Chairman George Flaggs, a Vicksburg Democrat, says prison officials believe the ability to move prisoners back and forth could be a disciplinary tool to control inmates who have little to lose.

    http://www.sunherald.com/2012/03/26/...#storylink=cpy
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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    Inmates: State failed to publicize lethal new drug

    A lawsuit contending that state corrections officials failed to properly publicize as required by law its switch to a new lethal injection drug is before the Mississippi Supreme Court.

    The case is among dozens on the court's current docket. The court will not hear oral arguments.

    The lawsuit by two anti-death penalty organizations was filed last year on behalf of three inmates. Two of the three have been executed.

    Mississippians Educating for Smart Justice and Mississippi Cure Inc. sued the state, hoping to stop the executions because the state switched to a different lethal injection drug. They said corrections officials failed to properly publicize the change as required by the Administrative Procedures Act.

    The 2003 law requires state agencies to notify the public of proposed rule and regulation changes. The law gives citizens the right to offer opinions on proposed changes to rules and regulations, ask for hearings and request official opinions from state agencies.

    In April of 2011, Hinds County Circuit Judge Bill Gowan rejected the challenge. The Supreme Court then denied a request to stop the scheduled executions while an appeal was pending.

    The lawsuit was filed on behalf of inmates Benny Joe Stevens, Rodney Gray and Robert Simon Jr. Stevens was executed May 10. 2011; Gray was executed May 17, 2011. Simon has appeals pending in federal court.

    The Mississippi Department of Correction said in April of 2011 that it would switch to a different drug, pentobarbital, for the state's next execution because of a nationwide shortage of one drug it has used in the past.

    Mississippi has used a three-drug mixture for its lethal injections for many years. Last year, one of the drugs Mississippi had used in the process, sodium thiopental, became unavailable when its European supplier bowed to pressure from death penalty opponents and stopped making it. No other vendor could be found, so the drug was replaced by pentobarbital.

    http://www.necn.com/05/19/12/Inmates...d41504992abee8
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    2012 could see most Miss. executions since 1950s

    With four executions so far and two scheduled this month, Mississippi is on pace to have more executions in 2012 than it has had in any year since the 1950s.

    The last time Mississippi executed more than four inmates in any single year was in 1961, when five died in the gas chamber. There were eight executions in each of the years 1955 and 1956. In those days, inmates were put to death for crimes like armed robbery, rape or murder. Today, the only crime punishable by death in Mississippi is capital murder — a murder that happens during the commission of another felony.

    The increase in executions comes as fewer people are being sentenced to death across the country. Some experts say the upward trend in Mississippi isn't likely to last.

    Don Cabana, a former Mississippi corrections commissioner and author of the book, "Death At Midnight: The Confessions of an Executioner," said the increase "was absolutely predictable" and has more to do with timing and the pace of appeals than anything else.

    "You have a number of people who have been sitting on death row for a long time whose cases kind of simultaneously, or in close proximity, started exhausting their appeals," Cabana said.

    Three of the men executed so far this year were convicted of crimes committed in 1995 and the other was convicted in the 1990 stabbing deaths of four children.

    Jan Michael Brawner, who's scheduled for execution on Tuesday, was convicted in the 2001 killings of his 3-year-old daughter, his ex-wife and her parents in Tate County. Gary Carl Simmons Jr., scheduled to die by injection June 20, was convicted of shooting and dismembering a man in Pascagoula over a drug debt in 1996.

    "Mississippi went for a long time with no executions, or hardly any executions. It's due to the slowness of the appellate process. But now these cases are coming to fruition," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group that collects and analyzes information on the death penalty.

    Jim Craig, an attorney who has worked on appeals for death row inmates, believes there's more to it than that.

    Craig said that seven out of 11 men executed in Mississippi since 2008 were represented on appeal by the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel when it was led by attorney Bob Ryan, who took over the office in 2002. Glenn S. Swartzfager took over the office in 2008.

    In a 2006 affidavit obtained by The Associated Press, Ryan described a situation in which the office lacked manpower and funding and he sometimes relied on trial summaries when filing appeals in numerous cases. At one point, he was essentially "the sole counsel on 21 cases," he wrote in the affidavit.

    Craig says he's convinced that some of those men would be alive, either still appealing their cases or having their death sentences reduced, if they had better representation. Craig said many appeals were filed based only on the court transcript, and the post-conviction office didn't bother to interview witnesses.

    "This is more than just the usual things moving at the usual speed. This is a breakdown in the system of providing lawyers to poor people when the state is trying to execute them," he said.

    The Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel was created by the Legislature in 2000 to represent indigent death row inmates in appeals.

    "A pace of one or two executions a year is about what Mississippi has averaged. The reason why we have had 11 since 2008, I think it has to do with the failures of the post-conviction office in those years," Craig said.

    The number of executions in Mississippi has fluctuated from year to year. There were two executions last year, three in 2010, none in 2009 and two in 2008. There also have been long gaps in executions over the years because of litigation. There were lulls between 1964 and 1983 and again from 1989 to 2002.

    So far this year, Mississippi is only one execution behind Texas. Texas, however, has more executions scheduled for the remainder of the year than Mississippi. Texas has executed some 460 more people than Mississippi since 1976, but Texas has a much larger population.

    There are 52 inmates on death row in Mississippi, which ranks 15th among death penalty states. Two of the inmates on Mississippi's death row are women, though it has been decades since a woman was executed in Mississippi. California has the most death row inmates with around 723.

    Richard Jordan, 66, who was first convicted in 1977, is the oldest person on Mississippi's death row and has been there the longest, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Jordan has an appeal pending in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

    Cabana said there was a time when Mississippi's condemned inmates sat on death row much longer than the national average, but over the last decade the amount of time spent on appeals has come down nationally and in Mississippi, Cabana said.

    In 1997, then-Gov. Kirk Fordice told a newly formed criminal justice study group that the state lets prisoners linger on death row too long.

    "Texas executed two in one day again the other day. Arkansas has done the same thing," Fordice said. "Both of those states are continually working down their inventory on death row, and ours continues to grow."

    http://www.ktvu.com/news/ap/crime/20...e-1950s/nPQYB/
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    Miss. Supreme Court rejects challenge to MDOC lethal injection procedure

    JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The Mississippi Supreme Court has rejected claims that corrections officials failed to properly publicize as required by law its switch to a new lethal injection drug.

    The lawsuit by two anti-death penalty organizations was filed last year on behalf of three inmates. Two of the three have been executed.

    Mississippians Educating for Smart Justice and Mississippi Cure Inc. sued the state, hoping to stop the executions because the Mississippi Department of Corrections switched to a different lethal injection drug. They said corrections officials failed to properly publicize the change as required by the Administrative Procedures Act.

    The 2003 law requires state agencies to notify the public of proposed rule and regulation changes. The law gives citizens the right to offer opinions on proposed changes to rules and regulations, ask for hearings and request official opinions from state agencies.

    In 2011, Hinds County Circuit Judge Bill Gowan rejected the challenge.

    "The protocol is an internal policy concerning lethal injections and the manner in which executions are carried out and is therefore not subject to the notice and comment requirements of the MAPL," Justice Randy Pierce wrote in Thursday's unanimous decision.

    The lawsuit was filed on behalf of inmates Benny Joe Stevens, Rodney Gray and Robert Simon Jr. Stevens was executed May 10. 2011; Gray was executed May 17, 2011. Simon has appeals pending in federal court.

    The MDOC said in April of 2011 that it would switch to a different drug, pentobarbital, for the state's next execution because of a nationwide shortage of one drug it has used in the past.

    Mississippi has used a three-drug mixture for its lethal injections for many years. Last year, one of the drugs Mississippi had used in the process, sodium thiopental, became unavailable when its European supplier bowed to pressure from death penalty opponents and stopped making it. No other vendor could be found, so the drug was replaced by pentobarbital.

    http://www.therepublic.com/view/stor...ppi-Executions

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