Death sentence reinstated for Mississippi's only woman on death row
Mississippi's only woman on death row has sentence reinstated
By Jimmie E. Gates
The Clarion-Ledger
JACKSON, Miss. — The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reinstated the death sentence of Mississippi's only female death row inmate.
The ruling Tuesday came almost three years after a federal court ruling granted Lisa Jo Chamberlin, 45, a new trial in a double homicide in Hattiesburg, Miss., about 85 miles southeast of the state's capital of Jackson.
At the state Attorney General's Office's request, the full 5th Circuit in New Orleans — with the exception of Judge James Graves who recused himself — reviewed the judge's ruling and a ruling from a three-judge appeals court panel that voted 2-1 to affirm the ruling.
Cameron Benton, special assistant attorney general, argued that the two appeals court judges who first heard the case put together unimpressive statistics and an incomplete comparison to find discrimination in the striking of two black prospective jurors.
"There is ample proof in the record to suggest that the exercise of peremptory strikes was not motivated by racial animus," Benton said in court papers. "Given the dearth of proof and the deference owed to the state court, the majority opinion seems to have improperly substituted its judgment for that of the trial judge and appellate court."
Chamberlin, housed in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl, was listed in a summer 2017 report from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as one of 53 women on federal and 16 states' death rows as of July 1. Less than 2% of death row inmates are women.
In 2015, federal District Judge Carlton Reeves ordered the state to grant Chamberlin a new trial within four months, saying prosecutors intentionally struck black potential jurors from her capital murder trial.
Chamberlin is white. She argued on appeal that her rights were violated when prosecutors struck some black potential jurors for nonracial neutral reasons.
The full 5th Circuit panel saw the scenario differently in a 9-5 ruling.
"The prosecution in Chamberlin’s case did what it was supposed to do: It rejected some black prospective jurors and accepted others, accepted some white prospective jurors and rejected others," according to the majority opinion. "When asked why it struck individual black prospective jurors, it gave specific race-neutral reasons for the strikes."
The five who opposed reinstating Chamberlin's conviction thought that Reeves' original ruling had merit:
The prosecution struck nearly two times as many black jurors as it accepted (eight strikes compared to five accepted, including one alternate) while accepting more than four times as many white jurors as it struck (five strikes compared to 23 accepted, including three alternates). It exercised 62% of its strikes on black jurors, despite black jurors making up only 31% of qualified prospective jurors.
This racial breakdown of the strikes is even more telling when compared with the results random strikes would predict. Given the demographics of the venire (the panel of citizens from which a jury is selected), the probability that random, race-neutral strikes would result in 8 of the 13 struck jurors being black was about 1 in a 100.
Chamberlin and her boyfriend, Roger Lee Gillett, were convicted of two counts of capital murder in the March 2004 slayings of Gillet's cousin, Vernon Hulett, 34, and Hulett's girlfriend, Linda Heintzelman, 37, in Hattiesburg. Their bodies were transported to Kansas in a freezer.
Gillett and Chamberlin were arrested March 29, 2004, after Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents raided an abandoned farmhouse near Russell, Kan., that Gillett's father owned and found the dismembered bodies of Hulett and Heintzelman in a freezer.
Kansas state agents were investigating Gillett and Chamberlin for their possible connection to the manufacture of methamphetamine, according to published reports. Gillett and Chamberlin were living with Hulett and Heintzelman in Hattiesburg at the time of the slayings.
In a taped confession played at her trial, Chamberlin said the victims were killed because they wouldn't open a safe in Hulett's home.
Chamberlain was sentenced to death in 2006, and Gillett was sentenced in 2007.
However, in June 2014, the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned Gillett's death sentence. The court said his attempt to escape jail while in custody in Kansas could not be considered as a crime of violence to support a death sentence.
In 2011, Chamberlin filed a post-conviction challenge to her conviction federal District Court after the state Supreme Court upheld her conviction and death sentence.
One of the claims was that the prosecution improperly struck seven African-Americans from serving on her jury. The prosecutor said he struck 12 potential jurors — seven black and five white. He denied any effort to strike potential jurors based upon race.
In death penalty cases, federal law requires a comparative analysis be done when black potential jurors are struck compared to white jurors allowed to remain in the jury pool, Reeves said.
Number of women on states' death rows
More than half of the women facing capital punishment in 16 states and the federal prison system are white. Black women constitute 22.7% of all women on death rows while they are 14.6% of all U.S. females, according to calculations of Census Bureau estimates from 2013.
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