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  1. #1
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    Terrance Williams - Pennsylvania




    Summary of Offense:

    In February 1986, Terrence Williams was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die for senselessly murdering Amos Norwood during a robbery. Williams was formally sentenced on July 1, 1987. Williams had already been convicted of murder and robbery in two separate cases at the time of his 1986 trial. From appellate record: At approximately 1:00 a.m. on December 25, 1982, Williams and a co-defendant broke into an elderly couple’s home in the West Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, robbed them at gunpoint, and then stole their car.

    Williams was a few months shy of his seventeenth birthday. He was certified for trial as an adult, convicted of two counts each of robbery, recklessly endangering another person, terroristic threats, and simple assault, and one count each of burglary, criminal conspiracy, theft and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. He was sentenced to 12 ½ to 25 years imprisonment. While Williams was awaiting trial in the robbery, he murdered Herbert Hamilton. While he was on bail awaiting sentencing for the robbery, he murdered Amos Norwood. He was sentenced to death in the Norwood murder case, and the convictions in the robbery case and the one involving Herbert Hamilton were used as aggravating circumstances to secure that sentence.

  2. #2
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    In a March 9, 2011 Third Circuit opinion, Mr. Williams' death sentence was affirmed.

    http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal...002/920110309/

  3. #3
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On November 14, 2011, the US Supreme Court denied Williams' certiorari petition.

    http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.a...es/11-6871.htm

  4. #4
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Fact's Avatar
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    That's a different Terrance Williams (confusing). That Terrance Williams is a pimp. The Terrance Williams on death row's petition is still pending http://certpool.com/dockets/11-7882

  5. #5
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Thanks for that! You're absolutely right. I should've noticed that the pimp case was "Williams v. United States" rather than "Williams v. Wetzel." Thanks again!

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    On June 29, 2012, SCOTUS denied Williams' petition. Expect a warrant in the near future.

    http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.a...es/11-7882.htm

  7. #7
    Senior Member Member Big Jon's Avatar
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    Court backs Wolf in Phila. death penalty case

    Gov. Wolf acted within his constitutional authority to temporarily halt the execution of a convicted murderer from Philadelphia, the state Supreme Court ruled on Monday.

    In a unanimous decision, the high court said Wolf had the power to delay the death sentence for Terrance Williams until a legislative task force issued its final report on the future of capital punishment in Pennsylvania.

    The ruling doesn't apply to Wolf's broader moratorium on the death penalty, but represented a victory for the governor in the broader and contentious battle over the future of executions in the commonwealth.

    Wolf announced the reprieve for Williams in February, saying he would shelve all executions until after the report was issued. That decision that was challenged by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams and prosecutors from other counties, who argued, among other things, that the governor's position unlawfully meddled with the jury's decision in the case.

    But in a 33-page decision written by Justice Max Baer, the court said, "we disagree with the Commonwealth's suggestion that the reprieve unconstitutionally altered a final judgment of this Court; rather, the execution of the judgment is merely delayed."

    The court was careful to say it was not considering whether Wolf's overall moratorium was legal; instead, it said, it was weighing specifically whether the governor could delay the execution of Williams, a former quarterback at Germantown High School who was convicted for the 1984 killing of Amos Norwood, a 56-year-old church volunteer.

    "Future challenges to reprieves granted by Governor Wolf will have to await independent examination based upon our holdings herein," the court wrote.

    In a concurring opinion, Justice Correale F. Stevens wrote that any reprieve should be "truly temporary in nature."

    "If there is no death penalty law in Pennsylvania, such decision should come from the legislative body," he wrote.

    Wolf issued a brief statement saying he was pleased by the court's ruling. When he announced the decision earlier this year, he called the death penalty "ineffective, unjust, and expensive."

    A report from the task force studying if the death penalty can be legally and effectively administered in Pennsylvania was initially due two years ago. But its deadline has been extended.

    Shawn Nolan, Terrance Williams' attorney, said Monday that he had not yet shared the news with his client but was pleased with the decision.

    "We have been saying all along that it was constitutional what the governor did," he said. "We're gratified that the Supreme Court made a unanimous decision."

    Williams' case is also scheduled to go before the U.S. Supreme Court in February. In that appeal, Nolan is arguing that former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Ronald D. Castille should have recused himself from hearing appeal in the case because he was Philadelphia's district attorney when Williams was sentenced to death.

    Cameron Kline, spokesman for the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, said that prosecutors respected the decision even though they had argued for another outcome.

    Pennsylvania's death penalty has been used only three times since being reinstated in 1976. Thirty-one other states have the death penalty.

    http://www.philly.com/philly/news/po...1uupo0JIdmf.99

  8. #8
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Supreme Court, in Recusal Case, May Find Itself Looking Inward

    By Adam Liptak
    The New York Times

    WASHINGTON — Not long after he took office as Philadelphia’s district attorney in 1986, Ronald D. Castille made a handwritten note on a subordinate’s memorandum. “Approved to proceed on the death penalty,” Mr. Castille wrote, in neat cursive script, authorizing prosecutors to seek the execution of a young murderer named Terrance Williams.

    Later, when Mr. Castille was running for a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he said he was reluctant to take a firm public position on the death penalty, fearing it would require his recusal from all capital cases.

    “I can certainly say I sent 45 people to death row as district attorney of Philadelphia,” he told a legal newspaper in 1993, adding that voters “sort of get the hint.” Mr. Williams was the first of those 45.

    Mr. Castille won the election and served on the State Supreme Court for 21 years, the last seven as chief justice. One of his final acts, about two weeks before he retired at the end of 2014, was to join a unanimous decision reinstating Mr. Williams’s death sentence.

    Next month, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether Mr. Castille should have disqualified himself from hearing Mr. Williams’s appeal, given his involvement in the prosecution. The case, Williams v. Pennsylvania, No. 15-5040, puts the justices in a ticklish spot, as the best arguments against recusal are grounded in their own practices. Individual justices decide for themselves whether their recusal is warranted, just as Mr. Castille had.

    That is the right approach, Mr. Castille said last week. “The individual involved should make the decision,” he said. “We leave it up to the individual conscience of the justice.”

    In declining to recuse himself from other capital cases over the years, Mr. Castille pointed to the examples of two members of the United States Supreme Court, Justices William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia.

    In 1972, Justice Rehnquist, a former Justice Department official, issued a statement justifying his participation in a decision about Army surveillance of domestic political groups even though he had defended the spying program in congressional testimony and had criticized the lawsuit when he was a government lawyer.

    In 2004, Justice Scalia explained that he could vote on a case involving the official conduct of Vice President Dick Cheney despite the fact that the two had gone duck hunting together.

    Similarly, Mr. Castille said last week, there was no reason for him to recuse himself. “I didn’t try the case,” he said. “I wasn’t really involved in the case except as the leader of the office.”

    Moreover, the decision to seek death was straightforward, he said. “This guy had a previous homicide,” Mr. Castille said. “That’s the easiest one, where they have a history of violent crime.”

    Mr. Williams committed his first murder when he was 17. A jury spared his life after hearing evidence that he had been sexually abused by the man he killed.

    In the second case, by contrast, Mr. Williams testified that he had not known the victim, a 56-year-old man named Amos Norwood, and had not been involved in the murder. In fact, Mr. Williams and a friend, both 18, had robbed Mr. Norwood and beat him to death with a tire iron.

    The trial prosecutor said that Mr. Williams had killed Mr. Norwood “for no other reason but that a kind man offered him a ride home.”

    In 2012, reviewing one of Mr. Williams’s many challenges to his death sentence, a state trial judge said there was another reason: As in the first case, there was evidence that Mr. Williams’s victim had abused him and other juveniles.

    The judge, M. Teresa Sarmina of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, said prosecutors in Mr. Castille’s office had failed to turn over evidence of the abuse to Mr. Williams’s lawyer, and she vacated the death sentence. That is the ruling Mr. Castille voted to reverse in 2014. In a concurrence, he called Judge Sarmina’s conduct “lawless.”

    Last week, Mr. Castille said that Mr. Williams had known the truth but had chosen to lie on the witness stand.

    “He was actually a male prostitute,” Mr. Castille said of Mr. Williams. “He was prostituting himself for money. This guy he killed was not the most upstanding individual, but he still took the guy’s life.”

    “It’s nothing that was kept from the defense,” Mr. Castille said. “If anything, he kept it from his attorney.”

    That is one way to look at it. Here is another, set out in a supporting brief from the American Civil Liberties Union: “Amos Norwood was a middle-aged sexual predator who preyed on teenage boys like Terry Williams,” starting when he was 13. “In exchange for sex, he would give the boys money, food, housing and other gifts.”

    “While Williams of course knew of his own past dealings with Norwood and other men,” the brief also said, “it is no surprise that he would not have disclosed such deeply intimate and traumatic events to an attorney he barely knew.”

    The vote in the Williams case in 2014 was unanimous, which suggests that the dispute over whether Mr. Castille should have recused himself is academic.

    But Mr. Williams’s supporters say he was entitled to an entirely unbiased tribunal, and they point to social science literature demonstrating that group decision making can be powerfully affected by one participant’s strongly held views.

    Mr. Castille rejected that line of thinking. “I’ve read the argument that one judge can sway all the other judges,” he said. “That’s not really accurate. The people on our court are all very independent-minded. They might have swayed me. Who knows?”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/us...ward.html?_r=0

  9. #9
    Moderator MRBAM's Avatar
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    To be heard at SCOTUS on 2/29/16:

    No. 15-5040 *** CAPITAL CASE ***
    Title:
    Terrance Williams, Petitioner
    v.
    Pennsylvania

    Docketed: July 1, 2015
    Linked with 14A1161
    Lower Ct: Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, Eastern District

    Case Nos.: (668 CAP, 669 CAP)
    Decision Date: December 15, 2014
    Rehearing Denied: February 18, 2015

    15-5040 WILLIAMS V. PENNSYLVANIA
    DECISION BELOW: 105 A.3d 1234
    CERT. GRANTED 10/1/2015
    QUESTION PRESENTED:

    1. In Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868, 881 (2009), this Court held that due process requires an "objective" inquiry into judicial bias. The question presented is:
    Are the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments violated where the presiding Chief Justice of a State Supreme Court declines to recuse himself in a capital case where he had personally approved the decision to pursue capital punishment against Petitioner in his prior capacity as elected District Attorney and continued to head the District Attorney's Office that defended the death verdict on appeal; where, in his State Supreme Court election campaign, the Chief Justice expressed strong support for capital punishment, with reference to the number of defendants he had "sent" to death row, including Petitioner; and where he then, as Chief Justice, reviewed a ruling by the state postconviction court that his office committed prosecutorial misconduct under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), when it prosecuted and sought death against Petitioner?

    2. In Aetna Life Insurance Co. v. Lavoie, 475 U.S. 813 (1986), this Court left open the question whether the Constitution is violated by the bias, appearance of bias, or potential bias of one member of a multimember tribunal where that member did not cast the deciding vote. The circuits and states remain split on that question.

    The question presented is:

    Are the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments violated by the participation of a potentially biased jurist on a multimember tribunal deciding a capital case, regardless of whether his vote is ultimately decisive?

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