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Thread: Douglas Ray Stankewitz - California

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    Douglas Ray Stankewitz - California


    Douglas Ray Stankewitz in 2013


    Summary of Offense:

    Douglas Stankewitz was sentenced to death in Fresno County on October 12, 1978 for murdering a young woman named Theresa Greybeal on February 8, 1978 by suddenly shooting her in the head after he and his friends had stolen her car and driven around for a while with her as a captive.

  2. #2
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On January 25, 2010, the State of California filed an appeal in the Ninth Circuit over the granting of Stankewitz's habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/cir.../ca9/10-99001/

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    The Fate of California's Longest Standing Death Row Inmate Could Change

    The fate of California's longest standing death row inmate, Douglas Ray Stankewitz, could change. Stankewitz was convicted of murder in 1978.

    Stankewitz’s case was the first to be tried after the death penalty was reinstated back in 1978 and the jury handed it to him.

    Monday, nearly 30 years after the crime, Stankewitz is asking for a reversal of the decision to be upheld. Now, he may be no closer to death than he was when he was first convicted.

    The case is open once again—convicted of murder and sentenced to death, Stankewitz is again making an appeal for his life.

    For Fresno attorney Salvatore Sciandra, it was hundreds of cases back, but he'll never forget his first court appearance. It's been more than 30 years since he stood next to Stankewitz but the new appeal is taking him back. “When I tried the case, I made a motion expressing doubt to his ability to understand the nature of the proceeding,” says Sciandra.

    Sciandria argued Stankewitz's mental competency but his client was never evaluated. Shortly after, Sciandria says Stankewitz hit him and he was taken off the case. “He was an impulsive person, immature unfortunately. It was that impulsiveness that caused him to be on trial in the first place.”

    It's Stankewitz's mental health and abusive childhood that are giving him a chance to appeal his death sentence. “The case today is based off the second attorney's failure to pursue the issue of competency and to provide proper investigations into his past,” says Sciandria.

    Stankewitz has twice been given the death penalty and twice it has been reversed. In Monday's hearing, Stankewitz asked a panel of judges to uphold a 2009 court decision; it would release him from the death penalty and instead give him life in prison. A panel of judges has not yet decided the inmate’s fate; it could take weeks or even months to finalize a decision.

    Stankewitz was convicted of murder in 1978. He was found guilty of murdering 22-year-old Theresa Greybeal. According to court documents, Stankewitz and two friends kidnapped Greybeal, stole her car and drove with her in it to Fresno. They robbed her and Stankewitz's friends testify he shot her point blank in the head bragging “Did I drop her or did I drop her?”

    30 years after the murder, the case continues. Attorney's and the victim’s family hope this is the last appeal so the case can be closed.

    Some attorneys are hoping to do away with the death penalty; they say the appeals process is too expensive. It's cost the state around $4 billion since it was reinstated in 1978.

    http://www.ksee24.com/news/local/Sta...138815599.html

  4. #4
    Srodriguez
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    Have read the website for Stankewitz? Do you believe he had a fair trail and deserves the death penalty? I think if he had a dscent paid lawyer he would already be out of prison

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    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    They try the "insane" defense. If he understood, as it seams from what I know, that killing was wrong he should get a death sentence. I believe that it´s ok to sentence people to death even if they´re not rocket scientists.
    No murder can be so cruel that there are not still useful imbeciles who do gloss over the murderer and apologize.

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    Senior Member Frequent Poster PATRICK5's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Srodriguez View Post
    Have read the website for Stankewitz?
    No. I do not read fanboy sites. I read case opinions.

    Do you believe he had a fair trail and deserves the death penalty?
    Yes and yes.

    I think if he had a dscent paid lawyer he would already be out of prison
    He had a dscent [sic] paid lawyer and no he would not already be out of prison under any circumstances. Why would you ever want that??? He's extremely dangerous. Do you want to see more people murdered???? Yep, you're the ultimate murderer groupie.

  7. #7
    lakota
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    Stankewitz does have some mental illness but he is certainly not insane. He has been on Death Row since 1978... Why even have death row if they are not going to execute people. I know he is not insane... I have corresponded with this man for a number of years. He has played the system, look how long he has been there. he has used the diminished mental issue, the fact that he is Native American, blaming his attorneys, everything he can do, and he is still alive. Insane... not at all. he has never taken responsibility, blamed eveyone else including his mother for the killing, never once taken responsibility for his own actions. If the state is not going to execute people then they might as well have life w/o parole and save the taxpayers a whole lot if money.

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    ‘Death penalty a joke,’ says Calif. inmate on death row

    Convicted murderer Douglas Stankewitz, who has spent more than three decades on death row, isn’t pinning his hopes of survival on a referendum next month to abolish the death penalty in California.

    He knows that, even if voters reject the measure, he may never be executed.

    “They can’t kill me because the system is messed up so bad,” California’s longest-serving death-row inmate said in an interview here.

    “The death penalty is a joke.”

    Stankewitz, a 54-year-old who arrived on death row at age 20 for killing a woman during a drug- and alcohol-fuelled carjacking, is one of 726 inmates on death row in California.

    The state hosts nearly a quarter of the nation’s condemned prisoners but has executed none in the past six years.

    A federal judge halted all California executions in 2006, saying a three-drug lethal-injection protocol risked causing inmates too much pain and suffering before death. California revised its protocol, but executions have not resumed.

    Public opinion in many states has been shifting away from the death penalty, with five states abolishing capital punishment over the past decade. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia do not allow the death penalty.

    QUESTION OF COST

    In California, proponents of repealing the death penalty are basing their campaign not so much on moral grounds, but rather on the question of cost. They say the system, with mandated appeals that can take decades, costs so much that the financially troubled state could save hundreds of millions of dollars by instead jailing the worst killers for life.

    Polls show the referendum — one of 11 ballot measures facing Californians on the same day as the presidential election, Nov. 6 — faces an uphill fight.

    A majority of Californians, 51 per cent, oppose abolishing capital punishment, according to a September USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of 1,504 people. Just 38 per cent backed repeal, while the rest were undecided.

    State offices do not track specific costs associated with prosecuting and housing death-row inmates, but a number of studies have shown the burden is high.

    A 2011 study by Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals senior judge Arthur AlarcDon and Paula Mitchell, an adjunct law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the death penalty has cost the state roughly $4 billion since 1978, when California voted to reinstate it following a nationwide pause.

    It called California’s capital punishment system “the most expensive and least effective” in the nation.

    An independent budget watchdog, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, has said repealing the death penalty could initially save the state $100 million a year, later growing to $130 million a year.

    “It is a failed public policy that wastes so much public money. And it is an illusion. We haven’t had an execution in over six years,” said Jeanne Woodford, a former San Quentin warden and a leading advocate of death-penalty repeal.

    APPEALS CAN LAST DECADES

    Death-penalty costs are driven by mandated appeals and a shortage of public lawyers qualified to handle capital cases, which means inmates can wait decades to make their way through the system.

    Condemned inmates wait an average of five years to be given lawyers for an automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court, which is mandated by state law, Woodford said, and then another 12 years for a lawyer to handle an automatic federal habeas petition, which is a formal request for a federal court to examine the legality of the petitioner’s imprisonment.

    The California Supreme Court spends a third of its time on death- penalty appeals alone, she said.

    34 YEARS ON DEATH ROW

    Stankewitz, who has been on death row for 34 years, is among 44 inmates who have spent three decades or longer waiting to die.

    Convicted in 1978, Stankewitz had his conviction and sentence reversed by the state Supreme Court in 1982 because his mental competence to stand trial had not been evaluated. He was then retried and reconvicted by a Fresno County court in 1983.

    That trial spurred another automatic appeal to California’s top court, which in 1990 declined to alter his conviction or sentence, according to court records. His first federal habeas appeal was filed in 1994.

    By his own count, Stankewitz has gone through roughly a dozen public defenders, whom he refers to disparagingly as “dump trucks,” and court records show more than 600 motions, orders and rulings in his case since 1991.

    His appeals have run the gamut from questions over his own mental competence to the competence of his previous legal counsel and procedural and evidentiary complaints.

    “I’m caught up in this game. I don’t like this game,” Stankewitz said inside a cramped visiting cell that was locked from the outside, monitored by guards and separated from the main visiting area.

    13 AWAIT EXECUTION

    Of the state’s hundreds of death-row inmates, just 13 have exhausted their appeals and are awaiting execution.

    By 2050, California is projected to have sent 740 more inmates to death row, and more than 500 death-row inmates will have died of old age or other causes before they can be executed, AlarcDon and Mitchell said in their study.

    Twenty-one inmates have committed suicide on California’s death row since 1978, and 57 have died of natural causes, prison officials said.

    An independent commission said in 2008 that the state’s death-penalty system was dysfunctional and warned that, if nothing were done to reverse structural delays in the appointment of lawyers and appeals, the application of capital punishment in California could be declared cruel and unusual punishment and, ultimately, struck down as unconstitutional.

    It said that a system with life without parole as the top punishment would cost only $11.5 million a year, well under the $137 million it pegs as the annual cost of capital punishment. The AlarcDon-Mitchell report puts the cost of having the death penalty at $144 million a year.

    The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said housing an inmate costs around $55,500 annually per prisoner. It does not break that down by sentence or crime.

    Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said capital punishment costs could be alleviated if sentencing appeals were not mandated, reducing the time from sentencing to execution to five or six years.

    “That would cost less than we are spending now, and less than to incarcerate them for life,” said Scheidegger, a co-chair of the coalition to keep the death penalty.

    VICTIMS’ FAMILIES SPLIT ON ISSUE

    Opponents of ending capital punishment, including San Bernardino District Attorney Michael Ramos, are concerned about the danger of mixing death row inmates with the general prison population, arguing that such serious offenders need the additional security measures that are standard on death row.

    Family members of victims of death-row inmates have spoken out on both sides of the issue.

    Sandy Friend, for example, wrote a public petition arguing that execution was the only fitting punishment for the man who kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed her eight-year-old son, Michael Lyons, in 1996.

    “I believe that the only justice for these horrendous crimes these individuals have committed is the death penalty,” Friend said in a video produced by repeal opponents.

    Her son was abducted on his way home from school by a man with two prior sex-offence convictions, Friend said, and was tortured for 10 hours.

    The man convicted of his death, Robert Rhoades, was sent to death row in 1999. His appeals are ongoing.

    SAME SCRIPT, DIFFERENT NAME

    Stankewitz’s defence lawyers have largely based their appeals on questions about his intellect and childhood abuse. He suffered alcohol exposure in the womb, was removed from his home at age six after his mother beat him and was bounced between foster-care facilities where he was severely troubled and abused, court documents show.

    He was 19 when he and a group of friends carjacked Theresa Graybeal, 22, from a K-Mart parking lot in Modesto and drove across California’s rural heartland to Fresno, roughly 160 kilometres away.

    There, Graybeal was shot and killed. Her family members could not be reached for comment.

    One of Stankewitz’s companions, 14-year-old Billy Brown, implicated him as the shooter in exchange for immunity from prosecution, records show.

    Stankewitz says he was framed by Brown. A federal judge granted him a new penalty phase trial — one that considers punishment only, not guilt or innocence — in 2009, but that remains under appeal.

    “We are a script. Every person on death row is the same script with a different name,” Stankewitz said.

    http://www.theprovince.com/Death+pen...#ixzz2AQQRUWay
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

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    DOUGLAS STANKEWITZ V. ROBERT WONG

    In today's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opinions, the court AFFIRMED the district court's decision to grant Stankewitz’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus on an ineffective assistance of counsel claim.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

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    And the article...

    California’s Longest-Serving Death Row Inmate Wins in Ninth Circuit

    A federal appeals court set aside the capital sentence of California’s longest-serving death row inmate on Monday. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit tracked that of a lower court, which found that a lawyer for Douglas Ray Stankewitz failed to investigate circumstances leading up to the murder of Theresa Greybeal – namely Mr. Stankewitz’s abusive childhood and long history of substance abuse.

    Mr. Stankewitz, a Native American, has been on death row in California since 1978, when he was convicted in the kidnapping and murder of Ms. Greybeal. (He was one of the first people sentenced to death after the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Thirteen people have been executed since then.)

    In a 2-1 decision Monday, the Ninth Circuit upheld a court order that Mr. Stankewitz’s death sentence be vacated unless California officials seek to retry the capital phase of his case within 90 days or resentence him to life without parole.

    “We are faced, however, with a situation in which counsel’s failure to investigate and present mitigating evidence cannot be rationalized on any tactical ground,” Judge Raymond C. Fisher wrote in the opinion, saying Mr. Stankewitz’s lawyer at the time failed to conduct the “most basic investigation” of his client’s background.

    In a dissenting opinion, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain argued that the circuit should have instead clarified the legal standard for evaluating Mr. Stankewitz’s claim that his former defense lawyer failed to present mitigating evidence – that is, evidence that could have persuaded the jury to vote against the death sentence. After establishing the standard, the Ninth Circuit should have remanded the case to the lower court for further proceedings, he said.

    “While I hesitate to remand this decades-old case once more, that is the prudent course. In this capital case, the stakes are high enough to take the long view, get circuit law right, and leave Stankewitz’s particular case for another day,” Judge O’Scannlain wrote. “If that day were to come, we would have the benefit of a better-grounded district court decision, and we could be confident that we got this case right. We cannot be confident today. I respectfully dissent.”

    The Ninth Circuit’s decision comes as California residents are preparing to vote on a ballot initiative that would ban the death penalty in that state and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Proponents of the new law have argued that the appeals required in death penalty cases are too costly and could be avoided by simply sentencing such persons to life without parole.

    “We are reviewing the decision,” said Shum Preston, a spokesman for California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

    Mr. Stankewitz’s current lawyer didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment Monday.

    http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/10/29/...th-row-inmate/
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

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