Criminal Law

Mississippi innocence news

Posted on February 08, 2008
The Innocence Project is reporting: Innocence Project client Kennedy Brewer is expected to be exonerated next week after serving more than 15 years behind bars in Mississippi ? much of it on death row ? for a child murder that DNA proves he didn?t commit...

Nebraska effectively kills off executions

Posted on February 08, 2008
Nebraska has effectively ended its the death penalty, as the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled the electric chair cruel and unusual. Nebraska was the only state in the U.S. to have the electric chair as its sole execution method. What this means is that in Nebraska people can still be sentenced to death but not executed...

Life: What a beautiful choice

Posted on February 08, 2008
In North Carolina Lisa Greene has been sentenced to life.

Your tax dollars at work

Posted on February 07, 2008
New Hampshire’s famously tightwad fiscally conservative government seems to be on a spending spree: The capital murder prosecution of Michael Addison in New Hampshire will cost the state at least $978,000 in its first stage. Attorney General Kelly A...

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Florida denial of relief & district court grant of relief in California

Posted on February 07, 2008
The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday denied relief in Samuel Jason Derrick v. State, No. SC05-1559 (Feb 7, 2008) , on claims relating whether: “(1) he was denied access to files and records pertaining to his case in violation of his constitutional rights; (2) he received ineffective assistance of counsel during pretrial and at the guilt phase; (3) the State withheld material and exculpatory evidence or presented misleading evidence or both; (4) he received ineffective assistance of counsel during the penalty phase; (5) resentencing counsel was ineffective for failing to obtain a mental health expert; and (6) he was deprived of a fundamentally fair trial because of the cumulative error present during the proceedings...

getting stoned update

Posted on February 06, 2008
 Thanks to all of our friends visiting from Confounding the Wicked. Tom questions why the heck are we covering an execution in Iran? I’ll offer three reasons.  One, it is a slow week. Two, international developments impact on domestic death penalty practice, esp...

Looking ahead

Posted on February 06, 2008
The SCOTUSBlog has posted its “cert petition to watch list” for the Feb. 15 conference. The most germane cert petition on the watch list is Norris v. Simpson, No.07-653 on “[w]hether a capital defendant may raise a mental retardation claim for the first time on habeas if state proceedings became final before the Court?s decision banning execution of the mentally retarded in Atkins v...

Low flying pigs: CCA grants relief

Posted on February 06, 2008
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on its own motion granted penalty phase relief in Ex parte Moreno, No. 75,748 (Feb. 6., 2008). The Moreno Court grants relief in light of Penry error. Specifically, the CCA grants rehearing and vacates as the jury instructions used in the trial did not permit the jury to give adequate effect to Moreno’s troubled childhood within the framework of the Texas Special Question regime...

And from the almost never heard from Second Circuit

Posted on February 06, 2008
In Humberto Pepin v. the United States, a pretrial capital case from the federal Eastern District of New York, the Government appeals to the Second Circuit certain evidentiary rulings. Specifically, the Government sought relief from the trial court’s exclusion of evidence of child abuse by the defendant and evidence relating to the defendant’s previous conviction for child endangerment, as well as the trial court’s exclusion of evidence of post-mortem dismemberment of the victims in both the guilt and penalty phases of the trial...

A loss in the 10th Circuit

Posted on February 06, 2008
In a case originating out of Oklahoma, the Tenth Circuit this morning denied relief in a capital habeas corpus case Darwin Brown v. Sirmon, No. 06-5071 (10th Cir Feb. 6, 2008)

Civilian Terrorism Trials Work

Posted on February 05, 2008
Leonie Brinkema, the federal district court judge who oversaw the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, is quoted in the Associated Press on Sunday that terrorism trials in the federal courts are not just good for the defendant, they are gooder (if that is a word) for the United States...

A loss out of California

Posted on February 05, 2008
I’ll leave it to Shaun Martin to analyze People v. Alphonso Howard: I think that you can figure out how this case comes out based solely upon two facts: (1) the fact that it’s in front of the California Supreme Court; and (2) the fact that the first sentence of the opinion begins: “Defendant Alphonso Howard was sentenced to death after a jury convicted him of first degree murder, rape, and a forcible lewd act upon a child under the age of 14...

slow news cycle

Posted on February 05, 2008
My apologies for the light posting of late, the news, unless I simply want to copy Of Counsel’s post on the Nichols trial in Georgia, has been light. So while we are light the baby’s photoblog has been updated.

email edition is now available

Posted on February 04, 2008
This week’s email edition is now available. From the intro One opinion of note is had this edition. The Ninth Circuit in Earl Lloyd Jackson v. Brown upholds the district court’s grant of relief as to Brown’s death sentence and the special circumstances findings...

getting stoned

Posted on February 04, 2008
In what passes for justice in Iran these days,  two sisters accused by their respective husband and brother of adultery will be stoned to death in the coming days.  The conviction for adultery is  based on video of the two women merely in the presence of men who were not their husbands or otherwise related to him...

mental health courts

Posted on February 04, 2008
from our good friends over at DPOAR: Improving Responses to People with Mental Illnesses: The Essential Elements of a Mental Health Court. A report prepared by the Council of State Governments Justice Center Criminal Justice/Mental Health Consensus Project for the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U...

Going, going gone

Posted on February 03, 2008
Sad farewells to Audacity & Corrections Sentencing who both finished their blogging efforts this week. Both will be sadly missed.  Let me note, should they ever drop by to read, that they are both more than welcome to guest blog here any time they want.

Proportionality review: Florida Supreme Court strikes down death sentence

Posted on February 02, 2008
The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday granted relief in Ryan Green v. State, No. SC06-211, in light of the overwhelming mitigation evidence present and the presence of only on aggravator. . . . Green?s death sentence rests on a single aggravating circumstance: that Green had been contemporaneously convicted of another violent felony?the attempted murder of Phipps...

say hello to…..

Posted on February 02, 2008
Say welcome to the new blog Compassion in Juvenile Sentencing which focuses on juvie LWOP cases.

Physicians and executions

Posted on February 01, 2008
The New England Journal of Medicine has posted a roundtable on doctors and lethal injection. From the intro: On January 14, 2008, the Journal hosted a videotaped roundtable discussion of the issues raised by Baze v. Rees, currently before the Supreme Court, that asks whether the three-drug protocol used to carry out the death penalty by lethal injection causes unnecessary pain and suffering in violation of the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment...

Say hello to . . . .

Posted on February 01, 2008
Say hello to In CASE  from the Indiana Coalition Acting to Suspend Executions. 

Japan: Attempting to liquidate its death row?

Posted on February 01, 2008
In less than 60 days Japan has executed more than 5% of its death row including several people who whose appeals were apparently still pending.  AFP has more.

stay in ‘bama

Posted on January 31, 2008
As anticipated, James Callahan in Alabama was stayed.  This potentially portends well for the Petitioners in  Baze v. Rees. The U.S. Supreme Court at 4:45 p.m. today issued a stay delaying the execution of convicted killer James Callahan, who was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p...

Caseloads: SC Supremes issue a warning

Posted on January 30, 2008
A major decision from the South Carolina Supreme Court concerning heavy caseloads, public defenders & the ethics rules. I was stunned as I read the opinion which seems to support the position that indigent defense attorneys with unduly heavy caseloads must stop accepting new files/cases or potentially face disciplinary proceedings...

In other news

Posted on January 30, 2008
Other stories making news: From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “the trial judge in the beleaguered death penalty case of Fulton County Courthouse rampage suspect Brian Nichols announced Wednesday he is removing himself from the case.” In New Hampshire attempts are under way to broaden that State’s death penalty...

Asking for abuse

Posted on January 30, 2008
The Eleventh Circuit has lifted — despite in the same of similar factual & procedural posture being stayed in light of Baze v. Rees by the Supreme Court — the stay imposed by the district court in James Callahan v. Allen.  In light of the body of precedents, one has to wonder, why lift the stay just to have the SCOTUS issue another one or is the Eleventh Circuit trying to have cert granted  (and yet another of its opinions reversed) again on the issues surrounding lethal injection? The SCOTUSBlog  has far better coverage on this matter than we ever could...

Another man cleared by DNA in Dallas

Posted on January 30, 2008
A serial rapists final victim may be Steven Charles Phillips who appears to have been prosecuted and sentenced for another man’s crime. From media accounts: DNA tests show that a transient serial rapist wanted for sex crimes in several states is the perpetrator in a case in which DNA revealed another man was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault, the Dallas County district attorney’s office said Tuesday...

Prosecutorial tunnel vision costs man his youth?

Posted on January 30, 2008
David L. Scott was freed from prison Monday based on DNA evidence, he had been incarcerated since he was a teenager, he is now nearly 40. Press accounts note: Scott, 39, had been serving a 50-year prison sentence for the 1984 murder of Loretta Keith, who was bludgeoned to death in her bed with a hydraulic jack...

When things turn ugly, real ugly

Posted on January 29, 2008
[update 11:05 PM Tuesday] Few capital cases are as ugly as Gregory Wilson v. Parker, No. No. 05-5191, decided today by the Sixth Circuit.  Today, drawing a “bad panel” in the Sixth Circuit, Wilson loses on federal habeas. Why?  The crime was a high profile capital murder...

GIT-R-DONE!!!

Posted on January 28, 2008
Capital cases are huge undertakings for counsel and courts.  The California Supreme Court, for example, regularly takes a decade, and sometimes well more than a decade, to decide a case.  Judge Sandra Beckwith, chief of the U.S. District Court for southern Ohio, last week — apparently citing delay — snagged five cases from a single federal district court judge, U...

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