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Capital Defense Weekly 
Covering Capital Defense
Post Frequency: 17.8/day Last Entry: March 28, 2011 at 23:29:51 Recent Entries: 1052
By Karl R. Keys, Esq.
Go to Capital Defense Weekly, find other Criminal Law blogs, or browse all law blogs.
Cone v. Bell
Posted on April 28, 2009The Court has released the opinion in Cone v. Bell(07-1114). The decision is 7-2 (Stevens, J., writing Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, & Breyer, J.J.) in, and the Chief Justice and Justice Alito concurring in separate opinions). In the 27 years since Gary Cone was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, no Tennessee court has reached [...
Grant of habeas relief by the Fifth Circuit
Posted on April 23, 2009The Fifth Circuit in John Adams v. Quarterman, No 06-70044, has affirmed the partial grant of habeas relief by the district court. Specifically, the panel granted relief as to Mr Adam’s death sentence as trial counsel failed to adequately investigate & present mitigating evidence...
interesting use of YouTube
Posted on April 22, 2009StandDown & DPIC have been doing an incredible job bringing the day to day headlines relating to the death penalty. Find below, however, a recent video post from the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty that seems to have slipped under their radar.
weekly likely not to run
Posted on April 20, 2009There are no new meaningful wins in the new edition. I’m going to rerun the search results in the morning and if that result doesn’t change we’ll do a double edition next week. If the results do change, we’ll publish Monday night...
Troy Davis loses in the 11th Circuit
Posted on April 17, 2009Troy Davis has lost in the Eleventh Circuit, 2-1.
Fourth Circuit remand
Posted on April 16, 2009via Death Watch: The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered an evidentiary hearing for Johnny Street Parker. Parker was sent to death row in 1997 for the murder of James William Buchanan, the murder of Jerry Lee Dowdy, and the castration of Mr. Dowdy...
‘bama kills
Posted on April 16, 2009Alabama tonight killed Jimmy Lee Dill: Jimmy Lee Dill has been executed for the 1988 murder of Leon Shaw during a cocaine robbery. Dill died from lethal injection at 6:16 p.m. Thursday at Holman Prison. Just before the execution started, the Associated Press reports Dill said “I just hope that God’s will be done and everybody find [...
Texas kills
Posted on April 15, 2009Following a short lull in executions in recent weeks, Texas Wednesday resumed its breakneck execution pace: Texas parole violator was executed Wednesday for beating and using kitchen tools to kill a 67-year-old woman in her Lubbock apartment. “I love you all...
Failed public policy
Posted on April 14, 2009Judge Boyce Martin, the former Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit, notes in concurrence today in Wiles v. Bagley, No. 05-371, his continued concern about capital punishment as a public policy issue, especially in lean economic times: Now in my thirtieth year as a judge on this Court, I have had an inside view of our [...
errata
Posted on April 14, 2009In this week’s edition we mentioned “A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green” by Thomas Cahill. Incorrectly we attributed that work to Jane Lampman who wrote the linked review for the Christian Science Monitor.
again
Posted on April 09, 2009via DPIC: A former *Illinois* death row inmate, *Nathson Fields*, was acquitted on April 8 of a double homicide for which he spent eleven and a half years on death row. ?I feel like my prayers have been answered,? said Fields after the judge issued the not guilty verdict in the retrial...
Texas CCA grants relief on Penry grounds
Posted on April 08, 2009The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday in Ex parte Gene Wilford Hathorn, Jr., No. AP?75,917, granted relief. The Court held that on the facts presented that Mr. Hathorn is entitled relief under Penry as the jury was not provided a vehicle to give effect to Appellant’s proffered mitigation evidence...
lawyerless defendants file suit in Georgia
Posted on April 08, 2009via StandDown: “Lawyerless defendants file lawsuit,” is Bill Rankin’s report in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A lawsuit filed Tuesday calls for prosecutions to be halted against a number of northeast Georgia defendants until they are provided lawyers to represent them...
DR USA census count
Posted on April 07, 2009via DPIC & LDF: According to the latest edition of Death Row U.S.A. published by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the size of death row decreased slightly as of July 1, 2008 compared to Jan. 1. After increasing steadily for about 25 years, the death row population started decreasing in 2000...
weekly email edition
Posted on April 06, 2009from this week’s edition: Leading off this edition is the Supreme Court’s holding in Harbison v. Bell. The nutshell holding of the case is that federally funded counsel can do state clemency proceedings. As DPIC notes the “Court determined that the reference to ?proceedings for executive and other clemency? in the federal statute reveals that the [...
Connecticut repeal efforts move forward
Posted on April 02, 2009Last night Connecticut joined New Hampshire in moving forward to make New England the first capital punishment free region in the country. Both efforts have a long way to go, as to Connecticut, the Hartford Courant notes: A bill to abolish the death penalty won approval from the legislature’s judiciary committee Tuesday night ? with proponents [...
A stay in Ohio
Posted on April 01, 2009The Sixth Circuit today stayed the execution of Brett Hartman. Mr. Hartman was scheduled to be killed April 7, 2009. The stay will purportedly not be appealed.
Harbison v. Bell
Posted on April 01, 2009The Court today released Harbison v. Bell. The nutshell holding of the case is that federally funded counsel can do state clemency proceedings. The 7-2 opinion reads provides a lot of great verbage. The real joy of the opinion, however, is Justice Scalia’s dissent in which he lays into Congress for reasons that most of [...
weekly edition rough
Posted on March 30, 2009The weekly edition’s rough draft is here. There were three notable cases out of Oklahoma that arrived very late that I’m still working through. My apologies. The two of the notable cases are: Yancy Lyndell Douglas v. Workman / Paris LaPriest Powell v...
Quick wrap up
Posted on March 30, 2009From elsewhere: Montana keeps the death penalty, for now. New DNA testing from rape kits implicates three separate men in the ?Yogurt Shop Killings,? an infamous 1991 case in Austin in which four girls working at an I Can?t Believe It?s Not Yogurt were raped and murdered...
The weekly edition’s is here. Leading
Posted on March 30, 2009The weekly edition’s is here. Leading of this edition is the Tenth Circuit’s decision in Yancy Lyndell Douglas & Paris LaPriest Powell v. Workman. The panel in Douglas/Powell examines a fairly audacious Brady/Napu/Giglio violation. As one observer noted “[t]o make a long story short, it eventually came out that [witness] Smith had told [prosecutor] Miller early [...
Maryland: limiting the reach of death
Posted on March 28, 2009DPIC notes that Maryland’s capital prosecutions are about to dramatically decrease, if not go the way of the Dodo. On March 26, the Maryland House of Delegates approved a bill requiring specific evidence of guilt if the death penalty is sought...
CJA panel rates increase
Posted on March 28, 2009via Law.com: Attorneys who accept assignments under the federal Criminal Justice Act (CJA) will see their fees bumped up from $100 per hour to $110 per hour because of recently appropriated funds by Congress. The CJA was enacted in 1964 to establish a comprehensive system for appointing and compensating lawyers to represent defendants financially unable to retain [...
Maryland moves closer to substantially limiting its capital punishment scheme
Posted on March 25, 2009In Maryland a major curtailment of that state’s death penalty moved closer to passage: New limits on the death penalty in Maryland took a major step Wednesday toward becoming law, even as some senators acknowledged refinements are needed to a proposal that appears headed to the desk of the state’s anti-capital punishment governor, who has said [...
NH House passes death penalty repeal
Posted on March 25, 2009Wednesday the New Hampshire House voted to repeal the death penalty.
Two notable pieces in the media
Posted on March 24, 2009Two notable editorial / analysis pieces in the press in recent days. In the first, Dick Dieter appears in the Guardian: Last week New Mexico became the 15th state to abandon capital punishment and the third to do so in the last two years. Upon signing the death-penalty repeal bill, New Mexico’s governor, Bill Richardson, stated: [...
NC grant of relief
Posted on March 23, 2009I usually avoid covering trial level grants of penalty phase relief in either state or federal courts as they are so often reversed on appeal, however, Death Watch’s coverage leads me to suspect the grant of relief in Jimmy McNeill?s case won’t be appealed successfully by the State...
cranky lawyer syndrome
Posted on March 23, 2009Maybe its me by the wire reports seem to have really botched the latest developments in the Jeffrey Woods case. Compare the press accounts to the Fifth Circuit’s opinion.
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It's legal to defend yourself and your family
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My fiance's check is DD into a local credit union. Bank seems to have a pattern of "invisibly holding" charges from the debit card until just HOURS before his DD is processed (and this is after hours, of course). Over th
Have your fiance take the information you've collected and go into the bank...
what are the proper and legal steps to dissolve a partnership in an ongoing farm business?
I would say that the final tax forms are dispersed for that year with the indica...
It is my understanding that the 6th Amendment requires, that if you can't afford a lawyer in a criminal case, the Court must provide a lawyer in your defense at no charge to you. However, in a civil case no such protecti
That is not entirely true, even in the case of criminal cases. The court will pr...
Attorney welt, weinberg & reis co....from pittsburgh are collecting a credit card debt from capital one can they force me to send them a list of my assets for sheriffs sale
No! Only a Judge can make you do that and that is only after you have your day i...
I was called to give a deposition for the defense and the defendant is the person who stole our car, there is a chance that I will be called to satisfy at his trial. How can I get out of this, as my husband is to testify
If you were subpoenaed for the deposition you will need to appear or face prosec...
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