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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.
email edition
Posted on August 24, 2008The email edition’s rough draft is here, the final will go out on Monday. I’m in court all week (continuing a trial from last week) and posting will continue to be light.
Sr. Helen takes on the DNCC
Posted on August 24, 2008via the Rocky Mountain News: Ultimately [ ] Prejean received a standing ovation for her fiery denouncement of war and her tying it to desensitization caused by the allowance of capital punishment in American prisons. “Practice of the death penalty on our own soil,” Prejeans said, “has made it easier for us to kill those we designate [...
adding an ask to the weekly email
Posted on August 24, 2008Going forward at the end of all the weekly email editions will be an “ask” for various nonprofits working on issues surrounding capital punishment and/or criminal justice reform. For the next quarter it will look something like this: As a reminder, if you find this email useful, feel free to forward it or excerpt it...
some good news on the PD student loan front
Posted on August 22, 2008Of late I work in a small public defender trial office (3 staff trial attorneys & 1 per diem). Good water cooler gossip virtually never exists. That is where Skelly’s Arbitrary and Capricious comes in. Skelly offers good news, good gossip & sometimes funny war stories about fellow PDs, usually best read over a cup [...
Jeffrey Woods execution has been
Posted on August 21, 2008Jeffrey Woods execution has been stayed for tonight. All executions for the remainder of the month are off. From that opinion. With all due respect, a system that requires an insane person to first make “a substantial showing” of his own lack of mental capacity without the assistance of counsel or a mental health expert, [...
Third Circuit grant of PP relief
Posted on August 20, 2008The Third Circuit has granted penalty phase relief in Bond v. Beard , No. 06-9002, 06-9003. The reason for relief is a stunningly common rationale: trial counsel failed to adequately investigate the Condemned’s social history. Counsel for Bond failed to meet this constitutional minimum...
Missouri stay
Posted on August 20, 2008The Missouri Supreme Court has postponed next week’s scheduled execution of Dennis Skillicorn, The state supreme court delayed his Aug. 27 execution date by at least 30 days.
COA granted in Rosales v. Quarterman on Atkins claim
Posted on August 20, 2008The Fifth Circuti in Michael Rosales v. Quarterman, No. 07-70019, has granted a Certificate of Appealability on the issue of whether the condemned is mentally retarded within the meaning of Atkins v. Virginia.
Headlines elsewhere
Posted on August 19, 2008I remain in trial for a few more days in what seems to be a summer of endless court deadlines and appearances in addition to trials. Posting will continue to be light through at least the end of the week. Elsewhere headlines read: From DPIC - Live Radio Show Covers Issues in Texas Executions From AI’s DP [...
term wrap up
Posted on August 18, 2008The Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association has made available its 2008 Annual Review of the Supreme Court’s Term, Criminal Cases. [via SCOTUSBlog & Harmful Error]
Cameron Todd Willingham to be reinvestigated
Posted on August 18, 2008via the Innocence Project The Texas State Forensic Science Commission agreed Friday to investigate possible negligence or misconduct in the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Willingham was executed in 2004 for allegedly murdering his three young children by setting his Corsicana home on fire in 1991...
Sixth Circuit penalty phase grant of relief
Posted on August 18, 2008The Sixth Circuit today granted penalty phase relief in Jells v Mitchell on a common refrain, failure to adequately investigate for the penalty phase. Jells has demonstrated that his counsel provided ineffective assistance when they: (1) failed to timely prepare for the mitigation phase of Jells?s trial; and (2) failed to use a mitigation [...
new scholarship
Posted on August 16, 2008via SLP A new article now up here at SSRN, which looks closely at one state’s death penalty, looks like useful weekend reading. The article is titled “The Death Penalty in Delaware: An Empirical Study,” and here is the abstract: This article reports the findings of the first phase of a three phase empirical study of the [...
new scholarship
Posted on August 16, 2008via the LTB: Deborah W. Denno (Fordham University School) has posted The Lethal Injection Debate: Law and Science (Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. 35, No. 701, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: On April 16, 2008, for the first time in decades, the United States Supreme Court reviewed evidence concerning whether a state’s [...
Texas stay
Posted on August 16, 2008Dennrd Mann was scheduled to be executed in the coming week. His execution date has been reset for November.
Clearing the row in Trinidad & Tobago
Posted on August 16, 2008In Trinidad and Tobago the 52 people earlier this weekend saw their death sentences commuted to life.
Texas Kills
Posted on August 14, 2008via the Dallas Morning News Michael Anthony Rodriguez wanted to die, and shortly after 6:30 this evening he got his wish. The 45-year-old is the first member of the Texas Seven to be executed. The infamous band of convicts killed an Irving police officer in December 2000, about a week after their escape from prison...
improving the administration of justice in cali
Posted on August 13, 2008Getting the right guy, step one. California lawmakers have voted to ban use of uncorroborated testimony from jailhouse informants that is used to convict criminal defendants. The state Assembly on Tuesday approved a bill by Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, that would prohibit use of the unsupported testimony...
Matthew 25 too costly these days?
Posted on August 13, 2008via Skelly: A Kodiak shelter that has served those in hard times for nearly a decade is closing… The closing is troubling to Allan Thielen, a supervising attorney with the Alaska Public Defenders Agency in Kodiak. He says the amount of crime the facility has prevented in the past nine years by taking substance abusers off [...
Details Magazine meets Glen Edward Chapman
Posted on August 13, 2008The sergeant says, ?Pack up.? Glen Edward Chapman has no idea what?s going on. It?s a sunny afternoon in April, and he has just come in from playing basketball with some of the other inmates at the maximum-security state penitentiary in Raleigh, North Carolina...
New resource: Access to Post-Conviction DNA Testing
Posted on August 13, 2008The Justice Project has developed a series of policy reviews on the leading causes of wrongful convictions that explain the problems and recommend common sense solutions Improving Access to Post-Conviction DNA Testing: A Policy ReviewThis policy review provides an overview of problems with current post-conviction DNA testing laws, offers solutions to these problems, profiles cases [...
A remand on a successive petition in the Fifth Circuit
Posted on August 13, 2008The Fifth Circuit in Rickey Lynn Lewis v. Quarterman remands on an Atkins claim raised on a successive petition. The issue before the panel in Lewis is whether an affidavit submitted for the first time in federal habeas review — and hence unavailable to the state court in making its factual determinations — could be [...
Remembering Leon Dorsey on his execution day
Posted on August 12, 2008more Jason Sickles has an incredibly candid blog post on tonight’s execution in Texas: Someone asked me the other day if I thought convicted killer Leon David Dorsey deserved to die. I didn’t respond. Why? Because that’s a call for a higher power greater than me to decide...
worth a second look: Understanding Defense-Initiated Victim Outreach And Why It Is Essential In Defending A Capital Client by Mickell Branham & Richard Burr
Posted on August 12, 2008I went back and read Understanding Defense-Initiated Victim Outreach And Why It Is Essential In Defending A Capital Client by Mickell Branham & Richard Burr after merely skimming it. WOWSER. From that article A murder evokes empathy. Upon first hearing of a murder in our communities, we immediately feel sadness and loss and an outpouring of feeling [...
Texas kills
Posted on August 12, 2008Reuters: Texas executed a man by lethal injection on Tuesday for a 1994 double slaying during an armed robbery, the seventh convict put to death this year by America’s most active death penalty state. Leon Dorsey, 32, was condemned for the 1994 murders in Dallas of two video store employees [James Armstrong, 26, and Brad Lindsey, 20], [...
email edition available
Posted on August 11, 2008This week’s email edition is now available: Opinions from Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court dominate this double edition. In Comm v. David Allen Sattazahn relief is granted on the failure of trial counsel to adequately investigate potential penalty phase defenses...
new scholarship
Posted on August 11, 2008via Legal Theory Blog /Lawrence Solum, Craig Haney (University of California Santa Cruz) has posted Evolving Standards of Decency: Advancing the Nature and Logic of Capital Mitigation (Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This article appears in the Hofstra Law Review symposium issue on the [...
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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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