NC Death Penalty Lawyer, Lisa Dubs, Profiled

Dubs reacts to a jury verdict acquitting Michael Mead

The Charlotte Observer profiles death penalty defense attorney Lisa Dubs.  Here's another great attorney doing remarkable work.  The story needs nothing more from me apart from my admiration and respect.

The First Innocent Man

The man in the mugshot is Randall Dale Adams, the subject of Eroll Morris' great documentary The Thin Blue Line.  Randall Dale Adams was one of the first Texas death row inmates to be exonerated.  Adams' exoneration for killing a police officer during a traffic stop predated the innocence project and the advent of DNA technology.  It was based on the astonishing efforts of a handful of people including Morris who questioned the illogical sequence of facts and proffered testimony in the case.  In exonerating Adams, Morris et al. demonstrated that highly motivated law enforcement will massage the evidence and testimony to put an innocent man on death row when the underlying crime involves a cop killing.  Big surprise, right?  The following is an excerpt from the Dallas Observer's obituary notice: 

"It's an Everyman's story. It's the story of someone slipping through the cracks -- if you like, a nonfiction Twilight Zone episode." That was filmmaker Errol Morris talking, in 1988, about his documentary The Thin Blue Line -- otherwise known as the film that proved Randall Dale Adams did not kill Dallas Police officer Robert Wood in 1976, despite his having been convicted of the crime and sentenced to die in '77.

Errol Morris did not come to Dallas in 1985 to spring Adams; he didn't even know who he was. The filmmaker had arrived instead to profile Dr. James Grigson, the local psychiatrist known as "Dr. Death," because his expert testimony on behalf of the District Attorney's Office all but guaranteed a death sentence. That's what Adams received, thanks to Grigson, who told the jury he'd kill again if ever released. But Randall told the director: "I'm innocent." Well, of course he was; who on Death Row isn't? But Morris looked into it: "History, properly considered, is a mystery," the director told me in '04 when speaking about The Thin Blue Line. And he discovered: Adams wasn't lying. This is what we wrote in 2007 in summation:

The documentary alleged that [Dallas County District Attorney Henry] Wade's first assistant, Doug Mulder, withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. Adams' attorney maintained Mulder manipulated key witnesses. Mulder denied that and said he'd simply "forgotten" to turn over a witness statement pointing to another man. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered Dallas County to grant a new trial, and then-District Attorney John Vance dropped the charges.

The real cop-killer, David Harris, told the Dallas Times Herald and District Court Judge Larry Baraka shortly after the film's release that he'd lied about Adams's involvement in the shooting. It took a while for D.A. John Vance to come around, but, finally, Adams was released in the spring of '89. Two years later Adams wrote a book about his case in 1991, but finally left Texas a few years later to lead "a quiet life in Columbus, Ohio." And that is where he died in October, at the age of 61. Few knew of his quiet farewell till an obit appeared in yesterday's paper, buried in the Metro section; the Associated Press picks up the tale today.

Adams wasn't the first whose wrongful conviction in Dallas County became national news; before Randall Dale Adams, Errol Morris and The Thin Blue Line, there was Lenell Jeter, Morley Safer and 60 Minutes. And God know he wouldn't be the last, as the parade of exonerees from the Dallas County courthouse reminds every few months. But as Adams's longtime attorney -- Randy Schaffer of Houston, who took the case pro bono in '82 -- tells the AP: "Within the context of the modern criminal justice system as we know it, he was the first innocent man, the first death row inmate exonerated based on innocence, even though in the court's opinion he was exonerated on the state's use of false testimony."
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I vividly remember watching Morris' documentary and being awe struck by the horror story at the heart of Morris' film.  It forever changed my view of the death penalty.

For proof that innocent men die in Texas (and elsewhere) look no further than the Bad Lawyer posts on the Cameron Todd Willingham case.  Willingham was murdered by Texas.  Governor Rick Perry, an assessory to the official killing, will be haunted by the spectre of the execution of Willingham, an Op-Ed at the New York Times claimed over the weekend.  Good.

Georgia Activists Attack Licensure of Death Drug Doctor

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that activists in an attempt to save the life of Roy Blankenship who is scheduled to be killed Thursday, are attacking the licensure of a doctor who helped procure drugs for other states which were used in the so-called lethal cocktail to execute the condemned.  This is an excerpt from Rhonda Cook's article:

Four days before Georgia is to execute a Savannah man in the murder of a 78-year-old woman, a human rights group is asking the state to revoke the license of a doctor who sometimes participates in lethal injections.

Roy Blankenship is scheduled to die by lethal injection Thursday for the 1978 murder of Sarah Mims Bowen, who was beaten to death. She was found in the bedroom in her house just a block away from where Blankenship lived. Police followed bloody footprints to Blankenship's house.

On Monday, the Southern Center for Human Rights filed a complaint with the Georgia Composite Medical Board alleging that Dr. Carlo Anthony Musso illegally helped Kentucky and Tennessee secure a scarce sedative used in a three-drug cocktail for executions, sodium thiopental. The only U.S.-based manufacturer of the sedative announced in January that it was no longer making the drug.

The group said in its filing that Musso, who owns CorrectHealth and Rainbow Medical Associates, secured some of the drug and then sold it to at least two other states even though he was not registered with the Georgia Board of Pharmacy or the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to ship sodium thiopental across state lines.

“Dr. Musso violated a host of state and federal criminal laws,” the Southern Center for Human Rights wrote.

Musso, who could not be reached Monday, has denied selling drugs to Kentucky or Tennessee.

The filing says Musso secured the drug from a company in London at the same time Georgia went to the same source: Dream Pharma, which operated out of the back of a driving school. The DEA subsequently seized the drugs that the Georgia Department of Corrections had bought from Dream Pharma because the department was not registered to buy the sedative from the manufacturer or to ship it to the United States.

At the same time that the Southern Center for Human Rights was trying to block Musso or any doctors associated with his business from participating in any executions, Blankenship’s lawyer filed an appeal in Fulton Superior Court. Judge Wendy Shoob has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday.

Blankenship could be the first inmate in Georgia executed with a new three-drug combination that swapped sodium thiopental for pentobarbital.
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Like that?  Dream Pharma.  Wow, the euphemisms used in the Death Penalty game are astounding.  The Bad Lawyer tries to be a euphemism-free zone as it relates to official killing of citizens.

California Taxpayers Pay $308 Million for Each Inmate They Put to Death, What a Great Expenditure of Limited Resources

That's right folks, the LA Times reports that California ponies up nearly $308 million dollars for each inmate on death row that they get to kill.  Isn't that utterly brilliant? 

Here's an excerpt from the article by LA Times reporter Carol J. Williams (with credit to HuffPost for the tip:)

Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty's costs.

The examination of state, federal and local expenditures for capital cases, conducted over three years by a senior federal judge and a law professor, estimated that the additional costs of capital trials, enhanced security on death row and legal representation for the condemned adds $184 million to the budget each year.

The study's authors, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, also forecast that the tab for maintaining the death penalty will climb to $9 billion by 2030, when San Quentin's death row will have swollen to well over 1,000.

In their research for "Executing the Will of the Voters: A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature's Multi-Billion-Dollar Death Penalty Debacle," Alarcon and Mitchell obtained California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records that were unavailable to others who have sought to calculate a cost-benefit analysis of capital punishment.

Their report traces the legislative and initiative history of the death penalty in California, identifying costs imposed by the expansion of the types of crimes that can lead to a death sentence and the exhaustive appeals guaranteed condemned prisoners.

The authors outline three options for voters to end the current reality of spiraling costs and infrequent executions: fully preserve capital punishment with about $85 million more in funding for courts and lawyers each year; reduce the number of death penalty-eligible crimes for an annual savings of $55 million; or abolish capital punishment and save taxpayers about $1 billion every five or six years.

Alarcon, who prosecuted capital cases as a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney in the 1950s and served as clemency secretary to Gov. Pat Brown, said in an interview that he believes the majority of California voters will want to retain some option for punishing the worst criminals with death. He isn't opposed to capital punishment, while Mitchell, his longtime law clerk, said she favors abolition. Both said they approached the analysis from an impartial academic perspective, aiming solely to educate voters about what they are spending on death row.

Alarcon four years ago issued an urgent appeal for overhaul of capital punishment in the state, noting that the average lag between conviction and execution was more than 17 years, twice the national figure. Now it is more than 25 years, with no executions since 2006 and none likely in the near future because of legal challenges to the state's lethal injection procedures.

The long wait for execution "reflects a wholesale failure to fund the efficient, effective capital punishment system that California voters were told they were choosing" in the battery of voter initiatives over the last three decades that have expanded the penalty to 39 special circumstances in murder, the report says.

Unless profound reforms are made by lawmakers who have failed to adopt previous recommendations for rescuing the system, Alarcon and Mitchell say, capital punishment will continue to exist mostly in theory while exacting an untenable cost.
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The Bad Lawyer blawg has long ridiculed the capital punishment follies. Florida is currently conducting an expensive tax-payer funded media circus in an effort to put a young, lunatic woman to death while many other parental killers are sitting in Florida prisons doing life or a lot less.  In Cleveland families of the victims of serial killer Anthony Sowell have begged a prosecutor and judge to accept a guilty plea with the death penalty off the table to spare them the horror of living through a trial.  The official response, nope.

Our law enforcement and punishment priorities in this violent, crazy place are completely irrational.

Why Are Some Killers Put to Death and Others Not?

This country's system of capital punishment is fundamentally flawed by arbitrary, inconsistent, dangerously inaccurate convictions and sentencing as well as documented racist state sanctioned slayings. 

The report at Kentucky.com of the death by natural causes of this country's former youngest death row inmate, confirms this firmly held belief:

"Todd Ice (legt) died Thursday at Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Crystal City. He was 47, according to an obituary posted by Garden View Funeral Home.  Ice was sentenced to death at the age of 16 after being convicted of murder for the 1978 slaying of his 7-year-old neighbor in eastern Kentucky's Powell County. Ice's father, Dean Ice, told The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., that his son died of an apparent heart attack.
Syl Knox, whose 7-year-old daughter, Donna, died in the attack, said he and his wife Sheila were relieved to learn of Ice's death. Sheila Knox, who was bound, beaten and stabbed by Ice, survived and later identified him as the assailant.

The Kentucky Supreme Court in 1983 reversed his conviction and death sentence, and he was retried in 1986. He was convicted of the lesser offense of manslaughter during extreme emotional disturbance and sentenced to 20 years.  Ice was eligible for parole at the time of sentencing based on time already served, but the state Parole Board, after being inundated with petitions from eastern Kentucky residents, ordered Ice to serve his full sentence.

He was released from prison in the mid-1990s and appeared on CBS' 60 Minutes in 1996, where he said he was taking anti-psychotic medication and was "not a violent person any more."

Ice later settled in Missouri. The family is holding a private burial at a cemetery in Muncie, Ind."
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Some men and women accused of heinous crimes die by capital punishment, some do not.  We are supposed to believe that capital punishment is a rational and civilized method of justice.  It is not.  The death penalty is arbitrary and capricious and cruel to all involved.  Capital punishment serves only our collective outrage and even then the administration of this penalty is so wildly imperfect and unpredictable that it serves our righteous anger, poorly if at all. 

The thing is, we all die.  Are we ever free of the crimes we committed?  I think not. 

Oklahoma Set to Execute Donald Ray Wackerly, II, Tonight at 6--Buddhist Monk to Be Present

Reporter Randy Kreihbel at Tulsa World is reporting that Oklahoma is scheduled to execute Donald Ray Wackerly II after reaching an accord on the presence of his spiritual adviser, a Buddhist monk.  This is Kreihbel's account:

"Donald Ray Wackerly II is set to be executed as scheduled Thursday after an agreement Wednesday night regarding the death-row inmate's spiritual adviser.


Wackerly, 40, had asked that a Buddhist monk be allowed to accompany him into the death chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester before Thursday's execution, scheduled for 6 p.m.   Generally, only the condemned prisoner and corrections officials are allowed in the chamber.   Wackerly's lawyer, Michael Salem, said an agreement has been reached to allow the monk access to the body immediately after the execution is carried out.

Wednesday's was the latest and presumably last twist in Wackerly's case.  In August, the execution of Jeffrey David Matthews was stayed because the state could not acquire a usable dose of sodium thiopental, the sedative used in lethal injections. Production of the drug has been suspended temporarily by its lone manufacturer.   Prison officials proposed a substitute sedative, brevital, but Matthews' lawyer argued that it might not meet the legal requirements for a humane execution.   Death by lethal injection actually involves three drugs: one to anesthesize the prisoner, one to stop respiration, and one to stop the heart.

The state eventually obtained a single dose of sodium thiopental. With Matthews' execution stayed, it was decided to use the dose for Wackerly, who was to have received pentobarbital as a sedative.  Wackerly asked for a stay on the grounds that the execution could not be properly carried out if for some reason the full dose were not administered.   That request was denied.

Wackerly was convicted in 1998 for the 1996 murder of Laotian immigrant Pan Sayakhoummane in rural Sequoyah County.  According to prosecutors, Wackerly developed a robbery scheme, pretended to have car trouble and ambushed the victim when Sayakhoummane, who had been fishing nearby, stopped to help. Sayakhoummane was shot eight times and left in his partially submerged truck."
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Wackerly's death sentence raises the question in my mind about the appropriateness of the sentence in what seems like like the sort of garden variety, heinous robbery and murder.  Since I know nothing about the underlying facts apart from the summary by this reporter, why is Oklahoma killing this inmate when so many similar crimes result in sentences resulting in lengthy prison sentences followed by eventual release?  Is Wackerly an especially bad outlaw?

Isn't this one of the flaws in this crazy quilt system of state sanctioned homicide?  A crime like this in Baltimore might yield a 9-year prison term, but death in Oklahoma. 

Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair from NPR

Apropos of the Ray Towler exoneration NPR features, this week, a documentary on the execution for rape of Willie McGee (picture) on their program Radio Diaries.   McGee was put to death a couple of minutes past midnight on May 8, 1951 in Laurel, Mississippi.  The U.S. Supreme Court rejected his death penalty appeal.

McGee was publically executed in a "traveling" electric chair (pic) with an audience of 1,000 on the courthouse lawn.  There is a radio recording of the execution which is featured in the documentary.  The crowd's celebration at the moment of McGee's death is clearly evident from the tape recording.  A book, The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex and Secrets in the Jim Crow South is due out from Harpers, next week.

From about 1940 on,  the mobile electric chair went county to county throughout Mississippi providing "closure" in capital cases.  We can only wonder at how many innocent men and women met their fate in this apparatus. 

We're so much more humane nowadays with the needle and gurney, don't you think?