Lethal Injection

Lawyers pleading for George Ryan's freedom

2010-09-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

WIFE 'TERMINALLY ILL' | Supreme Court ruling also cited in bid for ex-gov's release

Picture:Lura Lynn Ryan speaks to reporters at the Dirksen Federal Building while attorney Dan Webb, who represents her husband, former Gov. George Ryan, listens. Also pictured is former Gov. Jim Thompson. They are asking a federal judge to grant the early release of George Ryan from prison.

Lawyers for former Illinois Gov. George Ryan are pleading with a federal judge to free him, arguing his wife's terminal illness -- as well as a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision -- should factor into his release.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an honest services law -- which involved some of the charges that faced Ryan. Ryan's lawyers say he has served 34 months of his 78-month sentence and, given the Supreme Court decision, that should be enough.

"George Ryan is now in prison serving time for something that the United States Supreme Court has said is not a crime," Ryan's lawyer, Dan Webb, said after court.

U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer set a Nov. 1 hearing to weigh whether Ryan should be freed and parts of his conviction overturned because of the decision.

Webb pointed to Ryan's wife, Lura Lynn, who was in court Thursday carrying an oxygen tank that was hooked up to her nose.

"She is terminally ill,'' Webb said. "She has one, two, three years to live.''

Assistant U.S. Attorney Laurie Barsella said that prosecutors "strongly and vociferously disagree'' that the Supreme Court decision had a bearing on the Ryan case.

"In our view, this case was all about bribery and kickbacks,'' the exception to the honest services law that was upheld by the high court, Barsella said.

In a filing last week, Ryan's lawyers urged Pallmeyer to release Ryan as lawyers fight over the law, saying there was urgency because of his wife's illness.

The filing cited 10 medical conditions Lura Lynn Ryan suffers from, primarily pulmonary fibrosis. It also said she suffered a mini-stroke while visiting her husband in prison.

"The stress of being away from her husband exacerbates both her physical condition and her depression," they wrote in the filing.

Ryan is 76 and suffers from Crohn's disease, hypertension and heart disease, his lawyers say.

"It's fair to say that George Ryan has a lot of health issues also. He's a very strong man," Webb said. "We told him to hang in there. He's a strong-willed man."

Ryan's son, George Ryan Jr., teared up when Webb described his mother's condition outside the courtroom.

"I miss him a great deal,'' Lura Lynn Ryan told reporters, herself blinking back tears.

Without intervention, George Ryan is scheduled to be released in 2013.

In 2008, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin urged President Bush to grant Ryan clemency. Weeks later, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested on corruption charges.

The Ryans have renewed a clemency request with President Obama, who has not acted on it.

Source(www.suntimes.com)

A Contributor Perspective: Welcome to Illinois Where Corruption is in Abundance!

2010-09-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Former Governor George Ryan filed a motion in court late Tuesday to have part of his conviction dismissed. He is citing the Supreme Court ruling regarding Enron's Jeffrey Skilling's case.

According to Ryan's attorneys, under the new ruling, Ryan's conviction is unlawful. George Ryan was convicted in 2006 of racketeering, conspiracy, tax fraud, and making false statements to the FBI (sound at all familiar?). Not all of these convictions pertain to the honest services laws, so some of the convictions will stay even if he wins this battle. Currently Ryan is serving a 6 and a half year federal prison term in Terre Haute, Indiana.

If Ryan's attorneys are as good as they think they are, he can very well have these convictions overturned. This makes me very angry because after all the effort and money the state put into that 6 month trial in 2006, it seems like a waste. Being that Ryan is getting up there in age (he is currently 76), I almost feel as though the courts will take pity on him. Doesn't seem quite fair does it? If his convictions are indeed thrown out, it is also possible that he will be released from prison to return to the life he once had. I can't help but wonder, will this be yet another slap in the face for Illinois? After last month's trial of Blagojevich, the jury came out hung on 23 of the 24 counts. Can this get any worse?

This new honest services ruling seems to be a bunch of baloney. Just who exactly gave George Ryan honest services? The men/women who showered him with gifts and donations to his campaign? I can't see how that is very honest at all. With this ruling, I expect a lot of politicians in both the United States and Illinois to try and get away with as much as possible and not be able to be prosecuted. This ruling of the Supreme Court can only be deemed as ridiculous in my mind. I am going to sit back and watch this all unfold. My guess is, it won't be pretty and that Ryan's convictions will be thrown out.

The situation for Illinois is only getting worse with these corrupt politicians. George Ryan filing that motion was just one of the many setbacks I can see coming. Hopefully, his convictions will
stick, though I realize it is highly unlikely at this point.

Source(www.associatedcontent.com)

Attorneys: Ex-Gov. Ryan's wife terminally ill

2010-09-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

Attorneys for George Ryan say the imprisoned former governor's wife of 54 years is terminally ill.

A frail Lura Lynn Ryan attended a federal court hearing Thursday carrying an oxygen canister in a tote bag and with tubes running from it to her nose.

Attorney Dan Webb cited her illness in arguing there's urgency to the request to release the ex-governor while the judge considers a motion to throw out parts of George Ryan's 2006 conviction.

Webb says Ryan's wife has a lung disease and only has "one or two years to live."

The 76-year-old former Republican governor is due for release in 2013. He wants Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer to dismiss convictions based on disputed anti-fraud laws.

Pallmeyer will hear arguments Nov. 1.

Source(www.whbf.com)

State's new execution plan is challenged in court

2010-08-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

Death row inmate's lawsuit alleges that California corrections officials rushed through the reform process, and that the procedure they sent forward is likely to cause pain.

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

3:32 PM PDT, August 2, 2010

A death row inmate convicted of the 1985 torture and murder of a pizza deliveryman in Glendale asked a court Monday to strike down the state's newly revised execution procedures as illegal and likely to inflict excruciating pain if used on any of California's 700-plus condemned prisoners.

The lawsuit filed by Mitchell Sims, 50, alleges that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation rushed through revisions of the lethal injection procedures and deliberately sought to shut the public out of the process.

Corrections officials approved the changes one day before a May 1 deadline and sent them to the Office of Administrative Law for endorsement. That office endorsed the changes late April 30, allowing the execution plans to move forward to state and federal courts for review.

Executions have been on hold in California since early 2006, when U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel expressed concern that some of the 13 death sentences carried out in the state in the past two decades might have exposed prisoners to unconstitutionally "cruel and unusual punishment."

As in most of the 35 states that allow the death penalty, California used a three-drug method that was intended to anesthetize the condemned prisoner with the first shot, paralyze him with the second and stop his heart with the third.

Fogel was persuaded by expert witnesses who said some of those executed may not have been fully unconscious when they got the painful last injection.

After Fogel ordered reform of the procedures, a task force named by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger initially rewrote the new plan behind closed doors. Marin County Superior Court Judge Lynn O'Malley Taylor struck down that rewrite as illegal because the state failed to seek public comment as required by the Administrative Procedures Act.

Corrections officials have spent the last two years tinkering with the procedures to incorporate small changes suggested in some of the more than 20,000 public comments.

Sims, charged with killing Domino's deliveryman John Harrington as part of a cross-country rampage against the pizza company that once employed him, has exhausted all of his appeals, said his attorney, Sara Eisenberg. Only a handful of the 705 on death row are available for execution once the penalty is resumed.

carol.williams@latimes.com

Va. woman who persuaded men to kill husband, stepson to be 1st US execution of woman since '05

2010-07-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

DENA POTTERAssociated Press Writer

1:30 PM EDT, July 29, 2010

An undated photo provided by the Virginia Department of Corrections shows Teresa Lewis, 40. On Thursday, July 29, 2010, a Pittsylvania County, Va., Circuit judge set a Sept. 23 execution for Lewis. Lewis was sentenced to death for plotting to have her husband and stepson killed in 2002 so she could collect a $250,000 life insurance policy. Lewis would be the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly 100 years. (AP Photo/Virginia Department of Corrections) (AP/ July 29, 2010)

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A Virginia woman who used sex and money to persuade two men to kill her husband and her stepson to collect a $250,000 life insurance policy was scheduled Thursday to be executed in two months, which would be the first U.S. execution of a woman in five years.

A judge set a Sept. 23 execution date for Teresa Lewis, 41, the only woman on Virginia's death row. She would be the first woman executed in the state in nearly a century.

Lewis offered herself and her 16-year-old daughter for sex to two men who committed the killings. She provided money to buy the murder weapons and stood by while they shot her husband, Julian Clifton Lewis Jr., 51, and stepson Charles J. Lewis, 25, in 2002 in Pittsylvania County in south-central Virginia.

Lewis rummaged through her husband's pockets for money while he lay dying and waited nearly an hour before calling 911.

The gunmen, Rodney Fuller and Matthew Shallenberger, were sentenced to life in prison. Shallenberger committed suicide in prison in 2006.

Lewis' daughter, Christie Lynn Bean, served five years because she knew about the plan but remained silent.

Lewis' attorney James Rocap III claims Shallenberger said about two years before his suicide that it was him, not Lewis, who planned the killings and that he was using Lewis to get to her husband's money.

"The truth about her involvement in the tragic deaths of Julian and C.J. Lewis does not require or justify her execution, especially in light of the fact that the lives of those who actually gunned down Julian and C.J. were spared," Rocap said.

Lewis would be the first woman executed in the U.S. since Frances Newton died by injection in Texas. Newton shot her husband and two young children to death to collect insurance money.

Lewis would also be the first woman executed in Virginia since 1912, when 17-year-old Virginia Christian died in the electric chair for suffocating her employer.

Women commit about 12 percent of the murders in the U.S. annually, and few ever reach the execution chamber.

Out of more than 1,200 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, only 11 women have been executed. Of the more than 3,200 inmates on death row nationwide, 53 are women.

Women usually don't commit torture murders, they aren't serial killers and often don't have a history of other violent crimes compared with men who get sentenced to death, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. They also typically kill someone they know.

"I think it's those facts, rather than just gender that make the difference," he said.

Lewis' first attempt to kill her husband failed. The plan was for the men to kill her husband as he came home from work and make it look like a robbery, but a car was too close and foiled the plot. A few days later she found out her stepson was coming home on leave from Army National Guard duty, and they decided to wait and kill him, too, so they could get all the insurance money.

Lewis pleaded guilty to capital murder, allowing a judge to determine her sentence. Her attorneys believed she stood a better chance of getting a life prison term from the judge who had never sentenced anyone to death, than from a jury.

In a 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Lewis said she hired the hitmen to escape an abusive relationship. She said she and Shallenberger became lovers and concocted the scheme to murder her husband, who she said was an abusive alcoholic.

In a hearing before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March, Rocap argued that Lewis was too dependent on other people and prescription drugs to have plotted the murders. He said the trial lawyers' failure to raise dependency disorder and drug addiction as mitigating factors at sentencing violated Lewis' constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel.

Rocap said he would appeal her case to the U.S. Supreme Court and will file a clemency request with Gov. Bob McDonnell.

___

Online: www.saveteresalewis.org

Executioner Unaware

2010-07-02T18:18:00.000-07:00

In light of the pending execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner, set for June 18 by firing squad in the state of Utah, CNN posted an article this morning recounting an interview with a former member of a Utah firing squad. The individual, who spoke under condition of anonymity, discussed what it was like to be a member of the five-man team that carried out the state’s order to end a life. Overall, the individual displayed a nonchalance about taking another life that is all the more troubling when you read his rationale. The anonymous executioner said that he felt that the appeals process was too long, stating it should take a couple of years and that should be it. He further supported his pro-deaht penalty position with the assertion that he doubted there have been innocent people executed since the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty constitutional in 1976.

Clearly this individual is unaware of the case of Cameron Todd Willingham. Willingham was executed on Feb. 17, 2004 for capital murder of his three children via a purported arson at the family’s home in Corsicana, Texas. While the state forensic board investigating the case has yet to release a final report, the evidence of the case deconstructed in a number of articles, including one by the New Yorker’s David Grann, and the report submitted to the state forensic board by arson expert Dr. Craig Beyler demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that Texas has executed an innocent man.

Furthermore, how many more people would have been wrongfully executed if this anonymous individual had his way with the length of the appeals process. According to statistics provided by the Innocence Project, 17 of the 254 people exonerated by DNA alone (this statistic does not include other methods of exoneration) have served time on death row. Given that the average time served before exoneration is 13 years and these individuals on death row served anywhere from 5 to 21 years in prison, it is likely not a single one of these individuals would have survived long enough to see his name cleared. The executioner’s statements demonstrate the need for getting accurate information out to the public regarding the facts about wrongful convictions in the United States.

Spread the word folks.

Melbert Ray Ford executed

2010-07-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

No apology offered to the victims' families

Melbert Ray Ford Jr. took his last breath on June 9 at 7:27 p.m., more than 24 years after the last breaths of those he murdered. He ate most of his last meal and declined a sedative as well as a prayer request from the prison chaplin at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. His last words were not ones of remorse for his crimes but thanks to his family, friends and loved ones.

According to records from the Newton County Superior Court, Ford and Martha Chapman Matich, 31, had a romantic relationship and when it soured, he began harassing her by phone. Ford spoke to several people about robbing the store where she worked and told at least one person that he intended to kill Martha.

It wasn’t his first time threatening someone. In 1978, he was convicted of terroristic threats and actions and criminal trespassing in Cobb County.

"Finally, Ford met 19-year-old Roger Turner, who was out of a job and nearly out of money," reads a transcript from Ford’s trial. "By plying him with alcohol, and promising him that they could easily acquire $8,000, Ford persuaded Turner to help him. They drove in Turner’s car to Chapman’s Grocery, arriving just after closing time. Ford shot away the lower half of the locked and barred glass door and entered the store. Turner, waiting in the car, heard screams and gunshots. Then Ford ran from the store to the car, carrying a bag of money."

The store’s burglar alarm sounded at 10:20 p.m., according to the transcripts, and when the Newton County Sheriff’s deputy arrived at 10:27 p.m., he reportedly found Martha lying dead behind the counter. She had been shot three times with a .32 caliber pistol. Lisa Renee Chapman, 11, was found in the bathroom. She had been shot in the head but was still alive, sitting on a bucket, bleeding from the head and convulsing. She died later — never able to answer questions about the incident.

Both Ford and Turner were arrested the next day, and Turner confessed first. Ford allegedly told investigators the shooting began after Martha pushed the alarm button. He also at said his trial that he was "too drunk to know what was happening and that it was Turner who entered the store and killed the victims."

Ford was convicted of burglary, possession of a firearm during a crime, armed robbery and murder — for which he was sentenced to death on Oct. 23, 1986.

Cindy Chapman-Griffeth, the mother of Lisa, said in an interview Monday, “I feel like I have been at war, but instead of guns it has been a knife in my heart the whole time.

After the execution, as the sun was setting on the grounds of the prison, she said she felt closure but wished that Ford had admitted what he had done and asked her forgiveness.

Chapman-Griffeth described her daughter as a tenderhearted girl who loved animals, especially horses, and people and was always smiling and laughing. She attended Livingston Elementary School where students still stroll through a wing named in her honor. The young girl dreamed of becoming a teacher one day.

“She liked to learn sign language and speaking to people who were impaired,” said Chapman-Griffeth. “She loved unicorns and walking behind her daddy as he plowed the garden, pushing the dirt between her toes. She loved to help me cook and being a big sister. She was also saved the week before she was murdered at a Bible school at Prospect Methodist Church.”

Martha’s brother Paul described his sister as a quiet, reserved girl who tended to be a follower.

"She always looked for the good in every individual,” he said.

Paul said he met Ford only once, when he came to Georgia in 1985 for his mother’s funeral. He remembered noticing his controlling and manipulative behavior during a meal. Being a Baptist minister, Paul was used to counseling people.

“I took her aside and I told her that he was evil and she needed to put him aside,” said Paul. “She told me that she thought he would change. My sister loved life and looked for the good in everyone. She tried to see the good in this man, or this monster, and thought that maybe she could change him. But as we know, that didn’t take place.”

Martha’s family, who owned Chapman’s Store where Martha and Lisa were killed, knew Ford was abusive throughout their roughly year-and-a-half-long relationship. At one point, he tied her up in the trailer the two shared and burned and tortured her. Martha had to have a police escort home every night after working at the store. Just before her death she moved in with Chapman-Griffeth and her family.

The night of March 6, 1986, Martha and another woman were working at the store, but the other woman went home sick. Lisa was at the store playing with the minnows and crickets sold as bait and didn’t want to leave her aunt alone at the store.

According to the March 23, 1986 edition of The Covington News, Turner confessed that “Ford described killing Lisa Chapman in the bathroom at the grocery. Turner said that Ford told him that she was crouched by the toilet staring at him, so he felt he had to shoot her.”

“She was begging him not to do it in the bathroom where she went to hide,” said Chapman-Griffeth Monday.

When asked what she would say to Ford if given the opportunity, Chapman-Griffeth stumbled.

“I don’t know what I would say to him,” she said. “I’m trying to find peace in my heart and I think this will help. I don’t think the man has any remorse and if he doesn’t I hope he burns 70 times in Hell. He says he’s a changed man but he’s never admitted to doing it.

“Twenty-four years and 32 appeals and he’s never admitted it.”

Paul said that he has forgiven Ford because that’s what God would want him to do.

“Some say the death penalty should not be carried out because those were Old Testament laws, but I still believe to this day that he should pay for what he’s done and therefore, if he is put to death, he has received what he deserves,” said Paul, adding that it would be easier for him to forgive Ford if he admitted to the murders and apologized for committing them.

Although the families of Ford’s victims are in favor of his execution, members of Georgians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty organized vigils protesting capital punishment in cities across the state. About 15 protesters from the organization stood outside of the prison during the execution.

“Georgians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty denounces state killing in our names,” said Vice-Chair Kathryn Hamoudah in an e-mail. “We believe that this ultimate punishment is inhumane, arbitrary in application; perpetuates violence and does nothing to keep our communities safer, nor does it address the needs of victims’ families.”

The group is made up of “a coalition of individuals and organizations with a variety of representation, including those that minister to families of those on death row as well as murder victim family members who oppose the death penalty” according to www.gfadp.org.

"We are here to keep vigil and stand against Georgia's actions in taking the life of Melbert Ray Ford tonight,” Hamoudah said. “We stand unified as we remember the loss of life that brings us together and the victims’ family.”

Katey Brown drove from Macon to the vigil, as she has for five other executions.

"I as a taxpayer and a voter am responsible and this is not what I consider an appropriate way to protect society," Brown said.

Chapman-Griffeth, however, feels differently.

“I think it should be done to him the same way he did it to my daughter and my sister-in-law,” she said of Ford’s execution. “I think lethal injection is too good for him. That night I lost a part of my heart that will never be filled.”

Newton County Sheriff Ezell Brown was a deputy at the time of Lisa and Martha’s murder and remembers vividly working with other law enforcement officers to bring their killer to justice.

“I feel that the justice system has carried out its responsibility for ensuring that the victims have justice,” he said. “While their families still live with the horrific memory at least they know that the perpetrator has been brought to justice. Twenty-four years ago other deputies and I had the responsibility of witnessing probably the most gruesome crime of my entire 37 years in law enforcement. Immediately we focused our attention on suspect Melbert Ray Ford and did not rest until we arrested Ford for his careless acts. Today our work is done.”

Study Finds Blacks Blocked From Southern Juries

2010-07-02T18:15:00.001-07:00

By SHAILA DEWAN

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case.

The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed “arrogant” and “pretty vocal.” In another woman, he said he “detected hostility.”

Mr. Broussard also questioned the “sophistication” of a former Army sergeant, a forklift operator with three years of college, a cafeteria manager, an assembly-line worker and a retired Department of Defense program analyst.

The analyst, he said, “did not appear to be sophisticated to us in her questionnaire, in that she spelled Wal-Mart, as one of her previous employers, as Wal-marts.”

Arguments like these were used for years to keep blacks off juries in the segregationist South, systematically denying justice to black defendants and victims. But today, the practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Ala., largely unchecked.

In the Madison County case, the defendant, Jason M. Sharp, a white man, was sentenced to death after a trial by a jury of 11 whites and one black. The April hearing was the result of a challenge by defense lawyers who argued that jury selection was tainted by racial discrimination — a claim that is difficult to prove because prosecutors can claim any race-neutral reason, no matter how implausible, for dismissing a juror.

While jury makeup varies widely by jurisdiction, the organization, which studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — found areas in all of them where significant problems persist. In Alabama, courts have found racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases since 1987, and there are counties where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members have been struck in death penalty cases.

An analysis of Jefferson Parish, La., by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center found that from 1999 to 2007, blacks were struck from juries at more than three times the rate of whites.

In North Carolina, at least 26 current death row defendants were sentenced by all-white juries. In South Carolina, a prosecutor said he struck a black potential juror because he “shucked and jived” when he walked.

Studies have shown that racially diverse juries deliberate longer, consider a wider variety of perspectives and make fewer factual errors than all-white juries, and that predominantly black juries are less likely to impose the death penalty.

Excluding jurors based on race has been illegal since 1875, but after Reconstruction, all-white juries remained the norm in the South.

“It really made lynching and the Ku Klux Klan possible,” said Christopher Waldrep, a historian at San Francisco State University and the author of a forthcoming book about a lawyer who was able, in a rare case, to prove jury discrimination in Mississippi in 1906. “If you’d had a lot of black grand jurors investigating crimes, it would have made lynching impossible.”

Back then, judges and prosecutors often argued that blacks lacked the intelligence or education to serve. That such claims persist is evidence, said Bryan A. Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, that jury selection remains largely unscrutinized.

“There’s just this tolerance, there’s indifference to excluding people on the basis of race, and prosecutors are doing it with impunity,” Mr. Stevenson said. “Unless you’re in the courtroom, unless you’re a lawyer working on these issues, you’re not going to know whether your local prosecutor consistently bars people of color.”

In jury selection, potential jurors are first dismissed for cause — reasons like scheduling conflicts or opposition to the death penalty. Then, both sides can ask questions and take turns dismissing jurors using what are called peremptory strikes (the number of strikes varies by state, but it is often enough for one side to eliminate all qualified minorities).

In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled that if a pattern of discrimination emerged during peremptory strikes, lawyers must provide nonracial reasons for their strikes. The reason does not have to be “persuasive, or even plausible,” the Supreme Court ruled in a later case in which a prosecutor said he dismissed one black juror because he had long hair, and another because he had a goatee, saying, “I don’t like the way they looked.” It is up to the judge to decide if there was deliberate discrimination.

That is a high bar, defense lawyers say — so high that in Tennessee and North Carolina, there has never been a successful reversal based on Batson.

“Anybody with any sense at all can think up any race-neutral reason and get away with it,” said Stephen B. Bright, a capital defense lawyer in Atlanta.

Prosecutors have claimed to strike jurors because they live in high-crime neighborhoods, are unemployed or are single parents. In one Louisiana case, a judge allowed a black juror to be dismissed because the prosecutor said he “looked like a drug dealer.”

Often, a defense lawyer’s challenge is based on showing that white jurors who answered questions the same way or had the same characteristics were not struck. For example, in the Sharp case, Mr. Broussard said that because one juror was studying to be a minister, she “was not the kind of juror we were looking for.” But a white man who was a minister was allowed to serve.

Mr. Broussard did not respond to requests for comment, but Stephen Wimberly, the first assistant district attorney in Jefferson Parish, said that of more than 2,000 jury trials since 1997, only two had been reversed because of discrimination. “The legal standard is not representation of any race or gender, but the fairness and impartiality of each respective juror,” Mr. Wimberly said.

In one Mississippi case, a black man, Curtis Flowers, was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing four furniture store employees. The jury was made up of 11 whites and one black after prosecutors used all 15 of their peremptory strikes on black jurors. Montgomery County, where the crime occurred, is 45 percent black. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the case, noting that “racially motivated jury selection is still prevalent 20 years after Batson.”

At a retrial, in which prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, the jury of seven whites and five blacks was split along racial lines, resulting in a hung jury. At the second retrial, prosecutors sought the death penalty, which eliminated more blacks from the pool of qualified jurors. The jury, nine whites and three blacks, hung again when one black member declined to convict, said Andre De Gruy, the director of the state’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel.

The Equal Justice Initiative study argues that jury diversity “is especially critical because the other decision-making roles in the criminal justice system are held mostly by people who are white.” In the eight Southern states the study examined, more than 93 percent of the district attorneys are white. In Arkansas and Tennessee, all of them are white.

Bill to allow drug flexibility for executions sent to Henry Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?su

2010-07-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

By BARBARA HOBEROCK World Capitol Bureau

Published: 6/2/2010 2:21 AM

Last Modified: 6/2/2010 4:28 AM

OKLAHOMA CITY — A bill sent to Gov. Brad Henry's desk would give the Oklahoma Department of Corrections more flexibility in carrying out executions.

House Bill 2266 also would put restrictions on whom the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System could represent.

Current state law directs the Department of Corrections to use "an ultra-short acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic agent." The new legislation would strike the language specifying what type of drugs must be used.

The new language would give the DOC more flexibility to make changes to the execution protocol if medical procedures change or a court determines a problem exists, attorney general spokesman Charlie Price said Tuesday.

The state's lethal injection method has been previously challenged and upheld, Price said.

Oklahoma uses sodium thiopental to cause unconsciousness, vecuronium bromide to stop breathing and potassium chloride to stop the heart.

DOC Director Justin Jones said sodium thiopental is an older-generation drug and in short supply.

Newer drugs are becoming available, Jones said.

Ninety-two inmates have been executed by lethal injection, including three women. The first was Muskogee County killer Charles Troy Coleman on Sept. 10, 1990.

Prior to that, 82 were executed using electrocution.

McClain County death-row inmate Jeffrey David Matthews is scheduled for execution June 17.

HB 2266 also would put limits on who could be represented by the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System. The measure would prohibit district court judges from appointing OIDS lawyers to represent criminal defendants who post bail and get out of jail during their cases, unless that representation is paid for out of the local court fund.

The measure would not affect Tulsa and Oklahoma counties, which have separate public defender systems.

Rep. Rex Duncan, R-Sand Springs, the House sponsor, said the measure would reduce the cost of legal services to taxpayers.

Duncan is running for district attorney in Pawnee and Osage counties.

Joe Robertson, OIDS executive director, said it is designed to reduce the agency's caseload.

"Our caseloads have been climbing even though criminal filings are down," Robertson said. "A larger percentage of the accused are indigent."

The measure will likely not impact a requirement that the system provide adequate representation, he said.

"The court still has the authority to make an appointment, but it will be paid out of court funds rather than by OIDS," Robertson said.

Barbara Hoberock (405) 528-2465

barbara.hoberock@tulsaworld.com

GA. MURDER CASE SHINES SPOTLIGHT ON NATIONS INDIGENT DEFENSE SYSTEMS

2010-07-01T17:58:00.000-07:00

Murder suspect lost his lawyers after state ran out of money to pay them

Marcia Coyle

The National Law Journal

May 24, 2010

Jamie Weis, accused in 2006 of killing an elderly neighbor, had two state-appointed lawyers defending him from capital murder charges for more than a year.

When the state of Georgia ran out of money to pay them, the trial judge removed them, appointing public defenders who spent nearly two years trying to withdraw.

Weis, in county jail now for four years, is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to delve into what he claims is a breakdown of Georgia's public defender system.

Weis wants the justices to make clear that "lawyers are not fungible," said lead counsel Stephen Bright of theSouthern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.

Indigent defendants, Bright said, have the same Sixth Amendment right to continuity of counsel once the attorney-client relationship is established as do those defendants with the means to hire lawyers. That right, he and his colleagues contend, was violated in the Weis case, when two appointed attorneys were removed because the state ran out of money to pay them. "I think we have the complete breakdown in this case," Bright said. "The legislature just didn't put enough money into the system and it ran out of gas."

The case is not about a breakdown in the system, countered Assistant District Attorney Robert Smith of Fayetteville, Ga. Weis is responsible for most of the delay, he said, and the Georgia Supreme Court in March correctly rejected his constitutional claims. "This case is about bringing Catherine King's killer to justice and giving the people of Pike County the opportunity to hear it," he said. "That's what this case is about."

Weis' petition for review comes at a time when an increasing number of legal challenges are being made to underfunded and overburdened state indigent defense systems. Several lawsuits are pending in Georgia, and courts in New York and Michigan recently have given the green light to class actions against those state systems for alleged failures to provide adequate legal representation.

Georgia's problems are long-standing. Twenty years ago, The National Law Journal, in a six-month investigation of the defense of capital murder defendants in six Southern states, including Georgia, found poorly trained and underpaid lawyers in a hodgepodge of standardless systems with actual disincentives to effective representation.

Georgia, however, seemed to turn a corner in 2003 when the governor signed into law the Georgia Indigent Defense Act. The law created a statewide network of public defender offices and an Office of Georgia Capital Defender to represent death penalty cases.

But state funding has never kept pace with the need, triggering the recent round of lawsuits. "All of the promise we had from this new public defender system is just evaporating," Bright said.

A PUBLIC DEFENSE

Weis entered the system in February 2006 when he was charged with the felony murder of King. He has been confined in a series of county jails since then.

His first lawyer was a local public defender who handled the arraignment but did little else on the case, Bright said. After the state announced its intent to seek the death penalty, the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, which oversees the state system, asked Robert Citronberg and Thomas West, well-known Atlanta capital defense lawyers, to take Weis' case.

For the next six months, Citronberg and West worked the case, filing numerous motions and traveling to Weis' native West Virginia to gather background and interviews with people who knew him. "We started out at $125 per hour and when the [funding] crisis hit, it was cut to $95," West said. "At that point, I know some lawyers who got out of their cases. It was a rare situation where you had a total lack of payment and we were always told this would be remedied down the line. In that setting, I felt a duty to continue on my cases. My position is these cases would be going forward in some way by appointed local counsel, which would be a disaster."

RUNNING OUT OF MONEY

The two lawyers had budgeted roughly $300,000 for Weis' case, an amount subsequently approved by the state Public Defender Standards Council.

In mid-March 2007, the Council told the lawyers that it could not pay them after March 31. The lawyers filed a motion for a continuance in the case because they could not hire an investigator or a mitigation specialist.

In a November 2007 hearing, the Council director informed the trial judge that the state didn't have money for Weis' representation and might not have funds until 2009. West told the judge he and Citronberg can proceed with the case but, without adequate funds, Weis later may have a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard suggested replacing the lawyers and named three public defenders as substitutes, according to hearing transcript. Judge Johnnie Caldwell agreed.

"This court is going to do something it has never done, which I believe it has the inherent authority to do under the Constitution of this State, as well as under the rules of the Uniformed Rules of the Superior Court, and that is in this instance I am going to remove defense counsel from this case," said Caldwell, who resigned last month amid an investigation into allegations he sexually harassed a female divorce lawyer.

In December 2007, the two public defenders picked by the court began filing motions to withdraw, saying they had been told they would receive no state funds for investigators or experts. One said she was not certified to handle capital cases and was already lead counsel in 222 cases, 103 of which were felonies. The other public defender had 91 felonies and was heading a four-county public defender office with 12 full-time lawyers.

With the promise of a special appropriation to fund capital cases, the parties and the court agreed in April 2008 to reinstate West and Citronberg, and the Council approved $255,000 in funding. But the money was never made available.

West and Citronberg were not reinstated by the court until February 2009 -- 15 months after being dismissed.

In June 2009, the trial judge set a trial date for Aug. 3. Weis, still without funds, moved to dismiss the indictment, alleging right-to-counsel and speedy-trial violations. In July, the state Council agreed to provide $75,000 for defense counsel and $40,000 for investigative costs. The judge rejected Weis' motion to dismiss, and appeals began.

In March, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that delay was primarily attributable to Weis, not the state. Weis, the majority said, did not have a right to his choice of counsel and had refused to cooperate with his public defenders.

CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES

In the U.S. Supreme Court, Bright argues this is not a counsel-of-choice issue but an issue of continuity of counsel. Only Georgia, Louisiana and two federal circuits -- the 2nd and 6th -- refuse to recognize that, once the attorney-client bond of trust and confidence has been established, counsel cannot be removed absent some extreme circumstances. "There's a whole string of [lower court] cases saying, unless the lawyer is just disabled or engages in contemptuous behavior, you can't sever the relationship," Bright said. "This wasn't about Weis' seeking preference of counsel but opposing counsel moving to remove counsel. I think the Court will be offended by that."

Criminal law scholar Joshua Dressler of Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law and ethics scholar Monroe Freedman of Hofstra University School of Law said Bright's distinction is an important and valid one. Freedman is more emphatic, saying, "It is so clear this was a violation of fundamental rights that it should be the easiest of cases and should never have occurred in the first place."

Harder to convince the justices will be Bright's argument that there was a systemic breakdown of the state public defender system. In that analysis, the justices weigh a series of factors set out in their 1973 decisionBarker v. Wingo. Just last term, in Vermont v. Brillon, they rejected the argument in a speedy-trial case where the defendant went through six lawyers, firing one and threatening to kill another.

But the Weis case is not the Brillon case, said Dressler and Freedman. And the Court's possible reluctance to take on the Weis issue probably would have more to do with the consequences of finding a breakdown. "I can imagine this Court taking the view that, with county and state budget crises, they don't want to jump in," Dressler said. "To me that would be shameful if it's the reason for not taking it on."

Freedman agreed, adding, "The fact this could open doors to fundamental defects in the entire system of indigent defense is not a reason to ignore that this is going on."

Smith, the prosecutor who argued the Weis case in the state supreme court, said he did not know whether his office or the state attorney general would be responding to Bright's petition, but he insisted Weis' counsel were responsible for the delay in the case.

Smith said Weis' lawyers filed nine motions for continuances, motions to recuse the trial judge and sued the judge directly. "I agree the defendant played a role in the delay," he said, "and the Georgia Supreme Court apportioned the nature of the delay correctly."

Death Chambers: No Anesthesiologists Allowed

2010-07-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

by Turi McNameeMay 23, 2010

It’s a somewhat unusual experience when a regulatory body feels the need to make a public statement saying that doctors should not kill people.

But that’s exactly what the American Board of Anesthesiology has done, stating that anesthesiologists are not to participate in capital punishment if they wish to be certified. It’s a statement that’s reminiscent of the American Medical Association’s opposition to physician involvement in capital punishment. But why are anesthesiologists in particular being singled out?

In a nation where capital punishment is constitutional while at the same time such punishment is not allowed to be cruel or unusual, stories of bungled executions make headlines and fill courtrooms. Truly there are some gruesome tales where the final exit more closely approximates a final flail. While not targeting anesthesiologists in particular, some have argued that such incidents could be prevented if a person with training in anesthesia were present. Certain judges have taken the matter a step further, ordering that an anesthesiologist be consulted for executions.

The anesthesiology board’s statement could, in effect, prevent that from happening. Board certification is a prerequisite for employment for most physicians. Unless an anesthesiologist was willing to walk away from standard practice entirely, states would have a hard time finding someone to fill the role of anesthesiologist attendant at executions. The other alternative would be to find an anesthesiologist who had lost his or her certification for other reasons, but if you think about it, would that really be an improvement over the present situation?

What remains to be seen is how this statement will play out legally. Several state medical boards that have tried to take action to discipline physicians who have participated in executions have found their decisions overturned by the Supreme Court, which has argued that such disciplinary action by a state-sanctioned group is in direct contradiction to state law that allows physicians to be present in the death chamber. Since the American Board of Anesthesiology is not state-based, such an argument might not apply to their certification requirements.

Personally, I'd no sooner participate in an execution than I would an infomercial for do-it-yourself appendectomy kits. But I wonder how many, if any, anesthesiologists feel strongly enough in favor of participation to risk their certification.

TN may execute 4 death row inmates in the next year

2010-07-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee could execute four death row inmates in the next year.

If that happens, it would mark the first time the state has executed that many inmates in a single 12-month period in more than 50 years.

The state attorney general's office asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to set execution dates for Gaile Owens, Stephen Michael West and Billy Ray Irick. A request to execute Edward J. Harbison is expected soon.

All were convicted in the 1980s. For some of their victims' families, the delays have been excruciating.

A New Standard of Decency

2010-07-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

May 17, 2010

Monday’s welcome Supreme Court decision, banning sentences of life without parole for juvenile criminals who do not commit murder, recognizes that children mature and should not be irrevocably punished for a childhood act short of killing. But it also recognizes that nations mature — that standards of justice and constitutional principles change over the centuries and should be reinterpreted by new generations.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a five-member majority, acknowledged that permanent life sentences for juveniles might not have been historically recognized as cruel and unusual punishment but should now be considered unconstitutional because of “evolving standards of decency.”

Justice John Paul Stevens stated the case simply and elegantly in a concurring opinion:

“Society changes,” he wrote. “Knowledge accumulates. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes. Punishments that did not seem cruel and unusual at one time may, in the light of reason and experience, be found cruel and unusual at a later time.”

That, of course, infuriated the strict constructionists on the court, who said the Constitution’s framers meant “cruel and unusual” to refer to torture and nothing more. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for two other justices, said the court was overstepping its bounds by interpreting the clause to ban disproportionate punishment.

Viewing the case from that 18th-century perspective, however, means ignoring recent scientific evidence showing a fundamental difference between the minds of juveniles and adults. Justice Kennedy, expanding on his landmark 2005 decision that banned the death penalty for juveniles, noted that the brain matures through late adolescence. He said juvenile actions are less likely to be evidence of an “irretrievably depraved character.”

The subject of the case decided on Monday, Terrance Graham, whose parents were crack addicts, participated in a restaurant robbery at age 16 and in a home-invasion robbery at age 17. A Florida judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole in 2005 at a time when the state, overreacting to a rash of juvenile crime, was cracking down on what it considered teenage superpredators.

But the court was hardly ordering his release, or that of the 128 other juveniles like him around the country (mostly in Florida) who are also locked up with no chance of parole. Instead, the court simply gave these prisoners a chance to show that they have matured and been rehabilitated, that years after their crimes, they have, at least, the hope of winning their release. (Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. took a middle position, saying Mr. Graham deserved a shot at parole but declining to endorse a categorical position.)

The majority’s opinion was particularly heartening for its forthright acknowledgment that there are other sources of judicial inspiration beyond the country’s founders. The low number of juvenile criminals sentenced to life without parole for noncapital crimes demonstrates that states, judges, prosecutors and juries have reached a de facto national consensus against the practice, the opinion said.

And, braving the catcalls of nativists, Justice Kennedy also looked to international law to bolster his argument, noting that this form of sentencing had been rejected by countries the world over. Until Monday, the United States was the only country to impose such sentences on its teenagers; thanks to five justices on the court, the world now stands in unanimous agreement.

Anesthesiologists face penalty for participating in death penalty

2010-07-01T17:47:00.000-07:00

May 3, 2010

by Vicky Eckenrode

The American Board of Anesthesiologists has decided to drop the certification of any member who participates in a prisoner’s death sentence, according to a recent Washington Post article.

If enforced, it would mean anesthesiologists who help administer the lethal injection process could lose their ability to practice in most hospitals.

The issue of whether doctors should be a part of the death penalty has been a controversial one for years though the threat to pull certification is the furthest any physician group has gone.

North Carolina is one of the states that allow death by lethal injection. In the state, it now is the only way to administer the death penalty.

No one has been put to death in the state, however, since 2006, according to the N.C. Department of Corrections, which has 157 people currently on death row.

The de-facto moratorium started when the N.C. Medical Board blocked the doctors it licenses from being present at the procedure.

The state Supreme Court later struck down that position, saying the board could not discipline a doctor just because he or she participated in an execution.

The board stated because of the ruling, it would not take action against a doctor.

“The North Carolina Medical Board does, however, continue to take the position that physician participation in capital punishment is a departure from the ethics of the medical profession,” according to the group’s current position statement, which also points to the American Medical Association’s stance.

The AMA’s opinion on capital punishment states: “An individual’s opinion on capital punishment is the personal moral decision of the individual. A physician, as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution.”

Though the courts have settled the issue about the state medical board, legal challenges about the method of lethal injections and the cocktail of drugs used still have to be resolved.

Anesthesiologist Group To Decertify Physicians Who Help With Lethal Injections

2010-07-01T17:46:00.001-07:00

MAY 03, 2010

The American Board of Anesthesiologists "has quietly decided to revoke the certification of any member who participates in executing a prisoner by lethal injection," according toThe Washington Post. The decision "reflects its leaders' belief that 'we are healers, not executioners,' board secretary Mark A. Rockoff said. Although the American Medical Association has long opposed doctor involvement, the anesthesiologists' group is the first to say it will harshly penalize a health-care worker for abetting lethal injections. The loss of certification would prevent an anesthesiologist from working in most hospitals. About half of the 35 states performing executions, including Virginia and North Carolina, require a doctor to be present."

But supporters of capital punishment argue that "doctors are not needed during the procedures, which can be administered by prison employees. … With 3,200 prisoners now on death rows across the country, most of the 50 executions performed each year since 2008 have used lethal injections.” Members of the ABA learned about the new rule in February, and so far, "no doctors have been disciplined, Rockoff said" (Stein, 5/2).

This is part of Kaiser Health News' Daily Report - a summary of health policy coverage from more than 300 news organizations. The full summary of the day's news can be found here and you can sign up for e-mail subscriptions to the Daily Report here. In addition, our staff of reporters and correspondents file original stories each day, which you can find on our home page.

Briton on death row in Texas seeks stay from Supreme Court

2010-07-01T17:43:00.000-07:00

May 03, 2010|By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

When British consular officials in Houston first learned that Linda Carty was in trouble with the law, the St. Kitts-born British national was already on death row in Texas, convicted in a bizarre plot to kill a neighbor and kidnap her newborn son.

Under the Vienna Convention and a U.S.-British treaty, British authorities should have been notified of Carty's arrest "without delay." The time gap in notification is at the center of an appeal by Carty for a stay of execution, which the Supreme Court may rule on as soon as Monday.

If the court does not grant the stay, Carty, 51, stands to become the first British woman executed in 55 years.

Carty's case is well known in Britain, where capital punishment is outlawed. Newspapers have followed her pleadings since British consular officials learned about her 2002 death sentence more than a year after it was imposed.

Carty has maintained her innocence in the 2001 killing of 25-year-old Joana Rodriguez, and British diplomats and pro bono lawyers have appealed to the Supreme Court with arguments impugning the fairness of her trial.

Carty's defenders argue that the outcome of her trial would have been different had she been accorded the protections offered by the British government.

"It made a material difference in this case," said Paul Lynch, British consul general in Houston. "It is quite clear to us that Linda Carty did not get the assistance she should have and the trial she should have."

Carty's appeal is a long shot. Although the International Court of Justice has upheld treaties that mandate governments inform one another on arrests of their nationals, the Supreme Court two years ago rejected the notion that states were obliged to follow the international court's decisions.

In his appeal to the Supreme Court, attorney Michael Goldberg said Carty's state-appointed defense lawyer, Jerry Guerinot, did not meet with Carty until two weeks before her trial and then only for 15 minutes. Goldberg also said that Guerinot never interviewed potential witnesses.

Guerinot didn't return phone calls seeking comment.

In a September ruling, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged deficiencies in Carty's trial but upheld a lower court's denial of relief.

In the trial, prosecutors charged that Carty had participated in the kidnapping and killing of Rodriguez in order to obtain her baby. Texas Assistant Atty. Gen. Katherine D. Hayes said that the 5th Circuit judged the evidence of Carty's guilt as "overwhelming."

carol.williams@latimes.com

Supreme Court rejects plea from British woman on death row

2010-07-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

By RENÉE C. LEE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE

May 3, 2010, 9:38AM

The Supreme Court has refused to review the case of a British woman sentenced to death for killing a Houston mother and stealing her baby in 2001.

The justices rejected an appeal from Linda Carty, who complained her trial lawyers were deficient.

Twenty-year-old Joana Rodriguez had just given birth days earlier when four men busted into her Houston apartment on May 16, 2001, pistol-whipped her husband and abducted her and her newborn.

Rodriguez's body was later found in the trunk of a car with a plastic bag over her head. Her arms and legs were bound with duct tape and her mouth and nose also had been covered with tape. An autopsy revealed she suffocated.

Authorities said Carty, a neighbor, plotted the kidnapping because she wanted Rodriguez's baby in a desperate attempt to keep her common-law husband.

Carty, 51, was found guilty of capital murder in February 2002. She is one of 10 women on Texas death row. The British government and anti-death penalty groups have taken up her cause.

Carty, who claims she had ineffective counsel and maintains her innocence, was optimistic before the ruling.

“I think there's a possibility they will take it,” Carty said during an interview last week at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Mountain View Unit, just west of Waco.

Texas officials will now set an execution date and Carty, a British citizen, will become the only woman to have a slot on the state's execution calendar. It could be years before she's actually put to death.

It is rare for women to get the death penalty in the United States and even rarer for them to be put death. Fifty-four women are on death row and in the modern era (1973 to 2009) of the death penalty, only 11 women have been executed.

Part of the reason is that few women commit capital offenses, but Ohio Northern University law professor Victor Streib, who has studied women and death penalty for 25 years, suggests there's a secondary reason.

The justice system, Streib said, treats women differently than men.

“Women aren't sentenced to death at trial as often as you think,” Streib said. “And once they're sentenced to death, they're more likely to have the sentence reversed by an appellate court. As a society, we're nervous about taking women's lives.”

That's even true in Texas, the nation's death penalty capital, he said. The state has executed only three women since 1973. The last female execution in the U.S. was in Texas in 2005. Francis Newton, of Harris County, was put to death for killing her husband and children in 1987. She sat on death row for nearly 20 years.

Bias denied, but . . .

Most prosecutors and judges deny there's a bias, but the statistics show otherwise, said Streib, who publishes an annual report, Death Penalty for Female Offenders.

Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos declined to comment on the issue because of pending death penalty cases, but other prosecutors who have handled capital cases involving women said they review them the same as they do those involving men.

“Our policy has always been if we feel someone committed a crime that merits the death penalty, we're going to seek it no matter who they are or what their gender is,” said Bob Gill, assistant chief of the criminal division of the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office.

Collin County's first assistant district attorney, Gregory Davis, tried two death penalty cases against women when he worked for the Dallas County District Attorney's Office from 1992-2002.

Darlie Routier, the North Texas mother sentenced to death for killing her children in 1996, was one of them. Davis said he had some hesitation about pursuing the death penalty against Routier only because it had never been done before in the county.

“From a practical standpoint, you have to take into account the attitude of jurors and the jurisdiction,” Davis said. “But in the Routier case, I didn't feel that was significant because of the terrible brutality and lack of remorse.”

He said he believes there is a public perception that women are not as violent as men, and jurors are sometimes less likely to impose death sentences against women. And when looking at mitigating factors, they are also more prone to listen to emotional appeals from women than men, he said.

“They have a hard time finding these women are a future danger,” Davis said.

Streib said it's difficult to pinpoint why some women get the death penalty and others do not because the justice system is not a rational process. But women who kill like men (kill strangers or commit a senseless act) or commit a brutal, bloody crime tend to get a death sentence, he said.

Roe Wilson, who handles post-conviction writs for the Harris County District Attorney's Office, described the facts in Carty's case as “heinous.” Carty, who pretended to be pregnant, had planned to cut the baby out of Rodriguez's stomach and had brought surgical supplies to do it, Wilson said. When she learned the woman already had the baby, she abducted her, she said.

Witnesses also said they saw Carty put the plastic bag over the mother's head while she lay in the trunk.

Was she framed?

Carty, who came to the United States in the early 1980s, contends that she was framed by the other suspects who learned she was an informant with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. One of them had borrowed her car the day of the crime, she said.

She said the state's case is fabricated and had she had proper counsel during her trial, she wouldn't be on death row. In lower court appeals filed by her appellate attorneys with Baker Botts law firm, Carty claims her state-appointed attorney met with her two weeks before her trial for only 15 minutes. He also failed to properly investigate her case, to interview and inform her common-law husband of his right to spousal immunity and to notify the British consulate about her case.

While the lower courts denied her requests for a new trial, they admitted there were mistakes made in her defense, said Michael Goldberg, a partner with Baker Botts.

The law firm is representing Carty for free at the request of the British government.

“I believe with all my heart that she deserves to have a trial so a jury can hear a real case with a real defense on her behalf,” Goldberg said. “We have 20 key witnesses who were never called and could have testified that Linda is not a murderer and not a danger to society.”

Chronicle reporter Allan Turner contributed to this story.

renee.lee@chron.com

Doctors' board bans work on death row

2010-07-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

ROB STEIN

May 3, 2010

WASHINGTON: An American doctors organisation has quietly decided to revoke the certification of any member who participates in executing a prisoner by lethal injection.

The mandate from the American Board of Anesthesiologists reflects its leaders' belief that ''we are healers, not executioners'', the board secretary, Mark Rockoff, said.

Although the American Medical Association has long opposed doctor involvement, the anaesthetists' group is the first to say it will harshly penalise a healthcare worker for abetting lethal injections.

About half of the 35 states performing executions, including Virginia and North Carolina, require a doctor to be present at all executions. Other states have also recruited doctors, including anaesthetists, to play a role in executions involving lethal injections. In some jurisdictions, anaesthetists consult prison officials on dosages. In others, they insert catheters and infuse the three-drug cocktails.

Under the policy, which the group's 40,000 members learned about in February, any of these activities could lead to a loss of certification. Anaesthetists can get state medical licences without certification, but most hospitals require it.

While death penalty opponents welcome the move because it raises more questions about lethal injections, capital punishment supporters say doctors are not needed during the procedures, which can be administered by prison employees.

But as questions mount about the types and combinations of drugs used and whether they cause undue suffering, states have been turning to doctors for advice and assistance.

With 3200 prisoners now on death rows across the country, most of the 50 executions performed each year since 2008 have used lethal injections.

''If I were lying there on the gurney and someone was administering a paralysing drug … I would want someone there who knew what they were doing,'' said Ty Alper, the associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law.

Thus far, no doctors have been disciplined, Dr Rockoff said, but several anaesthetists, including some who have worked as execution consultants or testified in capital punishment litigation, said the step has had a chilling effect.

''They are clearly drawing a line in the sand and saying, 'If you cross this, we'll come after you,''' said Bryan Liang, a law professor at California Western School of Law and a professor of anaesthesia at the University of California at San Diego.

The Washington Post

Government's rendition bully tactics

2010-07-01T17:37:00.000-07:00

By Clive Stafford Smith on April 29, 2010

Six years ago the British took two men into custody in Iraq. Working with the Americans, the UK then rendered the men to Afghanistan where they have been held ever since in secret detention, beyond the protection of law.

The charity for which I work, Reprieve, has been trying to reunite them with their legal rights. We do not insist that they are innocent – although the evidence suggests that they are. We do insist that they should be allowed a fair trial.

The government has a policy for this kind of thing of course. Let us identify the policy, and then compare it with the government's practice.

"Providing help to those in need has long been an important part of the value lawyers provide to society," Jack Straw said to the Law Society on 8 March 2008. "It shows the profession at its very best, giving up time and expertise to help others."

Of course, this is what Reprieve seeks to do, at no cost to the public.

"The UK's position on secret detention is clear," said a Foreign Office spokesperson recently. "We oppose any deprivation of liberty that amounts to placing individuals beyond the protection of the law."

Here, Reprieve seeks to put an end to the two prisoners' detention beyond the protection of the law.

Thus, one might reasonably assume that the government would want to help us bring the law into this secret prison.

Yet there seems to be no government policy requiring adherence to principle. For several years the government simply lied about their involvement. Consider, for example, the statement that Jack Straw made on 13 December 2005 to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FASC):

"Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States … there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we have not been … Some of the reports … are in the realms of the fantastic."

Presumably we can all agree that this was false.

A leaked Home Office memorandum to then prime minister Tony Blair from December 2005 advised him to "dodge" questions about the extent of UK involvement in US renditions. Reasonable people may infer that Blair intentionally misled the public as well.

And so it went on. But in 2009, John Hutton admitted that the two men had, indeed, been rendered. I immediately wrote to him asking for their names so that Reprieve could offer them free legal representation. The Ministry of Defence wrote back saying that to disclose their names would violate the Data Protection Act. (It was OK, apparently, for Hutton to say that they were both irredeemable terrorists who should be held without trial by the US military.)

Over the next 14 months, Reprieve spent several thousand pounds trying to identify the men. We tracked down former Bagram prisoners on three continents, and they provided circumstantial hints that we pieced together. Every penny we spent could have been saved had the government merely told the truth.

We discovered evidence that proved Hutton had misled parliament as well. At least one prisoner could not possibly have been a member of the Sunni extremist group, Lashkar e Taiba, since he was a Shia rice farmer.

Over and again, as our investigation progressed, we asked the government simply to confirm their names. We underlined the heartache suffered by their innocent families. The government batted away each reasonable request.

Ultimately, this week, we had no choice but to sue to confirm the prisoners' names.

As the political parties squabble over cutting waste, they would do well to begin with the government's pointless defence of the indefensible with their expensive hired legal guns – here, as in Binyam Mohamed's case.

As if this were not folly enough, now the government has threatened to try to make Reprieve – a charity – pay their legal expenses. This is a blatant ploy to try to intimidate us from bringing suit.

When I complained about it yesterday, the MOD issued a hyperbolic response: "The suggestion that Reprieve has been 'intimidated' by a threat of costs is ridiculous." In a perverse way, this is true: we will not be intimidated, as their stratagem simply offends us.

The MOD goes on to say that they have issued this threat because we would not give them a "reciprocal" assurance that they would not have to pay us for their illegal actions, and their endless stonewalling of the truth. I cannot speak for the British lawyers involved in the case, but there is no question of the government paying Reprieve. They never have paid us for any work we have done for prisoners in secret prisons, and there is no reason to think that they are about to start now.

So it ultimately comes down to this: they want to fritter away billions on banks, but steal donations from Reprieve, a charity doing the work that they claim to encourage. It is the Robin Hood tax with a twist: rob from the poor to give to the rich. Perhaps we have finally learned what the term New Labour means: socialism turned upside-down.

This article first appeared in the Guardian

Doctors' role in executions debated

2010-07-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

Doctors' role in executions debated
Death penalty foes go after licenses.

By CARLOS CAMPOS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 02/01/05

After a lethal dose of chemicals flowed through the veins of convicted killer Timothy Don Carr last Tuesday night, two physicians with stethoscopes around their necks quietly entered the execution chamber.

One at a time, the doctors confirmed with a somber nod to the warden of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson that the state had succeeded in carrying out the court-ordered death penalty. A third physician, unseen behind a two-way mirror, monitored an electrocardiogram that displayed the prisoner's last heartbeats.

The doctors' identities are carefully protected — as are all involved in lethal injections, including prison officials who activate the plungers that deliver the deadly dose. The contract providing for the doctors' services at an execution forbids the Department of Corrections from disclosing their names.

The doctors have a reason for wanting anonymity: Their medical licenses are under attack from death penalty opponents.

Activists say doctors who participate in executions violate the Hippocratic oath and the American Medical Association's Code of Medical Ethics. Dr. Arthur Zitrin of New York, who calls himself a death penalty "abolitionist," has begun challenging physicians who participate in executions.

In October, Zitrin, two other doctors and a sociology professor lodged a complaint with the Georgia medical board against Dr. Hothur V. Sanjeeva Rao, a physician who testified in a Gwinnett County trial that he had assisted with executions.

"I think it's a totally improper role for a physician to be complicit with the state in killing people, because it's not the role of a doctor to do that," said Zitrin, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. "The role of a doctor is to heal and to preserve life, whenever there is a possibility of doing so."

Rao quit working executions in June after he learned that Zitrin planned to lodge a complaint against him. The challenge was dismissed in December by the state medical board.

The Georgia Department of Corrections is lobbying for legislation that would prohibit the challenge of physicians' licenses for participating in executions.

Cost to state rises

Corrections officials say they don't want to get involved in the debate over the death penalty. But it is the agency's responsibility to carry out orders of the court, and state law requires two physicians in attendance at executions "to determine when death supervenes."

Prison officials say the challenge to Rao's medical license dramatically drove up the cost of hiring doctors to attend executions. The prison system now pays Rainbow Medical Associates $18,000 per execution. Before Rao's license was challenged, the department paid $850 per execution, said Bill Amideo, a lawyer for the state agency.

The cost jumped because the doctors had to purchase liability insurance to protect themselves from possible license challenges, Amideo said.

While he expected the prison system would have to pay more for the doctor's services, perhaps as much as $6,000 per execution, "we ended up having to pay three times as much to get this contract," Amideo said.

State officials were in a hurry to sign Rainbow on June 29, just two days before the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Robert Karl Hicks on July 1. Since Rainbow Medical Associates has had the contract, its doctors have presided over three executions.

Georgia has executed 14 people by lethal injection since the electric chair was ruled unconstitutional in 2001.

"What they try to do is get publicity and embarrass physicians," Amideo said, making it difficult for the prison system to find doctors who will work executions.

Lawyers who represent prisoners facing the death penalty have been supportive of the effort, including some in Georgia who have argued in court that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment.

Dr. Carlo Musso, who signed the contract with the state on behalf of Rainbow Medical Associates, said the group of seven to 10 doctors provides medical services to county jails throughout Georgia and is available to monitor executions.

Musso said he and other doctors in the group are "a little bit worried" about license challenges, but he feels strongly they are providing an important service.

Musso said in an interview that he was one of the doctors who oversaw Carr's execution Jan. 25.

"If an execution is going to be carried out, it's going to be carried out," Musso said. "Our role is to make sure it is to be performed with the least amount of pain and suffering as possible. That's my duty."

The physician said he personally does not approve of the death penalty except "in the most egregious circumstances." But if doctors do not participate in lethal injections, he said, courts could return to more "archaic" methods of execution.

"If health care professionals were not involved in the process, then there very well may be undue suffering to inmates that occurs during execution, and I think that's a greater concern," Musso said.

Musso, who is also medical director of the Rainbow House, an emergency shelter for abused children in Clayton County, said the doctors have donated some of the money they earn from executions.

Musso is a member of the American Medical Association, a 250,000-member organization that represents the interests of doctors nationwide. The AMA has issued an ethical opinion that a physician "should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution."

The opinion goes on to define physician participation in executions as including monitoring vital signs and electrocardiograms and attending or observing an execution as a physician.

The Medical Association of Georgia, with 7,000 members, has adopted the AMA guidelines. But neither group has the power to sanction physicians beyond revoking their membership in the association.

In November, Zitrin and other doctors questioned whether Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky — also a physician — had jeopardized his medical license by signing a death warrant for a convicted killer. In January, the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure ruled Fletcher was acting as governor, not as a physician.

'An obvious tension'

Dr. Michael Goldrich, chairman of the AMA's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, said physicians should play no role in executions.

"There's an obvious tension between the state's requirements and the profession's roles," Goldrich said. "Just because the state says that physicians have to be present for there to be an execution, physicians are under ethical obligation that may be in conflict with the state's desires or needs."

David Cook, executive director of the Medical Association of Georgia, said the group has not taken a formal position on a bill filed last month by State Rep. Alan Powell (D-Hartwell) to block challenges to doctors' licenses for participation in an execution. But Cook said the association believes the state medical board should be able to determine on its own whether license challenges have merit.

Rao's testimony at a Gwinnett County trial that drew the attention of Zitrin and death penalty lawyers involved the execution of convicted murderer Jose Martinez High in 2001.

Medical technicians spent 39 minutes trying to find a suitable vein through which the lethal injection could be delivered.

Rao testified he eventually stepped in and inserted a catheter into a vein between High's neck and shoulder, allowing the execution to proceed.

Zitrin's complaint said Rao's conduct "violates established national medical ethics" and asked the state board to "impose appropriate sanctions should the board confirm these serious ethical violations."

LaSharn Hughes, executive director of the Composite State Board of Medical Examiners, declined to comment specifically on the case or on physician participation in executions, except to say that "it's not a burning issue with the board at this time."

A Dec. 15 letter sent to Zitrin from Hughes said that "after careful consideration, the board has determined that there was no violation of the Georgia Medical Practice Act and has consequently determined to close this matter." The letter went on to note that physician attendance at executions is required by Georgia law.

Rao did not return a telephone call seeking comment, but said in an October interview with American Medical News that he merely monitored lethal injections.

"There was just too much harassment, and I didn't want to be involved in these things," Rao told the medical newspaper. "I don't have any problems with prisoners who have killed people and don't have any regrets receiving the death sentence, but I don't want to be involved."

Powell said doctors should not be punished for helping the Department of Corrections carry out sentences "set forth by a judge and jury."

"Nobody wants to be involved in a public execution, but that's the law," he said. "But he's not injecting the drugs. The Department of Corrections actually does the injection."

Senate Resolution 1289

2010-07-01T17:32:00.000-07:00

Just when you think the GA legislature can't get anymore outrageous they do  things like recognizing Carlo Musso, the execution doctor! The resolution was  sponsored by dems Gail Buckner and Valencia Seay  Please feel free to get in touch with them and tell them how you feel; these  are their contacts...  ******************

10 LC 94 2777

Senate Resolution 1289
By: Senators Buckner of the 44th and Seay of the 34th

A RESOLUTION


Recognizing and commending Dr. Carlo A. Musso; and for other purposes.

WHEREAS, Dr. Carlo A. Musso has long been recognized by the citizens of this state for his leadership in the field of medicine, his compassionate treatment of his patients, and his deep concern for the well-being of others; and

WHEREAS, Dr. Musso earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry and a medical degree from Louisiana State University, completed an internship at Presbyterian/St.Lukes Medical Center in Denver, and served as a resident in emergency medicine at Denver General Hospital; and

WHEREAS, he has diligently and conscientiously devoted his time, talents, and energy as a physician, administrator, and businessman to Georgia Correctional Health (GHC) since 2000 as the organization's founder and president; and

WHEREAS, GHC is a multi-disciplinary medical organization that serves 20 correctional facilities in Georgia and specializes in the delivery and integration of community standards of health care for inmates; and

WHEREAS, GHC operates two nationally accredited facilities and three facilities accredited by the Medical Association of Georgia and has received a perfect score for its Clayton County facility in October, 2004, by the National Commission on Correctional Healthcare; and

WHEREAS, an active community leader, Dr. Musso serves as medical director for Rainbow House, Inc., Emergency Shelter for Children, where children who have recently been brought into Department of Family and Children Services care are housed before being placed in foster care; and
WHEREAS, Dr. Musso is a member of the American Medical Association, the Medical Association of Georgia, the Society of Correctional Physicians, and the Academy of Correctional Health Professionals; and

WHEREAS, a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, prior to establishing GHC, Dr. Musso served as a member of Pinnacle Emergency Consultants, a local emergency physician group, where he helped improve efficiency for operations and practices in emergency medicine; and

WHEREAS, it is abundantly fitting and proper that the extraordinary accomplishments of this distinguished Georgian be appropriately recognized.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE that the members of this body commend Dr. Carlo A. Musso on his incredible career in the medical field and recognize his commitment to and passion for providing quality health care to Georgia's inmates.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Secretary of the Senate is authorized and directed to transmit an appropriate copy of this resolution to Dr. Carlo A. Musso.

Calif. Case Spotlights Dysfunctional Death Penalty

2010-07-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

Calif. killer's life sentence highlights death penalty flaws; state has 700 stuck on death row

By PAUL ELIAS

The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO

Chelsea King's parents reluctantly agreed to a sentence of life in prison for their daughter's rapist and killer, calling the death penalty in California "an empty promise."

The Kings join a growing list of victims' families, law enforcement officials and other capital punishment proponents who have grown disillusioned with California's death penalty. The decision to forego capital punishment for registered sex offender John Gardner, who this month admitted killing Chelsea King and another teen girl, has once again thrust the gridlocked system into the spotlight.

Five more inmates joined California's death row this year, pushing the population past a record 700 inmates, by far the nation's largest.

Florida is second with 394 inmates on death row, and Texas is third with 333, but both of those states regularly carry out executions.

Legal challenges over how lethal injections are administered to condemned prisoners in California have halted executions in the state since Clarence Ray Allen was put to death Jan. 17, 2006. The lawsuits are far from being resolved, and most observers believe it could be years before another execution takes place at San Quentin Prison.

Even before the suspension, only 13 condemned inmates have been executed from the time capital punishment resumed in the state in 1977 until February 2006, when U.S. District Court Jeremy Fogel halted executions until prison officials revamped their lethal injection process.

After a lengthy regulatory review, the Department of Corrections is expected to issue the long-awaited new protocols this week.

Still, state and federal judges must approve the new regulations before executions can resume — and lawyers challenging the death penalty promise to vigorously attack the new protocols as inadequate.

California Chief Justice Ron George told the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice that the state's capital punishment system is "dysfunctional." Death penalty appeals account for 25 percent of the high court's workload, he has said.

"Most of us realize a death sentence at this time is a hollow promise in California," San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis said at the news conference with the King family announcing that Gardner would plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence.

Dumanis said in a telephone interview Thursday that she still files death penalty cases when appropriate "because it's the law," but the state's glacial execution rate is frustrating to victims' families.

"They have to live with it every day," she said.

In voicing frustration with capital punishment, these supporters of the penalty are lending momentum to a renewed push by death penalty foes to abolish executions in California.

With the state's financial woes as a backdrop, the foes have launched a new assault on the death penalty, saying California cannot afford it.

The state Legislature created the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice to investigate the chronic problems with the state's death penalty. The commission concluded that the state needed to spend more money, mostly on hiring more defense attorneys to hasten the automatic appeal process.

The commission, led by former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, released a study in 2008 concluding that capital cases cost the state an additional $125 million a year to administer. In response to a court order, the Department of Corrections spent $400 million building a new death chamber and death row.

"We are spending money on a broken death penalty," said Natasha Minsker, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who won the Abolitionist of the Year award from the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in 2008. "We aren't spending money on unsolved murders and other crimes. These are the trade-offs we are making."

The system is so topsy-turvy that convicted killer Billy Joe Johnson last year fought for a lethal injection sentence rather than life imprisonment at Pelican Bay State Prison. The convicted killer said death row inmates enjoy better accommodations such as larger cells that they don't have to share and access to television.

When a jury and a judge granted the white supremacist leader his wish, he was packed off to death row last year knowing that nearly all inmates there die of causes other than executions.

The state's capital punishment system also let down Maria Keever, who was counting on the death penalty to punish her son's killer.

Keever demanded that Scott Erskine receive the death penalty for murdering and raping her 13-year-old son and another boy in 1993 in San Diego.

Erskine was sentenced to die in 2004. The California Supreme Court has yet to schedule a hearing for Erskine's automatic appeal to the high court.

"He's up there watching television knowing I am going to die before he does," said Maria Keever. "The system is not what they say it is."

US judge refuses to protect Guantanamo prisoner Ahmed Belbacha from forced return to Algeria

2010-07-01T17:27:00.000-07:00

April 20, 2010

A federal district court in Washington has today rejected the pleas of former British resident Ahmed Belbacha, refusing to block his forced return to persecution and torture in Algeria.

Ahmed’s attorney Tara Murray of Reprieve, said:
“Ahmed’s desperate plight, together with his gentle nature, have attracted many private offers of help from both sides of the Atlantic. Sadly, no government has come to his rescue -- and now even the courts are turning their back him. All signs now point towards Ahmed’s imminent forced transfer to torture and persecution in Algeria.”
Ahmed had sought emergency protection after the district court dissolved an injunction, in place since 2008, prohibiting the US from sending him back to Algeria. US Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent visit to Algiers to sign a ‘mutual legal assistance treaty’ with the Algerian Minister of Justice emphasized the importance of Ahmed’s request.
Reprieve is deeply concerned about this treaty and will appeal to the DC Circuit Court -- and to the Supreme Court if necessary -- to seek protection for Ahmed. His legal team is also appealing worldwide – to the governments of Britain, Ireland and Luxembourg - for help.
Ahmed, a 39 year-old accountant, was visibly terrified during his attorney visit earlier this month and remains a tragic figure in Guantánamo. Cleared of all charges by the Bush Administration, he has consistently chosen to stay imprisoned rather than face his fate in Algeria, a country he originally fled after threats on his life by the terrorist group Group Islamique Armé (GIA).
Attorney David Remes of Appeal for Justice, which also represents Ahmed, said:
“The court's decision places Mr. Belbacha in grave danger. His very life is at risk. We'll take his case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary to protect him from the ghastly fate that awaits him in Algeria.”
BACKGROUND:
Ahmed Belbacha lived for years in the seaside town of Bournemouth, UK, where he studied English and worked; during a Labour conference he was responsible for cleaning the hotel room of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, from whom he received a healthy tip and note of appreciation. He is now in his eighth year of imprisonment without charge in Guantánamo Bay.
Ahmed’s fears about Algeria were confirmed by an alarming ‘conviction’ delivered in absentia by an Algerian court last November. In a disgraceful show trial, where no lawyer was appointed to defend Ahmed, the court sentenced him to 20 years in prison for belonging to an ‘overseas terrorist group’. Despite repeated requests and extensive investigation, Reprieve’s lawyers have been unable to discover what exactly Ahmed is supposed to have done. No evidence has been produced to support his ‘conviction’, which appears to be retaliation against Ahmed for speaking out about the inhumane treatment he would be subjected to if sent to Algeria.
Ahmed had been protected by an injunction barring the US government from repatriating him against his will, but a US judge dissolved the injunction in February. Reprieve immediately requested the decision be reversed, citing the US Supreme Court’s ongoing consideration of a related case, Kiyemba v Obama (Kiyemba II), in which it was decided that US courts could not prevent the Obama Administration from forcibly repatriating prisoners to countries where they face persecution. Worryingly, on Monday 22nd March, the Supreme Court decided not to review Kiyemba II; Reprieve then submitted another plea to DC’s federal district court on 24th March, followed by an emergency motion over the Easter weekend following Holder’s announcement.
Ahmed’s plight, together with his gentle nature, has attracted private offers of help. He has been given a room in a flat by a Bournemouth resident, and the Massachusetts town of Amherst has offered him refuge in defiance of Congress. So far, however, no government has come forward to help.
For more information please contact Katherine O’Shea at Reprieve’s Press Office: katherine.oshea@reprieve.org.uk 020 7427 1099/ 07931592674 or go to http://www.reprieve.org.uk/ahmedbelbacha.
Notes for Editors:
Reprieve, a legal action charity, uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantánamo Bay. Reprieve investigates, litigates and educates, working on the frontline, to provide legal support to prisoners unable to pay for it themselves. Reprieve promotes the rule of law around the world, securing each person’s right to a fair trial and saving lives. Clive Stafford Smith is the founder of Reprieve and has spent 25 years working on behalf of people facing the death penalty in the USA.
Reprieve’s current casework involves representing 33 prisoners in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, working on behalf of prisoners facing the death penalty, and conducting ongoing investigations into the rendition and the secret detention of ‘ghost prisoners’ in the so-called ‘war on terror.’
Reprieve
PO Box 52742
London EC4P 4WS
Tel: 020 7353 4640
Fax: 020 7353 4641
Email: info@reprieve.org.uk
Website: www.reprieve.org.uk
Reprieve is a charitable company limited by guarantee; Registered Charity No. 1114900 Registered Company No. 5777831 (England) Registered Office 2-6 Cannon Street London EC4M 6YH; Chair: Lord Bingham; Patrons: Alan Bennett, Julie Christie, Martha Lane Fox, Gordon Roddick, Jon Snow, Marina Warner
To join our press mailing list please email katherine.oshea@reprieve.org.uk

Mother urges UK Government to confirm rendition of her son six years ago

2010-07-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

April 15, 2010

Deborah Haynes, Defence Correspondent

The mother of a Pakistani man who disappeared six years ago urged the British Government today to confirm whether he is one of two suspects arrested by British Special Forces in Iraq, handed over to the US military and secretly flown to a notorious detention centre in Afghanistan in 2004.

Looking for answers in a case that could bring further embarrassment to Britain over its alleged complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition, Reprieve, a legal charity, said it has sued the Government to establish whether the detainee is Yunus Rahmatullah, a name it uncovered following a lengthy investigation.

Clive Stafford-Smith, director of Reprieve, which aims to protect the human rights of prisoners on death row as well as individuals in Guantanamo Bay and other such detention facilities, also accused the British authorities of trying to intimidate the charity into giving up the case by making it cost prohibitive.

Last year, John Hutton, then Defence Secretary, admitted that, despite repeated official assurances to the contrary, two Pakistani men captured and detained by British forces outside Baghdad in 2004 were subsequently removed by the US to Bagram airbase near Kabul where they remain in detention.

He said they were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a proscribed organisation with links to al-Qaeda.

The Ministry of Defence has since refused to reveal the identity of the pair, despite repeated requests by Reprieve, which wants to act for the men and their families. The charity believes it has proof that one of the detainees is Yunus Amanatullah, a rice farmer and father of five from the Pakistani province of Punjab, who it says was shot in the foot when he was arrested by British forces.

Reprieve has already begun legal proceedings in the United States on his behalf, rejecting the allegation that he belongs to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Sunni Islamist movement, because the farmer is from the Shia sect of Islam. He “is therefore no more likely to be a member of LeT than Mr Hutton himself,” it said.

The charity wants to offer the same legal support for the second man but needs to establish his name in order to progress. Adding to the sense of urgency, it said that former inmates from Bagram claim the individual has suffered severe mental trauma because of his alleged abuse while in detention.

Fatima Rahmatullah, the mother of Yunus, is desperate to know if her son is the same man being held in Bagram. She is quoted as telling Reprieve that she was shocked to learn that Britain might have played a part in his disappearance.

“All we ask now is that Britain should give us the information that we need to identify our lost son, and to reunite him with justice,” Mrs Rahmatullah, speaking from an undisclosed location, said in a statement released by the charity.

“As a mother, this is a position that I struggle to understand. My plea to the British Government is simple: Tell me whether you picked my son Yunus up, and gave him to the Americans.

“It is my basic right as a mother to know whether my son is still alive. I cannot bear further suspense. You have the power to help me recover my disappeared child. Six years is far too long to live without knowing whether my son is dead or alive. But I still have hope that the British Government will not make me wait a seventh year in agony.”

Mr Stafford-Smith said the lawsuit, first threatened last year, would have been avoided if Britain had given the name of the detainee. The MoD argues that confirming his identity as well as that of the other man who was arrested at the same time would breach their rights under the Data Protection Act.

Reprieve’s director also highlighted a warning regarding costs that was made by the MoD’s lawyers as part of ongoing correspondence between the two sides.

The Treasury Solicitor’s Department wrote in a letter dated February 10, 2010 that it “will not provide any undertaking that we will not be seeking to recover any legal costs associated with these proceedings from your client”.

The charity is seeking a protective costs order that would require the MoD to cover its expenses even if it won the case. Failure to secure such a guarantee could make legal action prohibitively expensive for the charity.

Mr Stafford-Smith wrote to Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, this week to complain. “The Government may think that bully-boy tactics will intimidate us. In truth, they merely steel our resolve,” he said.

“Yunus Rahmatullah’s mother cries herself to sleep at night because the Government refuses to do the decent thing, and confirm or deny whether her son is alive, and whether her son was rendered from Iraq six years ago. We will never diverge from doing what is right because some misguided official decides to threaten us.”

Asked yesterday whether there had been any developments in the case, a spokesman for the MoD said its position remained unchanged.

A previous statement from the ministry said: “The operation referred to by John Hutton in his February statement was directly related to threats to security and stability in Iraq. The individuals detained in this operation were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba and were a significant threat to the lives of Iraqi civilians and to coalition forces.

“Their initial detention was appropriate, legitimate and targeted at saving lives. The ICRC has had regular access to these detainees.”

After years as justice, John Paul Stevens wants what's 'best for the court'

2010-07-01T17:24:00.001-07:00

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 4, 2010; A01

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. -- Around here, one of the most powerful men in the nation is known as plain old John Stevens -- courteous bridge player, early-morning regular at the country club's tennis courts, a quiet but active condo neighbor who checks his weight in the gym before heading off for his daily swim.

But those who cross paths with him in his second home of South Florida have the same question as the president of the United States, the leadership of Congress, the abortion rights combatants, the disgruntled conservative legal activists and the grateful civil libertarians, all of whom know him as Justice John Paul Stevens.

"Do you think he's going to retire?" asks his friend Raymond A. Doumar, an 83-year-old lawyer who met Stevens years ago while waiting for a tennis match.

Stevens, who turns 90 later this month, isn't quite ready to say. "I can tell you that I love the job, and deciding whether to leave it is a very difficult decision," he said in an interview. "But I want to make it in a way that's best for the court."

That would mean a decision sooner rather than later, in time for the nomination and confirmation process to be completed before a new term begins in October, he said. He acknowledged that he told a reporter early last month that he would decide in about 30 days, but he said with a laugh that he hoped "that wasn't being treated as a statute of limitations."

His departure will hand President Obama his second chance to leave a lasting mark on the nine-member Supreme Court. "I will surely do it while he's still president," Stevens said, who plans to leave either this year or next.

If he stays past this term, Stevens will remain on course to become the oldest and longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history. Paradoxically, he is also among the court's least-known members; in a poll taken last summer, only 1 percent of Americans could summon his name.

His departure will mark a significant shift in the workings of the politically divided court. Obama is certain to nominate someone from the left to replace Stevens, so the ideological balance would not change.

But Stevens's lack of recognition nationally stands in direct contrast to his prominence on the bench. For more than 15 years, he has served as the leader of the court's liberal wing.

His ability to find common ground with the court's justices in the middle -- Anthony M. Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, who has since retired -- has led to groundbreaking decisions in favor of gay rights, restrictions on the death penalty, preservation of abortion rights and the establishment of a role for the judiciary in the nation's terrorism fight.

Stevens's departure also would mark a generational change, the removal of a link not only to the court's past but also to the country's.

Stevens was in the stands, as was Franklin D. Roosevelt, when Babe Ruth hit his "called shot" home run in the 1932 World Series. He is the only justice who was around for the start of the Great Depression or who lived through Prohibition. He cracked Japanese code during World War II.

His experiences pop up in opinions. This term brought a reference to World War II propagandist Tokyo Rose, and in the past he has chided his colleagues for being "unduly frightened" by videotape of a high-speed car chase. "Had they learned to drive when most high-speed driving took place on two-lane roads rather than on superhighways," they would not have been so shocked, he wrote.

"In a broad sense, the court's decisions help to tell, and record, the nation's history," said Gregory G. Garre, who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush. "There is often an added sense of legitimacy, and even color, when the justices write about the history that they actually lived through. And it's amazing to think of all the history that Justice Stevens has lived through."

'Unassuming person'

There are plenty of others who have lived through a lot of history along the Galt Ocean Mile, the beachfront strip that Stevens has made his cold-weather home for more than 25 years. He and his wife, Maryan, live in the fortress of concrete and stucco 1960s and '70s high-rises, behind tropical landscaping, fountains and fake waterfalls.

The Atlantic Ocean is on one side, and on the other are the dichotomies that mark South Florida beach life: The Ocean Hyperbaric Neurologic Center is a few doors down from a thatched-roof tiki bar; an osteoporosis clinic is wedged between a nail salon and a beach sandals factory outlet.

Stevens heads for Florida when the court is not hearing arguments, taking his paperwork outside and remaining in touch with the office by computer, while pursuing a fitness regimen that includes a daily swim and singles tennis three times a week.

Despite more than 34 years on the bench, he is anonymous on the beach. "That's one of the things I enjoy about it," Stevens said.

"I'm on the beach, I'm outside, that's awfully nice," Stevens said. "Of course, I have my computer, I'm still doing the same work. It's not really a vacation." He still writes the first draft of all majority opinions or dissents that bear his name, he said.

Stevens may be anonymous to the lady at the drugstore, who kindly helped him bandage a recent cut "not because she knew who I was, but because she was just being nice," but others are aware.

No one bothers him at the bridge club, manager Jeanni Blume said, but they notice. "Oh, they act like real ladies and gentlemen when he walks in," Blume said. Apparently, competitive spirit runs high: A large sign at the club pleads "Be Polite. Be Friendly."

She said conflicts are fairly frequent and recalled that after refereeing one dispute, she walked by Stevens's table to say, "I really should let you handle this."

Stevens laughs at the idea that the bridge players straighten up when he's around. "If that's true, it's because of my wife. She's far more popular at the bridge club," he said.

His friend Doumar remembers that when he met Stevens at the country club, it took him a while to connect the name -- "John Stevens" -- with the proffered profession -- "Washington lawyer" -- and then, finally, "judge." "I finally said, 'John Paul Stevens? Oh my God, Justice, I'm sorry,' " Doumar recalled.

"He's the most unassuming person I've ever met," Doumar said. "He has no airs about him -- he never goes to the front of the buffet line, he always waits his turn."

Diane Marie Amann, a former Stevens law clerk who has written extensively about her old boss, said his life outside Washington has been important to him.

"I think one of the secrets of his longevity on the court is the very vibrant personal life he has maintained outside the court," said Amann, who is a law professor at the University of California at Davis. "Having maintained a place where he can be something other than an associate justice has served him well."

Taking on leadership role

Stevens has cordial relations with the other members of the court, but he isn't part of the Washington party circuit and gives few speeches apart from an annual talk to the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago. That is where he grew up, and he was a circuit judge there when President Gerald R. Ford tapped him for the Supreme Court in 1975.

It is notable that he is one of the last justices whose ideology was not a major part of the calculus that led to his nomination. The Senate unanimously confirmed him 19 days after his nomination.

The lack of controversy may be one reason he has never been firmly established in the public's mind. And for a time, his votes fit a moderately conservative pattern, though he often struck out on his own in the legal reasoning he used to get to a result.

"He was known mostly as being idiosyncratic for many years," said University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt, a student of the court. "But as time went on, roughly in the last decade or so, he made a very conscious, very deliberate decision to take on a leadership role."

As the senior justice, Stevens has the power to decide which justice writes the opinion when the chief justice is not in the majority. It is that ability to shape historic outcomes, rather than a distinct judicial philosophy or strength of personality, that has marked Stevens's tenure, according to Notre Dame law professor Richard Garnett, a law clerk to William H. Rehnquist, the former chief justice.

"I wonder if a big part of it is luck," Garnett said. "He was the senior justice for a bloc on the court, the liberal bloc, that was stable for an unusually long period of time. And by being the senior guy, he was able to control the crafting of the court's judgments in a bunch of hot-button issues."

Stevens wrote most of the court's decisions that struck the previous administration's policies on the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But he was willing to give up the opinion-writing in other major cases -- to O'Connor on affirmative action, to Kennedy on gay rights -- to preserve a majority.

"The institution means a great deal to him -- I'd say more to him than his own personal legacy," Gerhardt said. But lately, the victories have been fewer. "The institution is not going in the direction he thinks it should," he said.

That was clear this year when he was on the losing side in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which changed the rules on the role that corporations and special interests can play in elections. Stevens delivered a stinging 90-page dissent, saying that his conservative colleagues in the majority had an "agenda" and that they ignored "the overwhelming majority of justices who have served on this court."

Stevens read part of the dissent -- in an uncharacteristically shaky voice -- from the bench, and some viewed it as something of a valedictory, or at least a confirmation that he was leaving.

The justice said too much is being read into his frustration.

"I'm always disappointed when people don't agree with me, but those rulings don't figure into my decision on whether to call it quits," Stevens said. "My colleagues are wonderful people. I miss Justice [David H.] Souter, but he has a wonderful replacement" in Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Obama, of course, nominated Sotomayor, and the White House has begun preparing to choose Stevens's successor. He said the president, who has taught constitutional law, is uniquely qualified for the role.

Obama is a "very competent president" to make choices for the Supreme Court, Stevens said. Perhaps the best, he added, "since Gerald Ford."

AFTER STEVENS

2010-07-01T17:20:00.000-07:00

What will the Supreme Court be like without its liberal leader?

by Jeffrey ToobinMARCH 22, 2010

Supreme Court Justices are remembered for their opinions, but they are revealed by their questions. For many years, Sandra Day O’Connor chose to open the questioning in most cases, and thus show the lawyers—and her colleagues—which way she, as the Court’s swing vote, was leaning. Today, Antonin Scalia often jumps in first, signalling the intentions of the Court’s ascendant conservative wing, and sometimes Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., makes his views, which are usually aligned with Scalia’s, equally clear. New Justices tend to defer to their senior colleagues, but Sonia Sotomayor, in her first year on the Court, has displayed little reluctance to test lawyers on the facts and the procedural posture of their cases; these kinds of questions had generally been the province of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, at times, has not seemed entirely pleased by the newcomer’s vigor. Samuel A. Alito, Jr., often says little; Clarence Thomas never says anything. (Thomas has not asked a question at an oral argument since 2006.)

John Paul Stevens, who will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on April 20th, generally bides his time. Stevens is the Court’s senior Justice, in every respect. He is thirteen years older than his closest colleague in age (Ginsburg) and has served eleven years longer than the next most experienced (Scalia). Appointed by President Gerald R. Ford, in 1975, Stevens is the fourth-longest-serving Justice in the Court’s history; the record holder is the man Stevens replaced, William O. Douglas, who retired after thirty-six and a half years on the bench. Stevens is a generation or two removed from most of his colleagues; when Roberts served as a law clerk to William H. Rehnquist, Stevens had already been a Justice for five years. He was the last nominee before the Reagan years, when confirmations became contested territory in the culture wars (and he was also, not coincidentally, the last whose confirmation hearings were not broadcast live on television). In some respects, Stevens comes from another world; in a recent opinion, he noted that contemporary views on marijuana laws were “reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student.”

Ever since last fall, when it emerged that Stevens had hired only one law clerk for the next year, instead of his customary four, there has been growing speculation that he will soon retire. Since 1994, Stevens has been the senior Associate Justice and so has been responsible for assigning opinions when the Chief Justice is not in the majority. He has used that power to build coalitions and has become the undisputed leader of the resistance against the conservatives on the Court. “For those fifteen years, John Stevens has essentially served as the Chief Justice of the Liberal Supreme Court,” Walter Dellinger, who was the acting Solicitor General in the Clinton Administration and is a frequent advocate before the Court, says. In Stevens’s absence, leadership of the Court’s liberals would fall, by seniority, to Ginsburg, but she is also elderly and has suffered from a range of health problems. Even if President Obama appointed a like-minded replacement for Stevens, that person, while taking his seat, would not fill his role.

Stevens is an unlikely liberal icon. When he was appointed, he told me recently, he thought of himself as a Republican and always had—“ever since my father voted for Coolidge and Harding.” He declined to say whether he still does. For many decades, there have been moderate Republicans on the Court—John M. Harlan II and Potter Stewart (appointed by Eisenhower), Lewis F. Powell and Harry Blackmun (Nixon), David H. Souter (Bush I). Stevens is the last of them, and his departure will mark a cultural milestone. The moderate-Republican tradition that he came out of “goes way back,” Stevens said. “But things have changed.”

So has Stevens. His positions have evolved on such issues as civil rights and the death penalty, and he has led the Court’s counteroffensive against the Bush Administration’s treatment of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. And, as Stevens’s profile has risen, and his views have moved left, so, too, has criticism of him from conservatives reached a higher pitch. “From the beginning of his time as a Justice, you could see Stevens’s roots in the New Deal Court and his willingness to justify an expanding welfare state,” Richard Epstein, a libertarian-leaning law professor at New York University, said. “On these issues, he’s been consistent and consistently wrong about everything—and highly influential.”

Still, Stevens’s views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy. Many great judicial legacies have a deep theoretical foundation—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s skeptical pragmatism, William J. Brennan’s aggressive liberalism, Scalia’s insistent originalism. Stevens’s lack of one raises questions about the durability of his influence on the Court.

But, more than anything, his career shows how the Court has become a partisan battlefield. In that spirit, Roberts last week denounced President Obama’s criticism of the Court in his State of the Union address, saying that the occasion had “degenerated to a political pep rally.” When Stevens leaves, the Supreme Court will be just another place where Democrats and Republicans fight.

Stevens tends to weigh in at oral argument at around the halfway point, and he does something that none of his colleagues do: he asks permission. “May I ask you a question?” or “May I ask you this?” Frequent advocates find this tic amusing and endearing, a little like the bow ties that he always wears. “However Justice Stevens is going to come out on an issue, he is going to do it in a way that is very friendly and avuncular and good-natured,” Paul Clement, who was George W. Bush’s Solicitor General from 2005 to 2008, says. “He’ll say something like ‘This is probably obvious, but I have this one question. Could you help me with this one point?’ An experienced advocate knows that you have to be on your guard, because he’s probably found the one issue that puts your case on the line.” Jeffrey Fisher, who clerked for Stevens in the 1998-99 term and is now a professor at Stanford, says, “The reason he very rarely speaks first is that he really listens to his colleagues and tries to figure out what is on their minds and tries to figure out what the swing votes care about in the case.”

On September 9th last year, Stevens engaged in a classic version of advocacy-by-interrogation during the argument of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Court was hearing the case before the first Monday in October, the traditional start of its year—an indication of how important some of the Justices thought it was. In 2008, Citizens United, a right-leaning nonprofit organization, had used some corporate contributions, along with money from individuals, to produce and promote a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton. (“She is steeped in controversy, steeped in sleaze,” the narrator says.) The group planned a video-on-demand broadcast on the eve of several Democratic primaries. But the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as McCain-Feingold, after its two chief sponsors) forbids political advertisements paid for by corporations in the weeks before a primary. Citizens United challenged the law, asserting that its right to freedom of speech was violated.

The Court had first heard arguments in the case in March, 2009, and the questions raised then were mostly narrow ones—whether McCain-Feingold pertained to video-on-demand technology, for example. Months passed without a decision. But, in June, the Court issued an unsigned order asking for the case to be reargued on new terms. Such an order, which requires a majority, had never been issued since Roberts became Chief Justice, in 2005, and only rarely in earlier years. The Court now told the lawyers to address much broader issues about the relationship of corporations to the First Amendment. Specifically, it asked whether two decisions, from 1990 and 2003, which upheld restrictions on corporate speech, should be overturned.

For a century, Congress and the Supreme Court had been restricting the participation of corporations, and individuals, in elections, mostly through limits on campaign contributions. The Court had come to see campaign spending as a form of speech, but one that clearly could be regulated, especially if the speaker was a business. The notion that corporations did not have the same free-speech rights as human beings had been practically a given of constitutional law for decades, and the 1990 and 2003 decisions (both joined by Stevens) reflected that consensus. Now the Court seemed open to what had been radical notions—that corporations had essentially the same rights as individuals, and could spend potentially unlimited amounts of money in elections.

Stevens never uses his questions to filibuster, and his first query was simple. “Does the First Amendment permit any distinction between corporate speakers and individual speakers?” he asked Theodore B. Olson, the lawyer for Citizens United and a Solicitor General in the second Bush Administration.

Olson hedged, saying, “I am not—I’m not aware of a case that just—”

“I am not asking you that,” Stevens persisted. “I meant in your view does it permit that distinction?”

Finally, Olson said, “I would not rule that out, Justice Stevens. I mean, there may be.”

Stevens was trying to alert his colleagues to the extreme shift in the law the case implied. But Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito had already made plain that they were seeking just such a change. As has often been the case, Stevens’s only hope appeared to be to get the vote of Anthony M. Kennedy, to make a majority with himself, Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Sotomayor. (So far, Sotomayor seems to be voting much like Souter, an ally of Stevens, whom she replaced.) When Elena Kagan, the Solicitor General, rose to defend McCain-Feingold, Stevens had his chance.

Stevens asked Kagan if it would be possible for the Court to rule narrowly. There could, for example, be an exception for nonprofits like Citizens United, or for “ads that are financed exclusively by individuals even though they are sponsored by a corporation.” Kagan, grasping the lifeline that Stevens was throwing her, said, “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

“Nobody has explained why that wouldn’t be a proper solution, not nearly as drastic,” Stevens went on. “Why is that not the wisest narrow solution of the problem before us?”

His strategizing was for naught. In a decision announced on January 21st, Kennedy, joined by the four conservatives, wrote a breathtakingly broad opinion, overturning the 1990 decision and much of the 2003 decision, and establishing, for the first time, that corporations have rights to free speech comparable to those of individuals. In the 1990 case, the Court’s majority opinion cited “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” Kennedy’s opinion simply asserted that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

Stevens’s ninety-page dissenting opinion in Citizens United (the longest of his career) was joined in full by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, and was a slashing attack on the majority, laden with sarcastic asides. “Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech,” he wrote.

To make his displeasure clear, Stevens read his dissent from the bench. Justices usually read pared-down versions of published opinions, but Stevens prepared a twenty-minute stem-winder. When the moment came, however, he stumbled frequently, skipped words, and, at times, was hard to understand. (As when he said, “As the corp, court has long resembled . . .”) For the first time in public, Stevens looked his age.

Stevens charged that the way the majority had handled the case was even worse than the legal outcome. “There were principled, narrower paths that a Court that was serious about judicial restraint could have taken,” he wrote. “Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” He added, referring to the Court, “The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” It suggested that, after thirty-five years on the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens was about to walk away from a place he no longer recognized.

Several weeks later, I sat with Stevens in his sun-streaked chambers at the Court. He had begun his day with a tennis game (singles), then showered and changed into a white dress shirt, suit, and bow tie at the Court. He wears a hearing aid, but walks at an athlete’s loping pace and shakes hands with a punishing grip; he keeps two well-used putters on hand to practice his short game on the office carpet.

For many years, Stevens, who grew up in Chicago, and his wife have divided their time between Washington and Fort Lauderdale, where they own a condominium. In the nineteen-eighties, Court insiders dubbed Stevens the FedEx Justice, because he spent so much time in Florida and corresponded with his chambers by overnight mail. Stevens still flees Washington at every opportunity, especially in the winter (though he now communicates electronically). He deals with his colleagues mostly by memorandum, occasionally by telephone, and rarely in person, except when the Court is in session. His law clerks report that months go by without another Justice visiting his chambers. Under Chief Justice Rehnquist, most of the Justices kept their distance from one another, and this has continued under Roberts, but Stevens in particular is, while cordial, remote.

Yet in person Stevens is as genial as he appears on the bench. He is ever hopeful about his home-town Cubs, and a devoted player, and fan, of golf—“though I have to confess, I miss Tiger.” His financial-disclosure form lists honorary memberships in four country clubs—near Chicago, near Indianapolis, near Washington, and in Florida. But when, in our conversation, the subject turned to the contemporary Supreme Court Stevens’s tone darkened.

I asked him if the center of gravity had moved to the right since he became a Justice. “There’s no doubt,” he said. “You don’t have to ask me that. Look at Citizens United.” He added, “If it is not necessary to decide a case on a very broad constitutional ground, when other grounds are available, then doesn’t that create the likelihood that people will think you’re not following the rules?”

Stevens doesn’t pretend that he’s more in tune with the Court than he is. When I asked him if there were any cases he especially regretted, he said, “Dozens. There are a lot I’m very unhappy with.” The first two that came to mind: District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Court, in 2008, recognized an individual’s right to own weapons under the Second Amendment; and Bush v. Gore, halting the recount that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered in the 2000 Presidential race. He was in the minority in both.

On some subjects, his own views have shifted. Writing on affirmative action, in 1980, he noted, “If the National Government is to make a serious effort to define racial classes by criteria that can be administered objectively, it must study precedents such as the First Regulation to the Reich’s Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935”; yet in 2003 he engineered the preservation of racial preferences in admissions in a case involving the University of Michigan Law School. In 1976, he joined his colleagues in ending a moratorium on the death penalty; in 2008, he wrote that executions are “patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.” Stevens has always supported abortion rights and an expansive notion of freedom of speech.

In all areas, Stevens has favored gradual change over sudden lurches and precedent over dramatic overrulings. But, especially since Roberts took over as Chief Justice, Stevens has found himself confronting colleagues who have a very different approach—an aggressive, line-drawing conservatism that appears bent on remaking great swaths of Supreme Court precedent.

On a wall in Stevens’s chambers that is mostly covered with autographed photographs of Chicago sports heroes, from Ernie Banks to Michael Jordan, there is a box score from Game Three of the 1932 World Series, between the Yankees and the Cubs. When Babe Ruth came to bat in the fifth inning, at Wrigley Field, according to a much disputed baseball legend, he pointed to the center-field stands and then proceeded to hit a home run right to that spot. The event is known as “the called shot.”

“My dad took me to see the World Series, and we were sitting behind third base, not too far back,” Stevens, who was twelve years old at the time, told me. He recalled that the Cubs players had been hassling Ruth from the dugout earlier in the game. “Ruth did point to the center-field scoreboard,” Stevens said. “And he did hit the ball out of the park after he pointed with his bat. So it really happened.”

Stevens has a reverence for facts. He mentioned that he vividly recalled Ruth’s shot flying over the center-field scoreboard. But, at a recent conference, a man in the audience said that Ruth’s homer had landed right next to his grandfather, who was sitting far away from the scoreboard. “That makes me warn you that you should be careful about trusting the memory of elderly witnesses,” Stevens said. The box score was a gift from a friend; Stevens noticed that it listed the wrong pitchers for the game, so he crossed them out with a red pen, and wrote in the right names.

This meticulousness is evident in Stevens’s judicial writing. Most Supreme Court Justices, if they write first drafts of their opinions at all, concentrate on the legal analysis, which usually includes the flowery language that gets quoted in newspapers and textbooks; it is for their law clerks to write up the facts of the case, the driest part. Stevens always does the facts himself (and says he does all the other drafting, too). For many years, his was the only chambers to review individually the thousands of petitions for certiorari that come to the Court each year; the others pooled their efforts. (Alito also recently left the cert. pool.)

It was not a surprise that Ernest Stevens, the Justice’s father, got tickets to the World Series. The Stevenses were prominent citizens of Chicago. The Justice’s grandfather James Stevens had gone into the insurance business, and, with the profits, he and his sons Ernest and Raymond bought land on South Michigan Avenue and built what was then the biggest hotel in the world, with three thousand rooms. The Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, and featured a range of luxurious services, a bowling alley, and a pitch-and-putt golf course on the roof. There was a big, stylized “S” over the main entrance. “We stayed at the hotel sometimes, every now and then,” Stevens told me. “I have pleasant memories, and there are also some unpleasant aspects of it, too.”

The Depression hit the family hard. As chronicled in “John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life,” a biography by Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman, which will be published in May, questions arose about whether the Stevens family had embezzled funds from the insurance company to prop up the hotel. In January, 1933, three months after Ruth’s called shot, the Chicago Herald-Examiner reported, “The Stevens children were sent to bed so they could not see their father arrested.” After Ernest Stevens was released on bail, according to the new biography,

four men brandishing a submachine gun, two shotguns, and a revolver ransacked the Stevens home in search of cash. Ernest and Elizabeth and two of their children, William, age fifteen, and John, age twelve, as well as the family cook and two maids, were herded upstairs and held in a bedroom after one of the boys was forced to open a safe in the first-floor library.

It remains unclear whether the intruders were police officers or gangsters (or both), but they found no secret stash of cash.

Later in 1933, the patriarch, James, had a debilitating stroke. A few days afterward, John’s uncle, Raymond, committed suicide rather than endure the disgrace of a criminal prosecution. Ernest Stevens thus had to go to trial alone, and in the toxic environment of the Depression he was swiftly convicted. He faced ten years in state prison. Deliverance came in 1934, when his appeal reached the Illinois Supreme Court and the justices unanimously reversed his conviction. “In this whole record there is not a scintilla of evidence of any concealment or fraud attempted,” the decision said. Still, the family never recovered its former wealth, and lost control of the hotel. (It is now known as the Chicago Hilton and Towers; the “S” is still there.)

“It was a tough period, no doubt about it,” Stevens told me. Notably, what saved his father was an appellate court. Stevens dismisses the connection as a “coincidence,” adding, “Of course, I respected the decision, but I was pretty young at the time—though I remember the words ‘not a scintilla of evidence.’ ”

The influence may be greater than Stevens acknowledges. His jurisprudence is distinguished by his confidence in the ability of judges to resolve difficult issues. “Generally, he respects the heck out of the profession of which he’s a member,” Deborah Pearlstein, a research scholar at Princeton who clerked for Stevens in 1999-2000, said. “Whether you take the examples from his personal life, or the litany of cases he’s heard in decades on the bench, his reliance on and confidence in judges to find out the truth was pretty unswerving.” Writing for a unanimous Court in 1997, Stevens rejected Bill Clinton’s argument that the Paula Jones case should be postponed until after his Presidency so that it would not interfere with his duties: “If properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of [Clinton’s] time.” (“I get razzed a lot for predicting there wouldn’t be anything to come out of the case,” Stevens told me, “because they were, in effect, saying that the opinion is what triggered the impeachment and all the rest of it.” But, he said, “the opinion really had absolutely nothing to do with what followed, because the only issue was when the trial was going to occur, not whether it would occur. And it was agreed by everybody that discovery would go forward. So we are not responsible for the fact that they took the deposition, and the deposition is what got the President in trouble.”)

In Bush v. Gore, Stevens framed his colleagues’ decision as an insult to the judicial role, one that could, he wrote, “only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.” In words that became better known than anything in the collectively written majority decision, he continued:

Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

John Stevens rallied from the family trauma of his teen-age years and excelled at the Lab School of the University of Chicago. (Sasha and Malia Obama were students there; the Obamas lived about a mile away from where Stevens grew up, on the city’s South Side.) He enrolled at the university in 1937. He was the editor of the newspaper, a stalwart of the tennis team, the head class marshal, a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Toward the end of his undergraduate career, the dean of students, Leon P. Smith, rather mysteriously suggested that he take a correspondence course, and Stevens did. He later learned, he said, that Smith “was an undercover naval officer who had been asked to see if he could get people interested in cryptography. Somewhere toward the end of November of 1941, they sent me a letter that said you’ve completed enough of the assignment, so you’re now eligible to apply for a commission.” He enlisted on December 6, 1941. “The next day, the war started,” he said.

Stevens spent most of 1942 in Washington, learning to analyze enemy transmissions, before being transferred to Pearl Harbor, where he served until 1945. “All of the intercepted Japanese traffic would come over the desk,” he said. “I was responsible for a twenty-four-hour period. The timing was such that when I came on, which would be eight o’clock in the morning, you know, that would correspond to a new day in Japan.” He went on, “I’d write up a report for Captain Layton, who was the intelligence officer for Admiral Nimitz. And we would give a summary of what we could learn from the day’s traffic.”

Like many veterans, Stevens will shed a customary reserve to share a war story. He tries to have lunch with the law clerks from the chambers of each of his colleagues in the course of a year. Thomas Lee, who clerked for Souter in 2001-02, during his lunch with Stevens mentioned that he, too, had been a Navy cryptologist. “I told him that I had served almost exactly fifty years after he did, and in the same place—in the Pacific,” Lee, who is now a professor at Fordham Law School, told me. “He asked me to stop by his chambers so we could continue talking about it.” Lee did, and the Justice told him about a moral dilemma that had haunted him for decades.

In April, 1943, a coded message came across Stevens’s desk—“one eagle and two sparrows, or something like that,” he said. Stevens knew the transmission meant that an operation based on intelligence from his station had been a success. American aviators had tracked and shot down the airplane of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who was the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the leader of Axis forces in Midway. Stevens was a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, and the mission, essentially a targeted assassination, troubled him. “Even at the time, it seemed to me kind of strange that you had a mission that was intended to kill a particular individual,” he told me. “And it was an individual who was a friend of some of the Navy officers.” (Before the war, Yamamoto had trained with the U.S. Navy and studied at Harvard.) Ultimately, Stevens concluded that the operation, which was approved by President Roosevelt, was justified, but the moral complexity of such a killing, even in wartime, stayed with him. “It is a little different than your statistics about so many thousands of highway deaths—that doesn’t mean all that much,” he said. “But if somebody you know is killed, you have an entirely different reaction.” The morality of military action became a lifelong preoccupation.

Veterans of the Second World War dominated American public life for decades, but Stevens is practically the last one still holding a position of prominence. He is the only veteran of any kind on the Court. (Kennedy served briefly in the National Guard; Thomas received a student deferment and later failed a medical test during Vietnam.) “Somebody was saying that there ought to be at least one person on the Court who had military experience,” Stevens told me. “I sort of feel that it is important. I have to confess that.” The war helped shape his jurisprudence, and even today shapes his frame of reference. In his dissent in Citizens United, he questioned the majority’s insistence that the United States government could never discriminate on the basis of the identity of a speaker by saying, “Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.” Since Tokyo Rose is not exactly a contemporary reference, Stevens told me, “my clerks didn’t particularly like that.”

Stevens’s Second World War experience also played a part in perhaps his most anomalous opinion as a Justice. In 1989, he dissented from the decision that protected the right to burn the American flag as a form of protest. “The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach,” he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent. “If those ideas are worth fighting for—and our history demonstrates that they are—it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.”

“The funny thing about that case is, the only consequence of it—nobody burns flags anymore,” Stevens told me. “It was an important symbolic form of protest at the time. But nobody does it anymore. As long as it’s legal, it’s not a big deal. You just don’t have flag burning.”

The war followed Stevens at the beginning of his legal career, too. After being discharged, in 1945, he raced through Northwestern Law School in two years, winning valedictorian honors. (He also acquired a new name, at least professionally. “I had a professor who said that every lawyer should have something unique about them,” he told me. “Some people sign their names in green ink, some people did other things. I had this very boring name. Who can remember ‘John Stevens’? So I added my middle name. I’ve used it ever since for work, but my friends have always called me John.”) Stevens earned a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, an F.D.R. appointee. In his year at the Court, Stevens worked on a case, Ahrens v. Clark, that had echoes sixty years later.

The matter grew out of the wartime detention of some hundred and twenty German-born U.S. residents, who were still being held at Ellis Island in 1948. The issue was whether these detainees had the right to challenge their incarceration in an American court. In a memo to Rutledge, Stevens wrote, “I should think that even an alien enemy ought to be entitled to a fair hearing on the question whether he is in fact dangerous.” Nevertheless, a six-to-three majority saw it the other way, so Rutledge and his twenty-eight-year-old clerk collaborated on a lengthy dissent, which said that the majority had torn at “the roots of individual freedom.”

Rutledge and Stevens were vindicated in 1973, when the Court effectively overruled its Ahrens precedent in a case involving the Kentucky legal system, but the issue of the rights of enemy aliens in wartime largely disappeared from the Court’s docket for many decades. It returned with a vengeance in the second Bush Administration. As Stevens said of the Ahrens dissent, with typical understatement, “It was relevant in the Guantánamo case.”

After his clerkship, Stevens returned to Chicago and took a job at one of the city’s first religiously integrated law firms. Abner Mikva clerked on the Supreme Court the year after Stevens, then returned to Chicago to start a career in public life. “Those were the days when there was such a thing as a moderate Republican, and that’s what he was,” Mikva said of Stevens. “He was a pretty conservative Republican on economic issues, but he was always a great progressive on civil rights and social rights.”

Stevens’s career resembled that of moderate Republicans like Harlan, Stewart, and Powell. All were successful corporate lawyers who leavened their private practice with periods of public service. Three years after joining the firm, Stevens did another short stint in Washington, this time as a lawyer on the Republican staff of the House Judiciary Committee, where he worked on antitrust issues. Back in Chicago, he became a widely renowned antitrust litigator while enjoying the life of a golf-playing suburban burgher. He and his wife, Betty, had four children, two of them adopted, and he took up flying a private plane as a hobby, which also enabled him to visit clients around the Midwest.

Robert H. Bork, the conservative scholar who was an unsuccessful nominee to the Supreme Court, was also an antitrust lawyer in Chicago in the late fifties, and in one case he and Stevens represented co-defendants. “I found him an amiable man, with conventional views for the time, and he gave no hint that he would become such a liberal in later years,” Bork told me.

Stevens likely would have lived out his life in prosperous obscurity if one of Chicago’s periodic corruption scandals hadn’t intervened. A local character, a wheelchair-bound frequent litigant named Sherman Skolnick, alleged that two justices on the Illinois Supreme Court had taken bribes to sway their votes in a political-corruption case. The court formed a committee to investigate, which appointed Stevens as its counsel. In a series of dramatic hearings in 1969, Stevens established that the two judges had indeed taken bribes. Both resigned, and Stevens became a public figure. The next year, Senator Charles Percy, an Illinois Republican, put Stevens up for a judgeship on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Richard Nixon followed Percy’s advice, and, in 1970, Stevens began his judicial career.

Gerald Ford, coming into office in 1974, sought to demonstrate a renewed commitment to ethics at the Justice Department by naming as Attorney General Edward H. Levi, the dean of the University of Chicago Law School. When, the following year, William O. Douglas left the Supreme Court, Levi pushed for Stevens, his fellow-Chicagoan, whose anti-corruption credentials looked especially desirable in that post-Watergate moment. “Ford’s purpose was not to make a big splash and change the world,” Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, said. “Ford was still smarting after the pardon of Nixon. He wanted to unite the country. There was no attempt to nominate a strong ideologue. That just wasn’t on the table. They wanted a straight-arrow, middle-of-the-road, normal guy, excellent lawyer—and that’s what they got in Stevens.” Ford nominated Stevens, who was then fifty-five, on November 28, 1975, and the Senate confirmed him just nineteen days later, by a vote of ninety-eight to zero.

Stevens’s corruption investigation had a profound effect on the kind of judge he became. One of the justices on the Illinois Supreme Court had written a draft dissenting opinion in the case in which his colleagues were paid off but at the last minute had decided to remain silent. (Dissents were rare in Illinois.) “If there is disagreement within an appellate court about how a case should be resolved, I firmly believe that the law will be best served by an open disclosure of that fact, not only to the litigants and their lawyers, but to the public as well,” Stevens wrote in the introduction to “Illinois Justice,” a 2001 book about the scandal. As a result, “I do clutter up the U.S. Reports with more separate writing than most lawyers have either time or inclination to read.”

This is true. Especially in his early years, Stevens wrote a lot of opinions, including many short dissents and concurrences. The point of all this writing has not always been clear—he’s not warning of corruption among his colleagues—and initially the number of opinions gave Stevens a reputation for eccentricity. “His early concurrences did not move the ball—they were personal statements,” Mikva said. “They were not stirring, Brandeis-type dissents. It used up a lot of his time.” (Also in his first few years in Washington, Stevens divorced and remarried. His second wife, Maryan Mulholland Simon, an old friend from Chicago, is a dietician, whose ministrations Stevens credits for his longevity.)

At first, Stevens settled into the ideological center of the Court, which at the time was bounded, on the left, by William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, and, on the right, by Rehnquist, then an Associate Justice, and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. The turning point came in 1994, when Blackmun retired and Stevens became the senior Associate Justice on the Court. Then, as now, the Court was closely divided between liberals and conservatives, so both sides had at least a chance of cobbling together majorities in important cases. This part of the job requires political deftness, which Stevens, in his Lone Ranger mode, had not often displayed. But he flourished in the role.

“Stevens controlled the assignment of opinions with great skill,” Walter Dellinger said. “Sometimes he has assigned the opinions to himself, but more important are the cases in which he gave up the privilege of writing the opinion in landmark cases in order to secure a shaky majority.” In 2003, Stevens asked O’Connor to write the opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan Law School case. The same year, Stevens bestowed on Kennedy the opportunity to write Lawrence v. Texas, the epochal gay-rights case invalidating bans on consensual sex between adults of the same gender.

Decisions like Lawrence, as well as abortion-rights cases, which are based on what are known as “unenumerated rights” in the Constitution, have long drawn the ire of conservatives. “It’s in recent years that Stevens has most become an activist judge, on issues like homosexual rights,” Bork told me. “He finds rights in the Constitution that no plausible reading could find there.”

But such cases also raised his standing with liberals. “It was particularly selfless for Stevens to assign Lawrence to Kennedy,” Dellinger said. “He could have chosen the honor of writing Lawrence for himself. But it seems he wanted to make sure that the tentative vote to strike down the Texas law held up, and assigning the opinion of the Court to Kennedy locked in the majority.”

Still, the summit of Stevens’s achievements on the bench came during the Bush Administration, in the series of decisions about the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and he kept for himself the most important of these opinions. In the 2004 case of Rasul v. Bush, among the first major cases to arise from Bush’s war on terror—and the first time that a President ever lost a major civil-liberties case in the Supreme Court during wartime—Stevens wrote for a six-to-three majority that the detainees did have the right to challenge their incarceration in American courts. In his opinion, which was written in an especially understated tone, in notable contrast to the bombastic rhetoric that accompanied the war on terror, he cited Rutledge’s dissent in the Ahrens case—which he himself had helped write, fifty-six years earlier. One of Stevens’s law clerks, Joseph T. Thai, later wrote an article in the Virginia Law Review entitled “The Law Clerk Who Wrote Rasul v. Bush,” which concluded that “Stevens’s work on Ahrens as a law clerk exerted a remarkable influence over the Rasul decision.”

Two years after Rasul, Stevens wrote the opinion for the Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which a five-to-three majority rejected the Bush Administration’s plans for military tribunals at Guantánamo, on the ground that they would violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva conventions. (Roberts did not participate in that case, because as a judge on the D.C. Circuit he had joined the opinion that Stevens overruled.)

Stevens’s repudiation of the Bush Administration’s legal approach to the war on terror was total. First, in Rasul, he opened the door to American courtrooms for the detainees; then, in Hamdan, he rejected the procedures that the Bush Administration had drawn up in response to Rasul; finally, in 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, Stevens assigned Kennedy to write the opinion vetoing the system that Congress had devised in response to Hamdan.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration conducted its war on terror with almost no formal resistance from other parts of the government, until Stevens’s opinions. He was among the first voices, and certainly the most important one, to announce, as he wrote in Hamdan, that “the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law.”

“The Second World War was the defining experience of his life, and he is proud of being a veteran,” Cliff Sloan, a Washington lawyer who clerked for Stevens in the mid-eighties, said. “No one can challenge his patriotism, and that’s why he was the right guy to take on the Bush Administration’s position at that time and in that way.”

Stevens, throughout his years on the Court, has drawn not just on history and precedent but on contemporary values and even on his own experience as a judge. According to Stevens, that approach has its origins in his brief stint as a lawyer on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee. “That was probably one of the most important parts of my education,” Stevens told me. He recalled an incident involving an antitrust law: “I remember explaining one of the tricky problems in the statute to one of the members of the committee. I got all through it, and he said, ‘Well, you know, let’s let the judges figure that one out.’ ”

What that told him was that “the legislature really works with the judges—contrary to the suggestion that the statute is a statute all by itself,” Stevens said. “There is an understanding that there are areas of interpretation that are going to have to be filled in later on, and the legislators rely on that. It’s part of the whole process. And you realize that they’re not totally separate branches of government—they’re working together.”

Andrew Siegel, a Stevens clerk and now a law professor at Seattle University, said, “Stevens believes that constitutional decision-making is conducted through the interpretation of a mix of various sources—a complex balancing act.” He added, “The glue holding it all together is judicial judgment.”

This is the core of Stevens’s disagreement with his great intellectual adversary on the court, Antonin Scalia. When it comes to interpreting statutes, Scalia believes that the Court should be guided by the words of the law “all by itself,” as Stevens put it. Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, told me, “What makes Stevens a moderate liberal is that he is fundamentally a legal realist, which means that when the text and history of the Constitution point in one direction, and good results and good consequences point in the other, he’ll usually go with what he sees as the good results.” He added, “Scalia sees the role of the judge as to read the text and apply it—period. Stevens thinks the law is more of a living thing, and he takes text and history and applies it in a way that he thinks serves the purposes of the framers, not necessarily their exact words.“

Just about every year, Stevens and Scalia take each other on in one or more cases. These contests reflect the temperaments of the two men—Stevens’s cautious balancings against Scalia’s caustic certainties. One dramatic example came in 2008, in Baze v. Rees, which asked whether execution by lethal injection amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Stevens and Scalia were both part of the seven-member majority, which said that lethal injections were permissible, but wrote separate concurring opinions. Stevens’s showed how his experience on the Court had soured him on the death penalty. “State-sanctioned killing is . . . becoming more and more anachronistic,” he wrote, and he proceeded to show that all of the purported justifications for the death penalty—deterrence, retribution—failed in practice. “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty ‘represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.’ ” Still, he felt bound by the precedents of the Court to uphold lethal injections.

Scalia wrote as a “needed response to Justice Stevens’s separate opinion.” He criticized Stevens’s assertions about the death penalty, but it was Stevens’s invocation of his own “experience” that really outraged Scalia. “Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of Justice Stevens’s experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence,” Scalia wrote, adding, “It is Justice Stevens’s experience that reigns over all.”

Scalia’s mockery gets to the heart of his critique of Stevens’s jurisprudence—that his variability simply amounts to a judge’s whim. “That flexibility and malleability that Stevens talks about is really just a license for a judge to reach any result he wants,” M. Edward Whelan III, a former Scalia clerk who runs the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, said. “Scalia believes in rules.” According to Calabresi, “Stevens gives judges too much freewheeling power, and that’s not the way our system was supposed to work and not the way it works the best.”

True to form, Stevens dismisses doctrinaire originalism, but says that historical evidence does have its uses. “The original intent cannot be the final answer—the world changes,” Stevens told me. “But I think it’s always a part of your job to take a look at what you can find out about the original drafting and all the rest of it.” In Heller, the gun-control case, Scalia invoked his view of original intent to find that the Second Amendment gave individuals a personal right to possess weapons. In his dissent, Stevens looked exhaustively at the same historical evidence and reached an opposite conclusion: that the authors of the Second Amendment intended to create no such right. “I’ve written a lot of opinions in which I’ve looked at the history pretty carefully,” he said. For Stevens, then, original intent is one factor—but only one—that should tell a Justice what the Constitution means.

On September 29, 2005, Stevens administered the oath of office to Roberts in a ceremony at the White House. “I didn’t think that ceremony should have been at the White House,” Stevens told me. “I feel very strongly about that. I think the proper place for that ceremony is at the Court. It has great symbolic importance. After a nominee has been confirmed, he’s a member of the judiciary—he’s not primarily the person who was selected by the President for the Court.” Still, Stevens went ahead with the ceremony, because “I think he was a particularly fine appointment, and I didn’t want anyone to get the misimpression that I didn’t approve of him.”

During Roberts’s tenure, though, Stevens’s view of the Constitution—holistic, gradualist, inclusive, broadly sourced—has most often been on display in dissent in important cases. The replacement of Rehnquist and O’Connor by Roberts and Alito made not only a more conservative Court but also a more aggressive one, with far less regard for precedent. This is evident in areas from abortion law (where the Court upheld for the first time a total ban on a specific medical procedure) to antitrust (where the majority overturned a ninety-six-year-old line of cases). William Rehnquist was no liberal, but he did not lead an attack on the Court’s past.

Stevens believes that even the 1954 landmark, Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” in education, is under assault. In 2007, when the Court, in an opinion by Roberts, struck down the Seattle school-integration plan, Stevens, in dissent, could only murmur in wonder: “It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

Even Stevens’s manners at oral argument are not entirely the result of Midwestern politeness. “You want to be sure to get it in,” he said. “The bench is a little more active than it was years ago. You’ve got four or five Justices who are very active.” Is that a good thing? “I’m not a Clarence Thomas, but I think a little more permission to the lawyers to develop their own argument would be better than the way it does develop.”

How long will Stevens remain on the Court? Good genes (one of his older brothers practiced law until he was ninety-one), a happy home, plenty of exercise, and even more luck could allow Stevens to keep up the fight into his tenth decade. Last December, he had lunch with Peter Isakoff, a Washington lawyer who was one of his early Supreme Court law clerks. “He had just played tennis that morning—singles!—and I was just kind of amazed,” Isakoff recalled. “And so I asked him, ‘Do you still run?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, how else are you going to get to the ball?’ ”

With the election of Barack Obama, the question of Stevens’s retirement has become more pressing. Even though Stevens was appointed by a Republican President, many assume that he would never willingly have turned his seat over to George W. Bush. I asked Stevens about his plans.

“Well, I still have my options open,” he said. “When I decided to just hire one clerk, three of my four clerks last year said they’d work for me next year if I wanted them to. So I have my options still. And then I’ll have to decide soon.” On March 8th, he told me that he would make up his mind in about a month.

Stevens needs a little more than two years to surpass Douglas for the longest tenure on the Court, and about one year to equal Oliver Wendell Holmes as the oldest serving Justice, but he said that those numbers were irrelevant. “I’ve never felt any interest in trying to break any records,” he said. He has had a closeup view of the complexities of retirement decisions for Supreme Court Justices. William Douglas, whom Stevens replaced, stayed on the Court after a series of strokes that incapacitated him; his colleagues awkwardly forced his resignation. On the other hand, O’Connor left the Court in good health, which continues, and has watched her successor, Alito, undo part of her legacy.

Did it matter which President named his replacement?

“I’d rather not answer that,” Stevens said. The Republican Party may have moved right since 1975, but Ford himself never displayed anything but pride in his choice of Stevens for the Court. In 2005, a year before his death, Ford wrote, in a tribute to Stevens, “For I am prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination thirty years ago of John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

As for Obama, Stevens said, “I have a great admiration for him, and certainly think he’s capable of picking successfully, you know, doing a good job of filling vacancies.” He added, “You can say I will retire within the next three years. I’m sure of that.”

He will not be seen again, under any circumstances, at a State of the Union address. “I went to a few of them when I was first on the Court, but I stopped,” Stevens told me. “First, they are political occasions, where I don’t think our attendance is required. But also it comes when I am on a break in Florida. To be honest with you, I’d rather be in Florida than in Washington.” ♦

Engaging Europe in the US death penalty fight: Can we help on your capital case?

2010-07-01T17:18:00.000-07:00

Do your clients have ties to foreign countries? Could they have a claim to foreign nationality? If so, Reprieve can help…

In September 2009 Reprieve launched a three-year project funded by the European Commission – theEC Project. The Project works alongside capital defense lawyers to meet their obligations under the ABA Guidelines, to: ‘make appropriate efforts to determine whether any foreign country might consider the client to be one of its nationals (10.6)’.

The EC Project

The EC Project has five full time staff members based in the US. Supported by staff in London they are reviewing the US death row population to determine whether any prisoners have a claim to foreign nationality. The project then works closely with the prisoner’s US legal team to conduct investigation in the US and overseas; litigation assistance, and engagement with foreign governments. We have already identified 24 confirmed or potential European nationals and 3 other non-European foreign nationals.

Why Nationality Matters

Representing foreign national clients sentenced to death brings with it additional complexities and challenges. Foreign clients unfamiliar with the US criminal justice system may feel alienated by proceedings culturally and linguistically different to those in their country of origin. Legal claims may also arise when a foreign national is sentenced to death without being informed of their right to consular notification and access.

Many foreign governments remain staunchly anti-death penalty and provide substantial assistance to their nationals facing the death penalty. Assistance has included facilitating home country mitigation investigations and document searches; filing amicus briefs; supporting clemency pleas; making diplomatic representations; and helping fund the defense.

Nationality Laws

Many foreign nationality laws are surprisingly broad, allowing the State to grant citizenship to those with even a tenuous link to their country. For example, Croatian nationality law allows the State to grant citizenship to descendants of Croatian citizens and those considered to be ethnic Croats. Other countries, such as Italy, can grant citizenship where they have a special interest in doing so. Indeed, the Sicilian Mayor of Palermo granted honorary citizenship to Joseph O’Dell, a US national sentenced to death and subsequently executed in Virginia. The City of Palermo even chartered a plane to fly his body from the US to Palermo, where he was subsequently buried.

Other relatively novel provisions include the Austrian law allowing citizenship to be granted to those who take up employment as a college or university professor in Austria; the German law that allows descendents of Germans deprived of their citizenship on political, racial or religious grounds between 1933 and 1945 to be re-granted German citizenship.; and the fact that individuals of Sephardic Jewish origin may be able to obtain Spanish citizenship under particular circumstances.

We think an extraordinary number and range of prisoners may have claims to foreign nationality as a result of such diversity.

How We Can Help

Engage foreign governments to assist their nationals facing capital charges or on death row
Provide litigation and investigation assistance in cases from trial to clemency
Conduct investigation in the US and overseas, including records collection and witness interviews
Stimulate legislative reform to establish the nationality of our clients
Facilitate amicus briefs from foreign governments
Secure culturally sensitive pro bono expert assistance
Create partnerships between your legal team and local non-profits and academic experts

Reprieve has assisted foreign nationals on death row for many years, originally with the main focus being on British citizens. Sometimes, as in the case of Kenny Richey, we had to threaten litigation in the UK to bring about a change in the law to establish his British nationality. Once this was achieved, the British strongly backed his case (in coordination with his US lawyers), and after 22 years on death row Kenny returned home to Scotland a free man.

We facilitate the drafting of amicus briefs from the British government, as with the cases of Linda Carty, Krishna Maharaj, and Kenny Richey. We have undertaken investigation and document collection all around the world, to help local counsel with the presentation of their client’s case. We have also secured expert assistance from Scotland Yard, challenging the DNA evidence used in a previous case we worked on. We also put local counsel in touch with a network of allies all around the world, who can help develop their case.

We try to provide assistance to cases at all levels, from trial to clemency. While our original focus was on British nationals, the EC Project allows us to extend this work to nationals of other countries.

To obtain a free full, privileged assessment of your client’s potential claims to foreign nationality, please contact: David Sellwood: Reprieve PO Box 52742 London EC4P 4WS United Kingdom +44 (0)207 353 4640 david.sellwood@reprieve.org.uk. Alternatively, contact: Lucy Larkins: EC Project, The Justice Center, 636 Baronne Street, New Orleans, Louisiana 70113 USA +1 (504) 569 8199 lucy.larkins@reprieve-ecproject.org

Undue process

2010-06-29T18:39:00.000-07:00

February 27, 2010

The US Supreme Court must order a retrial for the Briton who stands on death row

Friends must sometimes agree to disagree. Britain forbids capital punishment; the United States supports it. But above all, good friends must honour their word. An Anglo-American agreement requires Britain to notify the US if it takes legal action against an American citizen, and for the US to do the same if a Briton is to stand trial in America.

So the case of Linda Carty — who was born in St Kitts, which qualifies her as a British citizen — is especially galling. Carty now waits on death row in Texas. In a last attempt to avoid her becoming the first black British woman to be executed in more than a century, the British Government has now presented an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court urging it to reconsider the case.

Carty’s story raises disturbing questions on several levels. First, the case represents a gross abuse of British trust. The British Government — quite rightly — seeks to defend any Briton who stands accused of a capital crime abroad. Other countries may kill their own citizens if they must; where possible we try to prevent them from killing ours. But the Texan authorities made no attempt to discover Carty’s nationality when they arrested her, and the same lack of curiosity and responsibility afflicted the lawyer they appointed to represent her. Hence Britain was effectively precluded from involvement in the case until the death penalty had already been issued.

It is impossible to be certain of Carty’s innocence. But the original trial was clearly a farce. Carty faced the death penalty because her three co-defendents testified against her to avoid execution themselves. Meanwhile, Carty’s lawyer conducted a woefully inadequate defence. He talked to his client for just 15 minutes, blaming her for refusing to talk to him until he “bribed her with a bar of chocolate” — an extrememely unlikely version of events given that Carty is allergic to chocolate. It is also alleged that the lawyer neglected to visit St Kitts even though he had been granted funds by the court to do so. Had he bothered, he would have discovered that the island’s prime minister was willing to testify on Carty’s behalf.

Outrage at the nature of the legal defence provided for Carty extends far beyond critics of the death penalty. Baker Botts, a law firm that has often represented the Bush family, has taken up the case pro bono. Michael Goldberg, the defence attorney now representing Carty, is a supporter of the death penalty. He was simply appalled by the abuse of justice.

America’s execution policy is becoming a source of ridicule. Last autumn Romell Brown lay strapped to the gurney for an hour, sobbing while his executioners failed to find a suitable vein to adminster a lethal injection. In time, it is to be hoped that the United States reconsiders its outdated attitude towards justice and mercy.

More urgently, America should consider its responsibilities to its allies. When the US needs British support, it makes a great deal of the special relationship. British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq die every month serving the Anglo-American alliance. But friendship cuts both ways. The Supreme Court must demand a retrial. And America should remember that it owes Britain the obligations of trust as well as Carty the right of justice.

Debate Brewing Over Supreme Court Change To Miranda Rights

2010-06-29T18:38:00.001-07:00

Originally printed at http://www.wsbt.com/news/local/85444037.html

SOUTH BEND — A drastic change to a well known U.S. law could give police across America a new tool in the fight against crime. A 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court decision revises a 30-year-old ruling on what's known as "Miranda Rights."

Miranda Rights are intended to protect suspects arrested by police by barring interrogations from proceeding if the suspect asks for a lawyer. It stems from a 1966 Supreme Court ruling in Miranda v. Arizona that produced the new famous phrase that begins: "you have the right to remain silent" and ends with "you have the right to an attorney."

We've all heard it on TV before in reality cop shows or police dramas. But, just what does it really mean, and what rights does it afford to a criminal suspect?

For suspects, since 1981, it's meant that investigators can't continue questioning in a case once a person-of-interest has invoked their Miranda Right to an attorney. Without that attorney's consent, police can't legally interrogate the suspect any further.

The ruling was aimed at preventing police from coercing a person into waiving their rights to a lawyer by keeping them in custody. But, many officers said it's only led to frustrating roadblocks in important cases.

"It's been a fundamental tenant of police work that once somebody has invoked their Miranda Rights, they're unapproachable again except through their attorney. And when you go through their attorney, that's almost an automatic no," said South Bend Police Captain Phil Trent.

"After that point, it was expected that we could not approach that individual regarding the case again. So, a lot of cases just died in the water right there when we couldn't approach our suspect," Trent continued.

But, a recent case in Maryland involving a child molester who had asked for a lawyer nearly three years before he confessed challenged that ruling.

Michael Shatzer confessed in 2006 to abusing his own son. He had asked police for a lawyer when he was first questioned while already imprisoned on a child sex abuse conviction in 2003 when police questioned him about allegations he also sexually abused his own 3-year-old son.

Shatzer refused to talk and asked for a lawyer, and the questioning ended.

Then, in 2006, when Shatzer's son was old enough to offer details, a different police officer approached Shatzer in prison. He waived his Miranda rights, made incriminating statements and was eventually convicted.

But, Maryland's Court of Appeals threw out his confession, saying the passage of time did not make his first request for a lawyer less valid. The lower court judges also said that Shatzer's release from police interrogation back into the general prison population was not a sufficient break in custody to invalidate his lawyer request.

Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said enough time had passed between the first and second interrogations for Shatzer, even though he was being held in prison.

"The duration of the break in custody here (2 1/2 years) was plainly enough," Scalia wrote.

"In fact, the court decided--not just two years--but two weeks was enough," Trent said. "Now, 14 days after the first approach — even if we're turned down — as long as that person's had 14 days of non-custodial, clear thinking, we can re-approach that person without their attorney."

Trent called the ruling a major surprise that could make a major impact on law enforcement across the country.

"I'm personally shocked at this," he said. "It changes a rule I've been dealing with for 23 years, and it's a major, major modification."

But, perhaps the biggest modification will come on older, "cold cases." Officers can now bring in witnesses or suspects that were previously considered untouchable to question them a second time.

"It certainly allows us the ability to keep a case open and have a little bit more hope," Trent said.

But, some are concerned the new ruling also opens the door to potential abuse of power.

"I am concerned," said South Bend criminal defense attorney Andre Gammage, a partner in the firm Berger & Gammage. "I see this as an opportunity for a person's will to be eroded if police approach, and approach, and approach every [two weeks]."

Police might have "an incentive to badger suspects through repetitive catch-and-release tactics," the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers told the Supreme Court.

"A police officer questioning you on day 1 or day 15, it's still an intimidating situation for you. It may be that additional information may be gained by an officer between day 1 and day 15 or sometime down the line. So, he's asking the question again and trying to do his job," Gammage said.

"But, by the same token, that person who's being questioned, I believe, just by the very nature of being questioned, feels a bit intimidated — especially when it's for the second or third time," he continued.

Gammage, and other criminal defense attorneys are worried repeated questioning could wear down a suspect's will until they do something their lawyer would advise against.

"There's a real danger in the thinking — 'if I tell them what they want to know, will they stop bothering me? They may not believe that they're incriminating themselves, and say look: if I just tell them this, or tell them something, will they leave me alone? Well, that something just might be something that would land them in jail," Gammage said.

Some lawyers have even referred to the change as a "merry-go-round" that will allow police to "legally" badger suspects. It's enough to cause Gammage to add a new piece of advice to all of his clients.

"Remember, they may now approach you again. Your answer is still: I want to talk to my lawyer. You need to invoke that again," he said.

But, Trent says, while the new law does give police more leeway, it won't result in repeated badgering.

"It certainly does give us a lot more access to a suspect. However, at some point, I think we're going to find a happy medium. Officers may determine that an individual is not going to be forthcoming with information," he said.

"Who knows," Trent continued. "In the State of Indiana or elsewhere this could still be modified and the law could be narrowed. I think after a brief period, it would be determined that the police had their answer. Beyond that would be unnecessarily badgering an individual."

Still, until that challenge comes, Trent says officers will be using the change, hoping it will help them finally close cases--both new and old--for good.

"Before it was no means no," he said. "Now, it's no means no for two weeks. After that, it might mean maybe. We'll be making a lot more phone calls and knocking on a lot more doors in the future."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.