NC Death Penalty Lawyer, Lisa Dubs, Profiled

Dubs reacts to a jury verdict acquitting Michael Mead

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

Court: Don't Get Hung Up on the Details, "Worrisome"...Kill Him Anyway

Cleveland.com reported last week on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding the death penalty in the case of Tyrone Noling, (pic.) 

According to the Court's decision, there are some real concerns about whether Mr. Noling did the deed.  Regardless the Court says under existing law there is no way to stop this freight train....scary.  This is reporter Andrea Simakis' summary of the decision and implications for Noling:

Though two federal judges described his case as "worrisome" and questioned whether the state would be killing an innocent man, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided to let Tyrone Noling's 1996 death sentence stand.

The ruling by the Cincinnati-based court Wednesday also bars Noling from presenting new evidence that others might have committed the double murder that put him on Ohio's death row.

Kelly Schneider, Noling's longtime attorney, called the decision "heartbreaking."

"Basically, they see problems in Tyrone's case but [write that] their hands are tied by the rules that govern their ability to grant relief," Schneider said. "Literally, we've got a man I believe to be innocent who's just a few steps away from death and [they say] their hands are tied. It's horrifying."

Noling was sentenced to death six years after the bodies of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig were found dead of gunshot wounds on the floor of their kitchen in Portage County's Atwater Township.

He was largely convicted on the word of three men, one of whom admitted during the trial that he'd been coerced by prosecutors and police to implicate Noling to save his own skin. The other two men also later recanted, saying they lied on the stand to avoid a death sentence.

Earlier this year, another man claimed that his foster brother, Daniel Wilson, admitted to killing the Hartigs. Wilson was executed for an unrelated murder in 2009.

Those questions about Noling's guilt plagued at least two members of the three-judge panel.

Citing the "worrisome scenario" of possible witness coercion, "absolutely no physical evidence linking Noling to the murders" and the existence of "other viable suspects that the prosecutor chose not to investigate or did not know of at the time," the panel said nonetheless that the lower courts had not acted unreasonably.

A legal expert said the judges had to abide by a sweeping antiterrorism law passed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that severely restricts the ability of federal courts to overturn state court decisions.

Federal judges who look at a state case and think "the state got it absolutely, totally wrong cannot reverse that case unless they find that . . . the state was unreasonable in being wrong," said Michael Benza, visiting associate professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

"It really has created this bizarre situation, as in the Noling case, where you have a court saying, 'this conviction or this sentence is, in fact, unconstitutional in our opinion, but we are not authorized to do anything about it.' "

Though Noling has appeals pending in state court, his federal appeals are all but exhausted. His defense team will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case, but the odds are long.   Of 10,000 to 20,000 petitions each year, the nation's most powerful jurists agree to hear "like 75," said Benza. ADSENSE HERE

The First Innocent Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fla Death Penalty is Unconstitutional, Fla Taxpayers--Tell Us Again Why Were Paying for this Case Anthony Carnival?

At least that's the question Florida taxpayers should be screaming at prosecutors in the wake of the 94-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez striking down Florida's death penalty.  Judge Martinez repeatedly cited a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision as a basis for his finding that Florida's law is fatally flawed.

So Florida prosecutors are proceeding with a media circus in nearby Orlando in a declared effort to kill that idiot-child, Casey Anthony.  At the cost of how many millions?  And does Florida have so much revenue that they can feed and house all the abused and neglected children? ADSENSE HERE

Georgia Activists Attack Licensure of Death Drug Doctor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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