Thursday, July 7, 2005

TACOMA -- Prosecutors have decided not to seek the death penalty in the retrial of a man convicted in the 1998 execution-style slaying of his boss.

The state Supreme Court threw out the death penalty in the case last year, citing vague jury instructions. Now Pierce County Prosecutor Gerry Horne has decided not to try again for the death penalty, in part because of a possible paperwork problem. But he's proceeding with the retrial.

Covell Thomas, 28, was convicted in 2000 of killing his boss, Richard Geist, 26, during a robbery. Geist suffered four gunshot wounds to the head.

The death penalty was thrown out because jurors did not determine whether Thomas was the principal assailant or merely an accomplice Under state law, only primary participants in an aggravated first-degree murder case can receive the death penalty.

Under the high court ruling, prosecutors had the choice of retrying Thomas for aggravated first-degree murder, the only crime that carries the death penalty in Washington, or sentencing him to prison for the lesser charge of first-degree murder.

Recently, defense attorneys complained that prosecutors did not file a formal notice that they intended to seek the death penalty a second time at the retrial, scheduled to begin in October. So Horne has taken the death penalty off the table but intends to seek a aggravated first-degree murder conviction, to ensure that Thomas would spend the rest of his life in prison.

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Jun. 17, 2005

AUSTIN -- Gov. Rick Perry today signed Senate Bill 60, which gives juries in capital murder cases the option of sentencing a defendant to life without the possibility of parole.

"I believe this bill will improve our criminal justice system because it gives jurors a new option to protect the public with the certainty a convicted killer will never roam our streets again," Perry said.

While the life without parole sentence cannot be applied retroactively to those already convicted of capital murder, it will provide victims assurance that in the future, even if appellate courts overturn death sentences, those convicted of the most heinous murders will never be released from prison.

The law applies only to those convicted of capital murder after Sept. 1, 2005.

Perry also approved another death penalty-related bill, House Bill 93, which will change the terminology used on certificates of death for executed inmates.

"Individuals who commit unspeakable crimes against Texas citizens and are put to death under Texas law are not victims," Perry said. "They are criminals and the final document that bears their name should reflect this fact."

House Bill 93 requires the death certificate of an inmate executed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to be classified as death caused by "judicially ordered execution." Currently, the death certificates list the cause of death as homicide. This bill will take effect Sept. 1, 2005.

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Texas may have put innocent man to death, panel told
Nobody would listen, lawyer, expert say

By Steve Mills
Tribune staff reporter (go to the story)

AUSTIN , Texas -- April 20, 2005 -- With Texas' criminal justice system the subject of intense scrutiny for a crime lab scandal and a series of wrongful convictions, a state Senate committee heard testimony Tuesday about the possibility that Texas had experienced the ultimate criminal justice nightmare: the execution of an innocent person.
    Fourteen months after Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in the nation's busiest death chamber, a renowned arson expert and Willingham's lawyer told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee that they believed Willingham might have been innocent but found nobody willing to listen to their claim in the days before the execution in February 2004.
    "This was a frustrating case, and it was frustrating because it appeared that we could not get anybody to listen," said attorney Walter Reaves, who represented Willingham.
    "To say that this case was thoroughly reviewed," Reaves added, "I have my doubts."
    The execution of Willingham, convicted of the December 1991 arson fire that killed his three young daughters, was a focus of a hearing into a proposed innocence commission.

Governor's committee
    Texas Gov. Rick Perry has, by executive order, set up his own committee. But critics, including state Sen. Rodney Ellis, a longtime advocate of criminal justice reform in Texas , and Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the New York-based Innocence Project, told the senators that to be effective the governor's panel needed to subpoena sworn testimony, obtain documents and seek forensic testing. Ellis, a Houston Democrat, has sponsored legislation to beef up the power of Perry's panel.
    "Without subpoena power and the ability to order testing, I don't see how the committee can get to the bottom of these cases," Scheck said after testifying. "I haven't heard of a committee that didn't want all of those things. If you want to find out the truth, you have to have the mechanisms to do it."
    A Tribune investigation of the Willingham case last December showed that he was prosecuted and convicted based primarily on arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific advances--a fact backed up by testimony Tuesday by one of those experts, Gerald Hurst.
    According to Hurst and three other fire experts who reviewed evidence in the case at the Tribune's request, the original investigation that concluded the fire was arson was flawed, relying on theories no longer considered valid. It is even possible the fatal fire at the Willingham home in Corsicana , a small town about an hour south of Dallas , was accidental, according to the experts.
    Nonetheless, before Willingham died by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004, Texas judges and Perry turned aside a report from Hurst in which he questioned the arson evidence and suggested the fire was an accident.
   "The state," Hurst testified Tuesday, "needs to take an interest in these matters."
    Willingham maintained his innocence until the end. Strapped to a gurney in the death chamber last year, an angry Willingham said: "I am an innocent man, convicted of a crime I did not commit."
    The scientific advances that Hurst and the other experts cited in the Willingham case played a role in the exoneration last year of another Texas Death Row inmate, Ernest Willis. Hurst told the Senate committee that the two fires were identical, and that an investigation is needed to determine why Willingham died and Willis lived.
    Many prosecutors oppose expanding the power of Perry's committee, called the Criminal Justice Advisory Council. Barry Macha, the district attorney in Wichita County , testified legislators should first give the governor's panel a chance to work as designed.
    But that drew a skeptical response from the committee chairman, state Sen. John Whitmire.

Bush role in 2000 case
    "The problem is, they're appointed by the governor," Whitmire, also a Democrat from Houston , said of the council's members. "I would almost give them subpoena power and the first time they abuse it, we'll all come back."
    Scheck also pointed to the case of Claude Jones, executed in December 2000 for the murder of Allen Hilzendager, who was shot and killed in a 1989 liquor store robbery. In that case, Scheck said, counsel for then-Gov. George W. Bush prepared a recommendation for Bush that did not mention that Jones' request for a 30-day stay of execution was to allow DNA tests to be done on a hair found at the scene. Bush denied the request for a stay.
    Last year, the Tribune asked to see the recommendation in the Willingham case to try to determine whether Perry was informed of Hurst 's last-minute analysis. But the Tribune's request was rejected by state officials who said the documents are considered confidential.
    Scheck told the Senate committee he believed the hair in the Jones case was still in evidence and that an innocence commission with broad powers could seek to test the hair to determine if Jones was guilty. Without that ability, Scheck testified, the commission "would be hampered or powerless in its ability to get to the bottom of this very important case."

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ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)-- April 12, 2005 -- A powerful committee of the state Assembly voted Tuesday not to send legislation aimed at reinstating New York's death penalty to the full house, a move that may effectively kill the effort for this year.
    Such legislation has been pushed hard by Republican Gov. George Pataki and the state Senate's Republican majority leader, Joseph Bruno. In March, the GOP-led Senate voted 37-22 in favor of a bill almost identical to the one rejected Tuesday.
    Pataki harshly criticized the 11-7 vote by the Democrat-controlled Codes Committee, saying the ``Assembly leadership's `so what' attitude toward criminals ... is simply shameful.''
    New York's death penalty was reinstated in 1995 by the Legislature and Pataki, who had vowed to bring capital punishment back during the 1994 campaign when he ousted incumbent Democrat Mario Cuomo. Cuomo, in 12 years as governor, had routinely vetoed death penalty legislation.
    No one was ever executed under the 1995 death penalty law, and it was effectively declared invalid by a ruling from the state's highest court last year.
    Codes Committee Chairman Joseph Lentol, who had supported the death penalty, said advances in DNA technology have shown innocent people are too often convicted of murder.
    But Republican committee members argued the issue was too important to let it die without a vote by the full chamber. The legislation, Assemblyman David Townsend, said, was needed ``to protect the innocent people of New York from these monsters.''
    The high court's ruling last June invalidated the sentences of all four men on the state's death row. The Court of Appeals ruled that provisions in the law governing jury instructions could result in some jurors voting for death when they really don't want to.

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Saturday, 16 April 2005

What was most remarkable for Mary Gleysteen in January when she saw her friend Marie Bernard blocking the gate outside the Trident submarine base in Bangor was recalling the first time they met 34 years earlier.

They were among the Vietnam War protesters who camped by the Hood Canal Bridge, jumping into rowboats to try to get in the way of Navy ships headed to war. Bernard, who died Sunday of congestive heart failure in her Phinney Ridge home, had sat in an aluminum rowboat with a rope tied to another rowboat. A ship sailed in between, catching the rope and pulling both boats along.

"Eventually the Coast Guard came and cut the rope or they would have been pulled out into the Strait" of Juan de Fuca.

Bernard was 35 then, and the first five of her six children were camping with the protesters.

Then in the snow in Bangor this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there was Bernard, 68 and a grandmother, standing in a line of 11 people.

"That was the amazing thing. She was still doing it," Gleysteen said. "Activism was a constant in her life, and she had stayed true to her values."

She was arrested at the protest in Bangor this year. It was the last of what her friends estimate was more than a dozen times she was arrested opposing war and nuclear proliferation and demanding social justice.

Born in South Bend, Ind., she was the daughter of a lawyer who worked for the University of Notre Dame. She held a number of jobs, and left home in her early 20s for New York to be an actress.

She married and lived in Florida for a while, before settling in Seattle in about 1964. She worked as a Head Start teacher, and then in her 60s earned a master's degree in conflict resolution from Antioch University.

But as she once told Gleysteen, "Some people are doctors or lawyers or engineers. I'm a peace worker."

Bernard was raised a Catholic. Her youngest daughter, Yoshiko Matsui, said she wasn't overtly religious, but "she always told me, 'You don't know if the person standing on the corner asking for spare change is Jesus.' She used to say those kinds of things infrequently, but her faith was visible, and I came to understand it was the grounding of her work."

She was also stubborn, said her daughter Catherine Barashkoff-Kirkland.

An early opponent of the Trident submarine and its nuclear warheads, Bernard testified against the opening of the base in 1974: "When I think about having Trident built anywhere, it doesn't bother my head, my intellect, as much as it bothers my soul."

Over the years, she was involved in a variety of other issues, from protesting Seattle's law barring people from sitting on sidewalks to opposing both wars against Iraq.

During a protest of the first war, during Seafair in 1991, Bernard wore a crown and a "Miss Invasion 1991" sash across her chest. According to an account of the protest in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, she knew that many at the parade, which welcomed home returning sailors, viewed her with disdain.

"It's agonizing and stressful beyond belief to do this ... ," she said. "But if we don't do something, another person could be dead."

In 2003, she was one of 10 arrested as 275 protesters opposed the war in Iraq outside the Jackson Federal Building in Seattle.

Last Mother's Day, Barashkoff-Kirkland asked Bernard what she wanted to do. She wanted to protest the Trident base. "So that's what we did. I brought my children, and we pushed the strollers. My older daughter carried a flower."

Bernard is survived by six children: Ivan Barashkoff, Sophia Barashkoff, Catherine Barashkoff-Kirkland, Alex Barashkoff, Andre Barashkoff, and Matsui. She also had eight grandchildren.

A memorial Mass will be celebrated at 9:30 a.m. today at St. Benedict Parish, 1805 N. 49th St., in Seattle.

Another memorial, celebrating her work for peace and justice, will be held at 10 a.m. April 23 at the University Friends Meeting House, 4001 Ninth Ave N.E., Seattle. Both services are open to the public.  

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