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Headlines:
- Lethal injection flap means death penalty moratorium for Calif.
- Death sentence affirmed for Dayva Cross
- Richard Clark evades death penalty in 1995 murder of Roxanne Doll
- Moussaoui eligible for death penalty
- Judges Set Hurdles for Lethal Injection
- Clark executed after vein collapse causes lengthy delay
- Death penalty now possible in murder case
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Lethal
injection flap means death penalty moratorium SAN FRANCISCO - The state's postponement of an execution because no medical professional would take part amounts to a moratorium on capital punishment in California, home to the largest death row, and could have implications for other states that use lethal injection. Michael Morales, 46, was scheduled to die Tuesday by lethal injection for torturing, raping and murdering a 17-year-old girl 25 years ago. But officials at San Quentin State Prison couldn't meet the demands of a federal judge who ordered licensed medical personnel to take part in the execution. There were no takers and it was called off. The reprieve meant California, with 650 condemned inmates, awoke Wednesday without a viable death penalty for the first time since 1977, when lawmakers restored capital punishment after a court-ordered hiatus. The case may eventually place the lethal injection question before the U.S. Supreme Court. Thirty-seven of the 38 states with capital punishment use a procedure that is similar to California's. Although the high court has never declared any method of execution unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, it is weighing whether inmates can make such challenges on the eve of their executions. Last week's ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel shifted the debate from the constitutionality of lethal injections to whether medically licensed personnel should play an active role in the execution, something the American Medical Association and other medical groups have long opposed on ethical grounds. "I have no doubt that every inmate nearing execution will glom onto this," said Kent Scheidegger, director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-capital punishment group. "But I can't imagine the Supreme Court requiring a state to do something that can't be done." In past California executions, the intravenous lines were inserted by prison staff trained specifically for that purpose. The drugs were then added by a machine. Deborah Denno, a Fordham University School of Law professor and expert on lethal injection, said her survey of states with lethal injection found licensed medical experts generally don't take part, other than to pronounce a prisoner dead. "The states like to keep that a secret," she said. Natasha Minsker, a capital punishment expert with the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the death penalty, believes a prison may be breaking the law by using executioners who don't have proper medical credentials. "There are limits on practicing medicine with controlled substances," she said. "It appears prison personnel in this are breaking the law because they are not licensed to do this." Fogel will now hold hearings in May on whether California's method of execution is cruel and unusual punishment. Until that is resolved, neither Morales nor any other California death row inmate are likely to be executed unless licensed personnel step forward. The next condemned inmate in line, Mitchell Sims, 45, is on death row for killing a Glendale pizza delivery man in 1985. His final appeal rests with the U.S. Supreme Court. Morales wasn't the first to challenge California's lethal injection procedure on constitutional grounds. Others failed in large part because they didn't include medical records of previous executions. His attorneys claimed that once a sedative is given the prisoner, he may feel excruciating pain if still conscious when a paralyzing agent is administered. The judge, after reviewing medical logs of six California lethal injections, said he had "substantial questions" about whether inmates were indeed still conscious once the paralyzing agent began coursing through their veins. Fogel ordered a licensed anesthesiologist to be on hand to ensure that wouldn't happen. In the alternative, he said the prison could use just a sedative, but it would have to be injected by a licensed practitioner, a group that includes doctors, nurses, dentists, paramedics and other medical technicians. The three-drug protocol used in previous California executions takes about 10 minutes to kill an inmate, while the one-drug method takes 30 minutes or more. Hours before Morales was to be executed early Tuesday, the anesthesiologists withdrew, citing ethical concerns. The prison then opted for the one-drug method, but couldn't find anybody willing to perform the injection in front of public witnesses at San Quentin. "This is an issue that is ultimately going to have to be resolved by the Supreme Court," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "Because you're ultimately not likely ever going to have doctors in the execution chamber." |
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Death sentence affirmed for Dayva Cross Court rules inmate can be executed despite life for Ridgway Friday, March 31, 2006 By TRACY JOHNSON, SEATTLE
POST-INTELLIGENCER In the widely watched case, the sharply divided court found that "horrific aberrations" such as Gary Ridgway do not mean the death penalty should be thrown out. The five-justice majority ruled that Dayva Cross, who stabbed to death his wife and her two teenage daughters in their Snoqualmie rambler seven years ago, was fairly sentenced to die. Yet the other four justices said Washington's death penalty is "like lightning, randomly striking some defendants and not others" as it spares some of the state's worst mass murderers. King County prosecutors let Ridgway trade a detailed confession about the 48 young women he strangled for his own life -- a 2003 deal that left some legal observers suggesting it could end capital punishment in Washington. The question was whether it upended the scale for what justices must decide in each death penalty case: whether the sentence is proportionate to the punishment in similar cases. Cross' case was the first time the high court considered whether someone could be sentenced to death when the state's most prolific serial killer was allowed to live. Justices took nearly two years to decide. "Gary Ridgway is but a single case, an instance of what we hope were unique and horrible crimes," Justice Tom Chambers wrote for the majority. "Ridgway's abhorrent killings, standing alone, do not render the death penalty unconstitutional or disproportionate. Our law is not so fragile." While some might oppose a life sentence for Ridgway, who "brutally murdered at least 48 women ... over decades, often returning to rape their corpses," Prosecutor Norm Maleng's decision to give him a plea deal was "highly rational," the majority wrote. "It resolved the tragedy of many unsolved deaths and disappearances that probably would have otherwise remained unsolved forever. Families were spared the agony of unknowing and the rigors of testimony." The court said the "moral question" of whether other killers can still be executed is best left to state lawmakers or the people of Washington. Maleng said he was pleased the court found that Cross had a fair sentencing trial and rejected the 46-year-old man's attempts to have the death penalty declared unconstitutional. In a written statement, Maleng said the court "recognized that each aggravated murder case is unique" and that the outcome of any single case "should not invalidate the entire death penalty statute." But dissenting justices said Ridgway's case reveals a broken system: "When Gary Ridgway, the worst mass murderer in the state's history, escapes the death penalty, serious flaws become apparent." Ridgway does not stand alone, Justice Charles Johnson wrote in the dissent, "but is instead symptomatic of a system where all mass murderers have, to date, escaped the death penalty." Kwan Fai "Willie" Mak and Benjamin Ng, who were convicted of 13 execution-style killings at Seattle's Wah Mee gambling club in 1983, are also serving life sentences. A plea deal in Spokane County spared the life of Robert Lee Yates, who pleaded guilty to killing 13 people, most of them prostitutes -- though Pierce County prosecutors later won a death sentence for two people he killed there. The court has long struggled with how to decide whether someone's death sentence is proportional and has decided it in inconsistent ways, Johnson wrote. Comparing cases has become even murkier, he said, because 19 of the 31 people given a death sentence in Washington during the past 25 years have gotten their sentences overturned. Cross' attorneys, Todd Maybrown and Kathryn Ross, said they were reviewing the ruling and their options, which could include bringing a new petition to the state Supreme Court or to the federal courts. Ross said Ridgway "was just one example of many, of why the death penalty has not been applied proportionately. It wasn't just a one-case situation." "On any scale, Ridgway's crimes are exponentially worse" than the slayings committed by any of the seven men now on Washington's death row, Maybrown said. "He got the benefit of the fact that he killed more people, he killed so well and he knew where the bodies were." But Deputy Prosecutors James Whisman and Lee Yates, in their arguments before the high court in June 2004, said the notion that the case of a killer such as Ridgway should absolve all other convicted murderers seemed absurd. The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington argued that capital punishment has not been fairly applied -- especially in the way killers with more victims have been able to avoid it. "It doesn't seem reasonable for them to get life sentences and someone who committed three murders to get the death penalty," ACLU spokesman Doug Honig said Thursday. In Washington, a county's elected prosecutor decides whether to seek the death penalty in each aggravated murder case. It takes a unanimous jury to impose it. The state Supreme Court has found the state's death penalty constitutional time and again. In March 1999, Cross stabbed to death his new wife, Anouchka Baldwin, 37, and her daughters, Salome Holly, 18, and Amanda Baldwin, 15. He then held his youngest stepdaughter, Mellissa Baldwin, hostage for hours as he drank wine, smoked and chuckled at a movie. The 13-year-old girl ran to a neighbor's when he dozed. Cross -- who became partially paralyzed after slamming himself headfirst into the floor and walls of his cell in a suicide attempt -- entered a modified guilty plea to the killings. A jury concluded in June 2001 that he should die. Deputy Prosecutor Tim Bradshaw, who handled Cross' case in Superior Court five years ago, said, "There are few cases that present the quantum of horror that existed in this case and today the state Supreme Court recognized that." Court's OpinionsFrom the majority opinion, by Justice Tom Chambers and signed by Chief Justice Gerry Alexander, Justices Bobbe Bridge and Mary Fairhurst and former Justice Faith Ireland: "Since Cross's trial, the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, was caught, prosecuted, and sentenced to life in prison. We cannot begin to calculate the harm his abhorrent murders caused. The fact he will live out his life in prison instead of facing the death penalty has caused many in our community to seriously question whether the death penalty can, in fairness, be proportional when applied to any other defendant. "We do not minimize the importance of this moral question. But it is a question best left to the people and to their elected representatives in the Legislature. Under the United States Constitution ... Washington's death penalty is constitutional and nothing about Gary Ridgway changes that. "It may be that there will always be aberrations like Ridgway. We do not believe that these horrific aberrations make a statute unconstitutional. We look at the entirety of first-degree aggravated murder prosecutions, not just at whether any particular case is within an order of magnitude of the worst we have known. ... "We do not agree with those who say that no rational explanation exists for Gary Ridgway escaping a death sentence and Dayva Cross not. ... Ridgway was spared because a highly respected, honorable and thoughtful prosecutor made the decision to stay the hand of the executioner in return for information that would otherwise have died some midnight within the walls of the state penitentiary. "The information received in return for a life sentence allowed so many families to, at long last, know what happened to their loved ones. While many may disagree with that prosecutor's decision, no one should deny that it was highly rational." From the dissenting opinion, by Justice Charles Johnson and signed by Justices Barbara Madsen, Richard Sanders and Susan Owens: "When Gary Ridgway, the worst mass murderer in this state's history, escapes the death penalty, serious flaws become apparent. The Ridgway case does not 'stand alone,' as characterized by the majority, but instead is symptomatic of a system where all mass murderers have, to date, escaped the death penalty. "The death penalty is like lightning, randomly striking some defendants and not others. Where the death penalty is not imposed on Gary Ridgway, Ben Ng and Kwan Fai Mak (the latter two convicted in Seattle's 1983 Wah Mee massacre), who represent the worst mass murders in Washington's history, on what basis do we determine on whom it is imposed? No rational explanation exists to explain why some individuals escape the penalty of death and others do not." |
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Published:
Saturday, April 1, 2006
In the end, it was all about three sisters. The eldest was 12. The youngest 5.The middle girl, 7-year-old Roxanne Doll, disappeared from her south Everett bedroom 11 years ago. Her body was found a week later. She had been raped and murdered. Roxanne's sisters, one now 23 and a mother, the other a well-spoken 16, said that over the years they had tortured thoughts that maybe they could have done something to have saved their sister. On Friday, the man who killed their sister told them otherwise.Richard Mathew Clark, 37, stood up in a Snohomish County courtroom and said he alone was to blame for the March 31, 1995, killing. "No other person is responsible in any way, shape or form for Roxanne's murder," Clark said. "No one had anything else to do with these crimes. No one could have prevented me from doing what I did. No one failed to protect Roxanne." Clark, who was convicted in 1997 of Roxanne's murder, accepted responsibility for the killing under an agreement Snohomish County prosecutors reached in consultation with the girl's family. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop their years-long legal battle to see Clark die. Roxanne's mother, Gail Doll, said she supported the agreement because her surviving children needed to know they have no reason to feel guilty. "It is easy to tell the 23-year-old and the 16-year-old, but it is hard to tell the 12-year-old and the 5-year-old who still live in them today," she said. Nick Doll, 19, Roxanne's brother, also supported the deal because it would spare his sisters from the pain of another trial. Clark now faces life in prison without possibility of release. He waved all rights to appeal or legal challenges before being handcuffed and whisked from the courtroom. His final destination is expected to be the state penitentiary at Walla Walla. "I'm glad it is over, and I pray to God he gets what is coming to him while he is in there, because our system wasn't doing it quickly enough," said Roxanne's father, Tim Iffrig. "I'm tired of going through the pain." Friday's hearing was at times emotional, and at times a reunion. Corrections officers who provided security during Clark's 1997 aggravated murder trial lined the walls. The lead investigator, Everett police officer Lloyd Herndon, sat in the front row. His daughter, now 18, was the same age as Roxanne at the time of her death. The lead deputy prosecutor who won Clark's conviction in 1997, Ron Doersch, attended Friday's hearing dressed for his new job as a Snohomish County sheriff's deputy. Doersch decided last year to give up courtroom battles in favor of fighting crime on the streets. Roxanne's death was far-reaching, he said, "like throwing a rock into a pond. It touched many lives." One of Clark's attorneys, Seattle lawyer Jeff Ellis, wept when Roxanne's father embraced him after the hearing and thanked him for getting answers. Gail Doll also hugged Ellis, thanking him for helping her family. "We don't have any hard feelings to you," she said. As part of his statement, Clark told how he had lured Roxanne out of her bedroom window after she had been put to bed for the night. He told the girl she could come play in his van with a puppy. Clark said he then drove the child to north Everett, where he raped and killed her to keep her from reporting the attack. Prosecuting attorney Janice Ellis (no relation to Clark's lawyer) said she was prepared to go forward with another trial, scheduled for later this month in hopes of reinstating his death sentence. Then negotiations began regarding Clark's willingness to answer questions about the case. He gave prosecutors a taped statement, which was shared with Roxanne's family. "Roxanne Doll's family came to me and told me that Clark's confession ended part of their nightmare," Ellis said. "They have had many questions answered - questions that have tormented them for 11 years." To ask the family to continue living with this case "is unnecessary and cruel," Ellis said. "The family came to me. They asked me to do this." After the hearing, prosecutors gave Roxanne's family a bracelet the girl was wearing when she disappeared. It had been held as evidence since the child's body was found. Gail Doll tearfully snapped it around the wrist of her youngest daughter, Kristena. The slain girl's mother said she was comforted to know that her surviving children won't have to face more years of legal battles, and that "on the day that it started (11 years ago) is the day that we ended it." Now, Roxanne's name will no longer be brought up in connection with what may happen to the man who killed her, Gail Doll said. "Now the only things associated with Roxy are the good things," she said. |
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Moussaoui
eligible for death penalty
Updated: 7:55 p.m. ET April 3, 2006
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A federal jury found al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui eligible Monday to be executed, deciding that his lies to FBI agents led directly to at least one death in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The only person to face charges in this country in the nation’s worst terrorist assault, Moussaoui now faces a second phase of his sentencing trial to determine if he actually will be put to death. That phase is to begin Thursday morning. Moussaoui sat in his chair and prayed silently as the verdict was read. He was asked to stand but refused. Moussaoui eligible for death penalty - U.S. Security - MSNBC.com |
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By ADAM LIPTAK, The New York Times Judges in several states have started to put up potentially insurmountable roadblocks to the use of lethal injections to execute condemned inmates. Their decisions are based on new evidence suggesting that prisoners have endured agonizing executions. In response, judges are insisting that doctors take an active role in supervising executions, even though the American Medical Association's code of ethics prohibits that. A federal judge in North Carolina, for instance, ordered state officials there to find medical personnel by noon today to supervise an execution scheduled for next week. Otherwise, the judge said, he will impose a stay of execution. "This, of course, will make lethal injections difficult, if not impossible, to perform," said Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, a professor of surgery at Ohio State University who has studied lethal injections and opposes the death penalty. A California judge plans to hold hearings on the issue next month, after an execution there was called off for lack of doctors, and the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments this month on whether death row inmates may use a civil rights law to challenge lethal injections as cruel and unusual punishment. Scores of similar suits, asserting that lethal-injection procedures are illogical and potentially torturous, are pending around the nation. But, until recently, they had met with limited success, said Jamie Fellner, the director of the United States programs for Human Rights Watch, which will issue a report on lethal injections this month. "When prisoners first started making these challenges," Ms. Fellner said, "the courts gave them short shrift. They thought these were stalling tactics. And there was not a lot of evidence." The recent decisions, by contrast, rely on accounts of witnesses, post-mortem blood testing and execution logs that seem to show that executions meant to be humane have, in fact, caused excruciating pain. The three chemicals used in lethal injections in about 35 states have long attracted attention for what critics say is their needless and dangerous complexity. The first chemical in the series is sodium thiopental, a short-acting barbiturate. Properly administered, all sides agree, it is sufficient to render an inmate unconscious for many hours, if not to kill him. The second chemical is pancuronium bromide, a relative of curare. If administered by itself, it paralyzes the body but leaves the subject conscious, suffocating but unable to cry out. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart and causes excruciating pain as it travels through the veins. Problems arise, lawyers and experts for the inmates say, when poorly trained personnel make mistakes in preparing the chemicals, inserting the catheters and injecting the chemicals into intravenous lines. If the first chemical is ineffective, the other two are torturous. In veterinary euthanasia and in assisted suicides in Oregon, a single lethal dose of a long-acting barbiturate is typically used. But corrections officials and their medical experts say using that method in executions would take too long and would subject witnesses to discomfort. The three chemicals are to be used to execute Willie Brown Jr. on April 21 in North Carolina. Mr. Brown was convicted in 1983 of murdering Vallerie Ann Roberson Dixon, a convenience store employee, in Williamston, N.C. He had a long criminal history and had just been released from a Virginia prison after serving 17 years of an 80-year sentence for armed robbery and shooting a police officer in an effort to escape. Lawyers for Mr. Brown said in a court filing that all he was asking for was that state officials adopt "a protocol for anesthesia that affords him the same assurance of dying without conscious suffering of excruciating pain that is given to household pets." J. Donald Cowan Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Brown, said the state's reluctance to adopt a simpler protocol was "a little puzzling." That was especially so, he added, given that Mr. Brown's legal position amounted to saying, "State, this is how you can execute people properly." Doctors helped fashion and promote earlier modes of execution, including the guillotine and the electric chair. Similarly, the original lethal-injection protocol was developed in Oklahoma in 1977 in consultation with state's medical examiner and an anesthesiology professor. Other states, typically acting through their corrections departments and individual prison wardens, apparently copied the protocol. Though some states give prisoners a choice between lethal injection and a second method and Nebraska uses only electrocution, lethal injection is the all but universal method of execution in this country. Every state that has made its lethal-injection protocols public uses the three-chemical combination. Unlike the earlier methods, lethal injections appear to mimic medical procedures and so require doctors' participation, said Kenneth Baum, a doctor and lawyer who supports the medical oversight of executions. "If the process is medicalized," Dr. Baum said, "you must have physicians playing a central role in the execution chamber and in analyzing the protocols." But the American Medical Association's ethics code forbids doctors to perform an array of acts at executions, including prescribing the drugs, supervising prison personnel, selecting intravenous sites, placing intravenous lines, administering the injections and pronouncing death. The code is not legally binding, and doctors in many states have participated in executions, often anonymously. In the recent California case, however, doctors willing to participate in the execution could not be located in time. Judge Malcolm J. Howard of the Federal District Court in Greenville, N.C., on Friday ordered state officials to make certain that Mr. Brown would be provided with medical personnel capable of ensuring unconsciousness as the second and third chemicals were administered and of "providing appropriate medical care" if Mr. Brown woke up. Judge Howard did not say that the personnel had to be doctors, but medical experts said his meaning was unmistakable. "He's describing a physician, specifically an anesthesiologist," said Dr. Richard J. Pollard, the president of the North Carolina Society of Anesthesiologists. Noelle Talley, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina attorney general, would not say how the state planned to respond. "We're still reviewing the judge's order," Ms. Talley said. Judge Howard based his order on what he said were "substantial questions" about the possibility of agonizing death. He noted that post-mortem levels of sodium thiopental in the bodies of four North Carolina inmates executed in the last six months suggested that they might have been conscious as they endured the suffocation and pain caused by the final two chemicals. Prosecutors said the testing might not have been conducted properly. Judge Howard also noted that three lawyers who had witnessed executions in the state submitted sworn statements saying that some of the condemned men were writhing and gagging during their executions. "Instead of the quiet death I expected," one of the lawyers, Cynthia F. Adcock, said in a sworn statement about her client Willie Fisher, who was executed in 2001, "Willie began convulsing. The convulsing was so extreme that Willie's cousin jumped up screaming." Such convulsions are inconsistent with a proper dosage of sodium thiopental, a medical expert for Mr. Brown said. An appeals court in New Jersey halted executions there in 2004 pending an explanation from corrections officials of an aspect of that state's lethal injection procedures. "Nothing in the record," the court said, "suggests medical consultation." The corrections department has yet to issue new regulations, and the State Legislature adopted a one-year moratorium in January. Lawyers for a Missouri death row inmate, Reginald Clemons, said they would file their own challenge this month, asking that an anesthesiologist supervise his execution. "The state has chosen to proceed with an execution that requires the use of highly trained medical personnel," said Jill M. O'Toole, a lawyer with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York. "It's put itself in this bind." |
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Clark executed after vein
collapse causes lengthy delay
by Alan Johnson LUCASVILLE, Ohio - "It don't work. It don't work," Joseph Clark said repeatedly in what he thought were his last moments alive as he lay on the lethal injection table. But he didn't die -- not right away. For the first time since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999, problems with lethal injection delayed the execution of the Toledo murderer by an hour. Clark's vein collapsed or "blew out" after the process had started this morning at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville. Clark, 57, was eventually executed at 11:26 a.m., but only after medical technicians struggled behind a closed curtain for about a half hour to find suitable veins to inject the deadly drugs. Terry Collins, who took over Monday as director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said he ordered the curtain closed to shield victim family witnesses and his staff from being watched while they tried to get the IV lines going. "I absolutely believe I made the right call closing the curtain and I would do it again," Collins said later. However, he said the whole process will be reviewed. Media witnesses heard what they described as "moaning, crying out and guttural noises" while technicians worked on Clark behind the closed curtain. However, prison officials said he was not in any pain and eventually went to sleep just before the execution resumed. Collins said he was in touch with Gov. Bob Taft's office several times during the delay. He also summoned Greg Trout, the department's chief legal counsel, to the Death House to confer with George Pappas, Clark's attorney. The trio of drugs -- sodium pentothal, an anesthetic, pancuronium bromide, a muscle paralyzer, and potassium chloride, which stops respiration and the heart -- has been used in Ohio and 35 other states for several years. However, legal challenges to the lethal injection process are pending in several states, as well as at the U.S. Supreme Court. Opponents argue the drugs can leave a prisoner paralyzed, but suffering great pain as they are executed. They say that violates the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Court records show Clark shot and killed David A. Manning on Jan. 13, 1984, during a robbery at the service station where Manning worked. Clark confessed to the crime after being arrested a few days later in connection with a bank robbery. He was also convicted for murder, without a death penalty specification, for the shooting death of Donald Harris, a convenience store clerk. Mary Ellen Manning Gordon, the widow of the slain man who witnessed the execution, said she was glad to see Clark die. "I didn't shed a single tear for Joseph Clark. He lived 22 years too long." |
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Death penalty
now possible in murder case Michael Gilbert; The News Tribune Last updated: May 23rd, 2006 06:12 AM (PDT) Army prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the soldier accused of killing two people last Labor Day outside a Lakewood tavern, a Fort Lewis spokeswoman said Monday. Spc. Jamaal A. Lewis, 22, is accused of two counts of aggravated murder in the Sept. 5 shootings of another Fort Lewis soldier and a Sherwood, Ore., woman whose husband was serving in Iraq. The Fort Lewis commanding general, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, referred the case to prosecutors as a capital crime. He based his decision on the report of an investigating officer who presided over a preliminary hearing in March. “What that means is the death penalty will be a possible punishment,” post spokeswoman Tammy Reed said. No trial date has been set, she said. Lewis’ defense attorney, Army Maj. John Hyatt, could not be reached for comment Monday. The military criminal justice system includes mechanisms for capital punishment cases similar to those in the civilian system. A jury would have to unanimously agree the accused was guilty and that aggravating circumstances were involved – for instance, that the killings occurred during a robbery. In addition, jurors would have to unanimously agree that the aggravating circumstances outweigh any mitigating circumstances, such as the accused’s background, and must unanimously agree on the death penalty. There are six condemned service members on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The military last executed a service member in 1961. The Pentagon in February recommended to the White House that it proceed with the death sentences of two soldiers convicted of multiple murders in the 1980s. Both men still have appeal options in the federal courts. Lewis is one of three soldiers charged in the killings of Pfc. Jason Jowers, 26, and Crystal Hurley-McDowell, 23, as they sat in the woman’s car outside the Schooner Tavern, 5429 100th St. S.W. Authorities say Lewis tried to rob the two before opening fire from just outside the driver’s side door. The victims died at the scene. Pvt. Joseaf U. Griessett, 22, pleaded guilty to helping dispose of the pistol and lying to investigators. Pfc. Kevin Lambers, 21, pleaded guilty to helping the shooter flee the scene and of lying to investigators. The two are serving prison sentences. Lakewood police and Army detectives acting on a tip arrested Lewis the day after the killings. He has been held at the Fort Lewis Regional Corrections Facility. All three were assigned to the 1st Special Forces Group support company. Lewis is a communications specialist. Michael Gilbert: 253-597-8921 Originally published: May 23rd, 2006 01:00 AM (PDT) |