Post by thinkinkmesa on Aug 17, 2007 21:59:44 GMT -5
citybeat.com/2006-07-12/cover.shtml
Excerpt;
Making A Killing
Ohio's death penalty has plenty of critics, both inside and outside the criminal justice system
By Margo Pierce
By Jim Fugett
Why the Death Penalty in Ohio Remains So Controversial
Carol Parcell of Akron isn't a private investigator or a lawyer. But she found new evidence in the case of a Death Row inmate, and she found it in what most would consider an unlikely place -- the prosecutor's file.
"They said I couldn't do it, but I did it on my own," Parcell says. "I contacted the prosecutor's office, and I just went in and said I wanted to see Brett's file and I wanted a copy of it. ... It cost me $300 or $400. They just marked out the social security numbers of anybody, and this is where we found all the lies by the police and other things."
Her only qualification is the same thing that motivates her -- love for her son.
"It took me five years before I could even talk about Brett's situation," Parcell says. "I'm not ashamed of my son. He never committed this crime."
Like many Ohioans, Parcell never thought about the death penalty before her son, Brett Hartmann, was charged with the murder of a friend in 1997.
People on Death Row have a lot of time for introspection, Parcell says. She's watched her son mature into "a good person" and gets angry when people dismiss him as "a throwaway person."
"The hardest thing I've ever heard is the first week my son landed on Death Row, and I don't know if I can say it," Parcell says, hiccupping though tears. "He said, 'Mom, this is the end. I've had a really great life.' And he was just 23."
Parcell describes herself as a quiet person with few friends, but she's moved into the role of speaking out against the death penalty.
"I had a person say to me, 'You're just really normal looking,' " she says. "People have such a misconception of the families of inmates on Death Row."
Similarly, people make assumptions about the families of murder victims.
"Many people assume that family members of murder victims support the death penalty, but it's not the case," says David Elliott, communications director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). "We have a number of affiliates, including Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights and Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. Their point is the death penalty actually serves as a barrier to healing. You go through this roller coaster appeals process that's absolutely topsy-turvy. Then eight, 10, 12 years later, by the time in some cases you finally reach the point of execution, it all of a sudden becomes all about the inmate. Oftentimes the people can't even remember the names of the victims."
A recent poll indicates 65 percent of Americans favor the death penalty and 51 percent think it isn't imposed enough. Sixty percent believe it's applied fairly, even though 63 percent believe innocent people have mistakenly been put to death.
In fact, since 1973, 123 Death Row inmates have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing, new evidence or retrials, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org).
The latest challenge to Ohio's death penalty ironically centers on whether poisoning prisoners -- or lethal injection, as it's more commonly known -- is cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection came into use because of concerns about the propriety of the electric chair.
But even if the state comes up with a painless way to kill people, capital punishment is full of procedural problems on each step along the way to execution.
The brutalization of society
Faceless groups aren't as easy to relate to as a neighbor or friend who's lost a family member to murder. That's why many families in Ohio are speaking up to make their stories known.
"My nephew's ex-wife was murdered by her second husband, (against whom) she had a restraining order," says Sister Ruth Kuhn. "My nephew and Teri had three children. The oldest was not home, but the two younger ones were. He somehow got into the home, came to the bedroom and actually slit her throat. Her daughter was ill -- she was about 7 or 8 years old -- and was in bed with her mother. Her son didn't see it happen, but he did see his stepfather walk down the hall with the knife in his hand with the blood dripping off it."
The family, who lived in Montgomery County in 1998, gathered many times to discuss how to handle the situation.
"We did not want the children to have to go through a trial, to have to talk about their mother's death in front of strangers," Kuhn says. "By us saying that we did not want the children to testify at a trial, we eliminated the trial. In eliminating the trial, we eliminated the death penalty."
A Roman Catholic nun, Kuhn says she was hurt and angry but couldn't separate her beliefs from the tragedy.
"I start from the perspective that every human life is sacred," she says. "We cannot take the life of another human being. Only God can do that. I have seen the effect that losing their mother has had on these children, but I'm a firm believer that it's not our place to take the life of another person.
"This morning I heard on the news that a woman's estranged husband got in and stabbed her to death over in Blue Ash, and I thought, 'Isn't that interesting? I'm going to be talking about Teri this morning, and this many years later it's still happening.' The death penalty doesn't deter these kinds of crimes."
The concept of equality and the value of human life break down when the state says it's acceptable to kill some people. Saying some killing is wrong (murder) and some killing is acceptable (punishment) ultimately devalues all life and results in what scientists have dubbed the "brutalization effect."
Studies have proven that brutalization results when a state sanctions killing in the name of the people, according to DPIC publication Understanding Capital Punishment: A Guide Through the Debate.
"The theory behind brutalization is that, by having the death penalty, society devalues the worth of human life and legitimizes killing for those who are deemed to 'deserve it,' " the publication states. "A killer is not deterred because he does not identify with the person being executed; rather, the killer identifies with the executioner who can kill without reproach."
The proof is in the statistics. Thirteen states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico don't have the death penalty, and all but one have lower murder rates than states with the death penalty. Countries where the death penalty has been abolished also have lower murder rates: The U.S. murder rate is eight times higher than England's and seven times higher than France's.
Brutalization also undermines the foundation of religious beliefs about the value of life. NCADP and other abolitionist groups work with churches to educate people about capital punishment.
"Almost every single religious denomination in the United States has come out against the death penalty," Elliott says. "The exceptions that I can think of would be the Southern Baptist Convention and the Mormons. Even the United Methodist Church has come out of against the death penalty.
"In Ohio there are a lot of Catholics, and we work with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. They haven't come out against it absolutely, but they've come out with a strong statement that says that countries can only use the death penalty if it's the only way they have to protect themselves. Since countries can incarcerate people for lengthy periods of time, if not forever, then the Catholic bishops have said that it's time to effectively end the use of the death penalty."
The death penalty further defies religious and social precepts by sanctioning the value of one race over another, according to Elliott.
"Our criminal justice system sends a message in the way it implements the death penalty," he says. "Somehow the lives of white people are worth more than the lives of black people. Is anyone paying attention to that? Black people are."
That disparity becomes apparent when looking at the numbers. Of the people on Death Row for interracial murders in the United States since 1976, the number of white defendants with black victims is 12. The number of black defendants with white victims is 213.
'Closer to death'
Unequal application of the death penalty is why the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1976, effectively placing a moratorium on executions. The ruling demanded a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. Justice Potter Stewart wrote for the majority, saying death sentences were cruel and unusual punishment.
"These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual," he wrote. "I simply conclude that the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed."
Elliott says it looked like the death knell for the death penalty.
"When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in (1976), they weren't striking down the death penalty per se," he says. "They were striking it down as it was carried out at that time in the United States. Nonetheless, so many people thought that was the end of the death penalty. If you go back and look at the memoirs of former U.S. Supreme Court justices, they were surprised when state legislatures, some of them rushing back in emergency session, adopted new death penalty statutes."
The result was the creation of a "super form" of due process to ensure fairness. Bill Gallagher, a Cincinnati attorney who supports abolition, says the public and lawmakers are growing dissatisfied with the cost and time such a system requires. The result is a systematic erosion of the safeguards.
"I listen to what they're trying to do in Congress now to try to speed it up more, streamline it more," he says. "That's not the contract we entered into 30 years ago. We allowed the death penalty to be reinstated when the legislators and everyone said, 'Look it, if you're going to get the death penalty process back, you're going to have to create a super form of due process. You have to afford greater access to lawyers and courts to get the reinstatement of the death penalty.'
Defendants are often "out-funded and outmatched" by prosecutors until they're sentenced to death, according to Kelly Culshaw, an Ohio public defender.
"Now to turn around to say, 'We don't like the cost, we don't like the delays, we don't like the number of courts these men and women have access to,' is hypocritical. If you wanted it, you have to afford it. You can't renege on that now."
Yet it appears the citizens and legislators of the state of Ohio are doing just that.
"The voters in the state of Ohio, in their infinite wisdom and compassion, voted to eliminate the intermediate appeal," says Jay Clark, a local attorney and teacher at the University of Cincinnati. "The argument is that they all ended up in the Ohio Supreme Court anyway, so all we did was eliminate an 'unnecessary step.' It eliminated one possible level of review to expedite the death penalty. It's another year or year and a half closer to their death."
Clark believes that move was self-serving and dangerous because the design of the death penalty system means it can't be fairly applied. It means less time to correct mistakes when they happen, and they've been proven to happen.
"There's no perfect world, and that is what you'd have to have in order to make the application of the death penalty fair," he says. "There's no uniform way to apply the death penalty. There's always going to be issues of gender, race and other things. We're human. We can't ignore those things.
"The system is too flawed. f**k! This just isn't right when you apply that to the potential consequence of death. If you talk to anyone who doesn't have bloodlust, revenge or politics as a motive, I don't know how they can say it's fair."
The most frequent errors found in death penalty cases are erroneous eyewitness testimony or the inaccurate testimony of jailhouse informants; less common are police and prosecutorial misconduct. That's what the now-limited state appeals are supposed to remedy.
State courts hear the first round of appeals after a person is convicted and entertain new evidence. Federal courts decide only on alleged constitutional violations by the state courts.
That's what Parcell is dealing with now in her son's case.
Excerpt from same article;
Carol Parcell says she isn't worried that her son, Brett Hartmann, will become a victim of the state's blind vengeance because she's convinced his innocence will prevail. However, the threat of his execution makes her daily life so difficult she likens it to living in a pressure cooker.
"You're always hanging," she says. "You're constantly waiting for decisions. It took three years for Brett to get to the Ohio Supreme Court. Now you don't want to agitate for the judicial system to do it faster or they'll slough it off. They won't research it or give it all the attention you want them to give it."
There are few outlets for that kind of concern when the ruling made by a handful of judges is so crucial.
"When you get angry and when you see things that are wrong and when you hear things that are wrong, you keep quiet," Parcell says. "The lawyers tell you not to talk, especially don't talk to the media because they have taken and twisted things. You're going in for appeals, and if you talk, the media can take it and twist it and judges read the paper. One doesn't want to kid oneself that they're never influenced by anything."
The disabled woman now shares a home with her daughter because she's living on social security after three hip replacements, and she can't make ends meet after the loss of her son's income. Now that Ohio has moved condemned inmates from a prison in Mansfield to the supermax prison in Youngstown, she's able to visit her son more frequently. But Parcell says there isn't much to talk about because neither of them gets out much.
Excerpt;
Making A Killing
Ohio's death penalty has plenty of critics, both inside and outside the criminal justice system
By Margo Pierce
By Jim Fugett
Why the Death Penalty in Ohio Remains So Controversial
Carol Parcell of Akron isn't a private investigator or a lawyer. But she found new evidence in the case of a Death Row inmate, and she found it in what most would consider an unlikely place -- the prosecutor's file.
"They said I couldn't do it, but I did it on my own," Parcell says. "I contacted the prosecutor's office, and I just went in and said I wanted to see Brett's file and I wanted a copy of it. ... It cost me $300 or $400. They just marked out the social security numbers of anybody, and this is where we found all the lies by the police and other things."
Her only qualification is the same thing that motivates her -- love for her son.
"It took me five years before I could even talk about Brett's situation," Parcell says. "I'm not ashamed of my son. He never committed this crime."
Like many Ohioans, Parcell never thought about the death penalty before her son, Brett Hartmann, was charged with the murder of a friend in 1997.
People on Death Row have a lot of time for introspection, Parcell says. She's watched her son mature into "a good person" and gets angry when people dismiss him as "a throwaway person."
"The hardest thing I've ever heard is the first week my son landed on Death Row, and I don't know if I can say it," Parcell says, hiccupping though tears. "He said, 'Mom, this is the end. I've had a really great life.' And he was just 23."
Parcell describes herself as a quiet person with few friends, but she's moved into the role of speaking out against the death penalty.
"I had a person say to me, 'You're just really normal looking,' " she says. "People have such a misconception of the families of inmates on Death Row."
Similarly, people make assumptions about the families of murder victims.
"Many people assume that family members of murder victims support the death penalty, but it's not the case," says David Elliott, communications director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). "We have a number of affiliates, including Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights and Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. Their point is the death penalty actually serves as a barrier to healing. You go through this roller coaster appeals process that's absolutely topsy-turvy. Then eight, 10, 12 years later, by the time in some cases you finally reach the point of execution, it all of a sudden becomes all about the inmate. Oftentimes the people can't even remember the names of the victims."
A recent poll indicates 65 percent of Americans favor the death penalty and 51 percent think it isn't imposed enough. Sixty percent believe it's applied fairly, even though 63 percent believe innocent people have mistakenly been put to death.
In fact, since 1973, 123 Death Row inmates have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing, new evidence or retrials, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org).
The latest challenge to Ohio's death penalty ironically centers on whether poisoning prisoners -- or lethal injection, as it's more commonly known -- is cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection came into use because of concerns about the propriety of the electric chair.
But even if the state comes up with a painless way to kill people, capital punishment is full of procedural problems on each step along the way to execution.
The brutalization of society
Faceless groups aren't as easy to relate to as a neighbor or friend who's lost a family member to murder. That's why many families in Ohio are speaking up to make their stories known.
"My nephew's ex-wife was murdered by her second husband, (against whom) she had a restraining order," says Sister Ruth Kuhn. "My nephew and Teri had three children. The oldest was not home, but the two younger ones were. He somehow got into the home, came to the bedroom and actually slit her throat. Her daughter was ill -- she was about 7 or 8 years old -- and was in bed with her mother. Her son didn't see it happen, but he did see his stepfather walk down the hall with the knife in his hand with the blood dripping off it."
The family, who lived in Montgomery County in 1998, gathered many times to discuss how to handle the situation.
"We did not want the children to have to go through a trial, to have to talk about their mother's death in front of strangers," Kuhn says. "By us saying that we did not want the children to testify at a trial, we eliminated the trial. In eliminating the trial, we eliminated the death penalty."
A Roman Catholic nun, Kuhn says she was hurt and angry but couldn't separate her beliefs from the tragedy.
"I start from the perspective that every human life is sacred," she says. "We cannot take the life of another human being. Only God can do that. I have seen the effect that losing their mother has had on these children, but I'm a firm believer that it's not our place to take the life of another person.
"This morning I heard on the news that a woman's estranged husband got in and stabbed her to death over in Blue Ash, and I thought, 'Isn't that interesting? I'm going to be talking about Teri this morning, and this many years later it's still happening.' The death penalty doesn't deter these kinds of crimes."
The concept of equality and the value of human life break down when the state says it's acceptable to kill some people. Saying some killing is wrong (murder) and some killing is acceptable (punishment) ultimately devalues all life and results in what scientists have dubbed the "brutalization effect."
Studies have proven that brutalization results when a state sanctions killing in the name of the people, according to DPIC publication Understanding Capital Punishment: A Guide Through the Debate.
"The theory behind brutalization is that, by having the death penalty, society devalues the worth of human life and legitimizes killing for those who are deemed to 'deserve it,' " the publication states. "A killer is not deterred because he does not identify with the person being executed; rather, the killer identifies with the executioner who can kill without reproach."
The proof is in the statistics. Thirteen states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico don't have the death penalty, and all but one have lower murder rates than states with the death penalty. Countries where the death penalty has been abolished also have lower murder rates: The U.S. murder rate is eight times higher than England's and seven times higher than France's.
Brutalization also undermines the foundation of religious beliefs about the value of life. NCADP and other abolitionist groups work with churches to educate people about capital punishment.
"Almost every single religious denomination in the United States has come out against the death penalty," Elliott says. "The exceptions that I can think of would be the Southern Baptist Convention and the Mormons. Even the United Methodist Church has come out of against the death penalty.
"In Ohio there are a lot of Catholics, and we work with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. They haven't come out against it absolutely, but they've come out with a strong statement that says that countries can only use the death penalty if it's the only way they have to protect themselves. Since countries can incarcerate people for lengthy periods of time, if not forever, then the Catholic bishops have said that it's time to effectively end the use of the death penalty."
The death penalty further defies religious and social precepts by sanctioning the value of one race over another, according to Elliott.
"Our criminal justice system sends a message in the way it implements the death penalty," he says. "Somehow the lives of white people are worth more than the lives of black people. Is anyone paying attention to that? Black people are."
That disparity becomes apparent when looking at the numbers. Of the people on Death Row for interracial murders in the United States since 1976, the number of white defendants with black victims is 12. The number of black defendants with white victims is 213.
'Closer to death'
Unequal application of the death penalty is why the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1976, effectively placing a moratorium on executions. The ruling demanded a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. Justice Potter Stewart wrote for the majority, saying death sentences were cruel and unusual punishment.
"These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual," he wrote. "I simply conclude that the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed."
Elliott says it looked like the death knell for the death penalty.
"When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in (1976), they weren't striking down the death penalty per se," he says. "They were striking it down as it was carried out at that time in the United States. Nonetheless, so many people thought that was the end of the death penalty. If you go back and look at the memoirs of former U.S. Supreme Court justices, they were surprised when state legislatures, some of them rushing back in emergency session, adopted new death penalty statutes."
The result was the creation of a "super form" of due process to ensure fairness. Bill Gallagher, a Cincinnati attorney who supports abolition, says the public and lawmakers are growing dissatisfied with the cost and time such a system requires. The result is a systematic erosion of the safeguards.
"I listen to what they're trying to do in Congress now to try to speed it up more, streamline it more," he says. "That's not the contract we entered into 30 years ago. We allowed the death penalty to be reinstated when the legislators and everyone said, 'Look it, if you're going to get the death penalty process back, you're going to have to create a super form of due process. You have to afford greater access to lawyers and courts to get the reinstatement of the death penalty.'
Defendants are often "out-funded and outmatched" by prosecutors until they're sentenced to death, according to Kelly Culshaw, an Ohio public defender.
"Now to turn around to say, 'We don't like the cost, we don't like the delays, we don't like the number of courts these men and women have access to,' is hypocritical. If you wanted it, you have to afford it. You can't renege on that now."
Yet it appears the citizens and legislators of the state of Ohio are doing just that.
"The voters in the state of Ohio, in their infinite wisdom and compassion, voted to eliminate the intermediate appeal," says Jay Clark, a local attorney and teacher at the University of Cincinnati. "The argument is that they all ended up in the Ohio Supreme Court anyway, so all we did was eliminate an 'unnecessary step.' It eliminated one possible level of review to expedite the death penalty. It's another year or year and a half closer to their death."
Clark believes that move was self-serving and dangerous because the design of the death penalty system means it can't be fairly applied. It means less time to correct mistakes when they happen, and they've been proven to happen.
"There's no perfect world, and that is what you'd have to have in order to make the application of the death penalty fair," he says. "There's no uniform way to apply the death penalty. There's always going to be issues of gender, race and other things. We're human. We can't ignore those things.
"The system is too flawed. f**k! This just isn't right when you apply that to the potential consequence of death. If you talk to anyone who doesn't have bloodlust, revenge or politics as a motive, I don't know how they can say it's fair."
The most frequent errors found in death penalty cases are erroneous eyewitness testimony or the inaccurate testimony of jailhouse informants; less common are police and prosecutorial misconduct. That's what the now-limited state appeals are supposed to remedy.
State courts hear the first round of appeals after a person is convicted and entertain new evidence. Federal courts decide only on alleged constitutional violations by the state courts.
That's what Parcell is dealing with now in her son's case.
Excerpt from same article;
Carol Parcell says she isn't worried that her son, Brett Hartmann, will become a victim of the state's blind vengeance because she's convinced his innocence will prevail. However, the threat of his execution makes her daily life so difficult she likens it to living in a pressure cooker.
"You're always hanging," she says. "You're constantly waiting for decisions. It took three years for Brett to get to the Ohio Supreme Court. Now you don't want to agitate for the judicial system to do it faster or they'll slough it off. They won't research it or give it all the attention you want them to give it."
There are few outlets for that kind of concern when the ruling made by a handful of judges is so crucial.
"When you get angry and when you see things that are wrong and when you hear things that are wrong, you keep quiet," Parcell says. "The lawyers tell you not to talk, especially don't talk to the media because they have taken and twisted things. You're going in for appeals, and if you talk, the media can take it and twist it and judges read the paper. One doesn't want to kid oneself that they're never influenced by anything."
The disabled woman now shares a home with her daughter because she's living on social security after three hip replacements, and she can't make ends meet after the loss of her son's income. Now that Ohio has moved condemned inmates from a prison in Mansfield to the supermax prison in Youngstown, she's able to visit her son more frequently. But Parcell says there isn't much to talk about because neither of them gets out much.