Missouri executes murderer of two

The 22nd Execution of 2014
Missouri has carried out the execution of 46-year-old John Winfield for the murders of two women in St. Louis County 18 years ago, reported Missourinet. Winfield received a lethal injection of pentobarbital at 12:01 on June 18, 2014 and was pronounced dead at 12:10.
Winfield appeared to tell the witnesses that were there for him, “I love you,” after the curtains were opened to the execution chamber. After the 5 grams of the drug was administered, Winfield took a series of deep breaths and then stopped moving. The execution appeared to take less than a minute.
Winfield declined to make a final statement and did not accept food prior to the execution. His body was released to one of his attorneys.

The execution was witnessed by five members of the family of one of the women he killed, Shawnee Murphy, as well as his ex-girlfriend Carmelita Donald whom he shot four times leaving her blind, three members of her family, his mother, his daughter, and two of his friends. There were no representatives present of the other woman he fatally shot, Arthea Sanders.

Winfield is the seventh man executed in Missouri since November, and the seventh since the state began using pentobarbital compounded by a pharmacy that the Department of Corrections will not officially confirm the identity of.
After the execution was carried out, Attorney General Chris Koster also issued a statement. He writes, “Nearly two decades have passed since John Winfield’s cowardly acts of rage and jealously changed the lives of three families forever. He brutally murdered two defenseless young women, one in front of her children, and attempted to murder the mother of his own children, leaving her permanently disabled. For his actions, a court lawfully sentenced him to death under Missouri law, and tonight that sentence has been carried out.”
To read more Click Here

Georgia carries out first execution nationwide in 7 weeks

The 21st Execution of 2014
Georgia inmate Marcus Wellons was put to death on June 17, 2014 for the 1989 rape and murder of a Cobb County teenager in the state’s first execution where the source of its lethal-injection drug was cloaked in secrecy, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Wellons’ execution received heightened scrutiny because it was the first one in the country to be carried out since a botched execution occurred in Oklahoma seven weeks ago.
That incident ratcheted up the debate over the lethal-injection process and the use of made-to-order drugs produced by undisclosed compounding pharmacies. Even a federal appeals court judge who declined to halt the execution Tuesday cited what happened in Oklahoma as a reason why Georgia should not have a lethal-injection secrecy law.
Wellons, 58, was pronounced dead at 11:56 p.m. after his final appeals were denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Wellons apologized to the family of India Roberts the teenager he was convicted of killing and said, “I ask and hope they will find peace in my death.”
He thanked his family and friends for their love and prayers and added, “I’m going home to be with Jesus.”
Wellons hummed as prayer was being said and as the warden read the death warrant. Otherwise there was little movement visible as he lay on the gurney. He was seen to exhale a couple of times before his body seemed to quiver and then there was no more movement.
Three minutes before Wellons was declared dead a nurse standing to his left was seen asking one of the corrections officers if he was ok, just before the officer fainted.
In 1993, a Cobb County jury sentenced Wellons to death for the rape and murder of 15-year-old India Roberts in the Vinings townhouse of Wellons’ girlfriend. Wellons was supposed to be moving out of the townhouse when he abducted India as she was walking to her school bus stop the morning of Aug. 31, 1989. She was believed to have been strangled with a telephone cord.
To read more Click Here

GateHouse: Shootings on the rise in New York City

Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse News Service
June 20, 2014


New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton had all of the answers recently when he was besieged with questions about the increasing number of shootings and shooting victims in the city.

Here is an excerpt of the most astonishing answer: This year’s increase in shootings “wouldn’t be as steep if last year’s numbers hadn’t dropped so low.” Translation: If law enforcement efforts were not so effective last year when I wasn’t commissioner, I wouldn’t look so bad this year as the new commissioner.

According to recent figures, there were 507 shooting victims as of June 8, compared to 448 last year, a 13.2 percent increase. The number of shootings stands at 434, compared to 392 a year ago, a 10.7 percent increase, reported Capitol New York.

At the same time, the number of guns seized off city streets has declined. The police have confiscated about 1,290 guns so far this year, 10 percent fewer than this time last year, when it seized 1,435 firearms.

As a result, many New Yorkers are starting to rethink the controversial court decision limiting NYPD’s practice of stop-and-frisk. Last year, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin called the city’s stop and frisk “indirect racial profiling” because it targeted racially defined groups, resulting in the disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics while the city’s highest officials “turned a blind eye,” she said.

“No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” Scheindlin wrote in her opinion.

At the time, former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly defended the department’s stop-and-frisk practices during a round of television appearances. He emphatically claimed there’s “no question” violent crime will spike if stop-and-frisk is abandoned.

Last summer, in this column I wrote, “[I]t would be a mistake to pooh-pooh the impact of stop-and-frisk.”

“We’ve had an increase, a temporary increase, in shootings. … Crime goes up, it goes down,” Commissioner Bratton told The Christian Science Monitor. “It’s always going to go up at some point in time. We’ll always have the ability to push it down.”

In the first quarter of 2013, under the administration of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly, the NYPD stopped, questioned and frisked nearly 100,000 people on New York City streets, reported The Monitor. In the first three months of 2014, under Mayor Bill de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton the number of stops dropped to about 14,000 — an 89 percent decrease.

Can the sudden increase in shootings be the result of dramatically fewer stops? In just 28 days, between May 11 and June 8, there was a startling surge in shooting victims. Reuters reported there were 121 victims of gunfire, compared with 86 for the same period last year, a 41 percent increase.

The interesting thing is that homicides have continued to fall in spite of the increase in shootings. There were 120 murders reported so far in 2014 compared with 140 a year earlier, a 15 percent decline. That puts the city on track to set a new low after posting a total of 333 murders last year, the fewest homicides recorded citywide since 1963.

The declining homicide rate, despite an increase in shooting victims, may reflect in part on improved emergency medical response time, Steven Messner, a criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Albany told Reuters.

“There continues to be better response times getting to the scene and getting people to the hospital so that shootings that previously would have ended in a fatality, won’t,” he said.
Even with better response times and more effective treatment protocols — if the shootings continue to increase — homicides will inevitably rise as well.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was recently released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com, and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.
Visit the Column

The Cautionary Instruction: Supreme Court takes up Facebook threats

Matthew T. Mangino
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto
June 20, 2014
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of Anthony D. Elonis of Berks County, Pennsylvania who was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for posting ominous photos and making violent rants on his Facebook page against former co-workers, law enforcement officials and his estranged wife.
The case dates back to 2010, when Elonis' wife left him after a seven-year marriage and took their two children. Apparently despondent , he lost his job at an Allentown amusement park and began a series of dark postings, often in the form of rap lyrics. In his Facebook profile, he said the rants were therapeutic and disclaimed any "true threat."
Columnist Dahlia Lithwick wrote this week, “This case is not only crucially important in that it will force the court to clarify its own "true threats" doctrine and finally apply it to social media to determine whether -- as Justice Stephen Breyer has suggested -- the whole world is a crowded theater. Breyer was referring to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ First Amendment decision in Schenck v. United States.
For more than 40 years, the Supreme Court has said that "true threats" to harm another person are not protected speech under the First Amendment. But the court has cautioned that laws prohibiting threats must not infringe on constitutionally protected speech. That includes "political hyperbole" or "unpleasantly sharp attacks" that fall shy of true threats.
The federal statute targeting threats of violence is likely to be used more often in the coming years "as our speech increasingly migrates from in-person and traditional handwritten communication to digital devices and the Internet," said Clay Calvert, a law professor at the University of Florida.
The court's precedent for such cases is now 11 years old. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Virginia v. Black [http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2002/2002_01_1107] that a state law equating cross-burning with intimidation went too far, reasoning that not all cross-burning was meant as a threat. Since then, lower state and federal courts have split on what constitutes a threat -- the perpetrator's subjective intent to threaten, or anyone else's objective interpretation.
"There is a lot of fear right now about threats made online,” says Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties non-profit. “But it seems like we’ve elevated the Second Amendment above the First Amendment." "We’ve tolerated stupid speech a long time in this country, and we shouldn’t let the Internet shake that balance,” says Fakhoury. “We need a holistic approach to problems, not just, ‘If you say a threat on the Internet, you’re going to jail.'"

---

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George, P.C. He is the former district attorney of Lawrence County and just completed a six year term on the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole. His weekly column on crime and punishment is syndicated by GateHouse New Service. You can read his musings on the criminal justice system at www.mattmangino.com and follow Matt on Twitter @MatthewTMangino. His new book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010: The Crimes, Arrests, Trials, Appeals, Last Meals, Final Words and Executions of 46 Persons in the United States is now available from McFarland & Company publishers.

Pennsylvania assisted suicide law rarely used

Gus Yiambilis is charged with homicide and causing/aiding in suicide in the carbon monoxide poisoning death of his 59-year-old mother, reported the Bucks County Courier Times.

Yiambilis’ case might be the first prosecution in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for assisting in a suicide, a rarely used felony charge in Pennsylvania. Some legal experts believe the case has the potential to break new ground in the right-to-die movement, which has largely focused on assisted suicide cases involving the elderly, the terminally ill or people with life-altering disabilities.

Katherine Pearson, an attorney and a Penn State Dickinson School of Law expert on legal issues facing older adults, described the Yiambilis case as “extremely rare,” since neither mother nor son was physically disabled or terminally ill, but simply expressed a desire to die.

“Where there was no indication of suffering, physical suffering, or terminal illness, I can’t think of one that I’ve seen,” she said. “There may be a proof problem for the prosecution on that side of the case.”

Nationally, legal experts note that arrests for assisting in suicide are less common than years ago, which some believe signals changing attitudes about end-of-life decisions, despite existing laws that outlaw it in all but five U.S. states.

Statewide, 53 people were convicted of causing/aiding in suicide between 2004 and 2012, according to data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing. The data reflects sentences reported to the commission through its secure Web application.

Most of those convicted — 39 — were sentenced to state prison. Only 10 were sentenced to so-called “restorative sanctions,” non-confinement sentences that include fines, according to the commission.

Assisting in suicide has been a crime in Pennsylvania since 1973 and the law specifically notes that survivors of suicide pacts can be guilty under the statute.

Under the law, a person can be charged in either of two ways: criminal homicide for intentionally causing someone to kill himself by force, duress or deception or, as Yiambilis is charged, for aiding or soliciting suicide. That’s when a person intentionally aids or solicits another person to commit suicide or their behavior causes someone to attempt or commit suicide.

Yiambilis also is charged with homicide, but not under the assisting in suicide law.

Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association executive director Richard Long said that he has not heard of many prosecutions under the law.

“It’s one of those things that a district attorney has to make a determination on regarding the facts and determinations involving a suicide,” Long added.

To read more Click Here

SCOTUS to consider true-threat exception to freedom of speech

The U.S. Supreme Court will review the true-threat exception to freedom of speech when it considers the case of Anthony Douglas Elonis, a Berks County, Pennsylvania man who threatened his estranged wife, former co-workers and police through posts on his Facebook page, reported The Legal Intelligencer.
The high court carved out an exception to the constitutional protection of free speech for threatening language, but it never clearly defined the bounds of that exception.
So the question for the Supreme Court is whether someone can be convicted for making threats based on a reasonable person's understanding of the language as threatening or if the conviction must be based on the speaker's subjective intent to threaten.
When it ruled in September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit followed the lead of most circuits that have ruled on the issue—with the exception of the Ninth Circuit—and declined to interpret a 2003 opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court as requiring subjective intent from the speaker in order to trigger the true-threat exception to the First Amendment's protection of speech.
The understanding of the speech as a threat to a reasonable person is to be weighed, rather than the intent of the speaker to threaten, under the Third Circuit's standard.
The high court framed the question this way: "Whether, consistent with the First Amendment and Virginia v. Black, conviction of threatening another person requires proof of the defendant's subjective intent to threaten, as required by the Ninth Circuit and the supreme courts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont; or whether it is enough to show that a 'reasonable person' would regard the statement as threatening, as held by other federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort."
To read more Click Here

Pennsylvania DOC hiring freeze raises safety concerns

The money-saving hiring freeze placed on Pennsylvania state prisons amid budget pressure has raised concerns about safety in the institutions, reported the Citizen Voice.

Roy Pinto, president of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association, told the Associated Press that prison staffing is at the 2008 level, while the state prison population has grown by 5,000 more inmates since then. He said officers’ biggest concern is their own safety and a hiring freeze that lasts well past July 1 — the soonest Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel projected it to end when he imposed the freeze May 27 — will increase the danger.

Susan Bensinger, deputy press secretary for Pennsylvania DOC, said the freeze is across the board, not just for hiring correctional officers.

“We feel that freeze is going to be a short-term, temporary freeze,” she said.

As of April, more than 50,000 inmates were in state prisons. The state prison system has 9,483 security staff employment positions, but prison officials were unable to provide the total number of vacant security staff positions. Of the approximately 16,000 total employees, there are 422 vacant positions.

Bensinger said that number of vacant positions “is not out of line with where we normally are.”

The DOC freezes lasted no longer than six months, according to Bensinger; state freezes have lasted up to a year. She said there’s no safety concerns among administrative members regarding the vacant positions because if there are “critical positions” that need to be immediately filled, staff can apply for an exception.

“Wetzel started out as correctional officer,” Bensinger said. “He would not compromise the safety of staff and public to save a dollar.”

Bensinger said the DOC initiates freezes to make determinations about filling positions and managing the budget. It’s a temporary stop in hiring so the administration can review all open positions to determine what will need to be filled and what can wait without compromising safety and security, adding it also provides some temporary savings.

The state’s finances are under extreme pressure, according to the AP. Tax collections for the 2013-14 fiscal year ending June 30 are about $600 million behind expectations, putting Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s $29.4 billion budget proposal out of balance by more than $1 billion.

“With a need for supplemental appropriations this year and the budget uncertainties looming next year, the implementation of a freeze at this time is prudent fiscal measure,” Bensinger said.

Each month, she said, there are about 100 turnovers in the statewide prison system, and hiring state employees is always a process — no matter the agency — given civil service tests, application reviews, physicals and mental health evaluations.

A class of 42 trainees graduated Friday to become correctional officers. Despite the freeze, Bensinger said, those individuals will be granted one year of conditional employment.

To read more Click Here