Oklahoma and Alabama carry out executions on the same day

The 14th and 15th Executions of 2023 

ALABAMA

Alabama executed a man on Friday for the 2001 beating death of a woman as the state resumed lethal injections after two failed executions prompted the governor to order an internal review of procedures, reported Newser. James Barber, 64, was pronounced dead at 1:56am after receiving a lethal injection at a south Alabama prison. Barber was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2001 beating death of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps. Prosecutors said Barber, a handyman, confessed to killing Epps with a claw hammer and fleeing with her purse. Jurors voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence, which a judge imposed. Before he was put to death, Barber told his family he loved them and apologized to Epps' family, the AP reports.

It was the first execution carried out in Alabama this year after the state halted executions last fall. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced a pause on executions in November to conduct an internal review of procedures. The move came after the state halted two lethal injections because of difficulties inserting IVs into the condemned men's veins, and Barber said this week that he felt "trepidation." Barber's attorneys unsuccessfully asked the courts to block the execution, saying the state has a pattern of failing "to carry out a lethal injection execution in a constitutional manner." The Supreme Court denied Barber's request for a stay without comment.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent from the decision that was joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She said the court was allowing "Alabama to experiment again with a human life." "The Court should not allow Alabama to test the efficacy of its internal review by using Barber as its 'guinea pig.'" Sotomayor wrote. Barber's execution came hours after Oklahoma executed Jemaine Cannon, 51, for stabbing a Tulsa woman, 20-year-old mother of two Sharonda Clark, to death with a butcher knife in 1995 after his escape from a prison work center. It was the state's second execution this year, the AP reports.

Oklahoma executed a man Thursday for stabbing a Tulsa woman to death with a butcher knife in 1995 after his escape from a prison work center.

Jemaine Cannon, 51, received a lethal injection at 10:01 a.m. and was pronounced dead 12 minutes later at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It was the second execution in Oklahoma this year and the ninth since the state resumed lethal injections in 2021.

Cannon was convicted of killing 20-year-old Sharonda Clark, a mother of two with whom Cannon had been living at an apartment in Tulsa after his escape weeks earlier from a prison work center in southwest Oklahoma. Cannon had been serving a 15-year sentence for the violent assault of another woman who suffered permanent injuries after prosecutors say Cannon raped her and beat her viciously with a claw hammer, iron and kitchen toaster.

A federal appeals court late Wednesday denied Cannon’s last-minute appeal seeking a stay of execution in which Cannon claimed, among other things, that he was Native American and not subject to Oklahoma jurisdiction. Asked if he had any last words, Cannon said: “Yes, I confess with my mouth and believe in my heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore I am saved. Thank you.”

Cannon was executed on the same day that Alabama planned to execute James Barber for the 2001 beating death of a woman. It would be Alabama’s first lethal injection after a pause in executions following a string of problems with inserting the IVs.

OKLAHOMA

Jemaine Cannon was executed on July 20, 2023 in Alabama. The victim's eldest daughter, Yeh-Sehn White, and Sharonda Clark’s sister, Shaya Duncan, witnessed Cannon’s execution and described it as peaceful, reported The Associated Press.

“In my opinion, he died in a very favorable way,” White said. “Unfortunately my mom did not have that opportunity.”

Cannon claimed at a clemency hearing before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board last month that he killed Clark in self-defense.

“I am deeply disheartened that the act of defending my life and the acts that she initiated against me ever happened,” Cannon told the board via a video feed from the state penitentiary.

Cannon’s attorney, Mark Henricksen, also told the panel that Cannon’s trial and appellate attorneys were ineffective for not presenting evidence to support that claim. His trial attorneys presented no witnesses or exhibits and rested after prosecutors presented their case, Henricksen said.

In a statement sent to The Associated Press this week, Henricksen said the state’s decision to proceed with Cannon’s execution amounted to “historic barbarism.”

“Mr. Cannon has endured abuse and neglect for fifty years by those charged with his care,” Henricksen said. “He sits in his cell a model prisoner. He is nearly deaf, blind, and nearing death by natural causes. The decision to proceed with this particular execution is obscene.”

But White and prosecutors from the attorney general’s office urged the state to execute Cannon, and the board rejected clemency on a 3-2 vote..

Oklahoma uses a three-drug lethal injection protocol beginning with the sedative midazolam, followed by the paralytic vecuronium bromide and finally potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The state had one of the nation’s busiest death chambers until problems in 2014 and 2015 led to a de facto moratorium.

Richard Glossip was just hours from being executed in September 2015 when prison officials realized they received the wrong lethal drug. It was later learned that the same wrong drug had been used to execute an inmate in January 2015.

The drug mix-ups followed a botched execution in April 2014 in which inmate Clayton Lockett struggled on a gurney before dying 43 minutes into his lethal injection — and after the state’s prisons chief ordered executioners to stop. 

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Executions schedule for today in Oklahoma and Alabama

There are two executions scheduled today, one in Oklahoma and the other in Alabama. Oklahoma plan to execute Jemaine Cannon by lethal injection. He was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Sharonda White Clark, a mother of two. 

Alabama intends to execute James Barber, who is on death row for a 2001 murder. He is concerned about Alabama lethal injection procedure, given Alabama’s recent history of executions. The state failed to carry out its last two attempts. 

To read about Oklahoma CLICK HERE

To read about Alabama CLICK HERE

School board meetings are now the cultural battlefield

Time and again over the last two years, parents and protesters have derailed school board meetings across the country, reported ProPublica. Once considered tame, even boring, the meetings have become polarized battlegrounds over COVID-19 safety measures, LGBTQ+ student rights, “obscene” library books and attempts to teach children about systemic racism in America.

On dozens of occasions, the tensions at the meetings have escalated into not just shouting matches and threats but also arrests and criminal charges.

ProPublica identified nearly 90 incidents in 30 states going back to the spring of 2021. (That’s when the majority of boards resumed gathering in-person after predominantly holding meetings virtually.) Our examination — the first wide-ranging analysis of school board unrest — found that at least 59 people were arrested or charged over an 18-month period, from May 2021 to November 2022. Prosecutors dismissed the vast majority of the cases, most of them involving charges of trespassing, resisting an officer or disrupting a public meeting. Almost all of the incidents were in suburban districts, and nearly every participant was white.

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Illinois Supreme Court affirms law eliminating cash bail

The Illinois Supreme Court upheld a measure eliminating cash bail in the state, finding that Democratic legislators acted properly when they passed the law, which will transform the Illinois criminal justice system and limit judges’ ability to hold defendants in jail before trial, reported The New York Times.

The Illinois law, which went beyond similar bail overhauls in other states, was part of a national push to reduce jail populations and end a system in which wealth can determine whether a defendant returns home to await trial. But it infuriated many county prosecutors and sheriffs, who asserted that the law was passed improperly and made the state less safe.

In its ruling on Tuesday, the Supreme Court said cash bail would end in Illinois on Sept. 18.

Cash bail has been widely used for decades. Rather than sit in jail waiting for a trial that may not begin for months, a defendant is allowed to deposit money with the court and remain free. But if they fail to show up when they are supposed to, the defendant risks losing that money.

Civil rights groups and politicians, many of them Democrats, have long called for limiting or abolishing that system, and for allowing more defendants to be released without having to put up money. Critics say the cash bail system is unfair to poor defendants, who risk losing jobs or homes if they cannot afford to post bail.

“Someone’s experience with the criminal justice system should not vary based on their income level,” Attorney General Kwame Raoul, a Democrat, said in a statement praising the 5-to-2 decision.

But law enforcement groups have spoken in ominous terms about what the change would mean for public safety. In a court brief, lawyers for the union representing rank-and-file Chicago police officers said the law “sets forth a recipe for increases in crime, recidivism, dysfunction in the criminal prosecution system, and danger to police officers and the communities they serve.”

New Jersey and New Mexico have vastly reduced the use of cash bail but have not ended it completely. New York has eliminated it for certain types of offenses but not others. Those moves also led to fierce opposition, and some second-guessing.

The Illinois law passed with broad Democratic support and was signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, part of a shift to the political left since Democrats reclaimed full control of state government in the 2018 election.

Republicans voiced their opposition to the cash bail law during last year’s campaigns, but Mr. Pritzker won re-election by a wide margin and Democrats kept legislative majorities.

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Tree of Life Synagogue killer eligible for the death penalty

A Pennsylvania federal jury on found the gunman responsible for the shooting deaths of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania eligible for the death penalty. Robert Bowers now faces an additional trial in which the same jury will determine whether he should be sentenced to death or given life imprisonment, reported Jurist. A Pennsylvania federal jury previously found Bowers guilty on 63 criminal charges—including hate crimes—on June 16.

According to local reporters from KDKA within the room, which was otherwise closed to cameras, the jury weighed three questions in determining Bowers’ eligibility for the death penalty. Those three questions were:

• Is Bowers 18 or older?
• Did Bowers have the criminal intent to commit the crimes he was convicted of?
• Was there one or more aggravating factors present in the commission of those crimes?

After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury returned and unanimously answered “yes” to all three questions. As a result, the same panel of jurors will now sit for an additional trial in which federal prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania and Bowers’ defense counsel will present evidence and testimony as to whether or not Bowers should suffer the death penalty. That trial is set to begin as soon as Monday, July 17.

In closing statements, prior to the jury’s Thursday verdict, prosecutors argued Bowers “intended to hunt down and kill every Jew he could find.” They continued, “He fired his rifle more than 70 times in the Tree of Life synagogue, each time he pulled the trigger, he was proving his intent to kill.” In response, in their closing statements, the defense argued that Bowers was “delusional” at the time of the shooting and therefore did not possess the intent that prosecutors claimed.

Outside of the courthouse on Thursday, reporters spoke to President of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh Jeffrey Finkelstein, who said, “This is clear that this was hatred of Jews. This was antisemitism. It is not mental health. They are two different things.” Finkelstein also told reporters that he had spoken to the families of some of the victims. He said that they are eager to share their stories in the upcoming trial to determine Bowers’ sentence.

Under federal law, a criminal defendant is eligible for the death penalty in only three circumstances: if they are charged with a death penalty-eligible crime, if they have a high level of culpability or intent to kill the victim, or if there are one or more aggravating factors present in the case. In this case, 11 of the 63 charges against Bowers involved the obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death under 18 U.S.C. § 247, which made Bowers eligible for the death penalty. On top of that, prosecutors presented and proved that there were aggravating factors present in the case which warranted the application of the death penalty.

The shooting occurred at the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, 2018 during Shabbat services. Bowers entered the building with multiple firearms and opened fire on the congregation gathered inside, resulting in 11 deaths and 7 injuries. Over the course of Bowers’ trial, prosecutors revealed evidence of Bowers’ participation in and consumption of white supremacist media. This evidence is what ultimately led the jury to convict Bowers on all 63 criminal charges.

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Mangino appears with Elizabeth Vargas on NewsNation

 To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Mangino's quote to Fox News used by New York Post and the UK's Daily News

My quote was included in Michael Ruiz's article for Fox News. The quote was picked up by The New York Post and Daily Mail in the UK.

Hours after murder suspect Michael Burham escaped a Pennsylvania jail near the New York state line, a couple in Western New York reported coming home to find their dog dead and some male clothing stolen out of their bedroom. 

"It's not a coincidence," Lauraine Peterson, the burglary victim, told Fox News Digital Monday.

That is because she believes Burham has been in her area before. In May, after he allegedly gunned down Kala Hodgkin in Jamestown, New York, Peterson and her boyfriend Harold Lobb noticed a suspicious light coming from their neighbor's home when they knew the owner was out of town, she said.

Police arrived at the time to find broken windows, but whoever was inside had fled after charging a cellphone, Peterson said.

Police returned Friday, about 12 hours after Burham escaped the Warren County Jail by climbing down a rope made of bedsheets, prompting an interstate manhunt. He was being held on kidnapping and related charges and is also suspected of rape and murder in New York.

"Our clothes are missing, and our dog is killed," said Peterson, who is a nurse. Food was also missing from the freezer, she said, but the couple's firearms were securely locked in their safe.

Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens said during a Monday news briefing that police had investigated multiple burglaries in Warren County and neighboring areas, including across the state line in New York, but had found no "direct" connection to Burham's movements. Jamestown, New York, is about 20 miles from the jail.

Peterson said the missing clothes were a blue, hooded sweatshirt with her boyfriend's business name on the left upper chest, "Lobbs Automotive," and a car logo printed across the back, as well as a pair of dark gray sweatpants.

Police said Friday that Burham had previously last been seen wearing a denim jacket over his orange-striped jail jumpsuit and orange "Crocs-style" shoes.

Peterson and Lobb took in a rescue dog two years ago, she said. The pup weighed only 2.5 pounds and could barely walk. They nursed her back to health and named her "Sweetpea," and the grateful canine had grown to be very protective of their home, barking at bears, bobcats and other wildlife that wandered near the house, Peterson said.

"She really was blossoming into quite the little personality," Peterson said. "I'm sure the dog went after him."

Lobb left for work around 7:30 a.m. Friday, she said, and she went out to breakfast with friends an hour later. Then around 11 a.m., a passing driver knocked on their door, but they were not home. He then tried Lobb's daughter in the detached apartment and said he had found the dog dead on the side of the road, according to Peterson.

"If my dog was on him, she'd have chased him across the road," Peterson said. "I don't know if she got hit by a car, or did her throw her?"

Pennsylvania State Police believe Burham is still in the area and are asking anyone with information on his whereabouts to call 814-728-3600 or 911. 

A combined reward for information from the U.S. Marshals Service and Warren County Crime Stoppers is $9,500.

Burham is described as a "self-taught survivalist with military training." Police said he should be considered armed and dangerous.

The surrounding area is very rural and abuts the Allegheny State Park in Pennsylvania. 

"If you have the survival skills, there's a lot of opportunity to evade police," said Matt Mangino, a former Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, district attorney. "I think its inevitable that police are going to find him – it just depends how long it's going to take, and what other damage or victims might come about because of this man."

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