Texas carries out first execution of 2019

The 1st Execution of 2019

Robert Jennings was executed on January 30, 2019 for July 1988 fatal shooting of Officer Elston Howard during a robbery at an adult bookstore that authorities said was part of a crime spree, according to the Washington Post.

As witnesses filed into the death chamber, Jennings asked a chaplain standing next to him if he knew the name of the slain officer. The chaplain didn’t respond, and a prison official then told the warden to proceed with the punishment.

“To my friends and family, it was a nice journey,” Jennings said in his final statement. “To the family of the police officer, I hope y’all find peace. Be well and be safe and try to enjoy life’s moments, because we never get those back.”

Outside the prison, more than 100 officers stood vigil. And a motorcycle club that supports police revved their engines, with the roar from the bikes audible in the chamber.

Jennings was pronounced dead at 6:33 p.m., 18 minutes after the drug started. He became the first inmate put to death this year both in the U.S. and in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.

His attorneys had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his execution, arguing Jennings’ trial attorneys failed to ask jurors to fully consider evidence — including details of his remorse for the officer’s shooting and possible brain damage — that might have spared him a death sentence.

A twice convicted robber, Jennings had been on parole for about two months when prosecutors say he entered Mr. Peeper’s Bookstore with the intention of robbing the business. Since being paroled, Jennings had gone on a crime spree, committing about 10 robberies, including having already robbed the same adult bookstore 12 days before Howard’s slaying.

Officer Howard, 24, was in the middle of arresting the store clerk for operating a pornographic video arcade without a permit when Jennings shot the officer twice in the head.

Howard, who had been wearing a jacket with the words “Houston Police” on it, staggered for a few feet before falling to the ground, where he was shot twice more by Jennings. The clerk later testified the shooting was so quick, Howard never had a chance to unholster his gun.

Jennings was arrested hours later when he went to a Houston hospital after being shot in the hand by his accomplice, who got angry at Jennings for shooting the officer.

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Ohio doctor behind 28 overdose deaths

Troy Allison received a 1,000 microgram dose of fentanyl, which is used in hospitals to treat severe pain, although typically in much smaller amounts, reported NBC News.

Troy Allison's death and at least 33 others involving Mount Carmel patients from 2015 to 2018 remain part of a wider internal investigation into Dr. William Husel, who treated them, and why the intensive care doctor allegedly ordered "significantly excessive and potentially fatal" doses of pain medication in 28 of the cases, according to the hospital.

Husel's medical license was suspended Friday by the State Medical Board of Ohio, which said the allegations against him were so serious that he was not afforded a hearing prior to the board's vote and can no longer practice medicine in the state.

Yet, key questions remain unanswered: Why such high doses, and were they the result of repeated mistakes — or intentionally meant to be deadly?

Doctors, pharmacists and lawyers who spoke with NBC News say hospitals such as Mount Carmel, one of the largest health systems in Ohio, have multiple safeguards in place that should prevent patients from being overmedicated to death. There are checks and balances allowing those in the chain of command to trigger an alarm, the medical experts added, so that an error can be avoided or reviewed after the fact, including during emergency situations in which dangerous drugs such as fentanyl are used.Related

"We know that the risk for error goes up in chaotic situations, but hospitals have worked hard to limit these risks and do a very good job protecting safety in fast-paced environments like the emergency room or intensive care unit," said Dr. Daniel Tobin, an associate professor of medicine at Yale University and a leading expert on opioid safety.

At least six wrongful death lawsuits have been filed on behalf of deceased patients, including Troy Allison, alleging Husel ordered the doses either negligently or purposefully in order to hasten the end of their lives.

All Christine Allison knows is that her husband of 11 years, her best friend and a father of two, was taken from her — and she wants Husel to explain why.

"He actually seemed very kind and very compassionate. I trusted him," she said of the doctor. "Now I think he needs to be in prison. The system failed."

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Fear of crime: 'All the devils are here'

Nestor Ramos writing about fear for the Boston Globe:

It is easy, days like these, to look out the window or peer through the prism of our glowing screens and see a world that is full of monsters.

Maybe people have always harbored these feelings: moral panics, witch hunts, folk devils. “Hell is empty,” William Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest” about, oh, 400 years ago. “And all the devils are here.”

But while fear of the people who populate the world around us is no new phenomenon, it feels today like something approaching an epidemic.

And who wouldn’t be fearful, if you follow the news at all? Like so many people accused of heinous crimes all over the country, [a criminal's] face was plastered on every television set, homepage, and front page this week, his bizarre social media presence offering no shortage of disturbing comments and strange selfies. 

So it is not just easy but tempting to think that there are terrifying figures lurking, waiting, unhinged and everywhere, like devils among us.

But there aren’t.

And it is in the moments when that temptation — when that fear — begins to feel particularly acute that we would do well to remember that. Whatever tiny kernel of reality there may be in the notion that the people we don’t recognize are inherently out to get us, the fiction we build around the grain of truth is a lot more dangerous. It breeds a fear that leads us inexorably toward our worst impulses.

Let that fear fester, and we begin to forget one of the foundational tenets of both Judeo-Christian religion and secular ethics: love for our neighbors. We stockpile weapons, imagining all the nightmare scenarios in which we might use them, though the reality is that they dramatically increase our own risk of injury or death. We call authorities on anyone who looks out of place — “better safe than sorry,” we tell ourselves, without stopping to consider whose safety we might be risking.

Focus on that fear long enough in our hearts, and we’ll begin to build walls in there. Eventually, those walls become literal, built on the persuasive power of horror stories about attacks or abductions, however rare, that ended far worse than this one did.

The idea of an America awash in evildoers has a certain twisted appeal. We will always grasp for explanations when terrible, inexplicable things happen.

Our current national preoccupation — $5.7 billion worth of steel slats or whatever — is being sold to the public not on the basis of facts, but fear. No serious analysis suggests it will do anything meaningful to keep America safe. And so proponents point to the kind of grisly cases that stoke fear: American carnage, as someone put it at the capitol a couple years ago now.

There is a simple and quite famous phrase that encapsulates all this. The words are indelible on our national consciousness; you already know them by heart. But somehow, in the nearly 86 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address, his famous words’ meaning has been forgotten:

 “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

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NRA not pro-gun enough for some

The NRA, the nation’s leading Second Amendment group with 5.5 million members, is no longer pro-gun enough for some gun-rights supporters,The Wall Street Journal reports. Smaller organizations, often with Second Amendment positions more strident than the NRA’s, are seeking to capitalize on complaints that the NRA didn’t do enough to stop the ban on bump stocks, the devices that allow a semi-automatic rifle to fire rapidly enough to simulate fully automatic fire.

Since they were used in 2017’s Las Vegas massacre, the nation’s most deadly mass shooting on record, the Trump administration reversed past interpretations of existing law to find that it could ban the devices, and it did so in December. Gun Owners of America and Firearms Policy Coalition are fighting that decision in court. Other groups are using the controversy to recruit members and solicit donations. The NRA asked Congress to allow the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to review the device as an alternative to stricter legislative actions. Trent Steidley, an assistant professor at University of Denver who has studied the gun-rights movement, said the smaller groups don’t have NRA’s clout in Washington. They exercise their power largely by putting pressure on the NRA, he said. The NRA is “more worried about being outflanked on the right than on the left,” Steidley told the Journal.

Mangino talks Hoerig verdict on WFMJ-TV

Watch my interview on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today discussing the Claudia Hoerig verdict in Trumbull County, Ohio.
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GateHouse: Showdown at the High Court

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

January 25, 2019

The U.S. Supreme Court has not heard a gun rights case in more than nine years. That will change this fall. The Supreme Court said it will review New York City’s prohibition on carrying a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun outside the city limits.

The court’s decision to hear the appeal filed by a New York affiliate of the National Rifle Association could signal a more conservative Court’s interest in reviewing the often controversial world of gun ownership and gun rights. More directly, the court may be more willing to take on a gun rights case now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has retired and been replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh - who joins President Donald Trump’s first appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch.

According to Amy Howe of the SCOTUSBlog, opponents of the New York City ordinance suggest that the city’s ban on transferring even licensed, unloaded guns anywhere outside the city limits is draconian.

The so-called “premises license” allows New York City residents to take their guns to one of seven shooting ranges within city limits. The city ordinance forbids them to take their guns anywhere else, including second homes and shooting ranges outside the city, even when they are unloaded and locked in a container separate from ammunition.

The Second Amendment provides, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Much of the debate about the Second Amendment has related to whether the amendment protects armed militias or armed individuals.

In 2008, the Supreme Court invalidated a federal law that forbade nearly all civilians from possessing handguns in Washington D.C. According to the Constitution Center, a 5-4 majority ruled that the language and history of the Second Amendment showed that it protects a private right of individuals to have arms for their own defense, not a right of the states to maintain a militia.

Two years later, the Court struck down a similar handgun ban in Chicago.

The Court at the time listed a series of “presumptively lawful” regulations, including bans on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, bans on carrying firearms in “sensitive places” such as schools and government buildings, laws restricting the commercial sale of arms, bans on the concealed carry of firearms, and bans on weapons “not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”

Long time conservative member of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas made no secret of his frustration with the Court’s reluctance to review gun cases. In 2014, Thomas criticized the Court for not taking up more gun cases, calling it a “disfavored” right.

“The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan,” wrote Thomas.

The New York City case, at first blush, does not appear to be the vehicle to resolve any of the presumptively lawful regulations cited by the justices the last time a gun rights case was heard by the Court. Some of those presumptively lawful regulations have the support of gun advocates, but ardent supporters of the Second Amendment consistently view with suspicion any effort to control or restrict gun ownership.

Adam Winkler, the author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” told the New York Times he was surprised the Supreme Court agreed to hear such a minor Second Amendment case. “It’s a city ordinance, not a state law ... (t)his particular rule is unusual. It may be the only one of its kind in the country.”

“The justices,” said Winkler, “may see this as a way to start addressing gun rights outside the home in a quirky and incremental manner.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters at a recent news conference that the city would vigorously defend its unique premises license.

Battle plans are being drawn - the showdown at the High Court may impact the way Americans own, possess and transport guns.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.comand follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
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Government shutdown violates the accused's Sixth Amendment rights

The government shutdown is hurting attorney-client relationships, and is a violation of individuals’ right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, reported The Appeal.

Individuals in New York detention centers are just a fraction of the growing number of defendants across the country who are being adversely affected by President Trump’s insistence that a funding bill include $5.7 billion for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. While courts have managed to extend funding for federal defender agencies a week at a time, the funding is not expected to last past Feb. 1. Public defenders and investigators who are members of Criminal Justice Act (CJA) panels—groups of court-approved attorneys who are appointed on a rotating basis to represent people in criminal cases—are working without pay. So are lawyers with Washington, D.C.’s Public Defender Service.

“Members of the CJA panel and my office are essential to the proper functioning of the Sixth Amendment,” Jason Hawkins, the federal public defender for the Northern District of Texas, told The Appeal in an email. “We will continue to investigate our cases, appear in court, and defend our client [sic] against the awesome power of the federal government. Yet we will not be paid.”

Hawkins and other federal public defenders say they are concerned that many of their clients will be held in custody for longer than necessary.

“The Sixth Amendment doesn’t shut down when the government does,” he said.

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