Alabama still trying to get to unanimity to impose death sentences

 An Alabama lawmaker has introduced several bills dealing with criminal justice ahead of the upcoming legislative session, including one focused on death sentences, reports AL.com.

Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, prefiled several bills on Wednesday, including House Bill 14. The bill calls for a unanimous jury vote during the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial to put someone to death. It also provides an avenue for resentencing in certain circumstances.

Under current Alabama law, a jury can vote 10-2 and still impose a death sentence.

“Executing someone should be hard. It should be next to impossible,” England said. He also noted that a person cannot be convicted of capital murder without a unanimous jury decision, and said his bill would apply that logic to the sentencing phase of cases.

The document introducing HB14 said, “This bill would provide that a defendant may be resentenced if a judge sentenced him or her to a sentence other than the jury’s advisory sentence and if his or her death sentence was not unanimous.”

“This bill would repeal the existing code section relating to resentencing for certain defendants sentenced for capital murder,” it continued.

In 2017, Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law that juries, not judges, have the final say on whether to impose the death penalty in capital murder cases. It wasn’t retroactive, meaning people are still sitting on death row who were sent there against a jury’s recommendation. Those people would be eligible for resentencing under England’s bill-- meaning they could possibly serve life without parole instead of face being executed.

England said his bill’s resentencing clause would also apply to those who were sent to Alabama Death Row after juries voted 10-2, or 11-1, for the death penalty.

Alabama had been the only state in America that allowed a judge to override a jury’s recommendation when sentencing capital murder cases.

The law marked a win for death penalty opponents, but left Alabama as still the only state to allow a non-unanimous jury impose the death penalty.

England was one of the legislators who supported that bill, and at the time, his bill would have also required unanimous consent of all 12 jurors to recommend a death sentence. That didn’t change under the law ultimately passed by the legislature and signed by Ivey.

England said if the death penalty is going to exist in Alabama, it should be reserved for the worst criminals, whom juries felt sure were culpable of their crimes and were in agreement that capital punishment was the right decision.

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Texas executes man who claimed racial bias

 The 6th Execution of 2023

John Balentine, 54, convicted of killing three teenagers while they slept in a Texas Panhandle home more than 25 years ago was executed on February 8, 2023, the sixth inmate to be put to death in the U.S. this year and the second in as many days, reported The Associated Press.

Balentine's attorneys argued that his trial was marred by racial bias. He received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, for the January 1998 shooting deaths of Edward Mark Caylor, 17, Kai Brooke Geyer, 15, and Steven Watson, 15, at a home in Amarillo. Prosecutors said all three were shot once in the head as they slept.

Balentine appeared jovial as witnesses were entering the death chamber, asking if someone standing near the gurney could remove the sheet covering the lower two-thirds of his body “and massage my feet.” Then he chuckled.

After a brief prayer from a spiritual adviser who held Balentine’s left foot with his right hand, the prisoner gave a short statement thanking friends for supporting him. Then he turned his head to look through a window at seven relatives of his three murder victims and apologized.

“I hope you can find in your heart to forgive me,” he said.

The mothers of each of the three victims were among the witnesses a few feet from him.

He took two breaths as the lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital began flowing through intravenous needles in his arms, snored twice, yawned and began snoring again loudly. The snores — 11 of them —became progressively quieter, then stopped.

At 6:36 p.m., 15 minutes after the drugs began, a physician pronounced him dead. The victims’ witnesses then shared high-fives before leaving the death chamber. They declined to speak with reporters afterward.

Caylor’s sister, who was among the witnesses watching him die, was Balentine’s former girlfriend, and prosecutors said the shootings stemmed from a feud between Caylor and Balentine. Ballentine, however, argued that Caylor and others had threatened his life over his interracial relationship. Balentine is Black. The three victims were white.

Balentine confessed to the murders. One of his trial attorneys said Balentine turned down a plea agreement that would have sentenced him to life in prison because the racists threats he received made him afraid of being attacked or killed while incarcerated.

Lawyers were pursuing two legal strategies to save their client before he was executed. The first was to argue that his trial and sentencing were tainted by racism. But Balentine was also among five Texas death row inmates who sued to stop the state’s prison system from using what they allege are expired and unsafe execution drugs. Despite a civil court judge in Austin preliminarily agreeing with the claims, the state’s top two courts have now allowed three of the five inmates participating in the lawsuit to be executed. Robert Fratta, 65, was put to death Jan. 10 and Wesley Ruiz, 43, on Feb. 1.

Prison officials said the state’s supply of execution drugs is safe.

Separately, Balentine’s attorneys alleged the jury foreman in his case, Dory England, held racist views and used racial slurs during his life and bullied other jurors who had wanted to sentence Balentine to a life sentence into changing their minds. Lola Perkins, who had been married to England’s brother, told Balentine’s attorneys that England “was racist against Black people because that is how he was raised.”

England, in a declaration before his death in 2021, said he pushed for Balentine’s death sentence because he worried if the accused was ever released that England himself “would need to hunt him down.” However, England also said he threatened to report another juror to the judge for making prejudiced comments when the person “started going off about this Black guy killing these white teenagers.”

Balentine’s attorneys also alleged prosecutors prevented all prospective Black jurors from serving at the trial and that Balentine’s trial lawyers referred to the sentencing proceedings in a note as a “justifiable lynching.”

Randall Sherrod, one of Balentine’s trial attorneys, said Wednesday he could not remember the note but denied that he or the other attorney, James Durham Jr., had any racist attitudes toward Balentine. Durham died in 2006.

“I think he got a fair trial,” Sherrod said of Balentine. “I think we had a good jury. ... We tried to help John whatever way we could.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday declined an appeal from Balentine’s attorneys to halt the execution so that his claims of racial bias could be properly reviewed.

A defense request for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to temporarily stay the execution also failed and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied a request to stay Ballentine’s execution over allegations that “racism and racial issues pervaded” his trial. The appeals court denied the stay on procedural grounds without reviewing the merits.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously declined to commute Balentine’s death sentence to a lesser punishment or to grant a 30-day reprieve.

“Without a thorough judicial consideration of Mr. Balentine’s claims, we can have no confidence that the death verdict isn’t tainted by racial bias,” said Shawn Nolan, one of Balentine’s attorneys.

Potter County District Attorney Randall Sims, whose jurisdiction includes Amarillo, where the murders occurred, had pushed for the execution to go forward. On Monday he declined to comment ahead of the execution.

Koda Shadix, the younger brother of Geyer, one of the victims, said in a video posted online last week that he was upset by efforts to delay justice.

Balentine has “shown no remorse and absolutely does not care what he did. All he cares about is his life,” Shadix said.

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Missouri executes man for killing girlfriend and three children

 The 5th Execution of 2023

Missouri executed 58-year-old Leonard Taylor on February 7, 2023, who was convicted of killing his girlfriend and her three children at their home in Jennings nearly two decades ago, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

A state executioner delivered a fatal dose of pentobarbital at 6:07 p.m., and Taylor was pronounced dead a short time later, according to the Missouri Department of Corrections.

“Muslims don’t die. We live eternally in the hearts of our family and friends,” Taylor wrote in his final statement following a verse from the Quran. “From Allah we come, and to Allah we all shall return. Everybody will get their turn to die.”

Taylor was the third person to be executed in Missouri in three months. His death marked only the second time since 2015 that more than one person was executed in a calendar year.

He was convicted in 2008 of killing 28-year-old Angela Rowe and her three children, Alexus Conley, 10, AcQreya Conley, 6, and Tyrese Conley, 5, at their home on Park Lane in Jennings. He has insisted he is innocent of the killings.

Rowe’s older sister, Gerjuan Rowe, attended Tuesday’s execution along with eight other loved ones.

“Justice was served,” Rowe said. “Now, I get a little peace.”

Rowe and her children were found Dec. 3, 2004. Rowe was covered by blankets and shot four times, once fatally in the head. The children were also shot and lined up on a bed.

Prosecutors said they believed the family was shot on the night of Nov. 23 or early morning of Nov. 24, 2004.

Taylor had called his brother just before midnight, then again at 12:05 a.m. Nov. 24, and admitted to the killings. The brother told police Taylor stayed in the house with the bodies because he was waiting for a letter from his wife in California.

On Nov. 26, Taylor’s sister-in-law drove him to the airport. She testified at trial she saw him drop a long-barreled revolver into a sewer before he left.

Taylor was arrested Dec. 9 in Kentucky in possession of fake IDs and pamphlets about creating a false identity, authorities said. Police later tested the sunglasses he wore that day and found blood that matched Rowe’s DNA.

A jury sentenced Taylor to death on Feb. 29, 2008, for the four murders.

Taylor had since filed several appeals, including a request last month asking St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell to hold a hearing to review discrepancies in the state’s evidence and consider new declarations from Taylor’s daughter and her mother saying Taylor was actually in Los Angeles at the time of the killings.

Bell denied that request last week, finding “the facts are not there to support a credible case of innocence.”

On Monday, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson denied Taylor’s petition for clemency.

“Leonard Taylor brutally murdered a mother and her three children. The evidence shows Taylor committed these atrocities and a jury found him guilty,” Parson said in a statement. “Despite his self-serving claim of innocence, the facts of his guilt in this gruesome quadruple homicide remain.”

Taylor, meanwhile, met with his three daughters, his sister, his two attorneys and a spiritual adviser.

On Tuesday morning at around 11 a.m., he ate a last meal of a seafood platter, cheeseburger, fries and a milkshake.

At 5:52 p.m., it was announced all pending appeals and petitions, including one before the U.S. Supreme Court, had been denied. At 6:06 p.m., the order for execution was given.

Taylor was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m.

Afterward, Gerjuan Rowe reflected on the years waiting for Taylor’s death. She said it was painful to answer questions from investigators during his appeals and see his photo on her television screen.

She said she still missed her sister and her nieces and nephew and wondered what they would be like now as adults.

The execution, she said, gave her a bit of peace.

Still, “It’s not going to change nothing,” she said. “Not really.”

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