The courtroom about judis
case in realaudio or realvideo
ILLINOIS:
Illinois has 2 women on Death Row, one of whom murdered 3 people.
Dorothy Williams, 44, was sentenced in 1991 to die for the 1989 strangling of 97-year-old Mary Harris. She also pleaded guilty to
strangling Lonnie Laws in 1987 and stabbing Caesar Zurell in 1988. All 3 were elderly people whom Williams killed after robbing them to buy heroin.
The other condemned woman is Latasha Pulliam, 26, convicted in 1994 of strangling a 6-year-old girl . She killed Shenosha Richards in 1991 after
luring her to an apartment with promises of snacks and a movie. A court psychologist said Pulliam was "a female John Gacy," getting
sexual satisfaction from hurting someone weaker than she. Williams and Pulliam lost their 1st appeals to the state Supreme Court
but have years of legal challenges ahead and are unlikely to be executed soon.
2 other women have received the death penalty since Illinois reinstated it 21 years ago, but their sentences were overturned last year.
The state has not executed a woman since 1938, when Marie Porter was electrocuted for ordering her brother murdered for $3,300 in life insurance.
Then-Gov. Henry Horner had vowed that no woman would be put to death during his term and had commuted death sentences for 3 women.
But he turned down Porter's appeal for clemency, saying he couldn't grant it without doing the same for her boyfriend, who committed the murder.
Gov. Edgar commuted the death sentence of Guin Garcia in 1995. She shot her husband to death while robbing him, and Edgar said the crime was not
brutal enough to justify capital punishment.
"It is harder for women to get the death penalty. There's still a glass ceiling,
a natural inclination to believe women are incapable of committing these types of crimes,"
said Thomas Epach Jr., chief of criminal prosecutions for the Cook County state's attorney's office.
(source: Chicago Sun-Times)
FLORIDA:
Saying she is afraid her mother will be disfigured by Florida's electric chair, the daughter of a woman on death row begged state lawmakers to
allow execution by lethal injection instead of electrocution.
Kimberly Hawkins, 30, said that "I'm fixing to watch my mom die in the electric chair. People have burned alive in it.
I don't want to see her burned alive in it. I accept the penalty that she has to die. But we can choose a better way for her to die."
Her mother, Judy Buenoano, is scheduled to die in the electric chair on March 30. Buenoano was convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic
in 1971, then collecting $85,000 in life insurance proceeds. Hawkins was 3 when her father died.
Florida's electric chair has been idle since last March 25, when a footlong flame erupted from Pedro Medina's headpiece as he was being
electrocuted. The fire was blamed on human error. Later, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the chair is not cruel or unusual punishment.
The fire led many to say injection is a more humane method of execution.
Tuesday, Rep. Tracy Stafford, a Democrat from Broward County, argued that the electric chair "tends to be sensationalized and trivialized.
There are few things we do that are more solemn than carrying out a death penalty. Sometimes, electrocution lends itself to a little more
frivolity than I think the state should be involved in."
Stafford could not persuade his colleagues to unplug Old Sparky just yet, and the House committee voted down a propsoal to institute lethal injection.
The issue may be revived this spring, as another bill moving through the Florida Senate also promotes lethal injection as an alternative to the electric chair.
Rep. Victor Crist, R.-Temple Terrace, who once suggested the guillotine as a humane means of execution, said electrocution is quick and painless.
Hawkins "was very emotional and very touching,but she was incaccurate in her information. She said that bodies are scarred by electrocution, and
they are not. Medina had a slight scar; it is like sunburn in a spot," Crist said.
He added that he is concerned that nay change in death penalty methods could spur appeals, slowing executions for the 380 people now on Florida's death row.
Hawkins, a waitress in Navarre, near Pensacola, was 16 when her mother was arrested.
Dubbed the "black widow," Buenoano, 54, also was convicted in 1980 of killing her 19-year-old paralyzed son by pushing him from a canoe.
In 1983, she was found guilty of attempted murder in a car bombing that injured her boyfriend, John Gentry.
She had insurance policies on both men.
Buenoano would be the 1st woman that Florida has executed since 1848, 3 years after statehood, she is 1 of 6 women on Florida's death row.
Also this week, a lawyer for Buenoano went to the state Supreme Court, alleging that the state has refused to disclose information that would
show an FBI crime lab manager provided unreliabel evidence against her client.
(source: St. Petersburg Times)
GEORGIA:
A jury begann deciding today whether convicted murderer David Scott Franks should be executed for an August 1994 rampage in which he stabbed
to death a Hall County woman and injured her 2 children.
After 11 days of testimony, the jury deliberated for a total of about 1 hour on Saturday and Monday before finding Franks guilty of 12 felonies
in connection with the murder of 35-year-old Deborah Wilson and the stabbing of her 2 children, ages 13 and 9.
Franks, 33, also is accused of shooting to death Deborah Wilson's husband, Clinton, and his helper, David Martin, just hours earlier in the basement of his pawnshop in Haralson County. He has not been tried on those charges.
Franks, who has shown little emotion, was on the verge of tears Monday as he apologized to his own family for his actions. Moments earlier, he
asked relatives of his victims to forgive him for his "involvement in the dealings we had that night," an apparent reference to his earlier testimony in which he claimed 2 other men murdered Clinton Wilson, 50, and Martin, 28, because of a drug deal gone sour.
"I thought that was an empty apology," Chief Assistant District Attorney Margaret Gregory remarked afterward.
"If I were a family member, I would be insulted."
Franks' lawyers, Stan Robbins and Joey Homans, have asked the court to declare the electric chair unconstitutional on grounds that it amounts
to cruel and unusual punishment. The attorneys submitted the motion more than 2 years ago, although Judge John Girardeau has refused to rule
on the matter until after the jury decides the penalty. Georgia is 1 of a handful of states that still use the electric chair as the preferred form of execution.
Following Monday's decision, jurors heard from relatives of both Deborah Wilson and Franks.
Tearfully reading a written statement, Deborah Wilson's mother, Diane Boone, told jurors that she thinks about her dead daughter every day.
Her voice filling with anger, Boone recounted the last conversation with her daughter.
"The purpose of the last phone call I received from Debbie was to tell me about a man named David Scott Franks, who stabbed her and left her to die,"
Boone said.
"My heart was shattered on Aug. 5, 1994, and there is no way to repair the damage that David Franks has caused."
The jury is scheduled to return to court at 10 a.m. and will begin deliberations on the death penalty following instructions from Girardeau.
(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Rick Halperin
AI-Texas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Private reply: Rick Halperin <rhalperi@post.cis.smu.edu>
Public replies: deathpenalty@assocdir.wuacc.edu
List owners: Julian Killingley, julian.killingley@uce.ac.uk
Ray Spring, zzspri@acc.wuacc.edu
To unsubscribe, send message to: listserv@assocdir.wuacc.edu
message merely says: unsub deathpenalty
Technical question? Mark Folmsbee, zzfolm@acc.wuacc.edu
Washburn's WashLawWEB, a comprehensive legal research site:
http://lawlib.wuacc.edu/washlaw/washlaw.html