In Virginia, a Woman on the Verge of Execution

Friday, Sep. 10, 2010

By Katy Steinmetz and Alex Altman–Time

After midnight on Oct. 30, 2002, two men crept into an unlocked trailer in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. A family of three was sleeping. Toting shotguns, the intruders roused Teresa Lewis, now 40, and told her to leave the bedroom she shared with her husband Julian. One of the men shot Julian several times. The other intruder stalked down the hall and put five bullets into Julian’s son, C.J., a U.S. Army reservist. The intruders divvied up the cash in Julian’s wallet and fled the trailer. About 45 minutes later, Teresa Lewis called the police to report that her husband and stepson had been killed. But when the police arrived, Julian Lewis was still alive. Among his last words was an ominous accusation: “My wife knows who done this to me.”

She did. As detailed in court documents, Teresa Lewis had paid the shooters — Matthew Shallenberger, 22, and Rodney Fuller, 19 — to kill her husband and stepson. Some murders are spurred by sex and others by money; in this one it was both. After meeting the pair at a local Walmart, Lewis started an affair with Shallenberger. In return for killing Julian and C.J. Lewis, Teresa promised to split her stepson’s $250,000 life-insurance policy with the two men, and she fronted $1,200 in cash to buy the guns and ammunition with which her family would be executed. In May 2003, after waiving her right to a trial, Lewis pleaded guilty to seven offenses, including two counts of murder for hire. A judge, deeming Lewis the crime’s mastermind — “the head of this serpent,” as he put it — sentenced her to death by lethal injection. The triggermen, who also pleaded guilty, were given life sentences. (See the debate on lethal injection as a method of execution.)

Barring the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention or a decision by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to grant clemency, on Sept. 23 Lewis will become the first woman executed by the commonwealth in 98 years, and just the 12th overall since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1976. No one disputes her guilt, or the heinousness of her crime. Whether she should be put to death for it is a murkier matter.

Lewis’ lawyers have offered several reasons for why her sentence should be lightened, including tests that show Lewis is on the cusp of mental retardation. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that executing mentally retarded prisoners violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. But Virginia does not consider prisoners mentally handicapped unless they score significantly below the mean on an IQ test and struggle to function in society. Lewis — who scored as low as 70 — hasn’t qualified in the eyes of appeals courts. In addition to her poor cognitive abilities, says Lewis’ current lawyer Jim Rocap, she was addled by an addiction to prescription painkillers at the time of the killings, a condition that Rocap says contributed to her apparent lack of remorse. (According to the court documents, she began inquiring about redeeming her husband’s paycheck and stepson’s life-insurance policy, for example, just hours after the murders.) (See the 25 crimes of the century.)

Some medical experts also determined that Lewis suffered from a dependent-personality disorder, which left her particularly susceptible to manipulation by men. Rocap, who has represented Lewis since 2004, argues that Lewis was exploited by Shallenberger, who tested as considerably more intelligent and penned a 2003 letter to an associate stating that he had struck up an affair with Lewis to “get her to ‘fall in love’ with me so she would give me the insurance money.” (Shallenberger committed suicide in 2006.) “Nobody who has personal knowledge of their relationship disputes that he was the leader, the person controlling Teresa,” Rocap says. But Lewis’ trial lawyers declined to address this point during the sentencing phase of the case, and appellate law limits the type of evidence that can be introduced during habeas hearings.

In deciding whether to grant clemency, Governor McDonnell can consider a range of mitigating circumstances, including the Shallenberger letter and Lewis’ behavior during the seven years she has lived in an isolated, 6-by-8-ft. cell at a Fluvanna County correctional facility. During her imprisonment, Lewis’ faith has deepened. She ministers to other prisoners and has “provided some measure of peace” to troubled inmates, says the Rev. Lynn Litchfield, Lewis’ prison chaplain until April 2009. “I really believe Teresa can be a positive influence inside,” Litchfield says. Governor McDonnell will issue a clemency ruling by Sept. 18, in keeping with his policy of ruling on clemency petitions at least five days before the date of a scheduled execution, says his spokesman, Tucker Martin. (Comment on this story.)

Rocap describes his client as anxious and apprehensive as the days tick away. “She wants to live. She’s not resigned to dying,” he says. “She thinks she has a lot to offer and she wants to do anything she can to make people realize she’s much more than the person that was depicted on the worst day of her life.” In testimony written by Lewis and read by a fellow inmate at services held in late August, the condemned was remorseful. “I’ve done so many things wrong. I took two people’s lives that I loved very much and I hurt so many more that I loved as well!” she writes, later adding, “I don’t want to die this way, or actually die at all! … I will fight to the end, and in the end, no matter what, I’m gonna win either way.”

Too Old to Execute?

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Viva Nash, 93, is the oldest prisoner on Death Row in America.

Gabriel Falcon
AC360° Writer

Viva Nash has the dubious distinction of being the oldest prisoner on Death Row in America. The double murderer is 93. He has spent virtually his entire adult life behind bars. But is he too old to be executed?

Many believe he deserves to die for the brutal crime he committed on November 3, 1982. On that day, Nash walked into a coin shop in Arizona and demanded money.

The employees had no idea the armed robber was a fugitive from justice. Three weeks before, Nash had escaped from a Utah prison where he was serving a life sentence for murder.

At the coin shop, Nash pointed a .357 Colt Trooper at Greggory West and fired three rounds into the clerk, killing him. He was arrested a short time later.

 

He was tried, convicted, and on June 27, 1983, sentenced to death. 26-years later, Nash remains confined in a single-man cell. He is one of 116 men confined to Death Row in the Browning Unit at the Eyman Arizona state prison complex.

Nash, who was born in 1915, is treated like other condemned prisoners. He has no contact with visitors or other prisoners, is allowed two brief telephone calls a week, and , except for 2-hours of outdoor exercise, is locked up 22-hours a day inside an 86 square foot cell.

No execution date has been set for Nash. But should one? And should it be legal to put an elderly inmate to death?

Here’s what CNN Senior Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin said:

“The Supreme Court has said that juvenile offenders can’t be executed. The Justices have never addressed whether one can be too old to be executed. The only check here, really, is political – does a governor want to authorize the execution of someone who is so old?”

What do you think?

 

 

cnn.com

Ex-Panther says racism put him on death row

• Story Highlights
• Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case has become an international cause
• He has two appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court
• Racism responsible for his conviction, death sentence, appeal says
• Abu-Jamal convicted in 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer

By Bill Mears
CNN Supreme Court Producer

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Mumia Abu-Jamal sits on Pennsylvania’s death row, perhaps the most recognized of the 228 condemned inmates at the Greene Correctional Facility, an hour south of Pittsburgh.

Abu-Jamal, inmate AM8335, awaits three milestones. His new book, “Jailhouse Lawyers,” will be released next month. He’s also awaiting a pair of Supreme Court decisions, which could come in the next two weeks.

The former Black Panther was sentenced to die for gunning down a Philadelphia police officer 28 years ago. The high court will decide whether he deserves a new hearing to determine whether his execution should go forward.

The state is appealing a federal appeals court ruling on the sentencing question that went in Abu-Jamal’s favor last year.

The case has attracted international attention.

Abu-Jamal’s lawyers filed a separate appeal claiming that racism led to his 1982 conviction. That petition is scheduled for consideration by the Supreme Court on April 3. If either case is accepted by the justices for review, oral arguments would be held in the fall.

The former radio reporter and cab driver has been divisive figure, with many prominent supporters arguing that racism pervaded his trial.

Others counter that Abu-Jamal is using his skin color to escape responsibility for his actions. They say he has divided the community for years with his provocative writing and activism.

He was convicted for the December 9, 1981, murder of officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, in Philadelphia.

Faulkner had pulled over Abu-Jamal’s brother in a late-night traffic stop. Witnesses said Abu-Jamal, who was nearby, ran over and shot the police officer in the back and in the head.

Abu-Jamal, once known as Wesley Cook, was also wounded in the confrontation and later admitted to the killing, according to other witnesses’ testimony.

Abu-Jamal is black, and the police officer was white.

Incarcerated for nearly three decades, Abu-Jamal has been an active critic of the criminal justice system.

On a Web site created by friends to promote his release, the prisoner-turned-author writes about his fight. “This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion dollar endowed universities but in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America.”

His chief defense attorney, Robert Bryan, has filed appeals asking for a new criminal trial.

“The central issue in this case is racism in jury selection,” he wrote to supporters last month.

“We are in an epic struggle in which his life hangs in the balance. What occurs now in the Supreme Court will determine whether Mumia will have a new jury trial or die at the hands of the executioner,” Bryan said. Ten whites and two blacks made up the original jury panel that sentenced him to death.

A three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals kept the murder conviction in place a year ago but ordered a new capital sentencing hearing.

“The jury instructions and the verdict form created a reasonable likelihood that the jury believed it was precluded from finding a mitigating circumstance that had not been unanimously agreed upon,” Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica wrote in the 77-page opinion.

The federal appeals court ultimately concluded that the jury was improperly instructed on how to weigh “mitigating factors” offered by the defense that might have kept Abu-Jamal off death row. Pennsylvania law at the time said jurors did not have to unanimously agree on a mitigating circumstance, such as the fact that Abu-Jamal had no prior criminal record.

Months before that ruling, oral arguments on the issue were contentious. Faulkner’s widow and Abu-Jamal’s brother attended, and demonstrations on both sides were held outside the courtroom in downtown Philadelphia.

If the Supreme Court refuses now to intervene on the sentencing issue, the city’s prosecutor would have to decide within six months whether to conduct a new death penalty sentencing hearing or allow Abu-Jamal to spend the rest of his life in state prison.

Many prominent groups and individuals, including singer Harry Belafonte, the NAACP and the European Parliament, are cited on his Web site as supporters.

Prosecutors have insisted that Abu-Jamal pay the price for his crimes and have aggressively resisted efforts to take him off death row for Faulkner’s murder.

“This assassination has been made a circus by those people in the world and this city who believe falsely that Mumia Abu-Jamal is some kind of a folk hero,” Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham said last year, when the federal appeals court upheld the conviction. “He is nothing short of an assassin.”

The city has honored the fallen police officer with a street designation and a commemorative plaque placed at the spot where he was shot and killed.

The officer’s widow, Maureen Faulkner, wrote a book two years ago about her husband and the case: “Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain and Injustice.” She writes that she was trying to “definitively lay out the case against Mumia Abu-Jamal and those who’ve elevated him to the status of political prisoner.”

All AboutMumia Abu-Jamal • U.S. Supreme Court

Texas Executions Pick Up Pace

Texas on pace to execute far more in 2009

By ANNA M. TINSLEY
atinsley@star-telegram.com

As states debate whether to stop executing criminals, Texas – long the nationwide leader in executions – has picked up the pace and is on a rate to execute perhaps twice as many Death Row inmates this year as in 2008.On Tuesday, Texas marked its 11th execution of the year and the 12th is scheduled for tonight, moving the state closer to last year’s 18 executions – a lower-than-average number because executions were frozen for months last year as the Supreme Court studied whether lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

“Texas is far and away the most frequent user of the death penalty,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “We are on a tear here in 2009.

“If it’s an eye for an eye, we take far more eyes than every other state,” he said. “The rest of the country looks at us and wonders what we are doing.”

Since 1976, there have been 432 executions in Texas, far more than in Virginia, which had the second highest number of executions with 103, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Some states are clamoring to abolish the deadly practice. Even in Texas, bills have been filed to do away with the death penalty, since life without parole is now an option.

But state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, said he doesn’t expect that to impact what has long been called the “conveyor belt of death” in Texas.

“This Legislature isn’t going to deal with it,” said Burnam, who is co-sponsoring bills to stop the death penalty here. “I think it’s immoral. It’s pre-planned, pre-meditated, state-sponsored murder.

“It’s barbaric.”

There are 348 inmates on Death Row in Texas, including 24 convicted in Tarrant County, state records show.

Changing times

President Barack Obama has indicated he favors executions only in the most extreme cases, but he hasn’t publicly focused much on the issue. But he could have a big impact through the years, by appointing judges to federal courts who will weigh in on the issue.

States such as New Mexico are looking at whether to let the costly death penalty system die. Some officials complain that costs are skyrocketing, making the procedure nearly out of reach. In Kansas, a lawmaker even proposed using execution funds to instead help with a budget shortfall.

“States know in these economic times that they have to cut something, whether it’s police forces, prisons or libraries,” said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research center that opposes the death penalty. “The death penalty is something that’s being considered.”

The cost is just a new tactic used by death penalty opponents, said William Rusty Hubbarth, an Austin attorney and vice president of Justice For All, a victim’s advocacy group.

“No one is saying deny them due process,” he said. “But the cost (of keeping an inmate on Death Row for years) is instigated by the defense, by appealing, and they say it’s too expensive.

“The costs come from maintaining that person’s life.”

A recent effort to repeal the Maryland death penalty died, but New Jersey in 2007 successfully abolished using the death penalty.

Burnam, who has signed on to bills seeking to abolish Texas executions, said he doesn’t expect to have much success this session.

“This isn’t about the present,” Burnam said. “It’s about trying to build for the future.”

‘Justice is swift’

Executions were down last year because the U.S. Supreme Court halted executions between September 2007 and April 2008 to review whether lethal injections were unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

Once the hold was removed, Texas executed 18 Death Row inmates in the last eight months of the year. Virginia had the second most executions last year, with four.

Critics chastise Texas for the number of executions and the frequency at which they are done.

Even Fort Worth’s Italian sister city – Reggio Emilia, Italy – has threatened to cut ties if city leaders didn’t denounce capital punishment. City officials declined.

If no delays are issued, Texas will have executed 16 prisoners by June, Texas Department of Criminal Justice records show.

“I don’t think Texas is going to ban the death penalty,” said Jillson, of SMU. “But it would behoove us to look at the practices and see why we are so out of balance with the rest of the country.”

 

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States with the most executions

Year	2009 (to date)	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004
Texas	11	18	26	24	19	23
Oklahoma	1	2	3	4	4	6
Ohio	0	2	2	5	4	7
Virginia	1	4	0	4	0	5
South Carolina	1	3	1	1	3	4
Alabama	2	0	3	1	4	2
Florida	1	2	0	4	1	2

Source: Death Penalty Information Center 

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Executions by state in the United States since 1976

Texas	432
Virginia	103
Oklahoma	89
Florida	67
Missouri	66
Georgia	43
North Carolina	43
South Carolina	41
Alabama	40
Ohio	28
Louisiana	27
Arkansas	27
Arizona	23
Indiana	19
Delaware	14
California	13
Nevada	12
Illinois	12
Mississippi	10
Utah	6
Tennessee	5
Maryland	5
Washington	4
Kentucky	3
Nebraska	3
Pennsylvania	3
Montana	3
Oregon	2
Colorado	1
Idaho	1
Wyoming	1
Connecticut	1
South Dakota	1
New Mexico	1

Source: Death Penalty Information Center 

Is the Tide Shifting Against the Death Penalty?

The Tide Shifts Against the Death Penalty

By Richard Lacayo Tuesday, Feb. 03, 2009

A view of the death chamber from the witness room at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility

Mike Simons / Getty

If there were such a thing as a golden age of capital punishment in America, it peaked in 1999. There were 98 executions in the U.S. that year, the highest number since 1976, when the Supreme Court, which had overturned all death penalty laws in 1972, began approving them again. For most of the 1990s the number of death sentences handed down annually by courts had been humming along in the range of 280 to 300 and above. And it had been years since the Supreme Court had done much to specify whom states could execute and how they could do it. A decade later, capital punishment has a lot less life in it. Last year saw just 37 executions in the U.S., with only 111 death sentences handed down. Although 36 states and the Federal Government still have death penalty laws on the books, the practice of carrying out executions is limited almost entirely to the South, where all but two of last year’s executions took place. (The exceptions were both in Ohio.) Even in Texas, still the state leader in annual executions, only 10 men and one woman were sentenced to death last year, the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In recent years the Supreme Court has voted to forbid the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded, and it banned using the death penalty for crimes that did not involve killings. In 2007 the court put executions across the country on hold for eight months while it examined whether lethal injection, the most common means of executing prisoners, violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; in the end it ruled 7-2 that it did not.

Even more significantly, where states once hurried to adopt death penalty laws, the pendulum now appears to be swinging in the other direction. In 2007 New Jersey became the first state in 40 years to abolish its death penalty. In that same year repeal bills were narrowly defeated in Montana, Nebraska and New Mexico, all of which are revisiting the issue this year. Now the focus is on Maryland. After years of failed attempts by death penalty opponents to bring a repeal bill to a vote in the state legislature, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is personally sponsoring this year’s version, promising that he will fight to have the legislature pass it during the current 90-day session. In his state of the state address last week O’Malley called capital punishment “outdated, expensive and utterly ineffective.” (See the top 10 crime stories of 2008.)

Death penalty opponents say the use of DNA evidence, which has led to a number of prisoners being released from death row, is a big part of the reason for the decline in executions generally. “That’s had a ripple effect,” says Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group. “The whole legal system has become more cautious about the death penalty. Prosecutors are not seeking it as much. Juries are returning more life sentences. And judges are granting more stays of execution. Last year there were over 40.”

Maryland restored its death penalty in 1978, but it was 16 years before the state carried out its first execution under the new law. Since then the state has put to death four more convicted killers, the last of them in 2005. Today there are five men on Maryland’s death row, though the state suspended executions two years ago after its highest court ruled that regulations governing lethal injections had been adopted improperly. Until new protocols are in place, no executions can go forward, and the governor, a longtime death penalty opponent, has been in no hurry to issue them.

Last year, after months of public hearings, a Maryland state commission on the death penalty voted 13-9 to recommend that it should be abolished. In its final report the commission, which was headed by former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, cited the usual objections to capital punishment — cost, racial and jurisdictional disparities in sentencing, its ineffectiveness as a deterrent against crime and the possibility that innocent people might be put to death. One of the commission’s members was Kirk Bloodsworth, who had been on death row in Maryland for two years in the mid-1980s before he was cleared by DNA evidence.

Even so, repealing the Maryland death penalty is by no means a done deal. Bills to repeal it have been introduced repeatedly since the first of them arrived six years ago, only to die every time in the senate’s judicial proceedings committee. And the makeup of that committee is no different now than it was two years ago, when the bill fell one vote short of the number needed to release it to the full senate. But supporters of the repeal think that this year, with the governor’s support and the commission’s verdict still fresh, the bill will make it to the floor for a vote they are confident they will win. “This year we have momentum to move it,” says Jane Henderson, director of Maryland Citizen’s Against State Executions.

Senator Lisa A. Gladden, a Baltimore Democrat who chairs the committee, also thinks this is the year it will happen. “You have the commission report, which confirms what we already knew,” she says. “The death penalty is not a deterrent, it doesn’t reduce crime, it’s expensive, and it’s unfair. And the governor has the ability to persuade some of the swing voters in my committee — and I only need one — to get the bill onto the floor. ” If the bill is passed by the senate, it will then continue to the legislature’s other chamber, the house of delegates, where house speaker Michael E. Busch has said he believes there are enough votes for approval.

If Governor O’Malley can’t budge any of those swing voters, there are still parliamentary moves at his disposal that could allow him to bring the bill to the full chamber without a committee vote. One of them would be to persuade lawmakers on the committee who oppose the bill to release it anyway without a recommendation of any kind from their body. Some anti-repeal committee members are already said to be warming to that idea.

And O’Malley can get firsthand advice on parliamentary maneuvers from a source very close to home. In 1978, the bill that eventually created Maryland’s death penalty was held up for a time by the same senate committee before eventually being forced to a vote. Its chairman back then was a future state attorney general named J. Joseph Curran, a longtime opponent of capital punishment. These days he also happens to be the governor’s father-in-law.