capital punishment

In a rare move, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (which handles cases from North and South Carolina, as well as Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia) granted relief to death row inmate Dr. William Gray[FN] earlier this week. The Court said that Gray, who was sentenced to die for the 1992 murder of his wife in Lenoir County, should receive a new sentencing hearing because his lawyers failed to investigate and present considerable evidence that Gray was severely mentally ill.

Dr. Gray had been exhibiting bizarre behavior for months before he shot his wife. After he was arrested, he was kept in the state mental hospital for five weeks. Once Dr. Gray returned to the jail, he had to be kept in the juvenile cell block for his own safety. Everyone around him in the months before and after the murder noticed that Gray had made a precipitous decline into mental illness, but his attorneys – neither of whom had tried a capital case before - presented no such evidence to the jury. Now William Gray has a second chance.

Here are the top stories in criminal justice reform, taken from the Justice Newsladder.

Help me out, BlueNC, font of information that you are.

I'm looking to expand my most recent blog post.

I know that Richard Moore "believe[s] that there is Biblical evil that lives among us, and for some crimes you give up the right to be here on Earth with the rest of us," (source) and that Beverly Perdue "support[s] capital punishment as an option, but...also favor[s] the current moratorium [then] in place while constitutional issues are being studied." (source)

How do your (least) favorite candidates feel about the death penalty?

In the summer of 1990, Minh and Linda Rogers were shot to death while working at their family-owned grocery in rural Gates County, North Carolina. Some money was taken. Sixteen year-old Linda was raped. The next year, Jerry Wayne Conner was tried and sentenced to death for the murders. His sentence was overturned on appeal, but after a re-sentencing hearing in 1995, Mr. Conner was again sentenced to die. In May of 2006, Conner came within 36 hours of execution before the North Carolina Supreme Court intervened. The Court didn't want Jerry Conner to be killed until he had the chance to apply modern DNA technology to the semen found on Linda Rogers' body. Unfortunately, the semen sample was too degraded to produce conclusive results.

As discussed in a prior post, Floyd Brown, an innocent mentally retarded man, has been locked up for 14 years without a trial. He has been held at the state mental hospital since 1993 in connection with the murder of an Anson County woman. Until the Supreme Court banned the execution of the mentally retarded, he was facing a death sentence. Two days ago, his attorneys filed a petition that could finally win him his freedom. Here's how you can help.

Imagine you have been accused of a crime you didn’t commit. Now imagine that you can’t defend yourself because your IQ makes you the mental equivalent of a five or six-year-old child. You can’t tell time. You can’t spell your own name. But somehow, police say, you gave them a lengthy and detailed confession to the murder of an elderly woman. You are facing the death penalty.

Fast forward fourteen years. You’re still in jail. You haven’t gone to trial. Both of the detectives who accused you have been convicted of federal racketeering charges. All of the physical evidence against you - if there ever was any - has disappeared. It’s not clear that you will ever get your day in court. There is a very good chance you will die in a state mental facility because you are too retarded to stand trial for something you didn’t even do.

On the bright side, the Supreme Court has outlawed the execution of the mentally retarded.

From the Carolina Justice Policy Center:

We are at a crucial point in the death penalty reform movement and need your help. In our efforts to reduce the flaws in North Carolina's criminal justice system, we still need local citizens and individual organizations to contact several state legislators to ask for their support of crucial bills. We ask that you please send an email or make phone calls to the legislators listed at the bottom of this email and to share this email with your members.

The strange case of Guy Tobias LeGrande goes on. In 1996, Guy LeGrande was sentenced to death in Stanly County for the murder of Ellen Munford. (Incidentally, the man who hired LeGrande and provided him with the murder weapon - Munford's husband - was convicted only of second-degree murder.) LeGrande fired his court-appointed attorneys and was allowed to represent himself over their protestations that he was severely mentally ill.

Visit my blog to view a brief filed on behalf of five North Carolina death row inmates (Jerry Conner, James Campbell, Archie Billings, Marcus Robinson, and James Thomas).

The death penalty news coming out of the General Assembly this session is not all good. Senator Brock (R-Davie and Rowan) has proposed a bill which would make it a capital offense to kill a pregnant woman - whether or not she or anyone else is aware of the pregnancy.

At a time when so many are calling for the narrowing of the capital statute, Senator Brock (and his co-sponsors Allran (R-Catawba and Iredell), Apodaca (R-Buncombe, Henderson, and Polk), Berger (R-Guilford and Rockingham), Blake (R-Harnett and Moore), Brown (R-Jones and Onslow), East (R-Alleghany, Stokes, Surry, and Yadkin), Goodall (R-Mecklenburg and Union), Hunt (R-Wake), Jacumin (R-Burke and Caldwell), Pittenger (R-Mecklenburg, Preston (R-Carteret, Craven, and Pamlico), and Smith (R-Johnston and Wayne)) are trying to expand the statute in a way that is both unnecessary and unfair.