Texas Death Row Inmate Sentenced to Life over Intellectual Disability

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0oO7tSsNoo8yBrLGz1rhGsPcd7qpFCyzMZFvDkAdDXXc9HtF-KWE8JlLAFWB-hzEm8hAK6ZnEa_5ulzd0Cc5CgwNcV8h43R1_zhUeTKKe0M521WgOVBHrLXeAqt8uJDztBd2NKl9m5hg/s1600/Jose-Martinez.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Jose Noey Martinez" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0oO7tSsNoo8yBrLGz1rhGsPcd7qpFCyzMZFvDkAdDXXc9HtF-KWE8JlLAFWB-hzEm8hAK6ZnEa_5ulzd0Cc5CgwNcV8h43R1_zhUeTKKe0M521WgOVBHrLXeAqt8uJDztBd2NKl9m5hg/s320/Jose-Martinez.jpg" title="Jose Noey Martinez" width="234" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jose Noey Martinez</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: justify;">A man who fatally stabbed a 68-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter during a 1995 burglary in Hidalgo County will no longer face execution after he has been determined to be intellectually disabled.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, changed Jose Noey Martinez's sentence Wednesday to life in prison. The court agreed with a lower court's ruling that Martinez, now 40, “is a person with intellectual disability” and “is constitutionally ineligible for a death sentence.” Martinez had been on death row almost 20 years.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Martinez broke into the home of Esperanza Palomo to steal a TV and stereo, according to court documents. Palomo was babysitting her blind granddaughter, Amanda. Shortly after breaking in, Palomo confronted Martinez with a baseball bat. He stabbed the grandmother, who fell to the ground immediately, and raped her.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After killing the woman, Martinez told law enforcement, he heard the granddaughter crying in another room, court documents show. He told officers that he stabbed her to death.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A Hidalgo County jury found Martinez guilty of capital murder in 1996 and sentenced him to death.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On appeal, Martinez's attorneys had claimed that he is mentally retarded and argued that executing him would violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Once the Texas Department of Criminal Justice receives paperwork from the appeals court, Martinez will be taken to the Byrd Unit in Huntsville, agency spokesman Jason Clark said in an email.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"He will be interviewed, and information will be gathered about his family structure, criminal and social behavior, drug and alcohol involvement, military and institutional experience, as well as education and employment history," he said. "The results of the tests and interviews are the basis for classification decisions that determine the unit of assignment, the level of security supervision, housing and job assignments and time-earning status."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Source: The Texas Tribune, Jonathan Silver, June 15, 2016</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">- Report an error, an omission:<a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com" target="_blank"> deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a></span> <span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <span style="font-size: small;"> - Follow us on <b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/Death-Penalty-News-206848499362906/" target="_blank">Facebook</a> </b>and <b><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank">Twitter</a></b></span></div></div>

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Jose Noey Martinez A man who fatally stabbed a 68-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter during a 1995 burglary in Hidalgo County w...

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A sane approach to dealing with mentally ill death row inmates

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd6T7Wrv-JmT6gLhuIBC8jNKy99J5jFlpnwzNDYc_gqqgRqMmuEIR1slDOVw2-NpW7BHwgC6wRA57gtVuGGsLfDtBlk-A0biXMUpFaPfwuRuHyjxUiaLMy9h0LPDXP3n_0etecIyID9WI/s1600/California+Death+Row_+A+guard+stands+watch+over+the+condemned+prisoners+housed+in+East+Block+during+a+media+tour+of+death+row+a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="San Quentin's death row" border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd6T7Wrv-JmT6gLhuIBC8jNKy99J5jFlpnwzNDYc_gqqgRqMmuEIR1slDOVw2-NpW7BHwgC6wRA57gtVuGGsLfDtBlk-A0biXMUpFaPfwuRuHyjxUiaLMy9h0LPDXP3n_0etecIyID9WI/s400/California+Death+Row_+A+guard+stands+watch+over+the+condemned+prisoners+housed+in+East+Block+during+a+media+tour+of+death+row+a.jpg" title="San Quentin's death row" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">San Quentin's death row</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: justify;">California's death penalty system has been broken for so long, you could forgive people for thinking that it no longer exists. The last person executed at San Quentin was Clarence Ray Allen, who arranged the murders of 3 people in Fresno - 1 who revealed details of a burglary Allen had planned, and 2 others who testified against him. His January 2006 execution came 23 years after his conviction.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Since then, legal challenges have left California without a constitutional method of executing prisoners. The state has proposed a new lethal-injection protocol, but more lawsuits will likely stall the resumption of executions for the foreseeable future, and an initiative headed for the fall ballot would ban it outright. It's unclear how many executions have been forestalled by the freeze. Of 747 people on California's death row - most of them men held at San Quentin - only 18 have exhausted their appeals and could be slated for execution should the "machinery of death," as Justice Harry A. Blackmun once described it, ever be turned back on.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We hope it won't be. The result of a too-easily manipulated system, the practice is barbaric, immoral and applied disproportionately to people of color. As Paige St. John reported recently in our news pages, there also are many condemned prisoners in California who can't legally be put to death. The Supreme Court has held that the state can't execute someone who doesn't have a "rational understanding" of why he or she is about to be executed.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The state historically has argued that it could not acquiesce in removing a convicted killer from death row unless it believed there was a miscarriage of justice. And the mental state of a condemned person does not become a legal issue until execution is near, in part because many forms of mental illness come and go.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But now, under an agreement worked out with the state-funded office that coordinates death sentence appeals, Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris has taken the unusual step of joining the defense in asking the state Supreme Court to invalidate the death sentence of Ronnie McPeters. McPeters, a panhandler convicted of the 1984 murder of Linda Pasnick in Fresno, converses with a nonexistent wife and children, hoards his feces and says he's tormented by the voices of his victim's relatives.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One inmate continually bangs his head against the wall, believes he is controlled by computer chips and says he dies every night only to be reborn [every day].</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Though we wish that Harris, who personally opposes the death penalty, would use this opportunity to make a broader call for its abolition, we welcome her efforts to move inmates such as McPeters off death row. Working with defense lawyers to identify those ineligible for the death penalty earlier in the appeals process keeps the state from wasting time and resources pursuing executions that are constitutionally barred from occurring. No public interest is served by the state doggedly fighting a battle it knows it can't win, and we hope the state Supreme Court affirms this new process.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What depths of insanity are involved here? One inmate continually bangs his head against the wall, believes he is controlled by computer chips and says he dies every night only to be reborn the next morning. Another seesaws between delusions and catatonia, spending days at a time naked and smeared with his own feces on the floor of his cell. Several have had their appeals indefinitely delayed because they are too incapacitated to assist in their own counsel, yet they remain on death row ostensibly awaiting execution. If they're too crazy for court, they're certainly too crazy for the death chamber.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Victims' families have legitimate grievances, and a right to want the guilty punished. But executions do not achieve justice; they are revenge killings conducted by the state on behalf of the victims, and serve no broader societal or judicial purpose. And fighting to push the insane closer to the needle moves the practice into the realm of the absurd.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If a condemned person doesn't understand why he or she is to be killed by the state, the state must recognize that and place the convicted in circumstances that will ensure basic constitutional rights are protected. Even the guilty are human beings, and must be treated as such.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Source: Editorial, Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2016</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">- Report an error, an omission:<a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com" target="_blank"> deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a></span> <span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <span style="font-size: small;"> - Follow us on <b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/Death-Penalty-News-206848499362906/" target="_blank">Facebook</a> </b>and <b><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank">Twitter</a></b></span></div></div>

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San Quentin's death row California's death penalty system has been broken for so long, you could forgive people for thinking that it...

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U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Two Major Death Penalty Cases

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7XMgC_pg63z89Vkq5D_5-dexwvW118-hqVXU97xzM_Zdny_LO2ILwLqwBKbWNeNJND-hko1ol5qbLV1GNI04Ubb9raASvRxbHR87HV4od0CKOE2aOHng6D-3nhU7qMbnxRfhBGpfMto8/s1600/US+Supreme+Court.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7XMgC_pg63z89Vkq5D_5-dexwvW118-hqVXU97xzM_Zdny_LO2ILwLqwBKbWNeNJND-hko1ol5qbLV1GNI04Ubb9raASvRxbHR87HV4od0CKOE2aOHng6D-3nhU7qMbnxRfhBGpfMto8/s320/US+Supreme+Court.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear two cases raising major questions about the death penalty, including whether executing a condemned inmate more than 35 years after he was sentenced to death violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That case, <i>Moore v. Texas</i>, No. 15-797, concerns Bobby J. Moore, who has been on death row since 1980 for shooting and killing an elderly Houston supermarket clerk, James McCarble, during a robbery. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr. Moore’s case also raises questions about whether Texas uses outdated standards in assessing whether a defendant’s intellectual disability was severe enough to bar his execution.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The second case, <i>Buck v. Stephens</i>, No. 15-8049, concerns the role race may play in capital sentencing. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Duane Buck was convicted of the 1995 murders of a former girlfriend and another man. Texas law allows death sentences only if prosecutors can show the defendant poses a future danger to society.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">During the trial’s sentencing phase, Mr. Buck’s lawyer presented testimony from a psychologist who said that race is one of the factors associated with future dangerousness. I</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">n their petition seeking Supreme Court review, Mr. Buck’s new lawyers said his trial lawyer had been ineffective and that Mr. Buck’s death sentence was infected by racial bias.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/politics/supreme-court-to-hear-two-major-death-penalty-cases.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>, Adam Liptak, June 6, 2016</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">- Report an error, an omission:<a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com" target="_blank"> deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a></span> <span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <span style="font-size: small;"> - Follow us on <b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/Death-Penalty-News-206848499362906/" target="_blank">Facebook</a> </b>and <b><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank">Twitter</a></b></span></div></div>

Inadequate counsel Inordinate delay Mental retardation mentally incompetent inmates Race SCOTUS Texas USA U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Two Major Death Penalty Cases

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear two cases raising major questions about the death penalty, including whether executi...

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