Holland v. Florida

Monday, June 14, 2010

AP reports, "Court: Death row case goes back to lower court."

The Supreme Court said Monday lower courts should look again at an appeal from a death row inmate in Florida whose lawyer missed the deadline for asking federal courts to stop his execution.

The high court overturned an appeals court decision saying Albert Holland had missed his chance to get a federal review of his death sentence because his lawyer did not file his paperwork on time.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta said the only way the deadline could be extended is if a defendant can prove that his lawyer showed "bad faith, dishonesty, divided loyalty, mental impairment, or so forth" instead of just being "grossly negligent."

"In our view, this standard is too rigid," said Justice Stephen Breyer, writing the 7-2 judgment for the court.

The court sent the case back to the appeal court.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The Holland v. Florida opinion is in Adobe .pdf format. The ScotusWiki file, with all briefing, is here.

Tony Mauro writes, "Another Bilski-Free Day at the Supreme Court," for the BLT.

In Holland v. Florida, the Court ruled 7-2 that the one-year statute of limitation for habeas filings under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 can be tolled -- delayed or paused -- under certain circumstances, including egregious attorney misconduct.

The Court also agreed to review Collin v. Pinholster in it's next term, which will begin in October. This is a California death penalty case from the Ninth Circuit.

Earlier coverage of Holland v. Florida begins here.

Stuart woman sentenced in stepfather’s slaying, mother’s poisoning

June 14th, 2010 by Daphne Dure

STUART - A judge sentenced Nicole Claire Thornhill to 50 years in prison this morning for her role in the 2008 sword slaying of her stepfather and the poisoning of both her stepfather and mother.

Thornhill’s boyfriend, Christopher Tomlinson, stabbed Gerald Lee Jensen with a samurai sword and left his body in a trash bin.

A jury convicted him on first degree murder and poisoning charges last month, and he was also sentenced to life in prison.

Thornhill, 21, of Stuart, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder charges in November

Review | 'Coyote on a Fence' provokes Death Row questions Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/14/1679155/coyote-on-a-fence-provokes-death.h

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

CDOLEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Crime and capital punishment are center stage in Bruce Graham's Coyote on a Fence, an engrossing drama that deliberately raises more questions than it answers

The Alliance Theatre Lab production, one of the troupe's most powerful and polished shows to date, sends its audiences back out onto Miami Lakes' Main Street pondering forever-incendiary issues: justice, vengeance, the legal system, racism and the ``why'' of horrific crimes.

Graham's play focuses on a pair of Texas death row inmates. John Brennan (an intense, engaging Travis Reiff) is an educated man who once worked at the prison as a drug and alcohol counselor. Opposed to the death penalty, adamant about his innocence, he has created a prison newspaper to push his views and humanize those who are executed.

John's new next-cell neighbor is Bobby Reyburn (Mark Della Ventura), a slow-witted, cheerful man with a ruined eye and a damaged hip. After a horrific childhood -- his mother was an alcoholic prostitute, and the hip injury came from a gang rape when he was 12 -- Bobby embraced the acceptance he found in a community of white supremacists. His crime: torching a black church with 37 people trapped inside, 14 of them children.

Feeling that justice will be served when Bobby, who spews repulsive pronouncements about blacks and Jews, keeps his date with the executioner would be easy. But Coyote on a Fence doesn't settle for easy. Both Graham's writing and Della Ventura's masterful performance keep the play from becoming a clear-cut study of guilt and innocence.

Also part of the drama are a prison guard (Kirsten Upchurch), whose drunken conversations with an unseen journalist in a bar reveal the emotional cost of maintaining her tough-gal exterior at work, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter (Jehane Serralles) who has decided to write about John and his appreciative obituaries. Both women play their parts well, but casting Serralles in a role written for a male brings a slightly creepy dimension to her initial scene with John, who asks about her marital status then wants to see a picture of her 5-year-old daughter.

Working on Mike Stopnick's set, with its lived-in cell for John and barren one for Bobby, the cast and director Adalberto Acevedo take the audience on an intense, difficult, thought-provoking journey.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

Christine Dolen
cdolen@miamiherald.com

Christine Dolen has been The Herald's theater critic since 1979. She has been a fellow at the National Critics' Institute and at Stanford University, and in 1999 was a Senior Fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. She has served as a Pulitzer Prize drama juror and has won first place in arts writing in the Missouri Lifestyles Journalism Awards

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/14/1679155/coyote-on-a-fence-provokes-death.html#ixzz0qsI3nSzB

Florida Supreme Court looks into wrongful convictions

By Rene Stutzman, Orlando Sentinel

11:58 PM EDT, June 13, 2010

It was 2003, and this is how it started in Florida: Sheila Meehan had dozens of boxes stacked in her Tallahassee garage filled with letters and legal paperwork from hundreds of Florida inmates who claimed they were innocent and that DNA tests would prove it.

Meehan and her boss, Jennifer Greenberg, were launching the Innocence Project of Florida. Money was so tight, they set up desks in a rent-free space — a broad hallway at the top of a flight of stairs at the Florida State University College of Law.

Meehan and Greenberg have since left the nonprofit, but their groundwork paid off: DNA testing has freed a dozen Florida inmates since 2000.

And now the Florida Supreme Court is about to get involved. The high court is about to hire a full-time lawyer and name a panel to investigate how the criminal-justice system failed those people.

It is creating the Innocence Commission. It will not look for inmates who have been wrongly convicted but will examine systemic flaws that sent innocent people to prison

Meehan and Greenberg have since left the nonprofit, but their groundwork paid off: DNA testing has freed a dozen Florida inmates since 2000.

And now the Florida Supreme Court is about to get involved. The high court is about to hire a full-time lawyer and name a panel to investigate how the criminal-justice system failed those people.

It is creating the Innocence Commission. It will not look for inmates who have been wrongly convicted but will examine systemic flaws that sent innocent people to prison.

Meehan, Greenberg and others who have worked to free the innocent are thrilled.

"We're obviously pretty ecstatic about the idea that there will be a serious examination at the highest levels of the criminal justice system of why people are wrongfully convicted and wrongfully incarcerated," said Seth Miller, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida.

How many innocent people are currently in state prisons?

"I don't think anybody knows," Miller said, but his organization is awaiting DNA results on "a handful" of cases.

Since 2000, 11 men have been freed from Florida prisons following DNA testing, according to the project.

A 12th inmate, Frank Lee Smith, was exonerated 11 months after he died of cancer in 2000. He was wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a Broward County child. He died on death row.

Broward County leads the state in the number of convicted inmates freed or exonerated following DNA testing — four. Brevard is second with two, Wilton Dedge and William Dillon.

Dedge was freed after 22 years in prison when DNA proved he did not rape and slash a 17-year-old girl in Sharpes. She told two juries Dedge attacked her.

Dillon was released in 2008 after serving 27 years for the conviction of beating a man to death at Canova Beach. A court threw out his conviction, and prosecutors decided not to retry him after tests found the DNA of two other people on a bloody T-shirt that prosecutors said was worn by the killer. Dillon's DNA was not on it.

Brevard-Seminole State Attorney Norm Wolfinger has at times opposed DNA testing for convicted inmates but said he would work with the new commission. Wolfinger was not in office when Dedge and Dillon were convicted.

DNA testing has freed one other Central Florida convict: James Bain, who was released in December after serving 35 years for a Lake Wales child kidnapping and rape.

It has not exonerated any inmates from Orange, Seminole, Osceola, Lake or Volusia counties.

Earlier this year, the Florida Legislature funded the commission for one year, providing $200,000. Its work will probably take two years, said Lisa Goodner, Florida's state court administrator. Commission advocates are expected to press for more funding next year.

A smarter investment by lawmakers, Wolfinger said, would be to plow more money into DNA labs run by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

"The advent of DNA has been fantastic to prove guilt or prove innocence," he said.

William Cervone is less supportive of the commission. He is state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit, which includes Alachua County, and serves as president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association.

No prosecutor wants to lock up innocent people, he said, but he added, "I don't know what another commission at public expense will do."

People who have been wrongly convicted, he said, already have a remedy — appeals courts.

The commission is expected to have a staff of two: a lawyer/executive director and an assistant. They're expected to assist a not-yet-named commission that will likely conduct a series of public meetings throughout the state, Goodner said.

Among the issues it likely will target are false confessions, eyewitness misidentifications, police interrogation techniques and the use of jailhouse informants, she said.

"There are lots of wrongful convictions," said Bob Wesley, elected public defender for Orange and Osceola counties, "but how do you parse through the ones . . . that truly have merit?"

Scott Rost is an Orlando business and real-estate lawyer. He doesn't represent criminals, but he is a board member of the Innocence Project of Florida. He helped Meehan and Greenberg review cases when they still worked in at the top of the stairs at FSU.

"It's hard to see anything to disagree with," he said, "in continuing to look hard for the truth."

Rene Stutzman can be reached at rstutzman@orlandosentinel.com or 407-650-6394.

Courts consider new fates for 2 men

June 13, 2010

Jury issues shake up death sentences

BY KAUSTUV BASU
FLORIDA TODAY

Anthony Welch and Willie Nowell, both convicted of gruesome killings, were sentenced to death row in 2006 in Brevard County.

Four years later, they're headed back to local courts -- likely this year -- for retrial or resentencing on orders of the Florida Supreme Court.

Of the 14 people from Brevard who sat on death row in the past five years, four have been granted new trials or had their sentences sent back for reconsideration.

Experts say that's not uncommon.

"That is because we are dealing with people's lives here," said Robert Bohm, a University of Central Florida criminal justice professor. "We have to make sure we got the right person and he did what he is accused of doing."

Welch will get a new "penalty phase" or sentencing as soon as August because the state's high court overturned his death sentence in 2008, citing a procedural error by a trial judge.

Nowell will get a retrial in as early as late fall because the Florida Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that a Hispanic juror was improperly dismissed during jury selection.

Wayne Holmes, chief of staff at the Brevard State Attorney's Office, said both of these cases are coming back on what he called legal technicalities.

"Both cases had jury-selection issues. The appellate court is saying the law was followed improperly," he said. "You might dot all your i's and cross your t's, but somewhere down the road, a new trial or sentencing phase might be authorized."

Welch, now 32, was found guilty in the December 2000 deaths of Rufus Johnson, 69, and his 66-year-old wife, Kyoko. Prosecutors said Welch beat them with a blunt object and also attacked them with Samurai swords hanging on their wall.

He wanted $5,000 from the couple, they said, who were former neighbors. When Rufus Johnson told him they didn't have the money, Welch started attacking them.

Court documents show said Welch cleaned himself in their bathroom, stole their truck and drove to meet a woman he was dating after the killings at the Pineda Crossings residence.

He was arrested a week after the deaths and faced two charges of first-degree premeditated murder.

Welch gets a new sentencing because the Florida Supreme Court said the trial court inappropriately allowed a juror to be rejected because of her gender.

Willie Nowell, 34, initially was found guilty in the slaying of Palm Bay resident Michelle Gill in June 2002, who was pregnant.

Police said Nowell and an acquaintance, Jermaine Bellamy, who was 20 years old at the time, broke into her Palm Bay house and shot Gill and her boyfriend, Kelvis Smith. The boyfriend survived the attack.

Bellamy, described as a follower and not a leader, was sentenced to life in prison in 2006.

The Florida Supreme Court gave several reasons for overturning Nowell's conviction, including:

A Hispanic potential juror was dismissed because he was young and similar age to the defendant, while a non-Hispanic juror was not.

The prosecutor told jurors during the penalty phase that Nowell should be treated with the same mercy he showed his victims, which the court said was an unacceptable emotional appeal. Of the two other death-row cases returned to Brevard in the past five years, one is resolved.

Crosley Green was resentenced in September to life in prison, though he is likely to be eligible for parole in 20 years. He was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1989 killing of Charles Flynn Jr. of Titusville in an orange grove in North Brevard.

The Florida Supreme Court said it ordered the resentencing because the jury shouldn't have known about Green's record as a juvenile in New York.

The other case coming home involves George Porter, who will get his sentence reconsidered, though not until at least next year. Porter was convicted in the October 1986 killing of his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend in Melbourne.

The court ordered the resentencing because the jury didn't hear about Porter's mental-health issues.

Holmes said prosecutors know death-penalty cases are reviewed again and again, and they have to prepare for that.

"The death penalty is one area where the court is scrutinizing and changing the law as we go along," he said. "They keep changing the standards we are looking at. Not only do we have to meet current standards, we have to anticipate what the law will be 10 to 20 years later."

He cited the example of Bryan Jennings, who had three retrials and was found guilty each time. In 1979, Jennings kidnapped a 6-year-old girl from her Merritt Island home and then raped and killed her. Prosecutors say he has stayed alive by filing numerous appeals.

Holmes also said the opponents of the death penalty try to make those cases as drawn out and expensive as possible.

Professor Bohm agreed that death-penalty cases take up many resources, but he said higher courts often identify significant questions of justice.

"One of the misconceptions about these cases is that they are overturned because of legal technicalities and loopholes. Most of the time these are fundamental constitutional errors," he said.

Bohm cited a study at Columbia Law School that looked at cases between 1973 and 1995 and found reversible errors in nearly seven out of 10 death-row cases.

"More than 90 percent of states that administer death sentences have overall error rates of 52 percent or higher," according to a media release about the study.

David Muhlhausen, senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, said appropriate safeguards must be in place to protects the rights of inmates, "but we need to stop frivolous appeals."

He added: "There are some acts that are so morally reprehensible that the perpetrator deserves the death penalty."

Contact Basu at 242-3724 or kbasu@floridatoday.com.

Additional Facts

By the numbers

Fourteen inmates from Brevard County have sat on Florida's death row in past five years:

4: Inmates who have had or will have reconsideration of conviction or sentencing

1: Executed. Mark Dean Schwab, 39, was put to death in 2008 for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old Cocoa boy in 1991.

1: Died last year. William Cruse, 82, was on death row for a killing spree in Palm Bay in 1987 that claimed six lives.

8: Inmates from Brevard currently on death row. They are:
-- Chadwick Willacy, 42: Struck his neighbor over the head with a blunt object on Sept. 5, 1990, when she caught him burglarizing her Palm Bay home. Willacy tied her ankles and wrists, and fractured her skull. He then set her on fire.
-- Johnny Hoskins, 46: Raped and killed his 80-year-old neighbor in October 1992 after breaking into her house. Investigators said Hoskins confessed to assaulting the woman in her Melbourne home and drove her body to Georgia, burying it in a shallow grave.
-- Wydell Evans, 40: Shot his brother's 17-year-old girlfriend in October 1998 in a car after accusing her of cheating on his brother. Evans then forced the driver of the car to take him two other places before leaving the car. The girlfriend then was taken to the hospital, where she later died.
-- Randy Schoenwetter, 28: Broke into his friend's Titusville home with the intention of having sex with the friend's sister in August 2000. He stabbed the 10-year-old girl to death when she woke up and recognized him. He then stabbed and killed her father.
-- Robert Walker, 28: Convicted of kidnapping and killing a man he suspected of being an undercover drug agent in January 2003. Walker beat and shot the man before dumping his body in a recreation area near Palm Bay.
-- James Barnes, 48: Was serving a life sentence for killing his wife when he confessed to the 1988 rape and murder of a nurse. Barnes raped her, hit her head repeatedly with a hammer before setting fire to her mattress to conceal the evidence.Bryan Jennings, 51: Convicted three times for the rape and killing of 6-year-old Merritt Island girl in 1979.
-- Justin Heyne, 28: Sentenced to death in December in the March 2006 shooting deaths of two of his roommates and their 5-year-old daughter in Titusville as the result of an argument over money.

Source: FLORIDA TODAY archives

Patience, faith shepherd the wrongly accused

By Norris Burkes

At 21, William Dillon stood to hear a Brevard County, Fla., judge sentence him to life in prison for murder.

For the next 27 years, Dillon proclaimed his innocence. He finally was released from prison in 2008.

In May, I watched Dillon stand to preach a message of freedom to a small Florida congregation. Humbly receiving introductory applause, Dillon bowed with a noticeable shudder to his stance.

Whispers filled the congregation.

“It looks like he’s praying,” a congregant said.

“It’s OK,” assured another parishioner, “We are all here with you.”

More deep breaths. Dillon’s face reddened as he tried to steady himself.
“Good morning,” he finally managed to say. Then he expelled more deep breaths and sobs.

Finally, “I’d like to thank God, for what he did and the many people ... involved in freeing me. It was quite a journey.”

Dillon’s journey through false accusations started when he pulled off a Florida coastal highway for a smoke on Aug. 21, 1981.

As he stood watching the waves, sheriff’s investigators approached, asking Dillon if he knew anything about a murder on the same beach five days earlier.

Dillon assured them he knew only what he’d read in the paper. Yet, in less than 24 hours, a witness who was legally blind in one eye, a spurned girlfriend and a fraudulent scent-dog handler made the case to arrest Dillon for the beachside murder.

With that kind of evidence, he doesn’t blame the jury.

“I would have convicted myself,” he said.

Dillon was convicted in record time and went to Florida State Prison on March 22, 1982.

“This was a place for violent offenders,” Dillon said, “not first-time offenders. Somebody must have requested that I be sent there in hopes I’d disappear or be destroyed.”

Despite his lawyer’s insistence this could be fixed, Dillon said, “I knew my life was over.”

As the years sailed by, his life certainly seemed done. He wrote letters to every justice organization he could, including the famed Innocence Project, yet his cries went unanswered.

“Through the torments, I never forgot that I was an innocent man,” he said to a weeping congregation. “The problem was, the innocent man was gone.”

Determined to keep his youthful innocence in prison, Dillon created a music department through donations and grants.

“With the music,” he said, “I got people to think more about the right things than the wrong things.”

Finally, Dillon sat down to write one more letter. This one was addressed to a judge asking for a DNA test.

“I prayed about it before mailing it,” he said, “and four months later, it was granted.”

Finally, the Innocence Project joined the fight, and DNA tests led to Dillon’s freedom in November 2008.

I asked him about the spiritual strength that sustained him through almost 27 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and he credited God.

His faith reminded me of the prophet Isaiah, who would credit God for “freedom for the prisoners and ... release for the oppressed.”

“It’s been a ride, and God has blessed me and taken all the corners,” he said. “God gave me a bulldog for a lawyer and the Innocence Project team who knew about DNA.”

With no formal religion, Dillon declares that his “religion is my belief that God exists. I believe wholeheartedly in the Creator. I know that God works.”

Recalling the image of a beach where his nightmare began, Dillon likened his deliverance to “God picking me up like a grain of sand on the beach. He washed me up and made me a free man.”

Editorial: Fitting punishment

The Supreme Court took a proper step Monday in seeking the right balance when judges sentence juveniles convicted of brutal crimes.

The court ruled that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed shouldn't be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was the second major decision from the court in recent years regarding punishment of teens. In 2005, the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for juveniles.

The court agrees with the emerging science that says teen brains are less developed than adults'. As such, teens are more susceptible to peer pressure, and less able to make good decisions.

While the crimes at issue are often very heinous, teens also stand a better chance to be rehabilitated with the passage of time and maturity.

That's not to say every teen should eventually be set free. But all should at least be given a chance to show they have learned their lesson. That is essentially what Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.

"A state need not guarantee the offender eventual release," Kennedy wrote, "but if it imposes the sentence of life, it must provide him or her with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term."

The ruling supports the Eighth Amendment's protection against harsh punishment and is in line with the country's "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

The ruling is also in line with the judicial standards for much of the free world.

The case before the court involved a 16-year-old who helped rob a Florida restaurant in which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. The teen was sentenced to one year in prison and three years probation. The following year, the teen and two others committed a home invasion, and he was sentenced to life for violating his parole.

Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed with the majority, saying that when the Bill of Rights was adopted, capital punishment existed for children as young as 7.

But Justice John Paul Stevens showed how Thomas' "strict constructionist" logic was deeply flawed. He said under Thomas' argument, a 7-year-old who steals $50 today could be sentenced to death. "Knowledge accumulates," wrote Stevens, who is retiring this summer. "We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes."

Stevens' accumulated knowledge will be missed.