Category Archives: 21st Century

2011: A day in the death penalty around the world

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China

On the morning of July 19, 2011, two Chinese politicians were executed for corruption.

Xu Maiyong (right), former vice mayor of Hangzhou in Zhejiang and bearer of the Santa Claus-esque nickname “Plenty Xu”, was on the hook for $30 million of embezzlement as part of a wide-ranging campaign of public graft in service of a suitably luxuriant lifestyle filled with homes and mistresses.

Jiang Renjie, deputy mayor in charge of urban planning, construction, transportation, communications and housing in Suzhou, had made about half that much in bribes from developers around 2001-2004.

United States

On July 19, 2011, Arizona executed 52-year-old Thomas Paul West, a mere 24 years after he beat a man to death while robbing his Tucson trailer in June 1987.

West had the depressing background so common to condemned prisoners, a litany of childhood sexual abuse that drove him to drug abuse and a PTSD diagnosis: he would claim that he “freaked out” when the homeowner Donald Bortle surprised him and started yelling at him, and that he didn’t think he’d killed Bortle at all.

He lost a closely divided clemency vote shortly before his death on a 3-2 margin. He also lost judicial appeals over Arizona’s having illegally obtained the execution drug sodium thiopental, and then switched the injection protocol at the last minute to the instead use the hip new killing-drug pentobarbital. He even lost after he was already dead.

The Grand Canyon State, more famous perhaps for its outre immigration policies, is an emerging death penalty hot spot.

Per the Death Penalty Information Center’s database, Arizona didn’t conduct its first 21st-century execution until 2007, nor its second until 2010. But West was the fourth man (no women since 1930) put to death there in 2011, and the state could carry out up to seven in 2012.

Iran

The public triple-hanging in Azadi Square in the ethnically Kurdish west Iranian city of Kermanshah on this date was just a drop in the bucket relative to Iran’s hundreds-strong annual execution toll. But this one made the headlines.

Fazel Hawramy of Kurdishblogger.com provided the following video of the public hanging to Amnesty International, which helped focus worldwide attention on the event … although to what real consequence for “the continuing horror of the death penalty in Iran” (Amnesty’s words) is harder to say.

Equally hard to say from here is what relationship the hanged men’s rape conviction had to reality.

Warning: This is a snuff film.

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2011: Scott McLaren, Highlander

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A year ago today, 20-year-old Scott McLaren of the 4th Battalion (The Highlanders) the Royal Regiment of Scotland was captured by Afghan insurgents and summarily shot.

The baby-faced McLaren, not yet three months in Afghanistan at that point, had left his base in in the Nahr-e-Saraj district of Helmand province during the middle of the night; reports suggest that he’d done so in order to retrieve mislaid night-vision goggles whose loss he would have been punished for. (This detail, while poignant, is not completely certain.)

Whatever the reason for his sortie, it ended with him being captured by Afghan insurgents.

As British, U.S., and Afghanistan forces mounted a 17-hour manhunt for the missing soldier, McLaren was reportedly stripped of his body armor and equipment and, at some point, shot in the head and dumped in a canal. The exact circumstances of his capture and death may never be known.

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2010: Michael Perry, Herzog subject

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It was on this date in 2010 that Texas executed Michael Perry by lethal injection for his part in a triple homicide that netted a cherry-red Camaro.

Perry is the subject of the 2011 Werner Herzog documentary Into the Abyss; being a Herzog film, it comes recommended.

Abyss is “not an issue film; it’s not an activist film against capital punishment,” Herzog has said. “In this particular case, with this very senseless crime, so senseless it’s staggering, what fascinated me was that it points to a decay in family values and the cohesion of society, all these things that looked so big and beyond this case.”

Trailer:

Interview with Herzog:

Full movie, if it remains available:

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2001: Jay Scott, trend-setter

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Not Ohio’s first execution in the “modern” era — that distinction belongs to Wilford Berry, who voluntarily waived his appeals to hasten a 1999 execution — Jay Scott, who was put to death by lethal injection on this date in 2001, stands at the headwaters of Ohio’s 21st century death penalty binge.

Prior to Scott’s death, Ohio had carried out only that one execution, Berry’s, in all the previous 48 years.

But it’s made up for lost time with another 45 executions in the eleven years since Scott died.

A paranoid schizophrenic and career criminal, Scott entered an East Cleveland deli in May 1983, ordered bologna and crackers, and then shot the 74-year-old proprietess at point-blank range after she served him. Then he went for the restaurant brace by gunning down a security guard at another restaurant. (That death sentence was eventually reversed; technically, Scott died for the first murder only.)

By the time he paid for the crimes, Scott had gotten to know the fledgling Ohio execution process pretty well.

Scheduled death dates on April 17 and May 15 had both been stayed at the last moment over legal appeals around his mental competency — on that latter date, he was three minutes from execution with the shunts that would carry the lethal chemicals already stuck in his arms.

Laborious as it was to finally consummate, Scott’s was the only Ohio execution in 2001.

But the state conducted three the next year — and it’s never carried out fewer than two in any year since then.

Part of the Themed Set: Ohio.

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2011: Yao Jiaxin, road rager

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On this date last year, a young pianist turned public enemy number one was executed in China for a notorious roadside murder.

Yao Jiaxin, a 21-year-old student at Xi’an Conservatory, hit a waitress on her bike while driving in October 2010.

Seeing her taking down his car’s license plate and fearful that she would revenge herself with financial demands for her minor injuries, an infuriated Yao stabbed her to death there at the scene.

“Yao stabbed the victim’s chest, stomach and back several times until she died,” in the words of one court. “The motive was extremely despicable, the measures extremely cruel and the consequences extremely serious.”

Appropriately, the execution took place on the very day that Chinese students were facing grueling university entrance exams, like the ones Yao himself had passed a few years before.

This event sparked massive national outrage, and Yao — the ivory-tickling son of a well-off couple who worked for the defense industry but didn’t have the pull of true elites — proved to be perfectly cast for the role of public pariah in a country undergoing the cataclysmic social displacements of internal migration, urban proletarianization, social stratification, and uneven capitalistic growth. He reportedly told police in his confession that he feared that his victim, a “peasant woman[,] would be hard to deal with.”

So-called “netizens” thrilled to the scandalous murder and bombarded online communications spaces with demands for Yao’s condign execution — an offering to the hollow bromides of legal egalitarianism that people in China as everywhere else see flouted every day. Yao’s family even fed that in a backhanded way by offering the victim’s family a larger compensation than that demanded by law if they would back off their demand for execution. Those “peasants” spurned the bribe.

Despite the familiar spectacle of public bloodlust over an infamous crime, Yao’s case also had an unsettling effect for at least some. He was, after all, a promising young man undone by a moment of madness and moral frailty: his downfall was distinctly tragic, in the classical sense, and not such a stretch to read as symbolic of China’s challenges and transformations.

Palpably grief-stricken and contrite about it — his parents took him to the police station to turn himself in, and cameras tracked the frail-looking youth through his few months of legal calvary all the way to a pitiably sobbing spectacle in his final court appearance as he pleaded in vain for his life — Yao could inspire pity as well as loathing.

The nature of Yao’s crime makes him an unlikely poster-boy for ending capital punishment per se. Yet there was also something discomfiting about authorities’ theatrical and foreordained compliance with a bloodlust that they had arguably stoked.

And in a China which has moved towards dialing down executions in recent years, even Yao’s individual culpability met some overt challenge: academics and legal professionals prepared to frame it as a crime of passion or something akin to “temporary insanity,” meriting a lesser punishment.

“A lot of people felt shocked,” a Chinese death penalty opponent told a western reporter. “They felt shocked by the process. Some people thought the netizens pushed the court into giving Yao the death penalty.”

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2008: Curtis Osborne, poorly represented

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Nach Golde drängt,
Am Golde hängt
Doch alles.

–Goethe, Faust

On this date in 2008, Curtis Osborne suffered lethal injection in Georgia for a double murder.

In the words of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution report, “Osborne was executed for shooting Arthur Jones and Linda Lisa Seaborne on Aug. 7, 1990. Osborne allegedly killed Jones because Osborne didn’t want to give him the $400 he got for selling Jones’ motorcycle. Seaborne was killed because she was there.”

Pretty awful.

It’s very difficult to capture in individual cases the structural dimensions of the death penalty system, simply because individual cases are, well, individual. The many plausible actual innocence cases are one thing. Here what you’ve got is a guy who unquestionably shot dead two humans so that he could feed his cocaine habit: making some procedural argument for Curtis Osborne is going to sound like a lot of special pleading.

But those procedural arguments are the very guts of the animal. The U.S. death penalty proposes, as an institution, to attempt not the question, does Curtis Osborne deserve to die?, but the question, among hundreds of Curtis Osbornes, do we have the apparatus to justly distinguish the ones that deserve to die?

As an impoverished drug addict, Osborne was represented at trial by a since-deceased public defender named Johnny Mostiler.

If you search this case, the thing you’ll find immediately is that another defendant being represented at the same time by Mostiler would later swear that Mostiler told him, speaking of Osborne, “that little nigger deserves the chair.” And the context of the conversation was about how Mostiler had just received a plea offer that Mostiler didn’t plan even to relay to Osborne, for the aforementioned reason.

Pretty awful.

This sort of thing is hard to substantiate: the allegation comes from a man serving a murder sentence of his own, and Mostiler isn’t around to defend himself. But on its own, it’s a shocking claim and a reminder of how profoundly the trial attorney’s performance shapes the entire legal experience. As Time magazine put it, what if your lawyer wants you executed?

Whether Mostiler really dropped an N-bomb on Osborne’s case, we really don’t know. But it’s been said that capital punishment means those without capital get the punishment, and the fact of the matter is that not many of any race who have recourse to indigent defense are served at the bar by Atticus Finch.

Leave aside even that shocking racism allegation, one that no court saw fit to adjudicate. (Prosecutors called the racism claim “outlandish”; appellate court ruled it procedurally out of bounds.) Just reckon the structural situation.

The American Prospect profiled the blinged-out, fast-living Mostiler after his death — breathing not a word about Osborne’s case, which was nowhere on anybody’s radar — and described, essentially, the neoliberal project in action for public defenders.

Mostiler represented not only Osborne, but virtually every poor defendant in Spalding County, Georgia … because, in 1990, he’d pitched the county on a fixed annual contract. Mostiler argued that the county was

wasting money paying as many as 20 court-appointed attorneys $50 an hour to handle indigent cases without knowing exactly how many hours those attorneys would bill during any given year. Mostiler proposed instead that the commissioners pay him a flat fee to handle all of the county’s indigent cases, regardless of the number. That way the county would have to deal with only one lawyer, and it would know its final bill at the start of the fiscal year rather than at the end.

Let justice be done though the heavens fallwithin the confines of fiscal probity. This grift was going to be worth a good deal more than $400 … and come with its own body count, too.

Mostiler bragged about saving the county a good million bucks over the course of the nineties. That’s a new definition of the adversarial judicial process, fresh-minted for the race-to-the-bottom era: every exertion by a defense attorney on his client’s behalf costs him part of his own paycheck.

Small wonder that Mostiler hardly ever tried cases — no more than seven a year, he said, out of as many as 900 felonies. Most were dispatched within minutes in shotgun plea deals and no small number of those momentary clients remain on the inside of a Georgia penitentiary as we speak. Did we mention that Mostiler did all this “lawyering” in only 60% of his lawyer time? He kept up a lively private civil practice, too, one where he probably averaged more than 100 minutes per case.

Death sentences, of course, don’t result from plea bargains — but at Mostiler’s zero-sum rates he also wasn’t going to prep this like the Dream Team. Slate reported that

Mostiler never hired a psychiatrist to examine evidence that Osborne was a victim of childhood abuse, and was borderline retarded, despite a court-ordered sanity evaluation that had found “indications of depression, paranoia, and suicidal ideation.” He never examined the history of mental illness in Osborne’s family because, he said, he didn’t know how to conduct that kind of investigation. Mostiler called no expert witnesses to testify for his client and didn’t bother to interview the state’s experts before they appeared at trial. And he rejected appointment of a second attorney to help with Osborne’s defense, which the American Bar Association and all serious death penalty litigators say is essential if a capital murder defendant is to receive a fair trial.

Pretty damn awful.

Once Osborne’s conviction was in the books at the trial level, no appellate court could intervene without clearing a very high bar: would the evidence un-investigated and the argument un-made likely have made a difference? Could anyone prove that Mostiler described his client with a racial slur? Nobody could really say so. End of story.

It was 18 years between the time Osborne laid those two souls in the ground and the time he laid himself down on the gurney. The irony is that all that time, all those exhaustive appeals, left the most salient and troubling questions in his case un-examined. There were substantive questions here, but Georgia prevailed in a procedural argument that those questions remain closed.

All this unsalved death and sorrow, and all for what? So Curtis Osborne could have another hit. So Spalding County, Georgia wouldn’t have to trouble the property levies with billable hours. For nothing but a little bit of money.

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2012: Majid Jamali Fashi

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Today in Iran, Majid Jamali Fashi was hanged for murdering nuclear scientist Masoud Alimohammadi — allegedly at the behest of Israeli intelligence.

Alimohammadi, a Tehran University physics professor, was slain in January 2010 by a booby-trapped motorcycle parked next to his car just as he left for work in the morning.

It’s one of a whole pattern of “events that happen unnaturally” befalling Iranian scientists — events whose rather self-evident foreign sponsorship is supposed to be bracketed as “alleged” and definitely not described as “terrorism”.

Whether that’s specifically true in Alimohammadi’s case is arguably a bit harder to judge, since he was not directly involved in Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s western opponents have speculated that Tehran itself murdered him because he was a (low-key) supporter of the country’s opposition who in death could serve as an official martyr.

That would be awfully convenient: official martyrs come cheap but Iran doesn’t exactly have a limitless supply of particle physicists.

Accurately or not, Fashi confessed to carrying out Alimohammadi’s assassination, claiming that he was recruited, paid, and trained by the Mossad for the job.

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2011: Three in Shiraz

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A year ago this date, three young men identified as Abolfazl Faraei, Reza Roshanfekr and Seyed Rokneddin Karimi were executed by hanging from cranes in Shiraz, Iran, on charges of kidnapping, armed robbery, and murder.

Disturbing images of the public hangings follow; click on any save the last to zoom to a larger disturbing.

Update: Shiraz marked the anniversary date by hanging eight more the day this post was published, April 16, 2012.

Another man was reported hanged the same date for murder in nearby Takhteh Kenar.

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2010: Modise Mokwadi Fly, Botswana pol

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 2010, reggae artist, politician, activist and convicted child killer Modise Mokwadi Fly was hanged in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone.

He was the second person to be executed under the administration of President Ian Khama; the first was also a child killer.

Fly, a South African national, had been general secretary of the Botswana Congress Party Youth League. On November 27, 2006, he killed his two-year-old son, Tawana Mosinyi, with an ax while the toddler slept. Fly maintained until his death that Tawana’s death was accidental and he’d actually been trying to throw his ax at the police who were firing shots at his house from outside. The prosecution believed Fly deliberately killed his son to spite the child’s mother, whom he’d recently quarreled with.

After his conviction on October 17, 2008, Fly apologized to Tawana’s family for his death. He sentenced to hang five days later, then he waited a year and a half for his date with death. Witnesses reported he seemed oddly cheerful and gregarious in court, smiling and chatting amiably with his friends and relatives who attended the trial.

In February 2010, the month before his execution, Fly made an attempt to escape from prison. He was the first prisoner to succeed in escaping from Botswana’s death row — but he was only free for fifteen minutes. After his capture, it was alleged, he was brutally beaten by the guards and then placed in solitary confinement so no one could see his injuries.

If the prison did in fact do this, it didn’t work: the news of the alleged mistreatment became public on March 23. Whether the timing had anything to do with his secretive execution the next day is unclear. Predictably, Botswana’s Department of Prisons and Rehabilitation denied that the prisoner had been abused or placed in isolation.

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2010: Paul Warner Powell, jurisprudentially confused

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On this date in 2010, Paul Warner Powell was electrocuted in Virginia — the last human being, as of this writing, to be put to death by that method, although he is not likely to retain that distinction long-term.

However many might be yet to ride the lightning, it is doubtful that any will usurp this virulent racist’s place on dumbest-criminals lists.

Powell confronted a 16-year-old acquaintance about her relationship with an African-American, and in the altercation that followed our man stabbed Stacie Reed in the heart.

Then the charmer laid in wait in the house for the return of Stacie’s 14-year-old sister, whom he raped and left (so he thought) stabbed to death in the basement. Kristie Reed survived an abdomen wound and a slashed throat.

So far, just a regular malevolent criminal.

But his fate turned on a small legal technicality followed by a monumentally foolish blunder.

Initially death-sentenced for the murder (of Stacie) aggravated by the rape (of Kristie), that sentence was vacated by the Commonwealth’s high court on the grounds that rape could only aggravate the murder into a capital crime if it was the murder victim (Stacie) who was raped. Prosecutors had not shown that.

Erroneously believing this decision to have freed him from any risk of execution thanks to double jeopardy, Powell then proceeded to scribble a lengthy jeering diatribe to his prosecutor “to show you how stupid all of y’all mother fuckers are.”

The entire very profane letter is here. Apart from its intrinsically monstrous narrative, it made this very unwise admission about how things went with the murder victim Stacie:

I told her that all I wanted to do was fuck her and then I would leave and that we could do it the easy way or the hard way.

… she got up and started fighting with me and clawed me face. We wrestled around a little and then I slammed her to the floor. When she hit the floor I sat on top of her and pinned her hands down again. She said she would fuck me and I told her that if she tried fighting with me again, I would kill her.

This freely-confessed attempted rape (it was not consummated — hence the state’s previous inability to charge it) qualified as the exact aggravating factor whose want had just enabled Powell to escape death row. And in fact, prosecutors were able to use it to try Powell for his life once again. This time, they got him — and it stuck.*

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Powell, it turned out, was an energetic correspondent.

Apart from the aforementioned lethal missive, he posted other bigoted mash notes to his prosecutor “Fat Ebert”; he sent menacing taunts to the victims’ mother Lorraine Whoberry; and he even began swapping racy billets-doux with the married forewoman of his first jury who, guilt-stricken at having sent a man to his death, started writing the murderer and wound up falling for him and testifying on his behalf at his second sentencing.

Just a bizarre case all around.

Whoberry, the mother of Stacie and Kristie and the woman whom Powell had crudely harassed by mail from prison, founded the STACIE Foundation to teach compassion for violent crime victims. Whoberry even had some compassion of her own for Powell, eventually forgiving him; the two spoke amicably by phone on the night before Powell’s execution.**

* This raises our periodic reminder to anyone who should come to be of interest in a legal investigation not to talk to the police, period.

However, it is our firm conviction that Executed Today attracts a caliber of reader who intuit the inadvisability of confessing one’s capital crimes in florid written detail.

** Forgiveness or no, Whoberry did continue to support Powell’s execution.

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