Tag Archives: 2008

2008: Charles Laplace

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Charles Laplace was hanged in a Basseterre prison on this date in 2008, for stabbing his wife to death. It’s the most recent execution carried out in the Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis and it drew the ire of human rights advocates because it was carried out before Laplace could exercise his appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. That had also been the case with Saint Kitts and Nevis’s last previous execution, in 1998.

Capital punishment does remain on the books for the small (pop. 52,000) Commonwealth nation.

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2008: Kedisaletse Tsobane

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

On this day in 2008, 49-year-old Kedisaletse Tsobane was executed in the southern African nation of Botswana for the murder of his ten-year-old daughter, Kgotso Macfallen. He was the first person to be executed under the administration of President Ian Khama.

Tsobane approached Kgotso as she was walking to school in Francistown on the morning of January 20, 2004, and offered her a lift. She hopped into his car. Later that day, passersby found the little girl’s body in the bush. She was kneeling on the ground, hanging from a tree by an electric cable.

Arrested the next day, Tsobane quickly confessed to the crime. He pleaded guilty to murder, saying,

I killed the child in an attempt to avoid liability in order to do away with my indebtedness. I was trying to do away with maintenance arrears. I killed the child by strangling it with a rope.

He was supposed to pay 40 Botswana pula, or a little less than $4 a month, but he hadn’t parted with so much as a single thebe since Kgotso’s birth. He was deep in debt and his wife had begun to complain.

Tsobane claimed that a week before the murder, Kgotso’s mother had taunted him about the debt, telling him he had to pay support for a child that wasn’t his. He said he got drunk and high on marijuana and committed the murder impulsively. Upon these mitigating circumstances Tsobane founded his case for commuting the sentence to life in prison.

The prosecution, however, produced a death certificate for Kgotso’s mother: she’d died in 2002 and couldn’t have been teasing him like he said. And the court didn’t buy Tsobane’s plea that he was too intoxicated to realize the nature and consequences of his actions. His own statement that he’d strangled Kgotso and then hanged her from a tree to make her death look like a suicide probably didn’t help his case.

The judge that sentenced Tsobane to death remarked, “In the circumstances, it is not clear why he was driven to commit the offense.” The Botswana Court of Appeal was equally puzzled by Tsobane’s motives. He could have sold his car to alleviate his financial worries, the court noted, but

He did not do so. He had, apparently, never paid any maintenance for the deceased, so even that had nothing in reality to do with her. Why then kill her, in order to get rid of his liabilities?

Whatever his reasons, Tsobane took them with him to his grave.

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2008: Two alleged prostitutes, by the Taliban

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On this date in 2008, the Taliban executed two women whom it claimed were running a prostitution ring for U.S. soldiers based in the city of Ghazni.

The Taliban invited a journalist who gives us a disarmingly placid picture of the two burka-clad women seemingly conversing even as armed men surrounding them in the nighttime gloom prepare to take their lives.

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2008: Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Nerd Cult Killer

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

On this date in 2008, serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was hanged in Japan, alongside two men convicted of unrelated crimes. Sometimes called the “Nerd Cult Killer” for his fascination with anime and manga, Miyazaki had kidnapped, murdered and mutilated four young girls in the course of less than a year, between August 1988 and June 1989.

Like many serial killers, Miyazaki had a bad start in life. He was born premature, weighing in at only four pounds, and both his hands were badly deformed. His fingers were gnarled and his wrists fused, making it impossible for him to bend them upwards. The defect meant he was bullied in school, and at home, his entire family seemed to detest him. (Meanwhile, his father was sexually abusing his sister.)

Miyazaki was bright, and initially did well in school, even becoming the first student at his junior high school to pass the entrance exam to the exclusive Meidai Nakano High School. But in high school his grades got worse and he didn’t land a place in university. Instead he went to a tech school and learned to be a photography technician.

By his early twenties he had become obsessed with child pornography. Things got even worse when his grandfather, the only person he was close to, died in May 1988; Miyazaki killed his first victim a few months later.

Four-year-old Mari Konno walked out of her home in Saitana, Japan on August 22, 1988 and vanished. Robert Keller describes the ensuing search in detail in his book Asian Monsters: 28 Terrifying Serial Killers from Asia and the Far East:*

The little girl’s disappearance caused massive public distress in Saitana, an area unused to violent crime. Police cars with loudspeakers patrolled the streets warning parents not to allow their children out of their sight. Meanwhile the police spent nearly 3,000 man-days interviewing people who lived near Mari’s home. They distributed 50,000 missing person posters and brought in tracking dogs in hope of picking up a scent. Nothing.

A couple of people did report seeing Mari in the company of an adult man and the descriptions they gave, 5-foot-six with a pudgy face and wavy hair, were accurate, but the information lead nowhere. When the police received a genuine clue — a postcard sent to Mari’s mother with the cryptic message “There are devils about” — they dismissed it as a hoax.

Six weeks later, with Mari still missing, Miyazaki abducted seven-year-old Masami Yoshizawa, took her into the hills near Komine Pass, strangled her and sexually violated her corpse, leaving it 100 yards from where he’d dumped Mari’s body earlier.

The police thought the two disappearances were probably related, but they had almost nothing to go on and little hope that the children were still alive.

Miyazaki struck again on December 12, luring four-year-old Erika Namba into his Nissan, taking her to a park and telling her to undress. He started taking photos of her naked body, but then panicked and strangled her. He was driving away, with Erika’s body in the trunk of his car, when the car got stuck. Miyazaki carried the body into the woods and hid it, and when he returned to his vehicle, two men had stopped to help. They were able to get his car back on the road.

When Erika’s body was found the next day, the two witnesses told police about the man and his car, but they said it was a Toyota Corolla, not a Nissan. The police dutifully investigated 6,000 Toyota Corolla owners.

In the months that followed, as Keller records:

[Miyazaki] began stalking his victims’ families, calling them at all hours and then saying nothing on the other end of the line. When the distraught parents stopped picking up the phone, Miyazaki would allow it to continue ringing for upward of twenty minutes. Eventually he grew tired of taunting the grieving families by telephone and resorted to more sickening measures.

A week after Erika Namba was murdered, her father got a postcard with a message formed from cut-out magazine letters: “Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.”

On February 6, 1989, Mari Konno’s father found a box on his doorstep containing 220 human bone fragments and ten baby teeth — later identified as Mari’s — and photos of his late daughter’s shorts, underpants and sandals. There was a note also, typed on copier paper: “Mari. Bones. Cremated. Investigate. Prove.”

When the Konno family returned home after Mari’s funeral, they found another communication from the killer: a letter, titled “Confession,” where he described in detail the physical changes in Mari’s body as it decomposed.

On June 6, 1989, Miyazaki abducted five-year-old Ayako Nomoto and strangled her, then photographed and videotaped her body in various poses over the next three days. When the smell became too offensive, he dismembered the body, putting the torso in a public toilet and the head and limbs in the woods. He kept Ayako’s hands, roasted them and ate them.

Ayako’s torso was quickly found, but again the homicide investigation went nowhere. Like a lot of serial killers, Miyazaki was caught by accident.

On July 23, Miyazaki accosted some schoolgirls, sisters, playing in a park. The older one ran to get their father, leaving Miyazaki alone with the younger one. When the girls’ father arrived, he found Miyazaki taking pornographic pictures of his daughter. He was arrested and charged with “forcing a minor to commit indecent acts,” but after 17 days in custody he broke down and confessed to the four murders.

At his trial, he tried for an insanity defense, talking nonsensically and blaming an alternate personality named “Rat Man” for the murders. One court-appointed psychiatrist thought he did have multiple personality disorder; another thought he was schizophrenic; a third said Miyazaki believed the murders were resurrect his dead grandfather, his only friend in the world.

Nevertheless, the verdict was guilty and the sentence, death. The Supreme Court of Japan upheld the death sentence in 2006; Chief Justice Tokiyasu Fujita said, “The crime was cold-blooded and cruel. The atrocious murder of four girls to satisfy his sexual desire leaves no room for leniency.”

To his final breath, Miyazaki never expressed remorse for his crimes.

* We cite the titles, not write the titles. -ed.

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2008: Jose Medellin, precedent

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On this date in 2008, Mexican national Jose Medellin was executed by Texas, pleasurably sticking its thumb in the eye of the International Court of Justice.

U.S. state and local officials have often displayed the ugly-American tendency to view binding treaty obligations as a Washington thing of no moment to the likes of a Harris County prosecutor. So when Medellin was arrested for the 1993 rape-murder of two teenage girls in a Houston park, the idea of putting him right in touch with Mexican diplomats to assist his defense was, we may safely suppose, the very farthest thing from anyone’s mind.

Yet under the Vienna Convention, that is exactly what ought to have occurred. The idea is that consular officials can help a fellow on foreign soil to understand his unfamiliar legal circumstances and assist with any measures for his defense — and by common reciprocity, every state is enabled to look after the interests of its nationals abroad.

A widespread failure to do this, in death cases and others, has involved the United States in a number of international spats over the years.

Jose Medellin was among more than 50 Mexican prisoners named in one of the most noteworthy of these: the Avena case, a suit by Mexico* against the United States in the International Court of Justice.

In its March 31, 2004 Avena decision, the ICJ found that U.S. authorities had “breached the obligations incumbent upon” them by failing in these instances to advise the Mexican nationals it arrested of their Vienna Convention rights, and of failing in almost all those cases likewise to advise Mexican representatives that a Mexican citizen had been taken into custody.

“The appropriate reparation in this case,” the 15-judge panel directed, “consists in the obligation of the United States of America to provide, by means of its own choosing, review and reconsideration of the convictions and sentences of the Mexican nationals.”

If you think the Lone Star State’s duly constituted authorities jumped right on that “obligation,” you must be new around here.

Several years before, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions visited the United States and filed a report complaining “that there is a generalized perception that human rights are a prerogative of international affairs, and not a domestic issue.”

“Domestic laws appear de facto to prevail over international law, even if they could contradict the international obligations of the United States,” the Special Rapporteur noted.

Texas, famed for not being messed with, took a dim view indeed to being bossed about from The Hague. Indeed, the very concept of foreign law and international courts is a gleefully-thrashed political pinata among that state’s predominant conservative electorate.

U.S. President George W. Bush — a former Texas governor who in his day had no time at all for appeals based on consular notification snafus — in this instance appealed to Texas to enact the ICJ’s proposed review.† In fact, he asserted the authority to order Texas to do so.

Texas scoffed.

“The World Court has no standing in Texas and Texas is not bound by a ruling or edict from a foreign court,” a spokesman of Gov. Rick Perry retorted.

This notion that America’s federalist governance structure could insulate each of her constituent jurisdictions from treaty obligations undertaken by the nation as a whole naturally seems preposterous from the outside. But in the U.S., this dispute between Washington and Austin was resolved by the Supreme Court — and the vehicle for doing so was an appeal lodged by our man, Medellin v. Texas.

The question at stake in Medellin was whether the treaty obligation was binding domestic law on its own — or if, by contrast, such a treaty required American legislative bodies to enact corresponding domestic statutes before it could be enforced. The high court ruled for the latter interpretation, effectively striking down Avena since there was zero chance of either Texas or the U.S. Congress enacting such a statute.

Medellin, the decision, spelled the end for Medellin, the man — and, at least for now, the end of any prospect of effectual intervention in American death penalty cases by international tribunals.

* Mexico, which no longer has the death penalty itself, has the heavy preponderance of foreign nationals on United States death rows at any given time.

** The Texas Attorney General’s press release announcing Medellin’s execution included a detailed appellate history of the case which pointedly excluded anything that happened in the ICJ.

† The Bush administration did take one effective step to avoid a similarly embarrassing situation in the future: it withdrew the U.S. from the consular notification convention.

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2008: Christopher Scott Emmett, jocund

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(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. This post originally appeared on the Last Words blog. Fans of this here site are highly likely to enjoy following Elder’s own pithy, almanac-style collection of last words on the scaffold. -ed.)

“Tell my family and friends I love them, tell the governor he just lost my vote. Y’all hurry this along, I’m dying to get out of here.”

— Christopher Scott Emmett, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Virginia.
Executed July 24, 2008

The Washington Post reported: “Emmett fatally beat his roofing company co-worker, John F. Langley, with a brass lamp in a Danville, Va., motel room in 2001. He then stole Langley’s money to buy crack.” He later lost an appeal in Virginia claiming that the state’s lethal injection protocol constituted “cruel and unusual” punishment.

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2008: Wo Weihan, spy?

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On this date in 2008, Chinese biochemist and businessman Wo Weihan was shot for espionage along with his alleged co-conspirator Guo Wanjun.

Wo had been resident in Austria since 1990, and his daughters Chen Ran and Chen Di were Austrian citizens. In 2004, he returned to his native soil to launch a medical equipment firm in Beijing.

Wo was arrested in China in January 2005 and accused of passing “state secrets” to Taiwan and the U.S. He didn’t have a lawyer until 2006 — by which time he had produced a coerced confession that he tried in vain to retract — and the 2007 trial took place in secret, so the case against him was troublingly opaque at the time of his execution. The verdict publicly released in March 2008 even included such trifles as “discussing the health of senior Chinese leaders” — an actual crime in China but awfully difficult to accept as a factor in a capital case.

“The lack of transparency does nothing to reassure us that the court’s conclusion was the right one,” said a Dui Hua Foundation spokesman.

Allegedly, Wo got information about Chinese ICBMs from missile expert Guo Wanjun, and passed drawings to Taiwanese and American intelligence. Chinese state media have claimed that Wo’s wife was able to open a restaurant in Austria with the payoffs.

His daughters mounted a last-ditch clemency campaign involving European Union officials, Austrian President Heinz Fischer, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, all to no avail.

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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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2008: One man pardoned during hanging

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There were two hangings reported this date at the prison in the southern Iranian city of Kazeroun (or Kazerun).

One Kourosh was executed for murdering a 52-year-old in 2004.

And someone named Abolfazl — well, he was much, much luckier. The parents of his victim availed their right to pardon him, although they waited until after the hanging had commenced to do so.

I believe (because how often can this happen in one town?) that this is the failed/survived execution attributed by Amnesty International to 2 December — which Amnesty argues “illustrates the inherent cruelty of the death penalty.”

The original link given by the Amnesty press release is now dead, but this source links the same article and says it cites 7 December; this Persian news story positively attributes the event to dawn on 17 Azar on the Iranian calendar, which corresponds to 7 December.

Not seven seconds had passed when the murder victim’s mother gave her pardon. Moments later, the victim’s father gave consent. Thus, immediately the accused was brought down from the gallows and given CPR while he was transferred to hospital.

Abolfazl survived. This story sported the headline “the sweet end of an execution.”

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2008: Greg Wright, still fighting for exoneration

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Two years on from his execution in Texas this date in 2008, the website FreeGregWright.com still bears its namesake’s now-hopeless case for exoneration.


Wright’s wife Connie (the woman on the right) and their friend Bente Hjortshøj released this photo of Greg Wright 15 minutes after execution “to show the world the cruel and unusual punishment and its horrible consequences.”

Wright and another homeless man, John Adams, were taken in by a generous 52-year-old widow named Donna Vick. Vick paid for her charity with her life … but who was the killer?

Adams fingered Wright, but Wright always insisted that Adams killed her. Late-arriving DNA evidence appeared to back Wright. So did too-late-to-matter confessions by Adams. (Adams, for his part, was also convicted for capital murder; each man was separately tried on the theory that he was the murderer and the other the bystander.)

The disputed facts of this case are a muddier affair that don’t readily admit a slam-dunk exoneration. An episode of the Dallas DNA television series looked at Wright’s case and disappointed Wright’s supporters with its unfavorable view of the subject’s case.

Wright, nevertheless, maintained his innocence from the execution gurney.

John Adams lied. He went to the police and told them a story. He made deals and sold stuff to keep from going to prison. I left the house, and I left him there. My only act or involvement was not telling on him. John Adams is the one that killed Donna Vick. I took a polygraph and passed. John Adams never volunteered to take one. … I was in the bathroom when [Adams] attacked [Vick]. I am deaf in one ear and I thought the T.V. was up too loud. I ran in to the bedroom. By the time I came in, when I tried to help her, with first aid, it was too late. The veins were cut on her throat. He stabbed her in her heart, and that’s what killed her. I told John Adams, “turn yourself in or hit the high road.” I owed him a favor because he pulled someone off my back. I was in a fight downtown. Two or three days later he turned on me. I have done everything to prove my innocence. Before you is an innocent man.

The victim’s son — for whom little ice was cut by Wright’s admitted failure to summon medical help for the victim, or to turn in the alleged killer Adams — complained that the statement was “the same thing we’ve got since day one, each of them blaming it on the other one.”

Former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney witnessed the execution, taking a break from her Green Party presidential bid.

One of the crime scene investigators in this case, Eric George Rosenstrom, is now himself wanted for murder.

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