FW: [GFADP] News: Osborne -clemency denied; please join a vigil

1 view

Skip to first unread message

Joseph Shippen

unread,

Jun 2, 2008, 12:00:48 PM6/2/08

to epfat...@googlegroups.com

From: GF...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:GF...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of gfadp
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 11:56 AM
To: GF...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [GFADP] News: Osborne -clemency denied; please join a vigil

friends
very sad news this morning: the parole board denied the clemency
request to Curtis Osborne.

please plan to join one of the vigils on wed., june 4

vigil schedule:
http://www.gfadp.org/TakingAction/CurtisOsborne/tabid/79/Default.aspx

thnks
laura m
---------------
Also, this piece was published sunday:

Posted on Sun, Jun. 01, 2008 Georgia moves quickly to resume
executions
By SHANNON McCAFFREY
ATLANTA
After a seven-month nationwide halt on executions while the Supreme
Court considered the constitutionality of lethal injections, Georgia
seems eager to make up for lost time.

The state became the nation's first to hold an execution after the
court upheld the injections, and is now scheduled to hold another one
Wednesday. The execution scheduled for next week could have been the
state's third in a month, but what would have been the second one in
May was canceled when an inmate's death sentence was commuted.
Meanwhile, only two other states - Mississippi and Virginia - have
put inmates to death.

That's about to change. Texas, which has led the nation in executions
since the 1970s, has 14 scheduled into the fall. And eight other
states have set execution dates before the summer's end, according to
Capital Defense Weekly, a Web site for death penalty lawyers.

Why was Georgia so quick out of the box?

Experts say Georgia has a shorter waiting period - a maximum of just
29 days - than some other states to move forward with an execution
once a death warrant is signed. Once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
April that the three-drug lethal injection method used by most states
was constitutional, Georgia was able to move with almost no delay.

And there were already several cases in the pipeline when the high
court took up the lethal injection challenge. The backlog was created
in part because Georgia held only one execution between 2006 and 2007.

"In some ways, it's the luck of the draw," said Georgia Department of
Corrections spokesman Paul Czachowski.

William Earl Lynd's execution on May 6 was the first in the nation
after the April Supreme Court ruling. He was convicted of killing his
live-in girlfriend in Berrien County two decades ago.

Samuel David Crowe was scheduled to die on May 22 but had his
sentence commuted to life in prison without parole just hours before
he was to be put to death.

The state is set to move forward with the execution on Wednesday of
Curtis Osborne, for killing a Spalding County couple in 1990.

Bill Hoffmann, an attorney representing Osborne, said he can't fault
the state for its aggressive strategy.

"We had a stay awaiting the decision, and now it's been lifted," he
said. "The state's gotta do what the state's got to do."

Still, Sara Totonchi of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said
she's been surprised by the fast early pace Georgia has set.

"Why the rush?" she asked. "Is this really an area where Georgia
wants to be leading the nation?"

Prosecutors dispute that the state is moving quickly at all, noting
that Lynd, Crowe and Osborne have each been on death row for almost
two decades.

"What rush? Just look at how old these cases are," said Rick Malone,
executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia.

There's no denying that politics also plays a role in the scheduling
of death penalty cases, said Richard Dieter, executive director of
the Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, which
opposes capital punishment.

He said "informal slowdowns" take place in states where politicians
are less enthusiastic about capital punishment, while cases move more
quickly in states where influential leaders are in favor of the death
penalty.

"I would say the political shifts in Georgia favor executions and so
you are seeing that," he said.

Even if more executions are scheduled in Georgia this year it's
unlikely the state will surpass the record of 23 conducted in 1935,
when the Georgia's death row was using the electric chair.

Four executions were performed in both 2001 and 2002. That's the
highest number since the state adopted lethal injection as its method
of execution in October 2001.