[CUADPUpdate] CORRECTION, and more news....

[Abraham J. Bonowitz]

Sent to All Abolitionists - At Least Once!
Please Excuse Cross-Posts
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Greetings All!

CONTENTS
CORRECTION and more news

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CORRECTION

In the message I just sent out, I must have been sleeping when I wrote this:

>#4 - 30th Anniversary of Gregg Decision resources available.
>
>An organizing kit is available by e-mail request 
>to <khoule at aiusa.org>.  And, Prof. Michael 
>Radelet has prepared a "study guide" examining 
>the current state of the death penalty in the 
>United States in light of the 30th Anniversary 
>of the Gregg decision.  The 1972 Gregg decision 
>struck down all death sentences in the US, 
>forcing all states to re-write their death 
>penalty laws....  See the study guide at 
>http://www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/gregg/

**************

ACTUALLY, it was the FURMAN decision that struck 
down all the death penalty laws - on June 29, 
1972.  It was the GREGG decision that upheld the new laws.

The Fast & Vigil commemorates these two historic 
anniversaries.  Get more history at 
http://www.abolition.org/starvin13.Furmanhistory.html

*********


And a bit more news:


>From: Phyllis L
>Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 2:53 PM
>To: VADP-NOVA at yahoogroups.com; Diann Rust-Tierney
>Cc: Jack Payden-Travers; 'The Justice Project'
>Subject: One Life to Live soap opera denounces DP
>
>Please consider passing this on:
>
>“We have to stand together against this barbaric 
>inhumane practice,” says one of the leading 
>characters of daytime soap operas, Vickie 
>Buchanan (played by Erika Slezak) about the 
>death penalty.  The character of her brother, 
>Todd, is scheduled to be executed “tomorrow” – 
>which in daytime means today and tomorrow and in 
>two scenes on today’s episode, she says to the 
>press that she will be at the vigil against 
>capital punishment at the prison where the 
>execution will be held.  She asks all the 
>reporters to show up there, and on camera, 
>exhorts everyone in the public to stand with 
>her:  “Every voice must be heard.”   And one 
>reporter says, “It may not matter, but I agree 
>with you.  I’ll be there with my camera.”
>
>Pretty impressive!
>
>And everyone who is shown supporting his 
>execution looks rather vicious and 
>vindictive.  (The storyline is that he was 
>convicted of killing by throwing overboard in a 
>lake a woman who was carrying his baby, when 
>actually the woman survived and a scheming 
>doctor who wants Todd’s wife stole the “victim” 
>away and is letting him get executed for the non-murder.)
>
>It will be interesting to see soap opera 
>viewers’ response to this story.  Unlike other 
>soaps that have had people on the verge of 
>execution be saved at the last moment, I read 
>that they will actually go through with the 
>execution, and the truth of the “victim’s” 
>survival will come out moments too late.
>
>One Life to Live is on ABC, and in the DC area 
>is shown from 2 pm til 3 pm on ch. 7, and again 
>on Soapnet, a cable channel (on Comcast Ch. 
>120)  from 9 to 10 pm tonight, and overnight 3-4 
>a.m. , and tomorrow morning from 8-9 am
. The 
>same schedule for the Thursday and Friday 
>episodes.  On the weekend, all the week’s episodes will be shown on Soapnet

>
>Phyllis L.

**************


Message  of peace resonates after death of nun
By Rex W. Huppke; Chicago Tribune staff  reporter
May 21, 2006

BUFFALO -- Sister Karen Klimczak moved quick as  the wind off Lake Erie, a
peace-loving nun who crisscrossed the city with such  speed that friends
wondered, only half jokingly, if she hadn't borrowed some  Catholic saint's
miraculous ability to bilocate.

In a day she might race  from counseling ex-offenders at the halfway house
she ran to praying at a murder  victim's vigil, then head to the youth center
she founded before donning a clown  suit and 
bouncing joyously through a senior
center.

She was 62 years old,  5 feet 2 inches tall and just over 100 pounds,
tireless and in near-constant  motion. In western 
New York, they called her Mother
Teresa in fast forward.  Without a trace of hyperbole, they called her a gift
from God.

Now people  stumble over their words as they try to speak of her in the past
tense. That's  in part because the tragedy that befell Sister Karen Easter
weekend seems too  impossible, too wrong, to be real. And in part because this
nun, who left a  trail of forgiveness behind like footprints, seems as present
now in death as  she ever was in life.

Raised in a deeply religious home outside Buffalo,  Karen Klimczak entered
the convent after high school, earned a master's 
in  pastoral study from Loyola
University Chicago in the early 1980s and spent  several years as a
Catholic-school teacher in Buffalo.

A summer of  volunteer work at a state prison revealed in her a profound
sympathy for people  who'd served time, setting a course for her life's work.

"She felt they  were forgotten," said one of her sisters, Mary Lynch. "She
felt they never had a  chance unless somebody was there to help them."

In 1985, Sister Karen  opened HOPE House, a "Home of Positive Experience" for
ex-offenders. With a mix  of toughness and motherly compassion, it became one
of the more successful  after-prison programs in the region.

Men would return and invite her to  their wedding. They'd ask her to be
godmother to their children. Yet Sister  Karen 
insisted it was she who benefited
from the work.

"HOPE isn't for  men who have been incarcerated," she said in a videotaped
1987 interview with  the diocese of Buffalo. "HOPE is for me. For me to grow,
for me to see  brokenness in the eyes and in the heart of an individual. And
when the  brokenness is there, you can see God, 
and God can become real. And he's
become  more real for me through HOPE than any other experience."

On Good Friday,  Sister Karen attended a 7 p.m. service at Sts. Columba and
Brigid Church, where  she was a pastoral associate. The scripture focused on
the final words Jesus  Christ spoke as he hung on the cross at Calvary,
including: "Father, forgive  them; for they know not what they do."

After the service, she drove to  the red-brick halfway house. Several years
ago she had changed the name from  HOPE House to Bissonette House in honor of
Rev. A. Joseph Bissonette, a friend  murdered in the building in 1987 by two
teens who'd come to him seeking  help.

Sister Karen believed it important that the site of Bissonette's  murder be a
place of love and forgiveness. Morning prayers are said each day in  the
ground-floor room where he was killed.

About 9 p.m., Sister Karen was  on the third floor chatting with Robert
Walker, an ex-offender who'd been there  nearly a 
year. She mentioned the home's
newest resident, Craig Lynch, a  convicted car thief only nine days out of
prison.

Walker recalled the nun  saying Lynch, who'd battled the law and drug
addiction more than half his 36  years, seemed 
ready for a fresh start. A few days
earlier, he'd helped her  string paper crosses for Easter decorations. Before
leaving Walker's room,  Sister Karen spoke with her usual optimism: "I think
Craig's doing well," she  said. "I think he's going to be all right."

One floor down, police say,  Lynch had just passed Sister Karen's room and
noticed the door open, noticed the  cell phone by her computer. He would later
tell police he went in to take the  phone, hoping to sell it to buy crack
cocaine and cigarettes.

At 12:45  p.m. Saturday, Walker was in the kitchen of Bissonette House,
worried. He hadn't  seen Sister Karen all day. It 
wasn't like her to not check in.

"I  thought, `It's Easter weekend, maybe for once her planning got a little
screwed  up with all the festivities,'" he recalled. "But it didn't seem
right."

By 3:30 p.m., Walker phoned the Buffalo police, convinced Sister  Karen was
missing.

Concern grew as Easter weekend continued, and when she  didn't come to Easter
mass, most suspected foul play.

"I knew that  something terrible had happened," said Rev. Roy Herberger,
who'd known Sister  Karen more than 20 years. "I was just a basket case,
emotionally."

Police  and more than 100 volunteers spent Monday combing the rough Buffalo
neighborhoods where Sister Karen was best-known, and a prayer vigil was
planned  for that night. Minutes before the vigil 
began, relatives got word from
police:  The nun's body had been found.

When Detective Sgt. James Lonergan heard  Sister Karen was missing, it felt
like history repeating. Two decades earlier,  one of his first homicide cases
was the murder of Bissonette. Now he was  returning to the scene of that crime.

The home's nine residents were  rounded up Monday morning, interviewed and
given drug tests. Police say Lynch  was the only one who tested positive.

After several hours of  interrogation, Lonergan said, Lynch's claim that he
knew nothing of Sister  Karen's disappearance began to unravel.

"He finally admits he stole her  cell phone," Lonergan said. "He says she was
fine when he left. But it just  didn't make sense."

As his stories and alibis crumbled, Lynch confessed  to killing Sister Karen,
Lonergan said.

He led police to her body, buried  in a shed behind an abandoned yellow house
about 5 miles from Bissonette  House.

Lynch, who has two prior felony convictions and more than 10  arrests, mainly
on theft charges, has been charged with two counts of  first-degree murder
and, if convicted, faces life without possibility of parole.  His
court-appointed attorney, David Addelman, has 
entered a not guilty plea and  is looking into
the circumstances under which Lynch confessed.

"He does  not consider himself a violent person," Addelman said, noting that
Lynch got  along well with Sister Karen. "He was fond of her."

In a signed  transcript of his confession to police, Lynch detailed what he
claims happened  on Good Friday:

About 9:40 p.m. he entered Sister Karen's room on the  second floor to steal
her cell phone but heard her coming and hid behind the  door.

When she walked in, he grabbed her from behind and put his hand  over her
mouth. She was trying to scream.

"This is how people get hurt,"  he told her, according to the confession.
"People resist and they get hurt. I  don't want to hurt you."

He forced the nun to the floor, pressed her face  into the carpet and held
her there until she stopped moving. An autopsy 
would  later reveal she died from
strangulation.

Lynch said he put her body in  the bed so it looked like she was sleeping. He
then drove to a drug spot and  traded the phone for a rock of crack cocaine.

He drove off and stopped to  smoke the crack, but it wouldn't light. The rock
was fake.

"I threw the  rock out the window," Lynch told police. "That's when reality
set in and I  realized what I had done."

He said he returned to Bissonette House at 4  a.m., wrapped Sister Karen's
body in a comforter and drove to his mother's home.  He hid the body outside,
then returned on Easter and carried it across 
the  street in a garbage can to a
shed behind an abandoned house. He dug a deep hole  in the hard clay soil and
said a prayer.

"When I was done, praying, I  asked sister for forgiveness," Lynch said in
his confession. "I picked her out  of the garbage can and put her in the hole."

Lonergan said it was lucky  Lynch confessed.

"We'd have never in a million years found her," he  said.

Sister Karen's funeral in the cavernous St. Ann's Catholic Church  on
Broadway Street was believed to be the biggest in 
Buffalo history. White  paper doves
lined the walls and pews. People held candles high, swaying and  singing
"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."

Rev.  Herberger stood in the pulpit and referred to the words of Christ read
at the  Good Friday service eight days earlier: Father, forgive them; for they
know not  what they do.

"If one word would be synonymous with Karen it would be the  word `forgive,'"
Herberger said. "And she would be saying that about Craig. She  would be the
first person to say, `Father, forgive him, he really doesn't know  what he's
doing.'"

At the base of the altar was a dove-shaped sign. On it  was a slogan Sister
Karen came up with, part of a non-violence campaign she  planned to launch.

The sign read: "I Leave Peaceprints."

She hoped  it would inspire people to leave peace behind them wherever they
go. Since the  funeral, more than 4,000 signs have gone out, with more being
made each day, and  they've sprung like flowers on lawns across Buffalo.

Rather than turn  people against ex-offenders, Sister Karen's death has
brought greater commitment  to the work she did. 
Anonymous checks have come in to
Bissonette House to ensure  it keeps running. Volunteers have come forward.

"If she would have known  that her death would have had such a ripple effect,
she would've said, `So be  it,'" said Sister Roz Rosolowski, a chaplain at
Attica prison and longtime  friend of Sister Karen's. "What keeps a lot of us
going is the drive to continue  this work in her name. And it has just caught
fire."

The people of  Buffalo have lost someone who will never be replaced, yet
there is little anger  to be found this spring. Instead, there is resolve and
focus. Determination and  forgiveness.

There is a sense of ease, it seems, in the knowledge that  Sister Karen
hasn't gone far.

She's still leaving peaceprints.  Everywhere.

***********


The Death Penalty Punishes Us All
By Michael A. Kroll

Even before Joseph Clark struggled grotesquely, 
groaning through the 90 minutes it took Ohio 
executioners to put him out of his misery on May 
2, the courts had already refocused our attention 
on the evolving methods we employ in our efforts 
to find a humane way to put a human being to 
death. The method du jour, lethal injection, has 
replaced such methods (still in use) as hanging, 
lethal gas and the electric chair in 37 of the 38 
states that have the death penalty, and it is 
also the method chosen by the United States government.

         Among other reasons, challenges to the 
particular chemicals used in the lethal cocktail 
as violating the ban against cruel and unusual 
punishment have resulted in eleven stays of 
execution since the beginning of the year. Eleven 
others were executed over the same period, despite their challenges.

         One of those stays was in California in 
the case of Michael Morales. Until issues in his 
case are resolved in an evidentiary hearing now 
scheduled by Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel for 
September, there can be no executions in 
California. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court 
stayed the execution of Clarence Hill in Florida 
to consider whether or not he has the right to 
challenge that state's lethal injection protocol 
in civil court. In North Carolina, Patrick Moody 
was among the eleven unlucky ones. He became the 
state's 41st casualty of lethal injection on May 
17, though the first to have a court-ordered 
monitor attached to his temple to ensure that he 
was not conscious while the drugs killed him.

         In Professor Robert Johnson's seminal 
1997 book about those who carry out today's 
executions,  Death Work, A Study of the Modern 
Execution Process, he makes the point that each 
member of the modern execution team is trained to 
do a discrete task, like securing an ankle or a 
wrist, and then repeatedly drilled so that the 
task becomes automatic, like robots carrying out 
a pre-programmed task. The robot is not 
programmed to kill a person, but only to strap down his ankle.

         But executioners are not robots, and 
things happen to them, especially when what 
they've rehearsed is not what's played out. Will 
those terrible groans of Joseph Clark -- or the 
sight of him raising his head and shaking it 
while yelling, "It don't Work!" -- affect the men 
and women in that room? Will it affect the warden 
and his staff? The guards? The witnesses? And if so, how? And for how long?

         Some still alive today are haunted by 
the ghost of 15-year-old Willie Francis who 
survived his attempted electrocution in Louisiana 
in 1947, burned and smoking; no one who was there 
will forget how, in 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray died 
"banging his head against a steel pole in the gas 
chamber while the reporters counted his moans 
(eleven, according to the Associated Press"); 
some witnesses fainted as they watched William 
Landry's execution team take 14 minutes to 
reinsert the lethal needle after it popped out of 
his vein -- after the deadly drugs had begun to 
do their work; in 1990, the head of Jesse 
Talefero burst into flame as he died in Florida's 
electric chair. There are literally dozens of 
examples of botched jobs, and unexpected horrors 
scattered among every method of execution.

         But even when the executions go as 
planned, the potential effects on those involved 
cannot be minimized. The state of Florida, for 
example, provides for post-execution counseling 
for members of the execution team in its "Methods 
of Executions and Protocol." Most capital 
punishment states, including California, offer 
counseling services to all execution witnesses -- 
except those connected by blood or love to the 
condemned. But as one who has witnessed his 
friend's execution by lethal gas, I can confirm 
that the experience is deeply traumatic and long-lasting.

         In the radio documentary, "Witness to an 
Execution," produced in 2000 by South Portraits 
Productions and first aired on National Public 
Radio's "All Things Considered," a number of men 
who had been part of Texas' very busy execution 
process, agreed to sit and recall their 
experiences. Among them was Fred Allen who, after 
participating in 130 executions as a member of 
the state's "tie down" team, suddenly found 
himself collapsing emotionally. "I started 
shaking," he remembered, "and tears -- 
uncontrollable tears -- was coming out of my 
eyes... And I just thought about that execution 
that I did two days ago, and everybody else's 
that I was involved with... and it just -- 
everybody -- all of these executions all of a sudden sprung forward..."

         Huntsville Warden Jim Willet, who 
presided over approximately 75 of the 152 
executions carried out when George Bush was the 
state's governor, noted, "We've carried out a lot 
of executions here lately... Sometimes I wonder 
whether people really understand what goes on 
down here and the effects it has on us."

         Former Mississippi Warden and latter-day 
death penalty abolitionist Donald Cabana 
described the aftermath of being part of the 
gassing of Edward Earl whom he had come to 
befriend, in Ivan Solotaroff's The Last Face 
You'll Ever See: The Private Life of the American 
Death Penalty. "I was in the shower two hours 
later, scrubbing and scrubbing. Then I showered 
again. I just couldn't get the sweat and grime 
off me to the point where I felt clean enough to go to sleep."

         In the 1990s, when Louisiana had just 40 
people awaiting death as opposed to the 87 it has 
now, the Australian version of the news magazine 
"60 Minutes" did an episode titled "The 
Executioner" about Louisiana's good ol' boy 
executioner they called Sam Jones. At that time, 
Jones, an electrician by trade, had electrocuted 
18 men and boys. In this fascinating interview, 
Jones appears to embody the "good German" 
banality of evil mentality, telling the 
interviewer that he'd pull out fingernails or 
execute his own son if that's what he was told to 
do. With straight face he says, "It's no 
difference to me executing somebody than going to 
the refrigerator and getting a beer out of it." 
He insists that he "sleeps like a baby" following every execution.

         But when the interview moves to his 
house, it becomes clear that sleeping is not the 
only thing he does following every execution... 
he also paints -- masks of horror on canvas! The 
interviewer describes them as "Dark, morbid 
paintings, that seem to capture the essence of 
death itself." True to his public image, Sam 
Jones denies any connection between what he does 
at work and what he paints at home immediately 
afterwards. "I just call it paint on canvas," he 
deadpans. "They don't really represent anything." 
But then his own mask slips a little, and he 
adds, "It's an outlet... people jog..."

         At this point the interviewer 
interrupts, "People jog and you draw pictures of death and execute people."

         "Well," Sam drawls, "I draw pictures and 
I execute people." But after a moment, he allows, 
"It's my way of relief... the pictures..."

         Beyond the actual chambers of death, how 
far do the ripples go? Do they extend to the 
jurors who serve in capital cases and about whom 
more and more empirical evidence is gathering of 
long-term effects? To the DA and defense 
attorneys on both sides? To the multiple layers 
of judges? And ultimately to us, the indirect spectators?

         These are questions that seldom get 
asked as we understandably focus on the much 
narrower legal question of whether the condemned 
suffers a cruel or unusual death. But they are 
questions very much worth examining. They are 
among the questions that former California 
governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown considered in his 
book, Public Justice Private Mercy, A Governor's 
Education on Death Row. During his tenure 
(1958-1966), California put thirty-six 
individuals to death, but the governor spared the 
lives of twenty-three others who were condemned 
to die. As he looked back near the end of his 
life and considered those 59 individuals, he wrote:

         "I am 83 years old as I write these 
words... And looking back over their names and 
files now, despite the horrible crimes and the 
catalog of human weakness they comprise, I 
realize that each decision took something out of 
me that nothing -- not family or work or hope for 
the future -- has ever been able to replace."



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Thanks!

--abe