On the Record

Slate had an interesting story yesterday about the last meals of death row inmates in anticipation of convicted “Beltway Sniper” John Allen Muhammad’s execution last night in Virginia. (Muhammad chose not to reveal his last meal to the public.)

The Slate story provided links to the Web site of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which posted the final meals requested by offenders until 2004, and continues to post their final statements.  Psalm 23 appeared to be a popular choice judging by a random sample. (Muhammad “ignored a request” to make a final statement, according to news reports.)

The Texas sites are eerie and chilling. Delbert Teague Jr., for example, was executed in 1998 for murdering a Fort Worth man in 1985. He did not request a final meal, but at the “last minute he decided to eat a hamburger at his mother’s request,” according to records. His last statement was as follows:

I have come here today to die, not make speeches. Today is a good day for dying.

Est Sularus Oth Mithas (My Honor Is My Life).

As someone commented on the Slate story, “there is something disgustingly voyeuristic about it all.”

Back in 2007, I wrote about the fascinating case of a Mississippi convicted killer and the Ober Kaler lawyers who were helping with his post-conviction appeals.

At first, Alan Michael Rubenstein claimed to have stumbled on the decomposing bodies of his stepson, stepson’s wife and their 4-year-old daughter. But he was later convicted of killing the family himself in order to collect the insurance money on his step-granddaughter. In my story, the Ober team said there were a number of irregularities in Rubenstein’s trial:

The Ober Kaler team says the evidence was not as clear as prosecutors made it out to be. They say there were major problems with a forensic expert’s testimony at trial. They say Rubenstein may not have done it, and will try to persuade Mississippi courts to order a new trial.

“My theory is that jurors wanted to convict somebody of this very horrible crime, especially when there’s a little girl and the pictures are gruesome,” [former Ober partner Ray] Shepard said. “I believe Mr. Rubenstein may, in fact, be innocent.”

The team has a tough battle ahead. The highest court in Mississippi has already soundly rejected most of Rubenstein’s direct appeal claims, and the prosecutors who handled Rubenstein’s case at the trial level say there is no doubt he is the killer.

“He’s a con man and a shyster,” said Dunn Lampton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, who handled the case when he was district attorney of Pike County, Miss. “He’s just an unbelievably evil human being.”

Rubenstein was originally sentenced to death, but the Mississippi Supreme Court vacated that sentence in 2006.

I just discovered that last month, Rubenstein was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole, which will run concurrently with his two other life sentences.

From this lengthy article in The New Yorker, it sure looks like it.

If true, what does this mean for the future of the death penalty?

Happy Monday!

• Page Croyder observes “serious traffic court” in Baltimore City for a day. The former prosecutor-turned-gadfly is not impressed at the sentences imposed.
• The Washington Post writes about how the new death penalty restrictions could affect defendants already charged with murder. The story also raises the possibility of the governor using the new evidence requirements to commute the sentences of people already on death row.
• Benjamin Polakoff reviews construction contracts in the Baltimore-D.C. area.
• Over the weekend, The Sun had this compelling account of the Carl Lackl murder-for-hire plot. My one nit-picky criticism: why is murder mastermind Patrick Byers’ mother “hooked on heroin, an addict like her six siblings,” while victim Lackl was “struggling with a heroin addiction”? Do you see the difference in language? I think it’s a little heavy-handed and unnecessary, given how good the writer is elsewhere in the story at portraying her subjects.
• The balance of power in big law firms has shifted back to management, writes the National Law Journal.

Humor can be hard to come by in a federal witness murder trial in which one of the defendants faces the death penalty.

But this week in Baltimore, the judge and lawyers in the case of Patrick A. Byers Jr., charged with ordering the killing of Carl S. Lackl Jr., and Frank K. Goodman, who allegedly paid a Bloods gang member to do Byers’ bidding, have seized upon scarce opportunities for comic relief.

Just before trial began on Monday afternoon, William B. Purpura, one of Byers’ defense attorneys, walked over to members of the U.S. Attorney’s office who had come to watch their colleague’s opening statement.

“It’s not too late to give up,” he said with a grin.

On Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney John F. Purcell Jr. apologized to the jury for fiddling with his BlackBerry, explaining that he was arranging for the attendance of witnesses, not checking MySpace.

“You’re not on Facebook, Mr. Purcell?” U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett asked from the bench.

The balding veteran prosecutor paused, then rejoined, “Not with this kind of face, no.”

North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, maybe twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.

Devlin spotted him: a lone man in the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens.

The opening of a dimestore drug novel? No, Kimberly Atkins writes for our sister blog, DC Dicta. The start of a dissent written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., issued Tuesday after the Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case Pennsylvania v. Dunlap. (As the AP put it, Roberts was “channeling his inner Raymond Chandler” in the “debut of Supreme Court noir.”)

Reverting to traditional legal prose, Roberts said he would have taken the case. He even had a decision at the ready: that probable cause can be based on a single transaction, even if the officer didn’t clearly see the drugs and the suspect made no attempt to flee.

Check out DC Dicta for more on the high court’s actions Tuesday, including its refusal to consider whether a death row inmate who asserts a strong claim of innocence can be executed, and the arguments in Pearson v. Callahan, the “consent-once-removed” case.

BARBARA GRZINCIC, Managing Editor/Law

Judging by its “most popular” list, Time.com struck a nerve with its article on Curtis Osborne, fetchingly headlined “If your lawyer wants you executed.”

Osborne, who faces execution in Georgia on Wednesday for murdering two people, was represented by court-appointed lawyer Johnny Mostiler. Another Mostiler client claims the lawyer said, of Osborne, “That little [n---] deserves the chair.”

(Mostiler himself, before his death in 2000, assured a judge that he never uses the N-word “out in public,” the story says. Not exactly lawyer-of-the-year material.)
There were other allegations of outrageously ineffective assistance of counsel, all of which were rejected by state and federal courts.

However, the courts never reached the merits of Mostiler’s alleged statement, finding that claim was procedurally barred. Time.com takes umbrage at that, calling it the “ultimate insult.”

But it seems to me that misses the point.

The infuriating beauty of the criminal defense bar is precisely its belief that every defendant is entitled to representation, no matter how heinous the crime, no matter the lawyer’s personal feelings about the client.

I was once surprised to learn that a noted capital defense attorney did not oppose the death penalty. When I asked him why, he said he’d sat too often across the table from truly evil people.

“Truly evil,” he said. Yet he made it his life’s work to save theirs.

No, I’m not in favor of lawyers using racist slurs or publicly condemning their clients. And yes, there are lawyers who work to prove their clients are innocent, as opposed to wrongfully convicted or sentenced.

But if capital defendants are entitled to lawyers who believe in their innocence and feel friendly toward them as individuals, then we might as well abolish the death penalty.

Because there’s no guarantee – let alone a constitutional guarantee – that a lawyer like that will come along in anyone’s lifetime.

BARBARA GRZINCIC, Managing Editor/Law

There’ve been a few notable Baltimore Sun polls released this week, including one that found the majority of Marylanders polled favor legalizing slots, one that found Gov. O’Malley’s job approval rating dipping into the 30s post-special session, and another that revealed 57 percent of Marylanders support the death penalty.

Well, here’s the latest poll on a controversial issue: most voters in Maryland support some form of legalized same sex unions.

The poll shows 19 percent support gay marriage while 39 percent support civil unions; 31 percent of those polled oppose either form of same-sex unions.

Would you have expected these poll results to unfold as they have? How much faith do you place in this data?

JACKIE SAUTER, Multimedia Editor

I’d like to share an unusual argument with our legally-inclined readers.

A post on the blog Red Maryland states that “laws not enforced and punishments not imposed” contribute to a disrespect for the law, and “for that reason alone, without a lengthy discourse into its merits and flaws, the death penalty in Maryland should be abolished.”

Thoughts?

JACKIE SAUTER, Multimedia Editor