Man who spent 22 years on death row is cleared




A former death row inmate in Tennessee has been cleared of murder, 3 years
after the Supreme Court raised repeated questions about his conviction.

State prosecutors on Tuesday asked a judge to drop all charges against
Paul House, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to die in 1986.
Special Judge Jon Blackwood accepted the request.

House had been scheduled to be executed next month for the 1985 murder of
Carolyn Muncey. He had been on death row for 22 years but was released on
bail last year. He has multiple sclerosis and must use a wheelchair.

The high court ruled in June 2006 that House was entitled to a new
hearing.

"Although the issue is closed, we conclude that this is the rare case
where -- had the jury heard all the conflicting testimony -- it is more
likely than not that no reasonable juror viewing the record as a whole
would lack reasonable doubt," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-3
majority.

House's appeal was championed by the Innocence Project, affiliated with
the Cardozo School of Law in New York.

"In the 3 years since the U.S. Supreme Court stepped into this case and
sent it back to the trial court, substantial additional DNA testing and
further investigation have shown that he is innocent," said Peter Neufeld,
the group's co-director. "Each time a layer of this case was peeled away,
it revealed more evidence of Paul House's innocence."

Muncey disappeared from her rural Luttrell, Tennessee, home on July 13,
1985. Her body was found a day later, badly beaten and showing signs of a
struggle. She had been raped.

House, who was on parole at the time as a sex offender, was questioned by
police. He denied any involvement in the crime. He was a friend of
Muncey's husband, but claimed he was in his own house several miles away
the evening of the murder. But prosecutors found a hole in his alibi,
discovering that he had left his home the night of the murder and returned
about an hour later with unexplained cuts and bruises.

Forensic evidence found Muncey's blood on House's jeans, but questions
were later raised whether the samples were contaminated en route to an FBI
lab for analysis.

Subsequent state-of-the art DNA testing conducted after the conviction
showed semen on the victim belonged to her husband, not House. Blood under
her fingernails and cigarette butts discovered near the wooded crime scene
also did not match the accused.

But prosecutors maintain other evidence points to his guilt. Muncey's
family has also continued to believe House was involved in the crime.

In a 2005 interview, House told CNN he did not rape or kill Muncey, and he
wondered why he was still on death row.

"I guess that's the million-dollar question," he said. While maintaining
his innocence, he said lying to police about his whereabouts that night
was a big mistake.

Kennedy, in his 2006 high court ruling, offered an extensive summary of
the facts of the investigation, especially the DNA evidence, which he said
might point to "a different suspect." Kennedy said jurors might conclude
Muncey's blood found on House's pants may have inadvertently spilled there
during the autopsy, or through mishandling by police at the crime scene.

District Attorney Paul Phillips wrote in his petition this week that he
still believes House could have been convicted again in a new trial, "but
the new evidence (including the forensic examinations) raises a reasonable
doubt that he acted alone and the possibility that others were involved in
the crime."

But Phillips noted the "substantial sentence" House has already served as
another reason for the charges being dropped now.

(source: CNN)






NEW JERSEY:

N.J. Supreme Court rules former death row inmate may receive life in
prison


The state Supreme Court today said a convicted murderer whose case was
proceeding as New Jersey abolished the death penalty can be sentenced to
life without parole -- even though the state had no such punishment when
he was convicted.

A jury will now decide the punishment for Steven Fortin, a Cateret
handyman, who was twice convicted of murder and sentenced to death for
brutally raping and killing a Woodbridge woman in 1994.

Steven Fortin during his murder trial in 2007 in Superior Court, New
Brunswick. Fortin, a former Carteret handyman is accused of strangling
Melissa Padilla, a welfare mother of 4, in Woodbridge in 1994.

Before New Jersey abolished the death penalty in January 2008, convicted
murderers who were not given capital punishment got 30 years in jail
before parole. The law that revoked the death penalty, however, toughened
that prison term to life without parole.

But the law did not explain what to do with someone like Fortin, who
"committed the offense while the former statute was in effect" but was
still going through the trial "when the law was amended," the Supreme
Court decision reads.

In a 5-2 decision today, the justices said Fortin can be sentenced to life
in prison.

"We are faced with the issue before us in large part due to a
chronological anomaly," wrote Justice John Wallace Jr., for the majority.

Justices Barry Albin and Virginia Long disagreed and said Fortin should be
charged under the law as it was, when he committed the crime and not
treated "retroactively" under the new law. The new law "exposes him to a
more onerous sentence" of life without parole, rather than 30 years with
parole, wrote Albin.

(source: Newark Star-Ledger)






CALIFORNIA:

Court Denies En Banc Rehearing in Death Penalty Case


The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday denied en banc review of
a 3-judge panels ruling that upheld the death sentence for convicted
murderer Kevin Cooper.

Over the dissents of 11 of its 27 active judges, the court left standing
the panel's affirmance of an order by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff of
the Southern District of California denying Coopers petition for habeas
corpus relief.

Cooper's 2004 execution was stayed just hours before he was to die by
lethal injection. A Ninth Circuit en banc panel said Cooper should be
allowed to bring a new habeas corpus petition in order to obtain testing
of evidence found at the crime scene.

But in its December 2007 ruling, a panel consisting of Judges Pamela Ann
Rymer, Ronald Gould and M. Margaret McKeown said the results of those
tests did not establish Coopers innocence.

Cooper has been on death row for 25 years, since a San Diego Superior
Court jurythe trial was moved from San Bernardino County due to extensive
pretrial publicityfound him guilty of the 1983 murders of Douglas and
Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, and an 11-year old houseguest.

Prosecutors said Cooper hacked them to death in the Ryens' Chino Hills
home. Cooper, who was released from prison 2 days before the murders, has
steadfastly maintained his innocence and claims that police framed him and
withheld exculpatory evidence.

That view drew strong support yesterday from Ninth Circuit Judge William
A. Fletcher in his 103-page dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc.

"The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man," he
wrote.

The court, he noted, had halted the execution in order to allow Coopers
defense team to conduct mitochondrial DNA testing on blond hairs found in
one of the victim's hands, and to test for the presence of the
preservative agent EDTA on a bloody t-shirt.

Cooper claimed that three other men committed the attacks. He alleged that
testing the hairs would reveal the presence of someone other than himself
or the victims at the crime scene.

He also contended that testing the shirt would show that officers of the
San Bernardino Sheriff's Department had used the preservative agent on a
sample of Cooper's blood they had drawn in order to "plant" the blood on
the t-shirt.

Test results, however, showed that the hairs came from the victims, and
that the level of the preservative agent on the bloody part of the shirt
was lower than on a control sample taken from a non-bloodied part of the
shirt.

Rymer opined for the panel:

"As the district court, and all state courts have repeatedly found,
evidence of Cooper's guilt was overwhelming. The tests that he asked for
to show his innocence 'once and for all' show nothing of the sort."

Fletcher, however, faulted the district judges handling of the case,
saying she failed to conduct the proceedings in the manner expected by the
en banc panel that granted the stay of execution.

Huff, he said, "impeded and obstructed Cooper's attorneys at every turn as
they sought to develop the record." Fletcher said the district judge
"imposed unreasonable conditions on the testing the en banc court
directed; refused discovery that should have been available as a matter of
course; limited testimony that should not have been limited; and found
facts unreasonably, based on a truncated and distorted record."

Fletcher particularly criticized the procedures Huff required for the
testing of the t-shirt. The judge, he declared, "so interfered with the
design of the testing protocol that one of Cooper's scientific experts
refused to participate in the testing," allowed a prosecution expert to
help choose the samples to be tested, would not allow defense experts to
similarly participate in the selection, and would not allow the defense
experts to see the shirt.

He also noted that the laboratory designated by the state to conduct the
testing found "an extremely high level of EDTA in the sample that was
supposed to contain Cooper's blood," suggesting the blood was planted.
Huff, he said, allowed the lab to withdraw the result based on claimed
contamination, but would not allow the defense to inquire in the alleged
contamination and would not order further testing.

Fletcher also criticized Huff for including 2 photographsone of the
"photogenic Ryen family" and another of "handsome blond-haired"
11-year-old Chris Hughesat the end of her order with "no analytic reason"
for doing so.

Fletcher's opinion was joined by Judges Harry Pregerson, Stephen
Reinhardt, Richard A. Paez, and Johnnie Rawlinson.

Judge Kim M. Wardlaw, joined by Pregerson, Reinhardt, and Judges Sidney
Thomas and Marsha Berzon, authored a separate dissent arguing that the
district judge's errors, as articulated by Fletcher, left it uncertain as
to whether Cooper was guilty or was framed.

Judge Raymond Fisher, joined by Pregerson, Berzon, Chief Judge Alex
Kozinski and Judge Susan Graber, dissented, saying:

"I generally agree with Judge Fletcher that we should have taken this case
en banc to require the factual inquiry the previous en banc court expected
to occur."

Reinhardt wrote separately to say that, while he agreed with Fletcher's
and Wardlaws criticisms of the district judge, the Ninth Circuit's "own
handling of the matter, some of which has been made public and some of
which has not, leaves much to be desired, and is a cause of considerable
regret." He reiterated his previous view that the vote on en banc calls
should be made public.

Rymer took the unusual step of writing a concurrence in the denial of en
banc rehearing, defending the panel's opinion.

With the exception of DNA testing, which was not available at the time of
the trial, all of the issues raised by Cooper had been litigated adversely
to him on numerous occasions, she said.

The dissenters, she declared, were not showing the state courts the
deference to which they are entitled under the Antiterrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act of 1996.

"As [Fletcher's] dissent pays no attention, and gives no deference, to
state court determinations, and reaches the merits of claims without
regard to whether AEDPA mandates their dismissal, the picture it paints is
quite different from the canvas that is actually before us," she wrote.

Rymer also defended the district judge's compliance with the Ninth
Circuit's order.

Huff, she said, "issued a thoughtful 159-page ruling that discusses in
meticulous detail all aspects of the testing as well as each claim in
Cooper's petition." The district judge, Rymer asked, properly exercised
her discretion in excluding EDTA testing results that she found to be
unreliable.

The case is Cooper v. Brown, 05-99004.

(source: Metropolitan News Company)






USA:

Wide-Eyed takes on death row inmate doc----Project marks indie firm's
first trip to Cannes market


An innocent man who spent 23 years on death row without regretting "a
single day" is the unlikely hero of a planned feature-length documentary
from U.K.-based indie production company Wide-Eyed Entertainment.

The project marks a series of firsts for the company, including their
debut dip into feature-length filmmaking, their first trip to Cannes'
Marche du Film and their first effort backed by visual effects house Red
Vision VFX.

Wide-Eyed, formed by television production vets and financiers Jasper
James, Parule Basu-Barua and David McNab and partnered with Red Vision,
plans to bring the story of death row inmate Nick Yarris -- once on the
FBI's most-wanted list -- to the big screen. Yarris, a self-confessed
low-life, turned himself in believing that DNA testing would exonerate him
from a murder rap. Unfortunately, it would be 18 years before a judge
allowed the tests to go ahead. In the meantime, aside from beatings from
both guards and fellow inmates, the callow youth learned to read and write
and, while in jail, consumed 9,000 dime-store novels. As a result, the way
he talks is heavily influenced.

McNab, who is using more than 20 hours of interviews with him produced by
Dox Prods., says Yarris talks "like an Elmore Leonard novel." McNab and
company will splice together 1-on-1 interviews from DOX with CG-animation
of incidents in the story in a graphic novel style.

Basu-Barua, whose has years of experience raising cash for television
projects, told The Hollywood Reporter that the decision to set the project
up as a feature doc came as part of Wide-Eyed's aim to "produce feature
film animation made on television budgets."

Along with McNab, Basu-Barua is jetting into Cannes over the weekend to
take meetings. "We've done MIP and MIPCOM but never Cannes," she said.
"The budget for it is going to be 3 million ($4.1 million) because I am
very conservative when I do my budgets."

Strange to hear, as Cannes gets under way.

(source: Hollywood Reporter)