Gaile Owens (pictured) and Mary Winkler are two women who committed similar crimes under similar circumstances in Tennessee. Both women suffered from abuse from the spouses they killed, and both were examined by the same psychologist, twenty years apart. The psychologist said both women suffered from battered woman's syndrome. Mary Winkler confronted her husband with a shotgun and shot him in the back in 2006. Gaile Owens hired a stranger to kill her husband. Winkler was indicted for first-degree murder, convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served about two months in a mental health facility. She is now free and has custody of her children. Owens is on death row, awaiting execution by lethal injection.
According to an article by John Seigenthaler in the Tennessean, "The dramatic difference in the sentences received by Winkler and Owens relates directly to the manner in which the two cases were tried, how their separate teams of lawyers handled their cases and how two different judges dealt with their 'battered woman' defenses." Winkler testified on her own behalf regarding the abuse she suffered, while Owens did not take the stand in order to protect her children from hearing the details of her abuse. Winkler was represented by experienced criminal lawyers, whose expenses were paid by her friends. Owens, on the other hand, had trouble finding legal representation. Her first lawyer withdrew from the case because she could not pay him. Perhaps the starkest difference between the two cases were the women's pleas. Winkler pled not guilty on the basis that she was a battered wife. Owens accepted the prosecutor's plea deal in return for a life sentence, but the prosecutor subsequently refused to accept the agreement when Owens's co-defendant would not accept the same plea. They were tried and sentenced to death together.
On March 3, a federal District Court barred the re-prosecution of former Ohio death row inmate Joe D'Ambrosio (pictured) for the murder of Tony Klann over 22 years ago. The court had ruled in 2006 that state prosecutors improperly withheld evidence about their star witness that could have exonerated D'Ambrosio at his 1989 trial. That ruling led to D'Ambrosio's conviction and death sentence being vacated, and he was eventually released on bond pending a possible retrial. But the state delayed reprosecuting him and did not tell the court that its primary witness, their only eyewitness to the murder, had died. The court concluded that these developments biased D'Ambrosio's chances for a fair trial, and hence the state was barred from retrying him. The state may appeal this decision.
Gaile Owens is currently on death row in Tennessee and awaiting a decision from the Tennessee Supreme Court on a request to reduce her sentence to life. Owens's attorneys have asked the state's high court to remove the death penalty because her case presents unique circumstances that warrant the rare move. Owens may face execution soon for soliciting the 1985 murder of her husband, Ronald Owens, a man she said repeatedly abused her. Sidney Porterfield, whom she hired to kill her husband, is also currently on death row. Owens accepted an offer from the prosecutor to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, but the prosecutor backed out of the agreement when Porterfield would not accept the same plea. Owens and Porterfield were tried and sentenced to death together, after a judge refused to try their cases separately. Owens is the only inmate on death row who agreed to a plea bargain for a life sentence.
On February 24, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the death sentence of Charles Dean Hood because the jury was improperly instructed about potentially mitigating evidence at his trial. Hood's case more recently made national news when a prior extramarital affair between the trial judge and the prosecutor was revealed. In 2008, even after the judge and the prosecutor admitted to their intimate relationship, the Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that Hood should be executed anyway. Hood's attorneys have recently petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the conflict of interest in this case. Twenty-one former judges and prosecutors and 30 legal ethics experts have filed amicus briefs stating that the relationship between the judge and the prosecutor severely undermined the integrity of the proceedings. The Court has yet to act on the request, which could result in a new trial on guilt, as well as on sentencing, as now required by the Court of Criminal Appeals for other reasons.
Michael Traynor, President Emeritus of the prestigious American Law Institute (ALI), called the ALI’s recent withdrawal of its model death penalty law “a striking repudiation from the very organization that provided the blueprint for death penalty laws in this country.” He noted that the ALI had carefully reviewed the death penalty process, and that "Now, after searching analysis by our country's top legal minds, the institute has concluded that the system it created does not work and cannot be fixed." The ALI, with membership of more than 4,000 lawyers, judges and law professors, is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify and improve the law. Its model penal code became the prototype for death penalty laws across the United States after the old state laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1972. Last fall, Traynor noted, the ALI withdrew its support for the model death penalty law, effectively concluding that “we cannot devise a death penalty system that will ensure fairness in process or outcome, or even that innocent people will not be executed.”
On January 14, and almost 30 years after the crime, the Florida Supreme Court criticized the state for "lawless conduct" and vacated the death sentence of Paul Beasley Johnson because "the record here is so rife with evidence of previously undisclosed prosecutorial misconduct that we have no choice but to grant relief." Because of popular sentiment and the notoriety of the crime, Governor Charlie Crist signed a death warrant for Johnson in 2009 even though Johnson's legal issues were still pending on appeal. The Florida Court said that the governor's action put them in a difficult position. Johnson was found guilty of the murder of a Polk County sheriff's deputy and two others in January of 1981. The state induced Johnson to make incriminating statements to a jailhouse informant, then used the testimony at his trial, even though they knew it was inadmissible. Former assistant state attorney Hardy Pickard, who was the original prosecutor in Johnson's case, was aware that the informant was acting on behalf of the sheriff's investigator despite the claim that the informant acted on his own. Even though the informant's testimony was initially suppressed, Pickard used false testimony and misleading argument to allow the informant to testify. Commenting on the state's behavior, the Florida Court wrote, "It must be emphasized that in our American legal system there is no room for such misconduct, no matter how disturbing a crime may be or how unsympathetic a defendant is. Lawlessness by a defendant never justifies lawless conduct at trial."
Franklin E. Zimring is a distinguished professor of law and scholar at the Berkeley School of Law who has followed the development of the modern death penalty over many decades. Writing recently in the National Law Journal, Prof. Zimring said the recent action by the American Law Institute to withdraw the death penalty provisions from its Model Penal Code deprives the punishment of any legal legitimacy. "[T]he institute has pulled the intellectual rug out from under the current system of deciding between life and death," he wrote. Recalling that when the Supreme Court stopped the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, he noted many states turned to the Model Penal Code to fashion new death penalty laws that the Court would accept. But that model has now been discredited. "Now that the creators of the modern system of death penalty sentencing have disowned that system, there is no support for distinguishing the current death penalty lottery from the lawless system that Furman condemned. The apparatus that the Supreme Court rushed to embrace in 1976 has been exposed as a conspicuous failure."