Death Sentence

Maryland's top court overturned the death sentence yesterday of John Clifton Johnson, who killed a Cumberland grocer, but upheld his April 11, 1996, conviction for first-degree murder.It is the second time in three months that the Court of Appeals has ruled that the mitigating circumstance "youthful age" includes several factors that must be weighed in deciding a death sentence.Among those issues are the convicted killer's maturity, criminal behavior, work history and home environment. Allegany County Circuit Judge J. Frederick Sharer looked only at chronological age -- Johnson was 19 years and 2 months at the time of the April 19, 1995, slaying -- the seven judges wrote in a 26-page opinion.

At great political peril, George Ryan did the right thing. Not to canonize the man. After all, the then-governor of Illinois was later imprisoned on corruption charges. But that doesn't change the fact that, in 2000, stung that 13 inmates had been exonerated and freed from death row in the previous 23 years, Mr. Ryan committed an act of profound moral courage, imposing a moratorium on capital punishment. In 2003, in the waning days of his term, he one-upped himself, commuting every death sentence in his state.

ANNAPOLIS -- The Court of Appeals overturned yesterday the death sentence of James R. Trimble, who raped a 22-year-old Essex woman, beat her to death with a baseball bat, slit her throat from ear to ear and left her body in a blood-spattered cornfield.The unanimous court held that Trimble, who is retarded, may have been misled by Circuit Judge Cullen H. Hormes' explanation of Maryland's sentencing procedures in capital cases and thus did not voluntarily waive his right to have a jury decide his sentence.

The House of Delegates moved closer to abolishing Maryland's death penalty Wednesday night as it rejected changes that attempted to turn Gov. Martin O'Malley's bill into something less than full repeal. In the first of several key tests, delegates voted 77-61 to reject an amendment that would allow capital punishment for inmates already incarcerated for murder who kill again. The House worked into the night rejecting amendment after amendment — most offered by Republicans — before giving the bill preliminary approval shortly before 9 p.m. The bill is likely to come up for a final vote in the House Friday.

The state's highest court narrowly affirmed yesterday the death sentence imposed on Jody Lee Miles for the 1997 fatal shooting of a community theater director in Wicomico County. The Court of Appeals ruled 4-3 that the evidence used to convict Miles - including his confession - was legally obtained, even though he became a suspect only when police identified his voice in an illegally taped cell phone conversation. "We find it significant that the facts used by the police in questioning ... were all facts learned by the police through lawful investigative means," Judge Lynne A. Battaglia wrote.

The federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld yesterday a death sentence from a jury that had consulted the Bible's teachings on capital punishment. In a second decision on the role of religion in the criminal justice system, the same court ruled Friday that requiring a former prisoner on parole to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous violated the First Amendment's ban on government establishment of religion. In the case decided yesterday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 9-6 on the question of whether notes, including Bible verses prepared by the jury's foreman and used during sentencing deliberations, required the reversal of the death sentence imposed on Stevie L. Fields in 1979.

A Charles County judge has vacated the 1996 death sentence imposed on a Randallstown handyman convicted in the slaying of a 19-year-old student during a burglary of her parents' Baltimore County home. Wallace Dudley Ball, 39, was convicted of first-degree murder for killing Debra Anne Goodwich on Sept. 30, 1994. Goodwich, a Catonsville Community College student, was visiting her family's home in Stevenson when she apparently interrupted a burglary and was shot six times, police said. Ball was sentenced to death by Judge Joseph S. Casula, a Prince George's County judge assigned to hear the case.

Sunday's editions of The Sun incorrectly included a photograph of Vernon Evans III in a graphic depicting prisoners on Maryland's death row. The graphic should have shown his father, Vernon Evans Jr., but the Baltimore County state's attorney's office inadvertently provided the photograph of the son.The Sun regrets the error.He has spent eight years on Maryland's death row. Twice hideath sentence has been overturned, but twice, new juries have voted again for death. He has years of appeals left and knows that another reversal could free him from the shadow of the gas chamber.

ANNAPOLIS -- The Court of Appeals upheld yesterday the death sentence of Flint Gregory Hunt, who gunned down Baltimore police Officer Vincent J. Adolfo in an alley in 1985.Officer Adolfo was shot twice as he tried to arrest Hunt after Hunt fled from a stolen car into an East Baltimore alleyway.The ruling marks the second time Maryland's highest court has reviewed Hunt's sentence. It upheld his conviction but vacated the death sentence in 1988, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that testimony from a victim's family about its anguish could not be permitted in a sentencing hearing.

Flint Gregory Hunt, sentenced to die for the 1985 murder of a Baltimore police officer, moved a step closer to the gas chamber yesterday when a federal judge denied his appeal of his death sentence.Although subject to appeals in federal Circuit Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, yesterday's ruling could lead to Hunt's execution as early as 1995, said Gary E. Bair, Maryland's assistant attorney general in charge of criminal appeals. Mr. Bair said Hunt is further along in the process than any of the 13 other inmates on Maryland's death row.Mr.

Sensing a real chance to abolish the death penalty in Maryland after years of trying, opponents of capital punishment brought a parade of religious, political and civil rights leaders to Annapolis Thursday to urge lawmakers to do away with the ultimate sanction. Roman Catholic Archbishop William E. Lori, testifying before a legislative committee for the first time since taking the helm of the Archdiocese of Baltimore last year, said he had come to Annapolis to throw the church's support behind the repeal effort.

Marylanders should thank The Sun for showing the faces of those convicted murderers and describing their killings ("Death row: Should they die for their crimes?" Feb. 10). They are only alive today because Gov. Martin O'Malley has not acted to give them the penalty mandated by their trial and the law, giving them additional life with his countless delays. These people are alive today only because the same justice system that death penalty opponents point to as unfairly sentencing them is the same justice system treating their victims and victims' families so unfairly by keeping them alive.

Legislation is being submitted to abolish the death penalty in Maryland. It is suggested that the death penalty costs too much, achieves little and diminishes us as a society. The push to repeal comes on the heels of a poll showing that Marylanders still support the death penalty. If the death penalty diminishes us as a society, how can it be that 48 percent of the community wishes to have it remain as a punishment and only 42 percent does not? There is a reason. The death penalty in Maryland in the last 40 years has been applied in a much different manner than in other states - and even when compared to Maryland's own history.

Members of an Anne Arundel County jury were certain that Lee Edward Stephens was guilty of murder, but prosecutors could not convince them that the inmate — already serving a life sentence when he killed a correctional officer in 2006 — should be put to death. The jury decided Wednesday that Stephens will get another life sentence, this time without possibility of parole, for fatally stabbing Cpl. David McGuinn as he made his rounds at the now-closed House of Correction in Jessup.

More than three dozen legal scholars and attorneys — including former Gov. Harry R. Hughes and two former Maryland attorneys general, J. Joseph Curran Jr. and Stephen H. Sachs — are sending a letter and report to members of the General Assembly urging the repeal of the state's death penalty. "There's a lot of misconception about Maryland's law" among legislators and the general public, said Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions, which organized the lobbying effort.

Your article on the trial of two men charged with killing a correctional officer caught my eye because the case could result in the first death sentence in Maryland since the state changed its death penalty law in 2006 ("Trial opens in prison officer's killing," Jan. 12). A 2003 study found that a defendant is six times more likely to receive the death penalty when the victim is white. Since the victim in this case, Officer David McGuinn, was African-American, it seems statistically unlikely this case will result in the death penalty.

LONDON -- Salman Rushdie, still under Islamic death threat for writing "The Satanic Verses," carried his appeal against the sentence yesterday to the Iranians who imposed it.In a broadcast on the Persian service of the BBC's World Service, he said: "You know I have never been the enemy of Islam. I have never been this figure with horns and a tail. I am not the sort of person who would have written a book attacking Islam."He said his book had been "much misunderstood." He asserted that his book was not blasphemous and said all the "so-called insults" were "contained in the dreams of a man who was going mad, and the reason he was going mad was because he had lost his faith in Islam."

A federal judge in Baltimore overturned yesterday the death sentence of convicted killer Tyrone Delano Gilliam Jr., citing errors his attorney made during his sentencing hearing.U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis sent Gilliam's case back to Baltimore County Circuit Court for resentencing.Gilliam was convicted in the Dec. 2, 1988, shotgun slaying of 21-year-old Christine J. Doerfler, whom he kidnapped and robbed of $3 before shooting her once in the back of the head.In a 54-page opinion, Garbis denied several claims made on behalf of Gilliam, including one that physical evidence was insufficient to support a first-degree murder conviction.

A Baltimore man accused of killing a dentist in Glen Burnie was sentenced Tuesday to serve 60 years in prison for an unrelated 2008 murder over a $150 debt, according to the city state's attorney's office. Dante Jeter, 24, who was convicted in June of first-degree murder and weapons violations, was sentenced by Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Marcus Z. Shar to life in prison with all but 60 years suspended, the prosecutor's office said. Prosecutors said Tyrone Freeman, 25, was shot in May 2008 over a drug debt.