Killer gets new lease on life (stay of execution)

Citizen's Voice ^ | 12/2/2004 | Edward Lewis

[Born Conservative]

George Banks is getting a chance to live a bit longer, thanks to a court ruling Wednesday that puts his execution, originally set for tonight, on hold.

A successful appeal to the state Supreme Court will send Banks' case back to Luzerne County Court for an evidentiary hearing to determine his mental capacity and competency, which his defense lawyers hope will spare him from ever being put to death. The high court ordered that the hearing be held "expeditiously."

"This is exactly what we were looking for," said Banks' defense lawyer Albert J. Flora Jr. "It was obviously very close but I felt all along the stay should be granted." However, Luzerne County District Attorney David Lupas isn't so happy with the latest development.

"I am certainly not surprised by today's (Wednesday's) ruling, given the history and path this case has taken over the past 22 years since the 13 killings occurred. "The defense has raised a myriad of issues and legal challenges over several decades which have worked their way through the state and federal court systems, including a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2004, which once again paved the way for Mr. Banks' execution."

Banks, 62, was scheduled to die at 7 p.m. today for the September 1982 shooting rampage that killed 13 people, including five of his children, in Wilkes-Barre and Jenkins Township.

The state Supreme Court issued the stay of execution based upon an appeal Flora and the Federal Public Defender Association of Philadelphia filed Tuesday regarding a ruling by Luzerne County President Judge Michael Conahan on Monday.

Judge Conahan denied Banks' a stay of execution, saying the killer's lawyers failed to timely file the petition under the Post Conviction Relief Act within 60 days of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on June 24. That ruling reinstated Banks' 12 death sentences that had been overturned by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001.

"We're obviously very grateful the state Supreme Court ruled in our favor," said Michael Wiseman, supervisory assistant with the Federal Public Defender Association. Coincidentally, the state Supreme Court Tuesday rejected Banks' petition for a stay of execution that claimed he is incompetent and suffers from several mental illnesses preventing him from making rational decisions about his case.

Banks' mother, Mary Yelland, was named on the petitions as "Next Friend Petitioner" due to Banks' alleged inability to comprehend the case against him. With the ruling, the state Supreme Court ordered the evidentiary hearing to be held "expeditiously." Judge Conahan could not be See KILLER, page 20 reached for comment to determine when that hearing will be held. Flora said he would meet with Luzerne County Court officials to schedule a date.

Prior to the ruling by the state Supreme Court that was issued at about 2:30 p.m., Banks' lawyers had filed a voluminous petition for an emergency stay of execution with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. A hearing had been set for 5 p.m. before the Judge James F. McClure in Williamsport but was cancelled upon the state Supreme Court's ruling. Banks' lawyers argued executing someone who is mentally ill would violate the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.

During court proceedings before Judge Conahan on Monday and in state Commonwealth Court on Tuesday, Banks' lawyers raised the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case Ford v. Wainwright, which banned the execution of the insane and mentally retarded. Banks has not been officially declared incompetent in a court of law, which will be reviewed now in Luzerne County Court.

Former Luzerne County District Attorney Robert Gillespie said Banks was found competent during his 1983 trial. "That was the central portion of the whole trial - of Banks' competency," Gillespie said. "Even before the trial started, there was a question about his competency." Gillespie said Banks' lawyers produced two psychiatrists and prosecutors countered by presenting two psychiatrists before his criminal trial began.

"He did not meet the M'Naughten Test," Gillespie said. The M'Naughten Rule is a test applied if a defendant claims an insanity defense to determine if he or she was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind, leaving them unable to know the nature and the quality of the criminal act. Flora said Dr. Robert Sadoff, a psychiatrist who testified in 1983 that Banks was competent to stand trial, has now reversed his position.

"Although I found Mr. Banks sane at the time of the offenses, I also found that he suffered from paranoia, a major mental illness," Dr. Sadoff wrote in an affidavit filed with the Middle District Court Wednesday. Dr. Sadoff continued, "...I would strongly recommend that Mr. Banks' execution be stayed so that his mental state can be evaluated by several professionals with appropriate time in an in-patient setting in order to meaningfully resolve the issues about Mr. Banks' competency or lack thereof."

Before the state Supreme Court ruling, Gillespie said he doubted Banks' execution would ever take place. He did plan to attend, believing he owed it to the 13 victims and one survivor. "I'd be shocked that the execution takes place," Gillespie said. "I've always taken the position to have anyone on death row for that many years is more cruel and unusual punishment than the execution itself."

Susan McNaughton, representative for the state Department of Corrections, said Banks was not transferred to the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, Centre County, where executions take place. He remains at SCI-Graterford, Montgomery County. Banks' execution had been under a temporary stay issued Tuesday by Commonwealth Court Judge Bonnie Brigance Leadbetter.

If the state Supreme Court had not acted Wednesday or Thursday, Judge Leadbetter's temporary stay would have continued and the death warrant signed by Gov. Ed Rendell Oct. 5 would had expired at midnight Thursday.

[Born Conservative]

Jim Olsen: man who survived night of carnage

 

Jim Olsen lifts his shirt and lets the scars do the talking.
The jagged bolts that intersect under his left arm travel all the way back to the morning of Sept. 25, 1982, when George Banks murdered 13 people, including one of Olsen's best friends.

Olsen would have been number 14.

As yet another stay of execution keeps Banks from the death chamber, Olsen sits at the kitchen table of his Plains Township home and does what Banks never expected when he put the barrel of an AR-15 rifle to Mr. Olsen's chest and pulled the trigger.

He lives to tell.

"It sounded like firecrackers," Olsen says of the muffled gunshots he and his friends heard as they stood across the street from Banks' home on Schoolhouse Lane in Wilkes-Barre 22 years ago.
Inside, Banks was systematically taking eight lives; four belonging to his children. Out in the street, Olsen and his friends stood drinking cans of Genessee beer and debating a trip to Allentown to see The Who the next night.

It was after 2 a.m. Olsen was about to say goodnight to Raymond Hall, Ricky Thomas, Thomas Demillier and Molly McBride when Banks stalked out of his home wearing blood-spattered military fatigues and a T-shirt that read, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
"We didn't see the gun at first," Olsen says. "Then Ray said, 'Hey I know you,' and (Banks) just pulled up the gun and shot him in the stomach.

For the next few seconds, Olsen says, time seemed to stop. Hall, 24, convulsed in the street about 20 feet away. Writhing. Dying. It seemed like a bad dream, until Banks broke the silence.

"He said, 'You won't live long enough to tell anyone about this,'" Olsen remembers. "I had no idea what he meant. I think he thought we knew he had killed all those people in the house, but we didn't."

There was no time to say so. Banks pushed the rifle against Olsen's chest and fired. As he fell to the pavement, Banks climbed into a car and drove four miles to the Heather Highlands trailer court in Jenkins Township. He killed four more people there, including another of his children.

Aside from brief flashes of being loaded into an ambulance, Olsen says he remembers nothing between the shooting and the next day when he woke up in a bed at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville. He had been life-fiighted there after his wound - a five-inch hole in his back - was deemed too grave to be treated in a Wilkes-Barre hospital.

The bullet shredded a lung, shattered two ribs and destroyed Olsen's spleen. His liver and kidneys were also damaged. Ironically, he likely survived because Banks
pressed the gun to his chest. The bullet was a "tumblejacket," a round that spins inside a target, tearing up whatever it touches.
The 20 feet between Hall and his murderer ensured Olsen's friend wouldn't survive.

"They didn't tell me Ray died because they didn't want me to have any more stress," Olsen says. "But I was laying there in the bed and I grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV. The news was on, and I saw Ray's funeral. They were carrying Ray's casket. I knew it was Ray's casket because I saw all my friends carrying it."

It took a year for Olsen's wound to close. His mother cleaned and dressed the ragged hole in his back three times a day.

"When you looked at it, you could actually see inside my body," he says. "You could see my organs. My mom had to see that a few times a day. That's an example of how the whole family went through hell over this."

Although he struggled for years to heal from the shooting, Olsen, 44, is not bitter. He survived, and eventually married Molly McBride. The couple is in the middle of a divorce now, he says, but they have two daughters Olsen counts as blessings.

"He killed 13 people. I was supposed to be number 14, but I lived," Olsen says. "He didn't expect that. When I walked into the courtroom, you should have seen his face. I don't think they told him I had lived. He wasn't expecting to see me."

Anyone waiting for Banks to be executed for his crimes will likely be disappointed, Olsen fears. He has grown frustrated over 22 years of appeals and stays like the one handed down Wednesday.

"I was going to be there," he says, explaining that Gov. Ed Rendell's office invited him to witness the execution. "I wanted to see it. I don't mean that in a morbid way. I'm not like that. But he deserves what's coming to him for what he did to those kids. To kill babies. To shoot a baby in the head. What kind of person does that?

"Get it over with. Why have a death sentence if you're not going to use it? I think it's been so long now that if it didn't happen by now, it's never going to happen."

If Banks is ever strapped to a gurney at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, Olsen says he will be there to look into the cold eyes of his would-be killer a final time.

"I want to look at him one last time before he dies," he says. "I want to look at him the way he looked at me."

 

[Imaverygooddriver]

Why don`t they send him to France where he can be made an "Honorary citizen of Paris" like cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal. Matter of fact, why don`t we send all of our killers to France..#1. It saves the US taxpayers this BS of supporting killers for over two decades and #2. They can run amok and kill Frogs instead..

 

Paris names Abu-Jamal an Honorary Citizen

From Times Wire Reports
December 6 2001

The Paris city council has named Mumia Abu-Jamal, as an honorary citizen of Paris. Abu-Jamal has been on a U.S. death row in Pennnslylvania for 20 year. The African Amercian journalist was convicted of killing a police officer in a trial that has caused international controversy

An article on the action of the City of Paris also appeared in Los Angeles Times on Dec.6, Home section page A23

Also see AP report below
December 5, 2001

U.S. Inmate Named Honorary Parisian

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:35 p.m. ET

PARIS (AP) -- The Paris city council has named U.S. death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted for the 1981 slaying of a police officer, as an honorary citizen of Paris.

The show of solidarity with Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and journalist, came in a vote Tuesday in the wake of the Nov. 21 decision by a Philadelphia court, which said it did not have jurisdiction over a request for a new trial.

Jean Vuillermoz, leader of the Communist Party grouping on the council, said the decision by the council follows ``alarming news'' about Abu-Jamal. Vuillermoz said Pablo Picasso was the last person to receive the title, which is symbolic, in 1971.

Abu-Jamal argued that his former lawyers did a poor job and that he has new evidence that could clear him. The death row inmate's federal appeal is pending.

Celebrities, death penalty opponents and foreign politicians have rallied to Abu-Jamal's cause, calling him a political prisoner and saying he was railroaded by a racist justice system.

Human rights groups have scheduled a demonstration in support of Abu-Jamal in front of the U.S. Embassy in Paris on Saturday.

International Action Center
web: www.iacenter.org
39 West 14^th St., Rm. 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
fax: 212 633-2889 —
phone: 212 633-6646

 

Send your comments to webweaver@mumia2000.org

 

[gridlock]

One of the great ironies of this case is that Banks, as a former Corrections Officer, would be one of the few people the Brady types would allow to have firearms if they had their way. They point to this case as one of the few crimes committed over the last 50 years with assault weapons, but do not point out that even under the AWB, Banks would still have been allowed to own one, since he was one of the privileged few.

[Rakkasan1]

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 122-123