CNN: US SUPREME COURT: ALL DEATH PENALTY CASES WITH JUVENILE KILLERS THROWN OUT!

CNN on TV

[Next_Time_NJ]

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution forbids the execution of killers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes, ending a practice used in 19 states.

The 5-4 decision throws out the death sentences of about 70 juvenile murderers and bars states from seeking to execute minors for future crimes.

The executions, the court said, were unconstitutionally cruel.

This report will be updated as details become available.

[CIB-173RDABN]

A multiple-murder convict would be one of the "vicious individual"s.

---

So if I read this correctly, you do agree that some murderers shold be executed if they kill a certain number of people, but you neglected to state the magic number that would push your principle's aside.

What number of innocent people should die before you concede the death penalty is justified, 100? If so, why weren't the first 99 lives as important as the 100th?

Maybe that is too high, how about 50? But then the same question, what was so special about the 50th victim, above and beyound the previous 49?

Maybe still too high, how about 10, dog gone it, we have the same question, nine valueless lifes had to be sacraficed before we got to the magic number of 10.

What about 2, at least with 2 only one other person had to die so your principles would not be compromised.

Either you are against capital punishment in all cases are you are not. With your "principle" you want it both way, see how good I am, I respect all life (unless they kill enough innocent people then it is ok to fry him).

---

Again, abortion and capital punishment are no more the same then if you were to bring in what a soldier does on a battlefield. Lifes are loss in all cases, but if that is your only criteria, you would need to include traffic accidents, household accidents and so on, any activity that results in a death of someone.

[OhioAttorney]

I agree with them. Killing a 15 year old child is not my idea of just punishment reguardless of what they have done. I have no problem with them sitting in jail for a long time though. I am infavor of the death penality but not for young children.

This isn't quite what they decided. The decision is that no one can be executed at any age for crimes committed while under 18. Some of the death row criminals who thereby got a reprieve are well over 18 now.

[patriciamary]

If a fifteen year old individual can brutally kill another,He deserves to die.Why should any taxpayer provide for him in prison for the rest of his gay or soon to be gay life.

[Vote 4 Nixon]

yeah, and we as tax payers have to keep footing the bill for incarcerating their sorry worthless a$$es. Fry em I say.

[tx_eggman]

So, a 17 year old 'true believer' Islamofascist can now walk into the neighborhood mall and slaughter people with impunity.

No more need to blow himself up, he can train more like himself during his stay in prison.

Make it a movie and call it ... hmm, let's see ...

The Lee Malvo Story Part 2

[Carolinamom]

"the Constitution forbids the execution of killers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes"

Exactly WHERE does the Constitution say this? It's not in my copy.

[Little Ray]

Which means, in effect, we have no rights whatsoever.

[jaykay]

SCOTUS is using the new improved UN issued version.

[Vicomte13]

The "Switch in Time that Saved Nine" did not exactly happen as you have described it.

FDR did indeed threaten to pack the court, but the court-packing scheme got nowhere in Congress.

What did not happen was that FDR did not disregard the orders of the Supreme Court and proceed anyway. He waited for the court to change positions, which it did, in the West Coast Hotel decision. But that was made by the same justices who had been ruling against the New Deal previously.

[Vicomte13]

"Which means, in effect, we have no rights whatsoever."

No, no. You have lots and lots of rights.
It means that you have the rights that the Supreme Court says you have.

[Netizen]

In Alabama, two 17-year-olds, one 16-year-old, and one 19-year-old picked up a female hitchhiker, threw bottles at her, and kicked and stomped her for approximately 30 minutes until she died. They then sexually assaulted her lifeless body and, when they were finished, threw her body off a cliff. They later returned to the crime scene to mutilate her corpse.

Aw... they didn't know what they were doing the poor wee things.

Here's another case where a couple of wee poor babes didn't know what they were doing.

FACTS

¶2.Sixteen-year old Stephen Virgil McGilberry was charged with the deaths of 44-year-old Patricia Purifoy, his mother; 44-year-old Kenneth Purifoy, his step-father; 24-year-old Kimberly Self, his half-sister, and 3-year-old Kristopher Self, his nephew and Kimberly's son.Police were called to Kenneth and Patricia's home on October 23, 1994, where they found the four bludgeoned bodies.An investigation revealed that McGilberry and 14- year-old Chris Johnson had taken Kimberly's car and driven to a friend's house in another town.The next morning, their friend's mother, Brenda Smith Saucier, drove the pair back to the Purifoy home, where police were waiting.

¶3.After McGilberry was read his Miranda rights, he signed a waiver.He then confessed to the killings and told authorities that he and Johnson had committed the murders with baseball bats.McGilberry indicated that he was disgruntled because his driving privileges had been taken away and that he had bludgeoned Kenneth and Kimberly while John had hit Patricia and Kristopher.McGilberry also admitted striking his mother with the baseball bat because he felt that she was suffering.McGilberry told police that he had taken cash and credit cards from his mother and then driven away in Kimberly's car.Blood stains on McGilberry's clothing matched the blood types of the victims.

¶8.At trial, the State was granted a jury instruction which required the jury to consider whether the crimes were especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.McGilberry argues that the murders were not heinous, atrocious or cruel because the victims were either rendered unconscious by the blows or were killed nearly instantly.McGilberry claims that defense counsel should have objected at trial and should have raised the matter on direct appeal.

Did more digging. This 16 year old knew exactly what he was doing.

¶2. McGilberry, who was 16 years of age at the time, lived at 7101 Dewberry Street in the St. Martin community in Jackson County, Mississippi, in the home of his stepfather and mother, Kenneth and Patricia Purifoy. McGilberry's half-sister, Kimberly Self, and her son, Kristopher Self, also lived in the Purifoy home.

¶3. McGilberry and Meyer Shawn Ashley ("Ashley") initially planned only to steal his half sister's green GEO Storm and sell it for cash or drugs in New Orleans. One week prior to the murders, McGilberry approached Ashley about killing his family. Ashley withdrew from the plot the Friday night before the murders when "things didn't sound right." On Saturday, McGilberry then discussed the murders with Chris Johnson ("Johnson"), who was 14 years of age. That Saturday night, McGilberry had a dream in which he visualized killing his parents. It was after this dream that he went down the street to Johnson's house where the plan to murder his family evolved.

¶4. McGilberry and Johnson returned to McGilberry's residence sometime around 10:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, October 23, 1994. They originally considered slitting his parents' throats with a utility knife which police later found under a box in the attic of the Purifoy's home. This changed when they realized that it would be impossible to cut their throats because of the way Kenneth was sleeping. McGilberry and Johnson were in the garage smoking cigarettes when Johnson picked up a baseball bat and suggested that they knock their victims unconscious. They decided to hit the victims in the head with the baseball bat, drag them into the garage, weight the bodies and dump them off the pier. Due to the fact that McGilberry's mother was awake, the two were unable to execute their plan immediately. They placed the bats outside McGilberry's bedroom window and went back inside the house.

http://www.mslawyer.com/mssc/cases/990603/9700213.html

[PigRigger]

"Which means, in effect, we have no rights whatsoever...."

The ultimate in Judicial Activism....

The laws set forth by our legislative bodies, based on state and federal constitutions, can be overturned based on opinion dictated by thoughts and laws external to them....

Most people have no understanding what Supreme Court has stated and now put into motion....

[snarkytart]

>>>I still don't understand why people like you want the state to have the power over life and death. The government can't manage to get my tax return to me, how can they be trusted to kill someone?
I think this ruling might be injurious to states' rights, but how can giving the government less power be bad?<<<<


The court just took away the power of the people with this ruling not the power of the Government.
Juries and only juries are allowed to give the DP in this country.
Juries are everyday citizens and they have a right to decide how they want to punish the most violent offenders in their communities after all THEY LIVE THERE!
Death Penalty is a form of self defense for the community.

[snarkytart]

How about this case. Pretty long but please read...this is who the Supreme Court help save yesterday.

What happened... Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena were 14 and 16 years old, respectively. They were friends who attended the same high school in Houston, Texas, Waltrip High School. On June 24, 1993, the girls spent the day together....and then died together.

They were last seen by friends about 11:15 at night, when they left a friend's apartment to head home, to beat summer curfew at 11:30. They knew they would be late if they took the normal path home, down W. 34th Street to T.C. Jester, both busy streets. They also knew they would have to pass a sexually-oriented business on that route and so decided to take a well-known shortcut down a railroad track and through a city park to Elizabeth's neighborhood.

The next morning, the girls parents began to frantically look for them, paging them on their pagers, calling their friends to see if they knew where they were, to no avail. The families filed missing persons reports with the Houston Police Department and continued to look for the girls on their own. The Ertmans and Penas gathered friends and neighbors to help them pass out a huge stack of fliers with the girls' pictures all over the Houston area, even giving them to newspaper vendors on the roadside.

Four days after the girls disappeared, a person identifying himself as 'Gonzalez' called the Crimestoppers Tips number. He told the call taker that the missing girls' bodies could be found near T.C. Jester Park at White Oak bayou. The police were sent to the scene and searched the park without finding anything. The police helicopter was flying over the park and this apparently prompted Mr. 'Gonzalez' to make a 911 call, directing the search to move to the other side of the bayou. When the police followed this suggestion, they found the badly decaying bodies of Jenny and Elizabeth.

Jennifer Ertman's dad, Randy Ertman, was about to give an interview regarding the missing girls to a local television reporter when the call came over a cameraman's police scanner that two bodies had been found. Randy commandeered the news van and went to the scene that was now bustling with police activity. My first knowledge of the death of Jennifer was seeing Randy, on the news that evening, screaming at the police officers who were struggling to hold him back, "Does she have blond hair?? DOES SHE HAVE BLOND HAIR?!!?"

Fortunately, they did manage to keep Randy from entering the woods and seeing his daughter's brutalized body and that of her friend Elizabeth, but they were unable to escape that fate themselves. I saw hardened, lifelong cops get tears in their eyes when talking about the scene more than a year later. The bodies were very badly decomposed, even for four days in Houston's brutal summer heat and humidity, particularly in the head, neck and genital areas. The medical examiner later testified that this is how she could be sure as to the horrible brutality of the rapes, beatings and murders.

The break in solving the case came from, of course, the 911 call. It was traced to the home of the brother of one of the men later sentenced to death for these murders. When the police questioned 'Gonzalez', he said that he had made the original call at his 16 year-old wife's urging. She felt sorry for the families and wanted them to be able to put their daughters' bodies to rest. 'Gonzalez' said that his brother was one of the six people involved in killing the girls, and gave police the names of all but one, the new recruit, whom he did not know. His knowledge of the crimes came from the killers themselves, most of whom came to his home after the murders, bragging and swapping the jewelry they had stolen from the girls.

While Jenny and Elizabeth were living the last few hours of their lives, Peter Cantu, Efrain Perez, Derrick Sean O'Brien, Joe Medellin and Joe's 14 year old brother were initiating a new member, Raul Villareal, into their gang, known as the Black and Whites. Raul was an acquaintance of Efrain and was not known to the other gang members. They had spent the evening drinking beer and then "jumping in" Raul. This means that the new member was required to fight every member of the gang until he passed out and then he would be accepted as a member. Testimony showed that Raul lasted through three of the members before briefly losing consciousness.

The gang continued drinking and 'shooting the breeze' for some time and then decided to leave. Two brothers who had been with them but testified that they were not in the gang left first and passed Jenny and Elizabeth, who were unknowingly walking towards their deaths. When Peter Cantu saw Jenny and Elizabeth, he thought it was a man and a woman and told the other gang members that he wanted to jump him and beat him up. He was frustrated that he had been the one who was unable to fight Raul.

The gang members ran and grabbed Elizabeth and pulled her down the incline, off of the tracks. Testimony showed that Jenny had gotten free and could have run away but returned to Elizabeth when she cried out for Jenny to help her. For the next hour or so, these beautiful, innocent young girls were subjected to the most brutal gang rapes that most of the investigating officers had ever encountered. The confessions of the gang members that were used at trial indicated that there was never less than 2 men on each of the girls at any one time and that the girls were repeatedly raped orally, anally and vaginally for the entire hour. One of the gang members later said during the brag session that by the time he got to one of the girls, "she was loose and sloppy." One of the boys boasted of having 'virgin blood' on him.

The 14-year-old juvenile later testified that he had gone back and forth between his brother and Peter Cantu since they were the only ones there that he really knew and kept urging them to leave. He said he was told repeatedly by Peter Cantu to "get some". He raped Jennifer and was later sentenced to 40 years for aggravated sexual assault, which was the maximum sentence for a juvenile.

When the rapes finally ended, the horror was not over. The gang members took Jenny and Elizabeth from the clearing into a wooded area, leaving the juvenile behind, saying he was "too little to watch". Jenny was strangled with the belt of Sean O'Brien, with two murderers pulling, one on each side, until the belt broke. Part of the belt was left at the murder scene, the rest was found in O'Brien's home. After the belt broke, the killers used her own shoelaces to finish their job. Medellin later complained that "the bitch wouldn't die" and that it would have been "easier with a gun". Elizabeth was also strangled with her shoelaces, after crying and begging the gang members not to kill them; bargaining, offering to give them her phone number so they could get together again.

The medical examiner testified that Elizabeth's two front teeth were knocked out of her brutalized mouth before she died and that two of Jennifer's ribs were broken after she had died. Testimony showed that the girls' bodies were kicked and their necks were stomped on after the strangulations in order to "make sure that they were really dead."

The juvenile pled guilty to his charge and his sentence will be reviewed when he turns 18, at which time he could be released. The other five were tried for capital murder in Harris County, Texas, convicted and sentenced to death. I attended all five trials with the Ertmans and know too well the awful things that they and the Penas had to hear and see in the course of seeing Justice served for their girls.

One of the 17 year old gang members

The victims.14 and 16 years old.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

You could do the novel thing of just ignoring them, or Congress could strip their power to review cases in certain areas.

[Netizen]

Words fail me, but I'd like to see Next_Time_NJ defend these murderers as not knowing what they were doing.

[SunkenCiv]

Iran mullahs deny death row girl is mentally ill
Dec 22, 2004, 12:04
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_5060.shtml

[Vicomte13]

"You could do the novel thing of just ignoring them, or Congress could strip their power to review cases in certain areas."

Congress could TRY to do that, but I guarantee that if Congress attempted to strip the Judiciary of the power to review anything that the Supreme Court is interested in, the Supreme Court would rule Congress' effort to reduce its jurisdiction unconstitutional.
Ultimately, unless the step is taken to IGNORE the court on rulings which it has no constitutional authority to make, we are never, ever going to get out from under the Supremes.
Any legal or political move made is counterable by the Judiciary, because the Supreme Court has the ultimate and final say, in the current scheme of things, on what the law itself is.

The sole way out of the trap is to simply ignore the Court and make it clear by acts that it does not have that final say and it is not the final authority, that the covalent branches of government have the authority to overrule the court by nullification.

Legislation won't work.

[MEGoody]

"The principle is the right not to be killed unless you are threatening another life."

I understand the principle. The question is, why is the SC saying anything at all about the death penalty? Murder cases are handled by the state, not the U.S. government.

[MEGoody]

"I would argue that it is nothing more than victim revenge, and provides no other social function any longer."

I would argue that the death penalty removes any chance that the individual will murder again, thus providing a benefit to society.

As we all know, even "life without chance of parole" doesn't mean that any more. If they are alive, the likelihood that they will be released gets greater with each passing year. Recividism rates (particularly among violent criminals) are pretty high. Better to execute the murderer than give him a chance to kill again.