1. ARIZONA – In February, a single drug was used for the first time in an American prison execution, replacing the three-drug protocol. Robert Henry Moormann was convicted of killing and dismembering his adoptive mother while he was out of prison on furlough for another crime. Before he was put to death, he apologized to his family and to the family of an 8-year-old girl he kidnapped and molested in 1972. “I hope this brings closure and they can start healing now,” he said. “I just hope that they will forgive me in time.”
2. SAN FRANCISCO – In the first Jerry Brown administration, California had 44,000 people in prison. There are 44,000 prison guards today. “It costs seven times as much to put someone in prison as to educate them to keep them out of prison,” said Robert Corrigan, San Francisco State University president. Among African-Americans age 18 to 30, Corrigan said more are in prison, on parole or under the control of the criminal justice system than are in college. Calculating the percentage of third-graders who can read gives an accurate prediction of the amount of prison beds needed in the future, he said.
3. SAN FRANCISCO – Richard Schoenfeld, the youngest of the three Chowchilla kidnappers, is entitled to release, a state appeals court has ruled. Schoenfeld has been incarcerated nearly 36 years and has been denied parole 19 times. However, in 2008, the board said that he no longer is a danger to society, based on his good prison behavior, acceptance of responsibility, and educational and job training. This finding entitles him for release, the state Court of Appeals ruled in February. If the board appeals to the state Supreme Court, Schoenfeld would stay in prison while the court considers the appeal and for a longer period if it agrees to review the case. Schoenfeld, then 22, and his older brother James, both of Atherton, and Fred Woods of Portola Valley hijacked a bus at gunpoint in Chowchilla, July 1976. They put the driver and the children in vans, drove them to Livermore, buried them in a quarry and demanded a $5 million ransom. The victims dug their way out after 16 hours.
4. Florida – The United States Supreme Court ruled Terrance Graham’s sentence as a teenager unconstitutional. In the resentencing, the appeals judge noted that the Florida Legislature did not provide a method to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling or to give judges resentencing guidelines. Graham was 16 when he pleaded guilty to taking part in an armed robbery. A year later, he was arrested for a home-invasion robbery. Under a Florida law that allowed juveniles to be treated as adults, Graham was sentenced to life without parole. He is scheduled to be released in 2029.
5. North Carolina – Marcus Reymond Robinson is the first person to challenge his death sentence under the state’s Racial Justice Act. It permits a Death Row prisoner to cite statistical patterns to argue their jury selections or sentences were unfair based on race.
6. Texas – A man proclaiming his innocence to the end became the third person executed in Texas this year. Keith Thurmond was executed in March for killing his wife and her boyfriend. About an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected arguments to halt his execution, he was injected with lethal drugs. It took him 11 minutes to die. “All I want to say is I’m innocent,” Thurmond said from the death chamber gurney. “I didn’t kill my wife.” He blamed the shooting deaths on another man. “I swear to God I didn’t kill her,” he said. With that, he told prison officials, “Go ahead and finish it off.” As the drugs began flowing, he said, “You can taste it.” He wheezed and snored before losing consciousness.
7. SACRAMENTO – California prison officials made public possible modifications to rules that kept some gang members in segregated units for years. That led to prisoners conducting statewide hunger strikes last year. Previously, gang associates were automatically sent to the security housing units. Of the 2,300 offenders who are in the isolation units because of their gang involvement, nearly 1,800 are considered gang associates. The units also house non-gang prisoners convicted of killing other prisoners, who attacked staff members or where involved in prison riots. Under the proposed policy, many gang associates could continue living in the general prison population. That shift alone could significantly reduce the population in the security units, a state official said.
8. MISSISSIPPI – The last three prisoners pardoned by former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour were released in March, after the state’s highest court cleared the way for their freedom. Barbour pardoned more than 200 prisoners as he left office. He said he showed mercy out of a spirit of forgiveness – wanting to give them a second chance.
9. WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Corrections Corporation of America plan to privatize prisons was criticized by the Council of Prison Locals of the American Federation of Government Employees for weakening prison security, putting community safety at risk and pushing states to take on added debt.
10. MISSISSIPPI – William Mitchell was executed in March for the 1995 murder of Patty Milliken.
11. IOWA – A federal judge reversed Angela Johnson’s death sentence, saying her defense lawyers were “alarmingly dysfunctional” during her 2005 trial. Johnson was the first woman sentenced to death in the federal system since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. The judge said her defense attorneys failed to present evidence about her troubled mental state that could have spared her from execution.
12. WASHINGTON, D.C. – Twenty-one Death Row prisoners won an order stopping the use of sodium thiopental, an imported drug given as anesthesia prior to administration of lethal injections. A federal judge ruled that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration violated its own rules by allowing entry of the drug into the country without making sure that it worked effectively. “Prisoners on Death Row have an unnecessary risk that they will not be anesthetized properly prior to execution,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon wrote in a 22-page ruling in March. He added that the agency had created a “slippery slope” for entry of other unapproved drugs. In an accompanying two-page order, the judge banned the import of sodium thiopental, calling it a misbranded and unapproved drug, and directed Arizona, California, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and any others with stocks of the barbiturate to send them to the FDA.
