Playing G-d? Texas Jury Consulted
Bible Before Sentencing Man to Death


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(Origins - alternet.orgguardian.co.uk and amnestyusa.org)

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Read Rabbi Dovid Bendory’s response


(From alternet.org source) .....

 

Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet at 12:30 PM on October 16, 2009.


Khristian Oliver is set to be executed next month, after jurors used Old Testament passages to determine whether he should live or die.

This post first appeared in PEEK.

Last week I wrote about Texas Governor Rick Perry’s craven attempts to cover up proof that he signed off on the execution of an innocent man. Crazy, yes? But crazier than a pack of jurors who consult the Bible before deciding whether to sentence someone to death?

From Amnesty International: (and scroll down)

Khristian Oliver, 32, is set to be killed on 5 November after jurors used Biblical passages supporting the death penalty to help them decide whether he should live or die.

Amnesty International is calling on the Texas authorities to commute Khristian Oliver’s death sentence. The organization considers that the jurors’ use of the Bible during their sentencing deliberations raises serious questions about their impartiality.

A U.S. federal appeals court acknowledged last year that the jurors’ use of the Bible amounted to an "external influence" prohibited under the U.S. Constitution, but nonetheless upheld the death sentence.

Apparently, this "external influence" included the following passages from the Old Testament, some of which were read aloud in the jury room:

"The murderer shall surely be put to death"

"And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, the murderer shall surely be put to death."

"The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer."

(That last one, I assume, was determined to be logistically unfeasible.)

According to Chris McGreal in the Guardian, (scroll down) "another juror, Michael Brenneisen, told a journalist in 2002 that he asked himself ’Is this the way the Lord would decide the case?’ But Brenneisen also said that in discussing the Bible the jury ’went both directions in our use of the scripture -- forgiveness and judgement.’"

"McHaney said there were about four Bibles in the jury room."

Some opponents of the death penalty argue that societies have no business "playing God" by making judgments about who deserves to live or die. In this case, this is precisely what the jury seemed to believe was the task at hand.

For more on this case, go here (or scroll down for this local content.).

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(From Guardian.co.uk source) ……

 

US authorities urged to overturn death
sentence after jury consulted Bible

Jurors read from scripture as they deliberated on
whether Khristian Oliver should be sentenced to death


* Chris McGreal in Washington
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 October 2009 17.51 BST
* Article history

The Texas jury didn’t hesitate to find Khristian Oliver guilty of shooting and bludgeoning an elderly man to death. Oliver had stood over his bleeding victim, repeatedly hitting him in the head with a rifle butt before robbing his house.

But then came the difficult decision over whether to sentence Oliver to death, and that’s when the Bibles came into their own.

A clutch of jurors huddled in the corner with one reading aloud from the Book of Numbers: "The murderer shall surely be put to death" and "The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer."

Another juror highlighted passages which she showed to a fellow juror: "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, the murderer shall surely be put to death."

Ten years later Oliver, now 32, is just three weeks from execution. Two appeals courts have rejected his pleas for the jury’s death sentence in 1999 to be overturned on the grounds it was improperly influenced by references to the Bible. Some of the jurors have made no secret of the part their religious beliefs played in reaching their decision but the US supreme court has refused to take up a case that has been condemned as "a travesty".

Amnesty International has said the use of biblical references "to decide life or death in a capital trial is deeply, deeply troubling" and called on the authorities in Texas, which has carried out nearly half of the 39 executions in the US this year, to commute the sentence.

Oliver’s lawyers called four members of the jury that convicted him to testify at an appeal hearing. At the hearing, one of them, Kenneth McHaney described how another juror, Kenneth Grace, read the Bible aloud to a group of jurors.

Donna Matheny showed McHaney a Bible in which she highlighted passages including one that "says that if a man strikes someone with an iron object so that he dies, then he is a murderer and should be put to death".

Maxine Symmank told the court that she too had read a passage from the Book of Numbers: "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death." Another juror, Michael Brenneisen, told a journalist in 2002 that he asked himself "Is this the way the Lord would decide the case?" But Brenneisen also said that in discussing the Bible the jury "went both directions in our use of the scripture - forgiveness and judgement".

McHaney said there were about four Bibles in the jury room.

A Texas state appeal court rejected Oliver’s plea to strike down the sentence because, it said, he had not "presented clear and convincing evidence" that the Bible influenced the jury’s decision. The court acknowledged that there was reference to the Bible by the jurors but said it was not improper. It said "a conscientious, dedicated" jury was "uninfluenced by any outside influence of any kind shown to the court in this hearing".

A federal appeal court disagreed, saying that references to the Bible inside the jury room were improper but it still refused to overturn the death sentence on the grounds that Oliver’s lawyers had not proved that the readings influenced the death penalty decision. The court ruled that the jurors would have applied their own moral judgements which would, in any case, have been influenced by their religious beliefs.

Oliver’s lawyer until last month, Winston Cochran, said the rulings are the result of an impossible situation in which he was prevented at the first appeal hearing from directly asking the jurors if the Bible readings had an influence on their decision. The federal court then turned down a subsequent appeal on the grounds that the jurors had not explicitly said they were swayed by the Bible.

"We were prohibited from asking the question we were later being asked to prove," he said.

Cochran also criticised the appeal court view that jurors were merely applying moral beliefs they already held.

"The problem is there was testimony the Bible was passed around and shown to people. It was part of the discussion. It wasn’t just used by individuals to reinforce their existing belief," he said.

With the supreme court refusing to take up Oliver’s case, his remaining options are the Texas board of pardons and the state governor, Rick Perry. The board of pardons rarely recommends clemency and Perry is unlikely to set aside a death sentence in a deeply religious state on the grounds that jurors referred to the Bible.

Perry has in any case shown no interest in revisiting controversial death penalty cases. This week he described a man executed in 2004 for burning his three children to death as a "monster" despite a growing body of evidence that he was wrongly convicted on spurious scientific evidence. Perry described claims that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent as anti-death penalty propaganda.

"Willingham was a monster. He was a guy who murdered his three children, who tried to beat his wife into an abortion so that he wouldn’t have those kids. Person after person has stood up and testified to facts of this case," he said.

Perry has sacked some members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission just as they were about to review a new scientific report highly critical of the evidence used to convict Willingham. If the commission had decided the evidence was flawed, it could have led to the first official admission of a wrongful execution in Texas.

"Getting all tied up in the process here frankly is a deflection of what people across this state and this country need to be looking at," Perry said.

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(From amnestyusa.org source) .....

 

Texas execution looms after jury consult Bible


9 October 2009

As the international community prepares to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October, Amnesty International has highlighted two cases of people facing execution - one in the USA, one in Iran.

A Texas man who faces execution after jurors at his trial consulted the Bible when deliberating his fate should have his death sentence commuted, Amnesty International said on Friday.

Khristian Oliver, 32, is set to be killed on 5 November after jurors used Biblical passages supporting the death penalty to help them decide whether he should live or die.

Amnesty International is calling on the Texas authorities to commute Khristian Oliver’s death sentence. The organization considers that the jurors’ use of the Bible during their sentencing deliberations raises serious questions about their impartiality.

A US federal appeals court acknowledged last year that the jurors’ use of the Bible amounted to an "external influence" prohibited under the US Constitution, but nonetheless upheld the death sentence.

Khristian Oliver was sentenced to death in 1999 for a murder committed during a burglary. According to accomplice testimony at the trial, 20-year-old Oliver shot the victim before striking him on the head with a rifle butt.

After the trial, evidence emerged that jurors had consulted the Bible during their sentencing deliberations. At a hearing in June 1999, four of the jurors recalled that several Bibles had been present and highlighted passages had been passed around.

One juror had read aloud from the Bible to a group of fellow jurors, including the passage, "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death".

The judge ruled that the jury had not acted improperly and this was upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

In 2002, a Danish journalist interviewed a fifth juror. The latter said that "about 80 per cent" of the jurors had "brought scripture into the deliberation", and that the jurors had consulted the Bible "long before we ever reached a verdict".

He told the journalist he believed "the Bible is truth from page 1 to the last page", and that if civil law and biblical law were in conflict, the latter should prevail. He said that if he had been told he could not consult the Bible, "I would have left the courtroom". He described himself as a death penalty supporter, saying life imprisonment was a "burden" on the taxpayer.

In 2008, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that the jurors had "crossed an important line" by consulting specific passages in the Bible that described the very facts at issue in the case. This amounted to an "external influence" on the jury prohibited under the US Constitution.

However, it concluded that under the "highly deferential standard" by which federal courts should review state court decisions, Oliver had failed to prove that he had been prejudiced by this unconstitutional juror conduct. In April 2009, the US Supreme Court refused to take the case, despite being urged to take it by nearly 50 former US federal and state prosecutors.

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Read Rabbi Dovid Bendory’s response

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