criminal law

Clayton Lockett took 43 minutes to die when he was executed by the state of Oklahoma earlier this year. But investigators "downplayed and omitted disturbing details" about the botched execution, including that lawyers from the Attorney General's Office helped select the drug combination used for Lockett's execution, the Tulsa World reports.

Attorneys for death-row inmates said in a motion that a witness said "the scene 'was like a horror movie' as Lockett was bucking and attempting to raise himself off the gurney when he was supposed to be unconscious and dying," the newspaper further reports. A paramedic who struggled to start numerous IVs on the night of the execution told investigators that the process was a "'a cluster.'" The lawyers are challenging the state's execution procedures as cruel and unusual punishment.

Alaska Native tribes will now be able to prosecute domestic violence crimes committed against American Indians by non-Natives, The Washington Post's Sari Horwitz reports. A previous amendment to the Violence Against Women Act gave jurisdiction to tribal courts to prosecute domestic violence crimes and address the lack of legal protection that Native women have from assailants, but Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) added an exemption for Alaska Native tribes. Murkowski supported the rollback of the exemption.

Barrett Brown, a journalist and hacktivist who accepted a plea deal for threatening a federal agent on a YouTube video, is going to be sentenced Tuesday. But prosecutors have asked that their recommendations, as well as the defense's about Brown's sentence be kept sealed, Russia Today reports: "According to a statement made by the Free Barrett Brown group this week, 'It seems clear that the government doesn’t want journalists to attend the upcoming hearing with an understanding of what issues are at stake, and they don’t want further attention to a case that has already proven to be an embarrassment.”' Once First Amendment concerns were raised by Brown's defense and others, the government dropped a computer fraud charge against Brown for posting online a link to credit card information hacked by others.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema has ordered the Obama administration to decide by Tuesday whether it will make national security reporter James Risen testify at the trial of a government whistleblower and force the reporter to discuss his confidential sources, the New York Times' Jonathan Mahler (and Risen's colleague) reports. Prosecutors say the defendant Jeffrey Sterling provided  Risen "with information about a botched C.I.A. attempt to sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which Mr. Risen wrote about in his 2006 book, 'State of War.'"

A Staten Island grand jury cleared a NYPD police officer in the death of Eric Garner while he was held in a chokehold after being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, the New York Post's Larry Celona and two others reports. Garner's death was caught on a video that went viral and involved the same specter of white-officer brutality toward white men that the Michael Brown case has inspired. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called for a Department of Justice investigation into the case.

Ohio is preparing to join the ranks of several other states that have enacted provisions to keep secret their execution procedures, The Marshall Project's Maurice Chammah reports. The American Board of Anesthesiology has warned that it might revoke the certificate of any anesthesiologist who participates in an execution. A proposed Ohio law would protect doctors' licenses if they participate in executions. The law also would protect the identity of compounding pharmacies that mix drugs used in lethal injections. There are similar laws in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Arizona, among other states.

Megan McCracken, Eighth Amendment Resource Counsel at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law's Death Penalty Clinic told Chammah that “'when secrecy statutes prevent the courts from reviewing pertinent information about execution procedures, they effectively prevent a determination of whether the execution procedures are constitutional.”'

There have been a flood of misdemeanor cases in American courts because of tough-on-crime legislation and tough policing, The Wall Street Journal's John R. Emshwiller and Gary Fields report. The result has been assembly lines in court. Just minutes are spent adjudicating the cases and defendants, who have a constitutional right to legal counsel, often are not provided lawyers. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a misdemeanor defendant facing a potential jail sentence has the right to a lawyer, WSJ reports, but "what that means for the nation’s crowded courts is a topic of debate among judges around the country." Jean Hoefer Toal, chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, told the WSJ her state doesn't have the money to provide lawyers in every misdemeanor case as envisioned by the U.S. Supreme Court "and that chief justices from other states have told her the same."                 

A New York judge has ruled that the confession of the defendant in the Etan Patz case is admissible, ProPublica's Naveena Sadasivam reports. The defendant's lawyers argued that his confession to the murder of a little boy whose face was famously plastered on milk cartons is false. New York Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley ruled that "Hernandez did have the mental capacity to waive his rights to have an attorney present and understood that he had the right to remain silent," ProPublica reports.

The Washington Post's Robert Barnes has a preview of arguments next week in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Elonis. Anthony Elonis made several threats on Facebook in rap-style lyrics toward his estranged wife, law enforcement, schoolchildren and co-workers, and he was convicted in federal court of making "true threats" toward most of those people. At issue in the Supreme Court is whether the test for proving someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of making a true threat should be whether they subjectively intended to make good on the threat or if a reasonable person would view the speech as a threat. At issue are " the unique qualities of social media," Barnes writes. "In this rapidly evolving realm of communication, only the occasional emoticon may signal whether a writer is engaging in satire or black humor, exercising poetic license, or delivering the kind of grim warnings that have presaged school shootings and other acts of mass violence."

The Tulsa World's Ziva Branstetter reports that few Oklahomans receive compensation after their convictions are overturned because of evidence they are innocent: "Like most other states, Oklahoma’s wrongful conviction law requires a legal finding of 'actual innocence' after convictions are overturned. In practice, the process often requires exonerated people to prove their innocence again in court." Branstetter found in her review that just six out of 28 Oklahomans listed on the National Exoneration Registry collected any money for their years spent in prison.