PUBLIC AI Index: AMR 51/039/2008

09 May 2008

UA 123 /08

Death penalty / Legal concern

USA (Virginia)

Percy Levar Walton (m), black, aged 29

PUBLIC AI Index: AMR 51/039/2008
09 May 2008
UA 123 /08

Death penalty / Legal concern

USA (Virginia)

Percy Levar Walton (m), black, aged 29

Levar Walton, who suffers from serious mental illness, is scheduled to be executed in Virginia on 10 June. He was sentenced to death in 1997 for the murders of an elderly white couple, Elizabeth and Jesse Hendrick, aged 81 and 80, and a 33-year-old black man, Archie Moore, in the town of Danville in November 1996.

In 1999, three mental health experts concluded that Levar Walton suffers from severe schizophrenia and was probably suffering from this mental illness at the time of the crime. Walton, who was 18 years and one month old at the time of the murders, had displayed signs of emerging mental illness since the age of 16. He manifested bizarre beliefs and inappropriate behaviour after his arrest, in pre-trial custody, and during the trial. In telephone calls from the jail to his family, he insisted that his mother was his sister, and referred to his father as his brother, his grandfather as his father and his grandmother as his mother. He said that he had discovered that he had two brothers, when he had none. He told his mother that he was the Queen Bee, and his grandmother that he was Superman. He told relatives that he was Jesus Christ, and that he was a millionaire. He insisted that he would come back to life as soon as he was executed, and that he would retrieve and bring back alive his grandfather who had recently died. In a 1999 affidavit, his lawyer recalled how Levar Walton “did not meaningfully assist us in preparing a defence… Often times it was extremely difficult to communicate with Mr Walton, and there were occasions where we could not tell whether he understood what we were saying to him. Other times it was clear from Mr Walton’s questions and responses to my questions that Mr Walton understood little of what I was telling him”. The lawyer recalled that “we were unable to convince Mr Walton that he would not come back to life” if he was executed.

The defence asked for a mental health expert, and the trial judge appointed a psychologist. After a series of meetings with Levar Walton, the psychologist developed serious doubts about his competence to stand trial, finding that Walton’s articulation of his thoughts was incomprehensible. He was particularly troubled by Levar Walton’s notion that execution did not result in permanent death. The psychologist recommended that Walton be placed in a secure psychiatric hospital. This was rejected by the trial judge.

At first Levar Walton said that he wanted to plead guilty. Then in September 1997 he told his lawyer that he wanted to plead not guilty and have a jury trial because he was innocent. Days later, he reverted to admitting guilt. At end of that month, asked whether he would plead guilty or not guilty, he refused to speak, but responded by writing the word “chair” on a piece of paper. He told his lawyer that he wanted to be executed in order “to come back to life so he could be with his honeys”. In court in October 1997, he pleaded guilty to the murders, the judge accepted the plea and, after a sentencing phase at which no mental health evidence was presented, sentenced him to death. At the sentencing trial, Walton’s conduct was extremely prejudicial. He repeatedly burst out laughing and smiled inappropriately. The prosecutor argued that Walton’s outbursts indicated a “sadistic, ruthless, cold-blooded murderer who has no conscience, no remorse and no right to live in a civilized society”.

Levar Walton’s mental illness has worsened on death row - prison records have described an inmate who is “floridly psychotic”. In a March 2006 ruling on his case, six judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit noted the “substantial evidence that Percy Levar Walton does not understand that his execution will mean his death, defined as the end of his physical life”. They further noted that “there is no dispute that since his sentencing, Walton has fallen deeper and deeper into mental illness”. According to Levar Walton’s current lawyer, who has visited him regularly, Walton is unable to care for himself, such as in matters of basic personal hygiene. She has no doubt that he is severely mentally impaired.

There is evidence that in addition to his mental illness, Levar Walton functions, at best, at borderline mental retardation level and has the mental age of a young child. If the crimes for which he was sentenced to death had been committed five weeks earlier, Levar Walton would have been 17 years old and his execution would be illegal under US and international law. By all accounts, Levar Walton is less developed intellectually than most 18-year-olds.

In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court prohibited the death penalty for people with mental retardation, finding that “standards of decency” had evolved in the USA to the extent that such use of the death penalty now violated the Constitution. The Court further reasoned that the impairments of defendants with mental retardation diminish their personal culpability and their ability to understand consequences, rendering the death penalty unjustifiable on grounds of retribution or deterrence. Amnesty International believes that there is a profound inconsistency in exempting people with mental retardation from the death penalty while those with serious mental illness remain exposed to it. The same rationale of diminished culpability, greater vulnerability and limited capacity applies to defendants afflicted with severe mental illness. For further information, see USA: The execution of mentally ill offenders, January 2006, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/003/2006/en (including information on Levar Walton’s case).

Virginia accounts for 98 of the 1,100 executions in the USA since judicial killing resumed in 1977. In 1999, Virginia’s then Governor, James Gilmore, commuted the death sentence of Calvin Swann on grounds of his schizophrenia from which he had suffered since his late teens. Swann was tried in front of the same judge, by the same prosecutor, and with the same defence lawyer, as Percy Levar Walton.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases, unconditionally. There is no such thing as a humane, fair, reliable or useful death penalty system (see ‘The pointless and needless extinction of life’: USA should now look beyond lethal injection issue to wider death penalty questions,
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/031/2008/en).
RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible, in English or your own language, in your own words:
- expressing sympathy for the relatives of Elizabeth and Jesse Hendrick and of Archie Moore, and explaining that you are not seeking to minimize the suffering their deaths will have caused;
- opposing the execution of Percy Levar Walton, noting compelling evidence that he had begun suffering from serious mental illness more than a year before the crime, that his illness has deepened on death row, and also that he functions, at best, at the level of borderline mental retardation and has the mental age of a child;
- noting that six judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said in 2006 that “there is no dispute that since his sentencing, Walton has fallen deeper and deeper into mental illness”, and that this deterioration has reportedly continued;
- recalling Governor James Gilmore’s 1999 decision to commute the death sentence of Calvin Swann because of the prisoner’s schizophrenia, and calling for clemency for Percy Levar Walton.

APPEALS TO
(Time difference = GMT - 5 hrs / BST - 6 hrs):
Governor Tim Kaine
Office of the Governor,Patrick Henry Building
3rd Floor,1111 East Broad Street
Richmond, Virginia 23219, USA
Fax: 001 804 371 6351
Email via website: http://www.governor.virginia.gov/AboutTheGovernor/contactGovernor.cfm
[Salutation: Dear Governor]

PLEASE SEND COPIES OF YOUR APPEALS TO: His Excellency Mr Robert Holmes Tuttle, Embassy of the United States, 24 Grosvenor Square, W1A 1AE. PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY

As it’s about free speech and censorship it’s particulary relevant to what we’re doing right now, as long as you ignore that bit in their about David Blunkett.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200411080014

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/china/mothers.asp

If you haven’t already see this!

This event will be host to lots of interesting speakers who work in the area of protecting and upholding the rights of the LGBT community, and will consist of activist workshops to help us devise interesting and innovative campaign methods to support this cause.

For more information visit- www.idahoscotland.org.uk

Tuesday - LGBT guy and campaign discussion.

One Voice - Sinead and Rachel to go - organise meeting early next term?

Blog - debate on activism.

China covert ops - brainstorm and start at meeting.
QM based competition?

SRC - no storage - Emma to go into QMU.

Ethical investment - Sinead to email Struan

Charles Kennedy - Emma and Sinead to go to surgery, ask about ethical investment and invite to meeting.

Fundraising game - social - Rachel to email on Tues.

Tiananmen event - contact other Glasgow groups - Jonathan.

The issue is to what extent we can be explicit with what is happening to innocent people across the world. It has also been highlighted in the recent videos uploaded by Amnesty themselves. These videos though they are cleverly filmed still depict very explicit scenes of violence. Is this the form our activism should take? Some would argue that it is our duty to show the truth about the violence occurring world wide, and to ensure people across the globe understand the intensity of this violence. In this respect we then should be obliged to show the pictures we have received to our whole student body. By doing this we can highlight the full and truthful extent of the violent and murderous tactics being used by members of the Chinese Government and army against these innocent protesters.

However there is a counter argument that people do not need, and do not want to see such scenes of violence taking place. After all everyone has the human right not to witness violent and disturbing scenes, therefore we do not have the right to show such images to people who do not want to see them. The counter argument to that of course is that seeing such images is very different from witnessing them first hand. Allowing people to See such images can help individuals who are not confronted daily with such horror, to understand and acknowledge the damage occurring in their lifetime.

How explicit should we be in our campaigns? How much information and detail should we incorporate into our activism? If we show these horrific scenes of violence are we being Gruesome or Truth-some?

So, the Supreme Court considered this (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7013333.stm), and executions were put on hold.

Well, they’re back. Three weeks ago the Supreme Court ended the halt in lethal injections, and according to this article in the International Herald Tribune (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/03/america/execute.php) the US is, and I quote, “moving to clear the backlog of executions”.

Does this horrify anyone else? The Supreme Court had a chance to change the American stance on the death penalty, to bring the US out of its barbaric customs and into the present with the rest of the so-called developed world, and it just … didn’t.

“The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things,” said Douglas Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. “So in some sense, they’re back from vacation and ready to go to work.”

Quite.

Some welcome the end of the moratorium.

“We’ll start playing a little bit of catch-up,” said William Hubbarth, a spokesman for Justice for All, a Houston-based victims rights group.

“It’s not like we have a cheering section for the death penalty.” Hubbarth, an Austin lawyer, said. But he added: “The capital murderers set to be executed should be executed post-haste. It’s not about killing the inmate. It’s about imposing the penalty that 12 of his peers have assessed.”

Yes. You don’t sound morbidly enthusiastic at all.

This at a time when “a recent wave of exonerations after DNA tests proved wrongful conviction.”. They didn’t do it! We have no idea how many people have been wrongfully executed and are set to be wrongfully executed, and this in the US of A, home of the brave, land of the free, supposedly one of the civilised countries.

Go and read that article in the IHT. And then, scroll down this page a bit and look at rachie’s post on China’s human rights situations. Read about the problems there. Sound familiar at all?

We need to realise that in many ways, the USA is no better than China. To all of those in the US who are expressing outrage over the offences in China - look to your own country. Look to Texas where there are 360 men and 9 women on death row - more of a ‘death compound’ as the IHT article jokes. You know what? I don’t think it’s funny. This has to stop, and not in twenty, thirty, fifty years, but now.

MTVs campaign called EXIT (End eXploitation and Trafficking). Whilst they don’t seem to be doing much at the moment, Radiohead have released this video with them:

I haven’t listened to it yet, library with no sound, but just thought I’d share as we need to be using the blog more apparently…

Executions:

Amnesty are calling for the Chinese Government to reduce; with the intention to later abolish, the death penalty. Currently there are 68 crimes that can be punishable by death. On January 1st 2007 an important reform took place; which saw the restoration of the Supreme People’s Court, a court which reviews all death sentences passed in china. This is a positive reform but is only a beginning to ending the death penalty. Further to this reform Amnesty would like the Chinese Government to ensure that families and lawyers of those condemned to death are given access to them and to the information surrounding their case.

Fair Trails:

Currently a major element of the Chinese punitive system is ‘Re-education through Labour,’ a system that involves the detention of people without charge for extended periods of time, possibly up to three years. This is directly violating international fair trial standards, and Amnesty is calling for China to assess this situation. These so called criminals can range from ‘unlawful advertising, unlicensed taxis, unlicensed businesses, vagrancy and begging,’ hardly crimes worthy of detention for periods up to three years.

Respect for the Rights of Human Rights Defenders:

China gave assurances that the human rights issues within their country would improve during the run up to the Olympic games. However the authorities are still intimidating and harassing human rights defenders. Human rights defenders should have the freedom to highlight issues of concern without fear of penalty and repercussion.

Freedom from Censorship

The promise made by China for media freedom is not being kept. Thousands of internet police monitor cyberspace to censor any information the Chinese Government deem sensitive; phrases such as ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ come under such material. Many Chinese people have been imprisoned for acts such as signing petitions online, it is said that china have the most effective form of internet censorship, sometimes referred to as, ‘The Great Firewall of China.’ Currently there has been more leeway given to foreign journalists and media, however domestic media is still very effectively censored.

These four issues combine to create the major aspects to the Amnesty campaign, if we can campaign around these issues we have the chance to help the people of China, and allow human rights abuses to be confronted and realized fully in terms of international law.

Stuff Of Life:

Part of the unsubscribe campaign. See the related blog post and news item.

‘Torchure’:

Part of Amnesty International’s efforts to raise awareness of China’s record on human rights. Read the related post here.

What are your thoughts on these videos? Do they get the message across well, or are they too in-your-face - or esoteric? Did the waterboarding video go too far?