 |
| Mark Asay |
A man who is set to become the first white Florida convict to be executed for killing a black man has said he is ready to die.
Mark Asay, 53, was convicted in 1987 of killing black man Robert Lee Booker and Hispanic cross-dresser Robert McDowell and has spent the years since waiting to be executed.
And on the eve of Thursday's execution, a tearful Asay opened up about the killings, his newfound religion, and why he feels he should either go free or be executed immediately to News4Jax.
Asay was convicted in 1987 of the racially charged murders of Robert Lee Booker, a black man, and Robert 'Rene' McDowell, a Hispanic crossdresser.
The then-23-year-old Asay was hauled in by police in July of that year after Booker's body was found under the porch of an abandoned house in Jacksonville.
McDowell's body was found at a crossroads nearby. Both men had been shot, and a candy-apple-red truck with a missing bumper was spotted leaving the scene of McDowell's killing.
That truck was traced to Asay, who has admitted to killing McDowell, a former friend of his, but denies murdering Booker, who was linked to him with ballistic evidence.
When asked if he had anything he wanted to say, Booker tearfully told the channel: 'Well, really, just that I'm sorry and things just got out of control.'
Saying that McDowell's death came as he was 'having a meltdown,' Asay said they had been friendly until the man took money from him.
'I knew Robert McDowell as Rene,' he said. 'I had previous encounters with him, and we were sociable, and he did take money from me one time.
'I had said, in my mind, "When I see him, I'm going to kick his a**." But I never intended to murder him. It just happened.'
Asay claims he was drunk to the point of unconsciousness when he shot McDowell six times, and that he doesn't 'know what happened.'
'I can only look at it in hindsight,' he said, as he began to choke up again. 'But I know that anybody that says I'm not concerned, don't know me.'
Prosecutors, who mistakenly identified the Hispanic victim as a light-skinned black man, painted the killing - and that of Booker - as a hate crime. Authorities have only recently acknowledged that mistake.
They also said that his white supremacist tattoos, including one that read 'supreme white power,' proved his prejudice.
However, he denies that he's a white supremacist and says he only got the ink done because it was the only way to survive 'in a hostile prison environment', when he was locked up for a burglary and auto theft, aged 19.
'They are not representative at all of who I am, but they are tattoos, and they're not easily removed,' he said.
'I have covered them up. I had a swastika on my elbow; I covered that up. I had an SWP on my arm; I burned it off. I've removed every racial tattoo I had, except for the ones that I can't reach.'
 |
| Florida's death chamber |
'While it's a poor choice, it's a choice I made, and I can't undo it.'
Killing McDowell is another choice; but Asay claims that the punishment he has received for that decision is far greater than it should have been.
He says that he never killed Booker - whom he admitted had cheated him in a drug deal - and that the ballistic evidence that connected him to the death has been proven to be wrong.
And, he says, the death penalty was imposed because it was painted as a racially motivated killing - even though the only victim he will admit to killing was Hispanic, not black, as prosecutors claimed.
He says the government was acting in 'good faith' at the time of the prosecution, but in the wake of those revelations, he wants to get his conviction changed to second-degree murder and be released for time served.
If that's not an option, however, he says he'd rather die.
'No, I don't want life in prison [even] if they had an institution that had Ramada Inn-style housing. Prison is prison. I have served 36 years of my life in prison.
'If the purpose of prison is not accomplished now, it's never going to be accomplished.
If the purpose is just to protect me from society and protect society from me, OK, I accept that, but I'm saying I'm not a violent person or a threat to society.
'But if the government is like, "Well, we can't be sure," then I'm prepared to submit to the execution Thursday and go on and be at peace with my Lord.'
Asay, who is a born again Christian, says that his faith is giving him comfort in the hours before his death, and that he is ready to die.
'I'm loved by the Lord. I'm 100 per cent confident that if I'm going to get relief here, it's because of the truth,' he said.
'And if I'm not going to get relief here, it's because the Lord knows that my life here on Earth will not be productive.
'Because I pray, and I say, "I've had all of the prison I want. So I want out of prison - through the front door or the back."'
Unfortunately for Asay, there looks to be no way out alive now. He was scheduled to die last year, until his execution was postponed at the last minute.
But last month Governor Rick Scott signed Asay's new death warrant.
And that means he'll be killed by lethal injection at 6pm on Thursday.
That will make him the first white man to be executed for killing a black person in the history of Florida.
His pending execution will be carried out for the first time with the help of a drug that has never been used previously in any US execution.
It is expected to be carried out using etomidate, an anesthetic that has been approved by the Florida Supreme Court.
Death penalty experts say the drug is unproven, while state corrections officials say the choice has been reviewed. Two other drugs also will be used.
The execution is Florida's first since the US Supreme Court halted the practice in the state more than 18 months ago.
Source: Mail Online, James Wilkinson, August 24, 2017
Florida to resume executions with 1st use of triple-drug injection
TALLAHASSEE -- Florida’s death penalty hiatus is slated to end Thursday, when the state plans to execute the first Death Row prisoner in more than 19 months.
But the execution of Mark James Asay — a white supremacist accused of targeting black victims — won’t just be the first lethal injection since early 2016 in a state that was killing Death Row prisoners at a record-breaking pace until a U.S. Supreme Court ruling put Florida’s death penalty on hold.
It will also be the first execution anywhere in the country using an untested triple-drug lethal injection procedure.
Asay has spent nearly three decades on Death Row after being convicted in the 1987 shooting deaths of two men in downtown Jacksonville.
Gov. Rick Scott initially signed a death warrant for Asay in January 2016.
But not long afterward, in a case known as Hurst v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s death-penalty sentencing system as unconstitutional because it gave too much power to judges, instead of juries.
Lawmakers revamped the law, but a series of court rulings kept the death penalty in limbo until this spring, when the Florida Supreme Court lifted a hold on Asay’s execution, more than a year after it was supposed to take place.
It’s not unusual for Death Row prisoners, especially those with pending death warrants, to launch myriad appeals in one of the judicial system’s most complicated arenas.
But Asay’s case is more tangled than most:
- Asay, now 53, spent a decade on Death Row without legal representation, a violation of state law.
- Dozens of boxes of records related to his case were destroyed after being left in a rat- and roach-infested shed.
- One of his previous defense lawyers was the subject of an investigation by the Florida Supreme Court, after a federal judge chided her for shoddy work.
- Asay’s current lawyer maintains that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office hoodwinked him into agreeing to a delay by the U.S. Supreme Court, which could ultimately make it more difficult for the condemned killer to have a review by the high court.
- The Florida Supreme Court recently issued a rare mea culpa, acknowledging that it had for more than 20 years mistakenly believed that one of the convicted murderer’s victims was black.
- Florida Department of Corrections officials changed the three-drug lethal injection protocol a year after Scott signed Asay’s death warrant, adopting the use of a drug never before used in Florida or in any other state for executions.
Asay was convicted in 1988 of the murders of Robert Booker and Robert McDowell. Asay allegedly shot Booker, who was black, after calling him a racial epithet. He then killed McDowell, who was dressed as a woman, after agreeing to pay him for oral sex. According to court documents, Asay — who bears white supremacist and swastika tattoos — later told a friend that McDowell, who was not black, had previously cheated him out of money in a drug deal.
A jury found Asay guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and recommended the death penalty with a 9-3 vote.
The Florida Supreme Court last week rejected a major appeal by Asay, including a challenge to the new lethal-injection procedure. This week, the court rejected another attempt at a reprieve, after justices acknowledged the court had been mistaken for more than two decades about McDowell’s race.
McDowell was “known to friends and neighbors as Renee Torres,” the court wrote.
“Torres was identified at trial by everyone who testified as white and Hispanic. Renee Torres nee Robert McDowell may have been either white or mixed-race, Hispanic but was not a black man,” the Supreme Court wrote. “We regret our previous error.”
But the Supreme Court summarily dismissed Asay’s request for a new hearing because of the error.
“While this court may have mislabeled the racial identity of the victim in its prior opinions, this fact does not negatively affect this court’s final determination,” justices unanimously decided Monday afternoon.
Thursday’s execution would make Asay the 24th Death Row prisoner put to death since Scott — who has ordered more executions than any Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 — took office in 2011.
The number of death warrants signed by Scott, during a shorter period of time than other governors, was steadily growing until the Hurst decision put executions on hold.
While death penalty lawyers don’t wish for any complications Thursday, they worry that an uneventful lethal injection could prompt Scott to issue a flurry of new death warrants.
“The attention focused on this execution happens as a result of the lack of state sponsored killings in the last year and a half. I suspect the execution machine will start up again, these judicially approved medical homicides will become the norm again, and news about them will move to the back pages, if they make the paper at all,” Pete Mills, an assistant public defender in the 10th Judicial Circuit who also serves as chairman of the Florida Public Defenders Association Death Penalty Steering Committee, said in an interview.
Ocala-area State Attorney Brad King, a veteran prosecutor and outspoken defender of the death penalty, wouldn’t predict what the impact of Thursday’s execution would be in terms of Scott.
But “if this execution is carried out without any problems, without any stays by any appellate courts, then I think the road would be clear for executions to begin on a regular basis again,” King told The News Service of Florida in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Florida Supreme Court Justice Barbara Pariente, who dissented in last week’s ruling on Asay’s appeal, raised concerns that the execution is being rushed. She wrote, in part, that the state had thwarted attempts by Asay’s lawyers, led by Marty McClain, to obtain public records regarding the change in the lethal injection protocol.
“In its rush to execute Asay, the state has jeopardized Asay’s fundamental constitutional rights and treated him as the proverbial guinea pig of its newest lethal injection protocol,” she wrote in a lengthy dissent on Aug. 14.
Mills raised similar concerns.
“If the state is going to kill someone on behalf of the people of that state, I would hope they would take the time to get things done right,” Mills said.
But Asay has had “multiple trips through the appellate system,” the veteran prosecutor King said.
“There’s nothing rushed about it,” King said.
Source: Palm Beach Post, August 23, 2017
For the 1st time in Florida's history, a white man who killed black person to be executed
For the 1st time in state history, Florida is expecting to execute a white man Thursday for killing a black person - and it plans to do so with the help of a drug that has never been used before in any U.S. execution.
Barring a stay, Mark Asay, 53, is scheduled to die by lethal injection after 6 p.m. Asay was convicted by a jury of 2 racially motivated, premeditated murders in Jacksonville in 1987.
The planned execution - Florida's 1st since the U.S. Supreme Court halted the practice in the state more than 18 months ago - is expected to be carried out using etomidate, an anesthetic that has been approved by the Florida Supreme Court. 2 other drugs also will be used.
Asay, who is white, fatally shot Robert Lee Booker, 34, a black man, after making multiple racist comments, prosecutors said. Asay's 2nd victim was Robert McDowell, 26, who was mixed race, white and Hispanic. Prosecutors say Asay had hired McDowell, who was dressed as a woman, for sex and shot him 6 times after discovering his gender.
While Asay would be the state's 1st white man to be executed in Florida for killing a black man, at least 20 black men have been executed for killing white victims since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. A total of 92 Florida inmates have been executed in that time period.
Opponents of capital punishment said much more needs to be done to make Florida's criminal justice system more equitable.
"This does nothing to change the 170-year-long history of Florida not executing whites for killing blacks," said Mark Elliott, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Etomidate is the 1st of 3 drugs administered in Florida's new execution cocktail. It is replacing midazolam, which has been harder to acquire after many drug companies began refusing to provide it for executions. The etomidate is followed by rocuronium bromide, a paralytic, and finally, potassium acetate, which stops the heart. It is Florida's 1st time using potassium acetate too, which was used in a 2015 execution in Oklahoma by mistake, but has not been used elsewhere, a death penalty expert said.
While the state's high court has approved the use of etomidate, some experts have criticized the drug as being unproven.
"It's never been used in an execution before," said Jen Moreno, a lethal injection expert who works as a staff attorney at the University of California, Berkeley Law School's death penalty clinic. "There are outstanding questions about whether it's going to do what it needs to do during an execution. The state hasn't provided any information about why it has selected this drug."
State corrections officials defended the choice, saying it has been reviewed. The corrections department refused to answer questions from The Associated Press about how it chose etomidate.
"The Florida Department of Corrections follows the law and carries out the sentence of the court," Michelle Glady, the Florida Department of Corrections' spokeswoman, said in a statement. "This is the Department's most solemn duty and the foremost objective with the lethal injection procedure is a humane and dignified process."
Doctors hired by Asay's attorneys raised questions about etomidate in court declarations, saying there are cases where it had caused pain along with involuntary writhing in patients.
But in its opinion allowing the drug to be used, the state's high court said earlier this month that 4 expert witnesses demonstrated that Asay "is at small risk of mild to moderate pain."
Asay would be the 1st Florida inmate executed since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling found the state's method of sentencing people to death to be unconstitutional. The court ruled that the old system was illegal because it gave judges, not juries, the power to decide.
Since then, Florida's Legislature passed a law requiring a unanimous jury for death penalty recommendations.
In Asay's case, jurors recommended death for both murder counts by 9-3 votes. Even though the new law requires unanimity, Florida's high court ruled that the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling did not apply to older cases.
Asay will be the 24th inmate executed since Gov. Rick Scott has taken office, the most under any governor in Florida history.
Booker's son, Vittorio Robinson, who was 15 when his father was killed, told the Florida Times-Union newspaper in Jacksonville that his father's death helped him realize that racism was still alive.
"I just couldn't believe it," he said, describing when he learned of his father's death. "And then it dawned on me, there are actually still people out there that thought that way."
Source: Associated Press, August 23, 2017
Here's Another Example of Why the "Death Penalty System In Florida Is in Absolute Chaos": When life or death depends on date.
Mark Asay is scheduled to be executed in Florida on August 24 for the 1987 murders of Robert Booker and Renee Torres (who was originally identified in court documents as Robert McDowell). It will be the 1st execution carried out in the Sunshine State since Oscar Bolin was put to death in January 2016, and the 1st time ever that Florida will execute a white person for the murder of a black person.
But the case is also significant because the US Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that Florida's death sentencing protocol, which did not require unanimous juries before a judge imposes a sentence, was unconstitutional. Now, dozens of inmates on Florida's death row are eligible to be re-sentenced - but only if they were sentenced before 2002, so Asay does not qualify.
"The death penalty system in Florida is in absolute chaos," says Mark Elliott, the executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, an anti capital-punishment advocacy group. The state leads the country in wrongful death penalty convictions: Since 1973, 27 people have been freed from death row after new DNA evidence was discovered, prosecutorial misconduct was found, eyewitness misidentification had occurred, or other variables freed them. In 2013, Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed a law that would hasten executions by requiring the governor to sign a death warrant 30 days after the clemency review is completed, and the execution to occur within 180 days. Scott is currently being sued by Aramis Ayala, a state attorney, after he removed her from capital murder cases because she refused to seek the death penalty. In his seven years of office, Gov. Scott has signed 23 death warrants - more than any Florida governor in the modern era.
In his 7 years of office, Gov. Scott has signed 23 death warrants - more than any Florida governor in the modern era.
Since March, state law has required a unanimous jury to sentence an inmate to death, and the policy is retroactive to 2002. That means means dozens of inmates who have been on death row after 2002 are eligible to have their sentences reviewed and possibly commuted to life in prison. But some anti-death penalty advocates consider portions of the new law to be unfair, because it does not include all prisoners and is therefore not not fully retroactive.
The law came about from a 1998 case. Timothy Hurst gagged and murdered his co-worker, Cynthia Harrison at a Popeye's in Pensacola, Fla. He was sentenced to death 2 years later, in 2000, after a jury voted 11 to 1 for execution. During appeal, he was granted a new sentencing trial because his counsel did not present evidence of his possible brain damage and borderline intelligence. At his new sentencing trial in 2012, he presented those factors as mitigating evidence, but the jury sentenced him to death again, this time 7-5. Hurst appealed once more, and his case made it to the US Supreme Court in 2015. In Hurst v. Florida, the court ruled in an 8-1 decision that the state had violated the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial and forced Florida to change its sentencing laws.
In March 2016, the Florida legislature permitted the death penalty as long as 10 jurors recommended it. The law was struck down by the Florida Supreme Court and, in March 2017, Gov. Rick Scott signed a law requiring a unanimous jury for all capital defendants. The new law was consistent with Ring v. Arizona, the 2002 Supreme Court ruling that first required a jury, and not a judge, to decide if a defendant is eligible for the death penalty, The Florida Supreme Court decided that the unanimous jury requirement would be retroactive to the year of the Supreme Court case.
In December 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled, 6-1, that the 2002 line would stand. In his dissent, the now retired Justice James Perry wrote that "the line drawn by the majority is arbitrary and cannot withstand scrutiny under the Eighth Amendment."
There are more than 350 inmates awaiting execution on Florida's death row. Of them, more than 150 were sentenced to death after 2002, which means their sentences are eligible to be commuted. Approximately 200 inmates have no chance of getting their sentences changed, including Mark Asay.
His case is not one that invites sympathy. During a night of drinking and searching for prostitutes with his brother Robbie and friend "Bubba" McQuinn, Asay murdered 2 people in Jacksonville. His 1st victim was a black man named Robert Booker, whom he saw having a conversation with McQuinn. According to court documents, Asay yelled at Booker and called him racial slurs. McQuinn tried to intervene but Asay got his gun and shot Booker in the stomach. When his friend asked him why he shot Booker, according to court documents Asay replied, "You got to show a nigger who is boss."
Asay and his friends drove away and continued to look for women when they met Renee Torres, who court documents identified as Robert McDowell, "a black man dressed as a woman." Asay acted as a lookout while Torres and McQuinn engaged in a sexual act, court documents say. Asay then returned, dragged Torres from the car and shot the victim 6 times. When McQuinn asked why he shot Torres, Asay said that the "the bitch had beat him out of 10 dollars." The trial was fraught with racial tension, as witnesses testified about Asay's usage of racial slurs and alleged white supremacist tattoos. In 1988, jurors voted 9 to 3 to put Asay to death.
Asay has tried to halt his execution for several different reasons including the 2002 cut off date, but he's been repeatedly denied. Last week, the Florida Supreme Court denied his application for a stay of execution saying that Hurst cannot be retroactively applied. Justice Barbara Pariente dissented saying executing Asay despite the 9 to 3 jury vote "violates the foundational principles of both the Florida and United States Constitutions."
On August 14, just days before Asay's scheduled execution, the Florida Supreme Court announced that it had erroneously identified Torres as a black man, decades earlier. According to the Court, the victim was either Latino or white. In a petition to the state high court, Asay's lawyers say this error should entitle Asay to relief, writing that "the state's case against Mr. Asay was premised upon its claim that the 2 homicides at issue were motivated by [his] alleged racial animus."
For Mark Elliott, Asay's case demonstrates the injustice at the root of the partial retroactivity. "If a sentencing law is declared unconstitutional," he says, "it should be unconstitutional for everyone."
Source: Mother Jones, August 23, 2017
⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.
 |  |
Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Comments
Post a Comment
Pro-DP comments will not be published.