Word: presson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Norman, Okla., law office, attorney Steven Presson stores two unusual keepsakes. One is a leather pouch that holds the ashes of Sean Sellers, the only person executed for a crime committed as a 16-year-old since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976. Sellers--who murdered his mother, his stepfather and a store clerk--was dispatched by lethal injection in 1999, when he was 29. Presson's other memento is a plastic box containing the ashes of Scott Hain, who, it now seems fair to say, was the last juvenile offender to be executed...
...Presson, who represented both boys, found it "very bittersweet" when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that it was cruel and unusual to sentence anyone to death for crimes committed before the age of 18. "I'm happy for those on death row, but it came six years too late for Sean and two years too late for Scott," says Presson. "We've been arguing for decades that kids don't have the same moral culpability that adults have, and finally, finally, they listened...
...took 16 years for the high court to come around to Presson's point of view, by a narrow 5-to-4 vote. In 1989 the court ruled 5 to 4 the other way. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 1989 decision, argued that there was neither a "historical nor a modern societal consensus" forbidding capital punishment for 16- or 17-year-olds (though the court had found such a consensus for those under 16 a year earlier). Last week, however, Scalia was on the short side of the decision...
...mention of Wanda while a roach tiptoed over a grandchild's sneaker. A relative with Tourette's syndrome--one of several kin with disabilities--called, and the speaker phone broadcast a tirade in which he threatened a member of the defense team. "It's hard to believe," Presson said, "but Wanda Jean is the brain trust of that family...
...that it would have mattered. Oklahoma is one of 13 states that do not prohibit executions of the mentally deficient. Still, Presson argued in last-minute appeals that prosecutors knowingly misled the clemency board when they claimed Allen was a high school graduate and briefly attended college. Prosecutors, who insist that Allen was competent and functional, said Allen herself made those claims at her murder trial. And indeed she did, inexplicably and irrationally damaging her own cause...