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While the courts pretend to be neutral when you look at how they behave they sure often seem to be on the side of our government masters, not the PEOPLE who they pretend to serve.

I don't know if it is true in this case but frequently former prosecutors are appointed to be judges. Doesn't take much to figure out that they are probably biased on the side of the police, prosecutors and government.

Source

Arizona inmate attempts to halt his Wednesday execution

by Michael Kiefer - May. 22, 2011 02:51 PM

The Arizona Republic

An Arizona Death Row inmate on Sunday demanded that his Wednesday execution be halted and the Arizona Supreme Court be disqualified from his case because of a Death Row tour by the justices and meetings with the Director of the Arizona Department of Corrections to discuss execution schedules and methods while they were considering the inmate's case.

Donald Beaty, 56, is scheduled to die by lethal injection for the 1984 murder of a 13-year-old newspaper carrier in Tempe.

Beaty notified his attorneys at the Federal Public Defender's Office that several of the justices had participated in a tour of his cell block on May 11, which the attorneys confirmed by filing a public records request with the corrections department.

In letters signed by Corrections Director Charles Ryan, the attorneys learned that on April 13, Ryan met with Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch and Justice Andrew Hurwitz to discuss scheduling of executions. Ryan sent a copy of the letter to Assistant Arizona Attorney General Kent Cattani, who represents the state and the Department of Corrections in executions. On April 19, the court issued a warrant of execution for Beaty.

Then, in a May 11 letter to Gov. Jan Brewer, Ryan detailed how he had taken four of the justices, including Berch, on a tour of the Eyman prison in Florence, including visits to Death Row and the execution chamber. At the time, the high court was considering motions related to Beaty's impending execution. The motions were subsequently denied.

The motion filed Sunday by Assistant Federal Public Defender Sarah Stone characterizes the meetings as ex-parte communications, that is, meetings with a judge by parties from only one side of the case without the knowledge of the other side. Such communications are forbidden by judicial rules.

Furthermore, Stone wrote, it put the judges in the role of investigators, which is also forbidden by judicial rules, especially for appellate judges like the justices, who are only supposed to rule on pre-existing facts and records of a case and not try them as a trial court judge would.

Stone asked that the justices stay the execution and turn the case over to a new panel of judges to reconsider the various motions, which included requests to examine whether Beaty was denied effective assistance of counsel during his early appeals. A similar motion is currently in front of the U.S. Supreme Court; that court did stay the last scheduled execution in Arizona for those reasons.

Beaty kidnapped Christy Ann Fornoff on May 9, 1984, at the Tempe apartment complex where he was a maintenance man and where Fornoff and her mother were collecting money from customers on her delivery route for The Phoenix Gazette. Two days later, Beaty claimed to have found her body, wrapped in a sheet behind a dumpster near his apartment. He even talked to reporters about the find and attended the girl's funeral before he was arrested.

An autopsy showed the girl had been sexually assaulted and suffocated.