Anglonautes > Vocapedia > 2000s - 2010s - 2020s > English words - vocabulary - dictionary - encyclopedia > USA > Constitution, Supreme court, Law, Justice > Justices > U.S. Supreme court > Votes, Orders, Opinions, Decisions, Rulings > Death penalty / sentence, Capital punishment

JACKSON, Ga. — Proclaiming his innocence, Troy Davis was put to death by lethal injection on Wednesday night, his life — and the hopes of supporters worldwide — prolonged by several hours while the Supreme Court reviewed but then declined to act on a petition from his lawyers to stay the execution.

Mr. Davis, 42, who was convicted of murdering a Savannah police officer 22 years ago, entered the death chamber shortly before 11 p.m., four hours after the scheduled time. He died at 11:08.

This final chapter before his execution had become an international symbol of the battle over the death penalty and racial imbalance in the justice system.

“It harkens back to some ugly days in the history of this state,” said the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church, who visited Mr. Davis on Monday.

Mr. Davis remained defiant at the end, according to reporters who witnessed his death. He looked directly at the members of the family of Mark MacPhail, the officer he was convicted of killing, and told them they had the wrong man.

“I did not personally kill your son, father, brother,” he said. “All I can ask is that you look deeper into this case so you really can finally see the truth.”

He then told his supporters and family to “keep the faith” and said to prison personnel, “May God have mercy on your souls; may God bless your souls.”

One of the witnesses, a radio reporter from WSB in Atlanta, said it appeared that the MacPhail family “seemed to get some satisfaction” from the execution.

For Mr. Davis’s family and other supporters gathered in front of the prison, the final hours were mixed with hope, tears and exhaustion. The crowd was buoyed by the Supreme Court’s involvement, but crushed when the justices issued their one-sentence refusal to consider a stay.

When the news of his death came, the family left quietly and the 500 or so supporters began to pack up and leave their position across the state highway from the prison entrance. Mr. Davis’s body was driven out of the grounds about midnight.

During the evening, a dozen supporters of the death penalty, including people who knew the MacPhail family sat quietly, separated from the Davises and their supporters by a stretch of lawn and rope barriers.

The appeal to the Supreme Court was one of several last-ditch efforts by Mr. Davis on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, an official with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said that the vote by the Georgia parole board to deny clemency to Mr. Davis was so close that he hoped there might be a chance to save him from execution.

The official, Edward O. DuBose, president of the Georgia chapter, said the group had “very reliable information from the board members directly that the board was split 3 to 2 on whether to grant clemency.”

“The fact that that kind of division was in the room is even more of a sign that there is a strong possibility to save Troy’s life,” he said.

The N.A.A.C.P said it had been in contact with the Department of Justice on Wednesday, in the hope that the federal government would intervene on the basis of civil rights violations, meaning irregularities in the original investigation and at the trial.

Earlier in the day, his lawyers had asked the state for another chance to spare him: a lie detector test.

But the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole, which on Tuesday denied Mr. Davis’s clemency after a daylong hearing on Monday, quickly responded that there would be no reconsideration of the case, and the polygraph test was abandoned.

Mr. Davis’s supporters also reached out to the prosecutor in the original case and asked him to persuade the original judge to rescind the death order. Benjamin Jealous, the president of the N.A.A.C.P, also tried to ask President Obama for a reprieve.

The Innocence Project, which has had a hand in the exoneration of 17 death-row inmates through the use of DNA testing, sent a letter to the Chatham County district attorney, Larry Chisolm, urging him to withdraw the execution warrant against Mr. Davis.

Mr. Davis was convicted of the 1989 shooting of Officer MacPhail, who was working a second job as a security guard. A homeless man called for help after a group that included Mr. Davis began to assault him, according to court testimony. When Officer MacPhail went to assist him, he was shot in the face and the heart.

Before Wednesday, Mr. Davis had walked to the brink of execution three times.

His conviction came after testimony by some witnesses who later recanted and on the scantest of physical evidence, adding fuel to those who rely on the Internet to rally against executions and to question the validity of eyewitness identification and of the court system itself.

But for the family of the slain officer and others who believed that two decades’ worth of legal appeals and Supreme Court intervention was more than enough to ensure justice, it was not an issue of race but of law.

Inside the prison, Officer MacPhail’s widow, Joan MacPhail-Harris, said calling Mr. Davis a victim was ludicrous.

“We have lived this for 22 years,” she said on Monday. “We are victims.”

She added: “We have laws in this land so that there is not chaos. We are not killing Troy because we want to.”

Mr. Davis, who refused a last meal, had been in good spirits and prayerful, said Wende Gozan Brown, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, who visited him on Tuesday. She said he had told her his death was for all the Troy Davises who came before and after him.

“I will not stop fighting until I’ve taken my last breath,” she recounted him as saying. “Georgia is prepared to snuff out the life of an innocent man.”

The case has been a slow and convoluted exercise in legal maneuvering and death penalty politics.

The state parole board granted him a stay in 2007 as he was preparing for his final hours, saying the execution should not proceed unless its members “are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused.” The board has since added three new members.

In 2008, his execution was about 90 minutes away when the Supreme Court stepped in. Although the court kept Mr. Davis from execution, it later declined to hear the case.

This time around, the case catapulted into the national consciousness with record numbers of petitions — more than 630,000 — delivered to the board to stay the execution, and the list of people asking for clemency included former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 51 members of Congress, entertainment figures like Cee Lo Green and even some death penalty supporters, including William S. Sessions, a former F.B.I. director.

Kim Severson reported from Jackson,

and John Schwartz from New York.

Davis Is Executed in Georgia,
NYT,
21.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/
us/final-pleas-and-vigils-in-troy-davis-execution.html

No Justification

October 28, 2010
The New York Times

Two years ago, when a splintered Supreme Court approved lethal injection as a means of execution in Baze v. Rees, Justice John Paul Stevens made a prophecy. Instead of ending the controversy, he said, the ruling would raise questions “about the justification for the death penalty itself.” Since then, evidence has continued to mount, showing the huge injustice of the death penalty — and the particular barbarism of this form of execution.

In the case of Jeffrey Landrigan, convicted of murder and executed by Arizona on Tuesday, the system failed him at almost every level, most disturbingly at the Supreme Court. In a 5-to-4 vote, the court’s conservative majority allowed the execution to proceed based on a stark misrepresentation.

Of the 35 states that allow the death penalty, all now execute by lethal injection. Most use a sequence of drugs that is supposed to provide a painless death, but when it is administered incorrectly it causes agony that amounts to torture. Veterinarians say the method doesn’t meet the standard for euthanizing animals.

Arizona’s plan for Mr. Landrigan’s execution was thrown off by a shortage of sodium thiopental, one of three drugs used in standard lethal injections. The only maker approved by the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t been able to get a critical ingredient for almost a year. The state obtained the drug from a foreign maker.

When Mr. Landrigan tried to ascertain its effectiveness for sedating him so he wouldn’t feel the pain of the other drugs, Arizona refused to divulge the information. After the state defied four orders from a federal district judge to produce it, the judge stayed the execution.

When the case got to the Supreme Court, the majority overturned the stay, saying there was “no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe.” There was no evidence — either way — because Arizona defied orders to provide it.

The court’s whitewash highlights the arbitrariness of Mr. Landrigan’s execution. Cheryl Hendrix, the retired Arizona judge who presided over his trial, recently said, “Mr. Landrigan would not have been sentenced to death” if she had been given the medical evidence of the defendant’s brain damage and other factors. Mr. Landrigan’s inept trial lawyer didn’t submit the evidence.

She no longer had the power to alter his fate, but, in an affidavit for the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency, Ms. Hendrix supported his plea to have his death sentence commuted to life. “Since the courts have not corrected this injustice,” she stated, “I am compelled to submit this declaration on Mr. Landrigan’s behalf.” The Supreme Court should have upheld the stay of execution and forced the state to deliver the information called for. It failed, shamefully.

No Justification, NYT, 28.10.2010,

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/
opinion/29fri1.html

Woman on Death Row

Runs Out of Appeals

September 21, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

“She is clearly the head of this serpent,” the judge said of Teresa Lewis in 2003 when he sentenced her to death by lethal injection, describing her as the mastermind of the cold-blooded murders of her husband and his son as they slept in rural Virginia.

Late on Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied her last-ditch appeal for a stay, and Ms. Lewis, now 41, is scheduled to die on Thursday night at 9. Her case has drawn unusual attention, not only because she would be the first woman executed in the United States since 2005, and the first in Virginia since 1912, but also because of widely publicized concerns about the fairness of her sentence. Ms. Lewis waited this week in her prison cell, reportedly soothed by intense religious faith.

Her lawyers say her original defense against the death penalty was bungled. They also cite new evidence suggesting that Ms. Lewis — whose I.Q. of 72 is described by psychologists as borderline retarded — was manipulated by her co-conspirators, who were out to share in savings and life insurance worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her partners in the crimes, two young men who fired the guns, received sentences of life without parole in what her lawyers call a “gross disparity” in punishment.

On Tuesday, blocking her only other chance for a reprieve, Gov. Bob McDonnell said for the second time that he would not grant clemency for what he called her “heinous crimes.”

Ms. Lewis’s guilt is not at issue. By her own admission, she plotted with the men to shoot her husband, Julian C. Lewis Jr., 51, and his son, Charles J. Lewis, 25, a reservist about to be deployed abroad.

Ms. Lewis, then 33, met her co-defendants, Matthew J. Shallenberger, who was 21, and his trailer-mate, Rodney L. Fuller, 20, in a line at Wal-Mart and, according to court records, they quickly started meeting and hatching murder plans. She became particularly attached to Mr. Shallenberger, showering him with gifts, but she had sex with both men and also encouraged her 16-year-old daughter to have sex with Mr. Fuller, the records say.

Ms. Lewis withdrew $1,200 and gave it to the two men to buy two shotguns and another weapon. The night of the murders, she admitted, she left a trailer door unlocked. Later, she stood by as the intruders blasted the victims with repeated shotgun blasts. As her husband lay dying, court records say, she took out his wallet and split the $300 she found with Mr. Shallenberger. She waited at least 45 minutes to call 911.

Her husband was moaning “baby, baby, baby” when a sheriff’s deputy arrived and he said, “My wife knows who done this to me,” before he died, the records indicate.

After initially claiming innocence, Ms. Lewis confessed and led police to the gunmen. In 2003, she was sentenced by Judge Charles J. Strauss of Pittsylvania Circuit Court, who concluded that Ms. Lewis had directed the scheme, enticing the killers with sex and promises of money and showing the “depravity of mind” that would justify a death sentence. In separate proceedings, the same judge gave life sentences to the gunmen.

Ms. Lewis’s lawyers later unearthed what they called compelling evidence that it was Mr. Shallenberger who did the enticing, including his own statements that he devised the murder plan and a prison letter to a girlfriend in which he said he “got her to fall in love with me so she would give me the insurance money.” Mr. Shallenberger killed himself in prison in 2006.

But prosecutors, in fighting subsequent appeals, said that before and after the crimes, Ms. Lewis had engaged in concerted actions to obtain money from her husband’s account and then from insurance, showing that she was far more capable than her lawyers now assert.

None of the evidence suggesting Mr. Shallenberger’s dominant role has been presented in court, but it was provided to Mr. McDonnell in a plea for clemency, along with details of her limited intellect, her diagnosis of “dependent personality disorder” and her addiction to pain pills.

When he first turned down the appeal on Friday, Mr. McDonnell noted that appeals courts have upheld her sentence and that “no medical professional has concluded that Teresa Lewis meets the medical or statutory definition of mentally retarded.”

Her lawyers argued in their petition to the Supreme Court that the case should be reopened because her original defense lawyer failed to explore whether her low intelligence and her psychiatric vulnerability would have left her able to plan the scheme. State prosecutors disagreed.

Opponents of the death penalty, and others who feel Ms. Lewis’s sentence is unjust, plan to hold vigils on Thursday, including one outside the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va., where the execution is to take place.

“She said she is leaving it in the hands of Jesus,” her lead defense lawyer, James E. Rocap III, of Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, said on Tuesday, before she heard of the 7-to-2 decision by the Supreme Court not to consider her case.

Woman on Death Row Runs Out of Appeals,
NYT,
21.9.2010,
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/
us/22execute.html

D.C. Sniper

Is to Be Executed on Tuesday

November 10, 2009
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to block the execution of John A. Muhammad, the sniper who terrorized the Washington area seven years ago. The step cleared the way for Mr. Muhammad to be put to death on Tuesday unless Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia intervenes.

The court did not comment in refusing to hear Mr. Muhammad’s appeal, but three justices objected to the relative haste accompanying the execution.

Justice John Paul Stevens complained that “under our normal practice,” Mr. Muhammad’s petition for the court to take his case would have been discussed at the justices’ conference scheduled for Nov. 24. But because Virginia scheduled the execution for Tuesday, the judicial process was rushed, Justice Stevens said in a statement joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Stevens wrote that, having reviewed Mr. Muhammad’s argument, he did not disagree with the majority’s decision to decline the case. Nevertheless, he said, because the court declined to stay the execution, “we have allowed Virginia to truncate our deliberative process on a matter — involving a death row inmate — that demands the most careful attention.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., upheld the death sentence three months ago. In rejecting Mr. Muhammad’s appeal, that federal panel said it was “unable to find reversible error in the conclusions of the state and district courts.”

Unless Mr. Kaine stops the execution, Mr. Muhammad, 48, will be given a lethal injection on Tuesday night for the killing of Dean H. Meyers, an engineer who was shot in the head at a gas station in Manassas, Va.

Mr. Meyers was one of 10 people killed in Maryland, Virginia and Washington over three weeks in October 2002. Mr. Muhammad’s accomplice, Lee B. Malvo, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The two are also suspected of fatal shootings in Alabama, Arizona and Louisiana.

Mr. Kaine has promised to review Mr. Muhammad’s request but has signaled that he is not inclined to intervene.

The governor has said he is personally opposed to the death penalty, but he has allowed a number of executions to take place since he took office in 2006. Virginia has the nation’s second-busiest death chamber, behind Texas.

The jurors who convicted Mr. Muhammad in November 2003 cited the defendant’s apparent lack of remorse in deciding to impose the death penalty.

D.C. Sniper Is to Be Executed on Tuesday, NYT, 10.11.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/
us/10sniper.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Death Penalty Disgrace

June 1, 2009
The New York Times
By BOB BARR

THERE is no abuse of government power more egregious than executing an innocent man. But that is exactly what may happen if the United States Supreme Court fails to intervene on behalf of Troy Davis.

Mr. Davis is facing execution for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Ga., even though seven of the nine witnesses have recanted their testimony against him. Many of these witnesses now say they were pressured into testifying falsely against him by police officers who were understandably eager to convict someone for killing a comrade. No court has ever heard the evidence of Mr. Davis’s innocence.

After the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit barred Mr. Davis from raising his claims of innocence, his attorneys last month petitioned the Supreme Court for an original writ of habeas corpus. This would be an extraordinary procedure — provided for by the Constitution but granted only a handful of times since 1900. However, absent this, Mr. Davis faces an extraordinary and obviously final injustice.

This threat of injustice has come about because the lower courts have misread the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law I helped write when I was in Congress. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, I wanted to stop the unfounded and abusive delays in capital cases that tend to undermine our criminal justice system.

With the effective death penalty act, Congress limited the number of habeas corpus petitions that a defendant could file, and set a time after which those petitions could no longer be filed. But nothing in the statute should have left the courts with the impression that they were barred from hearing claims of actual innocence like Troy Davis’s.

It would seem in everyone’s interest to find out as best we can what really happened that night 20 years ago in a dim parking lot where Officer Mark MacPhail was shot dead. With no murder weapon, surveillance videotape or DNA evidence left behind, the jury that judged Mr. Davis had to weigh the conflicting testimony of several eyewitnesses to sift out the gunman from the onlookers who had nothing to do with the heinous crime.

A litany of affidavits from prosecution witnesses now tell of an investigation that was focused not on scrutinizing all suspects, but on building a case against Mr. Davis. One witness, for instance, has said she testified against Mr. Davis because she was on parole and was afraid the police would send her back to prison if she did not cooperate.

So far, the federal courts have said it is enough that the state courts reviewed the affidavits of the witnesses who recanted their testimony. This reasoning is misplaced in a capital case. Reading an affidavit is a far cry from seeing a witness testify in open court.

Because Mr. Davis’s claim of innocence has never been heard in a court, the Supreme Court should remand his case to a federal district court and order an evidentiary hearing. (I was among those who signed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Davis.) Only a hearing where witnesses are subject to cross-examination will put this case to rest.

Although the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution last fall, the court declined to review the case itself, and its intervention still has not provided an opportunity for Mr. Davis to have a hearing on new evidence. This has become a matter of no small urgency: Georgia could set an execution date at any time.

I am a firm believer in the death penalty, but I am an equally firm believer in the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution. To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional.

Bob Barr served in the House of Representatives

from 1995 to 2003

and was the United States attorney

for the Northern District of Georgia

from 1986 to 1990.

Death Penalty Disgrace, NYT, 31.5.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/
opinion/01barr.html

Texas Ruling Signals

Halt to Executions Indefinitely

October 3, 2007
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Oct. 2 — Signaling an indefinite halt to executions in Texas, the state’s highest criminal appeals court late Tuesday stayed the lethal injection of a 28-year-old Honduran man who was scheduled to be put to death Wednesday.

The reprieve by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was granted a week after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider whether a form of lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment barred under the Eighth Amendment. On Thursday, the Supreme Court stepped in to halt a planned execution in Texas at the last minute, and though many legal experts interpreted that as a signal for all states to wait for a final ruling on lethal injection before any further executions, Texas officials said they planned to move ahead with more.

As a result, Tuesday’s ruling by the Texas court was seen as a sign that judges in the nation’s leading death penalty state were taking guidance from the Supreme Court and putting off imminent executions.

The Texas court order gave state authorities up to 30 days to explain in legal papers why the execution of the inmate, Heliberto Chi, should proceed. With responses then certain from defense lawyers, the effect of the order was to put off the execution for months, lawyers said.

Mr. Chi was convicted of killing the manager of a men’s store in Arlington in 2001.

Other executions, including four more scheduled in the next five months, were also likely to be stayed, said David R. Dow of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit law clinic that worked on Mr. Chi’s appeal.

“Until the Court of Criminal Appeals addresses the questions raised in this case there will be no more executions in Texas,” predicted Mr. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston.

Acting less than a week after it rejected another inmate’s appeal 5 to 4, the appeals court justices provided no breakdown of the vote and did not give any reasoning for their decision. But they directed the state’s director of criminal justice, Nathaniel Quarterman, not to execute Mr. Chi and gave Mr. Quarterman and Tim Curry, the district attorney of Tarrant County, where the crime had been committed, up to 30 days to respond to claims by Mr. Chi’s lawyers that the formulation and administration of chemicals used for lethal injections did not quickly and painlessly kill but paralyzed the condemned inmates while they painfully suffocated.

Earlier Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 4 to 3 against recommending a stay for Mr. Chi. A request for a 30-day reprieve was also pending with Gov. Rick Perry.

Had the appeals court not halted the execution, Mr. Chi’s lawyers would have taken the case to the United States Supreme Court, which last Thursday stayed the execution for another Texas inmate, Carlton Turner Jr.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., and a law professor at New York University, said the Supreme Court’s ruling was a sign that while it was reviewing the legality of lethal injection in a Kentucky case, “it was at least unseemly for states to be carrying out executions.”

Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School, called the latest stay in Texas significant. “I do think Texas is reaching a turning point,” Ms. Denno said. “It’s not unusual throughout the country, but it is unusual in Texas. And not uncommonly when people are talking about the death penalty, there’s Texas and everywhere else, because Texas seems to be in its own death penalty world.”

But Diane Clements, president of Justice For All, a victims’ advocacy group in Texas, said the Supreme Court and the Texas appeals court gave no reasons for their rulings, “so we’re left here with no direction.”

The delays spelled more suffering for victims’ families, Ms. Clements said. “I’m sure family of that stayed-execution victim is on a roller coaster ride,” she said. “If there’s anything certain about the death penalty for families, it’s that it is very uncertain.”

Texas Ruling Signals Halt to Executions Indefinitely,
NYT,
3.10.2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/
us/03texas.html

Supreme Court

Throws Out 3 Death Sentences

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:19 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court threw out death sentences for three Texas killers Wednesday because of problems with instructions given jurors who were deciding between life in prison and death.

In the case of LaRoyce Lathair Smith, the court set aside the death penalty for the second time. It also reversed death sentences for Brent Ray Brewer and Jalil Abdul-Kabir.

The cases all stem from jury instructions that Texas hasn't used since 1991. Under those rules, courts have found that jurors were not allowed to give sufficient weight to factors that might cause them to impose a life sentence instead of death.

The three 5-4 rulings had the same lineup of justices, with Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and John Paul Stevens forming the majority.

''When the jury is not permitted to give meaningful effect or a 'reasoned moral response' to a defendant's mitigating evidence...the sentencing process is fatally flawed,'' Stevens wrote in Abdul-Kabir's case

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Roberts took aim at his colleagues in the majority in dissents he wrote in the Abdul-Kabir and Brewer cases. The court should have deferred to lower court rulings against the defendants because there was no clearly established federal law that judges could have followed to grant relief.

''Whatever the law may be today, the Court's ruling that 'twas always so -- and that state courts were 'objectively unreasonable' not to know it -- is utterly revisionist,'' Roberts said.

Smith was sentenced to die for the murder of Jennifer Soto, a former coworker at a Taco Bell who was stabbed and shot in a failed robbery.

In 2004, the justices overturned Smith's sentence because jurors were not allowed to consider sufficiently the abuse and neglect that Smith had suffered as a child.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reinstated the death penalty, however, saying any errors involving the jury instructions were harmless.

Abdul-Kabir, also known as Ted Calvin Cole, was convicted in 1988 of using a dog leash to strangle Raymond Richardson, 66, during a $20 robbery at his San Angelo home. Abdul-Kabir's lawyers contend the jury that condemned him had no way to take into account the mistreatment and abandonment that contributed to his violent adult behavior.

The same sentencing problems applied to Brewer, convicted of fatally stabbing 66-year-old Robert Laminack, who was attacked in 1990 outside his Amarillo flooring business and robbed of $140. Brewer was abused as a child and suffered from mental illness, factors his jurors weren't allowed to consider, according to his petition.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld the death penalty for Brewer and Abdul-Kabir.

Forty-seven inmates on Texas' death row were sentenced under the rules that the state abandoned in 1991.