Ark. governor didn't know about fugitive's health

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe on Wednesday defended his request to have a 63-year-old fugitive returned from Michigan, even though the convicted killer is in poor health.

Beebe told The Associated Press he wasn't aware of Lester Stiggers' health issues when he sought to have him brought back to the Arkansas prison system he fled in 1970.

"We can't pick and choose which laws that we like and which laws that we don't like," Beebe told the AP. "And once the Department of Correction was given information about his whereabouts, and ... they requested me to sign an extradition warrant, then that's my duty and that's the law and that's what we did."

Stiggers was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for killing his father as a teenager in 1965. When he was granted a five-day leave from prison for good behavior, he headed to Michigan, where his mother lived. He's been there ever since — thanks to a governor who, in 1971, refused to send him back to Arkansas and its then-notorious prison system.

The AP recently found Stiggers living in a one-bedroom apartment along a busy road in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Mich. He gets by on $700 a month in Social Security benefits, usually making trips outside only to see a doctor. He needs an inhaler and 10 pills a day for his diabetes, high blood pressure and other ailments. A stocky man with thick arms, Stiggers grappled with sewer lines as a plumber until two strokes ended his working days and made his speech difficult to understand.

He was astounded to learn that Arkansas has renewed its efforts to bring him back to prison — more than four decades after then-Gov. William Milliken blocked the state's initial request.

Beebe, a Democrat, sent a letter this year to Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, seeking Stiggers after his Social Security benefits put him back on Arkansas' radar.

State prison officials said they didn't know that Stiggers was sick, either. But Department of Correction spokeswoman Shea Wilson told the AP that it's not the agency's role to make judgments about whether Stiggers should be brought back to Arkansas.

"It's our job to carry out the mandates of the court," Wilson said. "And that's simply what we're doing in our efforts to seek him."

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Snyder, said the matter was still under review and "there's not currently a timeframe for when that may be concluded."

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Associated Press writer David Eggert contributed reporting from Lansing, Mich., and Ed White contributed reporting from Detroit.

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Follow Jeannie Nuss at http://twitter.com/jeannienuss

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Governor signs repeal of death penalty in Md.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Opponents of capital punishment marked a milestone Thursday as Maryland became the first state south of the Mason-Dixon line to abolish the death penalty in nearly 50 years, joining only West Virginia.

The passage was a significant victory for Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Roman Catholic who opposes capital punishment and is considering seeking the 2016 presidential nomination. Death penalty opponents said the governor helped maintain the national momentum of repeal efforts by making Maryland the sixth state in as many years to abolish capital punishment.

"I don't know exactly what the timing is, but over the longer arc of history I think you'll see more and more states repeal the death penalty," O'Malley said in a brief interview after the bill signing. "It's wasteful. It's ineffective. It doesn't work to reduce violent crime."

NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous, who worked to get the repeal bill passed, noted the significance of a Democratic governor south of the Mason-Dixon line with presidential aspirations leading an effort to ban capital punishment. Jealous noted that in 1992, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton left the presidential campaign trail to oversee the execution of a man who had killed a police officer, a move widely viewed as an effort to shed the Democratic Party's image as soft on crime.

"Our governor has also just redefined what it means to have a political future in this country," Jealous said. "You know, it was just 20 years ago that a young governor with possibilities below the Mason-Dixon stopped during his presidential campaign" to oversee an execution.

West Virginia, which is also south of the Mason-Dixon line, abolished the death penalty in 1965.

Maryland is the 18th state to abolish the death penalty. Neighboring Delaware also made a push to repeal it this year, but the bill has stalled.

Diane Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said Maryland is keeping the momentum going for other states to follow.

"It doesn't always happen overnight," Rust-Tierney said. "The more people study it, the more people understand it. This was a seven-year effort here in Maryland."

Supporters of capital punishment said the governor was taking away an important tool to protect the public. Del. Neil Parrott, a Washington County Republican, criticized the governor for moving ahead with banning the death penalty during the same session as he pushed for a gun-control bill to restrict firearms access to law-abiding citizens.

Parrott, who is chairman of a group called MDPetitions.com, scheduled a news conference on Friday to announce the group's decision on whether to launch a petition drive to try to put the death penalty ban on the ballot for voters to decide in 2014. He declined to say Thursday what the decision will be. They would need to get one-third of the 55,736 signatures needed to petition a bill to referendum by midnight May 31 to qualify to move forward.

State Sen. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and constitutional law professor who opposes the death penalty, said he believes pressure is building around the country to focus law enforcement resources on things that are proven to lower the homicide rate.

"The trend lines are clear," Raskin said. "There's nobody who's adding the death penalty to their state laws. Everybody is taking it away."

Opponents of capital punishment also noted that the state won't have to worry about potentially putting an innocent person to death. Kirk Bloodsworth, a Maryland man who was the first person in the U.S. freed because of DNA evidence after a conviction in a death penalty case, attended the news conference.

The bill will not apply to the five men the state has on death row, but the governor can commute their sentences to life without parole. O'Malley has said he will consider them on a case-by-case basis.

The state's last execution was in 2005, when Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich was in office.

Last year, the Death Penalty Information Center said in an annual report that just four states carried out more than three-fourths of the executions in the United States last year, while another 23 had not put an inmate to death in 10 years.

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Rhode Island lawmakers pass gay marriage bill; governor signs it

By Edith Honan

(Reuters) - Rhode Island lawmakers gave final approval to a bill to legalize gay marriage on Thursday, making it the 10th U.S. state to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples and the last of the six New England states to do so.

Governor Lincoln Chafee, an independent, signed the bill into law almost immediately after the vote on Thursday. The new law will take effect on August 1.

"We would not be where we are today without the Rhode Islanders who for decades have fought for tolerance and freedom over discrimination and division," Chafee said. "I am proud to say that now, at long last, you are free to marry the person you love."

The governor later joined the state's main gay rights organization, Rhode Islanders United for Marriage, at a victory party in the state capital Providence.

Last week, the Democratic-led state Senate approved the measure with the support of the entire Republican caucus. The state House had approved a similar bill in January and on Thursday approved the Senate's amended bill.

Despite the victory, some in the state continued to voice strong opposition.

In an open letter, Bishop Thomas Tobin of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence said he was "profoundly disappointed" by the vote and encouraged Catholics to "examine their consciences very carefully before deciding whether or not to endorse same-sex relationships or attend same-sex ceremonies."

The vote marks the latest in a string of victories for gay marriage advocates. Last November, voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington state approved same-sex marriage, while in Minnesota, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Before that point, advocates of same-sex marriage had never been successful at the ballot box, and voters in more than two dozen states had approved constitutional amendments defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Lawmakers in Illinois, Delaware and Minnesota have joined Rhode Island in taking up same-sex marriage legislation this year. In Delaware, the bill has passed the state's lower house and is scheduled for a vote in the upper house on May 7.

New Jersey Democrats, meanwhile, have until next January to attempt to override Governor Chris Christie's veto of a same-sex marriage bill in that state.

The other six states that have legalized same-sex marriage are Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Iowa. The District of Columbia also has legalized same-sex marriage.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Daniel Trotta, Richard Chang and Paul Simao)

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Connecticut governor signs strict gun law after Newtown shooting

(Reuters) - Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy is expected on Thursday to sign a tough new gun law that restricts sales of the sort of high-capacity ammunition clips that a gunman used to massacre 26 people in minutes in a December attack on a school.

Lawmakers in the state's Democratic-controlled House approved the measure, which supporters described as one of the toughest such laws in the United States, early on Thursday morning. The Senate approved the measure hours earlier.

The House debate stretched past midnight, with opponents of the law arguing that it infringed on the rights to gun ownership protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and that efforts to prevent attacks such as the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting should focus on providing better mental-health services.

Connecticut's law passed hours after Maryland's House of Delegates on Wednesday approved their own gun law, which also limits magazine size and requires that gun buyers be fingerprinted.

Connecticut's Malloy, who had advocated for the law, is expected to sign it at midday on Thursday.

The Connecticut law also requires background checks for private gun sales, expands the number of guns covered by the state's assault-weapons ban and establishes a $15 million fund to help schools improve security infrastructure.

It bans the sale of ammunition clips that hold 10 bullets or more and requires owners of such clips to register them by January 1. After that date, owning an unregistered high-capacity clip will become a felony offense.

A poll released on Thursday found that 91 percent of voters support regulations requiring all gun buyers to undergo background checks. However, 48 percent of all respondents and 53 percent of those owning guns said those checks could lead to the government's confiscating legally owned weapons.

That Quinnipiac University poll of 1,711 registered voters was conducted from March 26 to April 1 and had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

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ADB'S Kuroda leading candidate to be next BOJ governor: Asahi

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda is the leading candidate to be the government's nominee for the Bank of Japan governorship, the Asahi newspaper reported, which would signal a shift toward more aggressive monetary easing.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will make a final decision soon, in consultation with Finance Minister Taro Aso, and submit the government's nominee for parliamentary approval next week, the paper said on Saturday.

Kuroda, Japan's former top financial diplomat, has been regarded as among the key candidates to succeed incumbent BOJ Governor Masaaki Shirakawa, who leaves the central bank with his two deputies on March 19 after a five-year term.

Former top financial bureaucrat Toshiro Muto and Kazumasa Iwata, a former government economist and deputy BOJ governor, have also been floated as strong candidates to be the next BOJ head.

Kuroda is now leading the race, Asahi cited Finance Ministry officials and senior government officials as saying.

Abe, now in Washington, said he planned to seek the backing of a junior coalition partner and opposition parties over the nomination of a new BOJ governor on his return from his U.S. trip on Sunday.

The nomination of the next BOJ governor must be approved by both houses of parliament. Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party lacks a majority in the upper house and needs support from opposition parties to get the nomination passed.

As Japan's top financial diplomat from 1999 to 2003, Kuroda aggressively intervened in the exchange-rate market to weaken the yen to support the country's export-reliant economy.

He has also been a vocal advocate of more aggressive monetary easing, a view in line with that of Abe, making him a strong candidate to head the BOJ.

If Kuroda were to be chosen as next BOJ governor, he would be cutting short his term as head of the ADB, which could weaken Japan's standing as the country that traditionally provides the head of the organization established in 1966.

(Reporting by Leika Kihara; Editing by Jon Hemming and Peter Cooney)

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