Execution Watch

Death penalty agitation takes different forms in U.S., Europe

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:16:36 -0500

The ink is still drying on the European Union’s resolution Friday reaffirming their commitment to worldwide abolition of the death penalty.

You might call it a top-down approach from a part of the world that equates capital punishment with barbarism. In Texas, opposition to capital punishment comes from the bottom up. But there’s a lot percolating these days.

Along with tomorrow’s launch of the Journey of Hope visit to Houston, anti-death penalty activists are planning the 11^th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty for Oct 30. Protesters will mass on the Capitol steps in Austin, expressing their opposition to a form of punishment that has increasingly isolated the U.S. and Texas in world politics.

With so many death penalty stories in the news, organizers predict a good crowd. Last year’s march was the largest since the annual protest began. I can confirm the crowd was big; I was there. People who had lost family members to the Texas death machine were effective, passionate speakers about the juggernaut the Texas death penalty has become.

They'll be in Austin again Oct. 30, along with Journey of Hope speakers who have lost relatives to murder and still oppose the death penalty -- even for the people who took the lives of their loved ones.

Surviving family members in a murder don’t arrive at their anti-death penalty stances lightly. I know, because my cousin, Gary Stein, was murdered while a scholarship undergraduate at Yale.

None of the half-dozen young men who participated in his fatal mugging – for Gary’s watch, no less -- was executed for his murder. I’m fine with that. His murderers deserved to be brought to justice, and they were. Putting to death even one of them wouldn't have brought the "closure" prosecutors are so fond of invoking when they seek the death penalty. I believe an execution would only have been a grotesque reenactment of the crime that took Gary’s life.

I still wish my cousin Gary were here. But I don’t wish for the death penalty. I wish for its end, in Texas and around the world. Be it resolved.

Editor's Note: This piece first came out as a news commentary broadcast Oct. 14, 2010, on Pacifica Station KPFT Houston, 90.1 FM.

Exposing myth of death row's 'worst of worst'

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:36:57 -0500

Texas death row inmate Martin Draughon greets his mother in a visit.

(Editor's Note: Paris, who spent years on death row before being exonerated, wrote this in response to an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle earlier this month by NYU Professor David Garland about five myths that dominate the death-penalty debate. In this blog, Paris describes a sixth myth that dies hard: death row is occupied by criminals who are "the worst of the worst.")

To whom it may concern:

The idea that the worst of the worst are the ones under the gun, so to speak, on death row is laughable to anyone in our prisons. The death penalty is reserved for those too dumb to get out of the way and mental defectives, which may be the same thing in most cases.

The men on the row do not really frighten other inmates much, but often the gangs do. Reaching the one in control of criminal activity can't be done in most cases because they do not do their own dirty work. The smart ones who are caught negotiate a deal of some kind with prosecutors. When multiple suspects are arrested, there is a footrace to get to the man first.

For men in prison, the worst thing that can happen is not dying. There are many things far worse, and those things are feared by inmates on and off death row.

I once heard a man describe, almost lovingly, what he would do to another inmate if the other inmate did not do what the first one wanted, as a method of intimidation. The scenario involved the other inmate living the rest of his life locked in the shadows of his own skull without the ability to hear, see, or act in his own behalf for the rest of his life: blind, deaf, no useable arms or legs, complete with genital mutilation to deny the last chance of pleasure. To men who understand sensory deprivation as practiced by the state, understanding the possibilities takes very little imagination at all.

We have made our prisons into jungles beyond the imagination and peopled them with cripples handmade by society. The saddest part is how society looks down from its self-satisfied perch in silly supremacy, taking no responsibility for the child of indifference and systematic abuse, pretending they've made their own beds and now must sleep in them.

I know these truths.

Paris, ex-death row, free with my memories

Peter Cantu to be put to death Aug. 17

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:26:46 -0500

Peter Cantu

By Elizabeth Stein

Texas plans to kill Peter Cantu Tuesday by lethal injection -- the 16th execution this year in the nation's busiest death chamber. Execution Watch will provide live reports from outside the building, along with a discussion of the issues and an interview with the author of Capital Punishment on Trial, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Oshinsky.

RADIO PROGRAM PREVIEW
EXECUTION WATCH
Aug. 17, 2010, Tues., 6-7 pm Central Time
Listen on KPFT's HD2 channel, 90.1 FM Houston, or …
Go to www.executionwatch. org at 6 p.m. CT, click on “Listen.”

SCHEDULED TO BE EXECUTED
PETER CANTU, 35, was one of several teens convicted of raping and killing two Houston girls in 1993. Cantu and four companions received death sentences. Two have been executed; two had their sentences commuted to life after the U.S. Supreme Court barred the death penalty for those under 18 at the time of their crimes. The slayings led to a Texas law allowing victims' families to view the execution of murderers. International controversy erupted around the 2008 execution of co-defendant José Medellín when it was revealed he was not notified of his right to meet with Mexican consular officials after his arrest. (More at www.executionwatch.org > Backpage on Peter Anthony Cantu.)

SHOW LINEUP
Host: RAY HILL is an ex-convict who has lost many friends to the death chamber. His civil rights activism has included shepherding several cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ray also hosts the Prison Show, now in its 31st year, www.theprisonshow. org .

Legal Analyst: JIM SKELTON, a retired attorney, contributes to the profession by teaching a weekly continuing education class in appellate law. He has worked as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney in capital cases.

Featured Interview: DAVID M. OSHINSKY, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, holds the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin and is the Jacob K. Javits visiting Professor at New York University. He recently published Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America. Oshinsky's other books include Polio: An American History, which won a Pulitzer in 2006, and Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. (More on his latest book at www.kansaspress.ku.edu).

Reporter, Death House, Huntsville: DENNIS LONGMIRE, professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, and longtime activist against the death penalty (www.cjcenter.org).

Reporter, Vigil, Houston: DAVE ATWOOD, board member and founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and author of Detour to Death Row. (www.tcadp.org).

NEXT SCHEDULED EXECUTION
On Oct. 14, Texas plans to execute GAYLAND BRADFORD. Execution Watch will broadcast. Details at www.executionwatch.org.

PRODUCER: Elizabeth Ann Stein, eliza.tx.usa @gmail.com.
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: Otis Maclay, omaclay @gmail.com.
THEME MUSIC: “Death by Texas,” Victoria Panetti, www.myspace. com/shemonster

New image of Texas: a governor, a gurney, a needle

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:22:56 -0500

Image can be an transitory thing. Not so for Texas, with its enduring image of cowboys and cattle drives. Until recently.

International attention has zeroed in on Texas as the death penalty capital of the democratic world, with its record under Gov. Rick Perry and predecessor George W. Bush of carrying out half of the executions in a country that stands out as the sole democracy using capital punishment.

Even more disturbing is the image Texas has acquired from cases like that of Henry Skinner, scheduled for execution tomorrow despite untested evidence that might prove his innocence. His planned execution comes amid unresolved questions about Todd Willingham, whose execution in 2004 for arson murder has been condemned by experts as based on junk science.

There are others whose probable innocence troubles even those who had a hand in their executions, like Ruben Cantu and Carlos de Luna.

Until the Lone Star State either pursues justice more rigorously than executions or does away with its death penalty as too expensive, ineffective and error-prone, it must live with a new, emerging image: that of its titular head beside a white gurney occupied by a prone individual.

It might look like the inadvertently symbolic picture below, found on an official website of Gov. Perry's. Blur the face of the occupant and put a hypodermic in Perry's hand. You'll have the unfortunate new image of Texas.

Rodeo no competition for Judge Fine's court

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:43:19 -0600

The throngs visiting the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo are missing the best show in town. If I were them, I'd consider hopping on the MetroRail and heading for the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, where Judge Kevin Fine is causing a bigger ruckus than the Xtreme Bulls competition.

The jurist was in a spotlight brighter than Kenny Chesney's Thursday after ruling favorably on a motion in a low-profile murder trial. Why all the fuss? Fine's ruling made the death penalty illegal in the jurisdiction of his 177th District Criminal Court.

Beneath the robes: Judge Kevin Fine

I'm sorry I missed Fine's special session the following day in which he explained his ruling. The next best thing is the raw footage of his 12-minute statement, at http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/video?id=7314442.

“Based on the moratorium in Illinois, the Innocence Project and more than 200 people being exonerated nationwide, it can only be concluded that innocent people have been executed,” Fine said. “It's safe to assume we execute innocent people.”

Fine agreed with defense attorneys for Edward Green Jr. that the Texas law governing instructions to a jury violates the Eighth and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit cruel and unusual punishment and guarantee due process.

His decision came under fire for flauting existing case law, but he pushed back, saying, "There is no precedent to guide me in resolving this particular issue."

Fine praised the integrity of Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos, whose office is seeking the death penalty in Green's case. The basis for his ruling, he said, is his role as a trial judge to be a gatekeeper for society's evolving standards of decency and fairness.

The next time to be on the 19th floor of the Criminal Justice Center where Fine presides may be on Wednesday, when he is expected to rule on prosecutors' motions that he reconsider his ruling.

Meanwhile, I'm sending him a mash note:

Dear Judge Fine:

As of today, I’m proud to be a Houstonian. Thanks to you, I can point to incontrovertible evidence that at least one jurist in my city has moral courage and the intellectual wherewithal to use it wisely on the bench.

Anyone who thinks Gregg v. Georgia has corrected the random and capricious application of capital punishment in the U.S. ignores the shameful, overwhelming evidence that race and class remain the only valid predictors of who we condemn for murder.

Thank you for being brave enough to point out the emperor’s lack of attire. I’ll be following the aftermath avidly.

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Ann Stein

Senior Producer, Execution Watch

P.S. With the Rodeo in full swing at the time of your ruling, I’m reminded of something Mark Twain said: “It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”

Perry wants execution errors to go away as primary looms

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:42:51 -0600

No one can say Texas Gov. Rick Perry isn't a traditionalist.

He's treading a time-tested path in responding to tough questions about an execution carried out on his watch -- Delay!

Whether Perry's tactic diverts voters' attention long enough to ensure his nomination for governor may depend in part on a campaign by death penalty opponents to keep the issue front and center.

Perry's shakeup of the state Forensic Science Commission, including installation of a political ally as chairman, was designed to put off until after the March 2 primary potentially damaging disclosures about dated arson-investigation techniques that sent Todd Willingham to the execution chamber in 2004 for a fatal fire that might have been accidental in origin, as Willingham claimed all along.

The governor's hand-picked chairman has used bureaucratic bullying to keep the commission from taking up an independent report it commissioned about forensic techniques used in the Willingham case. Chairman John Bradley finally promised scientists they will discuss the Willingham report, but not until it was clear it wouldn't happen before their next meeting -- April 23.

By then, Perry hopes to have lulled voters into a false sense of confidence in him long enough to deflect Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's challenge for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Among the groups working to spoil Perry's plan to bury voters' heads in the sand is the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which seeks to keep the Willingham case in the headlines during the weeks leading up to primary.

The coalition is calling for a statewide day of action against wrongful convictions and executions on Wednesday, February 17, the six-year anniversary of Willingham's execution.

"Serious questions surround the circumstances of the fire that led to the deaths of his three young daughters in 1991," says Kristin Houlé, executive director of the Austin-based coalition. "Nine fire experts -- including one hired by the Texas Forensic Science Commission -- have examined the case since the time of conviction and determined that the evidence did not support a finding of arson."

As if the Willingham execution anniversary weren't enough to remind voters Perry has shown a disregard for human life in presiding over a record number of executions as governor, an execution is scheduled Feb. 24 for Hank Skinner, who is believed by many to be innocent and whose efforts to obtain additional testing of DNA evidence has been staunchly opposed by the state.

Hank Skinner, scheduled for execution Feb. 24, has broad support for his claim of innocence.

The coalition is urging people across the state to call attention to Skinner's and Willingham's cases Tuesday by contacting legislators about the fallibility of the death penalty; writing to Gov. Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to urge clemency for Skinner; writing letters to the editors of local newspapers calling for an end to the death penalty, and posting comments in online forums in response to articles about Willingham and Skinner.

The need to call for a special day to publicize evidence of unfairness around the death penalty adds weight to the argument that the death penalty is an instrument not of justice but of politics.

Perry's fall partner continues chokehold on forensics panel

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:36:17 -0600

I've been following by live webcast the meeting of the Texas Forensic Science Commission today in Harlingen. If commissioners were meeting any farther from Austin, they'd be in Mexico.

How ironic that Texans must rely on a webcast by the New York City-based Innocence Project to follow the suddenly far-flung activities of a state commission that, until recently, has operated in an accessible manner.

Gov. Rick Perry's fall partner, new commission Chairman John Bradley, continues to use a combination of legerdemain and hubris to hijack the commission, thwart the Legislature's intent, and prevent completion of the commission's investigation into the science that led to the execution of Todd Willingham for arson-murder convictions in a fire that may not have been deliberately set.

Texas put Todd Willingham to death six years ago for arson-murder convictions that were recently called into question by a state panel's probe that has been stalled by Gov. Perry's machinations.

Ignoring the unfinished business of the Willingham case, Bradley spent several hours today browbeating commissioners into approving a set of rules he wrote without their input. As if to confirm the process was delaying tactic, he admitted the commission does not have rulemaking authority and referred to the rules as "policies and procedures" that are "not even enforceable on ourselves."

Bradley's performance evinces a lack of respect for commissioners, taxpayers, legislators, and sham-science victims that is so broad in impact, it approaches the criminal.

I wonder what it will take for the Texas Legislature to call Perry's surrogate to task for his outrageous actions and get the commission back to its important work?

Perry may be in a tough primary fight, but that does not confer on him new constitutional powers to, in effect, replace the head of a commission with his co-conspirator in order to override the authority of the legislative branch and prevent voters from hearing the likely but politically inconvenient conclusion that an innocent man was executed on his watch.

On the other hand, if Perry isn't challenged effectively, those powers are, de facto, his.

Orwell would appreciate judge's approach to letting fellow judge off the hook

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:54:12 -0600

The ruling today in the ethics case against Judge Sharon Keller reads like an Orwellian primer for closing ranks.

In a stunning display of Newspeak, a hearing judge declared it mostly the fault of uber-attorney David Dow's team that their client was executed as scheduled in 2007, and not the fault of Texas' most senior criminal court judge, who blocked them from filing a motion to spare his life because it would have been minutes late.

Sharon Keller

In his decision, District Court Judge Judge David Berchelmann Jr. of San Antonio threw out state Judicial Conduct Commision charges against the still-defiant Keller, finding she did not break any rules -- even unwritten ones.

Berchelmann was the special master for hearings last summer that examined the commission's accusations that Keller's behavior in refusing to remain open late for a motion to stay the execution of Michael Richard "constitutes incompetence in the performance of duties of office" and "casts public discredit on the judiciary."

After taking weeks of testimony under advisement, Berchelmann proved himself a master translator of English to Newspeak, the language from George Orwell's 1984, in which a totalitarian government mandates a new tongue that promotes the expression of approved thoughts and lacks the capacity to communicate forbidden ones.

The strong language of the commission in charging Keller proved no match for Berchelmann's mastery of Newspeak:

Keller's refusal to keep the court open so lawyers could plead for Richard's life was, at worst, a "highly questionable" behavior. The incompetence and discredit the commission alleged are really a mild disagreement between Keller and colleagues, told philosophically they have "valid reasons" if they are "not proud" of her actions.

Such a translation might impress Orwell himself. But the futuristic elucidation by Berchelmann -- a former member of the Court of Criminal Appeals -- cannot alter the subtext that roils like algae beneath the surface: Judges, like cops, are susceptible to closing ranks behind a colleague under fire, even when the criticism is well deserved.

His wet kiss for Keller where a less polite gesture is demanded adds to the landfill-sized heap of evidence that public servants at every phase of the criminal justice system must be scrutinized constantly for evidence they are unethically putting their small, personal interests above the overarching interests of jutice.

Dark days for watchers of Texas death penalty

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:56:04 -0600

Thanksgiving Day 2009

I found a message in my inbox from a dear friend whose loved one, a law-of-parties prisoner on Texas Death Row, is uncharastically depressed. I can relate, because I have been depressed about the latest round of executions.

For me, Khristian Oliver's -- three weeks ago today -- was among the toughest to take in. The evidence indicated he killed someone. But the devil is truly in the details.

Oliver, who was 20 at the time, went with several juveniles to break into a farmhouse in East Texas. The farmer came home unexpectedly, grabbed his gun, cornered Oliver and one of the juveniles as they tried to flee, and shot the juvenile. Oliver returned fire, hitting the rancher, and then beat him. Oliver's crime was terrible, but it was far from the worst-of-the-worst murders the public imagines antecede the death penalty.

Cases like Oliver's convince me that, if Texans were constantly confronted with the unfair, arbitrary way the death penalty is administered in their names, even those who support capital punishment in the abstract would disavow Texas' system immediately. Hence, Execution Watch.

I sensed all of us at Execution Watch were in some level of shock that we did a show last Thursday. Like many observers, we thought Robert Thompson would get a stay. Gov. Rick Perry's refusal to grant clemency to Thompson, a law-of-parties defendant who was factually innocent of a murder in which the guilty party got life in prison, set a new standard for executive inhumanity.

When Perry's decision came down, I was still recoiling from the execution the previous day of Danielle Simpson. There's no doubt his crime was awful. Another interrupted burglary case, it involved the horrific abduction-murder of an elderly homeowner. But Simpson was so clearly mentally ill, the district court judge who heard his request to drop all appeals wrote that Simpson had "a mental disease, disorder or defect."

Executions scheduled during the next few months will be no easier to abide:

-- Bobby Wayne Woods, Dec. 3, retarded to the point of childishness.

-- Kenneth Mosley, Jan. 7, represented by ineffective counsel and condemned for a killing that resulted from a struggle for Mosley's weapon. Were the victim not a police officer, it might have been prosecuted as manslaughter.

-- Gary James Johnson, Jan. 12, who received the death penalty for two killings that occurred in another burglary-gone-bad in which his fall partner, who is also his brother, escaped the death penalty by testifying against him.

-- Hank Skinner, Feb. 24, a likely case of actual innocence containing many of the same elements of small-town prejudice and ignorance that made Todd Willingham's story so disturbing.

-- Franklin Alix, March 30, convicted on evidence later called into question by HPD crime lab investigators, who found that analysts failed to report exculpatory findings and claimed tests that did not implicate Alix were inconclusive.

These are the people being executed by my state? It's a struggle to sustain equanimity in the face of such cruel, capricious use of a penalty that is so ineffective and subject to error, it has no place in our code of laws.

I can understand why a person on death row -- even one whose case sees like a good candidate for commutation -- would feel discouraged lately. It's one of the things we have in common. I hope our mutual despair over the death penalty will be transformed into purposeful action. I know it should.

Blog will return after spam abates

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:52:46 -0600

The Execution Watch blog is meant to be a two-way discussion. Spam attacks to the Comments and Trackbacks sections have forced us to suspend publication. Once we've successfully blocked the spam, the blog will resume.

Meanwhile, listen to Execution Watch at 6 p.m. Central Time any day the state of Texas puts someone to death. Schedule: http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/scheduledexecutions.htm.

Execution Watch broadcasts coverage and discussion of the many legal and moral issues that attend capital punishment, on KPFT FM 90.1-Houston, HD2, and on the internet. Go to www.executionwatch.org at 6 p.m. Central Time the day of the execution and click on "Listen."

Thank you for your patience, support and understanding.