softheart
01-19-2003, 02:51 PM
Jan. 19
RESOURCES:
Death row inmates who are currently scheduled to die, and their crimes:
Jan. 22 -- Robert Andrew Lookingbill, 37 (robbery-murder, San Juan, 1989)
Jan. 23 -- Elkie Lee Taylor, 41 (burglary-murder, Forth Worth, 1993)
Jan. 28 -- Alva Curry, 33 (robbery-murder, Austin, 1991)
Jan. 29 -- Richard Eugene Dinkins, 40 (multiple murder, Beaumont, 1990)
Jan. 30 -- Granville Riddle, 32 (burglary-murder, Amarillo, 1988)
Feb. 4 -- John William Elliott, 42 (rape-murder, Austin, 1986)
Feb. 6 -- Henry Earl Dunn Jr., 28 (abduction-robbery-murder, Tyler, 1993)
Feb. 18 -- Gregory Van Alstyne, 36 (robbery-murder, Amarillo, 1990)
Feb. 25 -- Richard Head Williams, 33 (murder for hire, Houston, 1997)
Feb. 26 -- Michael Dewayne Johnson, 35 (robbery-murder, Lorena, near
Waco, 1995)
March 11 -- Bobby Glen Cook, 41 (robbery-murder, Anderson County, 1993)
March 12 -- Delma Banks Jr., 44 (robbery-murder, near Texarkana, 1980)
March 20 -- Keith Bernard Clay, 34 (robbery-murder, Houston, 1994)
April 15 -- Kenneth Wayne Morris, 32 (robbery-murder, Houston, 1991)
April 22 -- Juan Rodriguez Chavez, 34 (robbery-murder, Dallas, 1995)
April 23 -- Robert Charles Ladd, 45 (burglary-murder, Tyler, 1996)
-------
Texas put 2 men to death last week and has 16 more scheduled for
injection by the end of April, putting the state on a record-setting pace
at a time when capital punishment has come under increased scrutiny
elsewhere.
Even as the decision to empty Illinois' death row continues to
reverberate, and as the Texas Legislature prepares to deal with a new
U.S. Supreme Court prohibition on executing the mentally retarded, the
Lone Star state's death penalty system churns forward with machine-like
efficiency.
"We're seeing people coming through at a quicker pace," said Larry
Fitzgerald, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
noting that the typical death row inmate today exhausts his appeals in 5
to 6 years.
After 2 decades in which death sentence appeals seemingly kept cases
mired in the courts indefinitely, the legal rules have been streamlined
enough to spark a surge in executions nationwide. Nowhere is this new
efficiency more dramatic than in Texas.
Texas stands in sharp contrast to the federal government and 37 other
states that have revived the death penalty since it was made legal again
in 1976. Of the 823 executions nationwide since then, Texas has carried
out 291 -- or 35 %.
Nearly 2/3 of those executions have taken place in just the last 6 years.
In 2002, Texas put 33 men to death, nearly 1/2 of the U.S. total and far
more than Oklahoma, the 2nd-busiest state, which killed 7 people.
"What these numbers indicate is that while the rest of the country is
slowing down (on executions), Texas is barreling ahead despite the
problems with the system," said Jim Marcus, a lawyer with Texas Defenders
Service, a nonprofit organization that represents death row inmates.
Earlier this month, in the waning days of his administration, Illinois
Gov. George Ryan pardoned four inmates on death row and commuted the
sentences of the remaining 167 to life imprisonment.
Ryan's actions may have been the most significant anti-death penalty move
since the Supreme Court struck down many states' capital punishment laws
in 1972, but activists on both sides of the debate agree they will have
little, or no, effect in Texas and other death penalty states.
They could, however, fuel the national debate and may move some states to
follow Ryan's lead in creating commissions to examine their death penalty
systems, opponents say.
"The effect will be to cause people to question it who didn't question it
before," said lawyer Les Ribnik, who handles constitution-related appeals
for eight Texas death row inmates. "And the 1st challenge is to get the
public to focus on the issue.
"Whether it changes anybody's mind in Texas -- that's doubtful."
Ryan, a pharmacist who voted in 1977 while an Illinois legislator to
revive the death penalty, has emerged as one of the most influential
opponents of capital punishment.
Three years ago, he imposed a moratorium on executions after 13 Illinois
death row inmates were exonerated. He also created a blue-ribbon
commission that studied the system and wrote a scathing report, released
in April, on the inadequacies of Illinois' system.
But emptying death row was his most dramatic move.
"It's a watershed event because it happened in a traditional capital
punishment state," said Franklin Zimring, a University of California at
Berkeley law professor and death penalty opponent. "He made a judgment
that the entire system was dreadful."
In Texas, the 16 men scheduled to die between now and the end of April
include three who killed in Harris County.
·Keith Clay, 34, murdered clerk Melathethil Tom Varughese during the
robbery of a Baytown convenience store Jan. 4, 1994. Clay's execution is
scheduled for March 20.
·Kenneth Morris, 31, shot and killed James Moody Adams, a retired paint
company executive and founder of the Northwest Academy private school, on
May 1, 1991. He and 2 others broke into Adams' northwest Houston home
seeking to steal guns. Morris is to be executed April 15.
·Richard Williams, 33, is slated for execution Feb. 25 for carrying out a
contract killing of 48-year-old Jeanette Williams, who was in a
wheelchair and is no relation. For $400, Richard Williams cut her throat
on a southeast Houston street March 24, 1997. The married couple who
arranged the killing received life sentences.
Williams is typical of death row inmates convicted after 1995 who no
longer can delay death sentences with seemingly unending appeals.
The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, signed by President
Clinton in 1995, gives condemned inmates 1 year after their 1st round of
appeal ends in state court to submit federal habeas corpus petitions,
which must be grounded in constitutional issues such as ineffectiveness
of counsel.
"It put a clock on a case. There had not previously been a clock,"
explained David Dow, a University of Houston law professor who represents
some death row inmates in federal court. "It also made it very difficult
for federal courts to grant relief. Federal courts generally have to
accept factual conclusions reached by state courts."
The 1995 federal law has quickened the execution pace in Texas. In the
first half of the 1990s, 71 people were executed at the Walls Unit in
Huntsville.
But since 1997, 186 have been executed. During that period, only eight
months passed without an execution here. Another 442 men and eight women
remain on death row.
Of the 16 inmates slated to die before May, none appears close to getting
a stay.
"All the indications from the attorney general's office are that the
executions will go through," said Fitzgerald, the prisons department
spokesman.
A mass commutation of death row inmates, such as that granted in
Illinois, could not happen in Texas because state law does not allow a
governor to pardon or commute sentences. He can only recommend
commutations or pardons to the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, which
looks at inmates on a case-by-case basis. It does not order wholesale
commutations of classes of prisoners.
Nor does Gov. Rick Perry plan to create a commission to study the death
penalty system.
"The governor does not think that needs to be done," said his
spokeswoman, Kathy Walt. "He thinks the system is operating well and
fairly. Before he would agree, there would have to be a credible
indication that improvements could be made."
Some death penalty opponents think Ryan's actions will alter the debate
in Texas.
"It's going to have some impact. If Illinois came close to executing an
innocent person, a lot of states will have to look at this. Life without
parole might now be considered here in Texas," said Shelby Moore, a South
Texas College of Law professor.
Texas Defenders Service lawyer Marcus said, "I would hope that this would
be a cause for reflection here in Texas."
When he pardoned the four inmates, Ryan said, "the system has proved
itself to be wildly inaccurate, unjust and unable to separate the
innocent from the guilty and, at times, a very racist system."
Marcus thinks that could apply to Texas as well.
"Certainly, the system in Illinois is no worse and is probably better
than that in Texas," he said.
Even after a law was passed increasing the amount the state pays for
death row inmate's post-conviction legal representation, it still falls
short, Marcus said. Death row appeals are often lacking because the state
has paid so little that it can draw only sub-tier lawyers to seek the
work in many instances, he said.
Added Zimring, who has written a soon-to-be-published anti-death penalty
book: "Read that (Illinois) blue-ribbon commission's report, and tell me
what section doesn't apply to Texas."
Among those taking exception are Roe Wilson, who oversees death penalty
appeals for the Harris County District Attorney's Office, which has sent
more people to death row than any other municipality.
"You're dealing with a different state that had different procedures,"
said Wilson.
Most of the commission's recommendations, she said, such as one calling
for the appointment of experienced lawyers in death penalty cases, are
already in place here.
The state attorney general's office will make no changes in response to
Ryan's actions and his commission's report, said a spokeswoman for that
office.
Even some death row lawyers question whether Texas' system should be
lumped with Illinois'.
Ryan said some who received pardons and commutations gave false
confessions because they were tortured by a certain Chicago police unit.
"I have no sense of that in Houston or in Harris County," said Ribnik. "I
don't see a pattern suggesting there are cases arising from certain
units."
He also noted that it has become increasingly difficult to overturn death
penalty convictions won in Harris County because prosecutors are making
fewer mistakes.
While sparking a debate over the death penalty, Ryan also generated
another hot discussion: Should a governor be able to override trial
courts and appeals courts and pardon and commute death row inmates?
Dudley Sharp, resource director of Justice for All, which supports the
death penalty, said Ryan "violated the trust his constituents placed in
him and the trust placed in him by victims and their families.
"What he did was unjust, it was unfair, it was plain wrong. He should
have reviewed each case individually."
Sharp said as many as 11 of the 167 inmates whose terms were reduced to
life sentences appear to have been on death row for murders committed
while in prison. Ryan's commutations will send these inmates back to the
general prison population, endangering other prisoners, Sharp said.
Cook County prosecutors last week disputed Ryan's claim that the 4 men
pardoned by the governor are innocent.
One of the pardoned men, Madison Hobley, had been convicted of setting a
fire that killed his wife, son and 5 others in 1987. Former prosecutor
Jeff Warnick told the Chicago Sun-Times that he is convinced Hobley was
guilty based on the physical evidence linking him to the fire.
"You want to commute his sentence, Governor? Fine. But don't say he was
innocent," Warnick told the Sun-Times.
Susan Crump, a South Texas College of Law professor who handles some
death row habeas corpus petitions, said ideology appears to have
motivated Ryan.
"It concerns me that it was done in a blanket manner without apparent
serious consideration of the merits of each case," said Crump, who says
she neither supports nor opposes the death penalty. "What he was doing is
condemning the whole system. I wonder whether the system is as broke as
he says it is."
The Texas legislature now in session will consider a bill proposed by
Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, that would prohibit executing the mentally
retarded. If it passes, the state will be in compliance with last year's
Supreme Court decision that banned such executions.
Another Houston lawmaker, Democratic state Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., has
submitted bills to create a commission to study Texas' death penalty
system, to ban executions of anyone younger than 18, and even to abolish
the death penalty altogether.
Even death penalty opponents say abolition is unlikely for at least
several years.
"My guess is the death penalty will be abolished in my lifetime,"
predicted UH professor Dow, who is 43, "but probably not in my middle
age."
(source: Houston Chronicle)
RESOURCES:
Death row inmates who are currently scheduled to die, and their crimes:
Jan. 22 -- Robert Andrew Lookingbill, 37 (robbery-murder, San Juan, 1989)
Jan. 23 -- Elkie Lee Taylor, 41 (burglary-murder, Forth Worth, 1993)
Jan. 28 -- Alva Curry, 33 (robbery-murder, Austin, 1991)
Jan. 29 -- Richard Eugene Dinkins, 40 (multiple murder, Beaumont, 1990)
Jan. 30 -- Granville Riddle, 32 (burglary-murder, Amarillo, 1988)
Feb. 4 -- John William Elliott, 42 (rape-murder, Austin, 1986)
Feb. 6 -- Henry Earl Dunn Jr., 28 (abduction-robbery-murder, Tyler, 1993)
Feb. 18 -- Gregory Van Alstyne, 36 (robbery-murder, Amarillo, 1990)
Feb. 25 -- Richard Head Williams, 33 (murder for hire, Houston, 1997)
Feb. 26 -- Michael Dewayne Johnson, 35 (robbery-murder, Lorena, near
Waco, 1995)
March 11 -- Bobby Glen Cook, 41 (robbery-murder, Anderson County, 1993)
March 12 -- Delma Banks Jr., 44 (robbery-murder, near Texarkana, 1980)
March 20 -- Keith Bernard Clay, 34 (robbery-murder, Houston, 1994)
April 15 -- Kenneth Wayne Morris, 32 (robbery-murder, Houston, 1991)
April 22 -- Juan Rodriguez Chavez, 34 (robbery-murder, Dallas, 1995)
April 23 -- Robert Charles Ladd, 45 (burglary-murder, Tyler, 1996)
-------
Texas put 2 men to death last week and has 16 more scheduled for
injection by the end of April, putting the state on a record-setting pace
at a time when capital punishment has come under increased scrutiny
elsewhere.
Even as the decision to empty Illinois' death row continues to
reverberate, and as the Texas Legislature prepares to deal with a new
U.S. Supreme Court prohibition on executing the mentally retarded, the
Lone Star state's death penalty system churns forward with machine-like
efficiency.
"We're seeing people coming through at a quicker pace," said Larry
Fitzgerald, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
noting that the typical death row inmate today exhausts his appeals in 5
to 6 years.
After 2 decades in which death sentence appeals seemingly kept cases
mired in the courts indefinitely, the legal rules have been streamlined
enough to spark a surge in executions nationwide. Nowhere is this new
efficiency more dramatic than in Texas.
Texas stands in sharp contrast to the federal government and 37 other
states that have revived the death penalty since it was made legal again
in 1976. Of the 823 executions nationwide since then, Texas has carried
out 291 -- or 35 %.
Nearly 2/3 of those executions have taken place in just the last 6 years.
In 2002, Texas put 33 men to death, nearly 1/2 of the U.S. total and far
more than Oklahoma, the 2nd-busiest state, which killed 7 people.
"What these numbers indicate is that while the rest of the country is
slowing down (on executions), Texas is barreling ahead despite the
problems with the system," said Jim Marcus, a lawyer with Texas Defenders
Service, a nonprofit organization that represents death row inmates.
Earlier this month, in the waning days of his administration, Illinois
Gov. George Ryan pardoned four inmates on death row and commuted the
sentences of the remaining 167 to life imprisonment.
Ryan's actions may have been the most significant anti-death penalty move
since the Supreme Court struck down many states' capital punishment laws
in 1972, but activists on both sides of the debate agree they will have
little, or no, effect in Texas and other death penalty states.
They could, however, fuel the national debate and may move some states to
follow Ryan's lead in creating commissions to examine their death penalty
systems, opponents say.
"The effect will be to cause people to question it who didn't question it
before," said lawyer Les Ribnik, who handles constitution-related appeals
for eight Texas death row inmates. "And the 1st challenge is to get the
public to focus on the issue.
"Whether it changes anybody's mind in Texas -- that's doubtful."
Ryan, a pharmacist who voted in 1977 while an Illinois legislator to
revive the death penalty, has emerged as one of the most influential
opponents of capital punishment.
Three years ago, he imposed a moratorium on executions after 13 Illinois
death row inmates were exonerated. He also created a blue-ribbon
commission that studied the system and wrote a scathing report, released
in April, on the inadequacies of Illinois' system.
But emptying death row was his most dramatic move.
"It's a watershed event because it happened in a traditional capital
punishment state," said Franklin Zimring, a University of California at
Berkeley law professor and death penalty opponent. "He made a judgment
that the entire system was dreadful."
In Texas, the 16 men scheduled to die between now and the end of April
include three who killed in Harris County.
·Keith Clay, 34, murdered clerk Melathethil Tom Varughese during the
robbery of a Baytown convenience store Jan. 4, 1994. Clay's execution is
scheduled for March 20.
·Kenneth Morris, 31, shot and killed James Moody Adams, a retired paint
company executive and founder of the Northwest Academy private school, on
May 1, 1991. He and 2 others broke into Adams' northwest Houston home
seeking to steal guns. Morris is to be executed April 15.
·Richard Williams, 33, is slated for execution Feb. 25 for carrying out a
contract killing of 48-year-old Jeanette Williams, who was in a
wheelchair and is no relation. For $400, Richard Williams cut her throat
on a southeast Houston street March 24, 1997. The married couple who
arranged the killing received life sentences.
Williams is typical of death row inmates convicted after 1995 who no
longer can delay death sentences with seemingly unending appeals.
The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, signed by President
Clinton in 1995, gives condemned inmates 1 year after their 1st round of
appeal ends in state court to submit federal habeas corpus petitions,
which must be grounded in constitutional issues such as ineffectiveness
of counsel.
"It put a clock on a case. There had not previously been a clock,"
explained David Dow, a University of Houston law professor who represents
some death row inmates in federal court. "It also made it very difficult
for federal courts to grant relief. Federal courts generally have to
accept factual conclusions reached by state courts."
The 1995 federal law has quickened the execution pace in Texas. In the
first half of the 1990s, 71 people were executed at the Walls Unit in
Huntsville.
But since 1997, 186 have been executed. During that period, only eight
months passed without an execution here. Another 442 men and eight women
remain on death row.
Of the 16 inmates slated to die before May, none appears close to getting
a stay.
"All the indications from the attorney general's office are that the
executions will go through," said Fitzgerald, the prisons department
spokesman.
A mass commutation of death row inmates, such as that granted in
Illinois, could not happen in Texas because state law does not allow a
governor to pardon or commute sentences. He can only recommend
commutations or pardons to the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, which
looks at inmates on a case-by-case basis. It does not order wholesale
commutations of classes of prisoners.
Nor does Gov. Rick Perry plan to create a commission to study the death
penalty system.
"The governor does not think that needs to be done," said his
spokeswoman, Kathy Walt. "He thinks the system is operating well and
fairly. Before he would agree, there would have to be a credible
indication that improvements could be made."
Some death penalty opponents think Ryan's actions will alter the debate
in Texas.
"It's going to have some impact. If Illinois came close to executing an
innocent person, a lot of states will have to look at this. Life without
parole might now be considered here in Texas," said Shelby Moore, a South
Texas College of Law professor.
Texas Defenders Service lawyer Marcus said, "I would hope that this would
be a cause for reflection here in Texas."
When he pardoned the four inmates, Ryan said, "the system has proved
itself to be wildly inaccurate, unjust and unable to separate the
innocent from the guilty and, at times, a very racist system."
Marcus thinks that could apply to Texas as well.
"Certainly, the system in Illinois is no worse and is probably better
than that in Texas," he said.
Even after a law was passed increasing the amount the state pays for
death row inmate's post-conviction legal representation, it still falls
short, Marcus said. Death row appeals are often lacking because the state
has paid so little that it can draw only sub-tier lawyers to seek the
work in many instances, he said.
Added Zimring, who has written a soon-to-be-published anti-death penalty
book: "Read that (Illinois) blue-ribbon commission's report, and tell me
what section doesn't apply to Texas."
Among those taking exception are Roe Wilson, who oversees death penalty
appeals for the Harris County District Attorney's Office, which has sent
more people to death row than any other municipality.
"You're dealing with a different state that had different procedures,"
said Wilson.
Most of the commission's recommendations, she said, such as one calling
for the appointment of experienced lawyers in death penalty cases, are
already in place here.
The state attorney general's office will make no changes in response to
Ryan's actions and his commission's report, said a spokeswoman for that
office.
Even some death row lawyers question whether Texas' system should be
lumped with Illinois'.
Ryan said some who received pardons and commutations gave false
confessions because they were tortured by a certain Chicago police unit.
"I have no sense of that in Houston or in Harris County," said Ribnik. "I
don't see a pattern suggesting there are cases arising from certain
units."
He also noted that it has become increasingly difficult to overturn death
penalty convictions won in Harris County because prosecutors are making
fewer mistakes.
While sparking a debate over the death penalty, Ryan also generated
another hot discussion: Should a governor be able to override trial
courts and appeals courts and pardon and commute death row inmates?
Dudley Sharp, resource director of Justice for All, which supports the
death penalty, said Ryan "violated the trust his constituents placed in
him and the trust placed in him by victims and their families.
"What he did was unjust, it was unfair, it was plain wrong. He should
have reviewed each case individually."
Sharp said as many as 11 of the 167 inmates whose terms were reduced to
life sentences appear to have been on death row for murders committed
while in prison. Ryan's commutations will send these inmates back to the
general prison population, endangering other prisoners, Sharp said.
Cook County prosecutors last week disputed Ryan's claim that the 4 men
pardoned by the governor are innocent.
One of the pardoned men, Madison Hobley, had been convicted of setting a
fire that killed his wife, son and 5 others in 1987. Former prosecutor
Jeff Warnick told the Chicago Sun-Times that he is convinced Hobley was
guilty based on the physical evidence linking him to the fire.
"You want to commute his sentence, Governor? Fine. But don't say he was
innocent," Warnick told the Sun-Times.
Susan Crump, a South Texas College of Law professor who handles some
death row habeas corpus petitions, said ideology appears to have
motivated Ryan.
"It concerns me that it was done in a blanket manner without apparent
serious consideration of the merits of each case," said Crump, who says
she neither supports nor opposes the death penalty. "What he was doing is
condemning the whole system. I wonder whether the system is as broke as
he says it is."
The Texas legislature now in session will consider a bill proposed by
Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, that would prohibit executing the mentally
retarded. If it passes, the state will be in compliance with last year's
Supreme Court decision that banned such executions.
Another Houston lawmaker, Democratic state Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., has
submitted bills to create a commission to study Texas' death penalty
system, to ban executions of anyone younger than 18, and even to abolish
the death penalty altogether.
Even death penalty opponents say abolition is unlikely for at least
several years.
"My guess is the death penalty will be abolished in my lifetime,"
predicted UH professor Dow, who is 43, "but probably not in my middle
age."
(source: Houston Chronicle)