Posted on 05/14/2002 6:36:21 PM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Killer of gay man gets stay
Counsel in appeal calls prior state-appointed attorney incompetent
05/14/2002
An inmate condemned for the murder of a gay man in Tyler won a reprieve Monday from a federal appeals court a day before he was to be executed. His attorneys argued that a previous state-appointed attorney was incompetent.
Henry Dunn Jr.'s scheduled Tuesday evening lethal injection was put off with an order from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, said Mike Viesca, a spokesman for the Texas attorney general's office.
Mr. Dunn, 27, was sentenced to death for abducting, robbing and fatally shooting 23-year-old Nicolas West near Tyler in November 1993 in what authorities said was a hate crime.
AP Henry Dunn Jr. |
Mr. Dunn and his attorneys contended that a previous state-appointed attorney was inexperienced, unqualified and incompetent and missed deadlines, making future appeals impossible.
Mr. Dunn's case was featured in a September 2000 story by The Dallas Morning News, as part of a series that studied the competency of court-appointed attorneys. That story revealed that Mr. Dunn's initial appeals attorney was just out of law school and so inexperienced that he asked for and got a delay in the case in order to take a class on how to represent death-penalty defendants.
Mr. Dunn said he was at the scene of the shooting but denied he was responsible for the hate crime. Another man convicted in the case, considered the leader of the group that preyed on homosexual people in the Tyler area, told authorities he didn't like gays because a gay relative raped him as a child. Gays also were easy robbery targets, he said.
Mr. Dunn was among seven death-row inmates who tried to escape from prison Thanksgiving night 1998. Only one, Martin Gurule, cleared a pair of fences that surrounded the Ellis Unit prison northeast of Huntsville. A week later, Mr. Gurule was found to have drowned nearby.
Mr. Dunn and the other five were stopped by gunfire from corrections officers.
Mr. Dunn was the first of two Texas prisoners scheduled to die this week.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
That is a perfect description of my old lawyer in Los Angeles.
Yep Gurule, had cardboard wrapped around his body to keep from being cut by the razor wire. Once out he apparently got into a creek and was found drown a week later. It has been speculated the cardboard didn't help him once it became water logged....
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Too bad his name wasn't Gurgle.
I had to ask for a continuance which the judge gladly granted.
I don't know which is worse - lawyers or cab drivers. They both take you for a ride and in either case, you are going to end up paying.
So am I. I went over to Yahoo to see what the problem was and saw you there but Yahoo is such a mess these days I didn't post anything. It is an adventure just trying to read post. LOL!!
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