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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 01/19/2003 4:00:12 AM PST by Houmatt
Texas put two 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 five to six years.
After two 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 percent.
Nearly two-thirds of those executions have taken place in just the last six years. In 2002, Texas put 33 men to death, nearly half of the U.S. total and far more than Oklahoma, the second-busiest state, which killed seven 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 first 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 two 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 one year after their first 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 four 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 five 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."
No, that is just a murderer lover's schoolboy fantasy; like the kind we had with the teen idols of yesteryear.
Keep dreaming, pal.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It's great to be back home! ...And, I do feel much safer here.
I hope y'all down there in Houston kick the a$$es of Democratic state Rep. Harold Dutton Jr and UH professor Dow clear up to Illinois -- where they belong!
Move to Illinois. Do your killing in Illinois. All you have to do is drag out the appeals process long enough for a blanket pardon. Victims don't count in Illinois. They do in Texas.
In fact, Barbara Streisand wrote a song about it:
People, (in Illinois)
People who kill people,
Are the luckiest people in the world.
But the same anti death penalty people LOVE the death penalty for the truly innocent ones, the unborn children......
Isn't being a liberal wonderful, you never have to explain your hypocrisy.
Believe me, as long as I am breathing, I intend to.
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