Texas.. the state that loves to execute

[happyhaddock]

paka said:

Happily surprised to see that Perry actually took the recommendation and spared him! Life in prison is still pretty harsh for his case, but at least he will have his life, and you never know what could happen in the future.

BTW, will be a report by Dan Rather on HDNet tonight on a couple cases where Texas may have executed innocent men-

www.hd.net/drr229

I'm convinced that, based on statistics, G W Bush alone may have signed death warrants for more than one innocent.

[sdl]

happyhaddock said:

paka said:

Happily surprised to see that Perry actually took the recommendation and spared him! Life in prison is still pretty harsh for his case, but at least he will have his life, and you never know what could happen in the future.

BTW, will be a report by Dan Rather on HDNet tonight on a couple cases where Texas may have executed innocent men-

www.hd.net/drr229

I'm convinced that, based on statistics, G W Bush alone may have signed death warrants for more than one innocent.

You know what Bush*tler says:

"They had full access to the courts, they received a trial. No innocent person was executed on my watch..."

[happyhaddock]

Dan Rather asks: Did Texas execute innocent men? << LINK

No kidding. Tonight, a relatively new TV network, HDNet, which only goes into 400,000 households across the country, airs a special, commercial-free, 40-minute report entitled, “Dan Rather Reports: Did Texas Execute Innocent Men?”

The report, partly reported and entirely anchored anchored by Dan Rather, looks at the cases of Ruben Cantu and Carlos De Luna, who were two of the four people included in NCADP’s 2006 report, “Innocent and Executed: Four Chapters in the Life of America’s Death Penalty.”

The program will air at 8 p.m. East Coast time and again at 11 p.m. East Coast time so that people on the West Coast can see it during prime time. The new cable network carrying the report is called HDNet, and is unavailable to most American viewers (it only goes into 400,000 households.)

If you visit HDNets web site, you can see that a lot of restaurants and, strangely, sports bars do carry the network as part of their satellite programming (go here to see what cable systems carry HDNet: www.hd.net/watch_at_home.html And go here to see whether restaurants or bars in your town carry it: www.hd.net/sportsbars.html

For those of you who can't get to a place that has HDNet, you can see a clip from tonight's program by going here.

posted by David Elliot

[Paka]

Looks like HDNet is going to rebroadcast the report tonight.

This is another one you can include on the list for Texas; saw an investigation of it elsewhere that shows how flawed the forensic analysis was at the time - Todd Willingham. Though tragic in any case, this one was particularly so because it was for the death of his own children. I'm pretty convinced of his innocence, and can't imagine what he must have gone through, losing his kids and being falsely accused of it and then killed for it.

Edited to fix link

[pumpkinpie]

paka said:

Looks like HDNet is going to rebroadcast the report tonight.

This is another one you can include on the list for Texas; saw an investigation of it elsewhere that shows how flawed the forensic analysis was at the time - Todd Willingham. Though tragic in any case, this one was particularly so because it was for the death of his own children. I'm pretty convinced of his innocence, and can't imagine what he must have gone through, losing his kids and being falsely accused of it and then killed for it.

Edited to fix link

Reading the story, when the fire began at night, I can't even imagine how scary that must have been not to have been able to get to those children! It gave me a visual, and not a good one.
Shortly before his execution they had reason to believe it wasn't Willingham, yet they went ahead and executed the man?

I don't think he killed them either.

Hopefully he's with his children now... in a place better than here.

[sdl]

And we now see that the refused to allow 20 minutes because of a computer problem and Michael Richard was murdered as a result...

[pumpkinpie]

Attorneys' Organization Files Judicial Conduct Complaint Against Texas Appeals Judge

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) has filed a judicial complaint against the Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Sharon Keller (pictured), the first time the group says it has ever filed a complaint against a judge. NACDL has asked the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct to review Judge Keller's decision to turn away the last appeal of a death row inmate because the rushed filing was submitted past the court's 5 p.m. closing time. Attorneys for Michael Richard, who was executed on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would review the constitutionality of lethal injection practices, said they were experiencing computer problems as they prepared their client's lethal injection-based appeal just hours before Richard's execution. The appeal was being filed right after attorneys had learend that the Supreme Court would take up the issue. They asked Judge Keller for 20 more minutes to deliver their appeal to Austin because the court does not accept computer filings. They were told, "We close at 5." Without a ruling from the state court, the lawyers could not properly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the execution. At least 150 attorneys have filed similar complaints against Judge Keller with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which can impose sanctions ranging from additional education to suspension or a trial.

More than 300 lawyers - including two former Texas Supreme Court justices and other former judges, the head of the Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline and partners of leading Texas law firms - have signed a petition calling for the court to accept electronic filings in the future.

Two days after Richard's execution, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked another lethal injection in Texas after attorneys had filed, and lost, an appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The following execution date in Texas was stayed by the state court. There have been no executions in the country since Michael Richard was executed in Texas.
(New York Times, October 25, 2007). See Lethal Injection and Arbitrariness.

www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=2495&scid=64

[pumpkinpie]

News
07/29/2008 12:54:23 EST Steve Krauss/AP Photo

After Dallas DA's death, 19 convictions are undone
By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press Writer

As district attorney of Dallas for an unprecedented 36 years, Henry Wade was the embodiment of Texas justice.

A strapping 6-footer with a square jaw and a half-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth, The Chief, as he was known, prosecuted Jack Ruby. He was the Wade in Roe v. Wade. And he compiled a conviction rate so impressive that defense attorneys ruefully called themselves the 7 Percent Club.

But now, seven years after Wade's death, The Chief's legacy is taking a beating.

Nineteen convictions - three for murder and the rest involving rape or burglary - won by Wade and two successors who trained under him have been overturned after DNA evidence exonerated the defendants. About 250 more cases are under review.

No other county in America - and almost no state, for that matter - has freed more innocent people from prison in recent years than Dallas County, where Wade was DA from 1951 through 1986.

Current District Attorney Craig Watkins, who in 2006 became the first black elected chief prosecutor in any Texas county, said that more wrongly convicted people will go free.

"There was a cowboy kind of mentality and the reality is that kind of approach is archaic, racist, elitist and arrogant," said Watkins, who is 40 and never worked for Wade or met him.

But some of those who knew Wade say the truth is more complicated than Watkins' summation.

"My father was not a racist. He didn't have a racist bone in his body," said Kim Wade, a lawyer in his own right. "He was very competitive."

Moreover, former colleagues - and even the Innocence Project of Texas, which is spearheading the DNA tests - credit Wade with preserving the evidence in every case, a practice that allowed investigations to be reopened and inmates to be freed. (His critics say, of course, that he kept the evidence for possible use in further prosecutions, not to help defendants.)

The new DA and other Wade detractors say the cases won under Wade were riddled with shoddy investigations, evidence was ignored and defense lawyers were kept in the dark. They note that the promotion system under Wade rewarded prosecutors for high conviction rates.

In the case of James Lee Woodard - released in April after 27 years in prison for a murder DNA showed he didn't commit - Wade's office withheld from defense attorneys photographs of tire tracks at the crime scene that didn't match Woodard's car.

"Now in hindsight, we're finding lots of places where detectives in those cases, they kind of trimmed the corners to just get the case done," said Michelle Moore, a Dallas County public defender and president of the Innocence Project of Texas. "Whether that's the fault of the detectives or the DA's, I don't know."

John Stickels, a University of Texas at Arlington criminology professor and a director of the Innocence Project of Texas, blames a culture of "win at all costs."

"When someone was arrested, it was assumed they were guilty," he said. "I think prosecutors and investigators basically ignored all evidence to the contrary and decided they were going to convict these guys."

A Democrat, Wade was first elected DA at age 35 after three years as an assistant DA, promising to "stem the rising tide of crime." Wade already had spent four years as an FBI agent, served in the Navy during World War II and did a stint as a local prosecutor in nearby Rockwall County, where he grew up on a farm, the son of a lawyer. Wade was one of 11 children; six of the boys went on to become lawyers.

He was elected 10 times in all. He and his cadre of assistant DAs - all of them white men, early on - consistently reported annual conviction rates above 90 percent. In his last 20 years as district attorney, his office won 165,000 convictions, the Dallas Morning News reported when he retired.

In the 1960s, Wade secured a murder conviction against Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald after Oswald's arrest in the assassination of President Kennedy. Ruby's conviction was overturned on appeal, and he died before Wade could retry him.

Wade was also the defendant in the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. The case began three years earlier when Dallas resident Norma McCorvey - using the pseudonym Jane Roe - sued because she couldn't get an abortion in Texas.

Troubling cases surfaced in the 1980s, as Wade's career was winding down.

Lenell Geter, a black engineer, was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison. After Geter had spent more than a year behind bars, Wade agreed to a new trial, then dropped the charges in 1983 amid reports of shoddy evidence and allegations Geter was singled out because of his race.

In Wade's final year in office, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a black man, Thomas Miller-El, ruling that blacks were excluded from the jury. Cited in Miller-El's appeal was a manual for prosecutors that Wade wrote in 1969 and was used for more than a decade. It gave instructions on how to keep minorities off juries.

A month before Wade died of Parkinson's disease in 2001, DNA evidence was used for the first time to reverse a Dallas County conviction. David Shawn Pope, found guilty of rape in 1986, had spent 15 years in prison.

Watkins, a former defense lawyer, has since put in place a program under which prosecutors, aided by law students, are examining hundreds of old cases where convicted criminals have requested DNA testing.

Of the 19 convictions that have been overturned, all but four were won during Wade's tenure. In two-thirds of the cases, the defendants were black men. None of the convictions that have come under review are death penalty cases.

"I think the number of examples of cases show it's troubling," said Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal group affiliated with the Texas effort. "Whether it's worse than other jurisdictions, it's hard to say. It would be a mistake to conclude the problems in these cases are limited to Dallas or are unique to Dallas.

Former assistant prosecutor Dan Hagood said The Chief expected his assistants to be prepared, represent the state well and be careful and fair.

"Never once - ever - did I ever get the feeling of anything unethical," Hagood said. He denied there was any pressure exerted from above - "no `wink' deals, no `The boss says we need to get this guy.'"

But Watkins said those who defend The Chief are "protecting a legacy."

"Clearly it was a culture. A lot of folks don't want to admit it. It was there," the new DA said. "We decided to fix it."