Sept. 24 TEXAS: Girl's life began where her father's may end----Her mother, then a security guard, conceived her with an inmate who is on death row 5-year-old Gabriela Green has never hugged her father. She knows his voice only through the telephone of a death row visitors' stall. And one day soon, she may see him, barricaded behind a Plexiglas window, for the last time. "Gabbie," as her family calls her, does not know it yet, but her father, 30-year-old Edward Green III, has spent nearly 12 years on death row and is scheduled for lethal injection on Oct. 5. A bright-eyed girl with braided hair and a nose that crinkles when she smiles, Gabbie Green is not the only child in Texas who has a father on death row. But she may be the only one who was conceived there. "People always want to know, 'How can you have a 5-year-old-child with a man who has been incarcerated for 12 years?' " said Tameika East-Green, the condemned inmate's wife. "I tell them I used to work at the prison." The genesis of this unusual family began in September 1998, when Tameika East was a correctional officer at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Ellis Unit in Huntsville, which then housed the state's more than 400 death row inmates. Edward Green had been on death row for 5 years, appealing a capital murder conviction for his role in the 1992 deaths of Edward Perry Haden, 72, and Helen O'Sullivan, 63, who were shot as they sat in a car at a stop sign in Houston. East-Green, 26, says she immediately was drawn to the articulate young man with a boyish face and engaging smile who had grown deeply religious, introspective and remorseful about his past. "I just fell in love with him," she said in a recent interview. "He didn't hide his feelings like most men." Their courtship As their courtship progressed, she said, she often traded daily assignments with other correctional officers so she could work in the death row wing and visit with Green. "We talked about everything. He has a very positive attitude. He never lets his situation get him down," she said. "He's not the same person that he was. I would not have fallen in love with that person." When asked about the circumstances of her becoming pregnant in such a restrictive environment, she looked down and said, "That's personal." Edward Green also declined to elaborate on their relationship. "We just got real close," he said recently. "One thing led to another, and we had our daughter." It's unlikely that such a scenario could be repeated today. In 1999, death row inmates housed at the Ellis Unit in Huntsville had much more freedom of movement than they do today at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston. They could participate in work programs, move about the hallways, eat, socialize and attend church together. Since death row was moved to Livingston in 2000, its inmates are confined to their cells 23 hours a day and are escorted by at least 2 guards when they leave the cells for exercise, showers, medical attention or visits. While still working at the prison, Tameika East learned she was pregnant. She gave it some thought, then told Green she wanted to get married. "He was like, 'Are you serious?'" she recalled. "I said, 'Yes, I'm positive.' "My thing was, this is the man I'd fallen in love with. This is the man I wanted to be my husband. No one has intrigued me like Edward has." Her family pleaded with her to change her mind. "I thought, 'What's the matter with her? Is she crazy, with him being locked up and everything?'" said her 46-year-old sister, Christine Santee. "What if she met somebody else? You know she'd look back on that and say it was a mistake." East gave Edward Green documents to sign, clearing the way for a marriage by proxy. She took the documents to the Austin County courthouse, where the 2 were legally married in Edward's absence in April 1999. At about the same time, her supervisors learned of the relationship after finding love letters. Given a choice of quitting immediately or being fired, she quit. She was devastated, she said - not because she lost her job, but because she was then relegated to the same non-contact visits as the rest of the public. Although having sex with a prison inmate was made a felony punishable by up to 2 years in a state jail in 1997, East-Green was not charged. For the past few years, East-Green has lived in Hempstead, working the overnight shift at a Wal-Mart. She says she "got saved" about 2 years ago and now attends the Straitway Ministry Church in Hempstead every week. She visits Edward Green on death row as often as possible, given his restriction to one visitor per week. "We've really reconnected lately," she said. "We're so in tune; I know what he's thinking. It's like we finish each other's sentences." She usually brings their daughter along on the visits. "She always hogs the phone," East-Green said. "And she'll just stop the conversation and say, 'Daddy, I love you.'" She watches her husband, who once asked if his daughter was heavy to hold, try to savor the moments with his child. "He will just stare at her, every move she makes," East-Green said. "It's like he's in a daze." Edward Green considers his daughter a divine gift. "She's a miracle," he said. "To me, it's like a point to let me know that God is good - that even in a situation like this, good things happen to all people." Initially, the child had no concept of prison. "She used to say, 'Daddy, is this your house?' And he'd say, 'Yes, this is where I live,'" East-Green said. Gabbie now understands that her father is in prison, but does not know why, or the nature of his sentence. 'You can get Daddy out' She once overheard a conversation about an uncle who was arrested and released after posting bail. "She was like, 'Mama, if you get enough money, you can get Daddy out like Aunt Linda.'" As the execution date nears, East-Green says, she frequently prays for a stay. She dreads looking at a calendar but says she worries most about her daughter. "What am I supposed to tell her? One day her father's here, and the next ...," she said, unable to finish the sentence. "I think Edward is going to tell her. He said he wants to be the one to tell her. "I know she's going to have a lot of questions; not so much now, but when she gets older. I'm sure she's going to want to know how she came to be." (source: Houston Chronicle) ARKANSAS----(temporary) stay of impending volunteer execution Supreme Court Stays Man's Execution In Little Rock, the Arkansas Supreme Court has granted a temporary stay of execution for death row inmate Rickey Dale Newman. The stay was issued 1 day after the high court denied a request to halt the condemned killer's execution scheduled for Tuesday. The court had said Thursday that federal public defenders who made the request lacked standing in the case because Rickey Dale Newman fired them. Newman was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for the February 2001 stabbing death of Marie Cholette who was found dead in a Crawford County transient camp. In seeking a Supreme Court order to stay the execution, public defenders said Newman is mentally ill and mentally retarded, and is not competent to waive his rights to a thorough and accurate review of his case. But prosecutors have argued that Newman wants to die. (source: Associated Press) NORTH CAROLINA: Lapse called 'honest mistake'--Gell trial prompts State Bar hearing The prosecutors who helped put Alan Gell on death row testified Thursday that they made an "honest mistake" when they withheld evidence that pointed to Gell's innocence.David Hoke and Debra Graves face charges before the State Bar that they withheld evidence and made false statements to a judge at Gell's 1998 murder trial. Gell won a new trial in 2002 when the withheld evidence became public. The retrial took place in February this year. Gell was quickly acquitted. Gell was aided by the evidence he didn't have at the 1st trial -- statements of people who saw the victim, Allen Ray Jenkins, alive after Gell had been jailed, and a taped conversation of the star witness saying she had to "make up a story" for police. "It was an honest mistake on our part," Hoke said in sworn testimony read at the hearing Thursday. "Nobody is more sorry about that than Debra and I." The State Bar hearing resembles a civil trial. The three-person panel hearing the case could hand down punishment ranging from a reprimand to taking away Hoke's and Graves' law licenses. The proceeding is expected to conclude today. The State Bar's lawyers did not call witnesses Thursday. Instead, they read excerpts from testimony they took from Hoke and Graves in recent weeks. The case started with the April 1995 slaying of Jenkins, a retired truck driver, in his home in Aulander in Bertie County. 2 15-year-old girls admitted to a role in the crime and identified Gell as the triggerman. Hoke was assigned the case in February 1996 when the attorney general's office took over the case from David Beard, the local district attorney. Beard was compelled to withdraw from the case when one of Gell's lawyers accepted a job on his staff. Hoke first received a copy of the case file from Beard. Hoke then requested a copy of the complete SBI file, which he received in May 1996. The SBI file contained the statements of the 17 witnesses, who said they had seen Jenkins alive after the only date Gell could have committed the killing. Hoke said he never looked through it. He said he assumed the new files duplicated what he had already received from Beard and that he never saw the statements when reading Beard's files. Graves joined the case in January 1997. As the trial began in February 1998, Hoke and Graves had not handed over any evidence beneficial to the defense to Gell's lawyers, as required by law. Hoke said he thought Gell's lawyers would have gotten all they needed from Beard's files. At the start of the trial, Gell's lawyers asked for statements from witnesses who had seen Jenkins alive after Gell was jailed. The judge ordered Hoke and Graves to hand over all such statements. The 2 prosecutors turned to the lead investigator, SBI agent Dwight Ransome. Ransome produced statements from 9 people who he said had changed their stories in a 2nd round of interviews. 'This is all of them' Hoke said he never looked through the files himself. It was more efficient to rely on Ransome, who had a tremendous grasp of the files, Hoke said. When another statement surfaced 2 days later, Hoke said he again asked Ransome if there were any more witness statements. "He forcefully said, 'David, this is all of them,'" Hoke testified. With hindsight, Graves admitted that she was operating with tunnel vision at that critical point in the trial. "I couldn't think outside the little box I was in," she said in her previous testimony to the Bar. "Maybe I just put the blinders on. ... When you're an advocate for one side, you're truly an advocate for one side. You don't see it, or maybe that's a shortcoming that I have." Hoke, for his part, pointed to his reliance on Beard's open-file policy and to his trust in Ransome. "We wanted them to have everything we had," Hoke said. "We would never hide anything away from them." Hoke acknowledged that he and Graves intentionally withheld a secretly taped phone conversation of the state's 2 main witnesses, Crystal Morris and Shanna Hall, both 15 at the time. On the tape, Morris rehearses her story with her boyfriend and talks about how she had to "make up a story" for police. The taped conversation did not help to prove Gell's innocence, Hoke said, so he didn't give it to Gell's lawyers. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors must hand over any evidence beneficial to the defense as well as evidence that could undermine state witnesses. Jurors at Gell's 2nd trial said the withheld evidence was powerful in acquitting Gell. David Johnson, a State Bar lawyer, reminded Hoke that he had been in a similar situation before. In a 1993 murder trial in Halifax County, Superior Court Judge Howard Greeson admonished Hoke and a colleague for not producing police statements that could have undermined a state witness. Greeson considered dismissing the case but instead gave Hoke a brief lecture, according to a transcript of the trial. "I don't know how long you will stay in the business of prosecution, Mr. Assistant Attorney General," Greeson said, "but you will always be able to say that you came within a little bit of having a 1st-degree murder case ripped out from under you." The State Bar panel also heard from character witnesses praising Hoke and Graves for their integrity and professional ethics, including former SBI director Jim Coman, former State Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr and Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals John Martin. (source: News & Observer)
