September 1
TEXAS:
Harris County Executions
For immediate release: September 1, 2005----Contact: David Atwood (832)
693-5710
DESPITE SERIOUS PROBLEMS, HARRIS COUNTY EXECUTIONS CONTINUE AT RAPID PACE
Despite serious problems with ineffective legal representation for the
poor, prosecutorial misconduct, racism in how the death penalty is
applied, and the Houston Police Department's Crime Laboratory, Harris
County continues to execute its citizens in record numbers. Six of the
next ten executions in Texas will come from Harris County alone. Harris
County has more executions than any other county in the nation, and more
than any state other than Texas and Virginia. The following people are
currently scheduled for execution:
September
14 Frances Newton Harris County
22 Michael Riley Wood County
October
6 Ronald Howard Travis County
20 Luis Ramirez Tom Green County
November
2 Jaime Elizalde Harris County
3 Melvin White Pecos County
8 Marion Dudley Harris County
9 Charles Thacker Harris County
15 Robert Rowell Harris County
16 Shannon Thomas Harris County
Frances Newton's legal defense was practically non-existent. Evidence that
was used to convict her has been destroyed and can no longer be tested.
Problems with the Houston Police Department's Crime Laboratory prompted
Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt to say, "I think it would be very
prudent for us as a system, that is, a criminal justice system, to delay
further executions until we have had an opportunity to re-examine evidence
that played a particular role in the conviction of an individual that was
sentenced to death."
The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is opposed to all
executions. However, we believe that it is particularly immoral to
continue with executions considering the multiple problems with the Harris
County criminal justice system.
(source: Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty - Houston Chapter)
USA:
The Agenda----Cross-Examination; The Executioner's Swan Song?; The death
penalty is not about to vanish overnight - but the Supreme Court's
tolerance for it is diminishing rapidly
Is it just my imagination, or has there been a palpable change recently in
the Supreme Court's approach to death-penalty cases?
The Court has without question shifted gears on capital punishment. For
years the justices turned a willfully blind eye to the claims of those on
death row. They created onerous procedural obstacles to federal review of
state convictions. They tolerated the most grotesque incompetence by
counsel in capital cases, along with alarming disparities in the way the
death penalty was implemented. They allowed executions not only of the
mentally retarded but of the seriously mentally ill. In short, the message
from the Court to death-penalty states was simple: Godspeed.
But lately the Court has struck a very different tone; one question raised
by John Roberts's nomination is whether this trend will last. In 2
particularly high-profile cases, one in 2002 and the other last spring, it
rejected the death penalty first for the mentally retarded and then for
juvenile offenders; the justices had upheld it in both situations as
recently as 1989. In other cases the justices have also tightened the
rules concerning apparent efforts by prosecutors to strike
African-Americans from capital juries. They have made clear that juries,
not judges, must make death judgments. They have beaten up on Texas - the
nation's unrivaled leader in death-penalty activity - for cases involving
flawed jury instructions and prosecutorial misbehavior. And they have
sought to rein in certain lower courts that have reviewed death cases with
particular leniency. It has almost seemed to be a different Court.
Why? It was the same group of justices until now.
In large measure the shift emanates from a change of heart in what were
the Court's two swing justices: Anthony Kennedy and the soon-to-retire
Sandra Day O'Connor. Once solidly part of the bloc that deferred to state
convictions and procedures, both evidently had second thoughts. Back in
1991, for example, O'Connor wrote the Court opinion refusing to even
consider the case of Roger Keith Coleman, a Virginia death-row inmate with
particularly strong claims of innocence. Coleman had lost his chance to
appeal when his lawyers missed a state-court filing deadline by a single
day. O'Connor began the opinion, "This is a case about federalism." A
decade later, however, she was singing a different tune. "Serious
questions are being raised about whether the death penalty is being fairly
administered in this country," she said in a 2001 speech in Minnesota.
"Minnesota doesn't have it, and you must breathe a big sigh of relief
every day."
Kennedy's shift has been just as dramatic. In 1989, for example, Kennedy
signed Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion upholding the death penalty for
people who committed their offenses as juveniles. This year he wrote the
opinion striking down the juvenile death penalty, and in doing so he
explicitly repudiated several of the methodological premises of the Scalia
opinion he had signed.
The attitudinal shift on the part of Kennedy and O'Connor - 2 of the less
rigidly principled justices in recent years - is hardly a surprise. As DNA
exonerated growing numbers of prisoners through the 1990s, the public grew
more skeptical toward capital punishment in general, realizing that even
when juries are sure of a person's guilt, they are sometimes dead wrong.
Although polls still show majority support for the death penalty, that
support is shrinking. Juries are handing down fewer death sentences.
Executions countrywide, after reaching a modern-day high of 98 in 1999,
declined to 59 last year. Judges are not immune from the anxieties that
have led to these trends. It would actually be surprising if no Supreme
Court justice had rethought his or her approach in light of what we now
know about capital punishment. So is the Court getting ready to strike
down the death penalty once and for all?
Almost certainly not. And for the Court's reticence on this point, foes of
the death penalty (of which I am one) should, paradoxically, count
themselves lucky. The justices went down the abolition road once before.
In their ill-fated 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia - which came down at
a time when capital punishment was on the decline anyway - they
effectively struck down the death-penalty statutes of every state in the
country that had them.
The intense public reaction against the decision provoked many states to
rewrite their capital-punishment laws to comply with the Court's new
standards - much as the current backlash against judicially mandated
recognition for gay marriage is prompting state constitutional amendments
that limit marriage to heterosexual couples. Within just a few years the
Court allowed these new laws to go into effect: executions began again -
and then skyrocketed, from one in 1977 to 25 in 1987 to 74 in 1997. By
denying the public the option of a penalty that, although disfavored by
elites, was supported - then as now - by much of the polity at large, the
courts intensified public commitment to it. With capital punishment once
again on the wane, justices uncomfortable with it would be deeply foolish
to repeat that mistake. Even the Court's liberal flank seems to understand
this.
So is the new judicial scrutiny in capital cases just window dressing?
Not at all. The Court's new interest in scrutinizing capital cases has the
effect of reducing the death penalty's political air supply - that is, of
constricting its public legitimacy. In theory this should not be the case
- just as the permissive attitude the Court for many years took toward
executions should not have functioned as a political enabler of them. The
Court has never approved of or rejected the death penalty as a political
matter. Its decisions merely outline what the ground rules of democratic
government require of states that want to use it. Yet people do not read
Supreme Court opinions in strictly legal terms. Every time the Court
upholds a dicey state conviction, it sends a message legitimizing capital
punishment. In contrast, when the Court nibbles away at the death penalty,
it undermines its acceptability. It also makes capital cases ever more
difficult and expensive for states to litigate, thereby making capital
punishment progressively less viable as a regular instrument of criminal
justice.
Such moral and practical constraints may not matter in Texas, Oklahoma,
and Virginia, where the death penalty is a comparatively routine feature
of the criminal-justice system. But states like these are the exception,
not the rule: only 5 states have accounted for two thirds of all
executions since 1976. In most places where the death penalty is legal it
is quite marginal, and judicial tolerance can matter a lot to its
vitality. Recently, for example, courts in New York effectively
invalidated that state's death-penalty statute, which had been passed only
in 1995 and had never led to an execution. The state legislature decided
not to pass another.
What are the big issues to come?
The most important is quality of counsel, about which the blitheness of
the Court's jurisprudence has bordered on the obscene. The Fifth Circuit
Court of Appeals recently had to debate, for example, whether under the
Supreme Court's precedents a death-row inmate whose lawyer had slept
through considerable portions of his capital trial was presumptively
entitled to a new trial. The Court has issued a few opinions recently -
including a potentially significant one last term - emphasizing the
importance of effective counsel. But it has only begun to tinker with its
prior approach here, and it's far from clear that the justices intend a
real revision. Even in the midst of their newfound concern about capital
cases, for example, they let a Virginia man be executed despite the fact
that, unbeknownst to him, his lawyer at trial had previously represented
the person he was accused of killing. No state behavior in capital cases
as consistently undermines fair-trial rights as the appointment of
ill-prepared, overworked, or just plain lousy lawyers to represent people
whose lives are on the line. How seriously the justices take on this
question will tell a lot about how committed they are to a new approach.
How much will the change of personnel affect the Court's direction here?
Perhaps a lot. If Roberts proves hard-line, O'Connor's resignation could
shift doctrine back toward permissiveness very quickly. On the other hand,
a Bush appointee to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist - a solid part
of the Court's conservative flank on these questions - wouldn't have to be
very moderate to fortify the current trend considerably.
So what's your instinct about where all this is headed?
Despite O'Connor's retirement, the Court's new approach seems likely to
impose significant constraints on capital punishment, but ones that will
be largely invisible to the public. The Court will probably not be
striking down many laws, but the justices will tighten the screws by
scrutinizing individual cases enough to further isolate the death penalty
regionally and to raise its political and financial costs. This is a
matter less of politics than of simple human nature. The Court speaks in
the language of principle, but only a few of the justices are so committed
to the principle of deference to state-court judgments that they would
feel comfortable over time seeing their names on opinions upholding
manifest injustices. Since Roger Keith Coleman's execution, in 1992,
Virginia law-enforcement authorities have successfully resisted calls for
posthumous DNA testing that could resolve his claims of innocence. Coleman
may or may not have been innocent; but someday we're going to learn for
sure that someone put to death in this country was in fact not guilty. And
it's a fair bet that no one would want her obituary to say she called the
debate over that execution "a case about federalism."
