Oct. 5
TEXAS:
Low-IQ killer's death sentence overturned for 3rd time
Convicted killer Johnny Paul Penry, whose case helped spark national
debate over whether mentally impaired inmates could be executed, had his
death sentence overturned for the 3rd time today.
A divided Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case back to trial for
the punishment phase of the 1979 slaying of an East Texas woman. The court
ruling said jurors during his most recent retrial may not have properly
considered his claims of mental impairment.
Penry over more than a decade became the face of mentally impaired killers
across the country, winning 2 reversals from the U.S. Supreme Court that
changed the way judges instruct juries in capital murder cases.
In July 2002, shortly after the high court's ruling, a jury in Conroe
determined Penry was not retarded and sentenced him to die.
Hours after Pamela Moseley Carpenter, 22, described her attacker as she
lay dying from a stab wound to the chest, Penry gave a detailed confession
of his premeditated break-in, beating, rape and stabbing of the woman in
her Livingston home. Carpenter was the sister of former Washington
Redskins kicker Mark Moseley.
"I knew if I went over to the chick's house and raped her I would have to
kill her," Penry told authorities. He also admitted casing out the block
and making sure Carpenter's husband was away, then said he got scared
after the stabbing and decided to "boogie" out of the house.
Before each of his first two trials, a competency jury decided he was able
to stand trial. In each trial, he was convicted and sentenced to die.
However, the Supereme Court overturned his conviction in 1989 and, in
2001, overturned his sentence but left the conviction intact. Both times
the high court reasoned the jury was not allowed to properly weigh Penry's
alleged retardation, and the uneducated East Texas laborer became a symbol
for anti-death penalty crusaders.
This time, jurors in the monthlong trial heard detailed testimony about
his intellect. Defense experts noted his IQ consistently tested below 70,
the retardation standard, and he remains very childlike in his abilities.
Prosecutors say Penry's lifelong anti-social behavior prevented him from
being able to properly take an IQ test and that he has a life-or-death
reason to act unintelligent.
Penry was on parole for rape when he was arrested and charged with killing
Carpenter.
******************************
Killer claiming influence by rap to die Thursday
It was a broken headlight that caught the attention of Texas Department of
Public Safety Trooper Bill Davidson, prompting him to pull over the GMC
Jimmy on a South Texas highway.
The music blaring from the radio would make the traffic stop all the more
notorious. At the wheel of the SUV, 18-year-old Ronald Ray Howard, with
gangsta rap music enveloping him, kept the truck in gear and his foot on
the brake as Davidson walked up.
"Should I shoot him or not?" Howard later would say, describing his
thoughts the night of April 11, 1992.
He leaned out of the stolen truck, raised his 9 mm pistol loaded with
hollow-point bullets and fired. Davidson, a 43-year-old married father of
2 and a trooper for 19 years, was hit in the neck and died 3 days later.
Howard, who at 18 already had at least four children and was on probation
for burglary, is set for lethal injection Thursday for the slaying. He'd
be the 14th convicted killer executed this year in the nation's most
active capital punishment state.
After the shooting, Howard sped down U.S. Highway 59. A passing motorist
used the trooper's radio to summon help. Howard wrecked in Victoria and
ran off but was caught by police.
"I heard him scream as I was leaving," Howard told a grand jury about the
shooting.
At Howard's trial, his lawyers blamed hours and hours of incessant gangsta
rap music - with lyrics advocating the death of police officers - as
contributing to his actions. The defense sparked a national debate on the
violence-laden anti-police music and censorship.
"No doubt he was blasting that cop-killer music on his radio when he was
pulled over by that trooper," lawyer Allen Tanner recalled last week. "He
grew up in the ghetto and disliked police and these were his heroes, these
rappers ... telling him if you're pulled over, just blast away.
"It affected him. That was a totally valid serious defense. It really
was."
Jurors in Austin, where Howard's trial was moved because of publicity in
Jackson County, convicted the seventh-grade dropout after 40 minutes of
deliberation. The same panel deliberated 6 days before deciding Howard
should die.
Howard told a grand jury he was listening to "Soulja's Story" by Tupac
Shakur before he shot Davidson. The song makes references to a young black
male being pulled over by police, remembering Rodney King, then opening
fire on an officer. Shakur himself was gunned down in 1996 in Las Vegas, a
slaying that remains unsolved.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Howard's death sentence in
1996 because a potential juror improperly was eliminated from the jury
pool.
At that 2nd trial, in Corpus Christi in 1999, Howard again was sentenced
to die.
Testimony showed Howard, from Houston, was a drug dealer and gang member
who beat his girlfriend and slept with a gun. Prosecutors argued the rap
music defense was a diversion intended to mitigate Howard's viciousness.
"Teenagers do crazy stuff," Tanner said. "He did something crazy and now
is grown up. This is a case that's really sad. This kid should not be
executed. He's always been really remorseful."
Howard said on a Web site that he hoped his experiences "would be an
example of the realities of life on the streets and where it could lead,"
and that some at-risk youth "might see my message and choose to do better
with their lives."
"I have never asked anyone for sympathy, for I realize no matter what, I
was wrong for my actions many years ago," he wrote. "It took time to
understand that. But I understand."
Department of Public Safety Maj. Art Garza, who worked out of the agency's
Edna office with Davidson, recalled his former partner and colleague this
week as "a good husband, great father, excellent trooper and good friend."
"He wore that uniform so proudly," Garza said. "I always knew Bill
Davidson as just a strong man. I don't remember him ever being scared. He
was a true police officer. What a great guy. We miss him."
Howard was 1 of 3 Texas inmates with execution dates this month. At least
6 are scheduled for November and another in December.
On the Net: Ronald Howard: http://www.ronrhoward.org
(source for both: Associated Press)
*******************
Biker Santa murder trial moved to April
Judge Susan Criss granted prosecutors a delay at a hearing Monday, meaning
the capital murder trial of a La Marque man will begin in April.
First Assistant District Attorney Joel Bennett told The Daily News
prosecutors had asked for the delay, and defense attorneys for Amador
Gonzales Sanchez Jr., 34, had no objection.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Sanchez, charged in the
October 2002 shooting death of a La Marque man who died as he tried to
foil a robbery at a bar.
The shooting victim was Joe Morreale, known to many as the "Biker Santa."
The night of Oct. 11, 2002, Morreale went to Murphy's bar and was there
shortly before the midnight closing time when 2 men walked in with guns
and demanded money.
Another patron struggled with one of the robbers, but the other shot
Morreale when he lunged at him in an effort to foil the crime.
Bennett said the delay would allow him and County Criminal District
Attorney Kurt Sistrunk time to prepare to prosecute the case. Last month,
prosecutors Mo Ibrahim, Bennetts predecessor as first assistant, and
Michael Elliott announced they would leave the office to form a private
law firm with attorney Greg Russell. Ibrahim and Elliott were the original
prosecutors in the case.
Morreale, 48, ran a Toys for Tots drive and was known in the community for
his charity work with the Shriners Burns Center Toy Run. He owned a
motorcycle customizing shop, just around the corner from where he was
gunned down.
After a hearing in February, defense attorney Katherine Scardino said
Sanchez, her client, would be pleading not guilty and maintained his
innocence.
"He says he was not present that night," she said.
Sanchez's co-defendants' trials will occur after his concludes.
Sanchez remained in jail Monday, under bonds totaling $500,000.
(source: Galveston County Daily News)
****************************
Serving Life, With No Chance of Redemption
Minutes after the United States Supreme Court threw out the juvenile death
penalty in March, word reached death row here, setting off a pandemonium
of banging, yelling and whoops of joy among many of the 28 men whose lives
were spared by the decision.
But the news devastated Randy Arroyo, who had faced execution for helping
kidnap and kill an Air Force officer while stealing his car for parts.
Mr. Arroyo realized he had just become a lifer, and that was the last
thing he wanted. Lifers, he said, exist in a world without hope. "I wish I
still had that death sentence," he said. "I believe my chances have gone
down the drain. No one will ever look at my case."
Mr. Arroyo has a point. People on death row are provided with free lawyers
to pursue their cases in federal court long after their convictions have
been affirmed; lifers are not. The pro bono lawyers who work so
aggressively to exonerate or spare the lives of death row inmates are not
interested in the cases of people merely serving life terms. And appeals
courts scrutinize death penalty cases much more closely than others.
Mr. Arroyo will become eligible for parole in 2037, when he is 57. But he
doubts he will ever get out.
"This is hopeless," he said.
Scores of lifers, in interviews at 10 prisons in six states, echoed Mr.
Arroyo's despondency. They have, they said, nothing to look forward to and
no way to redeem themselves.
More than one in four lifers will never even see a parole board. The
boards that the remaining lifers encounter have often been refashioned to
include representatives of crime victims and elected officials not
receptive to pleas for lenience.
And the nation's governors, concerned about the possibility of repeated
offenses by paroled criminals and the public outcry that often follows,
have all but stopped commuting life sentences.
In at least 22 states, lifers have virtually no way out. Fourteen states
reported that they released fewer than 10 in 2001, the latest year for
which national data is available, and the other 8 states said fewer than 2
dozen each.
The number of lifers thus continues to swell in prisons across the nation,
even as the number of new life sentences has dropped in recent years along
with the crime rate.
According to a New York Times survey, the number of lifers has almost
doubled in the last decade, to 132,000. Historical data on juvenile
offenders is incomplete. But among the 18 states that can provide data
from 1993, the juvenile lifer population rose 74 percent in the next
decade.
Prosecutors and representatives of crime victims applaud the trend. The
prisoners, they say, are paying the minimum fit punishment for their
terrible crimes.
But even supporters of the death penalty wonder about this state of
affairs.
"Life without parole is a very strange sentence when you think about it,"
said Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School. "The punishment
seems either too much or too little. If a sadistic or extraordinarily
cold, callous killer deserves to die, then why not kill him? But if we are
going to keep the killer alive when we could otherwise execute him, why
strip him of all hope?"
Burl Cain, the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, which
houses thousands of lifers, said older prisoners who have served many
years should be able to make their cases to a parole or pardon board that
has an open mind. Because all life sentences in Louisiana are without the
possibility of parole, only a governor's pardon can bring about a release.
The prospect of a meaningful hearing would, Mr. Cain said, provide lifers
with a taste of hope.
"Prison should be a place for predators and not dying old men," Mr. Cain
said. "Some people should die in prison, but everyone should get a
hearing."
Television and Boredom
In interviews, lifers said they tried to resign themselves to spending
down their days entirely behind bars. But the prison programs that once
kept them busy in an effort at training and rehabilitation have largely
been dismantled, replaced by television and boredom.
The lot of the lifer may be said to be cruel or pampered, depending on
one's perspective. "It's a bleak imprisonment," said W. Scott Thornsley, a
former corrections official in Pennsylvania. "When you take away someone's
hope, you take away a lot."
It was not always that way, said Steven Benjamin, a 56-year-old Michigan
lifer.
"The whole perception of incarceration changed in the 1970's," said Mr.
Benjamin, who is serving a sentence of life without parole for
participating in a robbery in 1973 in which an accomplice killed a man.
"They're dismantling all meaningful programs. We just write people off
without a second thought."
As the years pass and the lifers grow old, they sometimes tend to dying
prisoners and then die themselves. Some are buried in cemeteries on prison
grounds by other lifers, who will then go on to repeat the cycle.
"They're never going to leave here," said Mr. Cain, the warden at Angola,
of inmates he looks after. "They're going to die here."
Some defendants view the prospect of life in prison as so bleak and the
possibility of exoneration for lifers as so remote that they are willing
to roll the dice with death.
In Alabama, six men convicted of capital crimes have asked their juries
for death rather than life sentences, said Bryan Stevenson, director of
the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama.
The idea seems to have its roots in the experience of Walter McMillian,
who was convicted of capital murder by an Alabama jury in 1988. The jury
recommended that he be sentenced to life without parole, but Judge Robert
E. Lee Key Jr. overrode that recommendation and sentenced Mr. McMillian to
death by electrocution.
Because of that death sentence, lawyers opposed to capital punishment took
up Mr. McMillian's case. Through their efforts, Mr. McMillian was
exonerated 5 years later after prosecutors conceded that they had relied
on perjured testimony. "Had there not been that decision to override,"
said Mr. Stevenson, one of Mr. McMillian's lawyers, "he would be in prison
today."
Other Alabama defendants have learned a lesson from Mr. McMillian.
"We have a lot of death penalty cases where, perversely, the client at the
penalty phase asks to be sentenced to death," Mr. Stevenson said.
Judges and other legal experts say that risky decision could be a wise one
for defendants who are innocent or who were convicted under flawed
procedures. "Capital cases get an automatic royal treatment, whereas
noncapital cases are fairly routine," said Alex Kozinski, a federal
appeals court judge in California.
David R. Dow, one of Mr. Arroyo's lawyers and the director of the Texas
Innocence Network, said groups like his did not have the resources to
represent lifers.
"If we got Arroyo's case as a non-death-penalty case," Mr. Dow said, "we
would have terminated it in the very early stages of investigation."
Mr. Arroyo, who is 25 but still has something of the pimply, squirmy
adolescent about him, said he already detected a certain quiet descending
on his case.
"You don't hear too many religious groups or foreign governments or
nonprofit organizations fighting for lifers," he said.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas signed a bill in June adding life without parole
as an option for juries to consider in capital cases. Opponents of the
death penalty have embraced and promoted this alternative, pointing to
studies that show that support for the death penalty dropped drastically
among jurors and the public when life without parole, or LWOP, was an
alternative.
"Life without parole has been absolutely crucial to whatever progress has
been made against the death penalty," said James Liebman, a law professor
at Columbia. "The drop in death sentences" - from 320 in 1996 to 125 last
year - "would not have happened without LWOP."
But some questioned the strategy.
"I have a problem with death penalty abolitionists," said Paul Wright, the
editor of Prison Legal News and a former lifer, released in Washington
State in 2003 after serving 17 years for killing a man in a robbery
attempt. "They're positing life without parole as an option, but it's a
death sentence by incarceration. You're trading a slow form of death for a
faster one."
Mr. Arroyo shares that view.
"I'd roll the dice with death and stay on death row," he said. "Really,
death has never been my fear. What do people believe? That being alive in
prison is a good life? This is slavery."
Murder Follows a Kidnapping
Mr. Arroyo was convicted in 1998 for his role in the killing of Jose Cobo,
39, an Air Force captain and the chief of maintenance training at the
Inter-American Air Forces Academy in Lackland, Tex. Mr. Arroyo, then 17,
and an accomplice, Vincent Gutierrez, 18, wanted to steal Captain Cobo's
red Mazda RX-7 for parts.
Captain Cobo tried to escape but became tangled in his seat belt. Mr.
Gutierrez shot him twice in the back and shoved the dying man onto the
shoulder of Interstate 410 during rush hour on a rainy Tuesday morning.
Although Mr. Arroyo did not pull the trigger, he was convicted of felony
murder, or participation in a serious crime that led to a killing. He
contends that he had no reason to think Mr. Gutierrez would kill Captain
Cobo and therefore cannot be guilty of felony murder. "I don't mind taking
responsibility for my actions, for my part in this crime," he said. "But
don't act like I'm a murderer or violent or that this was premeditated."
That argument misunderstands the felony murder law, legal experts said.
Mr. Arroyo's decision to participate in the carjacking is, they say, more
than enough to support his murder conviction.
Captain Cobo left behind a 17-year-old daughter, Reena.
"I miss him so much it hurts when I think about it," she said of her
father in a victim impact statement presented at trial. "I know he is in
heaven with my grandmother and God is taking care of him. I want to see
the murderers punished not necessarily by death. I feel sorry that they
wasted theirs and my father's life."
Ms. Cobo declined to be interviewed.
Mr. Arroyo said he was not eager to leave death row, and not just because
of dwindling interest in his case.
"All I know is death row," he said. "This is my life. This is where I grew
up."
His lawyer sees reasons for him to be concerned about moving off death
row.
"He's going to become someone's plaything in the general population," Mr.
Dow said. "He's a small guy, and the 1st time someone tries to kill him
they'll probably succeed."
That kind of violence is not the way most lifers die. At Angola, for
instance, 2 prisoners were killed by fellow inmates in the five years
ended in 2004. One committed suicide, and 2 were executed. The other 150
or so died in the usual ways.
The prison operates a hospice to tend to dying prisoners, and it has
opened a 2nd cemetery, Point Lookout Two, to accommodate the dead.
On a warm afternoon earlier this year, men in wheelchairs moved slowly
around the main open area of the prison hospice. Others lounged in bed.
The private rooms, for terminal patients, are as pleasant as most hospital
rooms, though the doors are sturdier. The inmates have televisions, video
games, coffeepots and DVD players. One patient watched "Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider."
Robert Downs, a 69-year old career bank robber serving a 198-year term as
a habitual felon, died in one of those rooms the day before. In his final
days, other inmates tended to him, in four-hour shifts, around the clock.
They held his hand and eased his passage. "Our responsibility," said
Randolph Matthieu, 53, a hospice volunteer, "is so that he doesn't die
there by himself. We wash him and clean him if he messes himself. It's a
real humbling experience."
Mr. Matthieu is serving a life sentence for killing a man he met at the
C'est La Guerre Lounge in Lafayette, La., in 1983.
At Point Lookout Two the next day, there were 6 mounds of fresh dirt and
one deep hole, ready to receive Mr. Downs. Under the piles of dirt were
other inmates who had recently died. They were awaiting simple white
crosses like the 120 or so nearby. The crosses bear 2 pieces of
information. One is the dead man's name, of course. Instead of the end
points of his life, though, his six-digit prison number is stamped below.
The sun was hot, and the gravediggers paused for a rest after their toil.
"I'm hoping I don't come this way," said Charles Vassel, 66, who is
serving a life sentence for killing a clerk while robbing a liquor store
in Monroe, La., in 1972. "I want to be buried around my family."
The families of prisoners who die at Angola have 30 hours to claim their
bodies, and about half do. The rest are buried at Point Lookout Two.
"It's pretty much the only way you leave," said Timothy Bray, 45, also in
for life. Mr. Bray, who helped beat a man to death for falling behind in
his debts, tends to the horses that pull the hearse on funeral days,
placing white and red rosettes in their manes.
Wary of a Transformed World
Not all older lifers are eager to leave prison. Many have grown used to
the free food and medical care. They have no skills, they say, and they
worry about living in a world that has been radically transformed by
technology in the decades that they have been locked up.
Wardens like Mr. Cain say that lifers are docile, mature and helpful.
"Many of the lifers are not habitual felons," he added. "They committed a
murder that was a crime of passion. That inmate is not necessarily hard to
manage."
What is needed, he said, is hope, and that is in short supply. "I tell
them, 'You never know when you might win the lottery,' " Mr. Cain said.
"You never know when you might get a pardon. You never know when they
might change the law.'"
Up the road from Point Lookout Two, near the main entrance, is the
building that houses the state's death row. Lawyers for the 89 men there
are hard at work, trying to overturn their clients' convictions or at
least convert their death sentences into life terms. According to the
Death Penalty Information Center, 8 Louisiana death row inmates have been
exonerated in the last 3 decades. More than 50, prison officials said,
have had their sentences commuted to life.
But those hard-won life sentences, when they come, do not always please
the prisoners.
"I have to put a lot of these guys on suicide watch when they get off
death row," said Cathy Fontenot, an assistant warden, "because their
chances have gone down to this."
She put her thumb and forefinger together, making a zero.
Janet Roberts contributed reporting for this series. Research was
contributed by Jack Styczynski, Linda Amster, Donna Anderson, Jack Begg,
Alain Delaqurire, Sandra Jamison, Toby Lyles and Carolyn Wilder.
(source: New York Times)
