April 26
TEXAS:
Did An Innocent Man Just Die On Texas' Death Row?
Most death row inmates may be racing against time when it comes down to their
final days, waiting for a court to halt their execution often just hours before
it's scheduled. But it was a different kind of race for Max Soffar, who had his
own biological clock to battle with as he looped through the lengthy,
convoluted appeals process.
For years, his committed defense team had worked feverishly to secure an
exoneration based on a false confession. But on Sunday evening, at the Polunsky
Unit in Livingston, Soffar's time expired. He died of terminal liver cancer in
the death row infirmary; he had spent 35 of his 60 years in prison.
Although no physical evidence had ever connected Soffar to the murders, he was
convicted in 1982 of shooting 3 employees of a Houston bowling alley,
execution-style. The crime rattled the city for months. With the help of a
witness who survived a bullet to the head, a police detective drew up a sketch
of the suspect and offered a $15,000 reward to whomever could identify him. And
as both Texas Monthly's Michael Hall and Texas Southern University journalism
professor Michael Berryhill have written about extensively, that financial
incentive would ultimately put Soffar behind bars for the rest of his life.
As Berryhill wrote in a lengthy Houston Chronicle piece 2 years ago, Soffar was
a 7th-grade drop-out who had been addicted to drugs his whole life, already
born with liver and brain damage at birth because of fetal alcohol syndrome. At
the time he was convicted, he had been running with burglars and other drug
addicts for years, though he had acted as an informant to police as well. He
reportedly believed he could pin the bowling alley murders on a fellow criminal
who looked like the guy in the sketch, then recover the $15,000 and walk away.
Instead, even though the details Soffar originally gave to detectives about
that night in no way synced with the actual crime scene, police were able to
pressure Soffar into changing his story several times - from never even being
present and only waiting in the getaway car, to only witnessing the murders,
then, finally, to being forced by his accomplice to shoot people. During his
trial, this confession was the only evidence that jurors relied on to send
Soffar to death row. And that, Berryhill says, is the most troubling facet of
Soffar's case.
"These cases are frustrating, where you have a confession, no physical
evidence, but the crime is so horrendous that the jury feels impelled to render
a verdict," he told the Houston Press. "Even with such an improbable
confession."
In 2006, Soffar's appeals attorney, Andrew Horne, was able to secure a new
trial after arguing that he had ineffective counsel the first time. As
Berryhill reported, Horne had hoped to call to the stand a witness named
Stewart Cook, who had been a partner in crime with a man named Paul Reid, who
allegedly told Cook he was behind the Houston bowling alley murders. Reid was
already in prison in Tennessee, convicted for murders that a Tennessee police
detective said were strikingly similar to the bowling alley case. But State
District Judge Mary Lou Keel wouldn't let that into evidence, apparently not
believing the crimes were similar enough. And Cook never made it to the stand
either, because prosecutors threatened to try him for murder if he testified.
So for the 2nd time, Berryhill said, a jury found him guilty after weighing
nothing but his confession, never able to hear an alternative theory that may
have raised just enough reasonable doubt to acquit him.
"False confessions, I think, are really hard for the average person to swallow,
because they can't imagine anyone confessing to something they didn't do,"
Berryhill said. "But the average person may not be aware of all of these
factors."
Berryhill is hopeful that, if anything, Soffar's case becomes a catalyst in
changing police interrogation tactics, or at least contributes to the growing
public awareness about the problem.
But beyond that, some justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have even begun to
signal that the time has come to reconsider the constitutionality of the death
penalty because of cases much like Soffar's. Last year, for example, Justice
Stephen Bryer called out 2 Texas cases, punctuating the very real possibility
that the state may have taken innocent lives. He highlighted the case of Carlos
Deluna, who was executed in 1989 despite insisting for years that a different
man named Carlos had killed a woman at a gas station, which was later confirmed
in a book; and Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed for setting his house
on fire and killing his kids inside for reasons that were never clear - even
though the fire science used to convict him was later considered "junk
science."
We'll never know what would have come of Soffar's latest appeals. The Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals recently agreed to hear his case, perhaps one of the
last chances he would have had at an exoneration. The court was scheduled to
hear oral arguments tomorrow.
(source: Meagan Flynn, Houston Press)
****************
'Was Duane Buck sentenced to death "because he is black"?
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear the Texas case of
Duane Buck, who was sentenced to die in 1997 for shooting his ex-girlfriend
Debra Gardner and her friend Kenneth Butler while Gardner's daughter pleaded,
"Don't kill my mama." His small army of advocates don't dispute his guilt but
argue he is facing the harshest possible punishment primarily "because he is
black."
At his trial, Walter Quijano, a psychologist called by the defense, told jurors
that Buck was more likely to commit a violent crime again because of his race.
(Death sentences in Texas require that a defendant be judged a "continuing
threat to society.") Quijano later told The Texas Tribune he was describing a
statistical relationship, and not a causal connection between race and
violence, but Buck's lawyers say his comments tainted the jury's decision.
Since then, Buck's attorneys at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have turned his
case into a symbol for the argument that the administration of the death
penalty is rife with racial bias, part of the legacy of lynching and the
ultimate manifestation of the racism that permeates the wider criminal justice
system. Many capital defense attorneys see their work as an heir to the civil
rights movement and a precursor to Black Lives Matter. "It is impossible to
take race out of the death penalty because that's what it's for," defense
attorney Danalynn Recer said at an American Bar Association conference in
Austin, Texas, last month. "We spare the people that we identify with."
Later at the same conference, Stephen Bright, who has argued at the Supreme
Court against efforts to keep blacks off death penalty juries, said the court
"talks a good game but does nothing."
Buck's new appeal to the Supreme Court has been accompanied by a drumbeat of
news releases, op-ed articles, and blog posts (even MTV noticed). His lawyers
are asking the justices to decide whether his original trial lawyer was
"constitutionally ineffective" for putting Quijano on the stand, framing this
specific concern with the question of "whether and to what extent the criminal
justice system tolerates racial bias and discrimination." (The justices halted
Buck's execution in September 2011, but then decided not to hear arguments on
his case, though Justice Sonia Sotomayor called his death sentence "marred by
racial overtones.")
Regardless of what happens to Buck, these questions of race and the death
penalty will remain unsettled. So now is a moment to look back at the reasons
why, and the long line of cases his has joined.
Many historians (including David Oshinsky last week in the Wall Street Journal)
see the contemporary death penalty as the latest stage in a history that
stretches back to lynchings, pointing out that most executions continue to take
place in the states of the former Confederacy. "We've used the death penalty to
sustain racial hierarchy by making it primarily a tool to reinforce the
victimization of white people," the lawyer Bryan Stevenson told The Marshall
Project last year. Rachel Aviv's New Yorker story on the Louisiana case of
Rodricus Crawford made prominent mention of the Confederate flag inscribed on a
stone slab outside the courthouse during his trial.
But how can lawyers prove that their black clients are being subjected to
racism? The difficulties center around the 1987 Supreme Court decision
McCleskey v. Kemp. Warren McCleskey had been sentenced to death for murdering a
police officer in Georgia, but the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued that his
sentence was part of a pattern of bias. They presented a study by law professor
David Baldus finding that black murderers were 1.1 times more likely to get a
death sentence than white murderers, controlling for dozens of other variables,
and that killing a white victim made a defendant of any race 4.3 times more
likely to be dealt a death sentence.
The court saw a slippery slope. "McCleskey's claim, taken to its logical
conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our
entire criminal justice system," wrote Justice Lewis Powell in a 5-4 decision
rejecting McCleskey's claims. NAACP attorney Anthony Amsterdam famously called
McCleskey's loss "the Dred Scott decision of our time."
The case led some justices to shift their overall views of the death penalty,
but it closed off statistical arguments on racial issues. Still, scholars have
continued to collect such data in such disparate contexts as Washington, North
Carolina, and in the U.S. Military. As with Baldus, they have found that cases
involving white victims are more likely to lead to a death sentence (a
high-profile exception is Dylann Roof, a white man facing death for killing a
group of black church members in South Carolina.) Duane Buck's lawyers also
commissioned a study, which found that from 1992 to 1999 prosecutors in Harris
County sought the death penalty for African-Americans more than 3 times as
often as for whites who committed similar crimes. The county, which encompasses
greater Houston, has not sentenced a white person to death since 2004.
But with little traction in the courts for such arguments, defense lawyers have
tried instead to show, as they are doing now in the Buck case, that individual
actors in death penalty trials introduced racism into the proceedings, making
the sentence fundamentally unfair.
The Buck case concerns an expert witness; many others concern prosecutors. The
best known is perhaps "Death Penalty Donnie," the prosecutor who compared a
defendant to King Kong (that got the sentence overturned). But such overt
statements are relatively rare; much of the debate often centers on what
prosecutors do, rather than what they say. The Supreme Court is currently
considering the case Foster v. Chatman, which turns on whether a defendant was
unfairly sentenced to death because blacks were kept off his jury. (We recently
published a quiz on the racial statements of jurors in a variety of cases).
Some cases have involved overt racist statements by jurors, like Victor
Walther, a juror who voted to execute Gary Sterling and in a later affidavit
continually used the word "nigger" (Sterling was executed in 2005). Last week,
Georgia executed Kenneth Fults for shooting his 19 year-old neighbor in the
back of the head in 1996, despite an affidavit from a juror who said, in 2005,
"I knew I would vote for the death penalty because that's what that nigger
deserved." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, there are cases involving racist
defense lawyers. Fults also had a public defender who told racist jokes and
once said of another black defendant he represented, "that little nigger
deserves the chair."
Such cases are difficult for defenders to win. Many have been tripped by
technical hurdles; if an early appeal does not bring up the issue, it usually
can't be raised later. And lawyers must show a "reasonable juror" would not
have sentenced a black defendant to death save for the racist elements. Buck's
best hope - which failed to help Fults - is a precedent allowing judges to
overturn sentences with "extraordinary circumstances." Multiple lower courts
have ruled that Buck's trial was not extraordinary.
As the justices decide whether to examine Buck's case, they will confront a set
of issues that remain unresolved nearly three decades after they refused
McCleskey. And while many advocates see Buck's case as an "extraordinary"
example of racial bias, they also see it as the latest illustration of
discrepancies that are not extraordinary at all.
(source: tribtalk.org)
***************
Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----19
Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----537
Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #
20---------June 2-------------------Charles Flores--------538
21---------June 21------------------Robert Roberson-------539
22---------July 14------------------Perry Williams--------540
23---------August 10----------------Ramiro Gonzales-------541
24---------August 23----------------Robert Pruett---------542
25---------August 31----------------Rolando Ruiz----------543
26---------September 14-------------Robert Jennings-------544
27---------October 19---------------Terry Edwards---------545
(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)
DELAWARE:
State Supreme Court to decide death penalty
The Supreme Court of Delaware has scheduled oral arguments in the review of the
state's death penalty.
Lawyers will appear before the court June 15 in a debate that could help settle
a longstanding debate over capital punishment for convicted killers.
The current question stems from a federal court ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court
in January decided part of Florida's death penalty law violates the
Constitution because it allows the judge to sentence death. The court ruled a
jury must hold the responsibility for determining aggravating factors.
Delaware's law is somewhat similar to Florida's. In the wake of the federal
decision, a Superior Court judge requested the state's top court review the
capital punishment statute.
The Public Defender's Office is arguing against the constitutionality, while
the Department of Justice is taking the opposite stance.
The final brief was submitted last week by the Public Defender's Office.
Future capital cases have been on hold while the issue is up in the air.
Lawmakers have attempted to repeal the death penalty the past four years but
have fallen short.
(source: Delaware State News)
VIRGINIA:
North Carolina man pleads not guilty in Norfolk to capital murder; death
penalty still possible
Michael Ryan Brown pleaded not guilty Tuesday morning to charges that he
murdered Angela Lechlitner in her house 8 years ago .
His voice loud and clear, Brown told Norfolk Circuit Judge Junius Fulton III he
was pleading not guilty to 2 counts of capital murder, 1 count of sexual object
penetration, 1 count of malicious wounding and 1 count of abduction with the
intent to defile Lechlitner.
A capital murder conviction calls for life in prison or the death penalty.
Prosecutor Phil Evans told Fulton that the decision on whether to seek the
death penalty hasn't been made, but it will be by mid-June.
Brown was charged with murder in September and extradited from Goldsboro, N.C.,
to Norfolk 2 months later. His arrest came nearly 8 years after one of
Lechlitner's co-workers found her body inside her house in the 2400 block of
Shafer St.
Lechlitner, a 28-year-old who worked as a nursery technician at the Norfolk
Botanical Garden, was strangled, stabbed and raped with an object in her Fox
Hall house.
Brown faces 2 counts of capital murder because prosecutors allege he killed
Lechlitner during an abduction and while sexually assaulting her. Murder
combined with either crime makes the death penalty an option, so long as the
defendant is at least 18 years old.
The last capital murder case in Norfolk involved Jamiel Douglas Graves, now 33,
who murdered Phylicia Robinson in 2012. He pleaded guilty in 2014 in a deal
that gave him life without parole.
(soruce: The Virginian-Pilot)
GEORGIA----impending execution
Panel to hold clemency hearing for Georgia death row inmate
The state parole board plans to hold a clemency hearing Tuesday for a Georgia
death row inmate scheduled to die this week.
Daniel Anthony Lucas is set to be put to death Wednesday at the state prison in
Jackson by injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital. The State Board of
Pardons and Paroles is the only entity authorized to commute a death sentence
in Georgia.
Lucas was sentenced to death for the April 1998 killings of 37-year-old Steven
Moss, his 11-year-old son Bryan and 15-year-old daughter Kristin, who
interrupted a burglary at their home near Macon in central Georgia.
Lucas' lawyers have said his childhood was plagued by drugs and violence. They
say he's been reformed in prison and should be spared.
Lucas would be the 5th inmate executed in Georgia this year.
(source: Associated Press)
********************
The 3 murders behind what will be Georgia's 5th execution this year
Bryan Moss was a brave 11-year-old boy who armed himself with an aluminum
baseball bat to defend his home against the 2 men ransacking it.
But they had guns, and soon the boy was dead.
His 15-year-old sister, Kristin Moss, was just moments behind her brother,
getting off the school bus on April 23, 1998. Seconds after walking into her
house, Kristin was tied to a chair and, like Bryan, was shot and killed.
The children's father, home from work early, was shot and left to die at his
daughter's feet.
One of the killers, Brandon Rhode, was executed for the 3 Jones County murders
on Sept. 27, 2010.
Now his partner, Daniel Anthony Lucas, is scheduled to die by lethal injection
on Wednesday.
If Lucas is put to death, he will be the 5th person Georgia has executed in
less than 3 months. Only 2 other times has Georgia executed as many as 5 people
in a year: in 2015 and 1987. And there is at least 1 other man who has
exhausted his appeals and is eligible for an execution date this year.
On Tuesday, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles will hear from Lucas'
advocates who want his sentence commuted to life in prison without the
possibility of parole. Then, in the afternoon, Jones County prosecutors and
investigators will tell the board why Lucas should die as scheduled on
Wednesday at 7 p.m.
"You see kids getting off the school bus, but you don't picture them going in
the house and getting murdered," said Maj. Earle Humphries of the Jones County
Sheriff's Office, who investigated the killings and heard Lucas' confession.
In contrast to the image of a smiling and seemingly friendly Lucas in the photo
on the Department of Corrections website, the then-19-year-old Lucas "was cold
and ... matter of fact when we interviewed him and he was confessing" to the
murders, Humphries said.
But advocates for Lucas argued in a clemency petition that he should be spared
because he has changed during his 18 years in prison and has helped many fellow
death row inmates.
"Daniel committed murder," his lawyers wrote in the clemency petition filed
with the board last week. "He deserves to be punished harshly, as he has been
and will continue to be. But he has also shown that he is much more than his
crime. He is an example of how someone who has done something terribly wrong
can repent and choose a different path. And in choosing that path, he ... wants
to continue giving back to the world."
They said in the petition that Lucas now follows Buddhist teachings that focus
on compassion and wisdom through daily meditation. He "wants to atone for what
he did to the Moss family. ... He lives his life today in a manner that gives
strength and inspiration to others both inside the prison and out, and he will
continue to do so if the board gives him the opportunity," his lawyers wrote.
Lucas exhausted his appeals in October when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to
take his case.
Stephen Bradley, district attorney of the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit, called the
crime incomprehensible. "You can't get your head around it," he said.
What happened 18 years ago in the house on Griswoldville Road outside the tiny
Middle Georgia town of Grey was detailed in Rhode's and Lucas' confessions,
investigators'; reports and trial testimony.
Lucas, then 19, and Rhode, 18, were inside the Moss house, looking for anything
they could sell to buy drugs, when Bryan got home from school.
The boy saw the 2 men through the window, so he picked up a bat propped just
outside the backdoor.
Lucas and Rhode, armed with .25-caliber and .357-caliber handguns, saw Bryan
too. They were waiting for him when he crept into the house.
Lucas shot and wounded the boy.
When the men saw Kristin walking up the driveway, they moved Bryan to another
room and shot him again, this time killing the boy.
Then they shot Kristin.
Steven Moss, a truck driver, was killed moments after he stepped through the
door.
To ensure the children were dead, Lucas shot all 3 again and again.
Steven Moss' wife and the children's mother, Gerri Ann, found her family dead
about an hour later.
"They could have got away (without killing anyone) but they didn't want to
leave any witnesses," Humphries said.
But there were people who knew of Lucas' and Rhode's plans to go to the Moss
house, and there were witnesses who saw them leaving in a red car.
2 days after the murders, Lucas and Rhode were in custody.
Rhode was executed in 2010 after a 6-day delay because he tried to kill himself
by slitting his own throat and wrists. That's the year, according to the
clemency petition, that Lucas sank into a deep depression and began to study
Buddhism.
"This is the worst of the worst sort of crime," said prosecutor Bradley. "The
impact on the community and the impact on the surviving member of the family is
unspeakable. ... We thought we were a sleepy little town. We didn't have home
invasions. This case made us think bad things could happen in the world."
(source: Atlanta Journal Constitution)
ALABAMA:
Grant clemency to Robin Myers and change his sentence from death to life
without the possibility of parole
Robin Myers is a 53-year-old intellectually disabled black man who was
convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1993 for a crime he did
not commit.
With a vote of 9-to-3, an overwhelmingly white jury in Decatur, Ala.,
recommended that Robin be sentenced to Life Without the Possibility of Parole.
The elected judge presiding over the case overrode the jury and ordered his
execution instead.
The United States Supreme Court recently found this practice of judicial
override to be unconstitutional and struck down Florida's capital sentencing
scheme, which allowed override. Alabama is now one of only two states that
allows for such judicial override and it stands alone in giving a judge no
guidance in exercising this power.
In the last 15 years, shockingly, Alabama is the only state to ever use
judicial override to sentence someone to death. To quote U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Thurgood Marshall, "[I]t approaches the most literal sense of the word
'arbitrary' to put one to death in the face of a contrary jury determination
where it is accepted that the jury had indeed responsibly carried out its
task."
In all of Robin's post-conviction proceedings, he and his counsel have argued
that he should not be executed because he is innocent and intellectually
disabled. Additionally, Alabama's decision to execute Robin is a direct
violation of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found the execution of an
intellectually disabled inmate to be cruel and unusual and, therefore, in
violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And because Robin's
counsel abandoned him in the midst of his post-conviction proceedings, these
claims have never been fully addressed by any court.
Robin has no further appellate process available to him, and is subject to
receive an execution date at any time. Your signature to this petition is not a
vote for his innocence. It is a vote for justice, and one that will hopefully
compel the state of Alabama and Gov. Robert Bentley to grant Robin clemency
from an elected judge's arbitrary decision and allow him to serve the sentence
the jury of his peers intended - Life Without the Possibility of Parole.
To learn more about or to keep up with the status of Robin's case, please visit
www.clemencyforrockymyers.wordpress.com.
[see:
https://www.change.org/p/robert-bentley-barack-obama-grant-clemency-to-robin-
myers-and-change-his-sentence-from-death-to-life-without-the-possibility-of-
parole?recruiter=20812740&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_
campaign=share_email_responsive]
(source: change.org)
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