April 28
TEXAS:
Reasonable Doubt ---- Louis Perez has spent nearly 2 decades on death row. Does
he deserve to be there?
It was 3am on Thursday, Sept. 10, 1998, when Melvin Jones called the police. He
hadn't heard from his girlfriend Cinda Barz all day. The last time they talked
was on Wednesday, at 5pm, and that wasn't like her: The 2 spoke all the time.
Jones had been trying to reach her house all night. Stranded without a car at
his home in Northeast Austin, Jones asked police to run a welfare check on
Barz's house in Barton Hills.
3 officers arrived at 2810 Rock Terrace Dr. at 3:40am. They got no response at
the front door, saw no lights or movement other than the blue flicker of a
television left on in the living room. The front door was locked; so was the
sliding door around back. In the driveway were 2 cars: Barz's and her roommate
Michelle Fulwiler's.
Officer Scott Perry would later testify that he first saw Barz's body through a
living room window. She was buried under a blanket and couch cushion. Staci
Mitchell, Barz's daughter, could be seen through a bedroom window, her lifeless
body slumped across a bed. Unable to open a door, the officers broke a window
to get inside.
"We could see puddles or blotches of blood and smears," testified Perry. "There
was an iron skillet, frying pan, with the center knocked out of it sitting on
the floor." Investigators could tell that the skillet - a comal - had been used
to bludgeon Barz. She suffered "multiple incised wounds and lacerations," as
well as defensive wounds and a skull fracture, reported Elizabeth Peacock, a
forensic pathologist with the Travis County Medical Examiner's Office.
Police found Fulwiler's body wrapped in a blanket on the south side of her
bedroom. She, too, had cuts and defensive wounds, said Peacock, but she also
had strangulation marks around her neck. 9-year-old Staci Mitchell's hand had
been tied to the bed by a pair of pantyhose; she had a second pair tied around
her neck. The blue shirt she wore to school that day lay beside her on the bed.
Close to Barz's body, officers found a broken plant stand and a large knife
with its handle wrapped in a torn white towel. There were bloodstains on the
couch; more bloodstains on the bathroom tile and floor. Police found cocaine on
a plate and an empty dime bag. They found a telephone cord that didn't belong
to any of the house's phones draped over a chair. In the weeks that followed,
APD would find a blue towel on the ground outside the house, and the sole of a
Nike shoe.
Investigators learned later that Thursday morning that Fulwiler had called in
sick to work on Wednesday at 8:15am and hadn't answered any calls from
co-workers. Barz, who worked with Fulwiler at the Gardner-Betts Juvenile
Justice Center, spent the day working, but left abruptly after 5pm when she
didn't receive an expected phone call from her daughter. Mitchell walked home
at 3:30pm, her teachers told investigators. Nobody heard from her after that.
A Likely Suspect
Louis Perez was the last person known to have left 2810 Rock Terrace alive. The
36-year-old had been dating Fulwiler casually, and authorities knew he had
slept over at her house the night before.
Perez, a carpenter and occasional bouncer, was divorced, the father of three
boys with his ex-wife and a daughter with an ex-girlfriend. Large, smiling, and
affable, Perez liked to party - at Downtown bars and Carnaval - and would spend
his off days drinking and smoking at Campbell's Hole in the Barton Creek
Greenbelt. He had an affinity for social drugs - cocaine particularly. He would
often serve as a middleman in casual deals for friends. Perez had a strong
relationship with his young daughter but admits he wasn't there for his sons.
He'd gone to jail twice for failing to pay child support.
Perez knew Fulwiler through his brother, but it wasn't until a court hearing at
Gardner-Betts after one of Perez's periods of incarceration that the 2 began
dating. They were off-and-on for months while Fulwiler allowed another
relationship to play out. On Sept. 8, Perez and Fulwiler got together, and on
Sept. 10, she and her 2 roommates were dead. Perez was arrested on Friday,
Sept. 11, at a South Austin 7-Eleven.
At Perez's trial the following year, prosecutors were unable to tie Perez to
the DNA found on any of the murder weapons. There were no witnesses from the
scene. Instead, the Travis County District Attorney's Office relied on
circumstantial evidence - like the presence of Perez's fingerprints and DNA
throughout the house, including 1 palm print next to Barz's body - to get a
conviction. Perez was sentenced to death on Oct. 20, 1999.
Perez has maintained his innocence, saying that although he was the last person
to leave the house before the murders and the first to walk back in after the
attacks, he was not the killer. But his lone alibi witness - a California drug
dealer named Alex Gutierrez, with whom Perez says he spent the day - has never
been located. Perez's defense attorneys were never able to verify Perez was
with Gutierrez.
According to Perez's friend Minerva Hall, the 1st person to speak with him
after the murders occurred, Perez showed up on the doorstep of her apartment at
around 9:15pm that Wednesday night. He was barefoot, his hair "messed up." Hall
saw scratches on his neck. Perez said that he got into a fight with his father,
and Hall thought nothing of it. She offered him her bed, and went to sleep in
another room with her son.
On Thursday, after resting at Hall's apartment, Perez caught a ride to Texas
Discount Furniture on the Eastside, where he met his friend Tony Recio. He
spent Thursday night at Recio's. During Perez's trial, Recio would say his
friend wasn't acting at all unusual that evening. Recio said he noticed the
scratches on Perez's neck and asked about them. Perez told him he had gotten
into a fight with his ex-wife.
When Recio got to work that Friday, his boss showed him a newspaper story
naming Perez as the murder suspect. Recio called his attorney, who made a call
to APD. Two detectives showed up to the furniture store within the hour.
Together, Recio and detectives went back to his apartment to look for Perez,
who'd already taken off with a pair of Recio's boots.
Perez said he had seen a news report that day identifying him as a suspect, and
left Recio's house so as not to implicate him in the murders. He eventually
ended up at a pay phone outside a 7-Eleven off Bluff Springs. He called his
family and his attorney, who advised that he turn himself in. While he was on
the phone, a squad of officers pulled up.
Police had been looking for Perez since the night after the murders. Lead
investigator Brian Manley, APD's current chief of staff, who at the time was a
few months in to a yearlong stint in homicide, received a page from a scene
technician saying that a bloody palm print found next to Barz's body was
Perez's. The technician said that Barz's blood must have been spilled within 5
minutes of Perez making the print.
When officers went to Perez's parents' house looking for him, they said they
hadn't seen him; Perez was also a no-show for 2 different jobs. Manley caught a
break on Friday morning when he received a call from Hall, who'd seen the news.
The presence of the palm print left no doubt that Perez had been in the house
after the murders. What remains unclear, despite his death sentence, is whether
he's guilty of anything more than that.
An Uncorroborated Alibi
Perez waited a year to give his account of how he came to be in the house, not
confiding in anyone except for his defense attorneys before taking the stand at
trial.
Perez testified at trial that he left Fulwiler's that morning to meet up with
Gutierrez at a nearby 7-Eleven. (He had met the Californian a week and a half
earlier in a restaurant bathroom.) Perez and Gutierrez drove around Austin
selling coke to various friends and acquaintances before getting lunch at a
drive-through. The 2 then went to Zilker Park, where they whiled the day away
drinking beer, snorting coke, and watching people play volleyball. They left
around 5pm, and Gutierrez gave Perez a ride back to the 7-Eleven. He walked
through Barton Hills to Fulwiler's. Over???heated, he unbuttoned his shirt and
took off his shoes so that he could take a shower when he got inside.
Perez rang the doorbell a few times, walking in after getting no response. The
door was unlocked.
"As soon as I get - to get my shirt off right here, I walk around the corner
and I see Cinda on the ground," he testified. He saw the comal on her face and
"[threw] it out of the way." Barz - who was still alive but badly beaten -
reached for him, grabbing his neck and scratching it.
Perez was spooked. He grabbed his shirt and got out of the house. He didn't
call the police. He just split, not even bothering to take his boots. He sat on
a rock wall down the street and tried to comprehend what happened. He stopped
in to an Italian bistro for water, then wandered through Barton Hills. He
eventually ended up at Hall's apartment complex, sitting outside a while before
knocking on her door.
Inconclusive Evidence
Prior to Perez's testimony, Assistant D.A. Claire Dawson-Brown, trying her 1st
- and last - capital case, had presented eight days of evidence tying Perez to
the crime scene. She exhibited photographs of Perez's fingerprints lifted from
beer bottles and door handles in the house. She reminded the jury that Perez
left the scene without calling for help. She questioned the disappearance of
Perez's Nike boots, and got both Perez's father and ex-wife to testify that
Perez had lied about the provenance of his scratches.
Dawson-Brown presented Perez and Fulwiler's cocaine use as a motive, suggesting
that Perez killed Fulwiler - then waited around the house all day to kill
Mitchell and Barz - because she had snorted all of his dime bags. She said
Perez went on the killing spree because he thought Steve Jackson - a local
pusher who testified at trial to being Perez's "best friend" - expected Perez
to sell the bags and give him a cut of the profits.
Integral to Dawson-Brown's case was an emphasis on circumstantial DNA analysis.
Perez's DNA was on the piece of the comal that had covered Barz's face, and
both parts of the ripped towel. Dawson-Brown's argument also benefited from
cherry-picked probability statistics. DNA analysis concluded there was a 1 in
14 chance that the foreign DNA found under Staci Mitchell's fingernails came
from a Hispanic person - not specifically Perez. (The odds measured at one in
11 blacks and 1 in 20 whites.) DNA stripped from Barz's nail clippings showed
that one in 38,600 Hispanics would make a match. (With her, one in 181,000
whites and one in 321,000 blacks.)
It was an advantageous association, but - like much of the prosecution's
argument - it relied on inconclusive evidence. A thorough read through the
court record reveals a long list of investigative oversights.
3 hairs found on Mitchell's body weren't tested before the trial. Neither was
the handle of the comal used on Barz, or the 2 ends of the phone cord used to
strangle Fulwiler. Same goes for the pantyhose; investigators only tested the 2
pairs in the areas known to have come into contact with Mitchell. A DNA
specialist testified that she chose not to amplify test results from an
inconclusive DNA scan for blood found on the knife.
Robert Bux, a deputy medical examiner in Bexar County who testified for the
defense, alleged that the Travis County Medical Examiner took too long removing
the bodies from the home. Dave Harding, an investigator with the TCMEO, said he
performed a liver punch on the left side of the bodies so as to avoid altering
the crime scene (failing to consider that liver punches should land on a body's
right, where the liver is actually located). Smoked cigarettes found outside
the house were not immediately collected, tested, and analyzed. Officers
handled a house key from the mailbox without protective gloves. Blood found in
the bathroom wasn't tested. A fingerprint examiner for APD found 43 instances
in which fingerprints lifted from the scene "represent[ed] a person other than
the victim of the crime, the police officers, all other persons given to you as
suspects in this case - or Mr. Perez" - yet nobody else was investigated as a
suspect after police arrested Perez.
No blood from any of the three women was ever found on Perez's clothes. No
physical evidence connected Perez to Fulwiler's murder. In fact, aside from the
palm print and DNA left on the comal, there was little that suggested Perez
touched any of the suspected weapons. The Department of Public Safety's crime
lab "didn't even know until this summer [1999], June, with his trial beginning
Aug. 23, that they had foreign alleles in the towels," argued Joe James Sawyer,
one of the attorneys who represented Perez at his trial. (Alleles are variant
forms of genes that show up in DNA.) "Since September of last year they hadn't
so much as bothered to run DNA to see what was there.
"They didn't care. ... They had that skid mark, they had that palm print, and
that was enough."
The Serial Killer
On Oct. 4, 1998, 1 month after the murders, 81-year-old Leafie Mason was
bludgeoned to death with an antique flat iron at her home in Hughes Springs,
Texas. Her house sat 50 yards from the Kansas City Southern Railway tracks. On
Dec. 17, 39-year-old Claudia Benton was raped, stabbed, and beaten to death
with a statue at her house in West University Place, a Houston neighborhood
with the St. Louis Southwestern Railway as its western border.
Similar murders continued through 1999 - killings near railroad tracks
involving household objects as weapons. On May 2, Norman Sirnic and his wife
Karen were found dead at Weimar's United Church, where Norman was a pastor. The
church was located adjacent to Union Pacific tracks. 2 more bodies - Josephine
Konvicka, in Fayette County, and Noemi Dominguez, in Houston - were discovered
near railroad lines on June 4. Both women had been beaten to death with a
pickaxe.
Each of those killings, most of them never tried, is now believed to have been
committed by Angel Maturino Resendiz, a Mexican national who was convicted for
Benton's murder in 2000 and executed in 2006. Resendiz is also thought to be
responsible for a number of other killings in Florida, Kentucky, Illinois, and
Mexico.
Perez's defense knew that the Missouri-Pacific Railroad ran through South
Austin within a mile of Rock Terrace, and suggested during the trial that
Resendiz was the real killer, although it wasn't a theory they attempted to
flesh out. In 2002, Resendiz confessed to the murders, telling a private
investigator hired by Alex Calhoun, Perez's attorney at that time, that he
killed 2 women in Austin: "1 fat 1 and 1 skinny one." However, Resendiz never
confessed to murdering a child, and his mental state made it impossible for
Calhoun to secure an affidavit. While on death row, Resendiz confessed to
several murders that he could not have committed, which further calls into
question the veracity of his claims concerning Barz and Fulwiler.
Revisiting the DNA
Still, suspicions that Perez was innocent grew in Oct. 2001, when Calhoun
solicited post-conviction DNA testing to be conducted by Dr. Robert Benjamin, a
professor of biological sciences at the University of North Texas. The
professor wrote that Perez's trial counsel and their DNA expert "did not
receive a complete list of electropherograms for all of the DNA analyses
performed on the evidence." (Electropherograms are DNA test results.)
"Many samples were analyzed multiple times and only select examples of the
results were provided," Dr. Benjamin wrote. "This is of particular concern
because of the nature of the samples and results obtained with several pieces
of evidence central to the prosecution's case. Results obtained indicated that
the samples represented mixtures of DNA from multiple individuals with very
weak and incomplete profiles of minor contributors (some never identified). If
other analyses of these samples failed to show some or all of these alleles it
could be considered highly significant since it could, for example, raise a
question of contamination as an explanation for the inconsistency."
Benjamin also questioned certain conclusions concerning the DNA matches. He
said the state chose to look at the fingernail samples as a mixture of two
unknown people, when in reality the mixture would always include 1 known
quantity: each victim. "Since the victim's profile will always be present,
using their alleles in a probability calculation artificially increases the
calculated probability of exclusion/inclusion," he wrote. "In this case, the
evidence samples from AU1 left and right were calculated to have ranges from
about 1 in 3 to 1 in millions. This was presented to the jury and no effort was
made to explain the particular significance/appropriateness of either with
respect to the other."
In 2006, during state habeas proceedings, the Travis County D.A.'s Office
agreed to have DPS compare a portion of the unidentified DNA found at the scene
with Resendiz's profile in CODIS, a DNA database of convicted felons that
opened in 1996. In April 2006, DPS received pieces of the skillet, the blue
towel found outside the house, the telephone cord, 2 pairs of pantyhose,
cigarette butts found outside the house, a piece of the stained carpet from the
master bedroom, 1 beer can, and the hairs from Mitchell's back. None of the
results were a match for Resendiz. Additionally, many of the results did not
conclusively exclude Perez as a contributor.
Certain pieces of evidence could not be analyzed, however. Lab documents show
that the blue towel had a "complexity" that disallowed interpretations for a
DNA profile. The hairs could not be read. But according to Jani Maselli, the
Houston habeas attorney who represented Perez before U.S. Magistrate Judge
Andrew Austin on Aug. 19, 2010, "numerous" DNA samples tested during the state
process matched neither Perez nor Resendiz. Perez was excluded from one item in
particular: the comal's handle. At the time the report was written, the major
contributor for that piece of evidence was logged as "an unknown male
individual." Maselli learned at the Aug. 2010 hearing that the handle had been
contaminated by Leon Justice, the court reporter at Perez's trial. His handling
of the comal made it such that the mixture showed two people: Justice and what
looked to DPS forensic expert Emma Becker, at the time, to be Cinda Barz.
(Testing did show that Perez's DNA was consistent with the DNA found on the
piece of the comal he testified to having touched when he lifted it off of
Barz's face.) Becker also said that the piece of the towel that was wrapped
around the knife showed a DNA mixture of three people: Fulwiler, Perez, "and
then there were additional alleles that can essentially be attributed to
someone else.
"Based on this profile, this is something we wouldn't do the additional testing
on, just because when we have more than 2 people on the mixture, the
technology, it gets overloaded and it's - the results aren't accurate," Becker
testified. "So we have a rule where if it's more than 2 people, we do not
perform the additional testing on it."
Another Suspect? On Aug. 28, 2012, Perez's sister Delia Perez Meyer submitted a
declaration to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas,
stating that earlier that year she received a call from a woman who would only
identify herself as having worked for DPS. According to Meyer's statement, the
woman told Meyer she knew who the real murderer was, and gave her a name (that
name has been redacted from court records). Meyer said the woman had "called
her repeatedly over the course of this case, asking her about Louis' case and
the Railroad Killer." The woman told her the killer had been arrested for
molesting a child and assault, and that his information could be found in the
CODIS database.
Meyer wrote that after she got the call, she contacted Perez's new counsel,
Sadaf Khan, who had replaced Maselli. Khan told her that they should hire a
private investigator, which would cost Perez's family $10,000. Meyer found a
source for the money, but by then the family had lost touch with her brother's
attorney. Nobody - including Perez - would hear from Khan again.
Perez didn't know that he was being abandoned by his attorney until it nearly
was too late. His petition for relief had fallen short in federal court on
March 27, 2012. He had 180 days to appeal the decision to the 5th Circuit - had
he known a decision had been made. However, shortly after U.S. Federal Judge
Lee Yeakel issued his final judgment, Perez received word in his cell that his
attorney had come to see him.
The attorney there to see him was not his, but rather Richard Burr, a Houston
lawyer whose focus is death penalty cases. Burr told Perez that Khan had fallen
absent and said he could receive an execution date at any point. He asked Perez
how long it had been since he'd seen or heard from Khan. Perez said it had been
2 years. Burr said a conflict of interest (he served as a fact witness on the
court's questioning of Khan's abandonment) prevented him from picking up as
Perez's attorney, but that he might be able to find an attorney who could.
On Death Row
Early this April, Perez recounts this conversation in the same visitation room
in which it happened, at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, where he lives
with 262 other inmates on death row. (Polunsky also houses 2,600 other
prisoners.) He sits on a stool inside a steel-bound cell, his brown skin and
graying hair a stark contrast to the white scrubs and walls found all around
him. He wears black plastic-framed glasses with red tape around one screw. He
smiles and laughs often, revealing a gap where the upper-right side of his
teeth are missing. When he sits upright, he takes up much of the small cage.
"I think about [the case] every day," he says through a telephone on the other
side of a Plexiglas pane. "It's something that will never leave me ever again.
My failure to render aid is my crime, not a murder - not a triple homicide.
That's what's difficult for me. I believe in God, very much. I pray every day.
And I beg Cinda to forgive me every day for leaving her to die like that."
He spends his days reading, researching his case, and painting. He's 54, now
having been housed at Polunsky for 16-and-a-half years. He's well-accustomed to
life inside the unit. "You have to figure things out," he says. "You hear
stories, and a lot of them are true. Don't get me wrong: This place is bad. But
when you carry yourself in a respectful manner, and you keep your word - that's
all you have back here: your balls and your word. Once you lose either of
those, it's like free game. People come at you. But my size and my attitude
have saved me from trouble a lot, because I don't pick fights. I'm not a bully.
I'm not nothing like that. People see that and respect that."
Perez keeps up on his case and uses the library at Polunsky to maintain an
understanding of any developments that could affect his fate. "People ask me if
I still believe in the justice system," he says. "I have to, because it's the
only thing that's going to save my life. Nothing else is going to help me but
the justice system."
Revisiting the DNA, Once More
The latest attorney to take on Perez's case is Marcy Greer. The Austin civil
appellate attorney received a request from the District Court in the summer of
2012, asking that she look into allegations that Khan had abandoned Perez. She
took over in early August and by Aug. 29 had filed a motion urging Yeakel to
vacate his March judgment and issue a new ruling - one that could be appealed
by an attorney who hadn't abandoned their client. Yeakel complied, and on Dec.
12 issued a new judgment, which Greer and her team contested within the month.
The filings opened the case again, and gave Greer and her team time to sort
through the seven boxes of case files that have accumulated since the murders.
She's fought off perilous deadlines. In Nov. 2012, Hon. Karen Sage, the
presiding judge over the 299th District Court (where Perez was tried and
convicted) hadn't yet learned of Greer's Aug. 2012 motion to reopen the case,
and signed a death warrant for his execution, effective March 21, 2013. (The
order was quickly withdrawn.) The case has since failed at both the 5th Circuit
Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court.
Shortly after appealing Yeakel's ruling and delaying the impending death date,
Greer filed four unopposed motions in Sage's district court that would change
the course of Perez's effort. The motions, filed July 19, 2013, called for the
Travis County District Attorney's Office to provide Perez with a series of
previously unreleased documents from his case, including the transcripts from
his grand jury trial and any bench notes, data, or electropherograms taken or
previously held by the District Attorney.
The filings also included a motion requesting that the Tarrant County Medical
Examiner run additional post-conviction DNA testing on 6 items - the 2 pairs of
pantyhose used to strangle and bind Mitchell, fingernail scrapings from both of
Mitchell's hands, the comal's handle, and the full length of the telephone cord
- and that the Tarrant County crime lab test 3 other items that have yet to be
analyzed by any lab - Mitchell's shirt, the Nike shoe sole, and a broken,
bloody plant stand, which investigators concluded shattered during Barz's
struggle before her death. (Since 2001, the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure
has granted defendants the right to submit motions for additional DNA testing
to their convicting courts so long as any revelation of DNA evidence could cast
doubt on a convict's guilt. It also grants defendants the right to obtain grand
jury transcripts from their case if it's believed the prosecution committed a
Brady violation - that is, hid evidence favorable to the defense.)
"Several of these items of physical evidence were analyzed multiple times, but
only the final report and selected excerpts of the underlying testing data were
available to the defense team for analysis," wrote Greer, citing Dr. Benjamin's
letter from Oct. 2001. "Having access to all of the underlying data - not just
the reports prepared for the trial and the habeas hearing - will allow a
thorough and complete review of the evidence that was used to convict Perez and
may also potentially inform the results of the new testing that Perez is
seeking in order to draw out a profile of the real killer from the various
incomplete and mixed DNA contributions on these items."
Greer listed the significant number of fingerprints lifted "from highly
sensitive locations" around the house, including the "blood-covered bathrooms
and bedrooms where 2 of the bodies were found" that were never matched to Perez
or any of the victims. She noted "other leads that may have identified the real
killer in this case, including information about witness interviews and
background investigations," as well as information about any attempts the
prosecution made to verify Perez's whereabouts during the murders.
Buddy Meyer, who assisted Dawson-Brown at trial, denies Greer's accusations
that "Perez became the focal point of the case early and to the exclusion of
evidence suggesting his innocence or another possible perpetrator." However, he
told the Chronicle that the D.A.'s Office has no reason to oppose new testing.
"You're talking about a death penalty case here," he said. "Why would we not
agree to post-conviction testing? We're talking about a man's life."
"This Is Still Texas"
In March of this year, Greer told the Chronicle that 2 of the 9 items delivered
to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner have already been tested: the plant
stand and comal handle. The handle produced no new matches; the blood on the
plant stand was proven to be Barz's. Greer declined to comment on efforts to
find Gutierrez, saying that any discussion of Perez's alibi is privileged
information. She believes she knows who the actual killer is, but declined to
go into any detail.
"We have to undermine confidence in the verdict," she says, rather than point
to a new killer. "It's better [to implicate someone else], but not necessary."
Members of Barz and Mitchell's families declined to be interviewed for this
story. Through a friend, Fulwiler's family also declined comment, saying that
the memory drums up too much sadness. Asked whether new discoveries could sway
his opinion of whether Perez is the murderer, the friend reiterated that
Perez's fingerprints were found all over the house.
Back in Livingston, Perez maintains his focus, and his confidence in Greer and
her team. "She's saved my life twice already," he says. "They're that
efficient, that smart. They care. They have compassion. They're not with the
state [like indigent defense attorneys]. And they're not afraid to speak up.
Marcy is a bulldog. She gets in."
In October, Perez received a letter from District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg
informing him that his case "may be impacted by recent scientific concerns
involving the historical interpretation of DNA results." Lehmberg attached to
her letter a notice from Texas Forensic Science Commission presiding officer
Vincent Di Maio, which was sent to state and local law enforcement agencies on
Aug. 21, 2015. Di Maio said there are "concerns [involving] the interpretation
of DNA results where multiple contributors may be present." Included in his
letter is an explanation of the FBI's May 2015 announcement that it had found
"minor discrepancies" in its population database. (In May 2015, The Washington
Post reported that 3% of DNA profiles the FBI had examined since 1999 were
potentially affected.)
On Jan. 28, the developments prompted Sage to issue a stay on Perez's
execution. She sent a letter to Sian Schilhab, general counsel for Texas' Court
of Criminal Appeals, indicating that the state has discovered "some potential
Brady material in this case and has disclosed that evidence to the defense."
Greer stresses that Sage hasn't found anything definitive yet, but that the
three parties are working together "to try to identify where the holes are" in
Perez's case. "I don't have all the documents necessary to complete the
assessment," she said. "But there is a lot that does not add up about [Perez's]
conviction: the evidence in the case, the way the crime scene was processed,
and the Medical Examiner's reports."
Perez says that he's "optimistic" about any potential revelations but refuses
to get his hopes up. "I don't allow myself to get excited," he says. "I could.
"This is still Texas. They don't give a damn about who you have or nothing.
They want you dead, and they're going to do everything to kill me. I understand
that. That's already there. The reality is that I will die. Our hope is that
something happens and I walk out of here a free man. That's my reality, and I
have to face it."
**************
On the Outside----Delia Perez Meyer fights to prove her brother's innocence
Many times over the last 18 years, Delia Perez Meyer has tried to imagine what
it's like to live the way her brother Louis Perez does on death row. Sometimes
anti-death-penalty groups tape off 6-by-9-foot rectangles - the size of a
prison cell - for people to huddle inside. Other times, she's closed herself
off in a tiny room - a closet or a bathroom - and tried to put herself in her
brother's shoes. "It's just such a feeling of isolation and sadness," she said.
"I know that I would probably not survive back there."
18 years ago, a phone call woke Meyer from a deep sleep. A friend was calling
to ask about Perez, whose face and name were plastered across local news
outlets. As Meyer soon realized, he was wanted for murder. That night, Sept.
10, 1998, was essentially the beginning of a new life for Meyer.
Proving her brother's innocence became "99 %" of her focus. 2 years after Perez
was arrested, their mother died of a heart attack on their kitchen floor. Her
last words, Meyer said, were a plea that Perez's family continue to visit him.
Meyer, who had both a teaching job at AISD and a teenage son, began making the
weekly trips to Livingston to make good on that promise. During that time, she
also found a listing in the Chronicle for an anti-death-penalty meetup, which
led to nearly two decades of activism in the movement. "It became my job," she
said. "My brother was helpless. And I chose that. I didn't realize it was going
to be this hard or take so long for him to be free."
It wasn't without sacrifice. Meetings of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty
led to involvement with the Texas Moratorium Network. Later on, she did work
with Amnesty International. The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty took
her on trips to Europe. She's fasted, rallied, and spoken countless times in
her brother's name.
"My aunt has given up her whole life for my dad," said Perez's daughter Jade.
"She really is a blessing. She's fought so hard for my dad. I don't think I've
ever met someone so dedicated and loyal. ... She hasn't stopped for 16 years."
My mother, a childhood friend of Meyer, knows that well. Their parents ran in
the same social circles in Austin back in the Sixties. Growing up they'd been
close, but the stress and schedule associated with Meyer's second life made it
so they lost contact for nearly a decade, even though they lived in the same
part of town. As Meyer was getting acclimated to a life of travel and protests,
Jade and I were in the same 3rd grade class at Zilker Elementary. I remember
other kids talking about Jade's dad being in prison, but I didn't know until I
was a teenager the sweat Meyer was putting into getting him freed. Really,
until I was a teenager, I didn't know Meyer much at all.
Jade, Perez's youngest of four kids, was 7 years old when he went to prison.
She cherishes memories of camping trips with her dad from before, but admits
there have been times when she nearly lost hope. "I feel like now that I'm
older, it's hitting me harder because I have a family of my own and he's not
here."
Meyer remembers taking Jade as a little girl to the prison to visit Perez.
They'd try to distract her until the guards removed all of the chains and
shackles. But once father and daughter picked up the phones and began talking
to each other through the Plexiglas, nothing but the Texas Department of
Criminal Justice could separate them.
"You've met him," she said to me, referring to the time I took the trip with
her as a 16-year-old junior reporter, taking notes for my high school paper.
"He's just a wonderful, happy-go-lucky person. He's always been that way."
Meeting Perez is meeting an instant friend, and his big personality means he's
not letting you go until the prison calls time.
"It was especially hard on Jade because she was so close to her daddy," said
Meyer. "And that was one of the hardest things for us to see: The kids suffer
without a dad. ... He's missed so much. You look around this house and you see
all these pictures of weddings and birthdays and graduations and kids moving
on. All of our cousins and nieces and nephews, and all his grandchildren.
Everyone's growing up, going to school, getting married and going to college.
And he's missed all of that. He's missed all of that. It's not fair. He should
have a place at this table. And he does. He never leaves this table. He's the
heart and soul."
"I wonder a lot about what I would do if and when [my dad] gets out," said
Jade. "My whole world would flip upside down. I really think I would faint. I
would be overwhelmed with happiness. And I think that's what helps me keep my
faith."
(source for both: Austin Chronicle)
****************
The Only Way Is Abolition----The death penalty is too flawed to be saved
This week, Chase Hoffberger digs into the story of death row inmate Louis Perez
(see "Reasonable Doubt"). While I know that plenty of people won't come away
believing Perez is innocent of the crimes for which he was sentenced to death,
I would hope most would be given pause by just how scanty the evidence is that
he's guilty.
There are so many arguments against the death penalty, but the fact that we're
not always certain that the people we (as citizens of the state) kill are
guilty - that, in fact, it seems pretty close to certain that a few of them are
innocent - is the one that gets me the most. There's a commonly cited legal
principle that, as William Blackstone put it, it's "better that 10 guilty
persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer." But I'm not sure that the
U.S. justice system operates according to that principle, or that it ever has.
It was, after all, just last month that the Chronicle published the latest
installment of the saga of the Kellers, a couple who each spent 20 years in
prison for crimes that almost certainly did not occur (see "Learning From Our
Mistakes," March 11). And as Chase notes in his story about visiting Perez in
prison ("On the Inside," posted online with this week's cover story), Texas'
death row also currently houses Rodney Reed, a man whose guilt has been widely
and compellingly questioned (see "Rape Victim Believes Rodney Reed Is
Innocent," April 30, 2014).
We have to ask ourselves, just what principle are we operating under? Is it
that it's "better that 10 innocent parties suffer, than that one guilty party
escape"? If that is the principle, can it ever be put into practice? Because if
Louis Perez is innocent, then the murderer of 3 people has never been held
accountable for those crimes.
In 2009, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia baldly stated that
"actual innocence" wasn't a reason on its own to keep someone off death row,
writing that "this court has never held that the Con???sti???tu???tion forbids
the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is
later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent. Quite to
the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while
expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged 'actual
innocence' is constitutionally cognizable." Those lines are taken from a
dissenting opinion, and, of course, Scalia no longer sits on the Supreme Court.
But Scalia is far from the only jurist who is less concerned about the
execution of innocent people than those of us who value our lives might wish.
That dissent of his concerned the granting of a new trial to Georgia death row
inmate Troy Davis; after being tried again, Davis was executed in 2011 despite
the fact that a good many people believed he was innocent of the crime for
which he died.
In the end, the only way that we can ensure our own safety - that you or I can
make sure we're not the next one locked up or executed unjustly - is by
insisting that other people don't get convicted because someone thinks they're
guilty. It is inevitable that holding our justice system to its stated standard
for criminal guilt - proof beyond a reasonable doubt - will mean that some
guilty people go free. But that happens anyway, and we would at least be
preventing guilty people going free because the innocent have taken their place
in prison.
It will take a lot to get to that point. Ending the death penalty isn't going
to be enough. It won't fix whatever it is that's allowing people to lose years
of their lives to convictions obtained on thin or faulty evidence. But however
we might feel about the morality of the death penalty in a vacuum - where the
only people executed are those who actually "deserve" it - in practice, the
probability that we're killing innocent people is high. One innocent person
killed by the state is too many, and the only way to guarantee none is
abolition.
(source: Amy Kamp; Austin Chronicle)
***************
In Texas, Death Row Inmates Through the Eyes of a New York Artist----A supermax
prison isn't the best place to sit for a portrait, but Peter Charlap's subjects
have no other choice.
Chris Young, a death row inmate at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, is an avid
chess player who can manage multiple games at once without using a board, just
by calling out the moves to prisoners in neighboring cells.
Will Speer, another inmate, converted to Judaism in prison and worked
tirelessly to get officials to let him wear the Star of David on a chain.
Eugene Broxton, a 3rd inmate, became skilled in the art of origami, sending his
creations to people all over the world until the mail room guards began
unfolding them before they were sent out, leaving their recipients scratching
their heads at flat sheets of colorful paper lined with traces of tiny folds.
"Unless you know how to do it, you can't fold it back," says one of those
recipients, Peter Charlap, sighing. "So he stopped doing it."
Over the past few years, Charlap has traveled to Texas to complete a series of
5 portraits of men on death row at the Polunsky Unit, a supermax prison that
houses all of Texas's male death row inmates - more than 250 of them, each kept
in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day - among its population of several
thousand.
An artist and fine arts professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York,
Charlap lives in a state that ruled the death penalty unconstitutional more
than a decade ago. To him, Texas is no doubt a bit of a foreign country. But
it's one where, today, he has friends.
Charlap began the first portrait in the series, of Young, in 2010. It took
months to get on the prisoner's visitor list. Inmates are allowed 2 special
4-hour visits per month, speaking through phones across a layer of thick glass.
Security doesn't allow cameras, or even pencils or paper, so Charlap began the
sketches of Young back at his hotel room, from memory.
"The 1st time I went there I remember thinking, how am I going to talk to this
person I don't know for 4 hours?" Charlap says. But to his surprise, the time
flew by. "One of the things that Chris said the first day was, 'Ask me
anything; there are no boundaries.'"
4 of the death row inmates Charlap painted were convicted of murder; the 5th
was an accomplice to murder. But there's more to these men than their crimes,
the artist believes. "I thought one way I could contribute would be to show
people that these guys are not what their mugshots look like," Charlap says.
"Because if you look them up on the internet, they look like they could kill
you, you know? But they're not like that at all."
Charlap maintains that time has changed the inmates, all of whom come from
difficult backgrounds. He doesn't believe the state should take their lives.
Painting them, Charlap says, he felt the weight of responsibility - the need to
get their likenesses right. These portraits took more time than any other works
he's painted. "I'd never done anything where that kind of physical presence of
the person was that important," he says. "But in this it was very important. It
had to feel like, 'There's Chris' or 'There's Will.'"
The paintings, set against colorful backgrounds, showcase the inmates'
personalities. Young is playing chess. Speer wears his Star of David necklace.
Broxton folds his origami.
Charlap depicted another inmate, Robert Garza, displaying a sleeve of tattoos
he inked himself. Garza was executed in 2013, something that's still hard for
Charlap to think about. "Robert was a really interesting guy, very smart," he
says. "Every once in a while I'll think about Robert and realize he's dead.
I'll see a photograph or the painting or something like that, and it's just a
shame, a terrible shame."
Partly because of the project's emotional toll, the artist says he's finished
with the series. But Charlap continues to visit the other 4 inmates in
Livingston at least once a year, paying for the trips himself. He sends them
care packages quarterly, including books and magazines. He keeps in touch with
Broxton's wife, who lives in Paris, and makes time for lunch with Young's
cousin when he's in town.
"I consider these guys my friends," he says. "I say, 'I'm going to go visit my
friends in Texas.'"
(source: houstoniamag.com)
*****************
Appeal hearing in capital murder case reset
A hearing which had been scheduled today concerning an appeal of the capital
murder conviction of Micah Crofford Brown has been reset until June 6.
Brown remains in custody at the Hunt County Detention Center after being
transferred from state prison earlier this month.
Brown, 36, of Greenville, was convicted in May 2013 and sentenced to death by
lethal injection in connection with the 2011 murder of Stella Michelle "Doc"
Ray. He does not yet have an execution date scheduled.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has upheld the conviction and sentence, but
a separate post conviction writ was filed by the Office of Capital Writs,
listing multiple alleged issues with Brown's conviction and sentence, including
ineffective assistance by the trial and appeals defense attorneys, improper
arguments by prosecutors during the punishment phase, and failure to present
evidence during the punishment phase that Brown suffers from an Autism Spectrum
Disorder, which may have mitigates the jury's decision to issue the death
penalty.
The First Administrative Judicial Region has appointed 196th District Court
Judge J. Andrew Bench to oversee the proceedings.
(source: heraldbanner.com)
DELAWARE:
A killer whose sentencing led to changes in Delaware's death penalty law is
asking the Board of Pardons to commute his prison sentence
A killer whose sentencing led to changes in Delaware's death penalty law is
asking the Board of Pardons to commute his prison sentence.
Kenneth L. Rodgers is 1 of 4 men convicted of robbing and murdering 2 armored
car guards in 1990. The defendants all received life sentences after jurors
could not unanimously agree on the death penalty.
The killings so outraged the public that legislators held a special session to
change the law, giving judges the final say on imposing the death penalty after
considering a jury's recommendation.
In 2014, the pardons board refused to consider commutation for one of Rodgers'
co-defendants, James Llewellyn Jr.
After reviewing Llewellyn's petition, members agreed that they would not
recommend commutation of his sentence, so there was no reason to hold a
hearing.
(source: Associated Press)
SOUTH CAROLINA:
He Got Custody and Killed Their 5 Kids----Timothy Jones is on trial for the
murder of his 5 children - and his ex-wife is suing South Carolina's Social
Services, saying they failed to intervene and save the kids despite horrific
evidence of abuse.
In 2014, a South Carolina father allegedly did the unthinkable.
Timothy Jones, 34, is currently on trial for the murders of his five children.
According to officials, he picked them up from daycare and then strangled 4 of
them - one after another - with his bare hands until they were dead. The 5th he
beat to death.
He allegedly placed the little bodies of Merah, 8, Elias, 7, Nahtahn, 6,
Gabriel, 2, and Abigail, 1 in black plastic bags and drove for days, over 700
miles, to dump their remains in a shallow ditch in Alabama.
The crime Mr. Jones is charged with - for which prosecutors are seeking the
death penalty - is horrific, and compounded by the possibility that it could
have been prevented. Believing that to be the case, the children's mother,
Amber Jones, 31, is suing the South Carolina Department of Social Services
(DSS), alleging the agency "failed to provide the statutorily mandated
protection that would have saved [her children] from abuse and neglect and
prevented their deaths."
Ms. Jones' complaint seeks unspecified damages from the state DSS, calling the
Lexington County agency "grossly negligent," in its multiple interactions with
the Jones family leading up to the murders. The organization failed to fully
investigate multiple allegations of abuse, from teachers, school officials,
neighbors, babysitters, and Amber Jones herself, according to the complaint.
When investigations uncovered abuse, the DSS made a half-dozen ineffectual
"safety plans," instead of reporting evidence of child abuse to the authorities
and removing the children from Mr. Jones' care.
When reached by phone Wednesday, a spokesperson for South Carolina's Department
of Social Services said, "We aren't commenting at this time."
The complaint, filed in Richland County, on Friday, details Mr. Jones' alleged
crime and the lead-up to it, in a way previously unknown because of a
court-imposed gag order on his murder trial.
According to the new complaint, Timothy Jones - a former Navy man with a
history of substance abuse and a stint in prison for drug possession, forgery,
burglary, and car theft - married Amber Jones when she was 19 years old. They
had their 1st child in 2006 and soon had 3 children within 3 years' time.
In 2011, DSS started to receive complaints about the Joneses.
The kids were filthy, trash and power tools were strewn around the home, and
Mr. Jones was threatening to shoot a neighbor's dog, according to the DSS
reports referenced in the complaint. Mr. Jones lashed out at a DSS caseworker
and accused the agency of "ruining people's lives."
From 2011 to 2012, the county DSS made multiple visits to the home, but failed
to follow up on safety plans. By May 2012, Mr. Jones was displaying signs of a
violent nature, according to the complaint.
Mr. Jones threatened to "snap" his wife's neck in front of their children and
shoot his neighbors. Once, Ms. Jones alleges, her husband "played chicken" with
an 18-wheeler with her and the children in the car. On the same occasion, she
says he head-butted her and spit in her face.
Ms. Jones says she filed a domestic violence report with the sheriff and
informed her DSS caseworker about the report as well as other instances of
alleged violence around the home that she hadn't told law enforcement about.
In June, Mr. Jones discovered his wife was having an affair, according to
divorce records, and took the children to his parents' home in Mississippi
without Ms. Jones' consent. When Ms. Jones called the DSS caseworker, she says
she was told to contact a family lawyer.
Timothy and Amber Jones divorced in 2013. In his divorce complaint, Mr. Jones
argued his wife's "lifestyle" and her inability to care for the children made
her unfit. He said she was having an affair with a much younger neighbor and
would leave the children alone after she put them to bed to spend the night at
her new boyfriend's home. Mr. Jones noted the Department of Social Services had
investigated his wife and found that she maintained a "sloppy" home, but didn't
mention his own record with DSS. It's unclear whether Amber Jones had an
attorney to plead her case. While his wife did not have a job or a car or any
money, Mr. Jones said he was making $6,000 a month as an engineer at Intel and
could move the kids to Mississippi where he had family and a support system.
Mr. Jones' personal therapist, Dr. April Hames, filed an affidavit in support
of his request for custody. In it, she described Mr. Jones as "a
highly-intelligent, responsible father."
"His thoughts are very detailed, action oriented, and focused on his children
....When Mr. Jones sees an obstacle, he sets his sights on the solution and is
willing to go through the often difficult process of achieving his goal of
resolution."
And so, Mr. Jones won primary custody of the children.
As a single father, Mr. Jones continued his connection with the county DSS. In
April 2014, a teacher reported a handprint-sized bruise on one of the children,
who told her teacher she had been grabbed and "pulled around the house as
punishment."
No action was taken, according to the complaint.
In May, one of the children was reported to have been choked and thrown against
a wall. Mr. Jones had left bruises on the child's neck and jaw. Another child
reported that her crotch area hurt. The children were beaten with belts and 1
received 12 spankings. They were also forced to do push-ups and excessive
exercises for misbehaving. When DSS asked Mr. Jones about the markings, he
reportedly told a caseworker that his child "was very clumsy and bruised
easily."
The county DSS drafted their 6th and final safety plan.
Over the summer, a teacher who saw Mr. Jones at the store called DSS and
reported bruising "all over" the children.
A babysitter called a month later, telling the agency that she walked in as Mr.
Jones was "about to hurt" one of his children.
The agency's 3rd investigation, just weeks before the murders, found evidence
that Mr. Jones had been beating one of his sons and wasn't feeding his
children. A caseworker visited the mobile home where he had moved with the
kids. Her report stated Mr. Jones sometimes fed all 5 children with 1 20-piece
chicken nugget dinner and didn't want to send his kids back to public school
"because he does not want the school to report the beatings."
On August 28, 2014, the children were killed. Each one "suffer[ed] a horrific,
but entirely preventable death," the lawsuit reads.
While the courts will decide whether the Jones children might have been saved
by a more effective Deparment of Social Services, the agency's record of
inadequacy when it comes to protecting the children in its care is
well-documented.
2 months after the Jones children's murders, a legislative committee charged
with auditing state agencies released a report on the Department of Social
Services. Among its findings: South Carolina's DSS employees are unqualified,
their caseloads are excessive and inequitable from county to county, the DSS's
overall systems are inadequate, and because of unreliable record keeping, the
agency doesn't even know how many children in the DSS system have been killed
as a result of abuse or neglect.
A DSS spokesperson told local newspaper, The State, on Tuesday that the
organization had recently received increased funding for 177 new caseworkers
and 67 new caseworker assistants.
Several state senators formed the Department of Social Services Oversight
Subcommittee in 2013 and held 13 different hearings to hear testimony from
parents with experience in the system, many of whom echoed Amber Jones' account
of agency inaction when presented with evidence of abuse.
"Phones calls [to DSS], complaints, emails, contacts, subpoenas, all go
unanswered," said Nathan Ginter, a father who expressed frustration to the
committee that the mother of his child was not being investigated for abuse by
the agency.
The committee planned to look specifically at the Jones murders, but after a
request from law enforcement not to question agency officials during an
investigation, the hearing was canceled.
After reviewing the DSS file, one committee member, State Senator Katrina
Shealy, told local news station WISTV she couldn't say whether DSS could have
done anything to prevent their deaths.
"We're sorry for the kids," Shealy said. "We're sorry for the family that's
left ...You know, there's just not a lot you can say about it."
(source: thedailybeast.com)
GEORGIA:
Court to rule on evidence in capital case involving deaths of mother, infant
A dog named "Andy" came to Columbus with Alabama Deputy State Fire Marshal Ray
Cumby on Aug. 26, 2014, and sniffed out a crime scene at 1324 Winifred Lane.
The dog and handler arrived here 5 days after authorities searched the
fire-gutted home found the charred bodies of 32-year-old Rosella "Mandy"
Mitchell and her 6-month-old son Dylan Conner.
Suspecting arson, local investigators the previous Aug. 21 had collected 5
items of evidence they thought might reveal a flammable liquid was used to
start the blaze, but no dog trained to sniff out such evidence was available
then.
Testifying Wednesday in a pretrial hearing for accused killer Brandon Conner,
who was Mitchell's boyfriend and Dylan's father, Columbus fire Sgt. Lance
Christenson said local authorities tried to find a Georgia dog trained for the
task, but the 2 dogs usually available in the state were in Maine for training.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives then sought
help from Alabama, and Cumby was ordered to load Andy up and head to Columbus.
Cumby testified Wednesday that he first checked the fire scene to ensure Andy
safely could negotiate it, then brought in the dog that alerts to the scent of
accelerants like gasoline by staring at the source with his nose to it, then
sitting down.
In the kitchen of the burned house, Andy alerted to a kitchen cabinet below the
sink, Cumby said. Christenson said investigators cut the cabinet door loose and
kept it.
At a threshold between the kitchen and living room, Andy alerted again, this
time on the floor, Cumby said. Christenson said carpeting there was cut free
with a razor and collected.
Then in a room toward the rear of the house, where a hole burned in the floor
beneath a window, the dog again alerted to a scent, and some wood there was
removed as evidence, said Cumby, who suspected that was where the fire started.
Besides the evidence to which the dog pointed investigators, a gasoline can
found in a hall closet was collected, Christenson said.
Submitted to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab, all four items
tested positive for the presence of flammable liquids, testified GBI forensic
chemist Victoria Oehrlein, who said nothing authorities had collected 5 days
earlier tested positive.
Cumby said Andy has worked 4 years in the field and weekly is retrained if not
dispatched to a crime scene. The dog has a success rate of 80 to 90 %, meaning
that's how often the evidence he alerts to tests positive in the lab, Cumby
said.
Conner's defense team of J. Mark Shelnutt and William Kendrick argued the dog's
alerting to such evidence is not "scientifically verifiable," and thus the
evidence should not be admitted at trial.
The issue is among a series of court motions now before Judge William Rumer as
attorneys prepare for Conner's murder trial, in which District Attorney Julia
Slater intends to pursue the death penalty. The hearings are expected to
continue today and possibly Friday.
Conner's indictment alleges that he stabbed Mitchell in the throat and torso
with a knife, and that he also killed the infant, though the child???s fatal
injuries are not specified.
Conner faces 2 counts of malice murder, 2 of felony murder, and 1 each of
aggravated battery, using a knife to commit a crime and 1st-degree arson.
His malice murder charges allege he deliberately killed his girlfriend and
child, and his felony murder counts accuse him of killing the mother and infant
while committing the felony offense of aggravated assault.
Firefighters found the 2 face-down in a back bedroom of the house after
extinguishing the blaze around 12:30 a.m.
Winifred Lane is in south Columbus, off Amber Drive north of Buena Vista Road.
Within an hour of the fire, a police officer confronted Conner at Cedar Avenue
and Wynnton Road in Midtown after watching him sit immobile in his 2001 BMW for
about 10 minutes. Authorities said the officer found Conner to be sweating and
nervous, with blood on him.
After obtaining a search warrant, investigators found more bloodstained clothes
and a large serrated knife in the car, they said.
This is the 2nd case in which Slater, first elected in 2008, has sought the
death penalty. The 1st was the fatal shooting of Heath Jackson during a
burglary at his Carter Avenue home on Sept. 7, 2010.
In May 2013, defendant Ricardo Strozier pleaded guilty to Jackson's homicide
and a string of related crimes. Judge Gil McBride sentenced him to life in
prison without parole.
(source: ledger-enquirer.com)
********************
The economic drain of the death penalty versus life in prison
The planned execution of David Anthony Lucas on Wednesday, along with Kenneth
Earl Fults on April 12, Joshua Daniel Bishop on March 31, Travis Clinton
Hittson on Feb. 17 and Brandon Astor Jones on Feb. 3 will bring the total of
executions to 16 under Gov. Nathan Deal, if Lucas is executed (at press time a
stay was being considered). Once again it brings up the subject of whether the
government should be putting people to death. That is not for this Editorial
Board to decide, but it is a debate that should not be left out of the efforts
to reform the criminal justice system in the state.
Many of the reforms are not being undertaken just to save lives and to rescue
wasted potential - but to save money. And if saving money were the only
measure, should sentencing killers to life in prison rather than putting them
to death be one of the considerations?
Lucas was sentenced to die in 1999 for the murder of 3 people - Steven Moss,
37, his 2 children, 11-year-old Bryan and 15-year-old Kristin - during a
botched 1998 burglary at their home in Jones County. Lucas was not alone. His
accomplice, Brandon Rhode, was executed for his part in the crime 6 years ago.
18 years ago, Lucas' victim was the same age Lucas at the time of his scheduled
execution.
Staying strictly with the cost of the death penalty and ignoring other factors
such as it acting as a deterrence, bias in sentencing or innocence, there are
several reasons the death penalty, once sought, is time consuming and
expensive. District attorneys, according to the Marshall Project, devote more
staff to such cases and assign more experienced prosecutors from their offices.
More time is taken with every aspect of the trial, from jury selection to
expert witnesses to deal with a murderer's upbringing to his or her sanity to
DNA evidence to investigators. A death penalty case can easily cost more than
$1 million, more than housing and feeding them for their entire life.
Prosecutors also enter a death penalty case with trepidation. They know it's
going to be a long slog. Even in the Lucas case, though convicted in 1999, the
sentence couldn't be carried out before a number of appeals are automatically
granted. And that's another area where taxpayers need to be concerned. Who pays
for that court-public defender who may see the case through to the end - and
that end could easily take a decade or more. This is as it should be. Once a
lethal injection is given there is no going back - and yes, mistakes are made.
The Innocence Project over the past 20 years:
-- Proved the innocence of 18 prisoners sentenced to death using DNA evidence.
-- Proved the innocence of 29 prisoners using DNA evidence who pleaded guilty
to crimes they didn't commit.
-- Proved the innocence of 16 prisoners charged with capital crimes but not
sentenced to death using DNA evidence.
In Georgia we have some decisions to make. There remains about 73 prisoners on
death row. With the Lucas execution, if it happens, the state has tied a record
for executions it set in 1987. We are not here to decided whether these
murderers deserve to die. That's a question the court has already answered. The
question that needs to be answered in this debate is: Can we afford to kill
them?
(source: Editorial, Macon Telegraph)
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