Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Brian Stull, Capital Punishment Project
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Posts by Brian Stull, Capital Punishment Project
Texas Court Puts Brakes on Execution to Consider Need for DNA Testing
02 months ago
A couple of weeks ago, we told you about the plans of Texas prosecutors to execute Hank Skinner this coming Wednesday, despite that crucial DNA evidence that could exonerate him has never been tested. Today the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals put the brakes on these plans, staying Skinner’s scheduled execution.
In a brief order, the court held that the execution could not go forward while Skinner’s application for DNA evidence testing remained unresolved. The court also noted that Skinner’s application for DNA testing relied on changes to the Texas statute concerning DNA testing that had been prompted by his case. The court stated that it needed time "to fully review the changes in the statute as they pertain to this case."
While the court did not decide whether it will require DNA testing of the untested evidence, its decision is an encouraging sign. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals routinely hears motions to stay executions, and usually denies them. The court saw something different in this case. That is reason to be hopeful that justice will finally be served.
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Junk Fire Science: Too Scary to be Believed
03 months ago
It’s Halloween. So what could be scarier than a state throwing a person in prison for arson when the fire was accidental?
Executing him.
That’s the lesson of a report released Friday by the Texas Forensic Science Commission. The report is the latest twist in an ongoing legal saga following Texas’s 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. In 2004, before Texas executed Willingham for the alleged arson murder of his three children, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole had received a report by a renowned fire scientist named Dr. Gerald Hurst. Dr. Hurst’s report showed that the "fire-science" testimony accusing Willingham of arson at his trial was farcical and anything but scientific. Governor Rick Perry received the report too. Willingham’s execution went forward despite that the debunked "fire science" had been the centerpiece of the state’s case against him.
Concerned Texas legislators created a Forensic Science Commission, which took up Willingham’s case in 2008. After shenanigans by Governor Perry threatened to derail the Commission’s work and related wrangling that has gone on for three years, the Commission released findings in April showing that the "science" behind Willingham’s conviction and death was not science at all, and could be more accurately described as a collection of wives’ tales.
On Friday, the Commission supplemented its report, finding that it had no jurisdiction (under the statute creating it) to determine if the faulty science used at Willingham’s trial was the result of professional negligence or misconduct by fire investigators for the state.
But in a hopeful silver lining for people imprisoned for arson in Texas, the report included a commitment from the state fire marshal’s office, which will partner with the Innocence Project of Texas, to identify and reinvestigate old arson cases that may have been built on the same faulty "fire science" that spelled Willingham’s demise.
The Commission’s chairman, Dr. Nizam Peerwani, said "it is important to understand that science is an ever-changing process."
Dr. Peerwani is right. Even assuming that the state’s experts are never negligent, and that police and prosecutors never commit misconduct, science is ever changing. What was true yesterday may be found false tomorrow.
Still, scientific testimony has its place. It may sometimes be a proper basis for convicting and imprisoning a person. If we find out it was wrong, we can always let the person out and try to repair the damage — as Texas will now attempt for victims of junk fire science.
But while science can be probed to reveal flaws in our past understanding of it, it can never bring back the dead. That’s the frightening agony known by the family of Cameron Todd Willingham. And one we should thoughtfully consider before Texas or any other state executes again.
CORRECTION: The Texas Forensic Science Commission report was released on Friday, October 28, not Monday, October 31.
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Prominent Texans Call for DNA Testing Before November Execution Date
03 months ago
If prosecutors don’t change course, on November 9th Hank Skinner could be the 476th person executed by the State of Texas since 1976. Problem is, Skinner, like Troy Davis, may well be innocent, and Texas prosecutors have so far blocked DNA testing of evidence that could prove it.
In March, over the objection of prosecutors, the United States Supreme Court cleared the way for Skinner to bring a federal civil rights lawsuit to compel DNA testing of the untested evidence. Even though that litigation remains pending and unresolved, prosecutors have obtained an execution date for Skinner and appear poised to execute him before the court rules on his claim.
The prosecutors’ stubborn combination of refusing to allow this DNA testing and insisting that the execution go forward is unconscionable.
A letter today from prominent Texas officials including a former governor, a former criminal appeals judge, former district attorneys and current Texas legislators, eloquently spelled out why the testing should be done before Skinner’s execution date:
Executing Mr. Skinner without testing all the relevant evidence would suggest official indifference to the possibility of error in this case and needlessly undermine public confidence in Texas’s criminal justice system.
We would add that testing this evidence is necessary to make sure another innocent man is not executed this year. Is that too much to ask?
Take action to end the death penalty in your state.
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Fewer Americans Supporting the Death Penalty
03 months ago
Is it that the State of Georgia executed an innocent man last month? Is it the dawning realization that the risk of executing an innocent person exists in many cases beyond Troy Davis? Is it that race cannot help but to seep into the consideration of who gets executed and who gets to live? Is it that the quality of the lawyering and not the seriousness of the crime determines who gets executed? Is it that many family members of murder victims have said not to execute in their names? Or is it the simple realization that the state killing people does not teach its citizens not to kill?
Whatever the reasons, Americans are coming around to the thinking of most other nations that the death penalty is an anachronism that can be left to the dustbin of history. In the wake of New York, New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois’ recent repeals of the death penalty — and with possible repeal in California in sight — two new polls show significant declines in national support for the death penalty.
In a recent CNN poll, only 48 percent of respondents preferred a death sentence over a sentence of life without parole, down from 56 percent seven years ago. Meanwhile, fully 50 percent of respondents now believe life without parole is the preferable punishment. A recent Gallup poll reflected this same downward trend (though with more support for the death penalty). It found that now only 61 percent of Americans approve of using the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, down from 64 percent last year — the lowest level of support since 1972.
With these polls as further evidence that our message is taking the hold, the ACLU will continue to work to show that the death penalty is unjust, unwise and unnecessary.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misworded the findings of the CNN poll. This has been corrected.
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Execution By Race
04 months ago
When the United States Supreme Court approved death penalty statutes, it did so on the promise that race would play no role in the decision to execute a person. That, of course, mirrors society’s moral stance. Some people believe capital punishment is just. Some don’t. But we can all agree that deciding who lives and who dies must not be determined by the color of their skin.
Despite this broad agreement, our nation has failed to rid race from the decision to execute — take, for instance, the case of Marcus Robinson in North Carolina. And now, shockingly, Texas appears poised next week to execute Duane Edward Buck based on the fact that he is black.
In Texas, imposing the death penalty in capital cases comes down to one question: is the defendant going to be a "future danger" if he or she is not executed? Mr. Buck was sentenced to die based on testimony by Dr. Walter Quijano, who told jurors that Mr. Buck was more likely to pose a future danger to society because he is black. Dr. Quijano’s testimony came in 1997, more than 20 years after Texas promised the Supreme Court that "no correlation exists between the race/ethnic background of a defendant and the probability that he will be either convicted of capital murder or given the death penalty."
The same psychologist gave similar testimony in a total of seven Texas cases. In 2000, then-Attorney General John Cornyn did something highly unusual for a prosecutor: he called for the retrial of all seven men who had been sentenced to death based on Dr. Quijano’s testimony that their race or ethnic background made them more dangerous. This list of seven included Duane Edward Buck.
Courts granted new sentencing trials to six of those inmates, but upheld Mr. Buck’s unconstitutional death sentence on technical procedural grounds (which we have previously noted often lead to unjust results based on form over substance). Mr. Buck was therefore not granted an opportunity to have a new sentencing hearing unbiased by race. He is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas on September 15, 2011.
Attorney General Cornyn was a vigorous defender of the death penalty in Texas, but made it clear that he wanted no part of calling for executions that were based on this kind of racism: "The people of Texas want and deserve a system that affords the same fairness to everyone." It remains to be seen if the governor agrees.
We must not allow the execution of a man on the basis of his race. You can help to prevent this injustice: go here to urge Texas Governor Rick Perry and to the board of pardons and parole to intervene before it’s too late.
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Texas AG’s Flawed Opinion Need Not Spell End to Scrutiny of Convictions and Executions Based on Junk Science
06 months ago
An opinion letter issued on Friday by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is the latest chapter in Texas’s efforts to cover up its 2004 execution of an innocent man named Cameron Todd Willingham. The letter concerns the scope of authority of the Texas Forensic Science Commission (TFSC), an agency created to take a serious, objective look at the quality of forensic science in Texas courtrooms. It should be seen for what it is: just another attempt to divert attention from the scientists by the politicians.
As background, by appointing prosecutor John Bradley to lead the TFSC in late 2009, Governor Rick Perry stymied the TFSC’s investigation of the deeply-flawed “fire science” testimony used to condemn Willingham for murder by arson.
Though an assistant attorney general had always been present at TFSC meetings since its creation, one of Bradley’s tactics was to question the TFSC’s very authority to examine Willingham’s case. Bradley questioned whether the TFSC could investigate evidence introduced before its creation in 2005; he questioned whether it could investigate laboratories that had not yet been accredited; and he questioned whether it could investigate the professional negligence of forensic scientists who acted before 2005.
Lucky for him, Bradley’s dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin questions went to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott – Texas’s top prosecutor. Rejecting several points made by the ACLU of Texas and others who weighed in, the fox sent to guard the hen house did little to disappoint Bradley (whose reappointment the Texas Senate recently nixed).
In the attorney general’s non-binding opinion letter, he determined that the TFSC is limited to examining evidence introduced after September 1, 2005, despite the fact that the TFSC was created to address problems that arose prior to 2005. But the opinion letter also states that the statute places absolutely no time limits upon TFSC’s ability to investigate professional negligence and misconduct.
The opinion places the TFSC and Texas at a crossroads. The TFSC’s newly-appointed chair, Dr. Nazim Peerwani, has said that the commission would be debating the impact of the opinion on the Willingham case.
At a minimum, the opinion means the TFSC can move forward and assess the professional negligence of the State Fire Marshal’s Office. That office has continued to defend the faulty evidence used to condemn Willingham, and thus continues its professional negligence. The TFSC already recognized this year that the arson science used to convict Willingham was flawed.
If the TFSC decides that the attorney general’s opinion restricts its ability to fully review the Willingham case, it will still have important work to do. But in that case the Legislature should step in to clarify the TFSC’s broad mandate to root out junk science. The TFSC should be able to look at what the lawyers and the politicians knew about the use of junk science in death penalty (and other) cases.
Leading the nation, Texas has executed 472 people since 1982. 322 more await the same fate unless they win their appeals. Texas also leads the nation in DNA exonerations. Texas has almost certainly executed innocent people, Willingham likely among them. How the TFSC moves forward will help to answer how many more innocent people will be sent to Texas’s death chamber.
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Texas Puts Head in Sand at Prospect of Executing Innocent People
01 year ago
The highest criminal court in Texas yesterday halted an historic hearing in which lawyers for a man accused of murder and facing the death penalty argued that capital punishment is unconstitutional because it carries high risks that innocent people could be executed.
Lawyers for John Green this week presented in a Houston trial court evidence showing that Texas risks executing innocent people by relying on junk science, faulty eyewitness identification, unreliable informants, false confessions and other shoddy evidence. They cited two high-profile cases — those of Claude Jones and Cameron Todd Willingham — in which evidence has recently surfaced suggesting that both men executed by the state of Texas might well have been innocent of the crimes they were accused of committing.
Lawyers for Green say he is innocent and faces the risk of an unconstitutional execution. The appeals court’s ruling halted the hearing and gives the trial court and lawyers for Green 15 days to respond to a motion by prosecutors to halt the ruling.
The appeals court’s decision represented at least a temporary victory for prosecutors, who have repeatedly tried to avoid a hearing on this crucial issue.
First, they argued that the presiding judge, District Court Judge Kevin Fine, was biased and should be kicked off the case. That transparent effort tied up valuable judicial resources, but failed.
Second, they asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to stop the hearing last month. In an order issued last week, that court refused to do so. Once the hearing started on Monday, the prosecutors refused to participate. And now the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has changed its mind.
Regrettably, the Green prosecutors’ actions are part of a larger pattern of prosecutors and state officials turning a blind eye to these risks of executing the innocent. When Texas executed Claude Jones in 2000, then-Governor George W. Bush denied his clemency application, but did not know that Jones had requested DNA testing on the only piece of physical evidence tying Jones to the crime — a hair recovered from the victim which state experts said belonged to Jones. Texas executed Jones without allowing him to have the hair tested. Recent DNA testing — accomplished despite the state’s strenuous objection — has conclusively revealed that the hair on which Claude Jones was executed was not his — it was the victim’s.
Similarly, when Cameron Todd Willingham was executed, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole and Gov. Rick Perry received a memorandum by a Cambridge-trained fire expert showing that the "scientific" evidence the state had relied on to convict him was a sham. But public records collected by the Innocence Project strongly suggest that report may not have been read by state officials before allowing Willingham’s execution. It is almost certain that Willingham was innocent.
And now, further review of the Willingham case itself has been put on hold by prosecutors trying, yet again, to disqualify a judge who had the audacity to hold a hearing regarding the execution of an innocent person. "De ja vu all over again" was funny when Yogi Berra said it, but it is no laughing matter when prosecutors seek to thwart the truth-seeking process on an issue as important as the death penalty.
Twelve death row inmates have been exonerated in Texas since 1973, and there are profoundly troubling questions about the guilt of six inmates executed by that state. Yet Texas prosecutors apparently do not want the world to know that one cost of the death penalty is the serious risk of executing innocent people.
That is a travesty because prosecutors are charged with seeking the truth and upholding justice. For the sake of John Green and all of society, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will not acquiesce in the prosecutors’ efforts to hide the truth about this life and death issue.
Texas Court’s Bar on Unreliable Forensic Testimony Comes Too Late for Many
01 year ago
Under Texas law, a jury must unanimously find an inmate will pose a threat of future danger before it can sentence him to death. Many juries rely upon the testimony of psychiatrists and other doctors to make their determination.
Dr. Richard Coons, a Texas forensic psychiatrist, is one such doctor. Dr. Coons has testified in dozens of capital cases that the defendant would pose a threat of future danger if not executed.
Turns out many of those testimonies were bunk.
As reported earlier this week in the Austin-American Statesman, Texas’s highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, recently found that Dr. Coons should not have been permitted to testify in the case of Billy Wayne Coble because his testimony was neither scientific nor reliable (PDF). The court noted, “Dr. Coons forthrightly stated that ‘he does it his way’ with his own methodology and has never gone back to see whether his prior predictions of future dangerousness have, in fact, been accurate.”
Dr. Coons’ methodology is questionable, to say the least. The Statesmen reports:
At Coble’s trial, Coons testified that he has developed his own methodology to come to a conclusion on future dangerousness, one in which he considers factors such as the person’s conscience, criminal history and attitudes toward violence.
The significance of the court’s finding cannot be overstated. The Texas Defender Service is still reviewing records, but has so far identified at least 25 cases in which Coons’ nonscientific predictions contributed to a death sentence, including nine cases in which the condemned inmate has already been executed.
In other words, Texas has executed at least nine capital defendants on the basis of junk science. For them, the Coble decision tragically comes too late.
Dr. Coons’ crystal-ball predictions of future dangerousness are not new in Texas. Dr. Coons’ predecessor was Dr. James Grigson, who relied on a similar ad-hoc methodology in testifying in 136 capital cases and whom the American Psychiatric Association expelled “for claiming 100-percent accuracy in predicting how dangerous a defendant he had never examined would be in future years.” In a 2004 report, the Texas Defender Service demonstrated that the predictions of “experts” such as Drs. Coons and Grigson were almost always wrong (PDF).
In Dr. Grigson testified that Cameron Todd Willingham would pose a threat of future danger if not executed. The jury bought his testimony, and Willingham was executed. Now, a court of inquiry in Texas is going to determine if Willingham was innocent and if Texas did the unthinkable – executed an innocent man.
Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently observed, “Society changes. Knowledge accumulates. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes.” The lesson here is clear: our criminal justice system is too unreliable and arbitrary to permit the use of the death penalty.
When it comes to capital punishment, we cannot correct our mistakes.
Medication Shortage Reveals Some States’ Shamefully Wrong Priorities
01 year ago
The last-minute legal maneuverings over the pending execution of Albert Brown in California this past week put a spotlight on sodium thiopental, one of drugs used in lethal injection executions.
Physicians use sodium thiopental as an anesthetic for patients undergoing surgery. In most all of the 35 states with the death penalty, prisons use sodium thiopental as part of a lethal three-drug cocktail to execute condemned inmates.
A nationwide shortage of this drug calls into serious question the priorities of states that use it to execute.
The New York Times reports that the shortage of this drug has not only halted executions in several states, but is also disrupting ordinary surgical protocols. Anesthesiologists are "being forced to use less familiar medications that leave patients groggier and with a higher risk of nausea and headaches."
Meanwhile, Wednesday’s Huntsville Item reported that "Texas is well stocked with the drug," but that prison officials have asked Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott for an opinion on whether they have to reveal the amount of sodium thiopental they have on hand, in a "move to prevent disclosure." Texas, which in 1982 was the first state to employ lethal injection, has long led the nation in executions. Arkansas, too, has "plenty of sodium thiopental on hand," but has no scheduled executions.
And while surgical patients are suffering due to a shortage of sodium thiopental, some death penalty states are supplying it to other states facing a shortage so they can go forward with executions. The New York Times reported that Oklahoma, where the modern lethal injection protocol was first developed, "obtained a single dose of thiopental sodium from another state — it will not say which — and plans to use it to kill Donald R. Wackerly II on Oct. 14."
Hospira, the sole domestic manufacturer of the drug, has notified death-penalty states (PDF) that it does not support the use of its drugs for capital punishment, as it manufactures the drug to improve or save lives.
It’s not enough that states are executing people who may be innocent, who had woefully inadequate lawyers, who may be mentally retarded/mentally ill, or who were convicted based on junk science or fabricated evidence — all for no documented benefit to the public safety. Now some states, despite being on notice that sodium thiopental is being manufactured for medical purposes rather than executions, are hoarding the medication while patients needing it suffer. It underscores just how perverse the use of the death penalty has become.
Texas officials may hope that they are permitted to cover up how much of the medication the state is hoarding, but it is undeniable that it and other states are now affirmatively putting our fellow human beings at unnecessary medical risk to maintain an irreparably broken system.
Act Now to Save a Virginia Woman on Death Row
01 year ago
Teresa Lewis has an IQ of 72. In 2003, she pled guilty to two counts of murder in Virginia. The victims were her husband and his adult son. Immediately after the crime, she told police that another man, Matthew Shallenberger, masterminded the killings by seducing Teresa and convincing her that he should kill her husband so that Teresa could collect life insurance money they could use to “run away” together. Owing to her low intelligence and dependent personality disorder, Teresa was easily manipulated and agreed to the plan. Shallenberger, who was seeing two other women at the time, would later admit that Teresa was exactly what he was looking for and that he seduced her for the life insurance money. Shallenberger had hoped to use the money to fulfill his dream of moving to New York to become a hit man for the mob. Despite his dominant role in the crime and Teresa’s more limited role, Shallenberger received a sentence of life in prison, while Teresa was sentenced to death.
Teresa is not one of the worst of the worst. She has expressed sincere remorse for her crime and has spent her time in prison as a model inmate, whom a prison chaplain has described as “loving, faithful, and childlike.” Virginia, however, has scheduled Teresa’s execution for September 23, 2010.
Unless spared by Virginia’s governor, Teresa would be the first woman executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia since 1912. Please support Teresa’s plea for Gov. Bob McDonnell to spare her life by signing this petition, visiting Teresa’s website and visiting her Facebook page.
The fact that someone like Teresa can be executed, while her more culpable codefendant has received a life sentence, illustrates why the death penalty is wrong: its use is not limited for people who are the worst of the worst.