Sept. 12
TEXAS----impending execution(s)
Drifter Set To Die For Killing 2 People In Denton County
Former drifter and self-described junkie Steven Michael Woods says he and a
friend were high on LSD when they drove to a remote road by a Dallas-area golf
course where they met a man and woman a decade ago, but he insists that his
friend was the one who gunned the pair down.
“It was kind of surreal,” Woods said. “It registered in my head as it was
raining, and I got sprayed by some of the blood.”
Woods, 31, said his friend, Marcus Rhodes, was the gunman and he had nothing to
do with the murders of 21-year-old Ronald Whitehead and 19-year-old Bethena
Brosz in Denton County.
Woods said he remembers lighting a cigarette for Whitehead.
“All of a sudden, this guy’s face exploded,” he said.
Rhodes avoided a possible death sentence by pleading guilty and accepting a
life sentence. A jury convicted Woods of capital murder and decided he should
die.
His execution was set for Tuesday in Huntsville. Woods’ lethal injection would
be the 10th this year in Texas and the first of two set for this week. 2 more
are scheduled for next week.
“I’m terrified — terrified,” he said last week from a small visiting cage
outside death row. “I’m a lot calmer than I thought I’d be. But I wake up
shaking.”
Testimony at his trial showed Woods told others that he planned to kill
Whitehead and bragged afterward about the slayings. Prosecutors said his DNA
was found on a latex glove in Rhodes’ car after the killings.
“I hate conspiracy theory stuff,” Woods said. “I didn’t do anything at all.”
Woods’ lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the punishment, contending
he had poor legal assistance during the early stages of his appeals and that he
had been barred from claiming that one of his trial jurors was biased.
Brosz and Whitehead, who had moved to Dallas from Wichita Falls only a few
months earlier, were found by golfers May 2, 2001, along a golf course road
near The Colony, a North Dallas suburb midway between Dallas and Denton.
Whitehead was shot six times in the head. Brosz was shot twice in the head and
once in the knee. Both had their throats cut. Brosz was alive when she was
found but died the following day.
Witnesses testified at Woods’ 2002 trial that he lured Whitehead to the
isolated road on the pretense of a drug deal and killed him because he knew
about another killing that Woods had been involved in two months earlier, in
California.
Brosz was killed because she was an eyewitness, prosecutors said.
“Justice will prevail, and we will see him punished for what he did to her,”
Brosz’s mother, Sheila, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Woods and his trial attorneys blamed Rhodes for the killings, including the
death in California.
Woods was from Livonia, Mich., a Detroit suburb, quit school at 17 and drifted
through Chicago, New York and then Dallas in search of drugs and punk rock
clubs. In Dallas, he frequented the city’s Deep Ellum area and was known on the
streets as “Halo.” Court records described him being involved in Satanism,
bomb-making activities, abusive treatment of his brothers and animals, and
affiliation with white supremacists.
“I said a lot of things to get attention,” Woods said from prison, insisting
the records were untrue.
Authorities said Woods had been supplying other drug dealers with liquid LSD
and other drugs sold at clubs and parties in Deep Ellum, a trendy entertainment
district of redeveloped warehouses near downtown Dallas.
He was arrested in Garberville, Calif., about 200 miles north of San Francisco,
some 2 months after the Texas slayings.
When confronted by police, Woods said he gave a false name but an elaborate
tattoo of a red rose on a green branch the length of his right arm gave him
away.
2 months after he was extradited from California to Texas, Woods told The
Dallas Morning News from jail he never left Deep Ellum the night of the
slayings and that he was high on drugs. He also said he couldn’t remember much
of his teenage years because he usually was high. Court records indicated he
told his lawyers he wasn’t at the shooting scene and had been awake for 14 days
and was high on a variety of drugs when the shootings occurred.
“I know how stupid it sounds,” he said. “I know a lot of people don’t believe
it when you say you’re innocent.”
Rhodes, identified by police as one of Woods’ drug customers, turned himself in
to police days after the shooting victims were found and implicated Woods.
Detectives determined Woods left Dallas that same day and believed he fled to
avoid police.
Authorities recovered backpacks belonging to the slain pair in Rhodes’ car.
Guns used in the slayings were recovered from the home of Rhodes’ parents.
On Thursday, a Houston man, Duane Buck, was set to die for a double slaying 16
years ago.
(source: Associated Press)
******************
Perry’s odd ease with death penalty
2 things seemed creepily out of whack last week when the subject of the Texas
death penalty came up during the GOP presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library.
First was the crowd’s reaction at the mention of this state’s leading execution
statistic, a record 234 of them under Gov. Rick Perry. The audience actually
applauded the body count tallied in Huntsville over the last 11 years.
That bizarre outburst set the stage for the governor’s defense of his record,
and, with the crowd behind him, it probably was a politically effective media
moment for the governor.
Yet the justice system Perry depicted is not the system that comes into focus
when taking a hard look at the facts. His is a black-and-white rendition: bad
crime, fair trial, thorough review, last words on a gurney.
The reality of Texas justice is not so sound-bite simple. The fight for
fairness and truth can be an agonizing and often futile one.
Debate moderator Brian Williams might have thought he had a clever question —
do you sleep well at night, governor? — but that overlooked the goings-on in
Texas even as he spoke.
A better question might have focused on the refusal by Texas courts to permit
forensic analysis of untested evidence in the Hank Skinner murder case out of
West Texas. Does the governor lose sleep over Skinner’s execution date of Nov.
9, or is he confident that the courts will have it all sorted out by then?
Perry also might have been asked about this week’s scheduled execution of
convicted double murderer Duane Edward Buck out of Houston. In the trial’s
punishment phase, an expert testified that Buck was more likely to be a future
danger to society because he is black. Then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn
admitted that the state was wrong to allow juries to consider such outrageous
testimony in this case and six others, and he asked the Supreme Court to allow
for punishment retrials. But technicalities prevented a new sentencing from
happening in the Buck case, unlike the others. Has the governor lost sleep over
an unconstitutional punishment process?
And has the governor lost a wink thinking about how to address the hideous
Anthony Graves miscarriage of justice? Here was a man railroaded by a Central
Texas prosecutor in the sensational slayings of six family members. Isn’t it
true that Graves might never have been freed last year had it not been for
college journalism and law students who laid the foundation for his innocence?
Is this the same system in which the governor has unshakable faith?
Perry was right about one thing: The public is generally comfortable with the
death penalty. But consider that a mere theoretical statement. Dig deeper into
uncomfortable truths and, we think, the public will see hard realities that are
impossible to defend.
(source: Editorial, Dallas Morning News)
*****************************
Cheering on the Death Machine
Even supporters of the death penalty used to consider execution a solemn state
responsibility, not an occasion for celebration. But the crowd of Republicans
who gathered at the Reagan Library last week to watch their presidential
candidates debate actually applauded and cheered when a moderator noted that
Texas had executed 234 inmates under Gov. Rick Perry, by far the most under any
governor in modern times.
Then came Mr. Perry’s blithe denial that he had ever struggled with a single
one of those state killings. Texas has a “thoughtful, a very clear process,” he
said, which ensures everyone a fair hearing, so there is no need to lose sleep
over the possibility of executing an innocent person.
It may not trouble Mr. Perry, but any clear-eyed observer would be shocked at
the grim momentum of his state’s death machine, which stops for no suggestion
of error. The clearest and best-known illustration of that was the 2004
execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for the home fire that killed his 3
children, despite egregious flaws in the forensic science that helped convict
him. In the face of serious questions, Mr. Perry refused to grant a reprieve
for Mr. Willingham, and years later replaced the members of a state forensic
commission that was about to hold hearings on the execution.
That is hardly the only questionable case during his tenure, as shown by a
database developed by The Texas Tribune, a partner of The New York Times. In a
recent report, The Tribune described the case of Kelsey Patterson, who was
executed for two 1992 shootings despite a recommendation to Mr. Perry for
clemency by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on the grounds of clear
mental incapacity. He has also approved the execution of a man whose lawyer
suffered from mental illness and was repeatedly disciplined; a man involved in
a fatal robbery who did not kill the victim; and a man who was 17 at the time
of a murder and received clemency recommendations from the trial judge and
several legislators.
Mr. Perry is well known for being extremely parsimonious with his clemency
authority. His attitude about death may make sense in the hard-edged Republican
primaries, but other voters should have serious doubts about a man who seems to
have none.
(source: Editorial, New York Times)
************************
Execution in Texas----Governor Perry's Death Mission
In Texas, Steven Michael Woods is slated for execution on Tuesday, despite
considerable doubts about his guilt. The inmate is fighting to have his
sentence commuted, but his chances are diminishing. State Governor Rick Perry
is considered a champion of the death penalty.
It's a gruesome record, but Rick Perry is proud of it. "Your state has executed
234 death-row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times," NBC's
Brian Williams told the Texas governor during this week's presidential debate.
Did he ever struggle to sleep at night, Williams continued, "with the idea that
anyone of those might have been innocent"?
Before Williams had finished, the auditorium erupted in cheers, even whistles,
as if the spectators welcomed this killer number. Then Perry answered grimly:
"No sir, I never struggled with that at all." Asked what he made of the
applause, he said: "I think Americans understand justice."
This bizarre moment was almost lost in the subsequent coverage of the
Republican candidates' debate. For one man, however, it was a bad omen: Steven
Michael Woods.
Woods, 31, is incarcerated in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, which houses Texas'
death row, a four-hour drive east of the capital Austin. His execution for
capital murder is set for Tuesday -- one day after the next Republican debate.
It would be the 19th execution this year in Texas alone.
Grave Doubts about Verdict
There's more, though: Woods, his lawyers and his friends insist he is innocent.
There are indeed grave doubts about the verdict. Marcus Rhodes, Wood's
co-defendant and a former friend, has admitted to the double murder in question
and already been sentenced -- but to life in prison. Rhodes' DNA was found on
the weapons, but not that of Woods.
Yet all courts so far have rejected Wood's appeals. Even the US Supreme Court
refused to take up the case. Alex Calhoun, Wood's defense lawyer, has now filed
a clemency petition with Governor Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and
Parole, as a last resort.
Woods was deprived of his constitutional rights and convicted based on "false
or misleading testimony," Calhoun alleges in the 20-page petition to Perry.
Furthermore, the prosecution had "illegally withheld significant evidence."
"I am sure that the Board of Pardons and Paroles will, using their judgment and
innate sense of fairness, recognize the injustice and patent unfairness,"
Calhoun told SPIEGEL ONLINE. However, this sounds like overblown optimism:
Since he took office in December 2000, Perry has not once shown clemency in a
capital punishment case -- sometimes in spite of doubts. And it is highly
unlikely that Woods would be the first person to get it.
Woods' story started as a horrifying criminal case. On May 2, 2001, two people
were brutally murdered in a deserted field north of Dallas: Ronald Whitehead,
21, and Bethena Brosz, 19. Whitehead was shot in the head six times, Brosz
twice as well as once in the knee. Both also had their throats cut. Whitehead's
dead body was found hours later, Brosz was still alive but died 36 hours later
in a hospital.
Whitehead was a drug dealer, Brosz a chance acquaintance. The 19-year-old
planned to study astronomy. "Beth was just in the wrong place at the wrong time
with the wrong people," her mother Janet Shires wrote on a memorial website.
The suspects in the murders were tried separately. Woods, then 21, was
sentenced to death in August 2002. Witnesses had claimed that he had bragged
about the murders. His lawyers didn't dispute his presence at the murder scene
but named Rhodes the killer.
Before Rhodes' trial could start in January of 2003, he confessed to killing
Whitehead and Brosz alone -- without implicating Woods. In a plea deal, he was
sentenced to life, not death.
For years Woods has tried to overturn his sentence -- unsuccessfully. Texas law
is against him: Even if he had never pulled the trigger or swung the knives,
he'd still be as guilty as the killer by his mere presence. In Texas that's
called the Law of Parties.
The Polunsky Unit where Woods has been kept since is infamous for its terrible
conditions. In 2004, dozens of death-row inmates went on hunger strike to
protest their treatment, Woods among them.
'They're Killing the Wrong Person'
The courts weren't impressed. Even a broad coalition of activists for the
abolition of the death penalty fighting for Woods hasn't been able to achieve
anything. One of them is the Los Angeles student Tali Kaluski, 25. She learned
about the case when she was asked to design and print t-shirts for Woods
supporters. Woods thanked her in a letter. She visited him in jail in January.
"They're killing the wrong person," says Kaluski. "He's such a shy, quiet
person." She says that Woods told her that he was in the car with Rhodes but
had no idea then what he had planned. "How can a killer get life and Steven
death?" she asks.
By now, the Office of Capital Writs (OCW), a state agency that represents
death-row inmates in post-conviction habeas corpus and related proceedings, is
working on the Woods case, too. OCW lead attorney Brad Levenson has filed
another petition with the Supreme Court to review the verdict. On 44 pages he
lists what went wrong during the trial and after. Woods' original lawyers had
been "ineffective," the jury "prejudiced," the petition claims.
Insiders have little hope, as time is running out. "The concept of clemency in
this red neck, peckerwood state is a hollow illusion, existing only for the
sake of providing the appearance of due process," says one lawyer involved, who
refuses to disclose his name for fear of angering the courts. "If history is
any guide, I fear that Mr. Woods' case will be denied without a second
thought."
Even the US media have shown little interest. Capital punishment is no longer a
hot-button issue here. "The public is a lot more ambivalent than they had been,
say 15 years ago," Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty
Information Center, which opposes capital punishment, told the Website
Politico. "They see it as a grayer issue now."
Woods' execution is set for Tuesday, 6 p.m. local time. Tali Kaluski, who now
calls herself Woods' "fiancee," is already in Livingston, at least to be closer
to him in the final days.
(source: Der Spiegel)
******************
Where's justice in the execution process?
Dr. Death. It was a fitting nickname for the tall gentleman with a spectral
complexion who haunted the corridors of the Dallas County Courthouse in the
1980s.
Summoned by prosecutors to testify in more than 100 capital murder cases, Dr.
James Grigson delivered his diagnosis with creepy Marcus Welby-ish solemnity.
Sometimes without having met a defendant, he'd confirm what prosecutors needed
jurors to hear - that the miscreant posed a continuing threat to society.
He checked an important box for prosecutors who, under Texas' death penalty
law, had to prove to juries that the "future dangerousness" of a defendant
warranted execution. Without his testimony, the cases would have been
run-of-the-mill murders with ordinary prison sentences.
That he made a career of such testimony would ultimately earn him a
denunciation by the American Psychiatric Association. His reputation was
further sullied when his pronouncements turned out to be dead wrong.
Consider Randall Dale Adams, who once came within three days of execution for a
murder he did not commit. At his 1977 trial for the shooting death of a Dallas
police officer, Grigson declared Adams possessed a "sociopathic personality
disorder" that would surely drive him to kill again. The subject of the
acclaimed documentary The Thin Blue Line, Adams would later be exonerated.
Yet testimony about the "future dangerousness" of death penalty defendants
still keeps the gears of Texas' execution machine turning. This week,
Houstonian Duane Buck is scheduled for execution, partly based on testimony by
Conroe psychologist Dr. Walter Quijano.
The race factor
Ironically, Quijano was called to the witness stand by defense attorneys for
Buck. Though he was found guilty of a deadly shooting rampage, his attorneys
hoped to prove the tragedy, in which Buck's estranged girlfriend and another
man were killed, was an act of rage not likely to be repeated.
But under cross-examination, Quijano acknowledged to prosecutors that certain
factors are associated with violent crime. For instance, the prosecutor asked,
"The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various
complicated reasons; is that correct?"
"Yes," Quijano replied.
The jury concluded that Buck, a black man, would continue to be violent, and
sentenced him to death.
Quijano gave similar testimony in six other cases, which, along with Buck's,
were all red-flagged in 2000 by then-Attorney General John Cornyn. Rather than
defend the cases on appeal, an appalled Cornyn conceded error, clearing the way
for new trials for 6 of the 7.
Seeking clemency
Not for Buck, whose attorneys waited two and a half years to raise the issue.
By then, Attorney General Greg Abbott had replaced Cornyn, and the state had
decided that Buck's case differed from others tainted by the race issue.
For one thing, the defense attorneys, not the prosecutors, put Quijano on the
stand. For another, evidence suggested that Buck had been violent with another
girlfriend. For those reasons, on Friday, Abbott opposed Buck's request for a
stay of execution in a Houston federal court. The court agreed with Abbott, and
denied the stay.
Last week, Buck's appellate attorneys filed a motion for clemency with the
Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which could recommend that Gov. Rick Perry
commute Buck's sentence to life without parole.
The case exposes structural flaws in our death penalty law. Testimony involving
"junk science" regarding arson has been allowed, as demonstrated in the Cameron
Todd Willingham case. There is mounting evidence that eyewitness testimony is
unreliable.
As a young reporter, I watched a tearful widow identify a Dallas woman, Joyce
Ann Brown, as her husband's shooter, guaranteeing a death verdict. Brown was
later exonerated, but she spent her daughter's childhood behind bars. I also
pity the widow, who surely did not intentionally compound the tragedy of her
husband's death by ruining Brown's life.
Applause for deaths
During Wednesday's presidential debate, NBC anchorman Brian Williams prefaced a
question by noting that as governor, Perry had overseen 234 executions. The
audience erupted in applause. Williams forged on: "Have you struggled to sleep
at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?"
"No, sir," said Perry. In Texas, he assured Williams, the process precludes
mistakes.
He's wrong. Human frailty - on the part of prosecutors, judges, jurors, police
officers, victims, defense attorneys - courses through our criminal justice
system. According to the Innocence Project, 273 Americans have been exonerated
since the advent of DNA testing, and 166 of them were African-American.
Shouldn't those statistics trigger a little insomnia?
Yet Texas continues to outpace the nation in executions, with 473 since the law
was reinstated in 1976; Virginia is the closest next state at a mere 109. The
state of Texas soon may execute Duane Buck because 12 human beings, vested with
all the flaws that implies, decided he was beyond redemption. A real leader
would turn his back on the campaign trail lynch mob and call a moratorium on
executions based on such shaky ground.
(source: Commentary, Patricia Hart, Houston Chronicle)
***************************
Hate in the wake of 9/11
Mark Stroman thought he was a patriot when he walked into a gas station in
Mesquite, Texas, just outside Dallas, and fired a .44-calibre round into the
chest of man with a brown face who appeared to be from the Middle East.
“God bless America,” he said.
It was weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and Stroman was on a
rampage. During three separate attacks, he killed two men and severely maimed
another by shooting him in the face. He didn’t take any money — his motive was
to avenge the killings in New York, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa. He
later described his victims as “perched behind the counter here in the Land of
Milk and Honey .?.?. this foreigner [whose] own people had now sought to bring
the exact same chaos and bewilderment upon our people and society.”
This weekend, the nation is pausing to remember the men, women and children who
were killed senselessly a decade go — lives snuffed out too soon by hate.
Let’s also remember the names of men such as Vasudev Patel, who was behind that
gas station counter the day Stroman took his life.
Stroman assumed that Patel was Muslim and therefore deserved to die for the
atrocities at the Pentagon, Ground Zero and Shanksville.
Patel, a 49-year-old immigrant from India, had a family. I visited Patel’s
family a year after his death and here’s what I found: his wife, Alka Patel,
behind the counter of their station selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. Her
teenage son was crowded under the counter at her feet, doing his homework. The
sadness and sense of loss was palpable. For her, her loss was directly linked
to those killed at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on those
hijacked jetliners.
“If it wasn’t for September 11, my husband would still be here,” Alka Patel
told me at the time. “Why shouldn’t our families be treated the same? I feel
like we all have the same story.”
Her sentiment is one that I have heard over and over again from Muslims — and
those mistaken for “looking” Muslim — throughout the country over the past
decade. They scream silently: It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Please don’t look
at me that way. Please, don’t hurt my family.
Since Sept. 11, as the country sought to crack down on terrorism, people like
Anya Cordell have ramped up their efforts to remind the people of the nation
not to take out their frustrations on innocent Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Arabs,
South Asians and others. Patel’s killing was one of more than 80 hate crimes
against people who became targets after the terrorist attacks that authorities
prosecuted in the year after the terrorist attacks.
Cordell, of suburban Chicago, said the negativity is not subsiding. “If
anything, it’s increased and become more a part of the air we breathe,” said
Cordell, who was in Washington recently to speak on the topic.
In 2010, she received the Spirit of Anne Frank Outstanding Citizen Award from
the Anne Frank Center for her work. One particularly heartbreaking story that
she shares is of speaking at a high school and being approached by a boy who
whispered: Thank you so much for your program. I am Muslim, but nobody here
knows.
“The reason that Anne Frank survived is because of the non-Jewish friends who
supported her family in hiding,’’ said Cordell, who is Jewish. “We have got to
build alliances with one another. So many lives have been ruined in so many
ways — the teasing, the bullying, the name calling. Every single time you
mention Muslims in a newspaper article, some of the comments are genocidal.
Many of them flagrantly say ban all Muslims or kill all Muslims.”
After his arrest, Stroman was unrepentant, even boastful. He wrote hatefully
from prison as he sat on death row. He was proud of what he had done for his
country.
But as Stroman’s execution date neared in July, he was shocked into a new
reality when his only surviving victim went to great lengths to have his life
spared. Perhaps, he was just remorseful as he was staring eternity in the face.
Or perhaps, his heart had truly changed.
“I was an uneducated idiot back then, and now I’m a more understanding human
being,” Stroman said in an interview with a BBC reporter who visited him on
death row. “At that time here in America everybody was saying ‘let’s get them’
— we didn’t know who to get, we were just stereotyping. I stereotyped all
Muslims as terrorists and that was wrong.”
Stroman said he was grateful for those who sought to have his life spared and
hoped that the nation would not create another person who believed what he once
did. On July 20, almost a decade after his crime, Stroman was killed by lethal
injection. “Hate is going on in this world, and it has to stop,” Stroman said.
“Hate causes a lifetime of pain.”
His victims can attest to that.
(source: Washington Post)
_______________________________________________
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A free service of WashLaw
http://washlaw.edu
(785)670.1088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
