August 15
TEXAS:
Texas Weighs Its Life or Death Decisions
The execution of a schizophrenic man helps build support for a new
sentencing option in capital cases: life without parole.
Kelsey Patterson was babbling again, this time about somebody taking his
money, just as the state of Texas was about to take his life.
To most in the execution chamber that May night, Patterson's last words
sounded like those of a madman. To J. Gary Hart, his lawyer of 7 years,
they merely matched the rest of his delusions - that he had been
programmed by remote control, that the beans on his plate were talking to
him, that his own lawyers were trying to kill him.
"None of it was new to me," Hart said. "That's what was so disturbing."
Prodded in part by what some saw as the troubling execution of Patterson,
a schizophrenic who killed two people, Texas has in recent months begun
considering ways to fine-tune the application of the death penalty - an
unusual step for the state that executes the most inmates in the nation.
Although many states have inched away from capital punishment in recent
years, Texas executes an inmate every 12 1/2 days, on average. The state
is responsible for about a third of the nation's executions.
But some officials here who favor capital punishment - sheriffs, judges,
prosecutors and state legislators - are calling for a more measured
approach. They want to give juries the option of sentencing defendants to
life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Texas juries currently have 2 options when a defendant is convicted in
capital murder cases: life in prison with the possibility of parole after
40 years and death by lethal injection. Texas is one of three states that
applies the death penalty but does not allow juries to sentence a
defendant to life in prison without parole.
"Texas is Texas," said state Sen. Eddie Lucio of Brownsville, a Democrat
who supports the death penalty. "We used to hang horse thieves, and hang
'em high - make a public display of it. That has carried over, and we have
established a type of reputation. But we have a golden opportunity to show
the rest of the country that we are a compassionate state."
Lucio said he planned to introduce a bill this fall that would give juries
the option of sentencing defendants to life in prison without parole. A
spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry said he believed that the proposal
deserved consideration and could be a way to "improve the criminal justice
system."
Similar plans have been floated unsuccessfully in Texas in past years. But
Patterson's execution has led to new support for the proposal.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had voted 5-1 to recommend to Perry
that the state commute Patterson's sentence to life in prison.
Hart had argued that executing Patterson, considering his mental
deficiencies, would not "serve either the retributive or deterrence goals
of capital punishment."
The board sent its recommendation to Perry, who decided against
commutation less than an hour before Patterson was scheduled to die. Perry
feared that because Texas did not offer a life-without-parole option,
Patterson could one day be paroled.
Some prosecutors have protested the proposed sentencing measure, saying
they would be less likely to secure a death penalty. But most say they
sense that the public would like to see the change made.
"It is my thought that the public wants to have that option," said
Anderson County Dist. Atty. Doug Lowe. "I think it's something that will
happen."
Residents of Huntsville, a city between Houston and Dallas that is home to
Texas' execution chamber, are conflicted about the proposal.
On a recent afternoon, Randy W. Cooper, 52, a taxi driver, and Eddie
Marsh, 62, owner of a uniform business, wiled away the time chatting on a
town square bench. Huntsville is a city peppered with pawnshops, churches
and mobile home parks, home to seven prison units and Sam Houston State
University. When school is in session, about half the town's residents are
either university students or inmates.
Cooper feared that crime rates would soar if any effort was made to revise
the death penalty and said suggestions that innocent people may be on
death row didn't bother him.
"For every guy that didn't do it, there are 1,000 who did," he said. "Most
of them are just animals. Anybody that doesn't like the death penalty,
tell them to walk through death row and open all the doors and let them
all out. I think they'd change their mind."
Marsh, however, said Texas was ready for a more moderate approach to
capital punishment.
"The numbers are just horrible," he said. "We've got a stigma because of
that."
Texas isn't planning anything dramatic, such as following Illinois'
decision to commute the sentences of death row inmates last year after
determining that the capital punishment system was flawed, including a
disproportionate number of executions among minorities and the poor.
Support for executions remains strong in Texas, a state where political
candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, routinely campaign by
pledging that they have more zeal for the death penalty than their
opponent.
Former Gov. Ann Richards, for instance, a Democrat who was vigilant in
protecting a tough-on-crime image, repeatedly rejected clemency petitions
from women who had killed their abusive husbands. George W. Bush, while
campaigning for Texas governor in 1994, still criticized Richards for
failing to execute people quickly enough. More than 150 people were
executed during Bush's 5-year tenure as governor.
But there is evidence that the state's attitude toward the death penalty
is changing.
After rejecting every clemency petition that came its way for nearly five
years, the Texas parole board has recommended that the sentences of three
inmates on death row be commuted to life prison terms. Perry accepted one
recommendation, rejected another and is weighing the 3rd.
Increased scrutiny has been placed on executions of people with low IQs.
Last month, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that a jury
was not permitted to give adequate weight to evidence that a murder
suspect was mentally retarded. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor scolded
appellate judges for failing to give "careful enough review to these
cases."
Robert Tennard, 41, has been on death row since 1986, when he was
convicted in a killing in Houston.
Tennard's parole officer, the only witness called in his defense at trial,
testified that Tennard had an IQ of 67, 3 points below the threshold for
what is considered mentally retarded.
The Supreme Court has outlawed executing the mentally retarded, calling it
cruel and unusual punishment, and jurors in Texas are now allowed to give
more weight to a person's mental capacity. Tennard is one of 456 people on
death row in Texas.
And in Plainview, a prosecutor who won a death sentence, the sheriff who
investigated the case and a judge banded together recently to petition
Perry to commute the sentence. In June, a federal judge threw out the
death sentence and sent the case back to the state, and last week the man
was sentenced to life in prison instead.
Joe Lee Guy, 43, was convicted of acting as a lookout during the shooting
death of a storeowner in a 1993 robbery. He had received a death sentence,
while the 2 men who went into the store during the robbery received life
prison terms.
Guy's court-appointed attorney has acknowledged drug and alcohol abuse;
his former secretary testified that he had snorted cocaine on the way to
the trial.
An investigator hired to find witnesses who would ask jurors to spare
Guy's life produced none, though Guy had stumbled through a childhood of
abuse and poverty. The investigator instead befriended the mother of the
victim. The mother declared the investigator the sole beneficiary of her
will, and the investigator helped her prepare to testify against Guy.
"The facts of this case are unprecedented," the prosecutor, sheriff and
judge wrote to Perry, "and have made clear to us that Guy's death sentence
should not stand."
(source: Los Angeles Times)
***********************
Judging the value of life
Houston attorney Jim Marcus is used to losing. As executive director of
Texas Defender Service, he regularly goes to bat for clients on death row.
But this week, Marcus should buy a Mega Millions ticket. The odds are
better than the case he's taken.
Marcus on Tuesday filed before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles a
24-page application for a commutation of a death sentence so quixotic that
he invites board members to quit reading on Page 3.
Marcus doesn't argue that his client, James Allridge, didn't get a fair
trial, nor that he is insane or mentally retarded.
He argues simply that he's rehabilitated. He's not the same young man who
in 1985, under the influence of his violent older brother, wantonly shot
and killed a convenience store clerk who was tied up in a back room.
'Probably saved lives'
In the application, Marcus and another attorney ask Pardons and Paroles
Board members if the criminal justice system is served by executing a
person who committed a terrible crime but who for years has been a
positive influence among prison inmates.
"If the answer to that question in Texas is 'yes,' you need read no
further."
Marcus doesn't ask board members to accept Allridge's redemption on faith.
He presents the testimony of inmates and of guards that Allridge has not
only been a model inmate but one who inspires good behavior in others.
One inmate asserts that in 1995 Allridge's brother planned to cause mayhem
when guards came to take him for execution. Allridge was asked to calm his
brother and "talked him into just laying down so the officers could
handcuff him and take him to be executed."
A former death row guard, Jacoby Garmon, wrote of Allridge's example and
counselling of other inmates and concluded, "James probably saved a lot of
correctional officers' lives and they didn't even know it, just by calming
the situation."
There's more, including statements from 4 jurors who sentenced Allridge
supporting commutation.
Falwell's failure
But all this comes after the question on Page 3. Does rehabilitation
matter in Texas?
The answer so far is no. No governor in modern times has commuted a death
sentence because the convict was rehabilitated.
Then-Gov. George W. Bush in 1998 denied clemency to Karla Faye Tucker
despite widespread appeals, including this from evangelist Jerry Falwell,
a strong supporter of the death penalty, spoken in a television discussion
minutes before her execution:
"But as far as I am concerned, I think there has to be room for selective
mercy, or there's no hope for anyone. If God dealt with us all that way,
we'd all be in real trouble. And I believe in the case of Karla Faye
Tucker, her own conversion, and I think the genuineness of it, that to me,
is so very clear, and the opportunity she would have to minister to young
offenders."
Minutes later, Bush said in a brief statement, "Like many touched by this
case, I have sought guidance through prayer. I have concluded judgments
about the heart and soul of an individual on death row are best left to a
higher authority."
Bush and Gov. Rick Perry after him have held that they have little role
once the courts have decided the issue. Perry said as much in rejecting a
recent 5-1 vote by the Pardons and Paroles Board recommending clemency for
a man whose behavior on death row showed him to be insane.
Lawyer Marcus argues that the tradition of having commutations and pardons
by governors and presidents is "an admission that the judicial system
can't account for every circumstance that might arise."
He raises one more issue: In Texas, the death penalty requires a finding
by a jury that the defendant represents a future danger to society. But a
long tenure as a model and, by all accounts, peaceful prisoner suggests
the jury was wrong.
When I told a criminal district judge about this case, she asked how long
he has been on death row.
"17 years," I said.
"There's the problem," she replied.
If he had been executed earlier, we wouldn't have the problem that he's no
longer a danger.
(source: Houston Chronicle)
*****************
Art man of Polunsky prison in final fight to be spared death row
James Allridge is an unusual sort of artist. His work has been exhibited
in New York, Washington and Switzerland, and yet he has never been present
for one of his own openings. He has a lively correspondence with dozens of
friends around the world, including the Hollywood actress Susan Sarandon,
but he never visits them and they hardly ever come to see him.
The reason? He is a prisoner on Texas's death row, who faces execution by
lethal injection later this month unless he can convince the state's
notoriously reluctant Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend commuting
his sentence. Allridge's many friends argue that he is a model prisoner,
who has been completely rehabilitated following the brutal murder he
committed at a Forth Worth convenience store in 1985.
Four of the jurors at his original trial agree, as do a number of the
prison guards who have watched over him. They say that he is such a
calming influence at the Polunsky Unit in Livington, where Texas's death
row inmates are housed, that he has almost certainly saved lives.
The question is, will this be enough in the state that carries out more
executions than any other place in the Western world? "Executing people
like James sends a message that there is no point rehabilitating people
and turning them into positive members of the prison community," says his
lawyer, Jim Marcus of the Texas Defender Service.
This is an unusual case in every respect. Prison in the United States -
with its notorious culture of systemised rape, terrifying spasms of
physical violence, endemic racism and drug use - can turn the gentlest of
creatures into either a monster or a psychic wreck. Allridge, by contrast,
has a strikingly clean record. The last time he was written up for failing
to obey prison staff was 15 years ago. He had 2 fights in his 1st 2 years
inside, and in both cases he was written up as the victim, not the
instigator. "He has spent his time focused on trying to better himself,"
Mr Marcus said. "He enrolled in educational classes, did his artwork and
produced newsletters. More recently, he has also worked as a counsellor to
younger death row inmates."
And one of his guards, Jacoby Garmon, wrote in an affidavit to the parole
board: "I would consider James a role model prisoner. [He] probably saved
a lot of correctional officers' lives and they didn't even know it, just
by calming the situation."
Not everyone supports the commutation, starting with the family of the
victim, Brian Clendennen, who was 21 when Allridge shot him dead in a
robbery that netted $300 (#163). The jury at Allridge's trial was never
asked, however, whether they thought he deserved to die. Instead, they
were asked whether they felt he could pose a future danger to others - a
prerequisite for the death penalty in Texas.
His lawyers and friends argue that the crime was committed under the
influence of his brother Ronald, who was executed in 1995, and that all
indications now suggest he would never do such a thing again. Susan
Sarandon, who has corresponded with him for 7 years, quietly slipped in to
see him last week to offer her support.
Allridge's art is very far from the usual prison-house themes of
incarceration and social injustice. He specialises in detailed drawings of
flowers in bright colours and other images clearly inspired by life on the
outside.
The clemency petition, filed last week, offers the Texas authorities two
choices: commutation to life imprisonment, or a six-month postponement of
the execution. The point of the latter is that the Texas legislature is
due to meet in January and is considering cleaning up some of the more
egregious aspects of the state's system of capital punishment. One of the
reforms could be to force the Board of Pardons and Paroles to hold formal
hearings, rather than reaching their conclusions by sending faxes to each
other from their homes.
(source: The Independent)
