Dec. 9
TEXAS: With 30 years on death row, Texas dean set to die next month Condemned Texas prisoner Ronald Chambers describes himself as "loaded with patience." Now in his fourth decade behind bars, Chambers' patience hasn't wavered, but time finally may be running out for Texas' longest-serving death row prisoner. It's been nearly 11,300 days since Chambers arrived on death row in the nation's most active capital punishment state, where 380 of his fellow prisoners have been executed. He's set to join them next month. "I knew it was coming," Chambers, 51, said of the letter he recently received notifying him of his Jan. 25 execution date. "No rich folks here. I'm not mad at that. But again, if I had the money, I wouldn't be here." Chambers' longevity gets him the designation "Old School" by younger inmates. "Patience is the key, to be here as long as I have," Chambers told The Associated Press in a recent death row interview. "They give you space better than they would for somebody their age. I don't know if it's respect. I call it space." The encounters with other inmates are infrequent since death row inmates are kept isolated and get only one hour of recreation time daily outside their cell - alone - in a small concrete enclosure. Chambers recently received a visit from his daughter, who brought her infant son to see his grandfather for the first time. It was a rare meeting with a relative, he said. "There ain't nobody that owes me nothing," he said. "Always nice to see people, but then again at the same time, I've been gone a long time." Chambers arrived on death row Jan. 8, 1976, three days before his 21st birthday. "By now, I thought it would be one way or another," he said. "I was looking for it to be executed or to get a life sentence." Chambers, who grew up in the Dallas public housing projects, worked as a house painter and was a new father when he joined Clarence Ray Williams in the robbery, abduction and killing of one college student and the beating of another. A Dallas county jury convicted him. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Chambers' conviction 8 years later. It ruled a state-appointed psychiatrist who questioned him failed to warn Chambers his responses would be used against him. He was retried in 1985 and convicted again. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out that conviction four years later, ruling that prosecutors improperly excluded three black people from his jury. Chambers is black. He was tried for a third time in 1992, convicted and sentenced again to die. A life term, under sentencing rules of that era, would have made him eligible for parole in about 12 years, Chambers said. But prosecutors never offered him a deal. And he never considered giving up appeals and volunteering to die. "Don't know the definition, man," he said. "Ain't going to give up." Williams, also from Dallas, pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery and murder, accepted 2 life sentences and remains in prison. Gerald Ford had been president less than a year and George W. Bush was in business school at Harvard when Chambers and Williams on April 11, 1975, carjacked Mike McMahan, 22, a mechanical engineering student at Texas Tech, and Deia Sutton, a University of Texas at Arlington student. If Chambers' patience remains firm, it's long been exhausted for McMahan's parents, now in their 80s. "It has been horrible," Bennie McMahan, of Kennewick, Wash.,said. "No matter what they do, it's not going to bring our son back." McMahan and her husband, Mabry, attended Chambers' trials. Now, given their age, they don't plan to trek to Texas to witness Chambers' lethal injection. "We can't understand why this has been put off this long," she said. Mike McMahan and Sutton had been with friends at a Dallas club. On their way out, they were confronted at gunpoint by Chambers and Williams, who forced their way into their car. Williams drove to a levee on the Trinity River south of downtown Dallas where the captors pushed the couple down an embankment. Chambers ordered them to stop near the bottom, then fired 5 shots at them. As Chambers and Williams walked back up the hill, McMahan called to Sutton to see if she was OK. "Deia doesn't respond," Dan Hagood, the lead prosecutor at Chambers' 1992 trial, recalled. "She wants him to be quiet. Mike says something louder. "That's when the killers heard him." The gunmen returned. Chambers pummeled McMahan in the back of the head 10 to 20 times with a shotgun as Williams choked Sutton and tried to drown her in the muddy water. Chambers also pounded her 3 times with the shotgun. Then they left. Sutton would tell police she counted 15 times to 60 before moving, saw McMahan dead nearby, then managed to walk a half-mile to a hotel to summon police. McMahan's burned-out car was found in Calvert, nearly 150 miles to the south, after Williams had tried to sell it in Houston. Chambers, according to testimony at his first trial, wiped blood from money stolen from the victims and divided it, then played a game of dominoes before going to sleep. Within days, both Chambers and Williams were under arrest. Sutton testified at each of Chambers' trials. "I am probably much better off than most, but only because my faith in God and family get me through the rough times and nightmares," Sutton said last week. "The mind is powerful and it replays the attack, the killing, the fear over and over at the most inopportune times." Chambers' attorneys are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to postpone his execution until justices rule on another Texas capital case, set for arguments early next year, that raises questions about whether jurors properly were instructed to consider mitigating factors when deciding death sentences for some convicted killers. "He's right in there in the mix of them," James Volberding, Chambers' lawyer, said. Another minor issue in the appeal is that Chambers "has been on death row too long to be executed." Volberding said. "Frankly, there's not a whole lot else we can argue," he said. ***************** Death Row numbers for longest-serving inmate Name: Ronald Curtis Chambers 1-11-1955: Date of birth 20: Age at time of slaying. 22: Age of murder victim Mike McMahan 26: Dollars taken from purse of McMahan's date, Deia Sutton 3: Capital murder trials for Chambers. 15: Minutes for jury at trial No. 1 to convict. 2: Hours for jury at trial No. 2 to convict. 45: Minutes for jury at trial No. 3 to convict. 1-8-1976: Date Chambers arrived on death row. 000539: Chambers' inmate number on death row 11,340: Days on death row if executed Jan. 25. (31 years, 17 days). 8,982: Days on death row for Excell White, previous longest-serving Texas inmate, executed in 1999. 61.58: Daily cost, in dollars, to house a Texas death row inmate (as of 2002). 380: Texas inmates executed since capital punishment resumed in 1982. 86.08: Cost, in dollars, for lethal injection chemicals. (source for both: Associated Press) ******************* Convicted murderer's appeal rejected Ironically, on the same day the Angelina County District Attorney's Office reached a plea agreement with a Pollok man who was facing a death penalty trial in January, it received a state appellate court's ruling which rejected a convicted capital murderer's death row appeal. David Lee Lewis, a twice-convicted capital murderer who was sentenced to death in 1986 and again in 1993, is appealing his case on claims that he is mentally retarded. The Texas Criminal Appeals Court struck down Lewis' appeal on Wednesday, upholding former Judge David Wilson's findings and conclusions of the appeal in September. "Based upon the trial court's findings and conclusions and our own review, the relief sought is denied," stated a court order handed down by the Criminal Court of Appeals. Lewis received 2 convictions and death sentences for the Nov. 30, 1986, murder of Myrtle Ruby, 74. He shot her to death with a .22-caliber rifle as she confronted him in her Lufkin home during a robbery, Angelina County District Attorney Clyde Herrington said at a hearing on the case in June. Lewis was a 39-year-old carpenter with an eighth-grade education when he surprised Ruby who was returning home from church choir practice, according to a Northern Illinois University Web site study on the death penalty. In June, Lee's attorneys argued he was retarded, making the enforcement of a death sentence against him illegal based on the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision abolishing the execution of the mentally disabled as cruel and unusual punishment. The court of appeals in 2004 overturned the Lufkin capital murder case against Willie Mac Modden on the basis of mental retardation. Modden, who died in prison in April, was twice sentenced to die in 1984 and 1992 for stabbing 27-year-old gas station attendant Deborah Ann Fontenot Davenport. (source: Lufkin Daily News) ****************** 9, 2006 Trucker's trial delay extended----Judge declares recess until Jan. 2 in penalty phase of smuggling case An ailing defense attorney and a looming holiday led a federal judge to delay until next year the penalty phase in the trial of Tyrone Williams, who faces the death penalty. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal delayed the trial until Jan. 2 after the lead prosecutor expressed fears that jurors would feel pressure to reach a verdict before the holiday recess. Williams, 36, a legal Jamaican immigrant from Schnectady, N.Y., was convicted Monday on 58 smuggling counts, 20 carrying the death penalty. The penalty phase began Wednesday as prosecutors told jurors that Williams should be put to death for ignoring the pleas of an estimated 100 immigrants who were sealed inside his trailer. 19 died of hyperthermia, suffocation and dehydration. The trial was halted Wednesday after lead defense attorney Craig Washington complained of an unspecified painful condition. Rosenthal met with attorneys Friday to discuss the trial schedule. Defense attorney Oliver Sprott said that Washington was still in pain and had to be helped out of his car Friday, leaving it uncertain whether he would be well enough to appear in court Monday. Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Rodriguez said that even if the trial resumed Monday and testimony was completed Friday of next week, jurors would only have 2 1/2 days to deliberate before the holiday. Rosenthal said holiday plans of the jurors made a recess necessary from Dec. 21 until after the new year. The judge denied a request by the defense to have a special master appointed to determine whether several prosecution witnesses, relatives of the 19 victims, wanted to speak with the defense. Defense attorney Jennifer Carpenter said an intern who spoke Spanish attempted to phone family members in their hotel rooms and spoke to several she encountered in the hotel lobby to determine whether they would speak with defense attorneys. "We had the impression that they were instructed not to talk with us," Carpenter said outside the courtroom. Rodriguez countered that the family members had been asked if they wanted to speak with the defense and all of them said no. He said the defense was notified, but continued its efforts to speak with witnesses. "One witness was very upset," Rodriguez said. Rosenthal said the defense had a right to speak with family members, but only if they consented to an interview. (source: Houston Chronicle) ********************* Aunt recalls night girl was killed The baby was out of diapers, and one of the other children needed a new pair of shoes for the start of school the next day. On an August night more than 20 years ago, sisters Alicia Avila and Rosa Clarke left four of their children sleeping in their north-side home and headed to the store. It was a quick trip, less than an hour. But when the women returned, they walked into a parent's nightmare. Something was wrong with Clarke's daughter, 11-year-old Vanessa Villa. "We took the blanket off because she wasn't lying down correctly on the bed," Avila recalled Friday in Spanish, speaking through an interpreter. "The child was without clothes, naked." Vanessa was nude from the waist down, and her blouse and bra were pushed up over her breasts. Something that looked like semen was on her leg, Avila said. Paramedics tried to revive her, but Vanessa was pronounced dead at a hospital about an hour later. The elementary school student, who worked weekends selling shoes at a flea market, had been raped and strangled. Avila was the first witness to testify Friday on the opening day of testimony in the capital murder trial of Juan Mesa Segundo, 43. At the time of Vanessa's death, Segundo's wife worked at a Lake Worth nursing home with Vanessa's mother and aunt. If convicted of capital murder, Segundo -- who authorities say is linked to but not charged in the slayings of 2 other women -- will face the death penalty. During her opening statement, prosecutor Christy Jack, who is trying Segundo with Alan Levy, outlined the case to the 14-member jury, which includes 2 alternates. "This is a cold case, almost the perfect crime," Jack said. "But the defendant didn't know he left his calling card. It took us 20 years to find it." Jack told the jury that Vanessa's mother, aunt, baby sister and older brother left their humble house on the corner of Kearney Avenue and Northwest 22nd Street about 10 p.m. on Aug. 3, 1986, and went to two nearby stores. While they were away, Jack said, a killer entered the home and raped and strangled Vanessa without waking her 3 cousins in another room. People were interviewed, statements were taken and evidence was collected. But for nearly 2 decades, the case was unsolved. Over the years, Jack said, technology improved, and DNA testing gradually became widespread. Segundo's DNA was entered into a national database in 2000, she said. In 2005, the database linked semen taken from inside Vanessa's body to Segundo's DNA profile, Jack said. There is only a 1-in-a-quadrillion chance that the semen was from somebody else, Jack said. Of all the DNA profiles in the database, Jack told the jury, the one that matched in Vanessa's case was that of a man living in Fort Worth who knew Vanessa's family. He had been to her house several times before and went there for the viewing of Vanessa's body, she said. "It returned to someone who, 20 years ago, signed the guest book at her funeral," Jack said. "The Police Department didn't solve this case. We didn't solve this case. The evidence was there all along. It took science to show us his face." To be sure, the passage of time hasn't been kind to investigators, past and present. Retired crime scene officer R.E. Corder testified that he cannot find his handwritten notes on the case -- a point that prosecutors brought up but defense attorneys didn't let jurors forget. Although defense attorneys Mark Daniel and Wes Ball did not give an opening statement, they thoroughly cross-examined Avila and Corder on Friday. Most notably, they attacked the integrity of the police investigation. Through his questioning of Corder, Ball pointed out that no fingerprints were lifted, including visible ones on a bedroom window the killer may have used to enter the house. He questioned why police didn't collect and test a number of items for fingerprints or other biological evidence, including a bucket under the bedroom window that may have been used as a step to get inside, a fan in front of the window that appeared to have been moved and the mattress on which the rape occurred. Ball also pointed out that a large number of people, both officials and civilians, were at the house after the body was found, and he suggested that the crime scene was contaminated. Corder was still on the stand when court was recessed Friday. The trial is scheduled to resume at 8:45 a.m. Monday in state District Judge Elizabeth Berry's court. (source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
