Execution debate doesn’t slow Texas

As courts consider death penalty questions, other states stopping

05/19/2002

By ED TIMMS / The Dallas Morning News

Texas’ bigger-than-life ethos is sometimes more brag than fact, but one 
distinction is apparent: No other state has executed more inmates this year.

http://www.dallasnews.com/texassouthwest/stories/051902dntexdeathpenalty.65473.html

So far, 28 offenders have been put to death nationwide, 12 in Texas. And 
Texas accounts for all but two of the 15 executions scheduled in the United 
States through mid-September.

Because of legal complications and angst over how the death penalty is 
administered, several other states that until recently executed offenders 
have stopped – at least for the present.

Several factors contribute to Texas’ sobering record.

Those include a political climate in which the penalty is not a liability, 
as well as state and federal appeals courts that are not hostile to the 
death penalty.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry repeatedly has voiced his support for the death 
penalty, vetoed a bill last year that would have barred the execution of 
mentally retarded offenders and opposes a moratorium on executions.

Such sentiments are not uncommon among political leaders in the states where 
most executions are carried out.

“You have a lot of states outside the South with very large death row 
populations and no executions,” said University of Texas law professor 
Jordan Steiker, an authority on capital punishment who once served as a law 
clerk law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. “Outside the 
South and the border states, there simply hasn’t been the same political 
will.”

Some critics claim that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s 
highest criminal court, repeatedly has turned a blind eye to serious 
shortcomings in how capital cases are tried. Similar charges are leveled 
against the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which also reviews Texas 
death penalty cases.

“We have a politicized, partisan judicial system,” said Steve Hall, director 
of the StandDown Texas Project, which is seeking a death penalty moratorium.

Juries continue


But even as national and international attention focuses on the Lone Star 
State because of the death penalty, and legal challenges continue, juries in 
Texas, which decide punishment in capital cases, continue to sentence 
defendants to die.
“If people in Texas are really, by and large, disgusted with the fact that 
we have a death penalty, I think you would see far fewer death penalty cases 
handed out,” said Diane Beckham, staff counsel for the Texas District and 
County Attorneys Association.

She said she sees little evidence that Texas legislators are being 
encouraged by their constituents to oppose the death penalty.

Texans who oppose the death penalty, or seek a moratorium so that its 
application can be reviewed, assert that the system under which defendants 
are convicted for capital crimes and sent to death row is profoundly flawed. 
And they suggest that Texans are increasingly concerned about how the death 
penalty is applied.

“No other state carries out executions at such a relentless pace as Texas,” 
said Mr. Hall. “This headlong dash occurs in spite of many controversies 
over police and prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate standards of legal 
representation, dubious testimony by so-called experts, an appeals court 
that puts a seal of approval on sleeping lawyers, and a clemency process 
that simply does not fulfill its historic responsibility.”

What some have described as isolated incidents, Mr. Hall said, represent 
systemic problems.

Roe Wilson, chief of post-conviction writs for the Harris County district 
attorney’s office, said that Texas’ death penalty statute has been examined 
repeatedly by higher courts and has withstood the scrutiny.

“Anyone who is executing the death penalty, putting it into place and 
carrying it through like we do in Texas … then you’ve got a vested 
interest in doing it the right way and making sure that the law is as tight 
and well-defined as you possibly can,” Ms. Wilson said.

Litigation avoided


Mr. Steiker said that by defining what qualifies as a capital murder 
narrowly at the guilt-innocence stage of trial, Texas has avoided much of 
the litigation in other states, as has having juries sentence the defendants 
in capital cases. Still, some Texas executions have been held up, as courts 
consider the merits of appeals. Whether that’s part of a cycle, is a fluke, 
or reflects a broader hesitation about the death penalty, is open to 
speculation.
Last-minute reprieves this month postponed the executions of two Texas death 
row inmates, Curtis Lee Moore and Brian Edward Davis, after the U.S. Supreme 
Court received petitions alleging that they were mentally retarded.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals intervened and delayed the execution 
of Smith County death row inmate Henry Dunn last week; in that case, 
questions were raised about the competence of Mr. Dunn’s appellate counsel.

And in February, the Supreme Court also agreed to hear the case of Thomas 
Miller-El, who was sentenced to death in 1986 for the murder of an Irving 
hotel clerk during a robbery. Mr. Miller-El’s attorneys claimed that 
potential jurors were excluded from his trial because of their race.

Supreme Court cases


Two cases before the Supreme Court, neither from Texas, could have a 
significant impact on the death penalty in America.
One case, Atkins vs. Virginia, resulted in reprieves for Mr. Moore and Mr. 
Davis. It examines whether executing mentally retarded offenders is cruel 
and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment of the 
U.S. Constitution. The court is expected to rule in the Atkins case this 
summer.

More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Texas 
death row inmate Johnny Paul Penry, ruling that instructions to his jury did 
not allow proper consideration of mitigating evidence, such as his mental 
retardation. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the majority opinion that, 
at that time, there was not sufficient evidence of a “national consensus 
against executing the retarded.”

Mr. Penry was convicted in a subsequent trial, but his death sentence was 
overturned by the Supreme Court last year. A new punishment hearing is under 
way.

Mr. Steiker theorized that if the Supreme Court decides in the Atkins case 
“that there is now an emerging, prevailing consensus against executing 
people with mental retardation,” that would suggest that the way the court 
gauges “societal consensus” is shifting.

Such a shift, he said, could have ramifications for other death row inmates. 
For example, he said, the Supreme Court justices might find that executing 
offenders who were under the age of 18 at the time of the offense is 
unconstitutional, or they might revisit the issue of executing offenders who 
were not directly responsible for a capital murder, so-called 
“non-triggermen.”

‘Up to the states’


Richard Dieter, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty 
Information Center, said that if the Supreme Court decides to bar the 
execution of the mentally retarded, the justices “may not lay down neatly 
what mental retardation is, and leave it up to the states and courts to 
figure this out.”
And that, he said, is likely to set off considerable debate and legal 
wrangling.

Harris County prosecutors, for example, assert that Mr. Davis, convicted for 
the 1991 stabbing death of Michael Alan Foster in Humble, is not mentally 
retarded – and that claim was first raised in legal petitions on the day he 
was to be executed.

His attorneys point to Mr. Davis’ long history of difficulties in coping 
with day-to-day life, placement in special education classes while in 
school, and a test that placed his IQ at 74 – four points above 70, one 
benchmark for retardation, but within the margin of error.

The Supreme Court also could decide that the execution of the mentally 
retarded does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. If that occurs, 
inmates who were granted reprieves because of Atkins could be facing 
execution again in the near future.

Sentencing by judge


In the second case, Ring vs. Arizona, Supreme Court justices will examine 
the constitutionality of death sentences being handed down by a judge rather 
than a jury.
The case does not directly affect cases in Texas, where juries in capital 
cases decide punishment. But the Ring case has contributed to Texas’ 
dominance of death row statistics in 2002: Pending a ruling by the Supreme 
Court, several states in which judges assess the death penalty are not 
executing offenders.

Ms. Wilson, the Harris County prosecutor, predicts that frequency of 
executions in Texas will increase.

Death penalty reforms in 1995, she said, which restructured the appeals 
process, resulted in “a tremendous number of cases in the federal system.”

“We had a huge glut of cases that arrived … about the same time,” she 
said. “And now they’re starting to come out.”