Another Texas execution is scheduled for today. It will be the 9th execution in the U.S. this year and 8 of them have been in Texas.
Meanwhile last Fall, the Tides Foundation gave out $182,500 to groups around the county trying to stop executions, but it did not give any money to Texas organizations, instead giving $50,000 to an anti-death penalty organization in Wisconsin, which does not even have the death penalty. No wonder Texas executions are continuing at a torid pace. The national leaders of the anti-death penalty movement would rather fight the death penalty where it doesn’t even exist, rather than in Texas.
Call the Governor of Texas and tell him we need a moratorium on executions.
Contact Governor Perry to Protest Each Execution
Office of the Governor Main Switchboard: (512) 463-2000 [office hours are 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. CST]
Office of the Governor Fax: (512) 463-1849
For anyone who wonders about stays on the day of an execution here is a number to call:
TDCJ Public information—1-936-437-1303 —-just ask if the execution is still scheduled.
Condemned prisoner Charles Anthony Nealy says he wasn’t even in Texas on an August evening almost 10 years ago when two men were gunned down during the robbery of a convenience store just south of downtown Dallas.
“It’s not me,” Nealy says of a grainy videotape image from a security camera that shows one man carrying a shotgun and another with a pistol taking money from a cash register and then grabbing a bottle of wine and a couple of six-packs of cold beer. “Two kids — that’s what I see. Possibly teenagers. And I wasn’t one of them.”
A Dallas County jury believed otherwise.
Nealy, who would be 43 later this week, faced lethal injection Tuesday evening in Huntsville for the shooting death of one of the men, store owner Jiten Bhakta, 25.
He’d be the ninth condemned inmate executed this year in the nation’s most active death penalty state. Two more are set to die next week.