From the AP:

Proclaiming his innocence, an unemployed trucker was executed Thursday for the fatal stabbing and robbery of a woman he said had given him food, clothing and money after she spotted him on a street corner holding a cardboard sign offering to work for food.

As he had done for years, Gregory Wright pinned the murder of Donna Vick on John Adams, a fellow homeless man also convicted of murdering Vick and sentenced to die.

“My only act or involvement was not telling on him. John Adams was the one that killed Donna Vick,” Wright said from the death chamber gurney. “… I was in the bathroom when he attacked. I ran into the bedroom. By the time I came in, when I tried to help her with first aid it was too late.”

Wright was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m., nine minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow,

Sign up to receive text alerts on execution days on your cell phone. We just texted our list to urge them to call the governor for Greg Wright. We only use this list to send texts to remind people to call the governor on an execution day. We actually started sending text alerts back in 2003, so we were early adopters.

http://www.upoc.com/group.jsp?group=SXT

http://www.freegregwright.com
http://governor.state.tx.us/contact

# Citizen’s Opinion Hotline [for Texas callers] :
(800) 252-9600
# Information and Referral and Opinion Hotline [for Austin, Texas and out-of-state callers] :
(512) 463-1782

Gregory Edward Wright is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas October 30, 2008. Wright insists he is innocent and his co-defendant has agreed that Wright is innocent.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

“The truth doesn’t matter,” Wright told The Associated Press recently from a visiting cage outside death row, saying he was stunned at the outcome of his 1998 trial in Dallas. “I couldn’t believe what was happening. I’m very upset at a number of different people. I don’t blame the legal system. I blame individuals running the legal system. … I am innocent.”

Adams, who implicated Wright as the killer, earlier this year recanted his statement against Wright. Then at a court hearing last month, he reversed his recantation.

“The co-defendant has been a bit erratic,” Meg Penrose, one of Wright’s lawyers, said Thursday.

She said she understood demands for an execution in the case “but I thought justice demanded we executed the right person.”

“I guess there’s a difference of emphasis,” Penrose said. “I’d rather wait 30 years and make sure we have the proper individual executed than wait 12 and hedge our bets. I don’t like the rush to review that we’re at. A person who is innocent is rushed to the gurney and is executed.”

Governor Rick Perry
Governor of the State of Texas
Office of the Governor
P. O. Box 12428
Austin, TX 78711

Fax: (512) 463-1849

Gregory Edward Wright is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas October 30, 2008 for the murder of Donna Vick on March 21, 1997 in Desoto, Texas. Mr. Wright was one of two defendants sentenced to death in this case in separate trials. A petition for Commutation of his death sentence or in the alternative, a 180 day Reprieve has been submitted by his attorneys.

We are requesting that letters of support be sent to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, asking them to recommend these actions to the Governor, and to the Governor asking him to commute the death sentence to life or to grant a 180 day reprieve.

Some of the issues in Mr. Wright’s case have never been considered on appeal because his State Habeas attorney did virtually no work on his behalf leaving these issues unpreserved and preventing them from being raised in further appeals. This attorney is no longer on the list of attorneys approved to represent capital defendants in their appeals.

The other defendant in this case made confessions to the murder to a number of individuals both before the trial and after conviction. However he has never confessed under oath. One such confession was to an individual working at a 24 hour video story on the evening of the murder. The other defendant then asked him to call 911 for him. Both of them made calls to 911, but the tapes, which might have been helpful to Mr. Wright’s defense, have disappeared.

Mr. Wright’s attorneys were unable to find this witness to interview him, and the prosecutor’s office claimed they did not know his whereabouts. An affidavit by this witness confirms that the prosecutor’s office maintained contact with him prior to the trial.

There was another person to whom the other defendant confessed shortly after the murder while driving the victim’s car that the defense was never aware of until after the trial.

The prosecution made an undisclosed deal with another person who testified against Mr. Wright at his trial, providing information not available from any other source that was very damaging to Mr. Wright such as a cheerful demeanor after the murder. Although this witness testified to actions that would have subjected him to a lengthy prison sentence, he was never charged with a crime. Upon questioning by the defense attorney, both the witness and the prosecutor denied the existence of any deal. However testimony during the trial of the other defendant in the murder confirms the existence of a deal made prior to Mr. Wright’s trial.

A lot of emphasis was placed on the testimony of this witness during both the trial and the punishment phase. Failure to disclose a deal rendered the defense unable to point out the bias of this witness. Not only did the prosecution deny a deal but repeatedly insisted that none existed.

Items related to the crime, papers and clothing, such as jeans containing Mr. Vick’s blood, were found in a shack in Desoto. Although the police and the prosecutor were aware that both men had access to this shack, at trial the information was withheld that paperwork belonging to the other defendant was also present, and access was attributed only to Mr. Wright. In the other defendant’s trial, the shack was described as being shared by both men. There remain questions about the ownership of the jeans, which have questionable DNA inside a pant leg, and DNA testing is ongoing. Further testing is being opposed by the prosecution.

The state presented as their only physical evidence against Mr. Wright a partial bloody fingerprint on a pillowcase lifted by a crime scene officer not trained to handle evidence and who has now been indicted for murder in another case and is currently a fugitive from justice. Members of the Dallas Co. Sheriff’s Office with extensive experience and training in fingerprint identification did not find the print comparable to those of any suspects. A retired print examiner, who had worked in the past with the other examiners, testified to the match to Mr. Wright’s known prints without showing the points of comparison and told the jury they would have to take his word for it. A forensic scientist who recently reviewed the materials found that no scientific comparison could be made on the materials submitted at trial.

In conclusion, Mr. Wright did not have a fair trial. Witnesses were hidden, key evidence was suppressed, and testimony was bought and paid for. The State “shopped” for a fingerprint expert who would testify to a match.

There are serious doubts that Gregory Wright is guilty of the crime for which he is scheduled to be executed. There is NO doubt that he did not receive a fair trial

Using the information in this summary and any other factors you think should be considered, please write your letters to the Governor and the Board of Pardons and Paroles. Remember to include in your letter your awareness of the severity of the crime and the harm done to Ms. Vick and the loss to any of her relatives or loved ones.

Bob Ray Sanders, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, writes today that

Twenty-four ex-Death Row prisoners from across the country will meet Friday at the state Capitol in Austin to call for a moratorium on executions in Texas and for the creation of a statewide commission on wrongful convictions, said Kurt Rosenberg, executive director of Witness to Innocence, a Philadelphia-based organization of former Death Row inmates and their families.

Their news conference will be at 2 p.m. in the Speaker’s Committee Room.

The men who will appear at the Capitol have served “a combined total of nearly 200 years on death row for crimes they did not commit,” Rosenberg said in a statement announcing the news conference.

“Last month, Texas became third in the nation in death-row exonerations when Michael Blair was the 130th person exonerated from death row,” he said. “Blair’s exoneration came on the heels of a statement by Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins that he will re-examine nearly 40 death penalty convictions and would halt executions, if necessary, to give the reviews time to proceed.”

Watkins’ announcement also came in the wake of Dallas County’s record-setting number of overall exonerations — 18 since 2001.

“Witness to Innocence believes the rest of the state should follow Watkins’ lead and halt executions while it studies its broken death penalty system, which has exonerated nine people from death row since 1987, third only to Florida and Illinois in death-row exonerations,” Rosenberg said.

More and more leaders are recognizing that we do have a broken system in the Lone Star State.

Last summer the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals announced the creation of a Texas Criminal Justice Integrity Unit to examine weaknesses in the criminal justice system. And, Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson of the Texas Supreme Court is among those calling for a statewide innocence commission.

It makes sense that while we recognize an imperfect system with weaknesses that must be examined and corrected, there ought not to be any more executions in Texas until those issues have been fully addressed.

The Star-Telegram is on record supporting a moratorium on executions.

Texas Monthly’s November issue has an article “The Exonerated“. the link above is to a preview; TM articles can not be read online unless you have a subscription, so go out and get the print issue. TM’s website does have a four minute video of some of the exonerated at a photo shoot for the story, and a series of audio recordings with 14 of the exonerated.

Texas Monthly will present a panel discussion at SMU on November 6th at 7pm, featuring Michael Hall, Dallas County DA Craig Watkins, and James Waller—one of the exonerated profiled in the current issue. (RSVP by November 4th.)

From the article “The Exonerated”

These 37 men spent 525 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Then came the hard part: freedom.

by Michael Hall

The first thing you notice is the eyes—they all have the same look in them, the look of men accustomed to waking up every morning in a prison cell. These 37 men spent years, and in some cases decades, staring through bars at a world that believed they were guilty of terrible crimes. But they weren’t. Each was convicted of doing something he did not do. It’s hard to characterize the look in their eyes. There’s anger, obviously, and pride at having survived hell, but there’s also hurt, and a question: “Why me?”

The short answer is simple: People make mistakes. Most of these cases share a common story line: A woman, usually a traumatized rape victim, wrongly identifies her attacker. Sometimes her testimony is backed by rudimentary serology tests. Sometimes the cases are pushed too hard by aggressive police officers or prosecutors. Sometimes the accused already has a criminal…