“We close at 5” is no way to run a justice system on the day of an execution. Click here to sign the judicial complaint.
Posts by: "Texas Moratorium Network"
We found the official email addresses of the members of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, so now you can send an email to Sharon Keller asking her to resign.
The emails will also be copied to the other CCA judges, Governor Perry and the Texas Legislature. We don’t know if all the CCA judges check their official email addresses, but we know at least one of them does, because we got a response from Cathy Cochran.
1,200 people have signed our judicial complaint against Keller, so if you haven’t done that, just click here.
We have said before that the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board seems to be moving more and more towards the abolitionist position. They should stop dancing around the issue and make their position clear but they are not quite ready to do that. In September, they wrote an editorial saying
“There are several good reasons to give every death row inmate an indefinite reprieve. This week the U.S. Supreme Court found another.”
That sentence seems to imply that the lethal injection method is not the only reason to support a moratorium on executions.
“Particularly in Texas, the nation’s execution leader, the criminal justice system is prone to mistakes and abuse. The system is too unreliable in its assessment of guilt to justify exacting the ultimate, irrevocable penalty.”
Now, today they are again hinting that they are moving closer to taking an abolitionist stance, but are not quite ready to clearly say so. Here is what they are saying today:
Now that the Lone Star State’s punishment machine is temporarily halted, citizens should consider questions that go beyond whether lethal injection is excruciatingly painful to its recipients and violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment:
Why is the death penalty imposed so much more frequently in this state — and Harris County in particular — than in the rest of the country? Are Texans really proud that our state is one of the leading practitioners of government-sponsored executions on the planet?
Worldwide, 133 countries have abolished the death penalty in practice, and 93 have proscribed it by law. Amnesty International notes that only six countries accounted for nearly 90 percent of the executions last year: China, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and the United States. Is this the company we wish to keep when it comes to judicial standards?
Given the high volume of death sentences sought by Harris County prosecutors, instances of tainted evidence and the demonstrated lack of highly competent attorneys representing some defendants, is the risk of executing an innocent person unacceptably high? Chronicle reporting on the execution of a San Antonio man who was convicted of a killing as a teen strongly indicates another man committed the crime.
In next year’s Harris County judicial and district attorney contests, these are issues the candidates should discuss in detail and which voters should thoroughly consider.
Of course, their strongest editorial stance lately was when they said Sharon Keller should be removed from office: “since she will not face the voters until 2012, the miscarriage of justice perpetrated by Chief Justice Keller can only be remedied by a recommendation by the Judicial Conduct Commission to the Texas Supreme Court that she be removed from office.”
We were looking over the list of people who have signed on to the complaint against Judge Sharon Keller and we noticed that Richard Friedman was signer number 1,126. It took a minute to remember that Richard is Kinky’s actual first name.
Thanks Kinky.
You can sign the complaint too, just click here.
Michael Richard’s lawyer, David Dow, writing in today’s Washington Post, echoes what has been said by former Texas Governor Mark White that the attorney general of Texas or Governor Perry could have stepped in and stopped the execution of Richard after Sharon Keller’s now famous whine, “we close at 5.”, but they did not. He says Richard’s fate shows the arbitrariness of the death penalty system.
It is well known now that Sharon Keller, the chief judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, refused to allow us to file the pleadings at 5:30 p.m., when we finished preparing them. (The Texas court, unlike the Supreme Court, does not accept electronic filings, and a series of computer crashes in our office in Houston delayed our preparation of 10 hard copies of the 100-page petition and thus our ability to deliver them on time to the court in Austin.) We pleaded with the court at least three times to stay open, but Keller would not make an exception to the policy that the clerk’s office closes at 5. Keller has correctly been criticized, even vilified, for this decision. But the focus on Keller should not absolve the others who share responsibility for this preventable travesty.
The Texas attorney general’s office, for example, knew of our intentions that day. Officials there also knew about the delay. Attorney General Greg Abbott could have advised the warden not to proceed with Richard’s execution, but he elected not to. Gov. Rick Perry (R) knew what was happening but did not act. The district attorney’s office was aware of the development in the Kentucky case and that we had attempted to file an additional pleading citing that development, yet that office also declined to act.
Finally, there is the Supreme Court. For half a decade lawyers have been trying to get the high court to review the constitutionality of the prevalent protocol for lethal injections. The justices knew what they had done that morning in the Kentucky case. They also knew — because we told them in a last-minute pleading — that the state court had closed its door on us.
Yet the justices did nothing. They allowed the execution to proceed. Judge Keller’s decision, effectively consigning Michael Richard to death, was reprehensible. But it was also typical of the arbitrariness and brazen disregard for legal principle that characterizes most death penalty cases. Since the Supreme Court set this moratorium in motion with its announcement in September, nearly all of the more than 3,000 death row inmates in America have had their lives extended — all, that is, except one.
- Texas Moratorium Network (TMN) is a non-profit organization with the primary goal of mobilizing statewide support for a moratorium on executions in Texas. Significant death penalty reform in Texas, including a moratorium on executions, is a viable goal if the public is educated on the death penalty system and is encouraged to contact their elected representatives to urge passage of moratorium legislation.
We hope that you will join us in this fight for fairness and social justice.Please join our email list and become one of the more than 20,000 people receiving information through our network.
