Click here to send an email to Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg urging her to ask the judge to withdraw the June 15 execution date for David Powell.

From the Austin Chronicle:

Point Austin: Let David Live

The execution of David Powell will not serve justice

BY MICHAEL KING

How much pain is enough to make up for irreparable harm? – David Powell

If all goes according to plan, David Lee Powell will be executed by the state of Texas, in our names, on June 15. That’s the date set by state District Judge Mike Lynch at the request of Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg.

This is an execution more than 32 years in the making, and the story exhibits the tortured legal history of many Texas capital cases. The 27-year-old Powell was first convicted of the May 18, 1978, murder of 26-year-old Austin Police Officer Ralph Ablanedo in September 1978. The first conviction was overturned for legal reasons that included prosecutorial misconduct; he was tried and convicted again in 1991, and retried for sentencing only in 1999. Only then was it revealed that Travis County prosecutors (among them then young Assistant D.A. Lehmberg) had concealed potentially exculpatory information from his defense, including their belief that a chief state witness, Powell’s companion Sheila Meinert, had participated in Ablanedo’s murder. Nevertheless, Powell was again sentenced to die and has since exhausted all of his appeals.

Unless Lehmberg should decide to withdraw the execution request or the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommends clemency to Gov. Rick Perry and he concurs – none of which is at all likely – Powell will be executed. Had he been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1978, Powell would have been eligible for parole in 20 years. After 32 years on death row, much of it in solitary confinement, Powell will have effectively endured – in our names – both a life and a death sentence. As Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has opined, “Where a delay, measured in decades, reflects the State’s own failure to comply with the Constitution’s demands, the claim that time has rendered the execution inhuman is a particularly strong one.”

A Changed Man

Powell’s crime was locally sensational, an assault-rifle execution of a police officer during a seemingly routine traffic stop, followed by a brief chase and another shoot-out with Austin Police. Ablanedo left a wife and two children, and the prosecutor’s closing argument was attended by dozens of uniformed police officers wearing mourning ribbons. Even in execution-shy Travis Coun­ty, Powell’s sentence was virtually inevitable.

Although there was little doubt of Powell’s guilt, there should have been considerable uncertainty about the degree of his culpability. There was the clouded issue of “deliberateness” or premeditation; expert testimony that at the time of the crime he was deeply addicted to methamphetamine and likely suffering from amphetamine psychosis – the chemical equivalent of insanity – was ignored, as was the fact that he had never previously committed violence. The Texas death penalty requires a jury’s conviction of “future dangerousness” – prosecutors summoned psychiatrists nominally to determine Powell’s sanity for trial, then used their testimony to assert Powell’s propensity for violence.

Yet Powell had never been violent before the Ablanedo murder, and by the time of his final sentencing, in 1999, he had spent nearly a dozen years in prison without ever engaging in violence. Testimony in his defense included not only former gubernatorial candidate Sissy Farenthold and attorney general candidate David Van Os (who knew Powell as a young man) but also several prison guards who testified that he was not violent and presented no future threat. We now have 32 years of evidence that, despite that sentence, and now a dozen years of solitary confinement due to prison policy changes, Powell has presented no threat to anyone at all and has served his time as a model prisoner.

Once, there might have been doubt concerning Powell’s “future dangerousness” – now there is none. When we execute Powell next month, we will be executing a different person than the one who, in an irretrievable moment of mad frenzy, committed his terrible crime. If nothing else, Powell’s execution will confirm that the Texas death penalty is not about justice but revenge.

Who We’re Killing

Fair-minded people can certainly hold differing beliefs about the death penalty, though in my experience the more people learn about its actual practice, the less likely they are to believe that it serves justice, certainly in any equitable way. The political stakes (especially in a sensational case like Powell’s) are inevitably so high that prosecutors persistently bend the rules to get convictions. The consequent appeals strain and distort the justice system and, more cruelly, the innocent family members on all sides. Restorative justice is essentially impossible, since to avoid a death sentence the accused must not acknowledge guilt or remorse of any kind. Only when his appeals were completely exhausted was Powell able to write an eloquent letter of apology to the Ablanedo family.

“I am infinitely sorry that I killed Ralph Ablanedo,” Powell wrote. “I stole from you and the world the precious and irreplaceable life of a good man.”

Beyond this, Powell has been an exemplary prisoner for 32 years, teaching other inmates, consulting with experts on the Texas criminal justice system, testifying on the rights of prisoners with mental disabilities, and more. He has managed to make something useful and important of his life even in the extreme confinement of death row and the Texas prison system; to kill him now is to surrender to the nihilistic belief that there is no such thing as redemption.

But whether or not you believe that we should execute Powell, you should spend some time reviewing the background and history of his case, available at the website LetDavidLive.org, including an extended video interview with Powell on death row, members of his family, and people who have known him well. The history of the Texas death penalty is a lengthy one of obscure names and dates; it’s a little less abstract when you get to know the person you’re going to kill. It’s undeniable that Powell took a life – “I’m so so sorry for having killed Ralph Ablanedo and stolen from him everything that he might have become,” he says in the interview, “and stolen everything that he was from the people that loved him.” What possible good can come from adding another name, and the inevitably reverberating sorrow, to the long list of the dead?

In December of 2009, David Powell wrote the following letter to the family of Ralph Ablanedo; Ablanedo’s wife, Judy, later married Austin Police Officer Bruce Mills, who also adopted their two children .Powell’s letter to the family of Ralph Abla nedo is posted with this story here.

More information about David Powell’s case and suggestions for potential public action are available at www.letdavidlive.org.

Rogelio Cannady was executed today in Texas. He was the 457th person executed in Texas since 1982 and the 218th person since Rick Perry became governor. He was the 10th person executed in Texas in 2010. If you live in Texas, call your state legislators and let them know that you support a moratorium on executions. Find out who your legislators are here. 


(AP)  HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) – Condemned Texas inmate Rogelio Cannady was executed Wednesday evening for killing his cellmate while already serving two life sentences for a double murder.

Cannady, 37, from Harlingen, didn’t deny fatally beating 55-year-old Leovigildo Bonal with a belt and padlock in October 1993, but he insisted the attack at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice McConnell Unit in Beeville was self defense from Bonal’s sexual advances.

In the death chamber he smiled and nodded to his brother, a niece and three friends he selected to witness his death and told them repeatedly he loved them.

“I’m going to be OK,” he said as they watched through a window. “Y’all take care of yourself … May God have mercy on my soul.”

As he waited for the drugs to take effect, he laughed and lifted his head from the gurney.

“I thought it was going to be harder than this,” he said, grinning. “I’m going to sleep now. I can feel it. It’s affecting me.”

Then he began snoring.

Eight minutes later, at 6:19 p.m. CDT, he was pronounced dead. He was the 10th inmate put to death in the nation’s most active death penalty state.

Cannady walked to the death chamber about 30 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal that his confession in the 1990 murders of two teenage runaways in the Rio Grande Valley was coerced, meaning Cannady should have never been imprisoned in the first place.

It was the second appeal rejected by the high court this week in his case. State attorneys said the late appeals were without merit and that questions about Cannady’s confession already had been resolved.

Cannady’s lawyer said the case was “clearly one that deserves more investigation.”

Cannady was sentenced to two life sentences after pleading guilty to the 1990 murders of 16-year-old Ricardo Garcia of Freer and 13-year-old Ana Robles of Brownsville – both runaways from a youth home. Garcia was stabbed 13 times. Robles was raped and strangled.

Two of Garcia’s brothers also witnessed Cannady’s death. Cannady did not address them and the brothers declined to speak with reporters afterward.

Cannady, who was 17 at the time and one of four teenagers arrested in the case, said an investigator persuaded him to sign a confession to avoid the death sentence.

“I got scared,” he said from death row. “I was afraid I’d get the death penalty. Ironically, I did.”

State lawyers said Cannady swore in court that he “had not been coerced or forced into pleading guilty and that his plea was entirely free and voluntary.”

John Alba, 54, faces lethal injection in Texas on Tuesday for gunning down his 28-year-old estranged wife Wendy in Allen in Collin County in 1991. 

The U.S. Supreme Court banned life without parole for juvenile offenders convicted of non homicide crimes today in a 5-4 vote. This is one criminal justice issue where Texas is ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court, because Texas has banned life without parole for juveniles even in cases in which a juvenile is convicted of a capital crime. Last session, the Texas Legislature passed and Governor Perry signed SB 839 authored by Senator Juan Hinojosa (photo) that banned juvenile offenders convicted of capital crimes from being sentenced to Life Without Parole, instead making them eligible for parole after 40 years.

More than 2,000 juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone across the country. Those sentences are not affected by today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Here is what The Texas Observer reported about why Senator Hinojosa filed his bill last session: 

One of the Legislature’s leading voices on criminal justice issues has decided that teenage killers too young to face execution should also be exempt from being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“To me it’s a matter of fairness and consistency,” said state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen. “If the U.S. Supreme Court said to Texas and all the other states, ‘You cannot give these juvenile offenders the death penalty’ [which the Supreme Court did in 2005], then I believe the state of Texas should not be sending them to prison for life without parole.”

Hinojosa, a long-serving lawmaker who sits on the Senate Criminal Justice Committee (and led the House Corrections Committee during his final years as an eight-term state representative), plans to introduce legislation this session that would cap sentences for youthful offenders convicted of capital murder at life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 40 years behind bars.

Such a sentence would be in line with non–capital punishment death sentences handed down before the 2005 Legislature’s enactment of the life-without-parole law. Hinojosa says he decided to push for the new legislation after reading a recent article in the Observer examining the effects of the law (“The Life Penalty,” Nov. 28, 2008).

That law draws no distinction between offenders who commit capital murder before turning 18 and those who kill as adults.

“I think, for someone so young, there is a chance to rehabilitate their lives,” Hinojosa said.

Four under-18 offenders are now serving life-without-parole sentences in Texas. All were sentenced before the 2007 Legislature required the state’s district courts to report demographic information on capital murder cases to the state Office of Court Administration.