Text of apology letter from David Powell to family of murder victim Ralph Ablanedo (Facebook readers: Click link back to original post on TMN blog to read letter).

“I am infinitely sorry that I killed Ralph Ablanedo ,” wrote Powell, who shot Ablanedo 10 times with an AK-47, according to court records. “I stole from you and the world the precious and irreplaceable life of a good man.”

If you live in Travis County, and especially if you are a member of an Austin Democratic Club, please write a personal letter and ask your club to send its own letter to District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg urging her to seek withdrawal of the execution date for David Powell now set for June 15, 2010. Rosemary Lehmberg was elected in 2008 with the endorsements of many Austin Democratic clubs, so those clubs and Austin voters should let her know that they do not want her to allow this execution to proceed.

To learn more about the case of David Powell, visit letdavidlive.org or watch a 30 minute documentary, divided into four parts on YouTube: Part one, Part two, Part three, Part four.

Letter from David Powell on Texas Death Row to Family of Victim Apologizing

Watch David Powell expressing remorse in Part Four of Film.

Rosemary Lehmberg, District Attorney
509 W.11th St
Austin, TX 78701
Phone: (512) 854-9400
Fax: (512) 854-9695
Rosemary.Lehmberg@co.travis.tx.us

Sample letter:

Dear District Attorney Lehmberg,

I’m writing you in response to the execution date which you asked the trial court to set for David Lee Powell. I am extremely disappointed because this is a time when the death penalty is beginning to fall into disrepute, and Mr. Powell’s case provides a significant opportunity to make a statement about the enormous waste – human and monetary – associated with the death penalty. You could have used this moment to lead society away from the death penalty but instead you acquiesced to the conventional wisdom of Texas’ death penalty politics. In a world that is increasingly turning away from the death penalty, Texas is out of step. I believe you know this, and as the District Attorney of the most progressive county in Texas, you could have helped take us in a different direction.

I am writing to urge you to reverse your course. You have the authority to ask the court to withdraw the death warrant and to use that act as an opportunity to lead the State of Texas into a more just and peaceful future. Other leaders like you have chosen to lead the public away from the death penalty, where they once believed in it, because they understand it to be wrong on so many levels. I believe you are that kind of leader.

It has been said that the penalty of knowing one’s evil deed is punishment enough. David Powell knows his evil deed, has shown true remorse for it, and has suffered immensely. He has led an exemplary life, even from the despair of Death Row. He no longer deserves the death penalty. I have reason to believe you feel the same way. I beg you to ask the court to withdraw the execution date and use this as an opportunity to move us in a different direction.

Let the public know that when the death penalty no longer serves any legitimate public interest, as in the case of David Powell, you will not embrace it.

If you live in Travis County, and especially if you are a member of an Austin Democratic Club, please write a personal letter and ask your club to send its own letter to District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg urging her to seek withdrawal of the execution date for David Powell now set for June 15, 2010. Rosemary Lehmberg was elected in 2008 with the endorsements of many Austin Democratic clubs, so those clubs should let her know that they do not want her to allow this execution to proceed.

To learn more about the case of David Powell, visit letdavidlive.org or watch a 30 minute documentary, divided into four parts on YouTube: Part one, Part two, Part three, Part four.

Watch David Powell expressing remorse in Part Four of Film.

Rosemary Lehmberg, District Attorney
509 W.11th St
Austin, TX 78701
Phone: (512) 854-9400
Fax: (512) 854-9695
Rosemary.Lehmberg@co.travis.tx.us

Sample letter:

Dear District Attorney Lehmberg,

I’m writing you in response to the execution date which you asked the trial court to set for David Lee Powell. I am extremely disappointed because this is a time when the death penalty is beginning to fall into disrepute, and Mr. Powell’s case provides a significant opportunity to make a statement about the enormous waste – human and monetary – associated with the death penalty. You could have used this moment to lead society away from the death penalty but instead you acquiesced to the conventional wisdom of Texas’ death penalty politics. In a world that is increasingly turning away from the death penalty, Texas is out of step. I believe you know this, and as the District Attorney of the most progressive county in Texas, you could have helped take us in a different direction.

I am writing to urge you to reverse your course. You have the authority to ask the court to withdraw the death warrant and to use that act as an opportunity to lead the State of Texas into a more just and peaceful future. Other leaders like you have chosen to lead the public away from the death penalty, where they once believed in it, because they understand it to be wrong on so many levels. I believe you are that kind of leader.

It has been said that the penalty of knowing one’s evil deed is punishment enough. David Powell knows his evil deed, has shown true remorse for it, and has suffered immensely. He has led an exemplary life, even from the despair of Death Row. He no longer deserves the death penalty. I have reason to believe you feel the same way. I beg you to ask the court to withdraw the execution date and use this as an opportunity to move us in a different direction.

Let the public know that when the death penalty no longer serves any legitimate public interest, as in the case of David Powell, you will not embrace it.

Video from Keyetv.com about setting of execution date, including statement by Scott Cobb of Texas Moratorium Network.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission has posted its agenda for its meeting in Irving, Texas on April 23, 2010 at the Omni Mandalay Hotel at Las Colinas, 221 E. Las Colinas Blvd, Irving, Texas (Map and directions). The meeting starts at 9:30 AM, but is expected to last all day and the public comment period will be at the end of the meeting.

The agenda includes a period to accept comments from the public, although the proposed new rules on public comments say that the public comment period may be eliminated, reduced or postponed “if deemed necessary due to time constraints or other exigent circumstances”. Each commenter will be given three minutes and must fill out a form and give it to the commission coordinator before the meeting.

Texas Moratorium Network plans to attend the April 23 meeting and we encourage members of the public who wish to make comments to the commission to attend also. The commission needs to hear that the public wants them to speed up the process of investigating the Todd Willingham case and discussing the report given to the commission by Dr Craig Beyler, so that Texas can determine whether faulty forensic science lead to the wrongful conviction and execution of an innocent person.

Agenda for Texas Forensic Science Commission Meeting April 23, 2010

Rick Casey expects no major progress in the investigation until after the November election. He says in his Houston Chronicle column today:

The commission just posted its agenda for next week’s meeting, again drawn up by Bradley though this time honoring some suggestions from commissioners. The first item: approval of Bradley’s nominations for a number of committees, including an “investigative panel” for the Willingham case.

For that three-member panel, Bradley called his own number. The other two are Dr. Nizam Peerwani of the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office and Sarah Kerrigan, the Scotland Yard-trained head of the forensic science graduate program at Sam Houston State University. Peerwani is one of Perry’s new appointees. Kerrigan has been critical of Bradley’s leadership.

Little progress expected

The group’s first meeting is set for next Thursday, the day before the commission’s meeting. Since it is scheduled for just two hours and is not expected to hear from Beyler or any other witnesses, don’t look for it to advance the process much.

Bradley said he had planned to have the commission question Beyler at the October meeting, hear from critics of his report at the February meeting and then produce a final commission report by the spring or summer.

He said the nine members of the commission, a much smaller body than most congressional committees, were comfortable handling the matter as a whole.

If Bradley wanted to press the matter, I suppose he could push the investigative panel to produce a report by the July meeting and take action then or at the October meeting.

But to expect that, I suspect, would be doubly naive.

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast wrote a post critical of Bradley for creating the new three-person committee for the Willingham case instead of allowing the full commission to deal with it and for appointing himself as one of the members. Henson also suggested how the other commission members should handle the situation by making a motion to reconsider.

If one believes – as admittedly I do – that the Governor ousted his old appointees last fall and replaced them with Bradley and Co. for the purpose of scuttling the Willingham inquiry until after the election, then these new rules and committee assignments set them up admirably to accomplish the task. Particularly telling was the chairman’s brazen decision to assign himself to the committee assessing the Willingham case. From the Startlegram: “The notion that he would be on this particular committee in light of everything that has gone on in the last year is particularly inappropriate,” said Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth. “A suspicious mind would be concerned about nefarious activities.”

Burnam’s right about Bradley and the appearance of neutrality. The Williamson County DA has already been sharply, publicly critical of the arson expert commissioned to investigate the lack of scientific rigor in the evidence presented at the Willingham trial. Bradley even tried to prevent the scientist from testifying before a legislative committee that requested his views on the role of expert testimony unrelated to the case.

What’s more, a second member of the three-person committee, Dr. Peerwani, was also appointed last fall after the Governor interceded tochange the direction of the commission. So two of the three committee members evaluating the Willingham case were people who, by all appearances, were appointed to the Commission primarily to impede the investigation, not get to the bottom of the matter. Given that, there’s a decent chance the thing never gets voted out of committee – that’s what I’d do if I just wanted to kill it.

That’s why, IMO someone on the commission should bone up on their parliamentary procedure and make a “motion to reconsider” at their next meeting later this month, because they were sold a pig in a poke. The Commission made the decision to create this new committee structure based on false pretenses, believing it wouldn’t apply to pending cases. I was liveblogging the hearing at the time, and here’s how I recorded the exchange on whether the Willingham case would go through the new committee process:

Dr. Kerrigan asked whether these rules apply to pending cases or new ones. Good question! Bradley said new or recent cases would be affected but not those already in the pipeline. A commissioner asked particularly whether cases where they’d already spent money on outside consultants would now have to go through the new process. Bradley said “no.”

Later, though, just before the meeting ended:

Bradley backtracked after the rules passed to say old cases like Todd Willingham’s in fact will go through his new committee process. That’s a complete 180-degree flip from what he told the commission members twenty minutes ago, back when Commissioner Kerrigan told the chair her vote depended on his answer.

The next day, in a post reviewing the meeting, I accused Bradley of:

Dissembling: When a commissioner told the chairman her vote hinged on whether old cases already in the pipeline – including ones where the Commission had already paid outside consultants (there are only two) – would be subjected to the new committee process, Bradley said no, they would not. After the vote, when the meeting had nearly ended, Bradley insisted that Willingham’s case must go through “part of” the new committee process. If he’d been honest about that during the debate, IMO a majority of commissioners present wouldn’t have supported his rules.

That’s sufficient reason to initiate a motion to reconsider, which is allowable under Robert’s Rules if the motion is made by anyone – say, Dr. Kerrigan or her allies on the board – who voted for the rules at the last meeting. I think the Commission should reconsider and clarify the rules to have pending, longstanding cases bypass this new committee, which is what they were told would happen before they voted to create it.

The Atlantic has an article (“When Theories Fail“) that uses Justice John Paul Stevens as an example of how people can re-evaluate their positions on strongly held views in light of new and changing evidence. Stevens was appointed by a Republican president and he co-wrote the opinion in 1976 that reinstated the death penalty, but over the years he changed his opinion on the death penalty and decided it was a failed public policy. This is exactly the type of approach that Texas Moratorium Network takes in its advocacy for a moratorium on executions. The system is broken and it is good public policy to halt executions while the state sets up a Texas Capital Punishment Commission to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the death penalty system.

We have also seen other people recently who in the past were strong supporters of the death penalty and now have become strong critics, such as former Texas Governor Mark White and former Bexar County District Attorney Sam Millsap.

From The Atlantic:

In all the reminiscing and analysis that’s emerged following Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ retirement announcement last Friday, the piece that’s intrigued me the most is the explanation of how Stevens came to change his views on the death penalty over the course of his tenure on the court.

Linda Greenhouse, a former Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times noted that Stevens had renounced his support for the death penalty two years ago “in an opinion based not in abstract principle but in years of sorrowful observation of how the death penalty was actually being administered.” Stevens, she said, had come to the conclusion that “the premise that the justices had assumed in 1976, that the death penalty could be rational and fair, had gone unfulfilled,” and it was now time to reconsider “the justification for the death penalty itself.”

The justices had been operating on a theory that, at least in Justice Stevens’ opinion, the messy reality of life had not matched. And so he came to change his opinion about the theory.

That is, of course, what all good scientists are supposed to do. We develop theories, and then we test them, or see how they play out in real life. If reality doesn’t behave the way the theory predicted, we’re supposed to use that information to modify and improve our theories and opinions. What makes that anecdote about Stevens notable is how few public figures — or even private individuals, for that matter — manage that kind of measured re-evaluation of their beliefs or positions, despite how often our theories about business, economics, foreign policy or human behavior prove themselves less perfect in practice than they sounded on paper.

and

Three of the hardest words for anyone to utter are “I was wrong.” But they’re also a necessary first step in coming up with a better theory, approach, or solution. It can be wrenching for a scientist to realize that his or her prized theory, which he or she has spent years gaining status and benefits from pursuing and advocating, is flawed, wrong, or doesn’t really work in real life conditions. And scientists don’t generally have to face, in the course of acknowledging the flaws of their theories, irreparable damage done — innocent men executed, an industry grievously damaged, or millions of people left without jobs, houses, or retirement savings.

But as Stevens, Zoll and others have demonstrated, it can be done. In fact must be done, if truth, justice, sustainable solutions, or long-term success are ever to be achieved. Of course, perhaps Rubin, Greenspan and some of the others on Wall Street arguing that they weren’t really responsible and nothing needs to change truly believe their words, and still believe in their theories. More likely, I suspect that they just still want to believe in them. They like those theories. Those theories worked well for them.

And perhaps, given some more time, they’ll come around. Justice Stevens, after all, had over 30 years to re-evaluate his initial positions, assumptions, and theories. But if Stevens seems to stand a bit taller than the Wall Street wizards do at the moment, it’s not the black robe or title. It’s his ability to say “I was wrong. My assumptions did not play out in real life the way I thought they would. And so I am now advocating a different approach.” The titans of Wall Street — and, indeed, all of us — would do well to take a few notes.