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Innocence
The death penalty puts innocent people at risk of execution.
Todd Willingham
Todd Willingham was wrongfully executed under Governor Rick Perry on February 17, 2004.

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  • A Lifetime of Service
    HamptonIf elected, Keith Hampton will be the only judge who has handled death penalty cases in all stages of litigation – from accusation, trial, appeal and all post-conviction proceedings, including appearing before the Supreme Court of the United States.
    Growing up in Texas, a life-long Democrat, Keith Hampton began his career at age 17, as the youngest precinct chairperson for the Texas Democratic Party.
    For the last twenty years, Keith has defended the Texas Constitution and the Constitution of the United States in hundreds of cases. As an active member of the criminal defense bar, a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation, and a member of the Pro Bono College of the State Bar of Texas, Keith has tirelessly worked for fairness, integrity and justice for all Texans.

    For the last twenty years, Keith has defended the Texas Constitution and the Constitution of the United States in hundreds of cases. As an active member of the criminal defense bar, a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation, and a member of the Pro Bono College of the State Bar of Texas, Keith has tirelessly worked for fairness, integrity and justice for all Texans.
    A Celebrated Career
    • Voted “Best Qualified” by the Lawyers of Texas in the 2010 Judicial Bar Poll
    • Winner of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association President’s Awards for 7 straight years
    • 2003-2009 – Texas Monthly “Super Lawyer”
    • 2008 – Percy Foreman Lawyer of the Year
    • 1991 – present – Author/Speaker/Course Director, Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association
    • 1995-2005 – Legislative Director for the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association
    • 1989-90 – Briefing Attorney, Judge Sam Houston Clinton, Court of Criminal Appeals
    • 1989 – J.D., St. Mary’s University
    On the Issues: Returning Fairness to the Court of Criminal Appeals
    Keith Hampton is running for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 6. He is challenging two-term incumbent, Republican Michael Keasler. When he was first elected in 1998, Keasler replaced the last Democrat to hold a seat on the Court, Judge Charlie Baird. Ever since, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has been under total Republican control.
    Without any Democrats holding seats on the CCA, the ideological spectrum of the Court has shifted dramatically to the right. One Republican judge on the Court, Lawrence Meyers, recently toured newspaper editorial boards promoting the state’s fairness, prompting Dallas Morning News Editor Michael Landauer to write, “Try not to laugh.” (Source: Dallas Morning News, June 2009). Scott Henson, an award-winning blogger who writes for the non-partisan criminal justice site, Grits for Breakfast, wrote the following about the political nature of the CCA:
    There is no liberal wing on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. There’s a conservative wing, to which Judge Johnson belongs, and a more or less totalitarian wing, in which Keasler and Meyers reside along with Presiding Judge Sharon Keller. (Source: Grits for Breakfast, June 2009)
    The “totalitarian wing” of the Court has a well-documented and thoroughly perplexing history of unprofessional actions. From the “sleeping lawyer” case in October 2000, to investigations into the judicial conduct of Sharon Keller in 2007, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is in desperate need of professional, accountable judges on its bench.
    The “sleeping lawyer” case before the Court in October 2000 focused on the 1984 murder trial of Calvin Burdine. It was discovered that Burdine’s lawyer dozed off “repeatedly” during the original murder trial, for up to ten minutes at a time. (Source:New York Times, June 2004). The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that “although Mr. Cannon had fallen asleep, it had not been during important bits of the trial and therefore the murder conviction and death sentence were upheld.” (Source:BBC News, August 2001).
    One positive outcome of the Court’s embarrassing ruling was that Texas Democrats fixed the law immediately. The following legislative session, in 2001, State Rep. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (elected as a State Senator the following year) and Senator Rodney Ellis authored and passed Senate Bill 7, the Texas Fair Defense Act, which established a proper set of standards to overhaul Texas’ indigent criminal defense system. (Source: Texas Legislature Online).
    Unfortunately, the Court of Criminal Appeals didn’t wait long to fail again. On September 25, 2007, Judge Sharon Keller refused to keep the clerk’s office of the CCA open past 5pm, despite a direct request from lawyers of Michael Richard to keep them open to allow for an appeal on Richard’s death sentence – which was carried out that evening. Her fellow judge on the Court, Judge Cheryl Johnson, testified before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct that Keller violated their Court’s procedure. Johnson argued that it was she, not Keller, who should have made the decision on whether or not the Court should stay open, and that if she had been given the decision, she would have kept the Court open. (Source: Austin American-Statesman, August 2009)
    The formal hearing on Keller’s actions will be held on June 18, 2010. (Source: Texas Lawyer). At that date and time, the latest controversy of the Court of Criminal Appeals will be held even further under the microscope.
    However, the hearing will not change the reckless course of action the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has routinely taken over the years. In order to restore fairness and justice to the Court, it is essential that Texas Democrats work to elect Keith Hampton to the Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 6.

    The Houston Chronicle editorial board has been critical of the death penalty before and has published editorials that seemed to be moving the position of the paper closer to supporting abolishing the death penalty, but they still have not yet came out clearly for ending the death penalty. Today’s editorial is another one in which they come close to saying they favor abolishing the death penalty, but they again chose not to make a clear statement.

    Of the total executed in the U.S., 24 occurred in Texas, four times that of the closest competitor, Alabama. Only 10 of the 50 states carried out the death penalty last year.

    If Texas were an independent nation, we would be the seventh-largest practitioner of capital punishment, just a smidgen behind Yemen, a failed state with a medieval judicial system.

    Last year nine inmates on American death rows were exonerated and freed after spending a total of 121 years there, proof that even vaunted U.S. justice makes potentially fatal mistakes.

    If nations — and their judicial systems — are known by the company they keep, the U.S. and Texas remain in a very sleazy clique that continues to impose the death penalty on its citizens.


    Here is what the TMN blog wrote in 2007 when the Houston Chronicle also came close to saying they favor abolition:


    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 editorialsaying

    “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.”

    Texas Moratorium Network started holding anti-death penalty lobby days in 2003. This year, we held a lobby day as part of the Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break. Both students and non-students, plus six death row exonerees participated in the lobby day. As a result of the lobby day, at least two members of the Texas Legislature wrote letters to Governor Rick Perry urging clemency for Hank Skinner. Below is a report from Hooman Hedayati, who was part of one of the groups of students who visited legislators on March 18.

    Texas House Speaker’s Committee Room

    By Hooman Hedayati

    As part of the 2010 Anti-Death Penalty Lobby Day on March 18, I and several students participating in the Anti Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break visited several offices of Texas legislators at the capitol in Austin with information on Hank Skinner. We asked legislators to write clemency letters to Gov. Perry in support of Skinner, who was scheduled for execution the week after the Lobby Day. The students had been trained in how to lobby on March 17 in a workshop led by Alison Brock, chief of staff to State Rep. Sylvester Turner. James Tate, one of the spring break students, reported on the lobbying training on the Dallas Morning News blog.

    The day after the training, we put into action what we learned from Alison by going door to door to visit the offices of our own state representatives and several other members of the Texas Legislature, including Lon Burnam, Ruth Jones McClendon, Harold Dutton, Elliott Naishtat, and Rodney Ellis.
    We had initially intended to lobby for moratorium legislation for next year’s legislative session. However, after meeting with Sandrine Ageorges-Skinner, Hank Skinner’s wife, who talked about her husband’s case during the alternative spring break, we decided that we can be more effective by asking legislators to write clemency letters in support of DNA testing that could possibly exonerate Hank Skinner. 
    The lobby day started with a press conference at the House Speaker’s Committee room. The press conference was hosted by Colleen Farrell on behalf of all the students participating in the alternative spring break. Colleen, Amnesty International’s Student Regional Coordinator, is a student at SUNY-Geneseo in New York, She came to Texas to attend the alternative spring break to learn more about the death penalty. With all the local Austin channels present, plus Univision and several other reporters, Colleen introduced the exonerated former death-row inmates one-by-one: Ron Keine, Juan Melendez, Shujaa Graham, Perry Cobb, Curtis McCarty and Derrick Jamison. Some of them had come within days and even hours of being executed. The exonerees said they supported a moratorium on executions and called on Gov. Perry and Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to stay the upcoming execution of Hank Skinner to allow testing of the DNA evidence. Colleen then introduced Hank’s wife, Sandrine, who also spoke.

    Video of TV News Report.

    After the press conference, we went to one of the committee rooms in the Capitol Extension where each exoneree talked in detail about his case and how he had been convicted despite being innocent and how he later had been exonerated. Rep. Lon Burnam, a long time supporter of SADP and also an abolitionist, had sent an email to all the legislative offices in the capitol inviting them to come and hear the exonerees tell their stories.

    The Texas legislature is not in session so a most legislators were not in Austin, but staff members of several legislators attended the event, alongside people from other organizations, such as the Texas Catholic Conference. Many tourists walked in the room curious about what was going on and left the room outraged at the injustices of our criminal justice system.

    Afterward, the students divided into several groups with each group assigned to visit several legislative offices. Juan Melendez, who spent more than 17 years on Florida’s death-row for a crime he did not commit, accompanied my group. First, we visited the office of Rep. Elliot Naishtat, who represents the University of Texas at Austin, where I and several other students went and still go to school. We met with Dorothy Browne, Chief of staff to Rep. Naishtat. She apologized to Juan for not being able to attend the panel discussion event earlier in the day. She had already heard about Hank Skinner in the news and promised to talk to Rep. Naishtat about writing a clemency letter. Before heading for the 5 PM rally and the march through the SXSW crowd on 6th street, we visited the offices of Rep. Harold Dutton, Senator Ellis and Rep McClendon, who represents a student in our group. According to reports in CNN and the Texas Tribune we know that at least two of the state legislators we visited wrote clemency letters to Rick Perry urging him to stop the execution of Hank Skinner today. Naishtat wrote in his letter regarding questions in Skinner’s case, “post-conviction DNA testing of evidence could help resolve these questions. Governor, I believe we have time to answer questions in Mr. Skinner’s case. We should take that opportunity to have moral certainty that justice is achieved in the case.”

    On March 24, minutes before Hank’s scheduled execution, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and stayed his execution, giving us another reason to celebrate our success at the 2010 Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break.
    Next year, the alternative spring break will fall in the middle of the 2011 Texas legislative session, so we plan to spend the next year getting ready to visit the capitol again to lobby for a moratorium on executions.

    A public hearing before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct on the matter of Sharon Keller is set for June 18, 2010 at 9 AM Room 140 of the John H. Reagan State Office Building in Austin, Texas at 105 W. 15th Street. June 18 is a Friday. 


    Here is the notice of the hearing before the Commission:
    http://www.scjc.state.tx.us/pdf/skeller/NoticeOfObjectionsHearing.pdf

    Texas Moratorium Network filed a judicial complaint against Keller in 2007 and that was co-signed by about 1900 people.  



    On Sept. 25, 2007, Michael Richard’s lawyers called the court clerk’s office to say they were running late in delivering the papers for his appeal. The Supreme Court had unexpectedly issued an order in another death penalty case that they believed provided grounds for putting off his execution. When the request to keep the office open reached Judge Keller, she insisted it would close promptly at 5 p.m. The appeal was not filed with her court, and Mr. Richard was executed hours later.

    Judge Keller is now facing five counts of judicial misconduct and a possible recommendation that the state judicial system remove her from the bench.

    Texas on Tuesday executed its 452nd person since 1982, the 213th person since Governor Rick Perry took office in 2000 and the 5th in 2010.

    From the New York Times:

    Franklin Dewayne Alix was executed Tuesday evening for fatally shooting a Houston man during a robbery.
    Alix, 34, received lethal injection for the slaying of 23-year-old Eric Bridgeford, who interrupted Alix as he robbed the apartment of Bridgeford’s sister. The sister also had been abducted and raped in what authorities said was part of a six-month series of crimes by Alix more than 11 years ago.
    The execution was the fifth this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.
    ”I’m not the monster they painted me to be,” Alix said from the death chamber gurney, saying he ”messed up and made poor choices.” He denied responsibility for several rapes and said he ”did no drugs.”
    ”It is what it is,” he said. ”I’ve got peace in my heart.”
    Seven minutes later, at 6:20 p.m. CDT, he was pronounced dead.

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