The next planning meeting for the 10th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty will be Wednesday, Sept 23, in Room 1 at Carver Library in Austin from 7pm-8:30pm.
Everyone is welcome to attend and get involved in planning the march.
Address – 1161 Angelina (map)
The Tenth Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty is October 24 in Austin at the Texas Capitol. It starts at 2 PM.
Here is a link to a promotional video for the march. Please repost it to blogs or websites.
Thirty-seven-year-old Christopher Coleman received lethal injection Tuesday evening for his part in a scheme contrived by a Colombian man who hoped to eliminate an $80,000 cocaine debt by staging a robbery. Four people wound up getting shot in a car on a dead-end street in Houston. Three of them died, including a 3-year-old boy.
Coleman’s lawyers lost last-day appeals in the courts and failed to keep him from becoming the 18th condemned prisoner executed this year in Texas, the nation’s most active death penalty state.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier rejected a clemency request for Coleman, one of three men convicted in the case. The other two, Enrique Andrade Mosquera and Derrick Graham, received life in prison.
“All I know is the jury never heard the truth in this case,” said Coleman’s attorney, Patrick McCann. “And I don’t think anybody can say who shot whom.”
Prosecutors said Mosquera owed $80,000 for four kilos of cocaine he received from Hurtado Heinar Prado, 34, also from Colombia, but didn’t want to pay. Instead, he hired Coleman for $12,000 and Graham for $10,000 to stage a robbery during the payoff.
Hurtado Heinar Prado was in the front seat of a car driven by another Colombian, Jose Mario Garcia-Castro, 33, when they met the three men at the end of a Houston street in the early morning hours of Dec. 14, 1995. Elsie Prado, Prado’s sister and Garcia-Castro’s girlfriend, and her son, Danny Giraldo, were in the back seat.
Testimony showed that Coleman approached the passenger side of the car, said something to the two men in the front and opened fire. Only Elsie Prado survived. She identified Coleman as the gunman.
Ballistics tests showed that all 11 shots were fired from outside the passenger side of the car. Testimony showed that Mosquero was standing near the front of the driver’s side and Graham was in front of the car.
Coleman was arrested at a motel in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., a week later. He told police he was at the shooting scene but denied being the gunman. At his trial, Coleman’s lawyers argued he was not the gunman.
Coleman’s appeals attorneys argued that Elsie Prado’s testimony at his 1997 trial was not truthful, that she lied about her involvement in the drug deal and that she failed to disclose that she and Mosquera knew each other and grew up in the same neighborhood in Cali, Colombia.
The 5th Circuit ruled last week that jurors could have found Coleman guilty of capital murder even without the woman’s testimony.
“There was substantial evidence, independent of Prado’s testimony, that Coleman was present at the scene of the murders and participated in the robbery that led to the killings,” the court said.
Coleman had no previous prison record but served 60 days in jail in Harris County for assault. He refused to speak with reporters in the weeks before his scheduled execution.
His execution was one of two set for this week in Texas.
Kenneth Mosley, 51, was scheduled to die Thursday for fatally shooting a police officer, Michael Moore, during a bank robbery in the Dallas suburb of Garland in 1997.
Shout this name from the rooftops, Todd Willingham. He was innocent and Texas killed him. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, wrote that, in the modern judicial system there has not been “a single case–not one–in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”
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The San Antonio Express News Editorial Board says that there is “not a shred of evidence” that supports the theory that the fire in the Todd Willingham case was arson, and “the overwhelming evidence is that investigators, prosecutors, court appointed defense attorneys, jury members, appellate judges, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and, finally, Gov. Rick Perry failed and Texas executed an innocent man”.
If you agree with the San Antonio Express News, then sign the petition to Governor Rick Perry and the State of Texas to acknowledge that the fire in the Cameron Todd Willingham case was not arson, therefore no crime was committed and on February 17, 2004, Texas executed an innocent man.
“A lethal failure of justice in Texas”“
The one argument that gives even death penalty proponents pause is the prospect that the state might put an innocent person to death. Death penalty cases have multiple layers of appeals and reviews that are intended to avoid such an eventuality. Does that process work?
In recent years, the exoneration with DNA evidence of scores of death row inmates nationwide — including many from Texas — has raised serious questions about the way some death penalty defendants are represented and treated in the criminal justice system. Still, while there have been doubts raised about some cases in which executions have taken place, no one has been able to point to a case where an innocent person was clearly put to death.
That may be about to change. Journalist David Grann, writing in the Sept. 7 issue of the New Yorker magazine, makes a compelling argument that when the state of Texas gave Todd Willingham a lethal injection in 2004, it executed an innocent man.
Willingham was sentenced to death for the murder of his three children by arson. A review of the case by experts finds the determination of arson as the cause of the fire that consumed the Willingham home in Corsicana in 1991 was utterly faulty.
In 2005, Texas created a commission to investigate forensic errors in criminal cases. One of the first cases the Texas Forensic Science Commission reviewed was the Willingham case.
As Grann notes, a fire scientist hired by the commission issued a scathing report. He found that “investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of … fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire.”
In a letter last month to the Corsicana Daily Sun, state District Judge John H. Jackson Sr., who sent Willingham to death row as a prosecutor, responded to the mounting evidence of a wrongful execution. “The trial testimony you reported in 1991,” he wrote, “contains overwhelming evidence of guilt completely independent of the undeniably flawed forensic report.”
In fact, beyond the forensic evidence that Jackson now acknowledges as being flawed, there’s not a shred of evidence to support the allegation that Willingham or anyone else started the fire that killed his children. Fire experts believe it was caused by a space heater or faulty electrical wiring. In any case, there was certainly no evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to send Willingham to death row.
The overwhelming evidence is that investigators, prosecutors, court appointed defense attorneys, jury members, appellate judges, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and, finally, Gov. Rick Perry failed and Texas executed an innocent man.
Society should retain the power to apply the ultimate penalty to its most heinous and dangerous criminals. But with that power comes the ultimate responsibility to ensure that the state does not put innocent people to death. The Todd Willingham case suggests that Texas has failed in that responsibility.
Time magazine published an article Sept 19 dealing with recent laws passed by the Texas Legislature dealing with compensation for people wrongfully convicted and establishing a new statewide Office of Capital Writs to handle state habeas appeals. “Texas: The Kinder, Gentler Hang ‘Em High State” fails to mention the recent news regarding the Todd Willingham case and the report to the Texas Forensic Science Commission that the fire in the Willingham case was not arson, so Texas executed an innocent man.
Here is an excerpt from Time:
Tim Cole couldn’t tell his own story and so his family recounted the saga to the hard-bitten Texas legislators last spring. The convict had insisted he was innocent right up to the day he died. He had refused parole because that would have required him to admit he was guilty of raping a fellow student at Texas Tech University. The ordeal was wrenching: Cole wept during the nights as he awaited a trial that would sentence him to 25 years in jail. Twice during his prison term he was found unconscious in his cell, the result of the asthma that had plagued him since childhood. The third time he suffered an attack, Dec. 2, 1999, he died from heart failure. Then, in 2007, another man confessed to the crime and Cole was declared innocent. The Texas lawmakers wept at the tale; and as a result, the state that has the reputation of being toughest on crime came up with one of the most generous and supportive programs to compensate those wrongfully convicted: the Tim Cole Act.
“I think Tim Cole’s story moved a lot of people,” says Lubbock attorney Kevin Glasheen, who represents 12 men exonerated after serving lengthy terms for rape. “As far as the politicians go, there are a lot of Republicans who do not like abusive government power.” But the legislators from both parties did more than shed tears. Apart from the Tim Cole Act, they passed a second law this spring creating a well-funded office of expert appellate lawyers to represent death row inmates, a move to overcome the tales of sleepy defense attorneys and inept lawyering. The two new laws are now being implemented and their backers hope they will mitigate the state’s hang ’em high image.
The Tim Cole law provides $80,000 for each year of wrongful incarceration and adds free college tuition, and financial and personal counseling. Unlike past lump sum payments, the new compensation will be paid out in a mix of monthly payments, an upfront lump sum and an annuity which can be passed on through a recipient’s estate. The new law also sets up an investigative panel, the Tim Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions.
Glasheen’s 12 clients are among 38 Texas prisoners cleared by DNA testing thanks to the efforts of the New York-based Innocence Project. He filed federal civil rights lawsuits on behalf of his clients against several Dallas-area police departments and municipalities. Facing a long, arduous legal process, Glasheen also proposed a legislative solution to Dallas area civic leaders. The legal fight would be expensive for both sides, Glasheen told them, and the fundamental question was one of fairness. This spring, State Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat and a longtime champion of the innocence projects, and State Senator Bob Duncan, a Republican and, like Cole, a Texas Tech alumnus, sponsored the Tim Cole Act.
Glasheen, a self-described Republican from the “Libertarian wing of the party,” hopes new DNA testing on old evidence will free more prisoners. However, that hope is limited: Dallas County kept evidence on file, hence the large number of exonerated prisoners from that area, but evidence in Houston was lost in a flood, and smaller counties across Texas did not keep evidence once the appeals process ran out. “There’s a whole bunch of guys down there who were convicted on just eyewitness identification,” Glasheen says, as Cole was. There is now a national campaign to press a best practices written policy for lineups and eyewitness evidence. Dallas has adopted the new standards.
The second law passed by the legislature will set up new standards and funding for indigent defense appellate counsel programs. Texas was embarrassed by the 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ordered a new trial for a death row inmate whose lawyer slept through much of his proceedings in Houston in 1984. It responded after the ruling by boosting funds for indigent counsel. Despite that, studies showed death row inmates were still often badly served by appellate counsel. “Since 2004, 2005 there has been documented some horrible lawyering,” says Andrea Marsh, executive director of Texas Fair Defense Project. In one case, a habeas appeal was filed by an attorney who simply cut and pasted an old appeal and changed the defendant’s name, leaving the facts of the old case in place, Marsh says.
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