Upcoming Executions
Click for a list of upcoming scheduled executions in Texas.
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.

Hi, this is Hooman Hedayati. Four years ago while I was still in High School I attended the 2005 Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break in Austin. Afterwards I founded Texas Students Against the Death Penalty and then a national group called Students Against the Death Penalty. Now, after four years of continued activism against the death penalty during my college career, I am about to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin.

I plan to continue to fight the death penalty after I graduate until we abolish the death penalty everywhere. During my college career, I have kept very busy fighting the death penalty. Most recently for instance, I testified on April 27 at the hearing in the Texas Legislature to impeach Judge Sharon Keller. You can watch the video of me testifying here.

I want to ask you for a graduation present. Please help Texas anti-death penalty groups win the Jenzabar Social Media Leadership Award and the $3,000 prize to use against the death penalty in Texas. We need to win and bring those funds to Texas to fight the death penalty in the number one execution state.

http://tinyurl.com/cyf8fx

Several Texas anti-death penalty groups are jointly nominated in the Jenzabar Social Media Leadership Award and a chance to win $3,000 to use against the death penalty in Texas. The winner is the entry that gets the most people to comment on their nomination entry. To “vote”, you just have to leave a comment on the blog post of our entry here. Your comment is your vote. The deadline to vote is May 8 at midnight.

We believe we deserve to win because we have been using social media tools very effectively to jointly mobilize against the Texas death penalty.

http://tinyurl.com/cyf8fx

There are four fields in the comment form, name, email, website (you can leave that blank or put in your own personal website or any website you want), and a field for your comment.

Our entry is called Texas Friends and Allies Against the Death Penalty.

From the entry:

I would like to nominate for The Jenzabar Foundation Social Media Leadership Award: a group of allied organizations in Texas that have been using social media to effectively work together against the Texas death penalty: Texas Moratorium Network, Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, the Austin chapter of Campaign to End the Death Penalty, Texas Students Against the Death Penalty, Kids Against the Death Penalty, Students Against the Death Penalty and the Texas Death Penalty Education and Resource Center. These groups have a cause on Facebook called Abolish the Death Penalty in Texas. Each organization brings unique skills and experiences to the cause. Decisions on how to use any award money will be made jointly by these organizations.

This alliance is a great example of how small organizations can have a remarkable impact way out of proportion to their funding by using social media tools to work together.

Texas is a challenging environment in which to work against the death penalty, but these groups have found a way to make significant progress against the death penalty by working together both offline and online using social media tools for education, outreach and grassroots organizing.

Texas is a large state, so it is vitally important for groups here to use social media tools effectively. In the future, we want to increase our capacity to work for human rights in Texas by finding new ways to expand our use of online social media tools in order to identify new activists and grow our movement to achieve legislative victories on policy and to organize campaigns to stop specific executions.

Most recently, these groups all worked together to get the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence to approve the bill to end the death penalty under the Law of Parties. We continue to push for a vote on that bill in the full House.

If you think these groups have been doing a good job using online social activism tools, especially considering that we are all-volunteer organizations, please vote for us in The Jenzabar Foundation Social Media Leadership Award by leaving a comment on our entry Thank you for helping us win the $3,000.

We have also started a new initiative to organize protests of the 200th execution under Texas Governor Rick Perry, which is likely to take place on June 2, 2009. More people have been executed under Perry than under any other governor in U.S. history. Go here to sign the petition to protest the 200th execution.

http://www.protest200executions.com/petition.php

We are looking for people to organize protests in many cities in the U.S. and around the world. We already have protests being organized in Houston, Austin, Huntsville and Paris France. More protest announcements will be coming soon.

Thank you,

Hooman Hedayati

DallasJustice.com has a post on the news that Sharon Keller turned out to be a lot wealthier than she was reporting in official documents to the Texas Ethics Commission. Everyone should probably call their own daddy and ask if you are also wealthier than you thought.

From DallasJustice.com:

According to the financial statement, and the reporting of the Dallas Morning News, these newly revealed assets include:

1. two fast-food restaurants
2. a bank
3. a home on Garland Road
4. another home on Garland Road
5. a commercial tract in Euless, Texas (1.5 acres)
6. 22 Certificates of Deposit (CDs) in four different banks
7. $110,000 investment income.

Must’ve Been A Nice Surprise

Boy howdy. Wouldn’t that be great — to discover that you own a bank, a couple of restaurants, two houses on Garland Road, some land, some CDs, and you’re gonna get over $100K each year in investment income?!! Wow.

Sources:

Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-keller_02pro.ART.State.Edition2.4aa5bed.html

On June 2, 2009, the 200th execution under Texas Governor Rick Perry is scheduled to take place. Since he became governor of Texas in December 2000, Perry has allowed more executions to proceed than any other governor in U.S. history. The date of the 200th execution could change if any scheduled executions are successfully stopped.

The Texas anti-death penalty community asks people around the world to focus your attention on Texas and join us in protesting the 200th execution carried out under Rick Perry. Altogether, Texas has executed 437 people since 1982, including 152 under former Texas Governor George W. Bush.

How you can protest the 200th execution under Texas Governor Rick Perry

Visit http://www.protest200executions.com/.

1) On the day of the 200th execution, call Governor Perry at (512) 463-1782 and tell him your opinion on the death penalty. If you live in the U.S., you can use his the form on his website to email him. We suggest you both call him and email him. If you live outside the U.S., you can send him a letter in the postal mail. We would like to hand deliver letters to him, so please send your letter to the address below and we will deliver it to Rick Perry: You can send us your letter to Perry for us to deliver whether you live in the U.S. or another country.

Texas Moratorium Network

3616 Far West Blvd, Suite 117, Box 251

Austin, Texas 7831

2) Attend a protest in your city either on the day of the 200th execution or sometime before. If a protest is not scheduled, you can organize a protest. If you live outside the U.S., organize a protest at the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate. Send us a photo or video of your protest by email and we will post it on this website and on YouTube. Or you can upload your photos and videos yourself to our social networking site or directly to our group on YouTube. If your organization is planning a protest, please let us know so that we can list your protest on this site.

3) Sign the petition and add your name to the list of people who are raising their voices to protest the 200th execution under Texas Governor Rick Perry.

4) Donate a symbolic 200 cents towards helping us organize against the Texas death penalty. That is one penny for every execution under Rick Perry. We are asking everyone to donate $2, which is the equivalent of 200 pennies. You are welcome to donate more if you can afford it, but everyone can afford to donate $2.

The artwork above by German artist Jasmin Hilmer represents the isolation of Texas in the world community. While most of the rest of the world, including all of Europe, have turned their backs on the use of capital punishment, Texas continues to execute people at a shocking rate.

This campaign is sponsored by Texas Moratorium Network, Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, Campaign to End the Death Penalty – Austin, Students Against the Death Penalty, Texas Death Penalty Education and Resource Center, Abolish the Death Penalty Project on Amazee. If your organization would also like to be a sponsor, email us at admin@texasmoratorium.org or call us at 512-961-6389.

Sarah Hannah is organizing the protest in Huntsville. She will be announcing details later. If you would like to help her or let her know you will attend, you can contact her at 979-450-2179.

Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement is organizing the Houston protest. Contact them at Abolition.Movement@hotmail.com.

More protest annoucements coming soon.

Join our Social community at http://abolishtexasdeathpenalty.ning.com/

The Jenzabar Foundation Social Media Leadership Award recognizes non-profits using social media tools to advance their causes. The foundation is awarding $3,000 in a voting process that ends on May 8, 2009.
http://www.associatedcontent.comarticle/1694695/texas_antideath_penalty_groups_nominated.html

District Court Judge Greg Brewer has ruled that death-row inmate Charles Dean Hood received an unfair trial due to the fact that the prosecutor of the case had a sexual relationship with the judge. Here is what CBS’ Andrew Cohen had to say about the case.

The last time we checked in on law and justice in Collin County, Texas, Matthew Goeller had almost single-handedly stopped an execution less than two hours before it was scheduled to begin. The former assistant district attorney had sworn under oath in an affidavit that the trial judge in Charles Dean Hood’s capital murder case in 1990 had been having an illicit affair with the prosecutor in the case.

Goeller’s belated act of courage – he had known about the affair for decades before he went public with the information – has begun to force the state of Texas, grudgingly it seems, to do the right thing. Hood’s scheduled execution was postponed. An appellate court authorized an honest review of the unthinking conduct of former judge Verla Sue Holland and former prosecutor Thomas S. O’Connell, Jr. On Friday, a judge formally confirmed Goeller’s story.

Holland, the judge, and O’Connell, the prosecutor, “were involved in an intimate sexual relationship prior to Hood’s capital murder trial,” reads the Collin County District Court order. Neither disclosed that fact to Hood or to his attorneys before, during or after the trial. In fact, Collin County District Judge Greg Brewer found the lovers, both of whom were married to other people, “took deliberate measures to ensure that their affair would remain secret” even when specifically confronted by others, including defense representatives, about their relationship.

Holland and O’Connell, the court ruled Friday, “wrongfully withheld relevant information from defense counsel prior to and during the trial, the direct appeal, the state habeas proceedings, the federal habeas proceedings, and the successive state habeas proceedings.” This, Judge Brewer unsurprisingly found, amounted to a deprivation of Hood’s constitutional right to a fair trial. So he recommended to his bosses at the appeals-court level that they grant Hood a new trial, 19 years after his last one, to fix a problem that is plain for all to see.

The Court of Criminal Appeals now has the matter and its record in capital cases is not a particularly auspicious one. This is the court, remember, that directly and deliberately defied the United States Supreme Court in Miller-El v. Dretke, an infamous capital case involving racial discrimination in jury selection. The increasingly-frustrated justices kept sending the case back down to Texas with instructions to better protect the defendant’s rights. And the Criminal Court of Appeals, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, kept failing to take the hint.

Now that Judge Brewer has found facts that establish the affair, and the efforts of two sworn public servants to hide it, it’s hard to identify a legal theory upon which Texas or its appellate courts could rely in denying Hood a new trial. Is there a more direct conflict of interest, negating the duty of impartiality and integrity in the criminal justice system, than what Holland and O’Connell did? Would you want to be a defendant in those circumstances? Would you trust the judge’s rulings, or the prosecution’s conduct, or the interaction between the two knowing that your adversary and tribune had been shacking up?

It’s possible, I suppose, that the appellate court could reject Judge Brewer’s legal conclusion that Hood’s attorneys can push this matter further even though all of the relevant events took place 19 years ago. It’s even possible, I suppose, that the appellate court will reject the interpretation Judge Brewer gave to the facts before them. But such poor judgments surely would themselves generate an appeal, and another, and maybe even a Supreme Court review. And before you know it we’ll be five more years down the road without any finality or certainty for Hood or the families of his victims, Tracie Lynn Wallace and Ronald Williamson.

Texas might consider doing here what the Justice Department did in the Ted Stevens corruption case. Faced with evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, the feds simply walked away from the conviction they obtained. Texas wouldn’t need to go nearly that far – no one (except for Hood) is suggesting that he ought to be freed or that he is necessarily an innocent man. All Texas would have to do, saving time and money, is agree now that Hood can and should be tried again before an impartial judge and an honest prosecutor. There appears to be ample evidence suggesting Hood’s culpability.

Texas then could use the money it saves fighting against a new trial for Hood on ensuring that its judicial officials understand what a conflict of interest is, and how it can be avoided, why it’s never okay for a judge and prosecutor to be romantically involved when they are working on the same cases together and why, worst of all, it’s never okay to hide such a material fact from opposing counsel. Hood’s judge and prosecutor lied, over and over again, to hide their affair. Any blame for the delay in bringing justice to Hood is their fault, not his, and Texas would be better off acknowledging that now.

JUDGE GREG BREWER’s RULING in Favor of CHARLES DEAN HOOD

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