We received a copy yesterday of Jeanette Popp’s long-anticipated new book in the mail. Mortal Justice: A True Story of Murder and Vindication. It was published March 1. Jeanette has worked long and hard for many years against the death penalty. She served several years as chairperson of Texas Moratorium Network. Her book tells the story of her daughter’s murder, the wrongful conviction of two innocent men Chris Ochoa and Richard Danziger, their eventual exoneration, the subsequent conviction of the real killer, and Jeanette’s long activism against the death penalty, including a jailhouse meeting with the real killer and her successful efforts to prevent him from being sentenced to death.

The book can be bought on Amazon.

In her new book, Jeanette includes an account of a jailhouse meeting with the man who actually killed her daughter before his trial because she wanted to convince him to take a plea bargain and accept life in prison istead of going to trial and risking the death penalty. In the jailhouse meeting, she told him, “Mr Marino, you know I don’t want you executed?”

“Ive heard that,” he answered stoically.

“It’s the truth. I don’t want you to die.”

He shook his head and told her, “Mrs Popp, I’d rather be executed than spend the rest of my life in prison.”

A recent Dallas Morning News article said

Ms. Popp asked prosecutors not to seek the death penalty, because she says she did not want her daughter’s memory stained with someone’s blood. “I’m not a bleeding heart liberal,” she says. “But I do have a heart.”

Since the exoneration, she has been an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. That doesn’t mean she wants Mr. Marino to ever walk free.

We talked to Jeanette yesterday and she plans to come to Lobby Day Against the Death Penalty on March 24 at the Texas Capitol in Austin. In 2001, Jeanette’s testimony to the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee was instrumental in persuading that committee to vote in favor of a moratorium on executions. This year, the same committee will again consider a proposal by State Rep Harold Dutton to enact a moratorium on executions and create a commission to study the death penalty system in Texas.

The Dallas Morning News is reporting that another troubling incident occured at the Texas Court of Crminial Appeals and that Judge Cheryl Johnson reported this second incident to the State Commmission on Judicial Conduct, which interviewed the CCA’s general counsel. This case involved an appeal for Larry Swearingen, whose appeal includes strong claims of innocence.

Just weeks before the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was charged with “willful and persistent conduct” that discredited the judiciary, she was involved in a second incident in which lawyers for a condemned man were initially blocked from filing a last-minute appeal.

Judge Sharon Keller, a former Dallas prosecutor, was called shortly after the court’s general counsel and a clerk refused to formally accept legal filings requesting a halt to the execution of Larry Swearingen, a well-placed source told The Dallas Morning News. Keller’s attorney confirmed she was alerted but said it was after the incident was resolved.

The January incident was reminiscent of the September 2007 case in which Michael Richard was executed after the court, allegedly on Keller’s orders, refused to stay open past business hours to accept his attorneys’ appeals.

Amid the nationwide controversy that erupted over Richard’s execution, the state’s highest criminal appeals court formalized its rules of procedure for executions. The written procedures said the duty judge should be notified of any filings and work closely with the general counsel “to reasonably accommodate” defense lawyers, especially if they notified the clerk’s office that they were at risk of missing the deadline.

The Swearingen incident showed that problems remained.

Swearingen’s lawyers arrived at the clerk’s office at 5:01 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 23, after calling to say that copying problems were causing unexpected delays. Once inside, they were told their filings would not be entered into the court record until the office reopened Monday morning. That delay could have shortened the court’s timeframe for evaluating the appeal and subjected defense counsel to sanctions for failing to meet a 48-hour deadline for filing petitions in execution cases.

Their pleadings were accepted only after another judge on the court, Cheryl Johnson, intervened and ordered the chief clerk to return to the courthouse, several people involved in the matter said.

Although there is some dispute over what role Keller may have played in the latest case, she has long been a lightning rod for opponents of the death penalty, who contend she routinely favors the state’s position in capital cases. After the Richard execution, even some of her fellow judges were publicly outraged.

One of them, Johnson, had been the duty judge for Richard but had not been notified of the filing problems in that case. She intervened in the Swearingen case after his lawyers called her for help.

She later reported the incident to the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, the source said, on condition of anonymity. The commission interviewed the court’s general counsel about Swearingen, the source added.

Judge Mike Keasler said he, too, heard the commission had interviewed the general counsel, although he was not sure why.

The executive director of the judicial conduct commission, Seana Willing, said she could not confirm or deny knowledge of the Swearingen incident. She said she also could not discuss whether a complaint had been filed or anyone had been questioned.

Johnson declined to discuss the matter.

“Given all that’s pending right now, I really don’t want to comment,” she told The News. “Richard was not pending, and Swearingen is still pending. I’m going to leave it at that.”

Unlike Richard, Swearingen was not executed. A federal appeals court stayed his execution the day before he was to die to give his lawyers more time to pursue their case.

Concerns about how Swearingen played out, including why the judge assigned to the case was not notified, have prompted court members again to try to clarify their procedures, Keasler said.

“We need to get things as clear and as understandable so that everybody knows about it as much as possible,” he said.

The two bills that would abolish the death penalty will be heard next week in the Subcommittee on Capital Punishment of the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. The longest sponsor of abolition in the House is State Rep Harold Dutton. He first filed his abolition bill in 2003 when his bill was given a hearing by the full committee. A second person also filed an abolition bill starting in 2007, Rep Jessica Farrar.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING

COMMITTEE:
Criminal Jurisprudence

SUBCOMMITTEE:
Capital Punishment

TIME & DATE:
8:00 AM, Thursday, March 12, 2009

PLACE:
E2.016

CHAIR:
Rep. Robert Miklos

HB 297

Dutton | et al.

Relating to the abolition of the death penalty.

HB 682

Farrar | et al.

Relating to abolishing the death penalty.

From the Dallas Morning News’ Crime blog:

The death penalty in Texas is about to get another bright light focused on it with next week’s debut of A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green.

Green was executed in 2004, for the 1992 robbery and slaying of Andrew Lastrapes in Houston. Best-selling author Thomas Cahill, (How the Irish Saved Civilization), met Green the year before his execution and publicity materials say he encountered “a level of goodness, peace, and enlightenment that few human beings ever attain.”

Cahill arranged for Green to be visited by Archbishop Desmond Tutu before his death.

But more impressive than Cahill’s perspective or even Tutu’s, is that of the victim’s family: before his execution, Lastrapes’ widow and son asked that Green be spared.

Cahill’s book promotion tour takes him to the Rothko Chapel in Houston at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 12, but not to Dallas.

His publicist says, “he’ll be in Dallas next year for the paperback! We will go MUCH wider throughout Texas next year, including Dallas and Austin. You can catch up with all of the events and media on the Thomas Cahill Facebook page.

Buy A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green
through Amazon by following this linkand a small portion of the sales will benefit us to use against the death penalty.

Cahill is also the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe(1996)

The Dallas Morning News Assistant Editorial Page Editor, Michael Landauer, who heads the editorial board’s death penalty team, explains the paper’s position on Sharon Keller in response to an email from a reader:

Robert Rainey of Arlington e-mailed last week to complain about an editorial we wrote about Sharon Keller, the state’s head criminal appeals judge. The editorial called it “fitting” that Ms. Keller, who won national notoriety with her we-close-at-5 rejection of a 2007 death penalty appeal, will have to defend her actions – and her job – in a rare hearing before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

An excerpt from Mr. Rainey:

“Your editorial on Judge Keller spoke as the true liberals you are. Judge Keller was correct in her actions. There has to be a limit on appeals and that limit was not met. You did not ask the lawyers why they did not meet that limit after plenty of time for appeals. I suspect they were just trying to delay the execution, hoping something would happen.”

Assistant Editorial Page Editor Michael Landauer, who heads the editorial board’s death penalty team, responded to Mr. Rainey by noting that the particular appeal Ms. Keller rejected wasn’t the usual finding-of-fact issue or even a particular trial issue:

“It was based on action by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier that day that halted executions in this country for a matter of months. The attorneys did not file this earlier because this decision had just been made public by the court earlier that day. The Supreme Court later clarified that, yes, all executions should be on hold until they ruled on the case they had decided to examine.”

Michael added: “Even if we supported the death penalty, we would find it troubling that a judge would ignore the U.S. Supreme Court and make up an arbitrary deadline for lawyers.”

The other members of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later said there is no deadline for such appeals and have created a new system of considering appeals based on last-minute information. So, Michael concluded in his e-mail to Mr. Rainey, “in that sense, this is not about the death penalty as much as it is about a competent judiciary.”