After 7 months without executions, Texas has scheduled two people for execution. Meanwhile, we are still waiting on a response from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct to the complaint against Judge Sharon Keller that we sent them that was signed by around 1900 people regarding Keller’s unethical behavior on Sept 25, the last time a person was executed in Texas and in the entire U.S.

From the Houston Chronicle:

At least two condemned Texas inmates already have execution dates following last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the lethal injection process.

Charles Dean Hood, convicted of a double slaying in the Dallas suburb of Plano more than 18 years ago, and Larry Donnell Davis, condemned for a 1995 robbery-slaying in Amarillo, are set to die, said the Texas Attorney General’s Office, which handles federal appeals involving capital murder cases.

Hood, 38, was set for lethal injection June 17 by State District Judge Curt Henderson. Davis, 40, was set to die July 31 by State District Judge John Board.

The New York Times has an article on the number of people in prison in the U.S. compared to other countries. “Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

The end of the article offers one explanation, “Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”

Some highlights:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

…

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison.

…

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

…

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
San Jose Catholic Church
(South Austin off of Oltorf St.)
2435 Oak Crest Avenue (map)

through the eyes of Pastor Carroll Pickett, who served 15 years as the death house chaplain to the infamous “Walls” prison unit in Huntsville. During Pickett’s remarkable career journey, he presided over 95 executions, including the world’s first lethal injection. After each execution, Pickett recorded an audiotape account of his trip to the death chamber.

The film also focuses on the story of Carlos De Luna, a convict Pickett counseled and whose execution troubled Pickett more than any other. He firmly believed De Luna was innocent, and the film tracks the investigative efforts of a team of Chicago Tribune reporters who have turned up evidence that strongly suggests he was.

From award-winning directors Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) and Peter Gilbert (“Vietnam: Long Time Coming”).

“Broadcast debut of At the Death House Door on IFC May 29^th at 8pm”

The Austin American Statesman is reporting that an Austin man sentenced to death wants to drop his appeals and be executed because living in prison is too hard. His complaint makes a good argument for abolishing the death penalty and sentencing people to life in prison.

Sentenced to die for the 2006 killing of his girlfriend’s mother, Selwyn P. Davis told a judge in Travis County on Friday that he wants to waive most of his appeals because he is guilty and he doesn’t want to spend his life in prison.

“I’m certain of what I want,” Davis told state District Judge Julie Kocurek. “The quality of life is not, basically, to my standards, you know what I am saying? Basically, jail sucks.”

He talked about death row in Huntsville: He is confined 23 hours a day to a tiny cell, can’t watch television and hasn’t had any visitors since he arrived last year. He said a life of listening to the radio, writing poetry, reading and corresponding with a few pen pals does not appeal to him.

Davis said that since he’s been back in Travis County, he read in the newspaper about a death row inmate who was executed though some think he may have been innocent.

“I’m guilty of my crime,” he said. “They did not let him go; why would they let me go?”

ABC News is reporting more on what we noticed already about yesterday’s supreme court ruling on lethal injection, which is that Justice Stevens gave notice in his dissent that he in favor of abolishing the death penalty, making him the newest, and currently only abolitionist Justice on the Supreme Court.

Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court’s most senior member, took aim at the entire system of capital punishment Wednesday, writing in an opinion that it was a “pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.”

Stevens’ stance came to light in his opinion on Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol, which the court, including Stevens, upheld Wednesday in a 7-2 decision. There had been an unofficial moratorium on executions while the court mulled the case.

It is the first time 87-year-old Stevens has called on states to stop executions entirely.

Stevens wrote, “the risk of executing innocent defendants can be entirely eliminated by treating any penalty more severe than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as constitutionally excessive.”

In essence, Stevens has sent a signal that, while he recognizes the court has, in the past, found the death penalty to be constitutional, he thinks it’s now time for state legislatures, Congress and the courts to reconsider.

He wrote how current attempts to “retain the death penalty as part of our law” are the “product of habit and inattention, rather than an acceptable deliberative process” that weighs the costs of administering the penalty against its benefits.

In 1976, only months after he had been nominated to the high court by President Gerald Ford, Stevens voted to reauthorize the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia. Four years earlier, the court had invalidated it.

In speeches, Stevens has hinted that he found problems with the way the death penalty was administered, but Wednesday marked the first time he has used an opinion to clarify his position.

In an August 2005 speech before the American Bar Association, Stevens cited reports that death sentences had been imposed erroneously. “That evidence is profoundly significant,” he said, “not only because of its relevance to the debate about the wisdom of continuing to administer capital punishment, but also because it indicates that there must be serious flaws in our administration of criminal justice.”

Stevens joins only three other justices in history William J. Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun who voiced their opposition to the death penalty.