WHO: Texas Moratorium Network
WHAT: “It Came From Austin!!!!” – A Benefit for Texas Moratorium Network and the Save Kenneth Foster Campaign
WHEN: Saturday July 28, 2007 – 8:00 PM
WHERE: The Scoot Inn, 1308 E. 4th, Austin TX 78702
www.eastinns.com
ADMISSION: $5-$10 sliding scale, 21+

AUSTIN, TX – Texas Moratorium Network (TMN) is holding a benefit show to help raise awareness of current death penalty issues in Texas, raise money to fight the death penalty and gain new members. The benefit is July 28 in Austin at the Scoot Inn. Doors open at 8 PM.

Fifty percent of the proceeds of the benefit will be donated to the Save Kenneth Foster Campaign. The State of Texas intends to execute Kenneth Foster on August 30, despite the fact that he did not murder anyone. Unlike any other state in this country, Texas utilizes a unique statute called the Law of Parties which allows the State to subject a person to death even though he did not kill, intend to kill, help or encourage anyone to do so.

The other fifty percent of the proceeds will be used for the 8th Annual March to Stop Executions in Houston on October 27.

Several Austin performers will participate, including the Austin Chronicle’s winner of 2006 BEST NEW BAND, the Texas Sapphires. There will also be clowns, dancers, and various other performances.

The show’s sponsors have donated various products and services which will be raffled to attendees. Diablo Rojo, The Boiling Pot, Antone’s Records and Epoch Coffee will be donating gift certificates.

Bands and Performers:
www.thetexassapphires.com
www.invincibleczars.com
www.myspace.com/diasporic
www.laurascarborough.com
www.dampheat.com

Sponsors:
www.diablo-rojo.com
www.theboilingpot.ypguides.net
www.eastsidepies.com
www.epochcoffee.com
www.antonesrecordshop.homestead.com
www.motorblade.com

If Lonnie Johnson is executed today, he will be the 100th person executed from Harris County. Click here to write Governor Perry to protest this execution. We are hoping that he will get a stay, because it is likely that Johnson, who is African-American, may have acted in self-defense after being the victim of a hate crime.

Amnesty International has published a report on Harris County. Here is a link to a PDF file of the entire report:

One county, 100 executions
Harris County and Texas — A lethal combination
“One of the cruelest anomalies of the modern system of capital punishment: Geography means everything“, Houston Chronicle.

In 1969, “Houston” became the first word to be spoken by a human being on the moon, beginning astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous message back to earth. Four decades later, the City of Houston, or rather Harris County where both the city and NASA’s Johnson Space Center are located, has gained international notoriety for something that pushes the boundaries of human decency rather than space exploration.

For, while Texas is the execution centre of the USA, Harris County is that state’s main supplier of condemned human beings. This is a lethally symbiotic relationship that helps to create geographic bias in the US capital justice system on a grand scale.

Harris County is the third largest county in the United States, with a population of a little under four million inhabitants, or about 1.3 per cent of the US population. Between one and two per cent of the USA’s murders each year occur in Harris County. About four per cent of the country’s current death row inmates were tried in Harris County. Nine per cent of the men and 18 per cent of the women executed in the United States since judicial killing resumed there in 1977 were condemned to death in Harris County.

Ninety-seven men and two women prosecuted in Harris County have been put to death since Texas carried out its first execution of the “modern” era in 1982. At the time of writing, Lonnie Johnson was set to become the 100th such prisoner to be put to death, his execution scheduled for 24 July 2007. Johnny Connor was set to become the 101st on 22 August and Michael Richards the 102nd on 25 September.

If Harris County was a state, it would rank 26th in population among the US states, one above Oregon. Oregon has executed two people since 1977, both of whom had given up their appeals. There are about three of four times as many murders each year in Harris County as there are in Oregon, but Harris County accounts for 50 times as many executions as that west coast state. Indeed, if Harris County was a state, it would rank second only to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 1977.

Donwload the complete 15 page report: One county, 100 executions

Johnson’s execution, if not delayed, will be Harris county’s 100th execution since executions were resumed in Texas in 1982.

Harris county, if it were a state would be Number Two in the country for executions, following the state of Texas. Number Three is the state of Virginia.

Please read the article from today’s Houston Chronicle and following it an excellent report on Harris County by Amnesty International.

Then make plans to join us on the tree-lined sidewalk in front of Chuck Rosenthal’s home at 7723 Pagewood. The home is three blocks west of Hillcroft and three blocks south of Richmond, in between Hillcroft and Stoneybrook.

Invited speakers for the press conference are Assistant Minister Eric Muhammad with Nation of Islam Mosque 45, the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, Harris County Green Party, the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, prison activist Ray Hill, producer of S.O.S. Radio Brother Zin and the family of Michael Richard, a mentally retarded man set for execution on September 25.

July 22, 2007, 8:40PM
Tomball killer is set to be executed Tuesday
Case again focuses attention on race relations in community

By ALLAN TURNER
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Durham, alone in the store, telephoned her friend Gunar “Bubba” Fulk, 16, and asked him to keep her company. Minutes later, Fulk, a strapping 6-foot-plus Magnolia High football player, and his friend Leroy “Punkin'” McCaffrey, 17, pulled into the parking lot.

The teens talked to the man — later identified as Lonnie Earl Johnson — then told Durham they were giving the seemingly stranded motorist a ride.

Four hours later, about 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 15, 1990, a motorist spotted Fulk’s body beside FM 2920, about four miles from the store. He had been shot three times in the head and once in the chest. McCaffrey’s corpse was found 350 feet away.

Detectives traced Johnson to Austin, where he was arrested at a topless bar Aug. 30. Although the Tomball landscape worker said he killed the teens in self-defense, a Harris County jury found him guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to die.

Barring favorable action on last-minute appeals accusing prosecutors of illegally withholding crucial information from defense attorneys, Johnson, 44, will be executed Tuesday. In a recent death row interview, Johnson likened himself to James Byrd Jr., the 49-year-old Jasper man whose racially motivated dragging death in 1998 gained international notoriety.

“The only difference between me and James Byrd,” Johnson said, “is that I lived.”

The case, which has attracted interest from as far away as Canada, again focuses attention on race relations in the tiny northwest Harris County community, which two years ago hosted a Ku Klux Klan function in a city-owned building.

Racially charged period

The state of Texas is scheduled to execute Lonnie Johnson on July 24, 2007. Johnson was sentenced to death for the August 1990 murders of Gunar Nelson Fulk and Leroy McCaffrey. Johnson argues that he acted in self-defense.

Click here to send Governor Perry an email urging him to stop the execution of Lonnie Johnson.

Excerpt from Johnson’s latest writ of habeas corpus and motion for a stay:

Although Lonnie Johnson maintained from the outset that he was the victim of an assault and acted only in self-defense, Mr. Johnson was convicted of an unprovoked murder/robbery, allegedly committed because the victims owed Mr. Johnson money. At trial, the State manipulated the evidence in order to support its theory of the case and concealed evidence inconsistent with its presentation of the case to the jury.

For example, the jury was led to believe that Mr. Johnson was carrying a gun on the evening of the crime but new evidence demonstrates that — consistent with Mr. Johnson’s statements — the gun belonged to the victims. This new revelation renders Mr. Johnson’s statements that the decedents pulled a gun on him more plausible than the State’s theory that Mr. Johnson was the aggressor.

Further doubt is cast on the gun evidence because, unbeknownst to the defense and jury, the gun allegedly sold by Mr. Johnson and then recovered by the police was broken and inoperable, which casts graves doubt on the testimony by now-discredited HPD ballistics examiner Robert Baldwin that he test fired the weapon and matched it to the bullets recovered from the victims.

Likewise, the police knew but did not disclose that the decedents’ relatives and friends had been involved in a series of racially-motivated attacks and counter-attacks immediately before and after the incident. It is now clear that contrary to the State’s presentation at trial, placed in context, the assault in this case was one of many racially-motivated attacks in the area. Earlier in the evening, two young white men argued with two young black men at the Texaco, across the street from the Stop N Go where the decedents met and offered Mr. Johnson a ride.

Days after the death of decedents, a truck full of younger, unrelated black men fired at a vehicle containing the brother of one of the decedents, the Stop N Go clerk, and a young woman that decedents visited on the night of their deaths. Because the State withheld from the defense the information necessary to give the jury an accurate picture of the series of events in which this case arose, Mr. Johnson was convicted based on a deeply flawed picture of the facts.

In addition to sending Gov Perry an email, you can leave him a phone message at: 512-463-2000, fax him at 512-463-1849 (his fax line is often busy, so just keep trying) or write him at:

Office of the Governor
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711-2428

You can also contact Governor Perry through his online contact form.