On Monday, a court in Dallas County is set to hold a hearing on what will become the 13th DNA-related exoneration recorded in Dallas County since a state law was adopted in 2001 granting convicted people the right to petition for genetic testing. No other county in the nation has had as many exonerations.

The Senate Committee on Criminal Justice will hold a hearing on an innocence commission bill (SB 263) on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in room E1.016 at 10 AM. They will also hear testimony on a bill to raise the amount of compensation for wrongful imprisonment to $50,000 per year or $100,000 per year if the person was sentenced to death.

More on the 13th exoneration:

Based on the affidavits, prosecutors said they’ll join a request by attorneys for James Curtis Giles to have state District Judge Robert Francis find him innocent of the savage sexual assault that sent him to prison for a decade.

His would be the 13th DNA-related exoneration recorded in Dallas County since a state law was adopted in 2001 granting convicted people the right to petition for genetic testing. No other county in the nation has had as many exonerations.

District Attorney Craig Watkins is expected to be in court to offer an apology to Mr. Giles – the third case in which he has done so since taking office in January. He has made the correction of wrongful convictions a priority.

Below is a letter to the editor from today’s Austin Chronicle.

Date Received: Fri., Mar. 30, 12:17PM
HAVE YOU STOPPED BURNING BOOKS YET?
Dear Editor,
Any word from Rep. Borris Miles on when we’ll start the book burnings [“State Representative: Let’s Hang the Artist!,” News, March 30]?

Appalled,

Chris Taylor

And here is the article the letter was responding to. We finally got the art back and can send it back to the rightful owners.

State Representative: Let’s Hang the Artist!

Rep. Borris Miles, D-Houston, was walking through the Capitol with his two young children when he saw two works of art in a public corridor he didn’t like. He liked them so little that he took them down off the wall and hid them in his office.

Photo By Jana Birchum

On March 12, freshman state Rep. Borris Miles, D-Houston, was walking through the Capitol with his two young children when he saw two works of art in a public corridor he didn’t like. He liked them so little that he took them down off the wall and hid them in his office.

Now no one knows where they are.

Miles took down two paintings depicting executions because, he says, he found them offensive. Scott Cobb, president of the anti-death-penalty group Texas Moratorium Network, which organized the exhibition, condemned Miles’ action. “Here we are in the seventh year of the 21st century,” he said, “and people are still confiscating artwork for political reasons like it’s 1955.”

The two paintings were part of an exhibition intended to raise awareness of the death penalty in Texas. It contained 11 pieces, including three by artists on death row. They were exhibited March 12-17 – Texas Moratorium Week – in the main corridor on level E2 of the Capitol Extension (the bottom underground level). The artwork was selected from a larger touring exhibition, “Justice for All? Artists Reflect on the Death Penalty” (www.deathpenaltyartshow.org), which features pieces by 52 artists from the U.S., Germany, France, and the Netherlands and includes 13 works by inmates currently on death row in Texas. The full show was originally displayed at Gallery Lombardi in Austin in May of last year and in Houston’s Gallery M2 in February.

The Widow Maker by Reinaldo A. Dennes

The Widow Maker by Reinaldo A. Dennes (currently imprisoned in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston) shows two white men laughing and drinking at the feet of an old black man lynched from a tree. In the background, a second, chained black man looks despairingly out of a prison window. Cuban-born Dennes was found guilty of the 1996 murder of diamond merchant Janos Szucs and is awaiting execution. The second work, by professional artist Shanon Playford of Portland, Ore., is a monochrome watercolor showing a figure in an electric chair. The words “Doing God’s Work” – also the title of the piece – are written underneath in script. Both pieces were on loan from the artists.

Miles says he does not regret his actions and claims that more than 50 representatives have told him, either in person or by e-mail, that they support him. Explaining his actions, Miles said, “As a black man, I was offended on the first one, and as a Christian on the second one.”

Cobb said Miles had missed the point of exhibiting in the Capitol. It’s a building “where we’re supposed to discuss issues on an adult level,” he said. “We shouldn’t reduce the level of discourse in the Capitol [to] what’s appropriate for a 5-year-old.” And while Cobb disagreed with Miles about both pictures, he was most concerned about Miles taking down Doing God’s Work. “That’s a clear case of him stepping over the line,” Cobb said. “No one has the right to take down artworks to extend their religious views.”

Miles said that since he objected to the pictures, he was justified in simply stripping them from the exhibit on his own initiative. “There’s obviously not enough oversight if those pictures made it to be seen in the Capitol,” he said. “There needs to be some kind of system to see and screen what goes on display. Those were not appropriate.” He had no suggestion as to who should make the decision of what is acceptable art, “as long as we don’t have pictures in our hallways that could offend people of any race, creed, or color.”

Doing God’s Work by Shanon Playford

But there is an approval system in place, and the moratorium exhibition had in fact passed it. All exhibitions in the Capitol must be approved by the State Preservation Board, although board executive assistant Julie Fields said the application process is usually “just paperwork to keep track of what’s coming into the building.” Any exhibit must pass the basic test of being for a public purpose. “Basically,” said Fields, “what we screen for is a private business trying to set up any kind of advertisement or promotion or any kind of rallies or political events that are prohibited in the building.” She said that nothing like Miles’ actions had happened before and that the current application and approval system had been sufficient so far. “There’s no higher authority to ask for a review,” she added, “and quite frankly, we’ve never had anyone who has ever done more than voiced a complaint.”

Miles said that part of the problem was that the pictures were displayed with no explanatory note. However, the rules established by the Preservation Board for any exhibition in the Capitol states that they do not allow “activities which promote a certain viewpoint or issue or could be considered lobbying.” Had the network included the kind of warning or labeling that Miles suggested, it might have violated this clause. Instead, the art was allowed to speak for itself.

Also under board rules, all exhibitions must be sponsored by either a member of the Legislature, the governor, or the lieutenant governor. In this case, the exhibition was sponsored by Miles’ fellow Houston Democrat, Rep. Harold Dutton – a traditional foe of capital punishment, who has again filed bills this session proposing a moratorium or abolition. After several phone calls, Dutton’s office declined to comment, only confirming that Dutton had never actually seen the pictures but had indeed signed off on the Moratorium Network’s application for the exhibition.

Artist Playford was surprised at Miles’ action and that he had found her piece sacrilegious. “If you were really a Christian,” she said, “you’d see the hypocrisy of claiming execution is doing God’s work.”

Playford normally works in oils, but after the 2004 elections, she was drawn to make a series of politically satirical black-and-white watercolors called “Seeing Red.” “To me,” she said, they’re slightly humorous. I don’t think of my work as shocking. In fact, I’ve had some Christians e-mail me, and they were very supportive.”

One of those Christians has now offered to buy Doing God’s Work. That is, if the picture turns up. No one seems to know where either painting has gone. Miles said he gave the pieces to Dutton, and the Texas Moratorium Network said they thought they’d be able to collect them from his office. However, as of Wednesday, Dutton’s office denied that they have the missing pictures.

Protest the execution of James Clark on April 11, 2007.

Gov Perry is about to equal the record of executions while in office that was set by former Governor Bush. 152 people were executed by Bush while he was governor. On April 11, Perry could reach number 152. The person’s name who could become number 152 is James Clark. You can read more about him on his website. Clark may have mental retardation, so his execution should be stopped at least to make sure that Texas is not executing a person with mental retardation.

The Senate Committee on Criminal Justice will hold a hearing on an innocence commission bill (SB 263) on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in room E1.016 at 10 AM. They will also hear testimony on a bill to raise the amount of compensation for wrongful imprisonment to $50,000 per year or $100,000 per year if the person was sentenced to death.

The Innocence Commission would be empowered to investigate all “colorable allegations that an innocent person has been executed”, as well as all exonerations to determine what went wrong in the system that resulted in an innocent person being prosecuted.

Of course, if the state is going to conduct investigations of cases where an innocent person has been executed, then they should also enact a two-year moratorium to make sure that no other innocent people are executed while the investigations are being done. Right now, the innocence commission bill does not include a moratorium provision, but at some point it should be amended to include such a provision.

Attorneys given more time to file appeal.
New Execution Date: June 13, 2007

Click-2-Listen

By Steven Kreytak
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, April 03, 2007

For 13 years, Eryn Baugh has been consumed with the fate of Cathy Lynn Henderson, the Pflugerville-area baby sitter sentenced to die for killing Baugh’s 3-month-old son in 1994.

He followed her 1995 Travis County trial, tracked her rounds of appeals and recently has been looking forward to her date with death.

(enlarge photo)

Cathy Lynn Henderson Baby sitter convicted of killing child was to be executed April 18.

He’ll have to wait a bit longer.

On Monday, visiting state District Judge Jon Wisser announced that he would move Henderson’s execution date from April 18 to June 13 to give her lawyers more time to appeal.

“I want it to be over,” Baugh said. “It’s not that we are after blood of Cathy Henderson. We are not seeking vengeance; we are seeking our freedom.”

Henderson’s lawyers had argued during a hearing last week that advances in the science of evaluating head trauma have shown that Brandon Baugh’s injuries in 1994 could have been caused by an accident.

They said they will file an appeal based on what they say is a relatively new scientific approach that melds the work of doctors with that of physicists and engineers.

“I decided, although not convinced of the legal correctness of the defendant’s position, it is in the interest of justice” to delay the execution, Wisser wrote in an e-mail to lawyers in the case.

Travis County Assistant District Attorney Bryan Case declined to comment on Wisser’s ruling. Prosecutors had argued during last week’s hearing that the science is not new and that the execution should go ahead.

A Travis County jury convicted Henderson, 50, of capital murder in 1995 after prosecutors argued that she, while baby-sitting Brandon and his older sister, deliberately slammed Brandon’s head against a flat surface with enough force to shatter the base of his skull.

Doctors testified that the injuries could not have been caused by an accidental fall, as Henderson claimed.

Testimony showed that Henderson buried Brandon’s body in a rural Bell County field before fleeing to Missouri, her native state.

Henderson’s ex-husband and daughter, who live in Round Rock, said they were pleased with the extension.

“It’s pretty tough once you prepare yourself for such a final event,” Warren Henderson said.

Jennifer Henderson, 17, said she wants a new trial for her mother, “a fair new trial.”

“This new evidence, it seems to explain what happened,” she said.

Eryn Baugh isn’t convinced. He thinks his son’s injuries were too serious to have been caused by an accidental fall and said Henderson lost all benefit of the doubt when she buried Brandon’s body and skipped town.

He and wife Melissa, who have moved to Carrollton, near Dallas, plan to attend the execution.

“I am hoping that one of these days she will drop all the lies and she will just tell us what happened that day,” Eryn Baugh said, “and look us in the eyes and tell us that she’s sorry.”