Austin American Statesman Article on Granados.

Contact Governor Perry to Protest this Execution

Office of the Governor Main Switchboard: (512) 463-2000
[office hours are 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. CST]

Office of the Governor Fax: (512) 463-1849

For anyone who wonders about stays on the day of an execution here is a number to call:

TDCJ Public information—1-936-437-1303 —-just ask if the execution is still scheduled.

If Rep Jim Pitts becomes Speaker of the Texas House, let’s hope he has become a bit more mature and level-headed since 1998 when he advocated sentencing 11-year-olds to death. The Austin American-Statesman reported in an article Jan 8 on Pitts that in “1998, he drew attention for saying in the wake of school shootings in Arkansas that 11-year-olds should be subject to the death penalty. He never filed that proposal in the Legislature, instead pushing unsuccessfully for a death-penalty age of 16.”

Pitts’ bill to lower the age that people would be eligible for the death penalty to 16 was referred to the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, but was never given a hearing. Pitts seemed pretty fired-up about his bill back then. He had pre-filed it on November 09, 1998 in preparation for the session that began in January 1999.  At the time, Texas law allowed executions of offenders as young as 17.

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court banned executions of anyone whose offense was committed before they turned 18. The Court ruled that executions of such youthful offenders would violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

It’s a little scary to think that as late as 1998 there was at least one person holding office in the United States who seriously advocated sentencing 11-year-olds to death. Pitts didn’t actually want to execute 11-year-olds, his idea was to let them grow up to be 17, then execute them. As the New York Times explained in an article from 1998, under Pitts’ “proposal, an 11-year-old killer could be sentenced to death but would have to wait on a ‘juvenile death row,’ separate from the death row for older killers, until he or she turned 17.”

It all seems like an idea more suited to the Middle Ages. If Pitts is elected, he should sit down and discuss the death penalty with Brian McCall, who voted for a moratorium on executions in 2001 because he was concerned about the risk of executing innocent people, even though he supports the death penalty in general. Since 2001 there have been reports that Texas may have executed three innocent people: Ruben Cantu, Cameron Todd Willingham and Carlos De Luna. One of those executions, that of Willingham, took place in 2004. If Willingham was indeed innocent, then his life could have been saved if more people had joined McCall and the 51 other House members who voted for a moratorium in 2001.

Texas performed 45 percent of all the executions in the United States in 2006, according to the AP. Twenty-four condemned Texas killers were executed in 2006. There were 53 executions in the U.S. – seven fewer than 2005. The Texas total was up five from the previous year.

Even though Texas continues to set a blistering pace carrying out executions, the number of new death sentences imposed in Texas has dropped 65% over the last ten years, from 40 in fiscal 1996 to 14 in 2006, according to statistics compiled by the Texas Office of Court Administration. More from the AP:

Of the 38 states that allow capital punishment, only 14 carried out executions last year and just six of them conducted more than one.

Unlike Texas, where 379 inmates have been put to death since executions resumed in 1982, executions are on hold in at least 10 states where death penalty laws are under review, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based organization that opposes capital punishment and tracks the issue.

Two of those states, Illinois and New Jersey, have formal moratoriums. In the eight others — Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio and South Dakota — the lethal injection process is being challenged as cruel. Executions in New York are in limbo after the state’s death penalty law in 2004 was declared unconstitutional.

Carlos Granados is set to die Wednesday for the 1998 stabbing of a Anthony O’Brien Jimenez. Granados’ punishment would begin a series of five lethal injections over 20 days in Texas, site of the nation’s first lethal injection in 1982.

The four to follow this month include Johnathan Moore, convicted of killing a San Antonio police officer, and Ronald Chambers, a Dallas man who has been on death row about 31 years, longer than any of his fellow inmates in Texas. He is one of the longest-serving condemned inmates in the country.

At least two inmates have execution dates in February, three in March.

The 24 executions last year in Texas was about average for the past decade.

The New York Times is reporting that the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the Texas case of a schizophrenic death-row inmate in Texas to set the standard for determining when a mental illness is so severe that execution would be constitutionally impermissible.

The American Psychiatric Association expressed specific concern about the competency standard used by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the death sentence for Texas inmate Scott Panetti, in rejecting his petition for a writ of habeas corpus last May.

Panetti, convicted in Fredericksburg in 1992 of fatally shooting his in-laws in the presence of his estranged wife and their 3-year-old child, is a Navy veteran who was hospitalized 14 times for schizophrenia and other mental disorders in the decade before the crime.

A jury nonetheless found him competent to stand trial, and the judge permitted him to represent himself.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment bars the execution of the mentally ill. But the justices who decided that case did not settle on a definition of mental illness for the purpose of determining competency for execution.
…
The justices’ decision to hear his appeal was the latest indication of the Supreme Court’s concern about the administration of capital punishment. In recent years, the court declared unconstitutional the execution of mentally disabled defendants and those who committed murder before the age of 18.

Jordan Smith is reporting on The Austin Chronicle blog that Anthony Graves may be set free on bond soon.

It appears that the feds have had enough of state District Judge Reva Towslee Corbett and the rest of the state prosecutorial entourage that has been fighting to keep Texas Death Row inmate Anthony Graves behind bars. On Dec. 29, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Froeschner issued a bench warrant for Graves, pulling him from Burleson Co. jail and back to federal court in Galveston for a hearing tomorrow (Jan. 5), when it appears Froeschner will order Graves free on a $50K bond pending any retrial in the capital murder case that sent Graves to prison in 1994.

Graves was convicted and sentenced to die for the 1992 murder of six people in Burleson Co. Graves has maintained his innocence and last March the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, ruling that Burleson Co. prosecutors, led by former District Attorney Charles Sebesta, withheld crucial witness statements from the defense — including statements made by Robert Carter, who was also convicted and executed for the crime and who implicated Graves as his accomplice before later recanting and proclaiming Graves’ innocence — possibly tainting the outcome of the trial.

On the heels of that reversal, Froeschner in the fall recommended Graves be set free pending any retrial of the case, and U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent concurred, meaning that with $5K down, Graves could walk away from prison, where he has spent 12 years on death row.