The next planning meeting for the 7th Annual March to Stop Executions is this Sunday, Sept 24, at 4 PM at 3210 Duval St in Austin.

October 28, 2006

3 PM Meet at Texas Governor’s Mansion (between 10th & 11th Streets on Lavaca)

3:30 March around mansion, down Congress Ave to Austin City Hall

Rally at Austin City Hall Plaza

Have you ever seen that old movie with Henry Fonda called “12 Angry Men” about a murder trial where everyone on the jury votes to convict except one person who thinks the defendant is innocent. He eventually changes everyone’s minds and they vote “not guilty” unanimously. Sharon Keller tried to pull a Henry Fonda last December on the CCA in the case of Brandy Del Briggs, but she could not succeed in changing even one person’s mind. It was a bit different than in the movie though. Everyone thought the person was innocent, except Keller, who could not convince one single person that she was right. Keller is running for re-election as presiding judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals against Democrat J.R. Molina.

Texans have come to expect the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule Keller and lower federal courts to overrule her, but now she is out of step with her own all-Republican court, which is increasingly turning against her. The vote in this case was 8 to 1 and she lost. Everyone else thought Briggs’ conviction should be overturned, but not Keller. No one wanted to support her though. She is the presiding judge and she gets no respect on her own court. In the Republican primary last Spring, she was challenged by one of the other Republican members of her court, who said she had made the CCA a “national laughingstock”.

Today, The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Brandy Del Briggs is seeking to regain custody of the child she had lost custody of after she was wrongfully convicted of murdering her other child. Briggs was exonerated and released after spending five years in prison wrongfully convicted of killing her other child. Keller was the only member of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals who voted to deny relief to Brandy Del Briggs. The vote on the court was 8-1 with Keller being the one. Forget about “12 Angry Men”, this was “Rebel without a Cause” since Keller had no cause to go it alone. Everyone else voted to overturn the conviction on grounds that the “applicant’s attorney failed to adequately investigate this case under the standards set out in Strickland v. Washington and Wiggins v. Smith.” Keller argued in her dissent that the trial counsel was not ineffective, but that he was following a “reasonable trial strategy”.

Brandy Del Briggs was released in December 2005. Harris County DA Chuck Rosenthal recently dropped charges against her because he could not prove she was guilty. The Houston Chronicle wrote an editorial arguing that she should be compensated for the five years she spent in prison:

Whatever Rosenthal’s personal beliefs or intuition about the cause of baby Daniel’s death, he has admitted he cannot make the case against Briggs. Unless the definition of innocence in Harris County depends on Rosenthal’s unsubstantiated opinions, that makes this one-time defendant innocent and qualified for state restitution funds.

Briggs was charged with murder in the May 1999 death of her first son, Daniel Lemons. She pleaded guilty to injury to a child and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

She denied harming 2-month-old Daniel but said her attorney told her she would receive probation if she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge. The attorney, Richard Anderson, has denied saying that.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Briggs’ conviction last December and she was released. The court cited ineffective counsel, saying her lawyer had not thoroughly investigated Daniel’s medical records.

Experts who reviewed the records for her appellate attorney, Charles Portz, said a birth defect had caused a bacterial infection in the infant, who had been in and out of hospitals. They also said a breathing tube mistakenly was inserted in Daniel’s stomach rather than his lungs at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital, depriving his brain of oxygen for at least 30 minutes.

His death originally was ruled a homicide, but Harris County Medical Examiner Luis Sanchez later changed the ruling to “undetermined,” saying he found no evidence of abuse.

Protesters march from Capitol
David Stout
Posted: 9/14/06

Protesters gathered at the Capitol on Wednesday, petitioning the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to conduct a new trial for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed. (Walter Reed, Rodney’s father is pictured above.)

Reed was convicted for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites after matching DNA evidence was discovered at the scene of the crime.

Yet, rallies for Reed’s innocence have begun to gain popularity. The documentary “State v Reed,” which took home an award at the 2006 South by Southwest Film Festival, has helped gain support from death row abolitionists across the country for Reed.

Toddlers, protesters and members of the Reed family held banners and gathered in front of the Capitol building before marching to the Court of Criminal Appeals building to deliver the petition.

“We’re here to let the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals know there is a public that cares about what happens to Rodney,” said Stefanie Collins, member of the national organization the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. “We just want justice for Rodney and his family.”

Since Reed’s conviction in 1998, several groups including the Campaign to End the Death Penalty have banded together to demand a retrial claiming that key witnesses and DNA evidence discovered at the crime scene were left out of the trial.

“We came here to plead to the [Court of Criminal Appeals] for Rodney to have a new trial and a fair trial,” said Rodney’s mother, Sandra Reed.

While a date for Rodney’s execution has yet to have been set, 21 inmates have been executed in Texas so far this year according the Death Penalty Information Center Web site.

© Copyright 2006 The Daily Texan

In 2004, State District Judge Sharen Wilson ruled that John Michael Harvey was “actually innocent” and recommended his release. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed with Judge Wilson on a vote of 5-4 and Harvey was set free, exonerated of the crime that had wrongfully kept him in prison for 12 years.

Sharon Keller was one of the four judges on the CCA who voted to keep this innocent man in prison. Keller faces the voters in November. Will she survive the vote or have Texans grown weary of her unwillingness to protect innocent people from being wrongfully incarcerated?

Read more from the Houston Chronicle on Dec 11, 2004:

John Michael Harvey missed out on a lot the past 12 years behind bars: marrying the love of his life who never believed he molested a 3-year-old girl, spending time with his parents who never doubted his innocence.

His relationship with his fiancee fell apart after he was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1992. After draining most of their life savings to defend him, his father died of health problems in 2000, and his mother lost her battle with cancer in 2002.

Now that he has been cleared of the conviction and is finally free again, Harvey must start over. His old life is gone.

“In order for the next several years not to be contaminated and ruined, I need to put closure on it and try not to feel sorry for myself,” said Harvey, 40. “I want to have future relationships and not be sad and sour. I need to get back to the man I once was.”

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday upheld a lower court ruling of “actual innocence,” saying Harvey had been wrongfully convicted. The alleged victim, now a teenager, had recanted.

On Friday, a sheriff’s deputy drove Harvey from a prison in the Texas Panhandle to the Tarrant County Jail. He was released that evening after the appeals court received documentation that prosecutors would not seek a new trial for Harvey.

He started walking in downtown Fort Worth, carrying two small bags of belongings, but had no money and nowhere to go. His Houston attorney, Sean Buckley, picked him up Friday night, took him out for a steak dinner and drove back Saturday to Houston, where Harvey has relatives.

“This has allowed the public to see that a wrongful conviction is not as rare as they once thought it was,” Buckley said.

From The Houston Press

September 6, 2006
Killer Page, Your Honor!
Filed under: Spaced City
Wonder if Sharon will approve our friend request…

We love a good MySpace parody. Why, just check out ours here, and here. So we think this fake page belonging to Dallas judge Sharon Keller, who’s seeking re-election as presiding judge for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals against J.R. Molina, is pretty damn funny.

But Keller doesn’t, and complained to the now Fox-owned MySpace folks, who promptly removed it. (She’s apparently pissy about being called “Killer.”) It’s up again, for now, but chances are it will be gone by week’s end.

For anyone who has even casually followed Texas death penalty rulings, the site’s a hoot-and-a-half. Keller gained notoriety when she ruled in 1998 that convicted rapist and murderer Roy Criner couldn’t get a new trial, even though new DNA evidence refuted the original blood evidence that essentially built the case against him. (Criner was eventually pardoned by then Governor Dubya, after serving 10 years of a 99-year sentence for the rape of a 16-year-old in Montgomery County.)

And thus, the tune playing on her MySpace page is Vicky Lawrence’s cheesy – but entirely apropos – classic “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” (a song about an innocent man getting nailed by the system). Arguably the best pic in her scrolling image set is of her with a group of women, holding a big check (because nothing says politico like a big check).

Who does Judge “Killer” – who boasts 136 friends – want to meet? “Katherine Harris (some people say we look like each other), Karl Rove (some people say we think like each other). The editors of The Onion.”

Her blogs are priceless, especially the one titled “20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die.” The judge cites a piece in Esquire on the nation’s best hamburgers, one of which can be found at the judge’s dad’s Dallas joint , Keller’s Drive-In. Sez the Judge:

According to the article, “the hamburger is a symbol of everything that makes America great. Straightforward, egalitarian, substantial, and good-natured, it is also a little bloody at times”.

Isn’t that hilarious? It describes me exactly, straightforward and a little bloody. FATFLOL. I wonder if anyone I helped get executed in Texas ever made a last request of a Keller’s Drive-in burger. They should, it’s bloody good, but they probably can’t anyhow. A little known secret is that the last meal in Texas is not anything you want. It’s whatever they have in the prison kitchen that comes close to being what you want. And if you order, “Justice” as your last meal, like a smartass, well, then you just die, er I mean go to sleep, hungry.

Go eat a burger. Tell Jack, his bloody daughter sent you. 😉

FATFLOL? Emoticons? The verdict is in. This political satire, which is sure to be nixed by Rupert Murdoch’s goons, is awesome. – Steven Devadanam