Check out the Sharon Keller profile on MySpace before Sharon Keller has it deleted again.

[Update Sept 8: MySpace deleted the Keller profile again and replaced it with a MySpace created fake “Sharon” profile to prevent the parody from being reposted at the same address. So, the new address for the parody is www.myspace.com/judgesharonkiller.com.]

The address is www.myspace.com/sharonkiller. As someone wrote in a posting on Burntorangereport, “Anyone interested in the Texas tradition of arbitrarily applying the death penalty and JR Molina’s campaign to bring justice to Texas’ highest criminal court has got to check out this hilarious blog.” Read the Sharon Killer blog.

Sharon Keller is the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. She is running for re-election against J.R. Molina. Keller was challenged in the Republican primary last March by one of the other Republican judges on the CCA – Tom Price. He said she had lost the confidence of the court and once accused her of making the CCA a “national laughingstock”, according to Texas Monthly.

A few months ago, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace.com. Murdoch also owns Fox News. So, it is not surprising that MySpace is starting to be a total “control freak” as Kyra Phillips of CNN would say, to which Dick Cheney might respond, “yeah, big time.”

A few days ago, a Sharon Keller profile on MySpace was deleted by the MySpace authorities. Apparently, someone complained to MySpace that it was not an authorized profile, but was instead a “fake profile”, so MySpace canceled it. It wasn’t a fake, it was a parody. MySpace only cancels parody profiles if they get a complaint from the person being parodied/satirized, so we assume Sharon Keller emailed MySpace and complained. According to our sources, one email the complainer sent read, “Very Funny. Hope you are amusing yourself. Enjoy it while you can”. Shortly afterwards, the profile was deleted by MySpace.

As you would expect a judge to know, parodies of public officials are protected free speech under the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution. Parody and satire have long served as means of criticizing public figures and exposing political injustice. It is true that parodies against unknown people can sometimes be regulated and prohibited. For instance, a student who publishes a parody of a school teacher might be subject to punishment, because the teacher is not a public figure. However, parodies of public figures are protected free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a famous parody that Hustler magazine did of Jerry Falwell back in the 80’s was constitutionally protected free speech. It had portrayed Falwell as having had a drunken sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse. Parodies and satire directed at governmental officials in order to criticize the actions of the government are given the greatest protection under U.S. legal precedent, as seen in the Supreme Court case “New York Times Co. v. Sullivan”.

Satire and parody seem to be gaining in popularity these days as forms of political discourse, especially among younger people. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are two fake news programs that are often listed as top sources of daily news for some people. Of course, Saturday Night Live, has been presenting satirical skits of public officials for three decades. Anyone remember that old SNL skit that mocked three Texas politicians’ over-eagerness for the death penalty – Ann Richards, Jim Mattox and Mark White. The Onion and The Swift Report are other examples of satirical sites that use fake news.

The Sharon Keller profile on MySpace is a clear example of protected political speech. Anyone who reads it closely can tell that it is a satire. Just look at the name of the URL, which uses the words Sharon Killer, or does Sharon Keller call herself Sharon Killer? Maybe she does.

We suggest Sharon Killer gets over it. We hope that after the November election, Texas gets over Sharon Keller.

Anthony Graves may soon walk off Texas Death Row on his way to an exoneration. This is yet another case in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is said to have become a national “laughingstock” by one of its own judges, refused to remove an innocent person from Death Row. In March, the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals overturned Graves’ 1994 capital murder conviction, forcing U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent to order a new trial. Kent set a Sept. 12 deadline for Graves to be set free on bail or given a new trial. Kent refused a request Thursday by the Texas Attorney General’s Office to delay the Sept. 12 deadline while an appeal of the 5th Circuit Court’s ruling is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, Graves’ attorneys will seek to get Graves released on bail. Read an article from 2000 by CBS News on the case.

“The mere possibility that the United States Supreme Court could accept review of the decision of the Court of Appeals and reverse is not sufficiently likely to justify Graves’ continued detention in contravention” of a federal rule requiring that Graves be released on bond, Kent wrote, as reported in The Houston Chronicle.

Roy Greenwood, Graves’ defense attorney, has said: “They don’t have any testimony putting him there. They have no physical evidence. They don’t have a confession; they don’t have anything.”

Last statement of Robert Earl Carter before his execution on May 31, 2000

To the Davis family, I am sorry for all of the pain that I caused your family. It was me and me alone. Anthony Graves had nothing to do with it. I lied on him in court. My wife had nothing to do with it. Anthony Graves don’t even know anything about it. My wife don’t know anything about it. But, I hope that you can find your peace and comfort in strength in Christ Jesus alone. Like I said, I am sorry for hurting your family. And it is a shame that it had to come to this. So I hope that you don’t find peace, not in my death, but in Christ. Cause He is the only one that can give you the strength that you need.

A couple of years ago, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals failed to overturn the conviction of another innocent man – Ernest Willis. A federal court had to step in and overturn his conviction. Willis walked off death row in Octber 2004 a free man, fully exonerated.

Did Governor Perry’s zeal for the death penalty cause him to ignore a warning, backed up by scientific evidence, that Texas was about to execute an innocent man in 2004? Below is an excerpt from an article in The Independent that suggests the answer is yes and that Cameron Willingham, who was executed in Feb 2004, could have been exonerated just as Ernest Willis was soon to be exonerated in October 2004, if only Governor Perry had not been blinded by his unwillingness to believe that the Texas death penalty system makes mistakes. Texans support the death penalty, but do they support applying it to innocent people? Will they continue to support a governor that does not prevent the death penalty from being applied to innocent people? Read the “Report on the Peer Review of the Expert Testimony in the Cases of State of Texas v. Cameron Todd Willingham and State of Texas v. Ernest Ray Willis”.

It also spells political trouble for Governor Perry as he faces an election race this November. Many of the arson panel’s conclusions had been reached even before Willingham’s execution, by a Cambridge-educated arson expert called Gerald Hurst, who passed on his findings to the Governor’s office. As he told an investigative team from the Chicago Tribune at the time: “There’s nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire.” It does not appear, however, that Dr Hurst’s findings were taken seriously by either the Governor’s office or the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Barry Scheck, one of the two principles of the Innocence Project, who remains perhaps most famous for his role in defending O J Simpson, said he had established through open records requests that the Hurst report had indeed been properly filed before the execution.

“Neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it or calling any attention to it within the government,” he said. “The only reasonable conclusion is that the Governor’s office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence and went through with the execution.”

The prosecution, meanwhile, presented last-minute, second-hand evidence that Willingham had confessed to his estranged wife, something she later said was untrue.

Perhaps most poignant for Willingham’s surviving relatives is that, at the time of execution, a similar case was going through the Texas legal system, that of Ernest Willis, who had been sentenced to death for his alleged role in setting a fatal fire in west Texas in 1987. Dr Hurst examined his case, too, found the forensic evidence similarly flawed and said he saw no evidence of arson. Willis was able to have his case reopened and dismissed. He walked out of death row a free man seven months after Willingham’s execution.

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Originally uploaded by Texas Moratorium Network (TMN).

Ten people protested the execution of Derrick Frazier at the Texas Governor’s mansion today.

From the Houston Chronicle:

HUNTSVILLE — Texas death row inmate Derrick Frazier was executed today for the slayings of a South Texas mother and her teenage son at their home nine years ago.

Frazier, 29, was the second convicted murderer to die for the shooting deaths of Betsy Nutt, 41, and her son, Cody, 15. Three months ago, Frazier’s companion, Jermaine Herron, was executed.

He’s the 20th Texas prisoner executed this year, one more than all of last year in the nation’s most active death penalty state. At least seven other executions are scheduled for the remainder of year.

Campaign to End the Death Penalty has a newly redesigned national website. It looks very nice! And on the front page is a photo of the annual Texas March to Stop Executions. The photo they use is from the 2003 march, which was the 4th march.