Derrick Frazier, a 28-year-old black man, is scheduled for execution on August 31, 2006 for the 1997 murder of Betsy Nutt and her son, Cody, both white.

Urge Gov Perry to Stop the Execution of Derrick Frazier.

Houston Chronicle article.

Call Texas Governor Rick Perry at (512) 463-2000 or Fax him at (512) 463-1849. For more information, visit www.hasanshakur.com.

Come to the Governor’s Mansion in Austin or one of the protests sites in the list of cities below to protest the Texas death penalty every time there is a scheduled execution.

Statewide Execution Vigils/Protests

Huntsville – Corner of 12th Street and Avenue I (in front of the Walls Unit) at 5:00 p.m.

Austin – At the Governor’s Mansion on the Lavaca St. side between 10th and 11th St. from 5:30 to 6:30 PM.

Beaumont – Diocese of Beaumont, Diocesan Pastoral Office, 703 Archie St. @ 4:00 p.m. on the day of an execution.

College Station – 5:30 to 6 PM, east of Texas A &M campus at the corner of Walton and Texas Ave. across the street from the main entrance.

Corpus Christi – at 6 PM in front of Incarnate Word Convent at 2910 Alameda Street

Dallas – 5:30 pm, at the SMU Women’s Center, 3116 Fondren Drive

Houston – St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 5501 Main Street (corner of Binz). Parking is available in the church parking lot on Fannin.

Lewisville – St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church, 1897 W. Main Street. Peace & Justice Ministry conducts Vigils of Witness Against Capital Punishment at 6:00 pm on the day executions are scheduled in Texas.

McKinney – St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Community located at 110 St. Gabriel Way. We gather the last Saturday of the month between 6:00 to 6:30 to pray for those men/women scheduled to be executed in the next month.

San Antonio (Site 1) – Archdiocese of San Antonio, in the St. Joseph Chapel at the Chancery, 2718 W. Woodlawn Ave. (1 mile east of Bandera Rd.) at 11:30 a.m. on the day of execution. Broadcast on Catholic Television of San Antonio (Time-Warner cable channel 15) at 12:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on the day of execution.

San Antonio (Site 2) – Main Plaza across from Bexar County Courthouse and San Fernando Cathedral – Noon

Spring – Prayer Vigil at 6 PM on evenings of executions at St Edward Catholic
Community, 2601 Spring Stuebner Rd for the murder victim, for family and friends of the murder victim, the prison guards and correctional officers, for the family of the condemn man/woman, for the man/woman to be executed and to an end to the death penalty.

We are are searching for visual arts venues in Texas cities where we can exhibit our art show “Justice for All?: Artists Reflect on the Death Penalty”. We are especially interested in venues in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. If you know of a gallery, museum or other venue, please contact us at info@deathpenaltyartshow.org or leave a message at 512-302-6715.

The show first ran May 6-22, 2006 in Austin at Gallery Lombardi. There were 54 pieces in the Austin exhibit, selected by three jurors: Annette Carlozzi, senior curator at the Blanton Museum, Lora Reynolds of the Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, and Malaquias Montoya, an artist and professor of art at the University of California, Davis.

The exhibit includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, videos and installation art.

The show is online at www.deathpenaltyartshow.org. The online gallery includes not just the works that were selected by the jury, but all of the works that were submitted to the show:
www.deathpenaltyartshow.org/gallery.

You can also see images of the artworks on Flickr.

The show includes audio descriptions from many of the artists that visitors to the exhibition venue can listen to by calling a number on their cell phones. An example of an audio recording is here. Just click on “listen to audio description”.

Here is a link to a review of the show from The Austin Chronicle.

The “7th Annual March to Stop Executions” will take place on October 28, 2006 in Austin. It has been held since 2000 by a broad coalition of anti-death penalty groups.

The next planning meeting is Sunday, Sept 10, at 2 PM on the UT-Austin campus in the north dining area of the Texas Union building. Please come and help organize the march.

If you would like to get on the march planning discussion list, send an email to maustin-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

At the last meeting, on Aug 27, there were three representatives from the University Catholic Center Social Justice Committee and Catholic Longhorns for Life. They were very interested in helping organize the march this year. They attended the march last year. They are going to contact the Catholic bishop in Austin and invite him to speak at the march. He last spoke at the march in 2001 (see article below). Also they offered the use of the UCC building on the morning of the march. They also offered Inside Books the use of their kitchen to prepare food for the Inside Books pre-march brunch, if IB decides to organize a brunch again this year as they have in the past (We hope they do!). Below is an article about the 2nd Annual March, which was held in 2001.

Marchers gathered at Capitol demand end to death penalty
By Dick Stanley
American-Statesman Staff
Sunday, October 28, 2001

Maybe it was the anxiety so many feel in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax incidents on the East Coast.

Or maybe it was because none of the death penalty moratorium bills the Legislature considered this year passed.

Whatever the reason, organizers of the second annual March for a Moratorium against the death penalty estimated that the trek to the south steps of the Capitol drew fewer than half the 700 people who turned out for the first march in 2000.

There was no diminishment of passion, however, against what many marchers and speakers called legalized murder.

“We come to say with loud voices how we respect life,” Bishop Gregory Aymond of the Catholic Diocese of Austin told the crowd. “Very often the poorest and least educated do not have proper legal counsel.”

He noted that Texas executions account for a third of all state executions in the United States. There have been 13 this year and 253 since the penalty was reinstated in 1982.

Aymond asked legislators to reflect again on the need for the death penalty at their 2003 session, when state Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, is expected to resubmit his proposal for a two-year death penalty moratorium, which failed this year.

Led by a group of drummers, the crowd for the march, which was organized by more than two dozen groups, chanted: “The whole world is watching; moratorium now.”

Signs carried by many people demanded an end to sleeping lawyers, execution of the innocent and people with mental retardation, and racist sentencing.

Speaker Sandra Cook, wife of former death row inmate Kerry Max Cook, urged the Legislature to “execute the death penalty” in 2003. Her husband spent 22 years in prison in Texas before DNA testing refuted evidence from the 1977 rape and murder of a Tyler woman.

At the back of the crowd, with plastic donation buckets in hand, stood longtime death penalty opponents Ruth Epstein and Marjorie Loehlin of Austin. Epstein is a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, and Loehlin, 80, is on the board of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Despite the failure of Dutton’s and other bills against the death penalty this year, said Loehlin, at least they were up for discussion.

“That never happened before,” she said.

“We’re hoping (for passage) next time around,” said Epstein.

Would they support the death penalty if terrorists such as the ones responsible for the mass murders of Sept. 11 were facing it?

“Not even then, I would say,” Loehlin said.

Added Epstein quickly, “But I wouldn’t let them loose.”

We are kicking into higher gear in the planning for this year’s annual “March to Stop Executions”.

The “7th Annual March to Stop Executions” will take place on October 28, 2006 in Austin. It has been held since 2000 by a broad coalition of anti-death penalty groups.

The first planning meeting is Sunday, Aug 27, at 2 PM on the UT-Austin campus in the north dining area of the Texas Union building. Please come and help organize the march.

If you would like to get on the march planning discussion list, send an email to maustin-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

A former Texas death row inmate whose conviction was overturned, partly because of problems in the Houston Police Department’s crime lab, walked out of the Harris County Jail today after being paroled. On Sept. 20, 2004, a federal court in Houston, Texas, had overturned the death penalty conviction of Martin Draughon, who had been on death row for 17 years. U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal ruled that a ballistics expert presented evidence that showed that the victim was killed by a bullet that ricocheted off the pavement, instead of being killed by a bullet that had been intentionally aimed at him by Draughon. Such evidence could have persuaded the jury to give him life imprisonment if it had been presented at his trial, she said in her opinion. If it were not for the problems in the HPD crime lab and if Draughon had had a competent lawyer at his first trial, he would not have been sentenced to death in the first place. Draughon accepted a 40 year sentence this past July. He was released from prison on a program called intensive mandatory supervision.

From The Houston Chronicle:

Judge Rosenthal Rosenthal ruled that Draughon’s attorney had failed to hire a ballistics expert to present evidence about the bullet in the trial.

She also cited “serious questions” about the accuracy of analysis in the HPD crime lab, which is still the subject of an independent investigation because of problems in several divisions, including ballistics.

Rather than put Draughon on trial again, prosecutors reached a plea agreement with him that called for a 40-year sentence.

That period is based on a combination of the time he has served and the “good time” he accumulated while in prison.

The conditions of his mandatory supervision include reporting to a parole officer nine times a month, Lyons said.

He also will be fitted with a global positioning system monitor so that parole officials can track his movements.

While living in Livington, Draughon won’t be far from the Polunsky Unit and his former home on death row.

State District Judge Jan Krocker, the former assistant district attorney who prosecuted Draughon, did not believe his death sentence should have been overturned.

“If (the victim) was truly killed by a ricocheted bullet, the jury should have heard that evidence 17 years ago and Mr. Draughon should get a new trial,” Krocker wrote in an e-mail to the Houston Chronicle. “It would be morally wrong for the execution to go forward if the jury didn’t get to hear such important evidence.”

However, Krocker does not think Draughon should get a new trial. She is adamant that the ballistics evidence she presented is correct, that the shooting was deliberate and that he should be executed.

Some legal experts say Krocker violated the state judicial code of ethics by becoming actively involved in fighting Draughon’s appeal.

Rosenthal rejected Krocker’s request to present testimony supporting her ballistics theory. However, she did allow Krocker to submit written statements from witnesses as part of the court record.

Those witnesses included C.E. Anderson, who retired from the HPD lab’s firearms division in 1998. In his statement, Anderson, who performed the ballistics analysis of the bullet fragments in the Draughon shooting, stood by his findings.

“The bullet that killed the deceased did not ricochet before it entered the body,” he wrote.

But in her order, Rosenthal speculated that the prosecution’s assertion that the shooting was intentional may well have been the difference between Draughon’s receiving the death penalty or life in prison.

“The (new) ballistics evidence presented (in federal court) establishes that evidence existed that would have supported Draughon’s defense theory and would have allowed the jury to find a lack of intent,” Rosenthal wrote. “Had the jury done so, Draughon would have been convicted of felony murder, not capital murder.”

Jeff Keyes, Draughon’s appellate attorney, says the case reveals shortcomings in Harris County criminal justice.

“When we came into the case in 1993, we tried on numerous occasions to get the bullet and the gun to have them examined, and we were denied that by the state courts,” said Keyes, who is based in Minnesota. “You take a look at the evidence many years later, and it just gives you a lump in the throat to think that this is the way the system operates.”

As for Jan Kroker, the former assistant DA who prosecuted the case and intervened in the appeal, The Texas Observer calls her one of the “worst judges in Texas”:

In a county known nationwide for being tough on crime, District Judge Jan Krocker has set herself apart from her fellow judges as one of the toughest. Nineteen of Harris County’s 24 criminal district court judges, including Krocker, cut their teeth as prosecutors in the district attorney’s office. What’s different about Krocker, a Republican in her early 50s, is that she seems to have never really left. A dramatic case in point was her intervention in 2004 in the death penalty appeal of a young man named Martin Draughon. In 1987, while still an assistant district attorney, Krocker prosecuted Draughon for shooting a man to death during a restaurant robbery. During his trial, Draughon’s attorneys argued that the killing was the accidental result of a ricochet from a warning shot, and that Draughon shouldn’t have to face the death penalty. Krocker got the conviction, but Draughon’s appellate attorneys later produced convincing evidence that the Houston crime lab, already under public scrutiny for failings in its DNA work, had blown the ballistics testing of the bullet.

That revelation was embarrassing enough, but what happened next was even worse. Krocker—by now Judge Krocker—had been following the case as it made its way through the appellate process. According to the Houston Chronicle, Krocker contacted the appellate judge and insisted on testifying in the proceedings. The state team did not want her help, calling her intervention “improper and unnecessary.” But Krocker was adamant, arguing that her reputation was on the line in the case, the Chronicle reported. If it wasn’t before, it certainly was after Krocker’s efforts became public. The Chronicle editorial board castigated the judge, saying the case raised “serious issues regarding her impartiality.” At least one defendant convicted in Krocker’s court in an unrelated case requested a retrial, arguing, in effect, that one prosecutor in a Harris County courtroom was enough. The judge in Draughon’s appeal eventually allowed Krocker to submit written affidavits, and then granted Draughon a new trial anyway.