Many people from countries other than the U.S. visit people on Texas Death Row, but the prison authorities have decided to limit international visitors to inmates
at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston by restricting international visitors to one visit per visitor’s trip to Texas. Several of our friends from overseas have written a petition to try to convince the prison authorities not to further restrict visitation for long distance and overseas visitors, which according to the peition:
serves:

“absolutely no penological purpose whatsoever but demonstrates a clear intent to:

a) Retaliate against those who support death row prisoners, often from the other side of the world. Overseas visitors travel at their own expense and use their yearly vacation to do so and long distance families and friends also travel at a dear cost to visit with their loved ones, this visiting time is precious for all concerned.

b) Further punish those on death row who are already being punished beyond their death sentence by being placed in administrative segragation (while they are not serving a term of penal servitude but are sentenced to die) to cut them further from the outside world. To these men and women, overseas support is the only support available and their only mean to sustain some kind of sanity to counterbalance the outrageous deprivations they are already enduring while waiting for their death.

We urge you to rescind this decision as it is unjustified, counterproductive, cruel and totally unnecessary to maintain order and discipline on death row.

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Visits/petition.html

Please sign and forward around you.

This petition needs to be signed with your FULL name and ONCE only.Incomplete names and double signatures will be removed completely.

For those overseas, please consider sending a personal letter to your ambassador or consul in Houston (or in Washington if your country doesn’t have direct representation in Texas) using the petition text in order to ask them to voice your concern to TDCJ-ID Director, Nathaniel Quaterman in Austin. Contat me directly if you need the detailed info for TDCJ addresses, fax and phone numbers.

This petition will run until Sept 20th, 2006, so please don’t wait to sign it and circulate it among your friends.

Thank you!

Sandrine Ageorges

William Wyatt, Jr. Aug 3 EXECUTED

Richard Hinojosa Aug 17

Urge Governor Perry to Stop the Execution of Richard Hinojosa

TDCJ Info on Richard Hinojosa

Justin Fuller Aug 24

Urge Governor Perry to Stop the Execution of Justin Fuller

TDCJ Info on Justin Fuller

Derrick Frazier (aka Hasan Shakur) Aug 31

Urge Governor Perry to Stop the Execution of Derrick Frazier

TDCJ Info on Derrick Frazier

Website for Derrick Frazier

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.

Inside Higher Ed, “the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education”, recently ran a piece on online organizing on Facebook called “Hooking Up, Politically“. The article mentioned Hooman Hedayati of Texas Students Against the Death Penalty and TSADP’s Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break. “Facebook is becoming a key resource for student leaders who mine the site for users with similar interests and world views. Politicians and nonprofit groups have discovered the power of grassroots online organizing, and college leaders, who are even more used to the networking functions, are staking out their Web presence, as well”, says the article.

There is a global group on Facebook called Students Against the Death Penalty (you must be logged on to Facebook to see the page) that has students from all over the nation expressing interest in a national anti-death penalty student organization. Any student in the nation can join a Facebook global group, as opposed to the usual Facebook groups, which are limited to individual campuses. There are already almost 1,500 members of the global SADP group. And Hooman has come up with an organizing contest aimed at doubling those numbers rather quickly. Read about the contest on the TSADP blog. We hope it works out. There is a real need for a national student anti-death penalty organization and it is heartening that there seems to be a national student group growing up organically from the grassroots.

Last Fall, TSADP placed an online ad on Facebook advertising the 6th Annual March to Stop Executions. At the march, we were chatting with a young woman who was attending the march with her mother. We asked them how they had heard about the march and they said the daughter had seen the ad on Facebook. That shows you how valuable online organizing is. TMN is also looking for ways to increase use of the new generation of online “Web 2.0” social networking tools. One of our members, Crystal, has started a Texas Moratorium Network site on MySpace. Take a look at it and leave her a message or add TMN as one of your MySpace friends.

There is also an article on Texas Moratorium network in Wikipedia. Anybody can edit any article on Wikipedia, including the article on TMN or the article on Capital Punishment in the United States. If you have something to say, go ahead and make changes to the articles on Wikipedia. There are also Wiki articles on individual people, such as Frances Newton.

If you live in or near San Antonio, Texas, you should not pass up the chance on Sept 7 to hear Joan Cheever read from, discuss and sign copies of her book “Back From the Dead: One Woman’s Search for the Men Who Walked off America’s Death Row“. She will be at the Twig Book Shop, 5005 Broadway.

Here is the website for Joan Cheever and her book: “Back From the Dead“.

San Antonio is the white hot center of death penalty interest in Texas right now, because of the Ruben Cantu case. Texas Moratorium Network is working with TSADP to persuade the San Antonio City Council to pass a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions. One of the main reasons why city councils should endorse moratorium resolutions is because local governments can be held liable for wrongful conviction and wrongful death lawsuits. A wrongful death lawsuit could be filed against a local government, for example, when misconduct by members of its police department contribute to an innocent person being convicted (and in the case of Cantu executed).

The city council of Austin settled separate lawsuits with Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger for a total of $14.3 million because misconduct by members of the Austin police department contributed to their wrongful convictions in Austin. They spent 12 years in prison before being exonerated and released in 2001. Travis County also settled a separate lawsuit with Richard Danziger for another $950,000.

Another example from another state: On May 5, 2006, a federal jury in Virginia awarded $2.25 million to Earl Washington Jr. who claimed a police investigator fabricated a rape and murder confession that sent him to death row. In this case, the lawsuit was not settled with a local government, but with the estate of a state police investigator, Curtis Reese Wilmore, who died in 1994. Jurors awarded Washington damages upon finding that Wilmore deliberately fabricated evidence that led to his conviction and death sentence. Washington’s attoney’s will try to get the state of Virginia to pay the damages against Wilmore’s estate, according to the news article.

Cheever revisits history of ’72 death row inmates

08/04/2006

Steve Bennett
San Antonio Express-News Book Editor

In the summer of 1972, Joan Cheever was keeping an eye on the Marco Polo players at the San Antonio Country Club pool as a high school lifeguard when the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Furman vs. Georgia decision declaring the death penalty unconstitutional. Cheever paid it little mind; she was more concerned with her tan.

Little did she know that some 20years later the decision (reversed in 1976) would practically consume her life.

After a college summer internship with the San Antonio Light, as a reporter assigned often to the “cop shop,” and a law degree from St. Mary’s University, Cheever found her true love: journalism.

As managing editor of the National Law Review, Cheever knows the meaning of a deadline. As a lawyer representing a man on death row for nine years, Cheever knows the meaning of dodging a deadline — she and co-counsel Robert Hirschhorn had San Antonio convicted killer Walter Williams’ execution for the murder of a convenience store clerk postponed four times. But on Oct. 5, 1994, Williams’ luck ran out; he was executed by lethal injection, and Cheever was the only person there for him.

“The experience that changed my life was witnessing an execution,” Cheever says. “I wasn’t prepared for that. I don’t think anybody’s prepared for that.”

That night in Huntsville, and over the next few months, Cheever wondered what would have happened if, like the 589 inmates on death row in 1972 — winners of “America’s death row lottery” — her client’s sentence had been converted to life. More broadly, she wondered, what do convicted killers do with their second chance? Do they kill again?

She set off on a quest for what she has come to call “the class of ’72,” a story she tells in “Back From the Dead” (John Wiley & Sons, $24.95).

“Really what drove me, compelled me to search for the class of ’72 was that I always believed that he (Williams) would get off death row and go into the general prison population,” says the self-described “death penalty junkie.” “And when I stood five feet away and watched the execution, I thought that night the answer to my question as to what he would have done if he’d gotten off death row, that question died with him.

“But in the next couple of years I realized that no, there was a group of people that did have a second chance, not because they were innocent, or DNA, or anything like that, but that they happened to be in the right place at the right time in U.S. history.”

Over a decade of working on the book, Cheever was able to track down more than 100 inmates who walked off death row in 1972.

“What surprised me is that they called me and wanted to talk to me,” she says. “They’d been living anonymous lives until my letter came, and they picked up the phone and talked freely and openly. They put their face on the death penalty, and that’s very, um, brave.”

Among those were Chuck Culhane, a published poet and teacher, and Moreese “Pops” Bickham, a spiritual man who has found solace in his 25 great-grandchildren.

She even found William Henry Furman, whose name is on the historic case.

“It was very difficult to choose who to profile. There were a lot of uplifting and good stories that came out of the class of ’72,” Cheever says.

Of the 322 who got out of jail, only five killed again.

“That’s an incredibly low number, five out of 322,” she says.

One of those was Kenneth McDuff, the Texas serial murderer whom Cheever describes as “evil.”

“McDuff never should have been paroled,” she says. “Two days later, the bodies started piling up.”

McDuff scared her too much to visit him in prison, but there were some scary moments when she broke her rule of never being alone in a room with a convicted killer. What drove her was what drives every journalist, she says.

“You just have to keep digging, keep going,” she says. “Even though there was the fear factor, which I write about in the book, I just felt like I had to keep finding them, I had to keep talking to them. They had a message, and I needed to deliver it.”

Cheever stresses repeatedly that she doesn’t want to downplay victims’ pain and suffering, and that she believes murder is senseless and cruel. It’s tough to keep a dry eye reading her chapter on meeting Walter Williams’ victim’s mother.

But, she adds, “What we need to look at is who’s on death row. We tend to think it’s the worst of the worst, and that’s not who’s on death row. I mean, I thought it was a more exclusive club than it is.

“The people who are on death row, yes, they are murderers, but they are also people of color, people who are poor, didn’t get a good lawyer, a co-defendant, the accomplice — maybe the guy who pulled the trigger got a plea bargain. So it’s not a fair system. It really is good luck, bad luck.

“What I found out also is there are some continuing themes of what makes some successful. And it’s education, if they got skills on the inside. They had family, they had friends. They had friendships with prison officials who supported them, and faith. So it’s a combination of different elements that helped them to succeed once they got out.”
Joan Cheever will read from, discuss and sign copies of “Back From the Dead” on Sept. 7 at the Twig Book Shop, 5005 Broadway.

sbennett@express-news.net

San Antonio Express-News publish date Aug. 5, 2006