The Texas Democratic Party approved a platform at the party’s state convention on Saturday, June 10, that calls for a moratorium on executions and the establishment of a statewide Office of Public Defenders for Capital Cases “to ensure that every person accused of a capital crime has equal access to well-trained trial and appellate attorneys”. The capital punishment plank was drafted by TMN’s Scott Cobb, who was a member of the 2006 TDP Chair’s Advisory Committee on the Platform.

TMN shared a booth at the convention with Texas Students Against the Death Penalty. You can watch some video of the booth at the convention.

A well-attended meeting of the Death Penalty Reform Caucus, started in 2004 and chaired by Scott Cobb, was held at the party’s state convention. The caucus heard from Delia Perez Meyer and Christina Lawson. Delia spoke about the case of her brother Louis Perez, who is on death row in Texas. The Travis County DA has agreed to retest some DNA evidence to determine if Perez was wrongfully convicted. Christina related the story of how she lost her father to murder when she was 9 years old and of the conviction and execution of her husband David Martinez, who was executed July 28, 2005.

Below is the text of the Capital Punishment plank from the TDP platform:

When capital punishment is used, Texans must be assured that it is fairly administered. Texas Democrats extend our deepest sympathies to all victims of crime and especially to the family members of murder victims, and we strongly support their rights. The current system cannot ensure that innocent or undeserving defendants are not sentenced to death.

In the modern era, Texas has executed more than 360 people – by far more than any other state in the nation. The frequency of executions and inadequacies in our criminal justice system increase the likelihood that an innocent person will be executed. Texas may have already executed at least two innocent people, according to recent major newspaper investigations into the cases of Ruben Cantu and Cameron Willingham. Ernest Willis was exonerated and released from Texas Death Row on Oct. 6, 2004 after17 years of wrongful imprisonment. In order to promote public confidence in the fairness of the Texas criminal justice system, Texas Democrats support the establishment of a Texas Capital Punishment Commission to study the Texas death penalty system and a moratorium on executions pending action on the Commission’s findings. Texas Democrats support the following specific reforms:

• Establishing a statewide Office of Public Defenders for Capital Cases to ensure that every person accused of a capital crime has equal access to well-trained trial and appellate attorneys, regardless of income, race or the county of jurisdiction.
• Allowing testing of any possibly exculpatory DNA evidence to ensure guilt or innocence before executions are carried out and allowing testing of DNA evidence after an execution to determine if an innocent person has been executed.
• Establishing procedures to determine before a trial takes place whether an accused has mental retardation, in order to be sure that Texas complies with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on executions of people with mental retardation.
• Banning death sentences and executions for people with mental illness.
• Requiring the Board of Pardons and Paroles to meet in person to discuss and vote on every case involving the death sentence.
• Restoring the power to the Governor to grant clemency in death penalty cases without a recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

ms. pickles 3rd grade class presents death penalty movie

Here is a video that was a part of the death penalty art show. It’s called Ms. Pickle’s 3rd Grade Class Presents “Death Penalty Movie” by Stephanie Saint Sanchez.

How do we react when we are confronted with injustice? How far are we willing to go with our personal commitment? There is a film playing now in Austin and Houston that is a must-see for anyone working to make the world a better place, especially if their work involves challenging an unjust government. “Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage” tells the story of a group of students, including Sophie, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst, who challenged the Nazi government by distributing leaflets criticizing the government in 1942-43. They were executed a few days after their arrest. No matter what issue people have chosen to take action on, if their goal is to make the world more just and more peaceful, they will be moved by the film to want to do more and to raise their voices louder.

Here is a website where you can read more about the story before seeing the film.

Something that is not widely known is that the same executioner who operated the guillotine to kill the Scholls was employed by the Americans after the war to execute both war criminals and common criminals. Johann Reichhart kept a tally of the executions he performed for the Nazis – a total of 3,165. He was one of ten executioners employed by the Nazis to carry out judicially ordered executions. In 1964, he gave an interview with Die Zeit newspaper in which he said he had changed his mind on capital punishment and now thought it was pointless. You can read about him in “Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987” by Richard J. Evans.

The Austin Chronicle Review

There’s no moment of release, no instant of sudden redemption in this powerful, moving, and altogether devastating film. It moves, instead, like some awful emotional dreadnought, slipped free of reality’s moorings and adrift in an ocean of terrible and ever-darkening lunacy. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (an Oscar nominee from Germany for Best Foreign Film this year) chronicles the last desperate and desperately resolved hours of its Sophie Scholl, a real-life German university student who, in 1943 Munich, ran afoul of the gestapo while distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in the commons of her school yard. For her actions, Scholl (Jetsch), her brother Hans (Hinrichs), and their friend Christoph Probst (Stetter) were found guilty of sedition and executed. Scholl is a national hero in the reunified Germany, and – thanks in large part to a recently declassified and as-yet-unpublished series of transcripts of her grueling, three-day questioning by gestapo interrogator Robert Mohr (an icy, utterly believable Held) – what’s most disturbing about Scholl’s final days isn’t her predicament (which, by that time, was commonplace all over Germany), but how closely the words of Mohr and Judge Roland Freisler (Hennicke), who pronounced the death sentence against Scholl and her compatriots, seem to echo current political barbs aimed at painting dissent as unpatriotic and damaging to our men and women on the front lines of the war on terror. Chillingly, these real-life, fully documented statements by histrionic, card-carrying Nazis literally echo what has passed for political discussion on the conservative end of the spectrum. At one point the seethingly unhinged Judge Freisler goes so far as to refer to Hans as a “terrorist,” a moment that carries its own peculiar, time-warping frisson. That’s shocking enough in its own right but it’s unlikely it was the main concern of director Rothemund or his bracingly, uniformly fine cast, all of whom seem far more concerned, understandably so, with telling the day-by-day; hour-by-hour; and, finally, second-by-second end of the life of Scholl, who, as embodied by Jentsch, is clearly the sanest, most human being in the entire film, a committed Christian aflame with the righteous, unbending idealism that only youth can fully provide. This is an unapologetically distressing film, but neither Rothemund nor Jentsch allow themselves or their film to devolve into hysterics. Instead, Sophie Scholl plods along inexorably, one step after another, to its grim, sad end. It’s almost unbearable.

The New York Times published an article Friday about mental illness and the death penalty. It concerns Scott Panetti, who was “in and out of mental institutions 14 times and addicted to drugs and alcohol since he almost drowned as a child and was nearly electrocuted by a power line, Panetti wore cowboy costumes to court, delivered rambling monologues, put himself on the witness stand and sought to subpoena the pope, Jesus and President Kennedy.” There doesn’t seem to be much controversy about whether Panetti is mentally ill. The question to be decided is if he is insane “enough” that executing him would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against executing the insane. Read the Times article and decide for yourself.

Scott Panetti, a death row inmate, understands that the state says it means to execute him for the murder of his wife’s parents.

But Panetti, 48, who represented himself in court despite a long history of mental illness, says he thinks that the state’s real reason is a different one. He says the State of Texas, in league with Satan, wants to kill him to keep him from preaching the Gospel.

That delusion has been documented by doctors and acknowledged by judges and prosecutors. It poses what experts call the next big question in death penalty law now that the Supreme Court has barred the execution of juvenile offenders and the mentally retarded: What makes someone too mentally ill to be executed?

The 7th Annual March to Stop Executions has been scheduled for Saturday, October 28, 2006 in Austin, Texas.

Visit the page for last year’s march for links to lots of pictures from past marches. The march has been held every year since 2000. It is a joint venture of many groups, including all the Texas anti-death penalty organizations and allied groups.

Photo of 2005 March.