[Deathpenalty]death penalty news----TEXAS, NEV.

[Rick Halperin]

July 23


TEXAS:

Judge rules for Bell, against Chester


Criminal District Judge Charles Carver today recommended to the Texas
Court of Criminal Appeals that Walter Bell Jr.'s death sentence be
commuted to life in prison because he is mentally retarded.

Carver found, however, that Elroy Chester had failed to prove he was
mentally retarded. The judge recommended that his death sentence stand.

Bell, 50, has been on death row since 1975, longer than any other inmate.

He was sentenced to death by injection for the murders of Ferd and Irene
Chisum of Port Arthur. He has been convicted 3 times in the July 1974
slayings and twice sent to Texas' death row, now located in the Polunsky
Unit in Livingston.

Carver concluded that Bell's death sentence was unconstitional because of
his mental retardation.

Chester was given the death penalty in 1998 for shooting Port Arthur
firefighter Willie Ryman III, who was trying to save his 2 teenage nieces
from being raped.

Chester also admitted to killing John Henry Sepeda, 78, Etta Mae
Stallings, 87, Cheryl DeLeon, 40, and Albert Bolden Jr., 35, who was his
brother-in-law. The killings, all in the Pear Ridge neighborhood of Port
Arthur, took place during a spree of home burglaries from 1997 to 1998.

(source: Beaumont Enterprise)






NEVADA:

New execution date set for Nevada death row inmate


An Aug. 12 execution date was scheduled Friday for Terry Jess Dennis,
convicted of strangling a woman during a March 1999 vodka-and-beer binge
in a Reno motel room.

Dennis, 57, was scheduled to get a lethal injection this week, but the
execution was delayed when Washoe District Judge Janet Berry last week
ruled the initial execution warrant was flawed.

Berry on Tuesday signed a new order setting the execution at the Nevada
State Prison in Carson City for the week of Aug. 9. State Prison Director
Jackie Crawford followed up by scheduling Aug. 12 as the date.

Dennis was convicted of killing Ilona Strumanis, 51, an Eastern bloc
immigrant who he had recently met. He told police he strangled Strumanis
with a belt after she made fun of him for being unable to perform sexually
and questioned his claim that he killed enemy soldiers while serving as an
Air Force clerk in Saigon.

Dennis, who has a history of alcoholism, mental illness and failed suicide
attempts, has withdrawn all his appeals and said he'd rather die then
spend the rest of his life behind bars. A psychiatrist's report said
depression and self-hatred prompted Dennis to refuse any more appeals.

Michael Pescetta, assistant federal public defender, has filed a
next-friend appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San
Francisco, which plans to hear arguments on the case on Monday.

In a brief filed with the court, Pescetta argued the execution would
amount to state assisted suicide given Dennis' previous failed efforts on
his own. But the attorney general's office countered that Dennis has been
found mentally competent by the courts, and his past mental illness is
irrelevant.

Dennis, raised in Washington state, has been described by former
classmates and friends as a nice person who sang in his high school choir
but who also got hooked on drugs and alcohol as a teenager.

Court records state Dennis claimed he had been drinking since he was 13 or
14 years old, had been jailed at age 14 for marijuana use, and had made
his first of as many as a dozen suicide attempts in 1966.

Dennis was convicted in 1979 in Snohomish County Superior Court, Wash.,
for assault and also had a 1984 conviction in the same court for arson and
assault, and spent about 2 1/2 years in prison before moving to Reno in
1995.

Dennis' execution would be the second this year in Nevada. His close
friend on death row, Lawrence Colwell Jr., 35, was executed March 26 for
the 1994 strangling of an elderly tourist in Las Vegas.

(source: Associated Press)