[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

June 15



TEXAS----impending execution

Gregory Russeau of Texas Scheduled to be Executed on June 18, 2015



Gregory Lynn Russeau is scheduled to be executed at 6 pm CDT, on Thursday, June 
18, 2015, at the Walls Unit of the Huntsville State Penitentiary in Huntsville, 
Texas. 45-year-old Gregory is convicted of the murder and robbery of 
75-year-old James Syvertson, on May 30, 2001, in Tyler, Texas. Gregory has 
spent the last 12 years on Texas' death row.

According to Gregory's 4th grade teacher, he was a slow learner and had a 
learning disability. Gregory also shared a special bond with his daughter, who 
was born with a birth defect. Gregory dropped out of high school in the 11th 
grade and worked various jobs, including working as a barber, a laborer, and in 
a kitchen. Gregory smoked crack cocaine the day of the murder.

On May 30, 2001, James Syverton reported to work as normal at an automobile 
repair garage in Tyler, Texas. James spoke to a customer around 11:30 am. 
Approximately 1 hour later, another customer, Bob Bruner stopped to drop off 
his car. James was not seen, although both of his vehicles were seen parked 
outside. Bob attempted to contact James around 1:30 pm, but no one answered the 
phone.

Later that afternoon, James' wife went to the garage, looking for him. She also 
saw James' 2 cars, a gray Chevrolet Corsica and a gray Audi, parked outside, 
but she did not see James. She left after no one answered her knock at the 
door.

Bob returned around 5:30 pm to pick up his vehicle, as he had not heard from 
James. A short time later, Mrs. Syvertson also stopped by the garage. She 
became worried when she was unable to find him. She contacted her daughter, 
Jeanette Jones, and together, they returned to garage around 7:00 pm. James' 
gray Corsica was missing. They entered the garage and found James' body next to 
a car he was working on at the time of the murder. James' wallet was missing, 
as was his keys. James' pants pockets had been turned inside out. James' family 
also identified several items that were missing from the garage, or out of 
place.

It was estimated that James had been killed between 11 am and 2 pm that day. He 
had been killed by blunt force trauma to the head. Investigators discovered 
fingerprints and a palm print on the vehicle James was working on when he was 
killed. The fingerprints were eventually matched to Gregory Russeau. DNA 
evidence also linked Russeau to the crime scene.

Russeau was placed near the scene of the crime by several witnesses who saw him 
near the garage that day. A friend also testified that when giving Russeau a 
ride to Russeau's mother house, Russeau pointed out a gray Corsica and said 
that it belonged to his wife, but it had broken down. Russeau encouraged his 
friends to avoid driving by James' garage when they saw emergency vehicles out 
front.

Russeau was later seen driving a gray Corsica. He was stopped by a Longview 
police officer who discovered the title and registration papers of car, 
indicating that the car belonged to James, in Russeau's pocket.

Please pray for peace and healing for the family of James. Please pray for 
strength for the family of Gregory Russeau. Please pray that if Gregory is 
innocent or lacks the mental competency to be executed, evidence will be 
presented prior to his execution. Please pray that Gregory may come to find 
peace through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, if he has not already.

(source: The Forgiveness Foundation)

*****************

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----8

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----526

Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #

9-----------June 18------------------Gregory Russeau------527

10---------August 12----------------Daniel Lopez----------528

11---------August 26----------------Bernardo Tercero------529

12---------October 6----------------Juan Garcia-----------530

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)




*****************

Faces of Death Row: A New Tribune Data Tool



What's often called death row isn't really a row. There are far too many men 
and women awaiting execution in Texas to fit along one prison hallway. Instead, 
the condemned take up a large section of the sprawling, maximum security Allan 
B. Polunsky Unit, about 75 miles northwest of Houston.

The 6 women sentenced to death live at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, 
and a few inmates with the most severe mental illnesses reside in Richmond, at 
the Jester IV Unit.

But most of the 261 facing death by lethal injection reside at Polunsky, where 
they spend about 22 hours a day in single cells not much bigger than a 
bathroom. There is no television, and inmates are let out only to shower and 
exercise in the caged recreation yard.

In Texas, the death penalty remains as much about politics as it does about 
criminal justice. Voters here still heavily favor capital punishment, and few 
lawmakers can win election expressing anything less than full support for it.

This despite a drop in support for capital punishment nationally. According to 
a University of Texas/Texas Tribune internet poll conducted a year ago, 71 % of 
Texas voters supported it.

So who are all those inmates warehoused out in East Texas? What did they do? 
And which have spent more than 30 years awaiting their fate?

To add transparency to the state's capital punishment system, The Texas Tribune 
is unveiling a new tool for readers: Faces of Death Row.

It profiles all 261 inmates sentenced to death for the crime of capital murder, 
and allows readers to filter by race, age, sex and years spent on Texas death 
row, at the Polunsky Unit, Mountain View Unit or Jester IV.

Brief summaries detailing the crime for which each inmate was convicted are 
included, as well as the county where the conviction took place.

Of the 261:

--41 % are African-American.

--28 % are Hispanic.

--23 % are over the age of 40.

--Nearly 1/2 have been on death row for 15 years or more.

--12 inmates have lived on death row for 30 years or more.

The number of executions carried out each year in Texas has fallen dramatically 
in recent years, from an all-time high of 40 in 2000 to 10 last year. So far 
this year, 8 men have been executed.

There are several reasons for the slowdown. Since 2002, a series of U.S. 
Supreme Court rulings have limited the way the death penalty can be applied. 
For example, 29 inmates left Texas death row after the high court ruled in 2005 
that juvenile offenders could not be executed. Texas and other states have also 
been grappling with shortages of the lethal drugs used for injections, which 
began in 2011 after manufacturers refused to sell some of the drugs to U.S. 
prisons.

Also beginning in 2005, Texas became the last of the death penalty states to 
offer prosecutors the option of pursuing a life-without-parole sentence against 
a capital murder defendant, slowing the number of those sent to death row. The 
lifer's row in the Texas prison system has now outpaced the number of those 
waiting to be executed.

It may seem surprising that decades, even as many as 3, can pass between a 
capital punishment conviction and an execution, but the appeals process for 
death penalty - and non-death penalty cases - takes time.

"There are 2 competing, important governmental objectives," explains Robert 
Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit 
group that tracks trends and statistics about capital punishment in the United 
States. "The first is fairness and the second is finality. But a finality that 
is achieved by denying an individual a fair process is a miscarriage of 
justice."

Since 1970, there have been 154 people sentenced to death who have been 
exonerated, he said.

In Texas, 12 inmates have been released from death row as the result of DNA 
testing, confessions from other parties, shoddy investigative work or legal 
errors that were uncovered during appeals of capital murder convictions.

In 2010, Anthony Graves was released from death row after serving 16 years. His 
release came after another inmate confessed to the crime, and last week the 
prosecutor who won the case that put him on death row was disbarred for 
"professional misconduct."

Earlier this month, Alfred Dewayne Brown was released from death row after 
spending 10 years there. Last year, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw 
out his conviction and death evidence because his defense team was not given 
evidence that could have supported his alibi at trial.

(source: Texas Tribune)

***************

Another big reason to rethink capital punishment



A week ago today, Texas death row inmate Alfred Dewayne Brown walked free from 
prison after 10 years on death row for a crime he almost certainly didn't 
commit. A man whom the state was prepared to execute for the murder of a 
Houston police officer turns out to have been wrongfully convicted.

Who knows whether Brown can regain some semblance of his former life now that 
Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson has dismissed capital murder 
charges and acceded to his release. His case leaves this newspaper deeply 
disturbed about Texas' misguided rationale for the death penalty.

Brown's release underscores the unacceptably high potential for killing 
innocent people despite clear flaws in the prosecutorial system. Had it not 
been for an accidental discovery of an exculpatory document in an 
investigator's garage, Brown today would still be awaiting a state-sponsored 
death.

Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland and police union officials insist Brown 
took part in the fatal shooting of an officer responding to a robbery in which 
a store clerk also died. If they???re so convinced, why did Anderson drop the 
case on appeal?

Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg, who spent most of last year 
re-investigating Brown's case, won a Pulitzer Prize this year for reports 
exposing how the system failed.

Brown had long maintained that he was at his girlfriend's house, using the 
phone, when news first broke of the shootings. But no one, including the phone 
company, could recover phone records to support his claim. In 2014, a Houston 
homicide detective discovered some old records while cleaning out his garage, 
and among them was a phone log that corroborated Brown's version of events.

The fact that such exculpatory evidence existed, but wasn't provided to Brown's 
attorneys, violated his due-process rights. Brown's girlfriend had testified to 
a grand jury about the phone call and the fact that he was asleep on her couch 
when prosecutors say the robbers were scouting out their target.

But, as Falkenberg reported, the grand jury was loaded with members friendly to 
the prosecution. Under heavy pressure from a police officer serving as the jury 
foreman, who threatened to prosecute her for perjury and take away her 
children, the girlfriend changed her testimony.

The abuses uncovered in this case provided the push for the Legislature's 
approval this session of a bill, HB 2150, eliminating the "pick a pal" form of 
grand jury selection. Gov. Greg Abbott should sign it.

The fact that the prosecution's case unraveled upon closer scrutiny - while 
Brown's life hung in the balance - bolsters this newspaper's belief that 
capital punishment should be abolished. The criminal justice system is too 
riddled with imperfections to merit reliance on a sentence that cannot be 
revisited or reversed once it's carried out. Not when life without parole is an 
alternative.

(source: Editorial, Dallas Morning News)

****************

Did Texas Execute an Innocent Lester Bower?----Given our justice system, he 
won't be the last with so many holes in his case - and still on death row.



In the early summer of 2008, the woman known as Witness Number 1 sat in the 
living room of her East Texas home and told me the following story.

It was the 2nd weekend of October 1983 and her boyfriend at the time, a man 
named Lynn, seemed particularly agitated, she said. He finally explained why as 
the 2 of them were driving through Sherman, a small city in a rural area an 
hour north of Dallas. A dope deal near Sherman had gone sour, Lynn said, and he 
and 3 accomplices - guys who went by Ches, Rocky and Bear - "had to kill 4 
people."

She was skeptical until a few days later when, at the apartment of one of the 
men, she heard them discussing - joking about - the killings. Another night, 
after a nightmare, Lynn told her about seeing the eyes of a victim staring back 
at him, and hearing shots reverberate inside a big tin building.

The woman, who said she broke up with Lynn a short time later, first came 
forward to tell her story in 1989. That year, while reading a newspaper, she 
learned that another man, Lester Leroy Bower, Jr., was about to be executed for 
the crime that Lynn had described - the slaughter of 4 men in a North Texas 
airplane hangar on October 8, 1983.

Bower, a devout Baptist, husband and father, and former college football 
player, had no previous criminal record and no connection to Lynn and the 
others.

"I don't want Mr. Bower to die for something that he didn't do," the witness 
told me that day in 2008. Her identity has been concealed by federal court 
order because of the violent nature of the men she was accusing of murder. "I 
know in my heart that he didn't do it. I just could not in my conscience sit 
back and just go, 'Oh well, sorry.'"

Bower's 1989 execution was delayed as his legal team was allowed to dig into 
the woman's story. In the years to come, 3 other witnesses, including the wife 
and son of the man known as Bear, had independently come forward to corroborate 
her version of events.

Given the compelling stories of Witness Number 1 and the others, I assumed that 
they would someday have a chance to tell them to a jury of Bower's peers. Or 
that Bower's conviction would be vacated altogether.

But this is American criminal justice, where there is no real process for 
reviewing the accuracy of convictions, and, in the end, broad structural 
factors tend to block the possibility of getting another chance in front of a 
judge - even when you're faced with a sentence as extreme as the death penalty. 
The factors that could have given Bower another shot - a sympathetic 
prosecutor, definitive DNA evidence, someone else admitting their own guilt - 
are black-and-white, and comparatively rare.

And Lester Bower had no such luck.

After a dramatic series of hearings in 2012, Texas State Judge James Fallon 
went so far as to say that if the new witnesses had been available at Bower's 
trial in 1984, the outcome might well have been different. The judge then went 
on to reject Bower's request that the new witnesses have a chance to be heard.

That decision led to my second conversation with Witness Number 1 that took 
place just a few weeks ago.

"My heart is broken for him," she told me then. "I don't know what else to do. 
I know in my gut that this is just not right. I don't understand why people 
cannot just listen or not want to see the obvious. No one will ever convince me 
that Mr. Bower did it."

A few days later, in the early evening of June 3, the 67-year-old inmate was 
strapped to a gurney in Huntsville.

"I've fought the good fight," Bower said in his final statement.

He began to gently snore as a deadly cocktail of drugs began to take effect. 18 
minutes after the process began, a prison physician pronounced Bower dead.

On a steamy Texas afternoon 2 weeks before his execution, Bower grinned broadly 
as I sat down on one side of the visiting room glass. I was 45 minutes late to 
our interview after misplacing my driver's license, a necessity for gaining 
entrance to the prison visiting area.

"What kind of reporter forgets his ID when he comes to death row?" he said, 
laughing.

He and I were familiar by then. I had interviewed him once before, in 2008, and 
had closely followed his case ever since. As we sat together that recent day, 
it was clear his appeals were exhausted and the looming execution date, his 8th 
in 31 years on The Row, would likely be his last.

But Bower was cheerful and voluble, still stocky and athletic looking after 
decades behind bars. This surprised me. I asked him if he was afraid to die.

"What am I to be afraid of?" he said. "If they kill me 2 weeks from now, my 
last words will probably be, 'I'm out of here.' What can possibly be worse than 
this?"

I asked Bower if he had killed the 4 men.

"I did not," Bower said. "What's more, I feel we have had a reasonable number 
of people come forward with credible stories to say I did not commit these 
murders."

But Bower conceded that he was mostly to blame for his predicament. In the fall 
of 1983 he was married to his high school sweetheart and the father of 2 
daughters, with a nice home in a Fort Worth suburb and a good job selling 
chemicals.

But he was a restless, eccentric man, an avid outdoorsman and inveterate 
hobbyist always looking for the next great diversion. In the fall of 1983, that 
was piloting an ultralight aircraft. His wife, Shari, had other ideas.

"I looked at him and pretty much said, 'Over my dead body. You played football, 
weigh 240 pounds and you're talking about [an aircraft with] a lawnmower 
engine,'" Shari Bower said she told her husband. "I don't think so."

But Lester Bower went ahead anyway, responding to a magazine ad for an 
ultralight for sale. On Saturday, October 8, Bower told his wife he would spend 
the day bow hunting. Instead, he drove to the hangar on a ranch near Sherman, 
arriving in mid-afternoon. Bower said he paid $3,000 in cash for the ultralight 
that he stashed at a shooting range. That Saturday he arrived home just before 
dark.

The bodies of the 4 men were discovered in the hangar about the same time. The 
victims included one current and one former cop, a home builder and interior 
designer. 3 of the men were found wrapped in carpet inside the hangar. The 4th 
was found by the door, apparently killed as he tried to flee. All of the 
victims had been shot in the head, killings described at the time as 
"execution-style."

The slaughter dominated North Texas headlines for days and Shari Bower even 
mentioned it to her husband. But Bower kept his secret - that he had been to 
the hangar the day of the crime - from her and everyone else.

"I realized that I had no idea about what I may have gotten myself into or what 
I may have literally just missed," Bower told me on death row in 2008. "If I 
came forward, what might happen about the safety of my family? Then, of course, 
I had not exactly been truthful with my wife, so there was a level of 
embarrassment there, family-wise."

But his lies would be exposed. In January 1984, the FBI traced Bower's 
telephone calls to one of the victims. When questioned by agents, Bower 
admitted making the calls, but denied visiting the hangar on the day of the 
murders.

"So then October rolls around, November, December and we get into January. Then 
all of a sudden they [FBI agents] show up," Bower said in 2008. "And once you 
kind of start a lie, it just kind of grows and it rolls along. It just consumed 
me. You ask, 'Why would an intelligent person do something like that?' I find 
that hard to explain."

Bower was arrested after pieces of the ultralight were found in his home. 
Prosecutors later argued he killed the four men to conceal his theft of the 
aircraft. At trial, a state witness linked Bower to what was described an 
exotic brand of ammunition used in the killings. (His defense attorneys have 
since demonstrated that the ammunition was much more commonly available than 
the state had argued at Bower's trial.)

In any event, the most damning evidence was Bower's own initial duplicity. On 
the advice of his attorney, he did not take the stand to try and explain his 
numerous lies. Jurors deliberated 2 hours before finding him guilty.

"I blame myself mightily for the position I'm in," he told me in our last 
conversation. "The minute you start bucking the system, you immediately go from 
a person of interest to a prime suspect.

"I???m not upset with the prosecutors, the jurors or the judge," he said. "They 
did the best job they could with the information they had at the time. But now 
there would be a lot of other evidence to consider, and I wish they would have 
[gotten] the chance."

***

Unlike many in his circumstances, Bower did not lack for the finest legal 
representation. A high-powered Washington, D.C., law firm, Morgan, Lewis and 
Bockius, had taken his case pro bono, spending thousands of hours in his 
defense.

The defense lawyers and their investigators quickly determined that the 4 men 
accused by the new witness did indeed exist, and were known by authorities to 
have engaged in the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine in Southern 
Oklahoma, just across the Texas border from Sherman.

But Bower's legal team began to bump head-long into various realities of 
American jurisprudence.

One problem was that the appellate process in state and federal courts focuses 
on procedural and constitutional issues - that is, whether a defendant received 
a fair trial. Bower arguably did.

Unless you've had an unfair trail, "once you are convicted, it's really 
difficult to get back into court on an innocence claim unless you've got 
something like DNA," said Maurice Possley, senior researcher for the National 
Registry of Exonerations. As a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he also wrote 
extensively about wrongful executions. "I understand the legal theory behind 
it. We don't want cases dragging on continually. Defendants can't keep having 
unlimited bites of the apple.

"But at the same time, you never know when something critical is going to be 
discovered - that if it had been there at the beginning there would have been a 
strong likelihood of acquittal."

As such, under the current system, the fate of death row inmates is left 
largely to the whim of individual courts. In some cases where new evidence has 
surfaced, prosecutors and judges have reduced death sentences to life in 
prison, what 1 legal expert called a "consolation prize."

Texas' Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson recently went further, 
dismissing a capital murder charge against a man named Alfred Dwayne Brown 
altogether. Brown had served 10 years on the state's death row for the murder 
of a Houston police officer, but had always maintained his innocence.

In 2013, a Houston detective cleaning out his garage found telephone records 
bolstering Brown's innocence claim. An appellate court subsequently ordered 
that Brown receive a new trial. Anderson reviewed the facts and decided, over 
the objections of police, that the evidence was too weak to bring to court.

Just 5 days after Lester Bower was executed, Brown walked free. Such reversals 
often depend on the temperament and efforts of individual prosecutors.

"It varies so much from place to place," Samuel Gross, a law professor at the 
University of Michigan, said recently. Gross is an author of a 2014 study that 
showed more than 4 % of death row inmates in the United States have been 
wrongly convicted.

If an inmate doesn't find a sympathetic judge or prosecutor (like Anderson, 
apparently, in Alfred Dwayne Brown's case,) "you find yourself in a 
never-never-land, where there is strong evidence of innocence, but a jury never 
heard it," Gross said.

Despite that strong evidence, judges are legally justified under the current 
system to let inmates stay in prison or even be put to death.

"To me it's one of the most troubling features of our justice system" Gross 
said. "In the absence of procedural error, you have no effective escape valve. 
We don't have a procedure for reviewing convictions for accuracy."

***

Yet the new evidence in Bower's case, consisting mostly of the testimony of 4 
new witnesses, was thoroughly reviewed in court. Judge James Fallon's small 
courtroom was crowded for a series of hearings in the fall of 2012 where the 
defense got the chance to lay out their case for innocence.

Witness Number One took the stand, as did Bower himself. Much of the testimony 
concerned Brett "Bear" Leckie, who had died of cancer a few years before. His 
wife told Fallon that he had heard her husband and the other men discuss the 
hangar slayings.

"I believe they committed the crime, yes," the wife said.

A man named Rickey Joe Donaghey described his conversation with Leckie, who 
said he was searching for cocaine in the hangar when he was surprised by 3 men.

"He then pulled his gun and shot the 3 men," Donaghey testified. "Another man 
walked in and he had no choice but to shoot him."

A 4th witness, Leckie's son, said that shortly after his father was diagnosed 
with cancer, he admitted being present when the slaughter occurred.

But no DNA evidence linked the four men to the crime scene. Bower's lawyers 
worked for years, getting hair fibers, saliva and cigarette butts tested for a 
possible genetic link to one of the alternative suspects, with no success.

Meanwhile, if prosecutors had any qualms Bower's guilt, they didn't let on 
publicly. (They have not returned phone calls.) Instead they pointed to the 
drug use of the new witnesses and hammered away at inconsistences in their 
testimony, labeling their stories "preposterous."

Judge Fallon's ruling came in December 2012.

"...the new evidence produced by the defendant could conceivably have produced 
a different result at trial," he wrote. His next phrase essentially ensured 
Bower's demise. "...it does not prove by clear and convincing evidence that the 
defendant is actually innocent."

The ruling illustrated the dilemma for defendants.

"He [Fallon] points out in pretty clear terms that this guy probably would have 
been found not guilty had this evidence been available at trial," Maurice 
Possley said. "But now, all these years later, he can't meet the new standard, 
which is actual innocence. That was not the standard at trial. Then it was 
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

"To me the system as designed makes it almost impossible for someone in that 
kind of situation to succeed unless you've got DNA or someone else comes in to 
say, 'Judge, I did it. I killed those men.'"

Hence what is arguably the most compelling criticism of the death penalty, its 
finality. Wrongful convictions are inevitable in a system populated by fallible 
humans, but mistakes can't be rectified if an inmate is dead.

After Fallon's ruling, Bower's lawyers tried to buy time, hoping other 
witnesses would come forward. They are still waiting. It's now too late for the 
man whose memorial service will be held June 20.

"You never know when someone is going to come up and say, 'I know more about 
this,'" Bower told me in our last visit. "Or 1 of the 3 men who are left will 
come forward and say, 'I found Jesus.'"

"If that happens and you're dead," he said. "it does you no good."

(source: politico.com)