[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, N.C., MISS., OHIO, KY.

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 28



TEXAS:

Texas must halt 'shameful' execution of man with severe mental disability; 
Scott Panetti, a 56-year-old man with a mental illness, is due to be executed 
in Texas on 3 December.


The State of Texas should immediately halt its shameful plans to execute a man 
with severe mental illness, said Amnesty International with the scheduled 
execution now less than a week away.

Scott Panetti, a 56-year-old man whose mental illness predated and contributed 
to the 1992 double murder for which he was sent to death row, is scheduled to 
be executed in Texas soon after 6pm local time on 3 December. His mental 
illness infected his trial and persists to this day. He has spent nearly 20 
years on death row.

"In the 21st century, a clear majority of countries have stopped executing 
anyone, let alone individuals with profound mental illness. While we believe 
that the death penalty is never just, even those who support judicial killing 
should see the manifest injustice evident here," said Rob Freer, USA Researcher 
at Amnesty International.

"It is never too late until the lethal injection is administered. The parole 
board can vote for commutation. The governor can stop the execution, even 
without a recommendation to do so from the board. To choose to kill Scott 
Panetti would put down another shameful marker in the ugly history of the death 
penalty in the USA".

Scott Panetti had already been hospitalized more than a dozen times with 
schizophrenia and other mental illness when, soon after the last of these 
hospitalizations in 1992, he shot and killed his parents-in-law.

As 5 US Supreme Court Justices noted in 2007, there is "much in the record to 
support the conclusion that [Panetti] suffers from severe delusions", and the 
federal judge to whom they remanded the case found that "Panetti is seriously 
mentally ill", and "was under the influence of this severe mental illness" at 
the time of his crime and when he represented himself at trial.

Scott Panetti insisted on acting as his own lawyer at his 1995 trial. During 
the proceedings he dressed as a cowboy and gave a rambling defence. Witnesses 
have variously described the trial as a "farce", a "joke", a "circus", and a 
"mockery".

According to his current lawyers, Scott Panetti's mental illness persists, as 
indicated in prison records. The lawyers have said that the condemned man 
reports "hearing voices", and claims the prison authorities have planted a 
"listening device" in his tooth and want him executed to shut him up "about the 
corruption" and to stop him from "preaching the Gospel."

"Scott Panetti's mental disability and the related questions of 'competency' 
have riddled this case from the outset. It is highly questionable whether he 
was competent to stand trial, represent himself, or whether he has a genuine 
understanding of the reason for and reality of his punishment. But whether or 
not Texas continues to succeed in defending this death sentence in the courts, 
the parole board and governor should call a halt to this shameful planned 
killing in the interests of decency, compassion and human rights," said Rob 
Freer.

Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception. 
As of today, 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. 
The USA was 1 of the only 9 countries in the world that carried out executions 
each year between 2009 and 2013. Texas accounts for nearly 40 % of all 
executions in the USA since judicial killing resumed there in 1977 under 
revised capital laws.

Background

In a 5-4 ruling on 25 November, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) 
refused to issue a stay of execution, deciding it lacked jurisdiction over the 
appeal. 4 of the 9 judges dissented, arguing that what was "at stake in this 
case" meant that the court should review the appeal. Its failure to do so, they 
wrote, could result in "the irreversible and constitutionally impermissible 
execution of a mentally incompetent person".

In a 2nd ruling on 26 November, this time 6-3, the TCCA refused to review the 
claim that imposing the death penalty on someone with severe mental illness 
"offends contemporary standards of decency" and therefore violated the 
Constitution. In a strong dissent, one of the judges said that he would grant 
the claim, adding that it was "inconceivable" to him "how the execution of a 
severely mentally ill person such as [Panetti] would measurably advance the 
retribution and deterrence purposes purportedly served by the death penalty." 
The 2 other dissenters said they would have blocked the execution so that the 
issue could be further considered.

(source: Amnesty International)

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

Death row par avion By Nicola Cameron as told to Annabel Stafford


Aussie Nicola Cameron has an unusual American pen pal.

The concrete bunkers and barbed wire are intimidating, but I'd expected 
intimidation. I'd expected the X-rays, pat-downs and cages with doors that lock 
behind you. What I hadn't counted on was the guards being so normal, like the 
one who told Mum the inmates were just human beings and not the animals people 
expect.

The Allan B. Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, Texas, houses one of America's 
most notorious death row prison sections. Inmates here are confined to solitary 
cells for 22 hours a day, kept apart from one another during "recreation", and 
fed breakfast at 3am.

I am here for my 40th birthday present. I'll never know why I was matched with 
Damon. Maybe it was an age thing. I was 32 when we started writing - I'd just 
had my first baby - and he was 21, Texas's youngest death row prisoner. It was 
2006 and I'd read about an organisation that arranged pen friends for prisoners 
facing the death penalty. I loved letters, but I never expected to make a 
friend. Actually, I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to accept what they'd done, 
let alone like them.

Damon's 1st letter was in the most beautiful running writing, red pen on yellow 
paper. I was surprised at how literate he was - and how normal. His apostrophes 
were all over the place, though. Later, after we'd been writing for a while, I 
offered him grammar lessons. Damon said something along the lines of "Thanks, 
but I don't really care about apostrophes." That's one of the things I love 
about Damon: he's very upfront.

He's strong, too. I don't know how he stays sane with people dropping like 
flies all around him. He doesn't tell me the worst of it, but I've read about 
people on death row screaming and crying and rubbing themselves in their own 
faeces. And yet Damon is so positive. He helps me put things into perspective 
and never in a "You should feel lucky" way. He'll just remind me that there are 
more important things in life than, say, worrying about what other people 
think.

I Googled Damon when we first started writing, but the information back then 
was pretty basic: age, height, race and a few lines about what he'd done. He'd 
shot a guy. A drug deal gone wrong, I think; Damon had been taking and selling 
drugs since he was young.

I've never asked him about the killing. I didn't want to put him in the 
position of having to try to explain it to someone he wanted as a friend. Plus, 
I think some people write to guys like Damon out of a sort of voyeurism and I 
decided at the beginning that I wouldn't write for those reasons. Until my trip 
to Texas this year, the only people I'd told about Damon were my husband and my 
parents.

I have asked Damon why he thinks he is where he is. He told me about the day he 
sat in his car outside high school and couldn't go in. His great uncle, the 
closest thing Damon had to a father, had just died. He'd recently lost an aunt, 
an uncle and a close friend. His mum, a drug addict, had died from 
complications related to HIV when he was about 11 (he was raised by his 
grandmother and aunt) and he had never known his dad. When he lost his great 
uncle, there was no one to come to his gridiron games any more and he just 
thought, "What's the point?"

I'm assigned a booth in the prison's visiting centre. The phone stinks so, very 
surreptitiously, because I don't want to look like a princess, I wipe it down 
with toilet paper. But as soon as I'm finished wiping, the guard comes to test 
the phone and finds it's broken, so I have to move booths, revisit the 
bathroom, get more paper and wipe down the next receiver, making sure no one 
sees me. Later, I find out everyone cleans their phone.

I don't even see Damon come in. Suddenly, there he is: standing on the other 
side of the glass, arms bent backwards as he's uncuffed through a hole in the 
door. He's wearing a white jumpsuit and black, thick-rimmed glasses and he 
looks kind and gentle and just a little bit nerdy. I can't stop grinning as I 
wait for him to pick up his receiver. Finally, his hands are free and I hear 
his voice for the first time and it's as soft and gentle as he looks. "It's so 
good to see you," we say, over and over again, and then "I don't know where to 
start", because we're both so blown away at being face to face and where do you 
start after all this time?

Over the next two weeks we have four visits. We talk about how neatly he used 
to write when he was still trying to impress me. We talk about family, faith 
(Damon has converted to Islam) and Walmart. We tell childhood stories. He's 
well spoken, though sometimes he reverts to "badass" talk. I buy him a 
hideous-looking Philly cheesesteak sandwich from the vending machine and his 
excitement over it is heartbreaking. Worse, I can tell he feels embarrassed 
that I'm buying him stuff. He mentions he's not sleeping because he's anxious 
and, stupidly, I ask him what he's anxious about.

Before I came to Texas, I had hope that Damon might escape execution. He has 
some appeals left and there are mitigating factors that weren't mentioned when 
he was sentenced, such as the fact he was born with a drug addiction. Plus, 
lots of people who've done worse have received lesser sentences. Still, Texas 
abolitionists say once a person is on death row, they have almost no hope of 
escape. I just can't believe that any of the people who decided Damon should 
die would still think that if they spent time with him. That's why I'm talking 
about him now. I feel like screaming it from the rooftops: "He doesn't deserve 
to die!"

But Damon and I don't speak about that. We don't talk about how this is 
probably the first and last time I'll see him. We laugh about how I tried to 
drive from the passenger seat of my hire car. And about how good it is to see 
one another.

(source: The Age)






NORTH CAROLINA:

DA to announce death penalty decision


District Attorney Jim Woodall plans to announce next month if he'll seek the 
death penalty against 2 men accused of murdering a University of North Carolina 
professor.

Woodall said his decision will be announced at the defendants' next hearing, 
set for Dec. 16 in Orange County court. He said he wants to consult the 
victim's family before making his decision public.

The defendants, Derick Davis II, 23, and Troy Arrington Jr., 27, are charged 
with 1st-degree murder in the July 23 robbery and fatal beating of Feng Liu, a 
59-year-old research professor at UNC's Eshelman School of Pharmacy.

The men are accused of attacking Liu with a landscape stone about 1 p.m. near 
the intersection of West University Drive and Ransom Street close to the UNC 
campus as Liu was taking a lunchtime walk.

Liu, who lived in Durham, died the next day.

Chapel Hill police said Liu's wallet and 4 credit cards were stolen.

Both men remain in the Orange County Jail without bond.

(source: The Herald-Sun)

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

The dark side of justice: When defendants 'lose on technicalities'


In 1992, Kenneth Rouse, an African-American man with an IQ between 70 and 80 - 
"borderline intellectual functioning," in the clinical parlance - prepared to 
stand trial in North Carolina on charges that he had robbed, murdered and 
attempted to rape a white, 63-year-old store clerk.

Rouse's lawyers questioned the prospective jurors to try to expose any racial 
or other bias. But several years after the all-white jury convicted Rouse and 
recommended a death sentence, his defense team made a stunning discovery.

1 of the jurors, Joseph Baynard, who used a racial slur when referring to 
African-Americans, admitted that his mother had been robbed, murdered and 
possibly raped years before. Baynard had not disclosed this history, he said, 
so that he could sit in judgment of Rouse, whom he called "1 step above a 
moron."

As claims of juror bias go, the evidence could hardly have been stronger. But 
Rouse's final appeal was never heard. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective 
Death Penalty Act of 1996, Rouse's lawyers had just 1 year after his initial 
state appeal to petition for a last-resort hearing in federal court.

They missed the deadline by a single day.

A federal appeals judge wrote that it was 'unconscionable" for her court to 
reject Rouse's case because of such a mistake by his court-appointed lawyers. 
But dozens of lawyers have made the same mistake, and most of their clients, 
like Rouse, have not been forgiven by the courts for missing the deadline.

While the American public often complains about criminal defendants winning 
their legal cases on technicalities, the opposite is often true, says Gretchen 
Engel, a habeas expert who had advised Rouse's defense team and provided the 
correct filing date: "What they don't realize is how often people lose on 
technicalities, or in ways that would offend most people's sense of justice."

An investigation by The Marshall Project shows that since President Bill 
Clinton signed the 1-year statute of limitations into law - enacting a 
tough-on-crime provision that emerged in the Republicans' Contract with America 
- the deadline has been missed at least 80 times in capital cases. 16 of those 
inmates have since been executed - the most recent was on Thursday, Nov. 13, 
when Chadwick Banks was put to death in Florida.

Florida, in fact, has 37 of the missed deadlines - the most of any state by 
far.

By missing the filing deadline, those inmates have usually lost access to 
habeas corpus, arguably the most critical safeguard in the United States' 
system of capital punishment. Habeas corpus allows prisoners to argue in 
federal court that the conviction or sentence they received in a state court 
violates federal law.

The prisoners who missed their habeas deadlines have sometimes forfeited 
powerful claims. Some of them challenged the evidence of their guilt, and 
others the fairness of their sentences. A prisoner in Florida was convicted 
with a type of ballistics evidence that has long since been discredited.

The 80 death-penalty cases reviewed were largely culled from databases of 
federal court opinions, but they also include other unpublished rulings. They 
represent just a fraction of the habeas appeals foreclosed by the 1996 law, 
which also applies to non-capital cases.

Like Rouse, who is still awaiting execution in North Carolina, two other 
inmates missed the habeas deadline by a single day, and for the most banal 
reasons. One attorney made the mistake of using regular mail instead of an 
overnight courier; another relied on a court's after-hours filing system, which 
turned out to be broken.

But many of the other habeas petitions from condemned inmates were late by 
hundreds of days, or even thousands. On average, those lawyers missed the 
deadline by 853 days, or more than 2 years and 4 months. In 1 case, the 
attorney was more than 11 years late.

Some of the lawyers' mistakes can be traced to their misunderstandings of 
federal habeas law and the notoriously complex procedures that have grown up 
around it.

Meanwhile, the problem that the habeas deadline was intended to solve - the 
ever-lengthening delays in the carrying out of death sentences - has grown 
steadily. In 1996, the average time from sentencing to execution was 10 years 
and 5 months, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2012, the 
latest year for which the same figure is available, the delay had stretched to 
15 years and 10 months.

THE COMPROMISE

The 1996 law that set the 1-year statute of limitations on habeas appeals was 
one of the signal compromises that Clinton forged on domestic policy in the 
aftermath of the sweeping Republican victory in the 1994 midterm elections.

Some Republicans had advocated for habeas corpus reform for years, mainly as a 
way to streamline and limit Death Row appeals. The idea struggled to gain 
traction, but it became a small element of the Contract with America championed 
by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., who was on his way to becoming House 
speaker. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the proposal found new life 
as part of antiterrorism legislation embraced by both parties.

But one opponent of the habeas proposal, Rep. Melvin Watt, a North Carolina 
Democrat, cited the advent of DNA evidence and the fact that some prisoners 
were being exonerated up to 15 years after their trials.

Congress, he said, was proposing "to compromise the most basic thing - 
innocence - for political expediency."

The legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 8, and it cleared the 
House by a margin of more than 2 to 1.

CHALLENGES, FAILURES

Under the 1996 law, the 1-year statute of limitations to file a federal habeas 
petition is supposed to begin after the conclusion of an inmate's direct 
appeal, which is filed in the state courts.

The direct appeal - the 1st of 3 levels of possible appeals - must focus on the 
trial record. It can argue, for example, that an important objection by the 
defense counsel should have been sustained rather than overruled.

Lawyers who do post-conviction work in capital cases face a daunting array of 
challenges: They must typically reinvestigate the evidence for both guilt and 
punishment; canvass witnesses called and uncalled; plumb a defendant's 
criminal, social and family history; and round up and study thousands of pages 
of records - all while under the pressure of defending a client whose life may 
depend on their success.

Some of the same federal judges who are responsible for appointing habeas 
counsel have later traced the failure of such attorneys to meet the filing 
deadline to their inexperience, indifference, ineptitude or illness - and to 
myriad combinations thereof.

In at least 3 cases since 1996, attorneys filed papers in the wrong court. One 
appellate attorney, who insisted that he had read the relevant case file, was 
later found to have never picked up the voluminous records from a state 
repository.

In some of the 80 cases, mistakes by judges compounded those of defense 
attorneys.

The lawyer for Richard Hamilton, who was convicted in 1995 of raping and 
murdering a 23-year-old nursing student after kidnapping her from a supermarket 
parking lot in Lake City, thought Hamilton had more time to file than he really 
did. So did a local judge, who told Hamilton not to worry.

"It has been resolved," the judge said, to which Hamilton replied: "If you say 
so, that's good enough for me."

Then there are lawyers who have failed even more basic scrutiny.

Some of the attorneys appointed to the 80 cases include an Alabama lawyer who 
was addicted to methamphetamine and was on probation for public intoxication, 
and a Louisiana lawyer who suffered from a neurological and physiological 
disorder so debilitating that he was asked to leave his firm.

2 other men facing death sentences complained that their lawyer had a drinking 
problem - and they had the same lawyer.

In several cases, courts have shown that prisoners who schooled themselves in 
habeas law have sometimes demonstrated a better understanding of legal 
intricacies than their lawyers.

The Supreme Court took note of the phenomenon in the case of Albert Holland, 
who was sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of a Florida police officer who 
tried to arrest him.

"Holland was right about the law," the justices wrote. His lawyer, they added, 
"was wrong about the law."

TROUBLE IN THE SOUTH

The struggle to find capable lawyers for capital cases has been particularly 
visible in a handful of states with large numbers of death row inmates.

Since its death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Florida, for example, has 
bounced from 1 troubled arrangement to another for the provision of 
post-conviction counsel.

The state originally asked private lawyers to do the work free; it got few 
takers. It then established a special government office to do the work but 
shifted much of the load to a registry of private attorneys after lawmakers 
complained about the delays and the cost. In 1998, the state also set a cap on 
the number of hours per case those lawyers could bill (840) and the rate they 
could charge ($100 per hour).

Sometimes, even legal organizations that are usually lauded for the quality of 
their capital work have faced criticism.

In a Georgia case, a federal judge chastised lawyers with the Southern Center 
for Human Rights, a nonprofit that opposes the death penalty and provides free 
legal support to prisoners in capital cases. The Southern Center lawyers had 
left the case well before an inmate's habeas petition was due, but the judge 
argued that they should have done more to find replacement counsel and to help 
the inmate determine the filing deadline.

'GRIEVOUS INJUSTICE'

When a deadline is missed, an inmate's federal appeal can be lost - no matter 
the strength of the argument for a new trial, and even if the late filing can 
be attributed more to hard luck than ineptitude.

The law requires that prosecutors turn over evidence favorable to the defense 
before trial. But it wasn't until 22 years after William Kuenzel was condemned 
in Alabama that his appellate attorney received police notes and grand jury 
testimony undermining the prosecution's case. Kuenzel was convicted in 1988 of 
murdering a convenience-store clerk. But in 2010, the state disclosed that an 
alleged accomplice originally told police he was with someone else, and that 
the only eyewitness who identified Kuenzel at trial had told grand jurors she 
"couldnt really see a face."

Although Kuenzel now has potentially strong grounds for an appeal, he still 
lacks a court to hear them - his lawyer missed the federal filing deadline by 
nearly 3 years.

"It is just the most grievous injustice," says David Kochman, an attorney who 
has been working on Kuenzel's appeal since 2004. "If any case was crying out 
for review, it was this case."

On April 15, 1996, juror Joseph Baynard, who died last year, signed an 
affidavit acknowledging that he had deliberately withheld the fact of his 
mother's murder so that he could get on the jury.

At that point, Rouse's case was still in the state courts, which ultimately 
denied him a new trial. His 1-year habeas deadline came on Feb. 7, 2000, and 
his lawyers, who miscalculated the date, filed their petition on his behalf one 
day too late.

Despite the federal courts' refusal to hear his case, Rouse got 1 more chance 
in 2009, when the North Carolina legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, 
allowing condemned prisoners to challenge their sentences if they could 
demonstrate that racial bias had played a role. Rouse filed a motion to have 
his case reviewed under the act. But in 2013 - after 4 other death row inmates 
had succeeded in getting their sentences reduced to life without parole under 
the new provision - the state legislature repealed the law altogether.

Rouse's motion is still pending. It is unclear if it will ever be heard.

(source: Jacksonville.com)






MISSISSIPPI:

Mississippi inmate cites ruling in Florida case in arguing for dismissal of 
death sentence


A Mississippi inmate is citing a decision in a Florida case to support 
arguments that he is mentally disabled and his death sentence should be 
overturned.

Ricky Chase was convicted in the Aug. 14, 1989, killing of 70-year-old 
vegetable salesman Elmer Hart in Copiah County. Chase was sentenced to death in 
his 1990 trial.

In 2013, a state judge found Chase mentally competent. Chase argues to the 
Mississippi Supreme Court that the decision was in error. The state Supreme 
Court will hear oral arguments in the case Dec. 8.

Chase has argued that a pretrial mental examination showed he was mentally 
disabled. Chase said he was examined by 2 doctors. But court records show 1 
doctor did not find him mentally disabled.

(source: Associated Press)






OHIO:

Violent crime comes with consequences


I respond to the Sunday letter from Fred Smoot, "Do supporters have stomach for 
executions?"

As an opponent of capital punishment, Smoot asks those of us who support the 
death penalty whether we could stomach the execution of a convicted killer by 
firing squad. He believes this option might be too bloody, too messy, too 
archaic for us to tolerate.

I would ask Smoot if he has the stomach to view crime-scene photos of murder 
victims whose lives were ended by all manner of gruesome acts. He might also 
consider the unseen psychological terror they endured.

A murderer has no right to a fate any better than he inflicted on his victim.

BILL WALSTON

Columbus

(source: Letter to the Editor, Columbus Dispatch)






KENTUCKY:

Wait for execution has financial, mental toll


Scott Nelson was 17 when he died. Donata Nelson has seen 30 years pass without 
the man who killed her son being led into an execution chamber.

On Sept. 30, the day after the 30th anniversary of when Nelson and a friend 
were bound, gagged and shot in the back of the head, a federal judge struck 
down some of Victor Taylor's appeals on his two death sentences for murder, 
kidnapping and robbery, and sodomy.

But with new legal obstacles emerging, including a national debate over lethal 
injection drugs, Donata Nelson, 72, doesn't hold out much hope for a 
resolution.

"It gets tough," she said, her voice breaking up. "After all these years, it 
doesn't seem to ease up."

In Kentucky, the average time between conviction and execution is 20 years - 
exceeding a national average of 12.8 years. Texas, which has carried out 10 
executions in 2014, is the nation's most aggressive death penalty state but has 
an average wait time of 15 years.

According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, Kentucky had the 
second-longest wait between conviction and a death sentence being carried out 
as of 2012, the latest year available. As of that time, inmates lived 17 years 
before the sentence was carried out. Only Nevada, with 17.3 years, exceeded 
Kentucky's wait time.

21 of the 34 death-row inmates in Kentucky have been awaiting execution for 
more than 20 years as of 2014. 6 have been there 3 decades or more.

Kentucky has executed 3 people since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed 
states to resume using the death penalty.

Aside from individual delays due to appeals, Kentucky is barred from carrying 
out executions while inmates challenge the way it intends to kill them. A trial 
in a lawsuit on that issue was scheduled for December, but after botched 
executions in Oklahoma and Ohio, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd in 
September postponed the trial indefinitely.

Then, earlier this month, Kentucky dropped its 2-drug lethal injection 
protocol, leaving unclear how it will go forward. Regulations must be rewritten 
and put into place, which will take at least 6 months.

Katherine Nichols leads Kentuckians' Voice for Crime Victims in Shelbyville. 
She said the families of victims serve "a life sentence" when a defendant is 
sentenced to death. Nichols organized a rally for National Homicide Remembrance 
Day in September and lobbied lawmakers in August at a hearing on the future of 
capital punishment in Kentucky to speed up the process and keep the death 
penalty as an option for prosecutors.

"Not only is there bad in this world, there is downright pure evil," Nichols 
said. "Trust me, I have seen it with my own eyes. The death penalty needs to be 
an option for some people."

Kenton County Commonwealth Attorney Rob Sanders, a proponent of carrying out 
death sentences, said lawmakers should push the judiciary to move cases faster. 
He said that would reduce the financial and emotional toll.

"There's no reason appeals should languish for decades," Sanders said. "We 
should be stepping on the gas, not the brakes."

It has cost the state at least $986,000 over the last 3 decades to house 
Taylor. Feeding and housing the entire death-row population cost $947,800 in 
2014.

1 inmate finds the wait frustrating.

"If you are going to have a death penalty, then use it," said Randy Haight, 62. 
He is awaiting execution for the 1985 killings of Patricia Vance and David Omer 
near Herrington Lake in Garrad County.

For the Nelsons, anger and sadness are part of their daily lives.

"It's a feeling you shouldn't have," said Donata Nelson, who described her son 
and his friend, Richard Stephenson, as "good kids, but a bit naive." "The chain 
has been broken."

Taylor did not respond to 2 letters sent to him at the Kentucky State 
Penitentiary in Eddyville by The Associated Press. His attorney, Thomas 
Ransdell of Frankfort, declined to comment.

Taylor, twice a parolee from state prison at age 24, and his cousin, George 
Wade, agreed to lead Nelson and Stephenson to DuPont Manual High School in 
Louisville for a football game if they could have a ride. The teens were taken 
to a vacant lot near Interstate 65, forced to strip, hand over their property 
and bound and gagged. Taylor sexually assaulted 1 of the teens and both were 
shot.

2 weeks after the slayings, police arrested Taylor and Wade after a family 
member of Wade's reported being given a jacket from Trinity High, which Nelson 
and Stephenson attended. A jury delivered death sentences for Taylor after a 
13-week trial; Wade is serving a life sentence.

Donata and Emery Nelson, 77, are determined to see their son's killer brought 
to the execution chamber. Their anger at Taylor bubbles over with the talk of 
delays and frustration by inmates.

"I would solve their problem real easy, if I could," Emery Nelson said.

(source: Associated Press)