[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

June 7



TEXAS----new execution date

Judge signs execution warrant for Clinton Young----Clinton Young was sentenced 
to death in 2003 for 2 murders committed in 2001.


The 33-year-old has an execution date of Oct. 26 at the Texas Department of 
Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit.

Judge Robert Moore, visiting judge for the 238th District Court, issued a 
warrant of execution on Monday for Clinton Lee Young, according to the Midland 
County District Attorney's Office. The 33-year-old has an execution date of 
Oct. 26 at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit.

Young was sentenced to death in 2003 after he was convicted of the 2001 murders 
of Doyle Douglas and Samuel Petrey for the use of their vehicles.

The men were fatally shot during a crime spree that ended when Midland 
authorities apprehended Young, according to previous Reporter-Telegram reports.

Douglas, 41, of Ore City was killed near Longview. Petrey, 52, of Eastland was 
kidnapped in his hometown and killed in an oilfield near Midland, according to 
the reports. The incidents occurred within a 48-hour period, according to TDCJ 
records.

Young exhausted his state appeals, according to a Reporter-Telegram report from 
2010.

Young, a Titus County native, was being held Tuesday at the Polunsky Unit in 
Livingston, according to TDCJ records. He is the only Midland County offender 
on death row, according to the records.

David Lee Page, a co-defendant in the case, is serving a 30-year sentence for 
aggravated kidnapping. His parole was denied in November, according to TDCJ 
records.

(source: mrt.com)

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

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----24

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----543

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

25---------July 19-----------------Kosoul Chanthakoummane---544

26---------July 27-----------------Taichin Preyor---------545

27---------Aug. 30-----------------Steven Long------------546

28---------Sept.7------------------Juan Castillo----------547

29---------Oct. 26-----------------Clinton Young----------548

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)

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

County pays for capital cases


he Henderson County Commissioners Court approved payment of expenses from 
capital murder cases on Tuesday, by a 4-1 vote, which Precinct 4 Commissioner 
Ken Geeslin opposed.

The bills amounted to $21,514.47. Geeslin objected to more money being spent 
for a mental evaluation of Randall Mays, who was convicted in May of 2008 for 
killing Henderson County Sheriff's Office Deputies Paul Habelt and Tony Ogburn.

"It makes one wonder why we ever tried to convict somebody of a capital offense 
after shooting 2 deputies," Geeslin said. "The taxpayers are still paying 
today, another $21,514.47. If anyone in the audience thinks that doesn't upset 
me, well, think again."

Mays was scheduled to be executed in March, 2015, before an appeals court 
stopped the proceedings on the grounds he might not be competent to receive the 
death penalty. The county is required to pay bills for defense in capital cases 
when presented by the district court judge.

(source: Athens Daily Review)





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

Death penalty


America has become a land of cowards.

Even when a killer is found guilty of murder, rarely do they receive their 
death punishment. The death penalty should be the only option available when a 
person commits murder and is 16 and up. One who commits murder should die. 
Folks stay on death row 30 years or more and it cost millions of dollars of 
taxpayer money to keep them alive and in most cases a slick lawyer will figure 
out a way for his guilty client to never face the death march. There should be 
no insanity pleas.

The death sentence should be federal mandated in all 50 states. I am proud of 
Arkansas. Several well deserved murderers got fried recently. Speaking of the 
drugs that are used to kill the killers, some say that they are "cruel and 
unusual punishment." No, cruel and unusual punishment is what these murderers 
did to their victims. The answer to all the flak over these drugs used for 
executions? Eliminate all of them. Bring back hanging. It's cheap and works. 
Bring back Judge Parker's court! I would love the job of pulling the lever to 
hang them! All citizens should be required to watch on TV. Ask a woman or man 
who has been raped, if they don't relive it every day. Rapists of all children 
should be put to death. In a lot of ways, rape is worse than murder.

American's entire judicial and punishment approach is all messed up. Third 
world counties have better. Punishment for murderers and rapists than the USA 
does. No, America is not the greatest country on the planet. At one time it was 
- not anymore. My vote for the greatest country on the planet? It is Israel. If 
one kills an Israeli, see what happens to them? Don't mess with God's chosen 
people. I am sure God cries a lot of tears, as he looks down on what America 
has become. I cry too!

Joe Kilgore

Texarkana, Texas

(source: Letter to the Editor, Texarkana Gazette)

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

Who Is Dangerous, and Who Dies?----An appalling and racialized standard of 
'future dangerousness' has been used to condemn defendants. This lawyer fought 
it.


The death penalty, like abortion, is one of those hot-button topics that keeps 
popping up into the public consciousness, a roach motel for meretricious ideas 
and bad public policy - including racism. I would bet that if it involved 
putting white people to death for killing black people, it would have been 
abolished years ago. Still, it persists. Except our society - until recently - 
has come to believe that overt expressions of racism might not be a good thing. 
Better to keep a fig leaf over it than to explore its underbelly.

In 1972, the Supreme Court found in the 5-4 decision of Furman v. Georgia that 
the death penalty as practiced in this country was unconstitutional under the 
Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. But the majority couldn't agree on a 
rationale for its decision, so instead of 1 majority opinion, 5 separate 
concurrences were produced. While Justices Brennan and Marshall found the death 
penalty itself to be cruel and usual punishment, Justices Stewart, White and 
Douglas focused on its arbitrariness, leaving the door wide open for states to 
rejigger their statutes and return to executions.

In 1973, Texas did just that - the sentencing phase of a capital trial was 
separated from the guilt phase, and the jury was asked to consider "whether 
there is a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of 
violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society [future 
dangerousness]." In response to the Furman decision, Governor Preston Smith 
commuted the death sentences of 52 inmates in Texas, clearing out death row 
entirely. In 1976, consolidating cases from 5 different states (Georgia, 
Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Louisiana), the court in Gregg v. Georgia 
found that the death penalty was not unconstitutional in every case. Executions 
in Texas, now by lethal injection - Old Sparky, the Texas electric chair, had 
been retired - started back up in 1982.

I first became involved with all this while making my film "The Thin Blue 
Line." I had read about Dr. James Grigson, an expert witness regularly called 
by the state of Texas. Some referred to him as "Dr. Death" because he would 
routinely find that the defendant posed a risk of future dangerousness , and 
thus should be executed. I met with Dr. Grigson in 1985, and on his 
recommendation I started interviewing Texas death row inmates. Among those Dr. 
Grigson had testified posed a risk of future dangerousness was Randall Dale 
Adams, a convicted cop killer - or at least, so it seemed.

My film was finished, and Mr. Adams was exonerated. I had thought - stupidly, 
it turned out - that Dr. Grigson had been put out of business. Not so. The 
"dangerousness" provision of the Texas law remained very much in place. But I 
forgot about it. I had done my fair share of good - got an innocent man out of 
prison.

Then, not long ago, I read about the case of Buck v. Davis, decided by the 
Supreme Court on Feb. 22. Duane Buck had been convicted of capital murder in 
1997. He killed his ex-girlfriend and one of her friends. The details of the 
crime are appalling, but no less appalling is that Dr. Walter Quijano discussed 
Mr. Buck's race as a factor in determining his future dangerousness. 
African-Americans, Dr. Quijano argued, are more likely to commit acts of 
violence. Though Dr. Quijano opined that Mr. Buck was not a risk of future 
dangerousness, his testimony about race remained an element for the jury to 
consider.

Dr. Quijano has given similar testimony in other death penalty cases since 
1991. Prompted by the Supreme Court's decision in Saldano v. Texas (2000), 
which vacated the sentence of Victor Hugo Saldano because Dr. Quijano had 
testified that Mr. Saldano's Hispanic ethnicity made him a greater risk of 
future dangerousness, State Attorney General John Cornyn promised that his 
office would not object if the other defendants (Mr. Buck among them) sought to 
overturn their death sentences based on Dr. Quijano's testimony. In Mr. Buck's 
case, though, they did object, claiming that since it was the defense attorney 
who put Dr. Quijano on the stand and allowed his testimony into the record 
without objection, the State of Texas owed the defendant nothing.

I called Mr. Buck's attorney Christina Swarns, litigation director of the NAACP 
Legal Defense & Educational Fund Inc., to discuss the case.

-----

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Thank you so much for reaching out about the Duane Buck case.

ERROL MORRIS: It brought alive a lot of feelings that go back so many years. 
One of the horrors of the "Thin Blue Line" case involved the prediction of 
future violence. You had a psychiatrist, "the hanging psychiatrist," Dr. James 
Grigson, who would make predictions of future violence based on a diagnosis of 
sociopathy. He would testify the defendant is a sociopath and will kill and 
kill again. I am offended that this law still exists. I believe it came out of 
the Dallas district attorney's office and was written with Dr. Grigson in mind. 
Various prosecutors thought: "We have these psychiatrists in our hip pocket. 
Why not fashion a law which will allow us to make use of this in the 
courtroom?" And that is exactly what they did, except they overplayed their 
hand. As a result many of these cases were retried on grounds of improper jury 
selection and Fifth Amendment violations. And then 25 years later, along comes 
Duane Buck.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Everyone was horrified by the fact that the damaging 
testimony was introduced by the defense counsel. It explicitly, out loud, links 
race to dangerousness. This is not implicit bias; this is explicit, 
1st-generation racism. This is the good old stuff. And that's bad, but it's 
even worse that his own lawyer brings it in.

ERROL MORRIS: Not ineffective counsel, but counsel actively undermining the 
case.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Predictions of future dangerousness are absurd, and then to 
be put in a capital punishment box which is already so contaminated by racial 
bias. The introduction of evidence linking race to dangerousness - like that 
which was presented in the Duane Buck case - was an inevitable product of 
future dangerousness in the capital punishment system in Texas. Because the 
Texas death penalty system was already so contaminated and corrupted by racial 
bias, the Duane Buck death sentence was a predictable outcome of that mess.

ERROL MORRIS: And yet you kept losing in the courts.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Yes. For me, having litigated it for the last 6 years, I was 
astonished every time we lost. Clearly someone is going to correct this thing. 
It plays on so many of the obvious flaws in the system.

ERROL MORRIS: Can you tell me about the attempts made "to correct this thing"?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: When L.D.F. [the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund] 
first joined the case in 2011, it was in the Supreme Court and it was being 
conferenced. Buck got an execution date, and Texas Defender Services filed a 
flurry of litigation bringing the race issue to the attention of the court. The 
Supreme Court stayed the execution, and we were excited, thinking, "O.K., 
they're going to take this case." And so we waited, and then the Supreme Court 
denies it in 2 decisions, which is unusual. They usually don't explain their 
decisions, but here we had 2 decisions, one authored by Justice Alito and 
joined by - here is the interesting part - Justice Scalia and Justice Breyer.

ERROL MORRIS: Breyer joined? [Stephen Breyer was part of the liberal minority 
on the Supreme Court, along with Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader 
Ginsburg. He was an unusual partner to Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr.]

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Yes, it was just completely fascinating. Breyer joins Alito 
and Scalia and they say: The testimony is what they called "bizarre and 
objectionable," but this is defense counsel's fault. They say: The prosecutor 
just exploited an error made by defense counsel, so you've brought the wrong 
claim. Sotomayor, joined by Kagan, dissents, essentially saying: Are you 
kidding me? This is terrible. This is racism. It's all over this case.

ERROL MORRIS: And [Justice Clarence] Thomas, in this instance?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: He doesn't speak. He says nothing. But obviously, for us, 
Breyer joining Alito and Scalia was troubling, to be charitable. So we regroup, 
and we say, "O.K., oh good Lord, what are we going to do now?"

-----

Dr. Quijano's testimony had been questioned in Buck and other death penalty 
cases:

Q. [The prosecutor] asked you about statistical factors in predicting future 
dangerousness. When we're talking about statistics, are we talking about 
correlation or causation?

A. Oh. These statistics are strictly correlation. There's a big distinction, 
and we must keep that in mind. Correlation simply says that 2 events happened - 
coincidentally happened at the same time. It does not mean that 1 causes the 
other.

Q. So when we're talking about these statistical factors - that more men 
re-offend than women, Hispanics offend more than blacks or whites, people from 
the low socioeconomic groups offend more than people from the higher 
socioeconomic groups, people who have opiate addiction or alcohol abuse offend 
more often than those who don't, people who have less education offend more 
often than those who have - do all those things cause people to offend? A. No. 
They are simply contributing factors. They are not causal factors. One cannot 
control one's gender or one's color. And obviously there are many, many 
Hispanics, many whites, many Orientals who don't commit crimes. But the 
frequence [sic] among those who commit crimes, these are the characteristics. 
They don't cause each other; they just happen to be coincidental to each 
other."

I find Dr. Quijano's attempts to explain his methodology ludicrous. If race is 
a contributing factor but not a causal factor, is the issue whether race is a 
causal factor among many, or whether it is a causal factor at all? Or is Dr. 
Quijano having trouble admitting that he does see race as a contributing causal 
factor?

In McCleskey v. Kemp the Supreme Court was asked to consider the statistical 
evidence of racial discrimination in death sentences reached by one study. The 
analysis found that defendants accused of killing white victims were 4.3 times 
more likely to receive the death penalty than defendants accused of killing 
black victims. The Supreme Court argued that racial discrimination has to be 
established in individual cases, not in the aggregate. Ironically, the court 
was perfectly willing to accept weak statistical arguments involving future 
dangerousness but to reject strong statistical arguments involving race and 
sentencing.

Back to Ms. Swarns.

-----

CHRISTINA SWARNS: We regroup and decide to bring a state postconviction 
challenge back in Texas. Now it's 2013.

We lose. We come back into federal court in 2013 and say: The rules have 
changed. The Supreme Court said we brought the wrong claim in 2011, but now 
we're bringing the right claim; we're now bringing the 
ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim that you basically asked for. This 
claim was brought to a federal district court judge who we thought would be 
receptive, based on the nature of the claim and the change in the law. 
Surprise. She denied it outright, without any apparent sympathy to the claim. 
She called it de minimis.

ERROL MORRIS: De minimis?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Inconsequential. I had personally litigated another case 
before her, and that was a jury discrimination case on behalf of a Latino, a 
Mexican-American gentleman on death row in Texas, and she granted relief. I 
thought from my personal experience that she would be receptive to it, but she 
was absolutely not. And so we go up to the Fifth Circuit, and the Fifth is 
equally unreceptive. The panel just completely affirms her decision. We sought 
rehearing en banc; we asked the full court to review the panel's decision. And 
of course we were denied again, with a dissent from a couple of justices on the 
full panel.

ERROL MORRIS: Things are not going well.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: No. But we sent it up to the Supreme Court. Our request for 
Supreme Court review was filed in the spring of last year, and it was 
conferenced repeatedly.

To have this delay and delay and delay and delay, it seemed to me that there 
might be some disagreement between the justices about whether to take the case. 
But they did. And it was argued in October, and then, of course, in February, 
we got a favorable decision from the court. It was 6 to 2 in our favor, but the 
language of the majority is very strong and unequivocal, and we had worried 
that it might be less clear, but the majority spoke really clearly, in this 
case about the inappropriateness of this evidence.

ERROL MORRIS: You were repeatedly questioned by Roberts [Chief Justice John G. 
Roberts Jr.].

CHRISTINA SWARNS: He kept asking me, But aren't you really just saying, isn't 
this case such an extreme outlier that it's hard to use it as a basis upon 
which to make a rule? This is so far outside the mainstream that it doesn't 
offer much guidance with respect to rules in the average case? And so that 
could have cut both ways. But obviously it ultimately cut not only in favor of 
granting full relief for Mr. Buck, but also for reaffirming the principle that 
"we sentence people for what they do, not for who they are."

ERROL MORRIS: Full relief --? They overturned the death sentence?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Yes, they did essentially. They said there is a Sixth 
Amendment violation - ineffective assistance of counsel - and we had crossed 
the procedural hurdles that we needed to get through. And so now it has to be 
remanded to the federal courts to, with those rulings, grant the writ and send 
him back to the state to decide whether they're going to seek another death 
sentence or resentence him otherwise.

ERROL MORRIS: And what do you think will happen?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: We don't know, but I can say that a death sentence is 
inappropriate here. Mr. Buck has been on death row since 1997, 1998, and he has 
had no disciplinary infractions in that time. So to your point about future 
dangerousness, the prediction could not have been more wrong. We now know 
without question that Mr. Buck is not likely to be a danger if he is sentenced 
to life, because he has been in jail for 20-some-odd years, and has had no 
disciplinary infractions, which is really unusual for anybody to come up with 
so few disciplinary infractions under any circumstance. It will be a very hard 
case for the state to prove future dangerousness if it tried to on a 
resentencing hearing. He has a perfect record.

ERROL MORRIS: Would it be a commutation to life if they decided not to retry 
it?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: We're just not sure.

ERROL MORRIS: But the real problem is the Texas statute [coming after Furman v. 
Georgia] to reinstate the death penalty in Texas. To me the law in itself is an 
abomination.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: I cannot disagree. The business of predicting future 
dangerousness without becoming corrupted by the various factors that are so 
tied to human functioning is impossible. It's an absurd requirement. As a 
prerequisite for a death sentence, it's insane.

ERROL MORRIS: People are celebrating, which they should, your victory in this 
case, but the underlying problem remains.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: That's right. I will say that along the way people asked me, 
were we challenging future dangerousness? And we just didn't. It wasn't raised. 
We just didn't have the opportunity to do that.

ERROL MORRIS: Dr. Walter Quijano, the psychologist, has testified in many, many 
cases?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: He has. He has been interviewed and holds to the position 
that there is a correlation between race and violence. He cites John Monahan, a 
researcher, for this view. But Monahan himself said it was inappropriate for 
Quijano to have used his research in this way.

ERROL MORRIS: Well, Dr. Grigson was until the end a very firm believer in his 
predictions of dangerousness based on sociopathy. I knew him well.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: I can't imagine what he was like.

ERROL MORRIS: He was avuncular, charming in his own insidious way. I rather 
liked him. I found his social views deeply pernicious, but he is the one who 
introduced me to the death penalty in Texas. I went down to interview him in 
Dallas, and he insisted that I interview people he had put on death row. That's 
how I began "The Thin Blue Line."

CHRISTINA SWARNS: That's amazing.

ERROL MORRIS: I found an innocent man who came very close to being executed. 
[Adams's execution was scheduled for May 8, 1979, but Supreme Court Justice 
Lewis F. Powell Jr. ordered a stay only 3 days before he was to be strapped 
into the lethal-injection gurney. Ultimately, the court overturned his death 
sentence, but not his conviction.] I uncovered all of these appalling details 
30 years ago and then opened up a newspaper recently and read about Buck. It's 
as if nothing ever happened. That's both depressing and infuriating. Mitt 
Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, was told that the death penalty 
is problematic because it's fallible. You could execute an innocent person, and 
given our current state of knowledge, there is really no way to bring them 
back. Once executed, they stay executed.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: And so what was Romney's reply?

ERROL MORRIS: He said: Oh, that's simple. We'll just make it infallible. We'll 
make it foolproof. You said it's fallible. We'll just fix that.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: If only.

ERROL MORRIS: If only. But this is an example of how it has never been fixed. 
And here is the $64,000 question. What are your feelings about Clarence 
Thomas's decision in this case? Why did he decide as he did?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: I have no idea. He is inexplicable. I don't really understand 
him. Putting aside the race politics here - and this is a big aside - we were 
right on the law. We were just 4 corners right on here. Put aside race, 
consider just the case. We met the law. I just don't understand him. He is 
really offended by the facts of the crime, which is fair, and I get that, 
because the facts are terrible, but the law is the law - ERROL MORRIS: I am 
interested in the kinds of casuistry that are involved in legal decisions in 
general, Supreme Court decisions specifically. I do believe the ends are always 
justifying the means. If you believe that somehow people should be executed, 
then you do whatever you need to do in order to make that happen. You think 
like Romney - we'll just make it infallible - but that argument clearly misses 
the point.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Right. It's absurd. Just think about. I can't predict what my 
kid is going to do tomorrow. It's an insane ask, based on no credible science.

-----

And so we're back where we started, except things have gotten worse. We have 
elected a president who invokes future dangerousness with respect to country of 
national origin (and also religion). In 1977 it was Dr. Grigson and sociopathy; 
in 1997, Dr. Quijano and race; and now it is Donald Trump and a list of s6 
countries. Think of it as a very thinly disguised form of racism against 
Muslims.

Christina Swarns sent me several legal briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in 
support of Buck, among them, a brief from the National Black Law Students 
Association. "Whether by a judge, a prosecutor or defense counsel, an appeal to 
a jury based on racial prejudice poisons our system of justice." And from the 
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: "Mr. Buck was entitled to have 
his dangerousness assessed on an individualized basis based on his personal 
attributes. Instead he received a death sentence tainted by 400 years of racial 
stereotyping."

Notwithstanding, the concept of dangerousness is alive and well. It took an 
egregious error to call it into question in Duane Buck's case. But it should 
have been ruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1976 (under the 
Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments) and should be seen as unconstitutional today. 
Admittedly, there is a difference between a court of law and a presidential 
order involving immigration. But under any circumstance, should public policy 
be held hostage to racial and religious discrimination?

(source: Errol Morris is a writer and filmmaker; Op-Ed, New York Times)