[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

January 17



TEXAS:

US Supreme Court Refuses Appeal for Houston Police Killer



The U.S. Supreme Court has refused an appeal from a Texas death row inmate 
convicted of killing a Houston police officer 27 years ago.

The high court, without comment, declined Tuesday to review arguments from 
lawyers for prisoner Carl Wayne Buntion that an appeal for him unfairly was 
rejected in the state courts last year.

The 73-year-old Buntion is the state's oldest death row inmate.

He'd been on parole only 6 weeks in June 1990 when evidence showed he shot and 
killed 37-year-old Houston officer James Irby during a traffic stop. Buntion, 
who had a long criminal record, was a passenger in the car Irby pulled over.

His death sentence was vacated by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2009. 
A jury in 2012 returned him to death row.

(source: nbcdfw.com)

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

Tx. Dad Allegedly Murdered 3-Year-Old He Claimed He Left Outside as Punishment 
for Not Drinking Milk



A Texas grand jury has returned an indictment against the adoptive father of 
3-year-old Sherin Mathews, charging him with the little girl's murder.

PEOPLE obtained a statement from the Dallas County District Attorney's Office 
that confirms Wesley Mathews, 37, could face the death penalty if convicted.

The indictment comes 3 months after Sherin vanished from Richardson, Texas, 
after her father allegedly said he left her outside as punishment for not 
drinking her milk.

Her body was found in a culvert drain weeks later.

Earlier this month, medical examiners concluded that Sherin died from 
"homicidal violence," but could not specify exactly how she died, as her 
remains were already in an advanced state of decomposition.

Wesley Mathews is also charged with injury to a child, abandoning a child and 
tampering with evidence.

During a press conference, Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson told 
reporters her office is committed to seeing justice is served.

"We will be tenacious, we will be persistent and we will prosecute this case to 
the fullest," Johnson said, noting she has yet to decide if she will seek the 
death penalty.

Johnson said she will not be releasing any more information about the case 
before taking it to trial.

The girl's adoptive mother, Sini Mathews, was also indicted by a grand jury on 
an abandoning a child charge.

Authorities allege Sini and Wesley Mathews left their adoptive daughter Sherin 
alone on the evening of Oct. 6, 2017, to take their 3-year-old biological 
daughter out to dinner.

The little girl was adopted from India in 2016.

Wesley Mathews was arrested on Oct. 7, 2017, after allegedly telling 
investigators he punished Sherin for not drinking her milk by leaving her to 
stand next to a tree outside their Richardson home.

He allegedly told police he placed her near the tree at around 3 a.m.

Mathews allegedly said he went to check on the toddler about 15 minutes later 
but she was gone. She was reported missing 5 hours later.

He later allegedly changed his story, telling police he watched his daughter 
choke on milk and die, according to an arrest affidavit previously obtained by 
PEOPLE. After her death, he says, he removed her from the home.

The affidavit says that Matthews was "trying to get the 3 year old girl to 
drink her milk in the garage.... Wesley Mathews said she wouldn???t listen to 
him." Mathews then allegedly stated that he "physically assisted" her in 
drinking her milk, "and the girl choked."

Wesley Mathews had been previously charged with felony injury to a child soon 
after Sherin's remains were found.

Sini Mathews was arrested weeks later, and charged with abandoning or 
endangering a child.

Both are still in custody and have yet to enter formal pleas to the charges 
against them.

(source: people.com)

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

When her brother is sentenced to death for a murder he didn't commit, one woman 
takes on the corrosive culture of capital punishment.



Terri Been had been sleep starved. She'd been spending 18 hours a day at her 
computer, contacting as many Texas state representatives as possible, pleading 
for help. She'd gotten good at hiding the fact that she was an "emotional 
basket case," a term she used to describe herself. But her inner turmoil had 
manifested itself on her exterior. Once a trim high school athlete and coach, 
the 43-year-old had been stress eating, and was now seriously overweight.

She'd been trying for years to gain control of an uncontrollable situation, and 
time was running out. Terri Been had exactly one month left to save her 
brother's life.

In May of 2016, the state of Texas had scheduled an execution date for her 
42-year-old brother, Jeff Wood, and Terri was counting the days until it was 
time to count the hours. On August 24th, 2016, Jeff was to be transported from 
the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, to the "death house" in 
Huntsville, where he was to be killed by lethal injection.

Terri had organized a rally in front of the Governor's Mansion in Austin. In 
triple-digit late-July heat, she was rushing around with petitions and pens and 
clipboards. She had brought a cooler with water and folding chairs for her 
aging father and stepmother. A friend had made T-shirts that showed a photo of 
her brother, but, like a bad omen, part of Jeff's head had gotten cropped off.

Terri spoke with a flat affect, as if that might prevent her from drowning in a 
torrent of emotion. She had erected a scaffolding of pragmatism around herself 
that kept her from collapsing.

The mansion's curtains were drawn, and it was hard to tell whether Governor 
Greg Abbott was home - and harder still to discern whether he had any concern 
about Texas' death row inmates, who numbered close to 240 at the time, let 
alone their families. The rationale behind the capital punishment system in 
Texas is nearly impossible to unravel and shrouded in secrecy. People who 
commit comparable crimes are not treated equally. Poor people and African 
Americans are at higher risk of being given a death sentence. Meanwhile, 
according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 160 death row inmates have 
been exonerated nationwide since 1973. Exhaustive investigations have suggested 
that Texas may have executed several innocent people since the 1980s. Yet since 
Abbott took office, he and the Board of Pardons and Paroles haven't granted a 
single death row inmate clemency.

There is nothing normal about counting the days until the state kills your 
brother. Your world shifts in ways you didn't believe possible. There is always 
guilt, shame, and pain. And there is always something that makes the execution 
seem unmerited, whether it is the defendant's abuse as a child, his mental 
illness, or the fact that he wasn't in the room when the murder took place. The 
sum of those things, in Jeff Wood's case, is particularly troubling.

Terri's kid brother has always been special. Down by the river where he would 
fish and swim as a teenager, Jeff entertained his friends by conjuring up wild 
fantasy stories. He has always had a hard time drawing the line between fact 
and fiction. He was just "happy-go-lucky," his father says. But the 
good-looking blond-haired athlete had a long-established learning disability 
and an IQ in the 80s. Jeff never felt like he was good enough, and he thrived 
on attention. He didn't seem capable of understanding that some of his 
so-called friends just used him, that he was often the butt of the joke. Even 
as he grew into an adult, he kept running to his older sister when something 
went wrong. "Terri, deal with it!" he would plead. And Terri, who was Jeff's 
advocate long before he went to prison, usually would.

Jeff had only known Daniel Reneau, a homeless drifter, for a couple of months, 
but he was enamored with his new friend's arrogant bravado. "Jeff was his 
little stool pigeon," Terri's husband, Steven, remembers. "Daniel bullied 
everybody at gunpoint. That was Daniel's thing: 'Look at me, I got a gun!'" 
Jeff seemed to hope that some of the respect Daniel garnered would rub off on 
him. He hung around people who didn't criticize him, people who he didn't have 
to compete with intellectually. Blindly, he followed Daniel into the abyss.

Jeff and Daniel had talked about robbing the Texaco gas station in Kerrville, 
Texas. The station's manager, William Bunker, had shown them where the store's 
safe and recording equipment were in exchange for a cut of the plunder. But on 
the appointed day, according to Terri, they did not go through with their plan. 
The very next day, January 2nd, 1996, the two stopped at the gas station in 
Kerrville on their way to Devine to visit Jeff's family. Jeff and his 
girlfriend Nadia had both witnessed Daniel leaving his gun under the couch in 
the trailer where he and Jeff lived. But Nadia later testified that, while Jeff 
was waiting outside, Daniel had picked the gun back up before leaving.

At the gas station, Jeff told Daniel he would go inside and ask for the safe. 
But when he came back out and said he hadn't asked for it, Daniel took it upon 
himself. Jeff waited in the car.

When Jeff heard gunfire, he went back inside and found Kriss Keeran, the 
attendant, shot dead. Daniel then forced Jeff to drive the two away from the 
scene. Jeff, who'd been threatened by Daniel before, obliged.

It was quickly established that Daniel had fired the gun, and he was sentenced 
to death in March of 1997. The following year, Jeff was convicted of murder 
under the controversial Texas Law of Parties. Passed in 1973, the law states 
that someone can be held responsible for a crime they did not commit if they 
had helped plan it, or didn't try to prevent it when they conceivably could 
have. Lucy Wilke, the prosecutor in Jeff's crime, argued that, while he didn't 
fire the deadly shot, he should be held equally responsible. Reached by email 
in July of 2016, Wilke maintained that Jeff was the ringleader of the robbery. 
(Wilke did not respond to multiple calls from the magazine's fact-checking 
department.)

In order to sentence a person to death, a Texas jury must unanimously judge 
that the defendant will commit violence in the future, even though a study by 
the Texas Defender Service found that expert predictions of a person's 
potential to commit future acts of violence are wrong 95 % of the time. To 
convince jurors that this would be the case with Jeff, the prosecution hired 
James Grigson, a disgraced psychiatrist, to testify against him.

Grigson, who has been dubbed Dr. Death because the vast majority of cases in 
which he has testified have resulted in a death sentence, never even examined 
Jeff. He solely relied on Lucy Wilke's version of the story. At the time of 
Jeff's trial, Dr. Death had been expelled from both the American Psychiatric 
Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for ethical 
misconduct, but this information never made it to the jurors, who unanimously 
believed Grigson's assessment that Jeff would absolutely pose a future threat 
to society.

Anyone who knows Jeff will tell you that it is hard to imagine him the 
ringleader of anything. In 1997, a jury found him mentally incompetent to stand 
trial. After a short time in a mental institution, Jeff was sent back to court 
and deemed competent enough to stand trial. The week before the trial's 
punishment phase, he tried to fire his lawyers. A judge denied his request, but 
Jeff ordered his lawyers to remain quiet, and essentially ended up representing 
himself. Mitigating evidence of his learning disabilities, his emotional 
problems, the abuse he suffered as a child, and Daniel Reneau's power over him 
never made it into the courtroom.

The average time a death row inmate in Texas spends awaiting execution is, by 
the state's own count, 10.87 years. Daniel Reneau was executed in 2002. Jeff 
has been in isolation on death row now for almost 2 decades.

"I was taught to believe in our system, and I did, for 35 years of my life," 
Terri told the small crowd gathered at the rally. Her husband Steven stood 
behind her, his arms crossed assertively. Terri is absolutely ashamed that she 
was once in favor of the death penalty, she said. "I no longer believe in it 
because I have seen it fail."

Terri continued with a string of rhetorical questions that had been keeping her 
awake at night. "Does taking the life of a killer bring about justice, or does 
it only continue the cycle of violence? Doesn't the death penalty make a killer 
of somebody? Does it matter that 'they' get paid to 'do their job'? Shouldn't 
they be charged with capital murder under the murder-for-hire law or, at the 
very least, under the Law of Parties for accepting money to kill somebody?"

Terri's questions are seemingly of little interest to the state of Texas, which 
has killed 545 men and women since 1976, nearly 5 times more than Virginia and 
Oklahoma, the states with the 2nd- and 3rd-largest numbers of executions.

In an article published by the United Nations, Walter Long, an appellate 
attorney in Austin, calls the death penalty "a trauma-organized system"???a 
phrase he borrowed from Arnon Bentovim, the British child and family 
psychiatrist who coined it in the 1990s to describe violent cycles of 
interaction that reach beyond the abused and the abuser into the political and 
societal realms. Because its effects are so far-reaching, Long argues, the 
death penalty poses a significant public-health concern.

"A defendant's execution is at the end of a chain of terrible circumstances 
that, in large part, the defendant and his or her family members suffer 
together," Long says. "As the overwhelming threat of execution waxes and wanes 
and then the execution is finally carried out, the process 'dysregulates' the 
defendant's family in the same way as the defendant. The appeals process moves 
in fits and starts and can repeat itself, leading to indeterminate anticipatory 
grief that can be horrible."

While Terri Been hasn't herself been convicted of a crime, she may as well 
have, for all the suffering she has experienced over the past 20 years. The 
same can be said for the tens of thousands of others who have a loved one on 
death row in this country. To make the public aware of this ripple effect, Long 
founded the Texas After Violence Project, a non-profit that promotes 
non-violent approaches to criminal justice. The organization's primary activity 
is to collect testimonies that provide a profound glimpse into the lives of 
those affected by the death penalty, and to question the far-reaching ideology 
that punishes violence with more violence. In 1 video, Jim Willett, a former 
corrections officer and warden, remembers the effect on his family when he had 
to carry out 5 executions in 17 days. In another, Vic Feazell, a former 
district attorney, recounts why the system has left him wounded. "It's really, 
really hard work. Physically and mentally it's exhausting, whether you're the 
prosecutor or the defense. And then it's a real emotional toll, too, because 
you are dealing with human life. Not just the life of the person that's on 
trial, but you've got the victim and then the victim's family. They think that 
if this person is put to death then that closes the chapter for them. Well, 
they all find out it doesn't. The only thing that ever will close that chapter, 
from my belief - and this is really hard to talk to the family members of the 
murder victim about - is forgiveness."

When I ask her where this story begins, Terri sighs. "My dad, my dad - that's 
all I can say. My dad. He was a valedictorian and pushed for perfection," she 
says. "We used to get spanked for everything under an 85. Jeff would get it 
like crazy. He's always the one that got the worst of it. My dad would just hit 
him and hit him with a razor strap. We watched Jeff suffer through a lot of 
physical abuse because he couldn't remember things. For a long time I tried to 
break up the spanking, but if you have the adult turn on you, you would sit in 
the corner and cry for Jeff, and beg him to stop. It had no effect."

Terri was the oldest of eight siblings and the only girl. She has always been 
especially protective of Jeff, 1 of 2 brothers with whom she shared a mother. 
"I am my brother's keeper - that was quoted to me I don't know how many times. 
I led him down the wrong path. I'm blamed for everything."*

Terri wants to forgive her father. She refuses to see herself as a victim. She 
breaks down crying as she tells me this. I tell her it's OK to cry.

"I hate looking weak in front of other people," she says. "It is normal, but 
that doesn't take away the guilt and the hate I have for myself. I'm the worst 
sister ever."

Terri's father Danny told me he didn't beat Jeff because of bad grades, but 
because of his lies. Jeff was faking his signature on school notes, and tried 
to cover up for his brothers and sister. Danny sometimes worried that he harmed 
Jeff's self-esteem. "How come you don't catch on?!" he would ask Jeff. "Your 
brother is 2 years younger than you - he's already caught on to this!"

Danny continues to believe in physical - and capital - punishment. Growing up, 
he was beaten with belts and switches at home, and with boards at school. To 
him it seemed logical to continue this conduct with his children.

When asked what, in his view, justifies physical punishment, Danny mentions the 
Bible. "A spanking that don't hurt don't teach you anything. That's one of the 
things that the Lord put in people and animals. Pain is a teaching mechanism." 
Danny thinks the reason why children are "so nuts" today is because parents and 
teachers are too lenient. "They need to have hall monitors like Steven Seagal 
or Chuck Norris. They can slap them and knock them down. Period."

Texas is 1 of 22 states where it is legal for teachers to hit students. 
"Corporal punishment, now widely recognized as child abuse, persists almost 
unchecked in the same parts of America where capital punishment thrives," 
observes Walter Long. Both practices mirror and sustain each other in places 
like Texas, spreading the tenets of blame, retribution, and pain into all 
corners of society.

In a lot of ways Jeff had it better than his father growing up: He was never 
hungry (Danny often had to subsist on fried potato on old bread); he had a 
television (Danny had none); he had a father who took him hunting and fishing 
(Danny's father never took him anywhere). Danny would even study with him until 
late at night, yet in the morning, Jeff seemed to have forgotten everything. 
"It was like if you put a computer off and you didn't save the information," 
Danny told me.

Terri, a middle school science and technology teacher, thinks her brother has a 
processing disorder. When Jeff was 12, his reading and spelling skills averaged 
at a 3rd-grade level; his visual-motor integration skills, which describe how 
well a child's eyes communicate with his hands, were that of a 7-year-old. A 
school psychologist described Jeff's bed-wetting and his self-doubt, his 
recrimination and fear of embarrassment. "Jeff seems to be struggling between a 
good, smart and a bad, dumb self-image. There is a drive to please others, but 
he is unsure how this is done without risk to his emotional self." He noted 
that Jeff's excessive fear led to faulty reasoning and reality testing, and 
that his hygiene and grooming were often poor. Jeff was fidgety. "He seemed to 
want attention from his math teacher, asking her for help on the testing 
activity. The observer's opinion was that Jeff seemed to want to have his 
teacher all to himself."

Jeff was categorized as emotionally disturbed and placed in special education. 
The psychologist advised his teachers to emphasize what is good and right about 
him. "Corporal punishment is not suggested since this will only make Jeff feel 
more helpless," the report reads.

When Jeff was 15, a different psychologist wrote: "During both test sessions 
Jeff chewed gum so vigorously that his ears wiggled. His facial and body 
movements were loose. Sometimes he mumbled or distorted his speech. Jeff was 
anxious about his test performance and frequently he asked how he was doing. He 
worded it negatively, though, as, 'I flunked, didn't I?' On the Rorschach, Jeff 
nervously rotated the cards and took a long time to respond. He was reluctant 
to risk an initial answer." After a minute, Jeff asked the examiner, "What do 
you think it looks like?"

Sadly, Jeff's story is not exceptional. In 2000, a study of death row inmates 
in California, published in Social Science & Medicine, found that every one of 
the 16 inmates examined had experienced violence and individual impairment; 14 
individuals suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 12 from 
traumatic brain injury. Violence perpetuates violence. It can sweep through 
families like a flood.

The entrance to the Polunsky Unit is adorned with a colorful, hand-painted seal 
that features the state's proud Lone Star garlanded with lush green olive and 
oak branches. To visitors, it must seem like a mockery - such amateurish 
signage welcoming them to the place where inmates are kept in isolation for 23 
hours a day until they are killed by the state.

The August 24th, 2016, execution date was Jeff's 2nd. The 1st had been set for 
August 21st, 2008. The week before, Jeff's family traveled four and a half 
hours to say what they thought would be their final goodbye. As usual, an 
impenetrable glass wall separated them from Jeff, and they had to talk to him 
via phone. The 1st time they would be able to make physical contact with him 
was once he was dead. While prayer granted them some comfort, eventually 
everybody broke down. Steven remembered calling his mother. "I was telling her, 
'Momma, I'm trying to be strong, but what if I fall?' It was too powerful of a 
situation to make it through unscathed."

Steven couldn't bring himself to say goodbye to Jeff. "I said: 'See you later. 
We are not leaving each other forever. If they do take your life, I expect you 
to have golden rope swings and kick-ass waterslides at the river Jordan waiting 
on me when I get there.'"

Terri refused to leave her little brother, and had to be dragged out of the 
building by guards, kicking and screaming.

5 1/2 hours before the appointed time, a federal judge stayed Jeff's execution, 
granting him a new competency hearing. Jeff's offbeat statements during trial 
and in prison - at some point Jeff had believed himself to be a victim of 
conspiracy by the Freemasons - "at least arguably suggest petitioner lacks a 
rational understanding of the causal link between his role in his criminal 
offense and the reason he has been sentenced to death," wrote Judge Orlando 
Garcia.

The reprieve was short-lived. As Terri remembers it, "The very first thing the 
judge said at the hearing was, 'What's the hold-up in this execution?' I just 
wanted to jump that little fence that separated us. I wanted to punch him in 
the face. What are you talking about? That's my brother!" Jeff's defense lost 
the hearing.

In the aftermath of Jeff's 2008 execution date and subsequent stay, Terri was 
tormented with numbness by day and nightmares by night. Her dreams kept taking 
her to the death house. "Sometimes I go in and I watch it happen. And sometimes 
I can't and I'm just too frozen with fear. Sometimes it takes me back to the 
place where I'm saying my final goodbye to him and they are pulling me out of 
the prison."

A crime doesn't happen in a vacuum. It cannot be isolated from larger forces 
and relationships, whether within families or the culture at large. That's why 
a proper trial includes a mitigation specialist, whose responsibility it is to 
exhume a family's secrets and try to explain to the judge and jury what led to 
the perfect storm.

"There is always a trauma history in one form or another," explained Dana Cook, 
co-director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation in Philadelphia. 
As a mitigation specialist, Cook has spent 14 years unearthing mitigating 
evidence for capital defendants.

"When we set out to buy a house, we look at the neighborhood and the school 
district because we want to make an educated decision. I think it's natural to 
say that we should do the same when we decide if a person should live or die. 
The goal of mitigation is not to sweep the crime under the rug but to help the 
jury understand how something like this might have happened." Cook added that 
proper mitigation doesn't only involve the negative aspects of the offender's 
life. A father's caring love, his contributions to his child's upbringing, 
should also be considered.

There was no mitigation specialist on Jeff's defense team, and since Jeff 
basically represented himself, there was no one to even tell the judge and jury 
about his learning disability, his beatings, his fear, and his inferiority 
complex. What prevailed was the prosecution's image of Jeff as a calculating 
criminal. Nobody heard anything about how much he cared for his daughter Paige.

Paige was only 2 when her father went to prison. At 22, she is the spitting 
image of Jeff. Father and daughter have the same round face, the same childlike 
features, and the same impish smile. While we talked via Skype, she lay on her 
belly in her trailer while her husband played with their 2 small sons. Paige 
has had to work 2, sometimes 3 jobs in order to support her family.

"I have always been a daddy's girl," she told me. When Paige was little she 
used to hide under the counter in the prison's visiting room. Suddenly, she'd 
leap up to surprise Jeff. She has pictures of herself with her father from 
before he went to prison, but no memories of touching or hugging him. Still, 
she said, he did "the whole daddy thing: 'Finish school. Don't have sex. And 
when you do, be protected.'"

"He doesn't skip a beat," she said. "Even though he's behind glass he's still 
my dad." To say goodbye after visits at the prison, father and daughter align 
their hands on the glass partition, "touching."

Terri, who helped raise Paige, worries about her. Like her aunt, Paige tries to 
bury her emotional turmoil, stress-eating and apologizing when tears escape her 
eyes. She was bullied in high school, Terri tells me. "'Your dad is a killer, 
your dad is a monster, your dad rapes small children!' Even though he didn't, 
adults say crazy things and kids pick up on it," Terri says.

To Elizabeth Beck, a professor of social work at Georgia State University and 
co-author of In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row 
Families, the monster metaphor is destructive. In the mind of the public, Beck 
says, "by extension, you as a family member are either a monster or you've been 
part of a monstrous situation - or you love or care deeply about a monster. You 
become not credible, not worthy, and, as a result, you are alienated."

This bias isn't always out in the open; it can be subconscious - and even 
trauma experts aren't entirely free of its sway. When Susannah Sheffer, the 
author of Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense 
Attorneys, tells colleagues about the effects of the death penalty on families 
and even attorneys, they often voice surprise. "People aren't necessarily 
negative about it, but their 1st reaction is, 'I have never even thought about 
it,'" Sheffer says. "They aren't only hidden victims, they are also unimagined 
victims." To make an informed decision, either for or against the death penalty 
as a form of punishment, she says, we are obliged to take a public-health 
perspective, evaluating the impact of the social practice and taking the full 
data into account.

The problem is, there is little public-health data to begin with. There's 
certainly no conclusive evidence that harsh punishment prevents violence, or 
that it even decreases a state's murder rate. Analyzing census data from 1990 
through 2016, the Death Penalty Information Center found that, from year to 
year and overall, states with capital punishment had higher murder rates than 
those that had abolished the death penalty.

According to a 2004 study by Katherine Baicker, now dean of the University of 
Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, the cost of seeing a case through to a 
death sentence is estimated to be more than $2 million. Some estimates range as 
high as $7 million, if you count the time until a person's execution. "This is 
as much as 10 times more than a life in prison," Baicker writes, "and most of 
these costs accrue at the trial level, contrary to much public discourse about 
the cost of 'endless appeals.'" Counties are sometimes forced to increase sales 
or property taxes to pay for capital punishment trials. For example, to pay for 
the trial of the white supremacists who killed James Byrd Jr. in 1998, Jasper 
County, Texas, reportedly increased property taxes by 6.7 %.

The psychological toll of capital punishment is harder to compute. It is widely 
assumed that the death penalty, with its implied vengeance and finality, brings 
closure to the families of murder victims. But this assumption appears to be 
wrong. In 2012, Marilyn Armour, a social work professor at the University of 
Texas, co-authored a study that compares the experience of murder victims' 
families in Texas with those in Minnesota, a state that abolished the death 
penalty in 1911. The results are striking. Families of victims in Minnesota 
reported better well-being and a higher sense of agency than the families of 
victims in Texas, likely because life sentences have fewer appeals and there is 
less media coverage and fewer court appearances. As a result, those family 
members aren't constantly reminded of the painful details of their loved ones' 
deaths. The study participants were less likely to suffer from stress-related 
conditions like high blood pressure, insomnia, and depression. "You have a lot 
of people in Texas who, for lengthy periods of time, do not feel the kind of 
control over their lives that give them a sense of agency," Armour explains. 
Instead, she says, "what gets reinforced is impotence and probably anger."

It seems logical that the capital punishment system would affect death row 
families in similar ways. Mitigation specialist Dana Cook remembers 
accompanying clients to appellate hearings, where they sat alongside the 
victim's family, who were, for obvious reasons, angry and in pain. "These 
emotions tended to come out in the courtroom, and because they couldn't direct 
it at the defendant, they directed it at the defendant's family," Cook says. 
Sometimes the victim's family would just glare at the defendant's family; at 
other times things would escalate. "On more than one occasion, sheriffs had to 
break up potential fights. It was a really traumatic experience for these 
families who are there to support their loved ones, and next thing they know 
they are the targets of grief, anger, and hate."

The pain and adversity isn't limited to the courtroom. Capital punishment can 
also pit family members against each other. Except for herself and one brother, 
Terri says, her entire family continues to support the death penalty. A fight 
even broke out between them over the subject at her dying grandfather's 
bedside.

"When you kill somebody and rape little kids, you need to die," Danny says. 
"Terri and I argue a lot," he admits. "It's created an atmosphere of hostility 
in our own household. There's fighting all the time. We try to skirt around it 
but it creates hard feelings. It's gotten to the point where Terri doesn't even 
let us know about the rallies. She wants us to speak up against the death 
penalty, and I can't. I can only speak up against the Law of Parties; it needs 
to be taken up on its own merits."

Families are complicated. Children don't stop loving their parents because they 
abused them, and big sisters don't stop caring for their little brothers 
because they drove the getaway car. Terri and her husband Steven live with her 
father and stepmother. They help pay their taxes and utilities. "I love my 
father," she says. "But I don't like him."

Following the rally in Austin, Terri's small crowd of supporters gathered at 
the house of Lily Hughes, a director of the non-profit Campaign to End the 
Death Penalty. About a dozen of us sat in Lily's living room and talked over 
melon and deep-dish pizza. Terri's 4 sons, all of them in their late teens and 
early 20s, kissed their mother before going out to catch Pokemon.

Once the sky darkened and everything quieted down, a brief moment of relaxation 
set in. Lily put on some music and Terri stretched out on the couch. Anita 
Ward's "Ring My Bell" came on, and Terri started singing along. She begged 
Steven to dance for her. Moments later her phone went off. "Prayers for Jeff!" 
she called out. Lily turned off the music. Each night at 8:24 p.m. sharp, 
numbers that mirror Jeff's execution date, the family stopped whatever they 
were doing, closed their eyes, and prayed for Jeff's life. This nightly ritual 
had become what Walter Long calls an act of "meaning-making," an attempt to 
structure and gain agency in a world that has spun out of control.

During the gathering at Lily's, Terri's son Nick occasionally sat down on my 
armrest to listen in while his older brother Nathan quietly stayed at his 
mother's side. With soft features, long, straight hair, and a curious, open 
nature, Nick appears much younger than his 20 years. One of his skinny arms 
bears a raised, black fist, a symbol of resistance in the face of violence. The 
day of the rally, Nick's skin was still reddened and sore from the needle.

Nick says he used to look forward to visiting his uncle. Upon arrival at the 
Polunsky Unit, Nick had to take off his belt and shoes and show the bottoms of 
his feet to the guard. He was patted down for contraband. He didn't understand 
why Terri cried, because Jeff always told funny stories. Over and over Jeff 
would tell the story of when he took Paige to the river when she was a baby and 
how she peed on him. Jeff didn't seem to age. In both his speech and emotional 
affect he appeared like a child, always trying to please and entertain those 
around him.

During those visits, Jeff would make sure that the kids got their candy first, 
even though the $40 in coins Terri and Steven brought for the vending machine 
were barely enough to buy Jeff his few cans of Dr Pepper and the ingredients to 
his "weird salad," a concoction of fresh vegetables, Doritos, and hot sauce.

Terri and Steven didn't have much. Not only did they chip in for Terri's 
parents, they also helped support Paige. The gas for the 600 miles from their 
hometown to Livingston and back cost a fortune. Terri has also been giving Jeff 
money for pens, toothbrushes, and toothpaste - even for toilet paper.

During family visits to the prison, while the adults talked, the children would 
run up and down alongside the glass wall. When they would see an inmate sitting 
by himself, waiting for family or for a guard to take him back to his cell, 
they'd pick up the phone to say hi. Nick became close with Willie Pondexter, a 
young prisoner who'd committed murder as a teenager. They became pen pals. 
"Willie had compassion for the kids," Steven remembered. "He would make them 
laugh."

Reality didn't set in until the day Nick was told that Willie had been 
executed. "I sat for four hours with Nick in my lap consoling him because of 
the tears and the sobbing," Steven said. "He had lost his friend. That was a 
big turning point for all the boys, when they realized these people were taken 
from us."

When I asked how his feelings had changed since Jeff's 1st execution date in 
2008, Nick swallowed. "I have stronger, more hateful feelings toward the system 
now," he said. "If they take him, by some act of the devil, I'll know that he's 
in a better place. All the memories will probably just flood me when he goes 
pale."

Nick has attended multiple rallies for death row inmates and has become 
accustomed to death penalty supporters driving up to the protesters and 
flipping them off. One time a guy tried to run Paige and Terri over with his 
truck. When Paige was 13, someone yelled "Prison whores!" at them. Then there 
was the guy who would show up to every single rally, yelling, "Kill them all!" 
One time Nick couldn't take it anymore. "'How about I just kill you?' I yelled 
at him." Nick thought the traffic would drown out his voice, but the guy came 
at him. Then, Nick says, one of his brothers grabbed a fistful of the guy's 
hair and threw him on the concrete.

One time in seventh grade, Nick wore his anti-death penalty shirt to school. 
His teacher challenged him: Surely he was only against the death penalty in 
certain cases? "I said: 'No. I'm against it as a whole because when did two 
wrongs make a right?'" But the God his teacher knew was wrathful and 
unforgiving. "She was like, 'It's been said, 'An eye for an eye.'" Nick argued 
that Jesus preached forgiveness, and that times have changed. In antiquity, 
Nick said, rapists were punished by having their testicles crushed between 
stones, a method that has long been abandoned, so why not abandon the death 
penalty? His teacher called on the class president to defend her. Nick decided 
to let it go, and to keep his mouth shut. "To single me out and to challenge me 
like that? At the time, that kind of just hurt."

Until 2005, the death certificate of those executed in Texas listed "homicide" 
as the cause of death. Now it reads "judicially ordered execution." In her 
speech at the rally, Terri called it a form of "state-sanctioned killing."

"As opposed to losing someone to death from natural, organic causes, these are 
family members who have lost their loved ones to the deliberate act of someone 
else," says Susannah Sheffer, who has worked on behalf of those who have lost 
loved ones to violent crime as well as to the death penalty. Comparing the 
trauma of the 2 groups, Sheffer has found arresting parallels. Both parties are 
prone to PTSD, which counts among its key symptoms flashbacks, anxiety, and 
depression due to the exposure to actual or threatened violent death. The grief 
of a death row family, however, appears to be even more ambiguous than that of 
a murder victim's family. First, there is no individual person to lay blame on; 
as a killer, the state is more powerful and far-reaching, yet more abstract and 
opaque. Second, the indefinite looming threat of death complicates the grieving 
process. If your grief is anticipatory and never-ending, if it isn't given the 
chance to run its normal course, if it isn't acknowledged, validated, or even 
taken seriously by society, the pain is all the more unbearable.

The social practice of state-sanctioned murder raises a number of troubling 
questions for Sheffer. "If, as a child, you're told the state killed your 
father, what does that do to your relationship with the state? Does that mean 
everybody is complicit? Or, if a child is told that killing is wrong, why is it 
OK for the state to kill daddy?"

There is a network of support services for families of homicide victims, but no 
such thing exists for death row families. When Illinois abolished the death 
penalty in 2011, money in the Capital Litigation Trust Fund (formerly used for 
capital defense) was transferred to the Death Penalty Abolition Fund, securing 
services for families of murder victims and for training law enforcement 
personnel. The National Organization for Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) 
possesses a remarkable amount of financial backing as well as dozens of 
individual chapters across 21 states. POMC holds monthly meetings and provides 
advocacy and court accompaniment. Nothing like this exists for Jeff's family.

Terri took time off from school in the summer of 2016 to spend those last 
remaining days with her brother and, if necessary, to make funeral 
arrangements. In 2008, during the weeks prior to Jeff's first execution date, 
Terri's former principal had been supportive of her missing work, but by August 
of 2016 she'd already used up her vacation days. The Family and Medical Leave 
Act, she discovered, didn't apply to her situation, and she was worried that 
the payroll department would penalize her for taking more time off.

Terri didn't know whether she could watch her brother being murdered. In her 
nightmares, her "inner demons" forced her to be in the death house, but during 
her visits with Jeff she couldn't bring herself to ask him whether he wanted 
her to be present. She felt like she needed to be there for him and to witness 
the execution or she would disappoint her little brother yet again.

Instead of talking about his death, Jeff and Terri spoke about where he wanted 
to be buried. Jeff didn't want to end up at the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, 
alongside those prisoners whose bodies weren't claimed by their families. The 
crosses of death row inmates in Texas don't even bear names. Some feature 
prison ID numbers that begin with 999 (a prefix assigned to death row inmates); 
some of the older crosses are entirely blank. The pariah status of those 
sentenced to death outlives them.

During the week leading up to the execution date, Terri's family began to 
bicker. Jeff's official visitation list was limited to 10 adults, and could 
only be changed every 6 months. Jeff had put Terri and Paige, their husbands, 
his parents, his 3 loyal pen pals, and a "Bible Daddy" on his list. Terri's 
boys were disappointed, and Jeff's 6 brothers and his birth mother were angry 
that they wouldn't be able to say goodbye. As always, Terri remained 
unflappable: "It's drama that I don't need," she said. She was hurting as well 
- "it's beyond depression," she told me - but she also has an astonishing 
resilience. She powered through work and sleeplessness, gathering more than 
8,000 signatures and getting dozens of Catholic leaders and state officials on 
her side.

Jeff's 43rd birthday was on Friday, August 19th, 5 days before he would be put 
to death. He was usually allowed one visit per week, but because of his 
upcoming execution date, he was given extra visitation days; he would be able 
to see his family and friends on Friday, Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday. The 
family went back and forth to make a schedule that accommodated everyone as 
well as possible. On his birthday it was Terri first, then his pen pal Katie, 
then Paige. But no one felt like celebrating.

Jeff's lawyer, Jared Tyler, had filed an appeal on July 29th, but the court 
hadn't responded yet. Terri felt hopeless. After her morning visit with Jeff, 
she went to Whataburger to meet family as well as reporters, whose curiosity 
grew more fervent as the execution date grew near.

That afternoon at 5, Terri received a call from Jared Tyler. A criminal appeals 
judge had stayed Jeff's execution. The judge merited Tyler's claims regarding 
the testimony of the psychiatrist James Grigson. Apparently, 3 jurors had come 
forward to say that it would have affected their deliberations had they known 
that Grigson testified falsely and misleadingly and that he had been expelled 
from various professional organizations. 1 juror said he was "angered" that the 
prosecution put Grigson on the stand. "The government lied to the jury by 
presenting him as an expert," the juror said, adding that he no longer believed 
that Jeff deserved the death penalty.

"We got a stay! We got a stay! We got a stay!" Terri shouted, her face wet with 
tears. Soon the whole family was laughing and crying, hugging, screaming, and 
praying. When the flood of emotions subsided, they strategized about how to let 
Jeff know. He shouldn't have to wait until visiting hours on Saturday to hear 
the news. Katie suggested they call in to a radio show Jeff listened to.

And that is how Jeff, on his birthday, found out that he wouldn't be put to 
death the following Wednesday.

Katie and Terri's visit that Saturday was all laughing and goofing around. 
Terri and Jeff drank soda and had a burping contest, something they used to do 
when they were children. They could hardly breathe, they were laughing so hard. 
>From behind the glass partition, Jeff participated in the planning of his 
birthday party, which was to take place that night at Lily's house in Austin. 
He had one wish: Take a piece of cake and throw it in his nephews' faces.

Terri did throw the cake into her sons' faces, and Katie sent me pictures to 
prove it. But the photos seem a lot less cheerful when you consider what's 
missing: Jeff himself, who cannot attend his own party, and whose right to live 
is still being debated in the Texas courts. His family continues to fight for 
his life, while constantly, prematurely mourning his ever-anticipated death.

POSTSCRIPT: While we were preparing this story for press, the Texas Tribune 
published a letter from Lucy Wilke, the prosecutor in Jeff Wood's original 
trial, asking the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend that Governor 
Greg Abbott commute Wood's sentence to life in prison. The letter was co-signed 
by Kerrville police chief David Knight, who was an officer at the time of the 
murder, and Keith Williams, the district judge handling Jeff's appeal.

(source: psmag.com)