[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 19




TEXAS:

After defeats in 2019, a group of Texas lawmakers is teaming up to push 
criminal justice reform----The new Criminal Justice Reform Caucus in the Texas 
House will set its sights on changes in 2021.



Lawmakers entered 2019 with high hopes that they could change Texas' bail 
procedures, death penalty laws and drug policies. But the legislative session 
ended this summer without major reforms in any of those issues.

Trying to prevent a similar outcome in 2021, a bipartisan group of House 
representatives has banded together to form an uncommon, issue-based caucus in 
the Texas Capitol: one targeting criminal justice reform.

“I’m sad to say that for all our other successes, the 86th Legislature was a 
failure for criminal justice reform,” said state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, in 
a statement given to The Texas Tribune on Thursday. “Misinformation and a lack 
of issue-specific guidance on the floor stopped a lot of commonsense, crucially 
needed bills.”

Moody and state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican who chairs the House 
Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee, will initially lead the House 
Criminal Justice Reform Caucus, which has 10 other House members — 5 Democrats 
and 5 Republicans — signed up. The goal is to help educate colleagues on 
criminal justice issues and work together to advance reform proposals, Moody 
said.

In some ways, the 2019 legislative session was marked by bipartisan progress on 
issues that have vexed the Legislature for years, most notably school finance. 
But time and again, key proposals to change the criminal justice system fell 
flat.

A bipartisan push to reform bail practices, which have been ruled 
unconstitutional in several counties, slowly moved through the House with 
backing from Gov. Greg Abbott before dying quickly in the Senate.

House lawmakers messily scrambled back and forth on a measure to limit arrests 
for nonjailable offenses, like traffic violations or theft under $100, before 
it finally fell apart.

Proposals to restrict or require reporting on law enforcement’s ability to 
seize property without a criminal conviction failed, were partially 
resuscitated and then later killed again in the House.

And a House bill to lessen criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of 
marijuana arrived at the Senate’s doorstep with a death notice already pinned 
to it.

For Moody, who announced Thursday he'd seek reelection to the Texas House after 
weighing a run for the open El Paso district attorney seat, the biggest 
failures this year pertained to death penalty bills. The most notable was one 
that would have created a pretrial process for determining if a capital murder 
defendant is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. 
Texas’ top criminal court has been slammed twice by the U.S. Supreme Court in 
the last 2 years for how it determines intellectual disability in death penalty 
cases, and state judges have begged for the Legislature to step in for years.

“[These are] reforms that have been essentially dictated by the U.S. Supreme 
Court, and we failed to act again for 20 years running now on intellectual 
disability, and that should just be unacceptable,” he told the Tribune. “What 
was a session that could have seen monumental reform in criminal justice saw 
very little.”

Leach has also been a rare Republican voice advocating for death penalty 
reforms. He said in the statement that Republicans and Democrats can find 
common ground on criminal justice priorities.

“I am confident that, working together, we can make the Texas system a shining 
beacon of smart, effective criminal justice that leads the nation,” he said.

Although notable House bills often died after impasses with the lawmakers in 
the Senate, Moody said he hopes the caucus will help combat misinformation that 
disrupts reform efforts.

“All those positive structural things will create fewer roadblocks to success 
and will create a better line of communication to the Senate,” he said.

Other members of the newly minted caucus weren’t as keen on marking the session 
as a failure. State Rep. James White, R-Hillister, chair of the House 
Corrections Committee, marked as achievements legislation to improve care for 
women in prison, tackle the backlog of rape kits and end the widely reviled 
Driver Responsibility Program.

But he said the caucus will allow for lawmakers to take a broad approach and 
look at the criminal justice system as a whole, noting that several of the 
members are chairs of relevant committees dealing with public health, the 
judiciary and the state’s prison system.

State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, a Houston Democrat who leads the chamber’s 
Public Health Committee, said that lawmakers have recognized that Texas has 
over-criminalized our society.

“I’m happy that we’re going to be able to come together and have some consensus 
on some issues that have plagued us for a long time,” she said.

Other committee chairs who have joined as founding members of the caucus 
include Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, of the County Affairs Committee; Nicole 
Collier, D-Fort Worth, of the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee; and Dade 
Phelan, R-Beaumont, of the State Affairs Committee.

Other founding members are state Reps. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park; Jessica 
González, D-Dallas; Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi; Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth; 
and Ina Minjarez, D-San Antonio. Moody said he expects others to join after the 
2020 election and in the legislative session that follows.

“This is an initial founding membership to show there are strong voices on both 
sides of the aisle,” he said.

(source: The Texas Tribune)

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

Texas mother avoids death penalty for fatally shooting 2 young daughters, 
sentenced to life behind bars



A Texas mother has pleaded guilty to a pair of capital murder charges as part 
of a plea deal that will allow her to avoid the death penalty in the 2017 
slayings of her 2 young daughters.

A judge on Wednesday sentenced Sarah Nicole Henderson to life in prison without 
the possibility of parole for murdering her children, 7-year-old KayLee and 
5-year-old Kenlie, CBS-DFW reported. The 31-year-old mother was detained at the 
Henderson County Jail, where she has been behind bars since her arrest on Nov. 
2, 2017.

Authorities responded to her Mabank home, located about 50 miles outside of 
Dallas, around 11:30 p.m. the night before. When they arrived on the scene, 
both Henderson and her husband, Jacob Henderson, told authorities the situation 
was under control and officers left the residence.

Three hours later, Jacob again phoned authorities — this time to report that 
Henderson shot both of her daughters in the head, Dallas Morning-News reported. 
They were both pronounced dead on the scene.

He woke up to her saying, “Babe, I just shot the kids,” Jacob recalled. “And I 
didn’t want to believe it, I went in there and they were dead.”

As he continued to speak with dispatchers, Henderson could be heard in the 
background asking, “What did I do, Lord? What did I do? What did I do? What did 
I do, God?”

Authorities said she also attempted to shoot her husband, but that the gun 
malfunctioned.

Henderson County Sheriff Botie Hillhouse said the mother did not show “much 
emotion” when she confessed to the crime and was “matter-of-fact" during 
interviews with law enforcement. Authorities later said she’d planned to kill 
the girls for weeks.

When asked why she did it, she responded that she was “just caught up in life” 
and “going crazy.”

Jacob Henderson, who has since divorced Henderson, said he supported the plea 
deal. He was not the father of KayLee or Kenli.

(source: New York Daily News)








USA:

Brendt Christensen Avoids Death Penalty in Chinese Scholar's Murder



A former University of Illinois doctoral student is facing life in prison in 
the abduction, rape and killing of a scholar from China after a federal jury 
failed to agree on a death sentence.

The jurors returned their decision on Thursday after deliberations in the 
sentencing of 30-year-old Brendt Christensen. The life sentence is 
automatically applied if even 1 juror opposes execution.

The same jurors took less than 90 minutes to convict Christensen last month in 
the June 2017 killing of Yingying Zhang.

Prosecutors described how Christensen raped, choked and stabbed Zhang before 
beating her to death and decapitating her. Christensen has never revealed what 
he did with Zhang's remains. The defense sought to humanize Christensen, 
including by showing video of him as a child.

(source: Associated Press)