Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.
Although Duane Buck’s guilt is not in question for the 1995 murder of
his former girlfriend Debra Gardner and her friend Kenneth Butler,
critics say jurors in his case were led to choose a death sentence over
life without parole based on testimony of a state psychologist who
argued that African-American criminals are more likely to pose a future
danger to the public. We’re joined by two guests: Linda Geffin, the
second-chair prosecutor who helped win Buck’s death sentence in 1997,
but now opposes his execution, and Christina Swarns, an attorney with
Duane Buck’s legal defense team and director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Criminal Justice Project.
Here's an excerpt from the interview:
For more, we go to Houston, where we’re joined by Linda Geffin,
second-chair prosecutor who helped win the death sentence for Duane Buck
in '97. She now opposes his execution. She is currently senior
assistant prosecutor in Harris County attorney's office. And here in New
York, we’re joined by Christina Swarns, attorney who’s part of Duane
Buck’s legal defense team. She is the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Criminal Justice Project.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Linda Geffin, let’s go
to you. You helped convict Duane Buck. He ended up with the death
penalty, being sentenced to death. Why have you changed your view on his
case right now?
LINDA GEFFIN:
Fourteen years after the trial, I saw on the Internet the offensive
testimony in black and white. And when I had the opportunity to read it
and to really absorb what it was saying, it was so—I had so much clarity
that it was racially offensive, it was egregious, and it was error. So I
emailed Mr. Buck’s lawyer and asked how I could help.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what that quote was. I’ll read a comment Dr. Quijano made to The New York Times.
He said, quote, "I was asked a question whether there is a relationship
between race and violence or dangerousness. The literature suggests
that there is a correlation. So I had to say yes." He added, "It’s not
because of the blackness of the person that is causing the violence. It
is what goes with it. Poverty, the exposure to lack of education,
exposure to criminal elements." Let’s go to our guest right here in New
York, Christina Swarns. Your response to that?
CHRISTINA SWARNS:
Well, I think Dr. Quijano made quite clear that what he believed and
what the state was looking for him to say was that because Mr. Buck was
and is African American, he posed a future danger to society. And the
prosecution, in cross-examination, elicited that testimony. They then
went on to argue specifically that point during closing argument. What
the prosecutor said in closing was: Dr. Quijano testified that he would
pose a future danger, and that—on that basis, you should find that he is
a future danger, and he should be sentenced to death. I would go on to
say that, as The New York Times reported, Dr. Quijano’s
opinion, of course, about this is false: There isn’t a real connection
to support a future dangerousness finding.
ReutersLegal posts, "The would-be diva," by Anna Louie Sussman.
United
States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a reputation as an
opera lover; she’s seen frequently at the Washington National Opera and
has even made cameos in two of its productions. In fact, she says in an
interview with the WQXR radio program Operavore, she would have preferred to be an opera singer than a lawyer.
Justice Ginsburg tells host and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne that her career in law was a reluctant second choice.
“People
ask me, ‘If you could be whatever you want to be, what would you be?’
And my first answer is not, ‘A great lawyer.’ It is, ‘I would be a great
diva.’ But I totally lack that talent, so the next best thing is the
law,” she said.
She
also compared ruling on death penalty cases to the plight of Captain
Edward Vere in Billy Budd, who is forced to obey the letter of the law
and sentence Budd to hang, despite his doubts about Budd’s guilt. While
she has said before she finds death penalty cases very difficult, she has also refrained from declaring them all unconstitutional.
“If
I had my way there would be no death penalty. But the death penalty for
now is the law, and I could say ‘Well, I won’t participate in those
cases,’ but then I can’t be an influence,” she said.
On today's program, the highest art in the land meets the highest court:
presiding mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne talks with Supreme Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a noted opera fan who has even appeared onstage in
cameo roles. "If truth be told, lawyers and law do not come off very
well in opera," she explains.
RBG: No, but it is the law in most states. Well over half states.
Q: I don’t want to get too involved in this. How does this translate to the highest Court?
RBG: There is a question about the fairness of the trial. Maybe the prosecutor failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. Maybe the defendant was not mentally competent. These are the issues that come to us.
Interestingly, RBG would not take the approach that Justices Brennan and Marshall did–that the death penalty was always unconstitutional. Yet, their position became marginalized because they perpetually dissented.
Sister Helen Prejean,
73, anti-death penalty advocate and author of "Dead Man Walking," which
was made into a movie in 1995 of the same name, was in Houston for the
10th anniversary of GRACE, the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, which represents low-income death-penalty defendants at no cost. She spoke with Houston Chronicle reporter Harvey Rice about her passion for her cause.
Q. Was it your experience with Patrick Sonnier,
whose 1984 execution inspired your book "Dead Man Walking," that led
you to be outspoken against the death penalty, or was it something else?
A.
When he was killed in the electric chair he looked at my face. I had
never seen an execution before with my own eyes. I went outside and
vomited. Support for death penalty was 87 percent at the time. I
realized the people are never going to see this, but I've witnessed it.
I've witnessed the guards who had to do the killing. One who said I have
to quit. I met the victims' families. They are given this illusory
promise (that the death penalty will bring them closure.) I began
speaking out immediately after that execution. I wrote a book, "Dead Man
Walking." It was to get the word out to the people, to get them to face
the reality of the death sentence, to gradually take them into the
horror. That's what I tried to do.
On a Thursday afternoon walk along Canal Street, Damien Echols was
reflecting on how this busy thoroughfare once nourished him in the first
few months after his August 2011 release from a super-maximum-security prison in Arkansas.
Arriving from a life spent largely in solitary confinement and awaiting a
death sentence, Mr. Echols was starved for human interaction and
feasted on this downtown Manhattan smorgasbord teeming with awed
tourists, stubborn natives and street peddlers hawking unfamiliar wares
as if it were a five-course dinner.
Now, however, Mr. Echols compared this same block to a far less
appetizing meal: “A sack full of McDonald’s hamburgers,” he called it.
It’s not that Mr. Echols, 37, one of the defendants in the notorious
West Memphis Three murder case and the author of a new memoir, “Life After Death,” has become tired of a frantic, indifferent city or jaded by his own long-sought, hard-won freedom.
But after a year on the outside he finds himself an unlikely and
uncomfortable celebrity. He is famous mostly because of things for which
he does not want to be recognized, yet he is unable completely to shun
the spotlight he says he needs to win himself a full exoneration.
“You can have all the evidence in the world, and that’s still only 50
percent of the fight,” said Mr. Echols, who speaks in a soft but
resolute voice. “The other 50 percent is media. You have to get the
media to pay attention. If not, they’ll sweep it under the rug and keep
going.”
Tall and lean with long black hair, Mr. Echols is most widely known for
having been convicted in 1994, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie
Misskelley Jr., for the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis,
Ark., a crime the three men say they did not commit. Last year Mr.
Echols, Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Misskelley were released, after almost 20
years, in a deal that required them to plead guilty even though they
continue to maintain their innocence.
Since then Mr. Echols has lived a bifurcated existence. He has become
well known from the three “Paradise Lost” documentaries, directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky,
that chronicled the West Memphis Three case, and he has spent time with
several of the entertainment-world luminaries who fought for his
release and have helped finance his exoneration efforts, including
Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder and the “Lord of the Rings” director Peter
Jackson. (Mr. Jackson and Mr. Echols are also among the producers of a
coming documentary, “West of Memphis.”)
But Mr. Echols says his private life is happily mundane. He and his
wife, Lorri Davis, live in Salem, Mass., a city with long connections to
magic and the dark arts that has become a modest mecca of New Age shops
and meditation centers; he calls it “the only place on earth where I’m
in the majority.”
Eighteen and a half years after he was sentenced to death for
participating in the murders of three 8-year-old boys in Arkansas,
Damien Echols finds himself in Faireyland. Mr. Echols’s new book, “Life
After Death,” has a Shepard Fairey-inspired cover design that’s as
coolly lionizing as Mr. Fairey’s “Hope” poster
for President Obama. The book has a champion in Johnny Depp, who has
compared Mr. Echols’s writing to Dostoyevsky’s. And his story is the
subject of a forthcoming documentary, “West of Memphis,” even though that story has been exhaustively told in the three “Paradise Lost” films that paved the path to Mr. Echols’s release from death row.
These are mind-bending new circumstances for a guy who grew up as an
impoverished loner, sardonically described himself as white trash, and
spent his years of incarceration noticing the most grotesque,
dehumanizing aspects of prison life. Yet “Life After Death” tries to
reconcile all these extremes into a single narrative, and to a great
extent it accomplishes this magic trick. By the way, Mr. Echols spells
that word “magick,” just as one of his favorite writers, the very spooky
Aleister Crowley, did. It was Mr. Echols’s teenage taste for the occult, heavy metal and black clothing — a look inspired by Mr. Depp in “Edward Scissorhands,” he says — that initially made him a target for the vindictive and provincial police in West Memphis, Ark.
“Life After Death” does not discuss the details of that triple murder case
and the long, botched investigation and trial that followed. For one
thing, that story is not over. Last summer Mr. Echols, now 37, and his
two cohorts in what became known as the West Memphis Three, Jason
Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., were freed
on an Alford plea, an unusual technicality whereby the defendants were
released but not vindicated. The accumulated fan support, financial
backing and legal muscle that have rallied around Mr. Echols suggest
that his champions will continue to fight on his behalf.
But he is sick of that story anyway. So “Life After Death” is a dual
memoir, partly about Mr. Echols’s boyhood and partly about his prison
life.
As one of the West Memphis Three, Damien Echols spent nearly two decades
on death row for the murders of three Arkansas Cub Scouts in 1993, a
crime he says he didn't commit. Last year, due to a lack of evidence,
the men were released amid a flood of publicity.
And:
Q: It must also be a shock because people see you in
magazines with people like Johnny Depp and think, "Oh, he's living the
life."
A: People see the glamour angle or some red-carpet thing with Johnny,
but they don't know for the past month I've been homeless, and we've
(he and wife, Lorri Davis) been struggling to get a place to stay.
Tomorrow, we move to Massachusetts, but we've been moving from hotel to
hotel or staying with friends. When we left Arkansas, we literally felt
like refugees. I did not have one single penny in my pocket or a change
of clothes. If it wasn't for people helping us and trying to get us on
our feet, we would have been screwed.
In May, Victor Stephens, who is black, pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the shooting of a white store owner. The plea, which came after he had been granted a new trial, brought a life sentence but removed him permanently from death row in Alabama, where he was first sentenced in 1987.
Stephens' attorney, J.S. "Chris" Christie Jr., is a partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Birmingham, Ala., and co-chairman of the firm's pro bono committee. According to Christie, Stephens was the third inmate the firm has gotten off death row since it began handling capital cases in 1988. Christie talked to The National Law Journal about Bradley Arant's death penalty work, for which the firm will receive an exceptional service award from the American Bar Association's death penalty project next month.
And:
NLJ: The firm has represented 19 people on death row in Alabama so far. How does that compare to the total number of people on death row in the state?
C.C.: Alabama has about 200 people on death row. The number changes. For example, Victor Stephens was taken off in May 2012, but two people were added. The exact number was 201, so about 11 percent of the people on death row.
NLJ: Of those 19 cases, one person was executed and two died in prison. Stephens is one of three people the firm has successfully gotten removed from death row. Talk about that case.
C.C.: This is something I worked on from 1993 to 2012. Victor Stephens in 1986 was part of robbing a convenience store. The store owner shot him and, while the store owner was reloading his gun, Victor Stephens shot the store owner with a .25-caliber pistol that he had. Victor Stephens confessed to shooting the store owner with a .25 pistol after being shot with a shot gun.
At his trial in 1987, he was convicted of capital murder. That night, they held a sentencing hearing. The jury recommended life without parole. The judge held the final sentencing until after he'd been nominated to the Court of Criminal Appeals and before the general election that fall, and sentenced Victor Stephens to death, overriding the jury's finding that he should be sentenced to life without parole. That went up through the normal appellate process and post conviction proceedings started — and that's when I got involved, in 1993.
NLJ: What was the legal argument that got him off death row?
C.C.: The argument on which he actually was awarded a new trial was on the jury selection. The prosecution used 21 of its 22 regular strikes, and its first 21 strikes were to remove blacks from the jury. His counsel made a timely objection, and the state offered what appeared to be race-neutral reasons for strikes of 21 blacks.
Related posts are in the ABA and pro bono category indexes.
Connecticut death row inmates who are suing the state over alleged racial and geographic biases in the state's death penalty are supporting a plan to hold the trial in a prison instead of a courthouse.
Inmates' lawyers said in a court document filed Friday that the plan by state officials was "adequate." The plan calls for the trial to be held at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, which houses death row, beginning in September and be broadcast via a live video feed to Rockville Superior Court so the public can watch.
The trial would be held in one of the prison's dayrooms, where each inmate and his lawyer would sit together at their own table.
Nine of the 10 men on death row are plaintiffs in the appeal. The state repealed capital punishment for all future crimes earlier this year.
Inmates objected to an earlier plan by the state to hold the trial in Rockville and allow them to watch video feeds in their cells.
The plan to hold the trial in the prison still needs approval by a judge. A hearing on issue is scheduled for July 25 in Rockville.
And:
Six death row inmates are black and three are white, when blacks make up only 10 percent of the state's population. Inmates' lawyers also say several inmates on death row were prosecuted in Waterbury, bolstering claims of geographic bias.
Daniel Webb is awaiting execution for the 1989 kidnapping and murder of a Connecticut bank executive, but he believes he is also paying a price for another, unrelated crime that has heavily influenced the state's debate on capital punishment.
Webb told The Associated Press in a death row interview that he thinks there would be no capital punishment in the state if not for the public's desire to execute the men responsible for the 2007 home-invasion slayings of a mother and her two daughters in suburban Cheshire. The only survivor of that crime, Dr. William Petit, lobbied to keep the death penalty for the men who killed his family, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky.
"Dr. Petit is angry with them and with his anger he wants to kill all of us," said Webb, who spoke by telephone from behind a glass window. "Now you are trying to increase my suffering and take away the little that I had because you want to make Komisarjevsky suffer. That's not right."
Webb was sentenced to die for the slaying in Hartford of Diane Gellenbeck, a 37-year-old Connecticut National Bank vice president, who was taken from a downtown parking garage and shot to death near a local golf course as she ran from an attempted sexual assault.
The state legislature in April abolished capital punishment, but only for future crimes. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and key state lawmakers had insisted on that as a condition of their support for repeal in a long-running debate that focused on the Petit case.
Why did you get involved in these types of cases? Why do you feel so strongly?
Stevenson: I started representing children on death row 20 years ago, and I was struck by how desperately they wanted and needed mentoring, parenting, guidance. They were in every sense of the word “kids,” and that surprised me initially. . . . What I saw was that not only were they vulnerable and disabled and exposed in ways that adult clients weren’t, but they were also responsive in ways that adult clients weren’t. . . . The second thing was just seeing how exposed kids are in the adult system, how victimized, how brutalized.
Have you ever come face to face with a victim of one of your clients?
Tragically, I know more about victimization than I wish I knew. My grandfather was murdered when I was 16 by juveniles, four kids in a low-income project in south Philadelphia. Members of my immediate family have dealt with very serious crimes. It’s not a lack of awareness. We spend a lot of time with victims of violent crime. . . . I think we should be doing something radically better by people who are victimized by violent crime. But what we’ve done in the last 30 years is promised them revenge, mostly; we promised them blood and executions and extreme punishments.
We do very poorly in providing them with counseling and support and recovery or the promise of a new society where there’s going to be less crime because we’re doing something constructive to help people who are at risk or hopeless or marginalized.
I also think that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. And if we don’t commit in a complete way to justice for everybody, we risk perpetuating the dynamics that have been so injurious to American progress. And I do believe we should spend a lot more time thinking about how we treat people who are disadvantaged and disfavored in evaluating our progress, our decency, our character, because, ultimately, that’s how we’re going to be judged.
If a juvenile has committed the most heinous of crimes and the jury has adjudicated that individual guilty, why is it offensive to the Constitution for that juvenile to be subjected to a mandatory life without parole?
Children are different than adults. We recognize that children need extra protection. Their maturity, their judgment, their development doesn’t permit us to treat them like adults. That’s the reason why we don’t let even the smartest kids smoke or drink or vote or drive cars before they’re eligible.
We protect children under the law except in the criminal justice system, and in the last 30 years, we have essentially dropped the protections for kids, put them in the adult criminal justice system, where I think many of them have been really unfairly sentenced and condemned. . . . We do it mostly to kids who are poor and kids of color, and that makes this sentence “unusual.”
I believe that to say to any child that you’re only fit to die in prison is “cruel.” It’s true that some of these crimes are very disturbing, but it’s also true that the lives that many of these children have lived are also disturbing. They’re in many ways some of the most vulnerable kids in society, and we owe them more than to simply throw them away.
Syndicated columnist Robyn Blumner writes, "When the state kills the innocent," for the Tampa Bay Times. It's also available as, "Innocents have been executed via the Columbus Dispatch and Tribune Media Services. It's a must-read.
If you’re reading this in a comfortable, middle-class home, what happened to Carlos DeLuna almost certainly could never happen to you.
But everyone should care about DeLuna’s story because it lays bare America’s broken “machinery of death,” to quote former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. After decades on the bench, Blackmun finally stopped upholding death sentences. He said the potential for error is too great in a system “fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.”
DeLuna was a poor Hispanic nobody with a criminal record who was executed in Texas for a crime he didn’t commit. The system in Texas does not go out of its way for people like DeLuna. He was put to death in 1989 for the 1983 knife slaying of Wanda Lopez at a convenience store where she worked in Corpus Christi.
When DeLuna was arrested a short time after the murder, there wasn’t even a microscopic drop of blood on his clothes or shoes, despite a crime scene where Lopez’s blood was splattered on walls and pooled on the floor. A man’s bloody footprint at the scene was never measured by detectives to find a match.
Had police, prosecutors or defense lawyers done their job, they would have uncovered evidence pointing to another man. Carlos Hernandez was a knife-toting violent felon who told multiple witnesses that he had committed the Lopez crime. Hernandez died in prison in 1999 of cirrhosis of the liver.
And:
In 2006, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that because mistaken convictions have been uncovered, America’s death penalty is justified. He declared with relish that the system of procedural safeguards actually works because no innocent person, “not one,” has been wrongfully put to death. If there has been, Scalia wrote, “we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.”
Excuse us, Justice Scalia, but here are two: Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham. These are two men whose stories should lead all of us to conclude, as Justice Blackmun did, that America’s death-penalty experiment has failed.
Call it a graduate course on what can go wrong in the criminal justice system.
There are 891 case studies at present, and climbing.
That’s the number of individual cases listed so far in a new national project on cataloging and dissecting proven miscarriages of justice.
Called the National Registry of Exonerations, the project aims to build the first comprehensive listing of wrongful convictions in America so the public and professionals can learn the hard lesson of failure, then build a better system.
As with a similar, DNA-centered exoneration database maintained by the Innocence Project of New York, this one figures to be a good teacher. And Texas once again has an embarrassingly prominent presence.
So be it. This state needs to have its dirty laundry laid out as often as possible if that’s what it takes to overcome skepticism that things have been just fine the way they are inside Texas’ halls of justice. We know that’s not the case.
How many people wrongfully convicted of a crime are we willing to accept? Especially those who are sentenced to Death Row?
A report released Monday by the National Registry on Exonerations raises those questions and more. The registry, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, profiles 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. The report discusses including at least 1,170 other defendants whose convictions were dismissed after more than a dozen major police scandals. Most of those scandals involved the massive planting of drugs and guns on innocent defendants, which led to "group exonerations."
And:
Of the 16 state exonerations in Alabama, six were men sentenced to death. It does not require a vivid imagination to wonder whether a wrongly convicted person awaits execution on Alabama's Death Row or, worse, whether the state has killed an innocent person in our names.
If someone goes to prison for a crime he or she did not commit, it is an injustice. That is especially true in capital murder cases, where a life is at stake. We would like to have as much confidence in Alabama's criminal justice system as Strange professes, but the report on the national registry casts enough doubt to cause grave concern.
891 - Specific wrongful conviction cases detailed in the National Registry of Exonerations
93 - Percent of the exonerated convicts who are men
50 - Percent who are black
10.7 - Average time, in years, from conviction to exoneration
10,000 - Combined time, in years, the 891 exonerated prisoners spent behind bars
2.3 million - People incarcerated in the U.S.
1,170 - Convicted defendants cleared in 13 "group exonerations" since 1995, following large police-corruption scandals, usually involving planted drugs or guns
416 - People exonerated of wrongful homicide convictions
And, to start, Professor Gross, this registry contains information about, I guess, 2,000 exonerations since 1989, but do you know if that's really a comprehensive list?
SAMUEL GROSS: No, it's not. It's incomplete in two senses. It doesn't include all the exonerations that occurred. It includes those we've been able to get information on. And, second, and really more important, even if we could get information on all the exonerations that have occurred in the United States in the past 20-some years, that would only be a small fraction of the people who were innocent but convicted of serious crimes, despite their innocence.
CORNISH: So, of these 2,000 cases that you talk about, you have almost 900 cases, roughly, that you have the most detail about. And one thing I found interesting is that it wasn't DNA, necessarily, that exonerated all of these people.
GROSS: That's right. If you ask somebody on the street about exonerations, the next word out of their mouth will almost certainly be DNA and that's because DNA exonerations, which started in 1989, have gotten a lot of attention and for good reason. They've taught us a lot about the criminal justice system and they provide a type of scientific evidence of innocence that is very powerful.
But DNA exonerations have always been a minority of the exonerations that occur and the more we learn about exonerations that don't get as much attention, the more non-DNA exonerations we find out about.
At Huffington Post David Protess posts, "Meet the Exonerated." He's president of the Chicago Innocence Project.
Other findings were more nuanced. Notably, exonerations were spread across 43 states, but were most prevalent by far in three states: Illinois, New York and Texas. These states together accounted for one-third of the country's exonerations. Cook County and Dallas County led the way with 114 exonerations between them.
But why? While the knee-jerk reaction is to shout "corruption," the reality is good news more than bad. As the researchers indicate, these areas have been at the forefront of the national innocence movement, with dedicated lawyers, investigators, journalists and even college students engaged in exposing wrongful convictions since the 1990s. In the last five years, the D.A. of Dallas County has remedied injustice in 19 cases, some in collaboration with the local innocence project.
It is reasonable to conclude that if the loosely affiliated public interest groups were to bring their model to populated counties like San Bernardino (Calif.), Fairfax (Va.) and Bergen (N.J.) -- none with an exoneration since 1989 -- the problem of wrongful convictions would suddenly surface.
Another relevant issue is the death penalty. Seven of the 10 states with the most exonerations also had among the highest death row populations. Although fewer than 0.1 percent of prisoners are sentenced to death, 12 percent of exonerees had been condemned. Once again, the death penalty has been a priority of the innocence movement, and many dramatic exonerations have helped to change the conversation about capital punishment in America.
As governor of Texas during the early 1980s, I oversaw 19 executions. I was certain that the executions I oversaw involved guilty individuals, based on the best information available at the time, just as I am sure my successor was certain of guilt in the execution of Carlos DeLuna.
But now, a comprehensive investigation by Columbia University law professor James Liebman and his students suggests that Texas may well have executed the wrong Carlos.
And:
While Texas has certainly taken some steps forward since 1989 with regard to eyewitness identification reform and other innocence-related issues, the problems that plagued DeLuna's case continue to plague criminal - including capital - convictions in our state and across the nation. DeLuna's case should give us all pause as we realize that the possibility of executing an innocent individual is very real. And it should strengthen our resolve to ensure that convictions, particularly capital convictions, are accurate.
If we are going to continue to execute individuals, we must be absolutely certain of those individuals' guilt. Texas must implement best practices when it comes to criminal investigations and trials.
The eyewitness identification reform bill that the Legislature passed last year is one positive step, and I'm hopeful that jurisdictions around the state fully adopt and implement best practices in accordance with the legislation. Texas must also go beyond the steps it has already taken to examine other areas in need of reform, such as providing adequate defense counsel for the poor, reforming crime labs and revising the rules governing what evidence prosecutors must turn over to the defense.
I continue to believe some crimes are so heinous, some actions so abhorrent, that society is justified in demanding the perpetrator's life be forfeit. But I also believe if Texas is going to continue to impose the death penalty, we must take every possible precaution to ensure there is never another Carlos DeLuna.
Until the day Texas executed him in 1989, Carlos DeLuna insisted another Carlos stabbed and killed 24-year-old Wanda Lopez at a Corpus Christi gas station in February 1983. At trial, prosecutors dismissed the idea, calling the other Carlos “a phantom” that didn't exist.
More than two decades after DeLuna's execution, Columbia University law school professor James Liebman and a team of his students have gathered a trove of evidence they claim shows DeLuna was innocent of the crime, publishing the findings last week in a 400-page e-book and in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review's spring issue.
And, one of the questions and answer:
What's the impact of an investigation like this? What can it teach us when looking at capital cases today?
I think the most important thing is to make us recognize the risk we take. There is a real risk of executing the innocent in these capital cases, and that's why it's so important that this case is no different from many, many others we see. It's not an unusual case. Nobody had identified it anywhere near the time of execution as one that we ought to be worried about. There are a dime a dozen cases like this. And so right now where there's a big debate taking place across this country, when a number of states have abolished [the death penalty], with California's big referendum coming up, people should be asking the question: What do we get out of this penalty that we don't get out of, for instance, life without parole? And with what risk and at what cost? We feel this book really demonstrates the risk and the cost: the worst kind of risk out there. We feel it demonstrates that there is a very real risk even in this kind of run-of-the-mill case.
There's nothing about this case where you can say, “Oh we don't do it that way anymore,” or, “That just doesn't happen anymore.” As I say, the defense attorneys were not the strongest in the world but this is not the worst case of ineffective assistance out there. You see similar cases out there everyday across the country, Texas and elsewhere. Prosecutors did not turn over all of the evidence, but there are many cases where you see even worse examples of that. The appeals were quick, but that's not unusual. Like I said, in many ways this is a very run-of-the-mill kind of case even for today. It's the way cases go today. And so the real risk of an innocent person being executed that we found in this case is a real risk that the system continues to take as long as it's prepared to execute people.
"Texas killed the wrong Carlos," is a New York Daily News OpEd written by Shawn Crowley and Andrew Markquart. Both participated in the Columbia HRLR project, Los Tocayos Carlos,
Other details about the shoddy investigation shocked us. The witness told police the man fleeing the station after Lopez’s murder looked like a transient, wore a disheveled sweatshirt and had a mustache. Police records show that the clean-shaven DeLuna wore a white dress shirt and dress pants that night.
According to the witness, the attacker violently wrestled with Lopez as she bled to death, casting a mist of blood spatter, streaks and pools all over the tiny clerk’s area. But forensic analysis showed that DeLuna’s body, clothes, shoes and fingernails had no blood on them.
The Corpus Christi D.A.’s office has since lost the physical evidence from the investigation. Lost along with it was the potential for the kind of DNA analysis that has exonerated nearly 300 prisoners in recent years.
All of this happened not in the 1920s or even the ’50s, but in the ’80s. And the flaws in our system that led to DeLuna’s death have not been mended. Readers can review our work and decide for themselves what happened. But we are convinced: America must come to grips with the reality of wrongful execution — and decide whether we value the death.
Now, more than two decades after DeLuna's execution, Columbia University law school professor James Liebman and a team of students have uncovered evidence they say proves that Carlos DeLuna was innocent, and that Carlos Hernandez not only was real but was probably the real killer. They released their findings in a book-length monograph and website published by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review on Tuesday.
"I'm convinced that no jury could possibly have convicted Carlos DeLuna beyond a reasonable doubt on the evidence here. That's absolutely clear," Liebman said in a videotaped interview with the Tribune from Columbia University in New York. Liebman discussed the lengthy in-depth investigation that the team conducted, which he said revealed that Hernandez had a long history of violent crimes, that police worked too fast, that important leads were never followed and that, in the end, even DeLuna's execution may have been botched. "Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong," he said.
And:
Carlos DeLuna protested his innocence until his death. At his execution, the Rev. Carroll Pickett, the death house chaplain, said DeLuna asked if he could call him Daddy and held the pastor's hand as long as he could.
"I fully believe that Carlos DeLuna was an innocent man, and I will always believe that," Pickett said.
Issue 3: How did a Columbia investigator uncover in a day what Texas police weren't able to find in six years?
Liebman: If you don't look hard, you won't find, and I fear that this is a case where the responsible people didn't look hard because they believed that they had quickly arrested the right man. As sometimes happens, minds closed before the evidence was in.
Pilkington: Yes. When I read that I nearly fell off my chair.
Issue 4: Will public opinion be affected?
Liebman: There is a vibrant debate about the death penalty in the US just now and the public is paying close attention. We wrote this article so it could provide information on that debate to the public in a very accessible way. I have faith in the facts and in the public's ability to make reasoned judgments on matters of policy over time. And it takes time. In fact, public opinion on the opinion has changed dramatically over the past 15 years in the US and it has had an impact. Juries are imposing one-third as many death sentences each year now, compared to 1999.
Austin American-Statesman journalist Chuck Lindell broke the story of new developments in Michael Morton's case that led to his exoneration. He's still covering the story, and the Statesman has published a two-day series, "Free to Speak;" a wide-ranging conversation between Morton and Lindell. There is video at the links below. It's a must-read.
Morton's arrival in prison immediately drove home the seriousness of his new situation.
Standing in a line of inmates wearing only prison-issued boxer shorts, Morton said he counted 13 stab wounds on the back of the man in front of him. Suddenly, the advice imparted from a longtime inmate at the county jail made perfect sense: "Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open."
Morton had to learn to stand up for himself. There were confrontations, but nothing worth discussing today, he said.
"It had its rougher moments. But most of prison is boring and monotonous and stupid and disrespectful," he said. "That's not me being some kind of elitist. Everyone inside complains about it."
Knowing he was innocent added "a little bit of emotional baggage," Morton said. "But I was no different than a guy who was completely guilty, because prison is prison. ... You go through the same stuff, deal with the same people.
"I'm not saying I didn't feel crushed. In the early days when I was new, I admit there were some nights," he said, his voice trailing off. "I heard some guys weeping, almost howling like dogs. I never had that. I wasn't that uncontrollably devastated. But there were nights when I silently wept.
"When everything has been taken away, or what you think is everything at that point, it can feel awfully brutal."
Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, at the time convinced of Morton's guilt, opposed his bid for DNA tests on evidence that had been preserved, including a bloody bandanna discovered behind the Mortons' house.
It would take an appeals court order in 2010 to move the testing forward.
And:
Morton became eligible for parole in 2007, 20 years after entering prison, and again in 2010. Both times Bradley opposed his release, and both times Morton was denied.
In prison, Morton said, everybody knows that the key to parole is to admit your guilt and show remorse.
A 2009 letter from Bradley to the Parole Board drove the point home. "Ask Michael Morton if he has accepted responsibility for the murder of his wife by mercilessly beating her to death. If he tells you that he now acknowledges he committed that crime, please notify me and I will reconsider my opposition to his parole," Bradley wrote.
But Morton said making up a confession was never an option. Almost everything of value had been taken away from him. All that remained, he said, was his innocence.
In the months since he has been out of prison, Morton said, he has been inundated with kindness and gifts, hugs from strangers who wish him well and pleas for forgiveness from some who believed in his guilt. For him, those expressions, after decades of being treated like a villain, have been the most welcome surprise.
“Everybody, no matter what the setting, they want love and affirmation,” he said. “It’s one thing to want it, it’s another to get it.”
He has also restarted a relationship with Eric, who is married and has a daughter named Christine Marie, after his mother. The reunification has been a slow process for Eric, now 28. But Morton said he understands and respects his son’s concern for his adoptive family, who must also now learn to deal with the realization that he is innocent.
Morton said he is grateful that his sister-in-law raised Eric to be a loving, responsible and smart father, husband and son. When he met Eric at a recent family gathering, Morton said, during a few moments they had alone, his son asked about his mother. They both cried.
“There was no one I would rather spend my life with than his mother,” he said. “And that kind of got both of us.”
As he rebuilds his relationship with Eric, Morton is also working on another important objective: finding accountability for the men whose actions led to his wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
D Magazine: You didn’t prosecute the Texas 7 case. Why did you feel the need to go to George Rivas’ execution?
Watkins: I will tell you why. I have to make a determination on whether or not a person will be eligible for the ultimate punishment. So the reason I went was because I have experienced all aspects of capital punishment, but I hadn’t experienced the end, and so I needed to experience that. So I can be very sensitive in the decision-making process when I make a determination if a person is eligible for the ultimate punishment. I needed to experience all aspects of it. That’s why I did it.
And:
D Magazine: What’s your ultimate goal regarding the death penalty?
Watkins: The broader issue is, look, I have walked 25 men out of prison for crimes they didn’t commit. We have gotten this case in Williamson County, where the DA withheld evidence, or it’s alleged that he withheld evidence. Because of that, a guy spent 25 years on death row. The Supreme Court of Texas has instituted a court of inquiry to look into the actions of this individual. At the time he was DA; now he is a judge. You have got the Todd Willingham case. We have had all of these folks who have been exonerated that were on death row throughout our nation.
And so my concern, basically, is, look, we are seeking the ultimate punishment against someone, and we need to have all the safeguards in place to make sure that we don’t wrongly execute someone. And I think with all the evidence that we have seen, I think anyone that does not come to the conclusion that a person has been executed in this country for a crime they didn’t commit is being irresponsible. So that’s my position. Like I said, I can argue from my moralistic standpoint all day, but that’s not where the argument should be had. It should be one of logistics. Are we making mistakes? Do we need to reevaluate the process to make sure we are not making mistakes?
Earlier coverage of Craig Watkins begins at the link.
At the Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, Rodger Jones posts, "Craig Watkins on Craig Watkins," highlighting a KXAS-TV interview with the Dallas County District Attorney.
I recommend watching a very good interview that Channel 5 reporter Randy McIlwain did with District Attorney Craig Watkins this week. It was after Watkins went to Huntsville to witness the execution of Texas Seven ringleader George Rivas on Wednesday.
The interview lasts more than 30 minutes, and it's worth a listen if you care about justice, politics, history, the morality of the death penalty - you know, important things.
It's also a powerful interview on an emotional level. Watkins describes the other thing he went to Huntsville to do: find the grave of his great-grandfather, who was executed for a rape-murder-robbery in 1932. He found that headstone in the prison cemetery.
The Texas prosecutor leading an aggressive push to free wrongly imprisoned inmates, in a county where more than two dozen wrongful convictions have been overturned, is calling for a review of the capital punishment system in the nation's busiest death penalty state.
Craig Watkins' tenure as Dallas County's top prosecutor has earned him a national reputation. Now, as Watkins publicly acknowledges that his great-grandfather was executed in Texas almost 80 years ago, he called on state lawmakers to review death penalty procedures to ensure the punishment is fairly administered.
"I think it's a legitimate question to have, to ask: 'Have we executed someone that didn't commit the crime?'" Watkins said in an interview with The Associated Press.
After becoming district attorney in 2007, Watkins started a conviction integrity unit that has examined convictions and, in some cases, pushed for them to be overturned. Dallas County has exonerated 22 people through DNA evidence since 2001 — by far the most of any Texas county and more than all but two states. An additional five people have been exonerated outside of DNA testing. Most of those exonerations occurred during Watkins' tenure.
Texas has executed 55 inmates since 2009, including 13 last year, a 15-year low. Twelve former death row inmates have been freed since 1973.
"I think the reforms we've made in our criminal justice system are better than any other state in this country," Watkins said. "But we still need reforms. And so, I don't know if I'm the voice for that. I just know, here I am, and I have these experiences."
Among those experiences was hearing about the execution of his great-grandfather, Richard Johnson. According to state criminal records and news accounts, Johnson escaped from prison three times while serving a 35-year sentence for burglary, and he was charged with killing a man after his third escape. He was convicted of murder in October 1931 and executed in the electric chair in August 1932.
Watkins said he did not get a full explanation of what happened until he became district attorney. His grandmother, who was a young girl when her father was executed, still struggles with the story, according to Watkins and his mother, Paula.
Watkins says he opposes the death penalty on moral grounds but doesn't want those beliefs "pushed upon someone else." He has sought the death penalty at trial in nine cases, with eight death sentences received. An additional four death penalty cases are pending, according to his office. A panel within his office reviews possible death penalty cases and votes on whether to pursue it.
Long before he divulged that his great-grandfather was executed by the state, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins struggled to define his views on the death penalty.
And that extraordinary revelation, made in passing at a news conference on Wednesday, may signal that Watkins is at it again.
Whether his philosophical pendulum is swinging back to his nearly lifelong opposition to the death penalty, or will come to rest at some point short of that, remains to be seen. But there’s little question that his remarks will re-energize debate about capital punishment and scrutiny of Watkins’ performance as the county’s top law enforcement officer.
The Dallas Morning News reported Watkins’ disclosure that “people don’t know that my great-grandfather was executed by this state” online Wednesday and in Thursday’s newspaper, but Watkins balked at explaining his reasons for making the information public.
He told The Associated Press in a story distributed Thursday that he was calling on state legislators to review death penalty procedures to ensure the punishment is fairly administered.
He called for reforms. “I don’t know if I’m the voice for that,” he told the AP. “I just know, here I am, and I have these experiences.”
He hinted at a similar role for himself in April 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection while at the same time one justice called for a national debate on the morality of the death penalty.
Watkins, the first black elected district attorney in Texas, told The News that the spark for such a debate “is going to come from someone in a district attorney’s seat.” Whether the second-term Democrat’s shifting record on the death penalty might detract from his role as a voice for reform is a question yet to be answered.
State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, a senior member of the Senate committee on criminal justice, said in a statement released Thursday that he favored scrutiny of the death penalty.
“I think more and more Texans — and people all over the country — are taking another look at the death penalty. I don’t foresee a time when major changes will occur, but the discussion has at least begun on how we make it more just and how we make it more certain that we actually have the right guy.”
A murder that happened in Wichita Falls 81 years ago is now causing a ripple through arguments over the death penalty in Texas.
A judge in Dallas on Wednesday exonerated a man who spent 14 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Richard Miles, 36, was freed after evidence surfaced that another person committed the murder.
At that court hearing, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins expressed serious concerns over the use of the death penalty in Texas. Then Watkins dropped a bombshell — his great grandfather had been sent to the electric chair for committing a murder in Wichita Falls.
“We need to take a look at capital punishment as it relates to if we’re doing the right thing,” he said. "There’s a personal side of me. People don’t know that my great grandfather was executed by this state. And so that’s an issue we need to explore as it relates to our justice system — are we doing the right thing?”
Watkins’ great grandfather, Richard Johnson, was one of two men convicted in a killing that happened Sept. 9, 1931 on a sparsely-housed stretch of Dayton Street west of Brook Avenue.
The third and final installment of the documentary on the West Memphis Three case premieres on HBO tonight. Check your local listing for times. Here's the trailer:
A discussion with the directors:
And a panel discussion involving lawyers in the case:
When the documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” played on HBO in 1996, it left little doubt that the three young men convicted of the crimes were innocent. When “Paradise Lost 2: Revelations” came out in 2000, it left less doubt. Now it is 2011 and a third film, “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” shows them being set free in August 2011 after 17 years in jail. One of them was on Death Row.
The case of the West Memphis 3 became famous worldwide. The Dixie Chicks held a fund-raising concert to help pay for the accused’s defense. The original conviction was based on flawed circumstantial evidence and a confession obtained from Jessie Misskelley, one of the defendants, who had an IQ of 72 and was questioned by police for 12 hours without a parent or attorney present, and then tape-recorded only long enough to recite a statement he later retracted. A police transcript shows Jessie shifting the time of the crimes from morning to noon to after school to evening (when they actually occurred) under leading suggestions by police.
This latest documentary is the culmination of years of extraordinary persistence by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, whose work helped to free the three men. So flawed was the evidence against the WM3 that the state of Arkansas decided to avoid a court hearing on their appeal by offering this unique deal: They could go free and could even state their innocence if they would sign an admission of guilt — a technicality shielding Arkansas from lawsuits for wrongful imprisonment.
“Lost 3” does a smooth job of retelling the entire story, so you needn’t have seen the first two films.
Chronicling a controversial 1993 Arkansas murder case, filmmakers Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger evolved from observers into advocates.
Based in Montclair and New York respectively, they were dispatched by HBO to cover the trials of three teenagers accused of killing three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, a working class suburb.
The prosecution lacked eyewitnesses and physical evidence, so they built a case around a tale of teen rebellion curdled into devil worship and pedophilia. The alleged ringleader, Damien Echols, got the death penalty, while Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were sentenced to life without parole.
The team's 1996 documentary, "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" raised questions about the convictions and in the process, spurred a protest movement to "Free the West Memphis Three."
Retired Justice John Paul Stevens is a man of few regrets from his nearly 35 years on the Supreme Court, except one – his 1976 vote to reinstate the death penalty.
“I really think that I’ve thought over a lot of cases I’ve written over the years. And I really wouldn’t want to do any one of them over…With one exception,” he told me.
“My vote in the Texas death case. And I think I do mention that in that case, I think that I came out wrong on that,” Stevens said.
At the time he thought the death penalty would be confined “to a very narrow set of cases,” he said. But instead it was expanded and gave the prosecutor an advantage in capital cases, according to Stevens.
The retired associate justice has been an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, but his admission of that 1976 Jurek v. Texas vote comes at a time when the country appears to be revisiting its stance on the death penalty, in light of Troy Davis’ execution last week.
He writes in his book, “Five Chiefs,” that he regretted the vote “because experience has shown that the Texas statute has played an important role in authorizing so many deaths sentences in that state.”
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You of course, became an outspoken opponent of the death penalty in your time on the court. How did you evolve? Can you summarize how your own views evolved?
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: About the death penalty? Well, of course, it’s a long story, because I’ve been involved in that issue for so long. But there also you have to keep in mind, there are always two part to the question. One is, “When do you think it’s constitutional to have the death penalty?” And the other question is whether one thinks it’s a wise thing to do. And on the second question, whether your opponent is a matter of policy I’ve never felt that it was a particularly wise method of punishment. And several of the members of the court, I can say specifically Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun, although they voted to uphold the penalty consistently early on, they personally did not think it made sense.
But my own thinking on the issue, on the constitutional issue evolved over the years, after our first decision in 1975, in the first year that I came in the court, in which at which time I thought the court was adopting procedures and rules that would confine the imposition of the death penalty into a very narrow set of cases. And they took special pains to have fair procedures.
And over the years, the– I was disappointed to find they expanded the category of cases, rather dramatically later on, in ways that I don’t think Potter Stewart would have agreed with– who was sort of the principle author of our join opinion on– and they also have relaxed procedures in ways that actually give the prosecutor advantages in capital cases that I don’t think he has in ordinary criminal cases. And so that seemed to me there’s a change in the general atmosphere around capital cases that occurred over the years and made me–
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It seems like there may be another evolution now in the country that the case of Troy Davis, executed last week. It appeared with the protests around that that the country may be heading towards a tipping point in another direction, against the death penalty. Is that what you see?
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: I don’t know. I’m not a very good judge of public reaction on something like that. But I think there always has been a significant group that felt that the penalty really wasn’t worth it and caused more harm than good.
And:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Which case are you most proud of in your career?
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: You know, I’ve been asked that question a lot and I should be ready for– with an answer. I’m– there– there are a lot of them, to tell you the truth. And I really think that I’ve thought over a lot of cases I’ve written over the years. And I really wouldn’t want to do any one of them over.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Not one?
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: With one exception.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Which is?
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: My vote in the Texas death case. And I think I do mention that in that case. I think that I came out wrong on that.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And one of the things we’ve seen in Texas is a proliferation–
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: Right.
(OVERTALK)
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: –of executions.
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: And I think that my law clerk at the time sort of foresaw that that was a problem that was inherent in the way that statute was drafted.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: I don’t know if you saw it, but there was actually a moment in the last couple of weeks, in one of the presidential debates, where the number of executions in Texas was cited, and the crowd cheered.
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: I noticed that, yeah.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: What did you think?
JOHN PAUL STEVENS: I was– I was rather disappointed, because it– maybe one believes, and certainly a lot of people sincerely do, that it is an effective deterrent to crime and will in the long run will do more harm than good. I don’t happen to share that view. But there are obvious people who do. And, of course, being hard on crime has been– always– is politically popular, let’s put it that way.
Washington, D.C.'s great independent book seller Politics & Prose will host an author event with Justice Stevens on Nov 7, 2011. I'll post news of additional author events.
The typical 78-year-old woman who found herself having to slide down an emergency chute of an aircraft might decide to cancel her trip and head home to a hot bath.
But two-time cancer survivor Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not your typical woman.
After the pilot ordered the evacuation of Ginsburg’s plane before takeoff last week in Washington, D.C., she continued on a different plane to San Francisco. She had been invited to give a wide-ranging talk on the intricacies of constitutional law.
At the University of California Hastings College of Law, Professor Joan C. Williams sat down with Ginsburg Thursday and touched on issues ranging from the constitutionality of the death penalty, gender equality and her ride on an elephant with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
Asked about the death penalty, Ginsburg told the audience that earlier in the evening she had been getting calls from the court because of an emergency application filed by death-row inmate Duane Buck.
“There was an execution scheduled for 7 o’clock in Texas,” she said. “It has been stayed.”
Ginsburg said dealing with such applications “is the hardest part of the job I do.”
But she went on to explain why she hadn’t taken a position that the death penalty is unconstitutional in every circumstance. It is a position taken by some former members of the Supreme Court bench.
She did not take such a stance, she explained, in order to be able to have a voice at the table when death penalty disputes come up. Had she taken the position similar to former Justice William J. Brennan or Justice Thurgood Marshall, she said, “I would have no voice in what is going on. I would not be able to make things perhaps a little bit better. ”
Death penalty decisions, she said, are a “dreadful part of the business.”
Asked by the moderator if she had one thing she’d like to accomplish before leaving the bench, she said, “I probably would go back to the day when the Supreme Court said that the death penalty cannot be administered with an even hand,” noting that such an opportunity is unlikely to arrive.
Ginsburg was referring to a 1972 decision that invalidated capital punishment laws and led to a temporary moratorium on the death penalty. The court voted to reinstate the death penalty in 1976.
The court's oldest justice spent most of the night at the University of California, San Francisco's Hastings School of Law discussing her gender equality cases when she was a lawyer, as well as important cases and legal issues that came before her on the high court.
With prompting from Hastings professor Joan Williams, Ginsburg said she found the death penalty "the hardest part of the job."
Ginsburg said, if given her druthers, she would "go back to the day to when the Supreme Court said the death penalty can't be applied with an even hand."
Nonetheless, she said she stays engaged with death penalty cases – rather than automatically voting against the death penalty as her former colleague Justice John Paul Stevens did – so she can "a voice in what's going on."
Ginsburg was appointed to the federal appeals court in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter and the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993.
She said that even though the court often divides 5-4 on high-profile legal questions before it, she and her colleagues enjoy a collegial relationship. Ginsburg said she even travels the world with her philosophical opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Scalia is my biggest buddy at the opera," she said.
The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.
Steve Hall
Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.
