Th Houston Chronicle has a preview of the punishment phase in Tyrone Williams' federal death penalty trial. It begins today. LINK
Prosecutors said they would be presenting 25 to 26 witnesses during the punishment phase, including testimony about Williams' prior convictions. One of those was for stabbing a person.
"It wasn't the first time he acted with total disregard for human life," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Rodriguez.
Craig Washington, Williams' defense attorney, said he plans on calling 20 witnesses, including the truck driver's family and friends.
Washington said his client transported the illegal immigrants but wasn't responsible for their deaths because he didn't know they were dying until it was too late. Washington blamed another smuggling ring member for causing the deaths by overstuffing the trailer.
Williams abandoned the trailer at a truck stop near Victoria, about 100 miles southwest of Houston.
During the punishment phase, defense attorneys will have to present Williams "not as an altar boy but as a sympathetic figure" who wasn't aware of what was happening to the immigrants, said Douglas McNabb, a Houston attorney who represented a Brownsville man sentenced to death by a federal jury in 1993 and executed in 2001 for killing or ordering the deaths of three people.
Williams, 35, a Jamaican citizen who lived in Schenectady, N.Y., is the only one of 14 people charged in the case who is facing the death penalty.
Comments