"Harvard Law Interns Aiding Death-Row Inmate Detained by Sheriff, Suit Says," is Debra Cassens Weiss' report at ABA Journal, this morning.
Two Harvard law students working as legal interns on behalf of a Texas death-row inmate were stopped by sheriff’s deputies and ticketed for criminal trespassing after they tried to interview a corrections officer at home, a lawsuit alleges.
The students, who were interning with the Texas Defender Service during their winter break, were trying to gather evidence supporting a claim by inmate Willie Pondexter that he deserved clemency because he has been a model inmate, the Associated Press reports.
The civil rights suit (PDF) claims the sheriff and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice harassed Pondexter and tried to interfere with clemency efforts, the AP story says.
The law students were pulled over by Polk County deputies on Jan. 17 and told to drive to the sheriff’s office, according to the suit. After they got there, they were ticketed and warned that if they returned to the property of the corrections officer “there would be a '99 percent chance' that the officers would lock them in jail," the suit says.
After the incident, the suit claims, corrections officers "knowing Mr. Pondexter to be especially concerned about hygiene, removed his sheets, wiped them across the floor and walls and replaced them on his bed."
The suit, filed in federal court in Tyler, Texas, is on appeal following a judge’s ruling that he didn’t have jurisdiction. Pondexter is on death row for the murder of an 85-year-old woman more than 15 years ago.
Pondexter's lawyer, David Dow, told AP that he was surprised by the interns’ treatment.
"It would be a traumatic experience for anybody," Dow told the wire service. "We didn't prepare them for that because that honestly never happened to any of our interns before. We prepare them for a lot of things but that was not on the list."
"Lawyers for inmate set to die file harassment suit," is Michael Graczyk' AP report via the Houston Chronicle.
Attorneys for death row prisoner Willie Pondexter allege corrections officers at the Polunsky Unit outside Livingston in Polk County unexpectedly searched his cell and "knowing Mr. Pondexter to be especially concerned about hygiene, removed his sheets, wiped them across the floor and walls and replaced them on his bed."
The activity first occurred late last month after the Polk County Sheriff's Department detained two legal interns working on Pondexter's behalf, lawyer David Dow said. He said Monday it has been repeated at least twice in recent weeks.
Pondexter, 34, from Idabel, Okla., is set to die March 3 for the slaying of an 85-year-old woman at her northeast Texas home more than 15 years ago. A companion, James Lee Henderson, from nearby Sevier County, Ark., also was convicted of the shooting death of Martha Lennox at her home in Clarksville, about 60 miles west of Texarkana.
In his civil rights suit in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Dow said the interns working for the Texas Defender Service, a legal group that represents death row inmates, were detained by Polk County deputies after they were trying to interview death row corrections officers about Pondexter. Information from the interviews would be used to bolster claims in a clemency petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles that Pondexter has been a model inmate and has shown he is not a continued threat to society, a finding a jury made in 1994 when they decided he should be sent to death row.
The suit named as defendants Brad Livingston, the corrections department's executive director; Nathaniel Quarterman, director of the department's institutional division; Tim Simmons, the Polunsky Unit warden; and Kenneth Hammack, the Polk County sheriff.
Prison system spokesman Jason Clark said the agency had no comment "because of the pending litigation that has been filed by offender Willie Pondexter."
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