Today's Dallas Morning News reports, "District Attorney Craig Watkins says his great-grandfather was executed." It's by Jennifer Emily and Ed Timms.
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins offered a hint Wednesday to his nearly lifelong opposition to the death penalty, an opinion that changed only two years ago during a close re-election campaign.
“People don’t know that my great-grandfather was executed by this state,” Watkins said.
Watkins is the first black man elected district attorney in Texas, a Democrat whose national reputation largely rides on his pursuit of justice for wrongly convicted inmates.
The startling pronouncement came during a celebratory news conference after the official exoneration of Richard Miles, who spent 15 years behind bars for a murder and attempted murder he didn’t commit.
Watkins left the news conference without further comment and declined to talk again, saying he would not be available until Friday. He offered no further details on his great-grandfather.
That man, Richard Johnson, was executed on Aug. 10, 1932. An Associated Press story from October 1931 published in The Dallas Morning News said that Johnson was sentenced to death after a jury deliberated for 40 minutes in the murder of a Fort Worth man, Ted Nodurft. The murder occurred just more than a month before the trial.
Before telling the media that his relative was executed, Watkins said that exonerations should be used to examine whether the state is “doing the right thing” by using capital punishment. He also said that his office will continue to pursue death cases because it is the law.
And:
Watkins, at various times since he took office in 2007, has publicly said that he was against the death penalty and then changed his mind and said he supported it.
“I came in with a certain philosophical view. I don’t have that anymore,” Watkins said in 2010 when he announced he’d support the death penalty. “From a religious standpoint, I think it’s an archaic way of doing justice. But in this job, I’ve seen people who cannot be rehabilitated.”
Watkins at the time said he still had concerns that prosecutors somewhere might send the wrong person to death row.
His office continues to seek death sentences.
Dallas County has exonerated 22 men on the basis of eyewitness testimony since 2001. Several others, including Miles, were cleared with other evidence.
The Morning News also has more on the Miles exoneration, "Judge formally exonerates Dallas man wrongly convicted," by Jennifer Emily.
Earlier coverage of Craig Watkins begins at the link.
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