That's the title of Manny Fernandez' report in today's New York Times on the case of Duane Buck.
One morning in July 1995, Phyllis Taylor stood inside her best friend’s house here, face to face with her stepbrother. He was holding a .22-caliber rifle, his eyes bloodshot red. Then he pulled the trigger.Ms. Taylor survived — the bullet came within one inch of her heart and lodged in her right shoulder. More than 17 years later, a scar the size of a nickel remains on her chest, but her anger has faded: She has forgiven her stepbrother, Duane E. Buck, 49, and has been trying to secure his release from Texas’ death row.
“This is not an easy thing,” said Ms. Taylor, 46, who visited him last month at the prison that houses death row in Livingston, Tex. “It’s very hard. I still have moments. But I know that I’m doing the right thing. The Bible says that I have to forgive, and that’s just my key to my everyday living.”
Ms. Taylor is part of an unusual network of supporters who have been trying to halt Mr. Buck’s execution. His advocates include leaders of the N.A.A.C.P., one of the lawyers who prosecuted him and a former governor of Texas. While many contested death-row cases center on guilt or innocence, Mr. Buck’s case is different — his guilt has never been disputed, but the testimony of a psychologist has raised questions about the role that race played in the jury’s decision to sentence him to die by lethal injection.
And:
Last week, a statement calling for a new sentencing hearing for Mr. Buck that was signed by Ms. Taylor and dozens of others — including another of the prosecutors who had helped convict him, Linda Geffin — was delivered to the Harris County district attorney, Mike Anderson. It was handed to him by Mark W. White Jr., a governor of Texas in the 1980s.
Mr. White and Mr. Buck’s lawyers said that they believed his death sentence was a product of racial discrimination, and that Dr. Quijano’s testimony — and the prosecutor’s emphasis on that testimony — made the color of Mr. Buck’s skin a factor in the jury’s deliberations, violating his constitutional rights. In addition to their claims of racial bias, they said Texas was failing to follow through on a promise it had made to Mr. Buck.
In 2000, the attorney general at the time, John Cornyn, identified six capital cases in which Dr. Quijano had presented race-based testimony. Mr. Cornyn, now a United States senator from Texas, admitted that the state had erred in relying on such testimony in those and other cases, and that it was “inappropriate to allow race to be considered as a factor in our criminal justice system.”
Mr. Buck’s case was among the six. But he is the only defendant who has not been granted a new sentencing hearing. The others had all been on death row, and were ultimately resentenced to death after their new hearings. The state has opposed Mr. Buck’s attempts to receive a new hearing, but did not oppose the requests for new hearings made by the five other defendants.
Earlier coverage of Duane Buck's case begins at the link.
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