The StandDown Texas Project

Darby Tillis

The Chicago Sun-Times reports, "Darby Tillis, who fought wrongful convictions after he was freed, dies at 71," by Thomas Frisbie.

Darby Tillis, one of the first men to be freed from Illinois’ Death Row, died Sunday morning at Rush Hospital of what is thought to have been an aneurysm. He was 71.

Mark A. Clements, a board member of the Campaign to End to Death Penalty, said Mr. Tillis was a respected and strong advocate for ending the death penalty and wrongful convictions and “will be greatly missed.”

Mr. Tillis and co-defendant Perry Cobb went to trial five times for the early morning 1977 murder of Melvin Kanter and Charles Guccione at an Uptown restaurant. The first two trials ended in hung juries. Mr. Tillis and Cobb were sentenced to death after the third trial, but in 1983 the verdict was reversed on appeal. The fourth trial also ended in a hung jury.

The two men were acquitted at the fifth trial in 1987 after Michael Falconer, a Lake County prosecutor, came forward after reading an article about the case by Rob Warden in the Chicago Lawyer. Falconer said the state’s chief witness against Mr. Tillis and Cobb had confided to him that the crime actually was committed by another man, her boyfriend.

Related posts are in the in memoriam category index.

Michael Millman, 1939 - 2014

Today's San Francisco Chronicle reports, "Michael Millman, Death Penalty Focus co-founder, dies at 74."  It's by Bob Egelko.

Michael Millman devoted his legal career to fighting the death penalty, in individual cases and in state law. He had hoped to see capital punishment abolished in California in his lifetime - but after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, he said at an awards dinner in April, he realized it probably wouldn't happen.

"I ask you to make it happen as quickly as you can," Mr. Millman told the advocacy group Death Penalty Focus, sitting among well-wishers while a friend read his speech. "Please be sure to send me an e-mail to let me know it is finally gone. I look forward to reading the good news."

Mr. Millman, a co-founder of Death Penalty Focus and executive director throughout the 30-year existence of the California Appellate Project, which assists lawyers in death penalty appeals and other criminal cases, died Saturday at his home in Oakland. He was 74.

He graduated from Harvard with a physics degree in 1960 but changed course after working in the civil rights movement and went to Yale Law School. He started practice as a public defender in California in 1970, then moved to the state public defender's office and became its death penalty coordinator after state lawmakers reinstated capital punishment in 1977.

"Michael Millman, champion of legal aid for the condemned, dies at 74," is by Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times.

Executive director of the San Francisco-based California Appellate Project for 30 years, Millman assisted death row lawyers with technical and legal advice and helped create a network of resources to ensure the condemned received professional legal help. "Michael Millman was a pillar of the capital defense bar, a hero to many, and a true gentleman," said California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

The appellate project Millman headed was established by the state bar in 1983 as a nonprofit group to ensure poor people facing execution receive sound legal assistance in their appeals. Millman played a lead role in the group's creation and became its executive director in 1984.

"Michael was a profoundly kind and big-hearted man who dedicated his whole life to advancing social justice and, especially, to 'being the change we wish to see in the world' by daily acts of compassion and generosity," said Lance Lindsey, the project's administrative director.

Related posts are in the in memoriam category index.

Remembering Troy Davis - A Conversation With Jen Marlowe

In a little more than four months, we will note the third anniversary of the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia.  Already, friends and supporters of Troy are planning events for September 21.

I recently had a Q&A with Jen Marlowe, the co-author of I Am Troy Davis. 

Q)  This must have been an emotionally difficult book to write.  Not only was Troy Davis executed; your co-author - Troy's sister - died shortly after his execution.

A)  Writing this book was definitely one of the most difficult tasks I've ever undertaken. Not only was I immersing myself in the pain of three people I loved dearly whose loss I was still deeply mourning (Troy, Martina, and their mother Virgina who passed a few months before Troy was executed)--but I wasn't able to collaborate with the very people whose story I was trying to tell. So--it was difficult on both the emotional and practical levels.
 
Q)  Is the judicial process equipped to handle post-conviction review of actual innocence cases?  I think that people believe that every aspect of a death penalty case gets a fresh, top-to-bottom review by different levels of courts, but the reality is much more compartmentalized.

A)  From what I've seen, it seems to me that no, the judicial process is not equipped to handle review of innocence cases. Once a defendent is found guilty, getting evidence of innocence even reviewed is an uphill battle, let alone meeting the often impossible bar of "proving" innocence. The appeals process is really about whether there was constitutional errors at trial--not about reviewing the merits of an innocence claim. Appellate courts seem most concerned with procedural issues. 
 
Q)  With DNA exonerations pointing to failed eyewitness identifications, there a much greater awareness that innocent people get wrongly convicted.  We've seen several cases get attention, but nothing like the level of Troy's case.  Why do you think it captured so many people's attention?

A)  I think there are many reasons Troy's case captured the attention that it did, but largely because his case was so emblematic about what is so broken about the death penalty system. The enormous problems in his case were so clear, and so egregious--that it attracted the attention of, first, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the NAACP, and then, the media, leading to public outrage. The fact that there were 4 execution dates also gave time for a movement to really grow around Troy's case, a movement that grew in strength, numbers, and outrage each time Troy survived a near-miss. And, it can't be overlooked--Troy's family was a central reason that Troy's case broke through at all. Not every wrongfully convicted prisoner has advocates as passionate and relentness and articulate and determined as Troy had in his sister Martina and the rest of the Davis family.
 
Q)  Troy Davis went to his death with extraordinary grace.  Is that part of why his memorial service was so moving?

A)  I think Troy's going to his death with such extraordinary grace is due to the extraordinary grace that Troy possessed as a human being--and it was this grace that drew so many people to him, that made so many people want to champion his fight. This grace emanated from the entire Davis family. So, I think the connection between that grace and the memorial service was absolutely there--but not just the grace of Troy's parting the world. It was the grace with which Troy lived in the world.
 
Q)  In so many ways this is not simply Troy Davis' story, but the stories of a multi-generational family.

A)  Absolutely, and that's exactly the point. The death penalty has a human impact on real human lives. I wanted to reveal that human impact by showing how Troy's situation affected this multi-generational family--a family that I hope readers grow to know and care about through the pages of the book.
 
Q)  And of another family, as well.  What can you tell us about the MacPhail family, and their reactions?

A)  I can't tell much more about Mark MacPhail's family other than what is already in the book, though I wish very much that I could. I approached Mark MacPhail's mother twice (through a letter and over the phone) and asked if they would be willing to participate in the project, and to talk to me more about Mark as a human being--the son/brother/husband/father that they lost. I wanted very much for Mark MacPhail to be portrayed in his full humanity, and for the pain of the MacPhail family to be honored and treated compassionately. After all, Mark MacPhail was the first victim from the events set into motion that led to the execution of Troy Davis. Unfortunately, Mrs. MacPhail said she didn't want to participate in the book, and said her family felt the same way. I wish the MacPhail family peace, and I hope they never know another tragedy like that which they have already lived through.
 
Q)  Race and racism overlay capital punishment in America.  In many ways that relationship is very stark, such as the fact that 80% of American executions happen in the Old South.

A)  Absolutely. Race impacts all parties of the death penalty system. Race of the victim plays a role in who gets sentenced to death, as does race of the accused, and race of the jury. Race in sentencing (whether captial cases or not) was determined by the US Supreme Court im the 1989 decision McClesky v. Kemp to be an "inevitable" aspect of our criminal justice system. I believe that we should not accept that it is "inevitable". If race plays a pervasive role in our criminal justice system--which we know that it does--then we must find fundamental ways to address this.
 
Q)  As we move to the third anniversary of Troy's execution, what do you see as the lasting impact of this case?

A)  I hope that the lasting impact of Troy's case and Troy's legacy will be that it both reveals our country's broken death penalty system, and the human impact of that system. That is why we are calling for people all over the country to mark the 3rd anniversary of Troy's execution on Sept 21 by hosting Community Book Club events, so that I Am Troy Davis will be a part of expanding and deepening our national conversation about the death penalty. More information about that action is below.

September 21, 2014: Host a Community Book Club Event with I Am Troy Davis

On September 21, 2011, the state of Georgia put Troy Davis to death despite a compelling case of innocence. To mark the 3-year anniversary of this travesty of justice, and to deepen and widen the discourse about the human impact of the death penalty system, we invite you to participate in a worldwide Community Book Club on September 21, 2014.

We find that people who may be uncertain about their views on the death penalty, and may not want to come to a rally, vigil or other public event, are more willing to attend a small, private gathering to discuss a book they were asked to read. Through hundreds of intimate gatherings across the country and the world, Troy's story will reach thousands of new people who may not (yet!) be involved in the movement to abolish the death penalty.

To host an event, you need only:

1. Invite a group of friends, family and colleagues to read I Am Troy Davis ahead of September 21, 2014. These can be death penalty abolition activists, those who are uncertain about their views about the death penalty, those who support the death penalty, or a combination. (If you are already part of a regularly meeting book club, this can be your September book. Or, it can be any of your friends/colleagues you wish to invite for this one-time event.)

2. Invite that same group of friends, family and colleagues to gather on (or around) September 21 to discuss the book. (This can happen as a potluck dinner at a home, in a coffee shop, in connection with an existing church or synagogue book club, at your local independent book store, etc)

3. Use the I Am Troy Davis Discussion Guide developed by Equal Justice USA, in partnership with Amnesty International USA and the NAACP to facilitate the conversation around the book, or develop your own discussion questions!

4. We want to keep track of all the book discussions happening around the world! Register your event by emailing Jen Marlowe at: donkeysaddle @ gmail.com

5. Take photos of your event to be posted on tumblr, linking your event to similar book events that will take place that day all over the world!

Earlier coverage of the book begins at the link.

Remebering Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, 1937 - 2014

The New York Times obituary is, "Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, Boxer Whose Murder Convictions Were Overturned, Dies at 76," is by Selwyn Raab.

Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, a star prizefighter whose career was cut short by a murder conviction in New Jersey and who became an international cause célèbre while imprisoned for 19 years before the charges against him were dismissed, died on Sunday morning at his home in Toronto. He was 76.

The cause of death was prostate cancer, his friend and onetime co-defendant, John Artis, said. Mr. Carter was being treated in Toronto, where he had founded a nonprofit organization, Innocence International, to work to free prisoners it considered wrongly convicted.

Mr. Carter was convicted twice on the same charges of fatally shooting two men and a woman in a Paterson, N.J., tavern in 1966. But both jury verdicts were overturned on different grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.

And:

He attracted worldwide attention during the roller-coaster campaign to clear his name of murder charges. Amnesty International described him as a “prisoner of conscience” whose human rights had been violated. He portrayed himself as a victim of injustice who had been framed because he spoke out for civil rights and against police brutality.

A defense committee studded with entertainment, sports, civil rights and political personalities was organized. His cause entered the realm of pop music when Bob Dylan wrote and recorded the song “Hurricane,” which championed his innocence and vilified the police and prosecution witnesses. It became a Top 40 hit in 1976.

The obituary notes Mr. Carter's autobiography, The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472, which is still in print.

"Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter's life story is a warning to us about racism and revenge," is by Geoffrey Robertson for the Guardian's Comment is free.  He was an attorney in the case.

In 1976, I was a junior lawyer on Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter's retrial defence team. His story has a significance that should outlive his death.

And:

I met Rubin Carter during his release on bail in 1976. He had, quite literally, written his way out of life imprisonment with a memoir, The 16th Round, which revived interest in his case. Selwyn Raab of the New York Times cracked Bellow and Bradley, who confessed to perjury. Bob Dylan, who years before had so movingly mourned the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll, now set the story of "the Hurricane" to a driving, angry beat. Mohammed Ali led protest marches, and an appeals court ordered a retrial.

"‘Hurricane’ Carter went to the mat for the wrongfully accused," is by David A. Love at the Grio.  He's the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence.

To the end, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter fought for the wrongfully convicted as he had once fought in the ring, with the type of passion that earned him his boxing nickname.  In February, Carter wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News with his dying wish: He asked the new Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, also a black man, to release David McCallum, a man who has been in prison for murder charges since 1985, the year Carter became a free man.

Thank you, Hurricane, for opening our eyes.  Raised in this country to believe the system works for everyone, and accepting it without question, we simply did not know any better.

Andrew Cohen posts, "The Redemption Song of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter," at the Atlantic.

William C. Rhoden, the Times' venerable sports columnist, did better, writing in his tribute Sunday that "Carter offers a reminder that one’s deeds on the court or on the field will be quickly forgotten; contributions to society resonate across decades. Carter’s name endures not because he had a great left hook but because of the principles he represented until the day he died." Let us now spend a few minutes highlighting the ways in which those principles were distributed to countless men and women less fortunate than Carter, who had little of his natural charisma or talent or celebrity, and who desperately needed him to help bring their cases and their causes into light.

Related posts are in the exoneration and in memoriam category indexes.

David Love's Latest at HuffPost

"A Final Farewell to Greg Wilhoit, Who Survived Oklahoma's Death Row," is by David A. Love, the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence.  Here's the beginning:

America's community of death row survivors bids a farewell to another one of its own. Gregory R. Wilhoit, who had spent five years on Oklahoma's death row after being wrongfully convicted for the brutal murder of his wife, died in his sleep on February 13.

Greg had suffered. Suffered a whole lot. He was convicted of killing his wife Kathy -- the mother of his two little daughters, then 4 months and 14 months old -- on June 1, 1985. The case rested on the testimony of dental experts, one of them barely out of dental school, who said the bite mark found on Kathy's body matched Greg's teeth.

But that wasn't all. Greg was a victim of bad lawyering. He hired two lawyers who were incompetent and did not defend him. In fact, Greg's defense counsel came to court drunk and threw up in the judge's chambers. And Greg was convicted in 1987 and sent to Death Row, because after all, somebody had to pay.

You can find more from David Love at HuffPost.  Related posts are in the exoneration and in memoriam category indexes.

New York Times Obituary of Delbert Tibbs

"Delbert Tibbs, Who Left Death Row and Fought Against It, Dies at 74," is by Bruce Weber.  Here's the beginning:

It is not easy:

you stand waiting for a train

or a bus that may never come

no friend drives by to catch a ride

cold, tired:

call yourself a poet

but work all day mopping floors and looking out for thieves.

Those lines, describing the experience of an innocent man on death row, are from a poem by Delbert Tibbs, who in 1974 was convicted in Florida of a rape and a murder that he had nothing to do with, it was later found. He spent nearly three years in prison before the State Supreme Court reversed his convictions, vacated his death sentence and freed him.

Mr. Tibbs then campaigned for the abolishment of capital punishment and became one of six people whose stories of wrongful conviction and near execution were told in “The Exonerated,” a play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, who assembled their script from court documents, testimony, depositions and letters.

First presented in 2002 in Los Angeles and New York with celebrity-studded casts, the play went on to help reshape the national debate about the death penalty, reaching audiences in productions across the country and then on television in a filmed adaptation starring Susan Sarandon, Brian Dennehy, Aidan Quinn, Danny Glover and, as Mr. Tibbs, Delroy Lindo.

“People who once argued about the morality of executing the guilty now discuss whether the capital justice system can be trusted to separate those deserving death from the wholly innocent,” Adam Liptak wrote in The New York Times in 2005 in assessing the play’s impact.

Mr. Tibbs, whose poetic bent led Ms. Blank and Mr. Jensen to use his character as a kind of Greek chorus, introducing and closing the play and appearing intermittently throughout as a sagelike figure, died on Nov. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 74.

Earlier coverage of Delbert Tibbs begins at the link.

Andrew Cohen on Delbert Tibbs

"The Uncommon Life and Natural Death of Delbert Tibbs," is Andrew Cohen's post this morning at the Atlantic.  There is must-see video in the article.

Pete Seeger once sang about him. Studs Terkel once wrote about him. He counted Joan Baez among his advocates. He was the subject of a wonderful play, "The Exonerated," which was turned into a made-for-television movie. But when Delbert Tibbs, one of America's most famous and beloved death row exonerees, died in Chicago on November 23, the nation took little note of his passing. Not a single national news organization produced an obituary for him. Not a single politician called out his name.

That's a shame, for Tibbs personified the tragedy of so many capital cases in the United States in the last quarter of the last century. He was 74 when he died, in his bed, in his home. But in 1974, nearly 40 years ago, he was wrongfully arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death in Florida. He spent two years on death row before the case against him fell apart. In that respect, he was lucky. Most exonerees spend far more time on death row before justice comes to them.

And:

He had been a man of spirit and substance before his conviction—just read what he told Terkel about the arc of his life—and was so again after his release. Some people are just irrepressible that way. I have covered a great many capital cases, and many exonerations over the past 15 years, and yet I have never seen the advocates who dedicate their lives to these cases and these causes be so universally moved by one man's tireless advocacy as they have been by Tibbs. Clearly, to so many, he was more than just a man who had endured the great challenge of his life.

Earlier coverage of Delbert Tibbs life and work begins at the link.  You can also see more of Andrew Cohen's work at the Atlantic.

David Love on the Peacemaker, Delbert Tibbs

"Delbert Tibbs, Death Row Survivor, May You Rest In Peace," is David A. Love's Huffington Post essay today.  He's the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, where Delbert Tibbs was active.

A peacemaker is how people described Delbert Tibbs.

On November 23, 2013, the death penalty abolition movement lost a beloved family member and friend when Delbert, 74, passed away in his home in Chicago.

Delbert Tibbs was many things. He was a sage, a poet, a leader and the nicest person you could ever meet, with an intellect, a spirit and a commitment that inspired all of us. It was an honor to know this peacemaker, and to learn from him.

And:

What struck me about Delbert is that he was not one to complain, even when he was visibly weak and in pain. After speaking with him, as I did two days before he left us, I always learned something. And his Zen-like calm never failed to inspire me to do better, to be better. Few people have a depth of knowledge, of spiritual maturity, or commitment to racial justice as this survivor. He wrote in his poetry about Shaka Sankofa (Gary Lee Graham), Trayvon Martin and Troy Davis, all innocent black men who were killed, taken from us before their time.

In October, Witness to Innocence held a 10th anniversary celebration.  For the event program StandDown reprinted, with Delbert Tibbs' permission, the following.  It is from Selected Poems and Other Word/Works by Delbert L. Tibbs, copyright 2007:

For Gary Graham, A.K.A
Shaka Sankofia

Gary, this is written some hours before your scheduled execution; you
say murder and you know best; well, brother, I say these words to your
spirit which obviously is not on lockdown; a locked spirit could not have
touched these thousands of hearts as you have and we have fought
for you, I too have been near to where you are but our kinship is
greater than what the Death machine can make and those who know
not the sacred thing called life may break and destroy the physical
body but your warrior spirit will never Die; you are part of the One
who made the Sun and the Stars and the laughter of children and
love – I don’t tell you to be strong.  Because I know you are – nor do I
say don’t cry or fret because at times even strong me do that; but I do
believe that what is, is and what ain’t is not; likewise I believe that the
Judge will be Judged; the Governor will be governed; the executioner
will be executed and I believe that One who is totally righteous will
Come and judge and restore all things and I believe you, Gary will be
a witness

Peace and Love – Peace and Love
6.22.00

 Earlier coverage of the passing of Delbert Tibbs begins at the link.

Delbert Tibbs

This sad news is from David Love, the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence:

It is with extreme sorrow that I announce the passing of Delbert Tibbs, our beloved member and friend, assistant director of membership and training at Witness to Innocence, and death row exoneree #11.  Delbert died last night in his home in Chicago.  He was a sage, a poet, a leader and the nicest person you could ever meet, with an intellect, a spirit and a commitment that inspired all of us.  It was an honor to know this peacemaker, and to learn from him.

This is a tremendous loss for us, at WTI and throughout the abolition movement, and surely in the coming days we will continue to reflect on what Delbert meant to us, and find ways to memorialize his name.

More on Delbert Tibbs is available from Wikipedia, and from the archives of the Chicago Tribune.

It was my honor and delight to have had for the last several years an extended e-mail conversation with Delbert, and I own several of his books of poetry and writings.  His story was featured in the play, "The Exonerated," written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen.  It was the words of Delbert Tibb's that anchored the play; his words that began and concluded the play.

May his name live in blessed memory.

Another Reflection on Don Cabana

"A Tribute to a Prison Warden's Influence on Capital Punishment Abolition," is Diann Rust-Tierney's Huffington Post remembrance.  She's Executive Director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Donald Cabana, a former Mississippi prison warden who presided over executions, was not the usual ally for me and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. But Donald Cabana loathed the death penalty. As I mark his passing and celebrate his life, he died this month at 67, I think about the vantage point from which he formed his opinions about capital punishment.

Cabana worked in prisons and corrections for more than 25 years in Massachusetts, Florida, Missouri and Mississippi. He was a seasoned traveler in places that many have opinions about but relatively few have firsthand knowledge of or experience with. He punished, counseled and cared for the people and the families that most people forget or wish never existed. He also supervised, cared for and counseled the people who must work in the most hopeless and saddest of places, our nation's prisons and death chambers.

And that was the first point that he often made so eloquently. As a longtime corrections official, he was a man committed to holding people accountable for their actions, but he recognized the human folly of believing that we could ever pay back the harm caused by executing a murderer.

Earlier coverage of Don Cabana's legacy begins at the link.

More on the Legacy of Don Cabana

"Donald Cabana, Warden Who Loathed Death Penalty, Dies at 67," is the New York Times obituary written by Bruce Weber.  Here's the beginning of this must-read:

The first time Donald A. Cabana saw the gas chamber at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, in 1971, he was invited to sit inside it. He was 25 years old, had only brief experience as a corrections officer and was on a tour of the place — better known as Parchman Farm — hoping to work there one day. Certainly he did not envision himself as its future warden.

Nor did he imagine that he would preside over executions there — experiences that would transform him into an eloquent opponent of capital punishment. Known as a tough warden but not a ruthless one and a man with an active conscience, Mr. Cabana was the antithesis of the cruel, power-hungry, vindictive prison official of cliché. On that afternoon in 1971, in his first glimpse of the gas chamber, the seeds of his ambivalence had already been planted.

“Our guide invited me to occupy the chair, explaining that many of those who toured the prison wanted to experience sitting in it,” Mr. Cabana wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner.” “How odd some people are, I thought, that they should be so attracted to the macabre. I politely declined the offer. The death chamber was filled with ghosts.”

He added, “I shuddered at the thought of the terrible struggles and horrific events that had taken place there.”

Mr. Cabana was 67 when he died of an intestinal infection on Monday in Hattiesburg, Miss., his daughter Kristin Fitzgerald said. He had worked for more than 25 years in prisons in Massachusetts, Florida and Missouri as well as Mississippi. But he left corrections work for academic life in the early 1990s, largely because of his distaste for the death penalty.

Since then he had spent time in classrooms, at public forums and in a statehouse or two denouncing capital punishment as an ineffectual deterrent to crime, an expensive burden for taxpayers and an inhumane form of punishment, not only for the men and women who face execution but also for those who carry it out.

“There is a part of the warden that dies with his prisoner,” he often said.

"Death penalty opponent, OA grad Donald Cabana dies at age 67," is by Donna Whitehead in the Easton Enterprise.

Donald Cabana, whose book, “Death at Midnight: the Confession of an Executioner,” chronicled his journey from prison warden to death penalty expert and opponent, died Oct. 7 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Cabana, 67, was a 1963 graduate of Oliver Ames High School.

And:

His work in corrections spanned more than 40 years, taking him from Massachusetts to Florida, Missouri, and finally, Mississippi. He served as a deputy warden and warden in Missouri before being appointed superintendent of the Mississippi State Penitentiary in 1984. He later served as superintendent of the South Mississippi Correctional Institution from 1989 to 1991, retiring to pursue a career in academia.

He taught as a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Southern Mississippi for 10 years, serving as chairman of the Department from 2005 to 2006.

He later became warden of the Harrison County Adult Detention Center, as well as founder and first chair of the Criminal Justice Program at William Carey University.

“Don was a walking encyclopedia on corrections,” said Tom Panko, a colleague of Cabana’s in the School of Criminal Justice in an article on the University of Southern Mississippi web site. “He knew the system from the inside out. He had a wealth of stories about life inside the (prison) walls and was a master storyteller. His legacy is large and he will be dearly missed.”

Earlier coverage of Don Cabana's life and work begins at the link.  More information on Death at Midnight is available from the publisher.

Don Cabana Dies

The Associated Press reports, "Cabana, ex-corrections chief, dies in Hattiesburg."  It's filed by Jack Elliott Jr, via the San Francisco Chronicle.

Donald A. Cabana, who ran the state penitentiary at Parchman where he oversaw executions and later wrote about his experiences with death row inmates, has died. He was 67.

Mississippi corrections officials say Cabana died Monday at Wesley Medical Center in Hattiesburg after a long illness. Funeral services are pending. A list of survivors was not immediately available.

Cabana spent 40 years in corrections including stints as warden at Parchman and commissioner of the Department of Corrections. He also was chairman of the criminal justice programs at the University of Southern Mississippi and William Carey University. He also worked as warden at the Harrison County jail.

In the 1980s, Cabana supervised two executions, that of Edward Earl Johnson and Connie Ray Evans.

In his memoir — "Death At Midnight: The Confessions of an Executioner" — Cabana recounted his experiences with death row inmates and how he came to oppose the death penalty.

In the preface to the book, Cabana wrote that he spent most of his career as a prison administrator convinced of the need for capital punishment.

"I had always been something of a bureaucratic utopian, fully committed to the notion that if the government deemed capital punishment necessary then it must be so ... Not until I was confronted with supervising and carrying out the ultimate retribution did I begin to question the process in earnest.

"The execution of Edward Earl Johnson served as a milestone, an event at which to pause and wonder. But it was the execution of Connie Ray Evans that became, for me, a personal moment of truth," Cabana wrote.

As linked above more information on Death at Midnight is available from the publisher.

Related posts are in the In Memoriam category index.

Herman Wallace Dies a Free Man - Updated

This morning, Herman Wallace passed away. Below is a statement from his legal team, as well as background information about Mr. Wallace's life.

Statement from Herman Wallace’s Legal Team:

"For the past decade, it has been our honor to represent Herman Wallace.

“Herman endured what very few of us can imagine, and he did it with grace, dignity, and empathy to the end. He remained committed to standing up for himself and his fellow prisoners, including Albert Woodfox who is still kept in harsh solitary confinement conditions in a Louisiana prison. Despite the cruelty Herman was shown, he had no hatred in his heart.

“Although his freedom was much too brief, it meant the world to Herman to spend these last three days surrounded by the love of his family and friends. One of the final things that Herman said to us was, ‘I am free. I am free.’"

The New York Times obituary is, "Herman Wallace, Freed After 41 Years in Solitary, Dies at 71," written by John Schwartz.

Amnesty International published a report on them in 2011, and they were the subject of a documentary film, “In the Land of the Free,” directed by Vadim Jean.

In the film, Teenie Verret, the widow of Brent Miller, said of the killing, “If they did not do this — and I believe that they didn’t — they have been living a nightmare.”

George Kendall, who was a lawyer for Mr. Wallace and who confirmed the death, said in an interview that his client’s original conviction was “a travesty” based on shoddy evidence, and that the men had been kept in solitary confinement because they had been members of the Black Panthers, the black nationalist group. Officials worried “that they would organize the prison,” he said.

Even from solitary, Mr. Wallace worked to improve prison conditions and to press his own appeals, Mr. Kendall said. He answered mail from people who had heard about his case.

“It was a determination he would not be broken by the loneliness of the cell,” Mr. Kendall said.

Mr. Wallace gained further attention for a project that he embarked on with Jackie Sumell, an artist who had struck up a correspondence with him and asked him to describe his “dream house.” She then rendered his imaginings into a scale model of the house, which became an art installation seen in galleries in a dozen countries.

The project, Mr. Wallace had said, “helps me to maintain what little sanity I have left, to maintain my humanity and dignity.” A documentary film about the project, “Herman’s House,” was shown on PBS in July.

"'Angola 3' member dies days after federal judge orders his release from La. prison," is AP coverage, via the Republic.

A 71-year-old man who was convicted in the slaying of a prison guard has died less than a week after a judge freed him from a Louisiana prison after he spent more than four decades in solitary confinement.

Herman Wallace's attorneys said he died Friday at a supporter's home in New Orleans. Wallace had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and stopped receiving treatment.

U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson had ordered Wallace released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on Tuesday after granting him a new trial. Jackson ruled women were unconstitutionally excluded from the grand jury that indicted Wallace in the stabbing death of the 23-year-old guard, Brent Miller.

The Baton Rouge Advocate reports, "Herman Wallace, member of the Angola Three, dies at 71," by Andrew Vanacore.

Herman Wallace, whose four-decades in solitary confinement in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola made him among the most prominent symbols in the debate over race and prisons in Louisiana, has died. He was 71.

Nick Trenticosta, one member of a legal team that had finally earned Wallace a release from prison and a new trial just this week after decades of appeals, confirmed that Wallace succumbed to liver cancer at a friend’s home in Uptown New Orleans on Friday morning.

Since the 1970s, when Wallace was convicted of killing a guard while serving time for armed robbery, he has formed part of a trio known as the Angola Three, all of them former Black Panthers who maintained that they were wrongly convicted.

"Angola 3 member Herman Wallace died quietly in his sleep, friends say," is by Lauren McGaughy for the New Orleans Times Picayune.

New Orleans native, former Black Panther and member of the Angola Three Herman Wallace died Thursday night because of complications from liver cancer, friends and counsel confirmed Friday morning.

"He passed away in my home," said Ashley Wennerstrom, a long-time friend and program director at Tulane's School of Medicine. "He was surrounded by friends and family and love in his last few days."

Among his last words were, "I am free. I am free," said Wallace's counsel, who added he had "no hate in his heart...despite the cruelty (he) was shown."

Parnell Herbert, a Navy veteran who grew up with Wallace and has written a play documenting the story of the Angola Three, called Wallace "a phenomenal person" whose mission was to help people.

"He completed that mission," said Herbert. "And he was able to see himself a free man. He passed away peacefully in his sleep."

Democracy Now host Amy Goodman writes, "Black Panther exonerated as he lies dying," in her syndicated column.  It's via the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin.

After close to 42 years in solitary confinement, Herman Wallace is free. Wallace is dying of liver cancer, with days if not hours to live at the time of this writing. In a stunning legal ruling, Judge Brian A. Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ordered Wallace's release by overturning his 1974 murder conviction. As he lies dying, Herman Wallace knows that after a lifetime of enduring the torture of solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit, he is now a free man.

Herman Wallace is one of the "Angola 3," along with Robert King, who was released from prison in 2001, and Albert Woodfox, who remains imprisoned in solitary confinement, despite having his sentence overturned on three separate occasions. These three men, all African-American, were locked up in what was considered America's bloodiest prison, maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary, known simply as "Angola." The sprawling prison is on the grounds of a former slave plantation, with 5,000 prisoners. It's named for the African country of many of its earlier enslaved occupants. Prisoners toil in the prison's fields, overseen by armed guards on horseback.

Earlier coverage of Herman Wallace begins at the link.

Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson, 1955-2013

"Harris County DA, who was battling cancer, dies," is Juan A. Lozano's AP filing, via the Houston Chronicle.

Houston's top prosecutor, Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson, has died after battling cancer, officials said Saturday. He was 57.

And:

The Harris County District Attorney's Office, which has about 240 attorneys, is the largest office of its kind in Texas. Harris County has been noted as sending more inmates to the lethal-injection gurney than any other county in the nation.

Anderson, a Republican, had a long career in law enforcement. He spent 17 years as a prosecutor in Harris County, handling everything from misdemeanors to 11 capital murder cases that he either investigated or prosecuted. Anderson also served 12 years as an elected state district judge.

Anderson was born and raised in the Houston suburb of Pasadena. He earned his law degree from South Texas College of Law in Houston.

He was married to Devon Anderson, a defense attorney and former prosecutor and district judge. The couple has two children.

An obituary is also available at Legacy.com.

Sandra Coke

The capital defense community has lost a valued and beloved member, Sandra Coke.  This is, "A Statement from the Family of Sandra Coke."

The Coke family is devastated by the loss of our beloved Sandra. She was a loving mother, daughter, sister and auntie, and a shining light in our family; her good cheer, easy laugh and generous hugs will be missed. Those of us who were privileged to know Sandra will remember her as an unusually kind, generous and big-hearted person. She passionately devoted her professional life to helping the poor and those who endured difficult childhoods. All of us will miss Sandra’s beautiful, giving spirit.

We want to express our deepest thanks to the hundreds of caring people in local, state and federal law enforcement, current and former colleagues, friends, and members of the public and the media — who labored day and night to assist with the search for Sandra. Your care and expressions of concern have been humbling.

We are so grateful to each of you for your kindness and support during this most difficult time.

We also want to thank the wonderful friends and colleagues who have created the Sandra Coke Fund to provide for her daughter’s care and education.

Our family and Sandra’s daughter will need time and privacy to mourn our loss. We thank you for understanding our need for privacy at this time.

Thank you again for all of your support in bringing home our beloved Sandra.

"Friends and Colleagues Launch 'The Sandra Coke Fund',”.

Sandra Coke enriched the lives of countless people who were fortunate to have crossed personal, professional, and spiritual paths with her.  An advocate, a leader, and a friend, Sandra helped us all see the world for what it is while working in pursuit of a brighter vision for what it ought to be. Calls and emails flooding in over the past week make it clear: Sandra inspired us all.

We lost Sandra in a senseless, devastating way.  It’s a loss that has shaken hundreds of people who were touched by this smart, compassionate and dedicated woman.

“Sandra worked hard but she never forgot the importance of having fun. She had the joyful spirit of a child all her life, and she brought that joyful spirit into her parenting and into all her friendships. She was rich in her generosity to her friends, family and those in need,” said a longtime friend.

Today, we are launching The Sandra Coke Fund (http://sandracokefund.org) to provide for the education and care of her teenage daughter.

“We hope you will join us in celebrating Sandra's courageous spirit and fierce commitment to her family, friends and community by continuing to support the most beautiful, most joyful part of her life -- her equally courageous daughter,” said a colleague of 20 years.

We do not consider this a charity; we consider it:

• An opportunity to support a woman who inspired us.
• An opportunity to ensure Sandra’s daughter continues to benefit from the example her mom lived every day.
• An opportunity to live up to the example Sandra set for us.
• An opportunity to join with people nationwide and create a lasting benefit from the grief we all share.

“Sandra was the warmest, most good natured friend I had. She was one of the few friends that would truly sacrifice for me. I could call her when I was too proud to call anyone else, tell her what I needed, and she would help me out if she could. To me, she was the quintessential ‘good mother.’ She saw the good in everyone, even when you couldn't see it in yourself,” added another longtime friend.

Please take a moment to think about Sandra, to smile and share your memories of her, finally to find your "inner Sandra" give as generously as you can to her daughter's fund at http://sandracokefund.org

The Sandra Coke Fund is fiscally sponsored by the Community Resource Initiative, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization so donations to the fund are tax-deductible to the extent provided by law.

Thank you,
Friends and Colleagues of Sandra Coke

News coverage includes:

"Slain woman identified as Sandra Coke," by Henry K. Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Los Angeles Times reports, "Sex offender 'person of interest' in federal investigator's death," by Lee Romney and Paige St. John.

"Sandra Coke: Body Identified as Missing California Federal Investigator," by Alexis Shaw and Rachel Katz for ABC News.

Update:  "This time, death penalty attorney knows the victim," is an OpEd by Andrew Love in the September 15 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle.  He is a former death penalty lawyer.

One of our own - someone from my professional family - had been killed by one of those people we have long defended. Killed by someone who, in any other circumstance, I would have warded off others' attempts to demonize. "You can't define someone by the worst thing they have ever done," I would say.

It isn't that I don't still believe those things. I do.

But that doesn't matter now.

The perpetrator has receded into the background. I don't care about his history or life struggles, his impairments or his vulnerabilities. I don't feel anger or hatred. I don't have feelings of vengeance. I don't want him dead. I don't feel anything for him at all.

This isn't about him.

This is about the horror, shock, pain and overwhelming sadness at the loss of a remarkable person. For the first time in 25 years, my focus has shifted from perpetrator to victim.

Ronald Post

The Associated Press reports, "Ronald Post, Obese Ohio Inmate Spared Death Penalty, Dies Week Before Birthday," by Julie Carr Smyth.  It's via Huffington Post.

An Ohio inmate whose 450-pound weight became an issue in his death penalty case has died seven months after being granted clemency, officials said Friday.

Ronald Post died Thursday morning at a prison hospital where he'd been treated on and off since 2011, a state prisons spokeswoman said. He was a week shy of his 54th birthday.

Post was sentenced to death for killing Elyria motel clerk Helen Vantz on Dec. 15, 1983. His attorneys sought mercy for Post ahead of his Jan. 16 execution date on the grounds that he was so obese that he could not be executed humanely.

Republican Gov. John Kasich granted Post clemency in December citing poor legal representation, not his weight.

And:

His decision mirrored the recommendation of mercy by the state parole board, which said it didn't doubt Post's guilt but said there were too many problems with how he was legally represented 30 years ago.

Earlier coverage of Ronald Post's case begins at the link.

Moses Harrison, 1932-2013

"Former Illinois Chief Justice Moses Harrison dies," is the AP filing, via the State Journal-Register of Springfield, Illinois.

The Illinois Supreme Court has announced the death at age 81 of former Chief Justice Moses Harrison.

And:

Harrison began his career on the bench in 1973 as a circuit court judge. He was serving on the 5th District Appellate Court when he was elected to the Supreme Court in 1992. He served as chief justice from 2000 to 2002.

Harrison perhaps is best known for a dissenting opinion in the death penalty case People v. Bull in November 1998. Harrison urged abolition of the death penalty, fearing an innocent will eventually be put to death. Illinois' death penalty was abolished in 2011.

The Chicago Tribune reports, "Former chief justice of Illinois Supreme Court opposed death penalty."

Former Illinois Supreme Court Justice Moses Harrison was a longtime foe of the death penalty.

During his tenure as chief justice of the state high court, he appeared on the TV news show "60 Minutes" with Mike Wallace to discuss the state's death penalty, which Illinois lawmakers eliminated in 2011. He also appeared in the movie "Too Flawed to Fix: The Illinois Death Penalty Experience."

Mr. Harrison wrote in a dissenting opinion in a late 1990s death penalty case that "the execution of an innocent person is inevitable" and that "despite the courts' efforts to fashion a death penalty scheme that is just, fair and reliable, the system is not working."

When asked once how he saw his role, he said, "It is to protect ordinary citizens against wrongdoing by the government, large corporations and powerful individuals."

Related posts ar in the in memoriam category index.

Anthony Lewis, 1927-2013

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright.  Anthony Lewis' classic book, Gideon's Trumpet, has been educating readers about the case, the ruling, and criminal indigent justice since it was published in 1964.  It has remained continuously in print.

Today's New York Time publishes the obituary, "Anthony Lewis, Supreme Court Reporter Who Brought Law to Life, Dies at 85."  It's written by Adam Liptak, the paper's current Supreme Court reporter.

Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times reporter and columnist whose work won two Pulitzer Prizes and transformed American legal journalism, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.

The cause was complications of renal and heart failure, said his wife, Margaret H. Marshall, a retired chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Mr. Lewis brought passionate engagement to his two great themes: justice and the role of the press in a democracy. His column, called “At Home Abroad” or “Abroad at Home” depending on where he was writing from, appeared on the Op-Ed page of The Times for more than 30 years, until 2001. His voice was liberal, learned, conversational and direct.

As a reporter, Mr. Lewis brought an entirely new approach to coverage of the Supreme Court, for which he won his second Pulitzer, in 1963.

“He brought context to the law,” said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the University of Washington who compiled a bibliography of Mr. Lewis’s work. “He had an incredible talent in making the law not only intelligible but also in making it compelling.”

Coverage of the 50th anniversary of Gideon begins at the link.

Additional Coverage of the Murder of Tom Clements

"Hickenlooper: Tom Clements Slaying Like A 'Nightmare I Couldn't Wake Up From'," is by Matt Ferner at Huffington Post.

Over the weekend, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper dropped by CNN's "State of the Union" and spoke to Candy Crowley about the slaying of Colorado Department of Corrections head Tom Clements at his home last week as well as his longtime friendship to the Ebel family, whose son, Evan Ebel, is the main suspect in the killing and who was also killed after a shootout and high-speed chase in Texas.

"The whole week, I sort of felt like I was in a nightmare that I couldn't wake up from," Hickenlooper said about the killing of Clements last week and as the dots began to connect between all the various parties involved.

Hickenlooper's friend and colleague Tom Clements was gunned down at his home in Monument, Colo. last Tuesday night when he answered a knock at his door. Then as the investigation unfolded, the police named a suspect in the Clements killing -- Evan Ebel, a 28-year-old white supremacist and ex-convict, who is also the son of longtime friend to Hickenloooper, Jack Ebel.

"All these things kept happening to people that I loved and they didn't seem to be connected in anyway," Hickenlooper said to Crowley. "To me the emotional toll has been much deeper than worrying about security."

Hickenlooper also spoke about his friendship with Jack Ebel and their son Evan who, Hickenlooper says, had a "bad streak, a streak of cruelty and anger."

"I've known Evan's father for more than 30 years," Hickenlooper said. "When I first came out as a geologist to work in Colorado in 1981, he and I worked at the same company, we've always stayed friends. He's one of the hardest working, most honorable, honest people I've ever known. Just a wonderful person who from the beginning his son just seemed to have this bad streak, a streak of cruelty and anger. And yet they did everything they could, they worked with Evan again and again but to no avail. He had a bad, bad streak."

Today's Denver Post reports, "Tom Clements' widow: Family will pray for forgiveness for gunman."  It's by Jordan Steffen, Kurtis Lee and Ryan Parker.

Lisa Clements' voice warbled with grief. Before her on Monday sat more than 1,000 people, most in uniform, for the memorial service for her husband, slain Colorado Department of Corrections executive director Tom Clements. Beside her stood the couple's two daughters, wiping tears from their cheeks. As she paused to gather her strength, the only sound was the soft whoosh of the New Life Church's heating system.

"It's a challenge to wrap up all (that) the girls and I want to say about Tom," Lisa Clements said. "The love of my life. My hero. The best father and husband you could ever see.

"But in the end, we want everyone who hears Tom's story to know he lived his life believing in redemption and the ability of the human heart to change. He would want justice, certainly. But moreover, he would want forgiveness."

Even in death — even after last week's death at the hands, police suspect, of an inmate released on parole — mourners at Clements' service Monday wanted to ensure that Tom's message was of championing second chances.

"Weapon used in Texas gunfight also killed Tom Clements," is the KDVR-TV report by Matt Farley and Mark Meredith.

The 9mm handgun Evan Ebel used to shoot a Texas police officer last week is the same weapon that killed Colorado Department of Corrections chief Tom Clements, ballistic analysts concluded Monday afternoon.

The confirmation goes well beyond proving the same caliber and brand of ammunition used and all but guarantees the accuracy of the finding based on microscopic evidence, the Colorado Springs Metro Crime Lab said.

Ebel, who was killed after a wild chase and shootout with police in Decatur, Texas, last week, has not officially been named as a suspect. He was named a person of interest in the murders of both Clements and pizza delivery driver Nathan Leon after ammunition, a Domino’s pizza jacket and a pizza box were found in the 1991 black Cadillac he was driving.

Earlier coverage from Colorado begins at the link; also available, earlier coverage of Tom Clements.

Tom Clements

"Tom Clements remembered as family man, prison-reform leader," by Karen Augé of the Denver Post.

Tom Clements brought to his job as director of Colorado's department of corrections a passion possibly shaped by childhood experience, likely grounded in strong faith and obviously fueled by a belief — not shaken after 34 years of working with criminals — in the promise of redemption.

The morning after Clements was shot to death at his Monument home, colleagues, friends and even potential adversaries described him as a man committed to his wife, Lisa, and daughters, Sara and Rachel, and to prison reform and prisoner redemption. He also managed to be the rare individual who was both an effective leader and a likable guy.

"He was a dedicated, committed, funny, caring expert at corrections," Gov. John Hickenlooper said during a public statement Wednesday morning.

Clements was a prison system chief who, his father-in-law Carroll Smith said, opposed the death penalty.

"The whole field is just shocked. It's devastating. He was well respected especially as a leader and a voice of reason who showed that it's OK to be a head of corrections and care about people," said John Wetzel, head of Pennsylvania's corrections department.

The New York Times reports, "Colorado Reels After Killing of Top Official Over Prisons," by Jack Healy.

As Colorado’s governor signed a hard-won package of gun control measures on Wednesday, officials across the state were reeling from the seemingly inexplicable shooting death of the state’s prisons chief, who was gunned down at the front door of his home.

The killing of Tom Clements, a man described by friends and colleagues as a dedicated and thoughtful public servant, left state officials shaken and grasping for answers on Wednesday. State troopers increased security around the State Capitol, and some state workers said Mr. Clements’s death had put them on edge.

The state police said they had known of no specific threats against Mr. Clements before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, when someone approached his house in the pine-fringed hills of the town of Monument, near Colorado Springs, and shot him as he answered the door. Into Wednesday night, investigators were still searching for any trace of his killer, but said they had no suspects or motive.

And:

The news about Mr. Clements rippled through the Capitol, where lawmakers and crime victims had gathered to watch Mr. Hickenlooper sign the gun bills. Staff members asked one another, “Are you O.K.?” Tearful elected officials hugged and shared memories of Mr. Clements, 58, recalling his dedication in serving Colorado after a career with Missouri’s Department of Corrections.

Mr. Hickenlooper’s voice cracked as he spoke about Mr. Clements’s death. He called the shooting “an act of intimidation” that had cut down a thoughtful and deliberative man who had tried to reform Colorado’s prisons by reducing the number of inmates in solitary confinement.

“He did his job quietly and intently,” Mr. Hickenlooper said, joined by his cabinet and elected officials. “We are all grieving.” During his two years as head of Colorado’s prison system, Mr. Clements won praise from nearly everyone he met, from the governor to corrections officers, defense lawyers to former gang members.

Frank Bruni posts, "Redemption’s Advocate," at his New York Times blog.

Most Americans don’t think or talk much about the way prisons in this country are funded or run. We want a vague, blanket assurance that our politicians and their appointees are being tough on crime. We pay attention to verdicts and to sentences but not to what happens afterward, to the experience that a convicted criminal has over the years before he or she most likely reenters society. We forget—or we simply don’t bother to recognize—that the nature of this experience has an effect on whether the criminal breaks the law again. We want to feel safe, and yet we’re utterly uneducated about, and inattentive to, a part of our criminal justice system that in fact has enormous bearing on our safety.

Tom Clements, who was the head of Colorado’s prison system from the start of 2011 until his murder this week, made me realize that. A little over two months ago, on a reporting trip to Colorado, I happened to find myself seated a few feet from him at a dinner in Cañon City, about a two-hour drive from Denver. He happened to mention what he did for a living. And for the next 30 minutes, over bad steak and worse salmon, I sought, and got, a lively tutorial. It was fascinating enough and he was engaging enough that I tucked his card into my pocket and made him promise that we could talk again sometime. An approachable and affable man, he promised.

And:

Clements was a member of the governor’s cabinet, which has frequent meetings and retreats. “We had a retreat about a year ago, and we were discussing the death penalty, which is obviously going to come up,” Hickenlooper said, referring to a looming case in the state. “And he spoke about it. He’s a bear of a guy, a big, formidable person, and when it came time for him to talk, he gave the most eloquent, restrained argument against the death penalty.”

“Everyone assumed he would be for it, because he works with the worst elements of society day in and day out,” the governor continued, using the present tense. “Everyone was dumbstruck.”

But Clements had done the math, and it was costing governments more to execute someone, what with all the legal buildup, than to incarcerate him or her. Clements had also noticed a randomness in who got killed and who didn’t: the executed weren’t the ones who’d committed the most heinous crimes. And then there were Clements’s religious beliefs.

“He believed,” Hickenlooper said, “that only God can decide to take a life.”

Earlier coverage from Colorado begins in the preceding post.

Remembering a Death Row Exonoree

That's the title of David Protess' latest essay at Huffington Post.  He's the president of the Chicago Innocence Project.

"Dennis Williams, a former death-row inmate whose exoneration became a rallying cry for opponents of the death penalty in Illinois, died on Thursday at his home. He was 46. An autopsy has not yet been performed..." -- The New York Times: March 25, 2003

To outsiders a decade ago this month, Dennis Williams had it all. He was vibrant and gregarious, with a sharp wit and infectious laugh. Women were drawn to him, and his latest "fiancee," Alicia, was as bright as she was beautiful.

Related posts are in the exoneration, innocence, and wrongful incarceration indexes.

Williams' Philadelphia Court Hearing to Resume Monday

"Pa. death-row inmate’s hearing to continue Monday," is the AP report, via the West Chester Daily News.

A hearing for a death-row inmate who could become the first person in Pennsylvania executed since 1999 has been continued until Monday after nine hours of testimony in Philadelphia.

Forty-six-year-old Terrance "Terry" Williams now claims he was sexually abused for years by the middle-aged man he admits beating to death in 1984 at the age of 18. He's asked a Philadelphia judge to halt the scheduled Oct. 3 lethal injection based on new evidence about the victim and the key accuser.

One of the issues at Thursday's hearing was whether prosecutors and homicide detectives withheld from Williams' lawyers a statement that the killing was motivated by rage over sexual abuse. The jury was told it was over a robbery.

"Hearing continued on Terrance 'Terry" Williams case, man set to be executed Oct. 3," is the Harrisburg Patriot-News report by Donald Gilliland.

A last-ditch hearing to stay the execution of Terrance "Terry" Williams was continued late Thursday afternoon after nearly nine hours of testimony. The judge will reconvene in Philadelphia on Monday morning.

And:

The hearing Thursday was to determine if a stay should be granted, given allegedly new evidence from the primary prosecution witness, who helped Williams kill Norwood and who now -- after 28 years -- is saying he told police and a prosecutor that sex was at the heart of the killings, but that they weren't interested and told him to stick with a robbery scenario.

Williams has exhausted nearly all avenues of appeal -- both state and federal -- to stop the execution. A push in recent months to highlight his history of sexual abuse has garnered support from a wide variety of judges, former prosecutors, child victim advocates and Norwood's widow.

An appeal to the governor for clemency -- the first of its kind in 50 years -- failed last week, with a 3-2 vote from the board that considers whether such appeals should go to the governor. Three on the panel -- including Attorney General Linda Kelley -- voted that Williams should not be executed, but rather serve life without parole, but the vote must be unanimous.

Williams' defense team has asked for a reconsideration of that decision.

"Phila. prosecutor calls death-penalty plea by Terrance Williams bogus," is Joseph A. Slobodzian's Philadelphia Inquirer report.

The prosecutor who put Terrance Williams on death row denounced Williams' admitted accomplice Thursday, rejecting as a lie the contention that Williams killed Amos Norwood in a sexual rage and that authorities ignored evidence of his motive.

"It's a complete lie," Andrea Foulkes said when asked about new statements by Marc Draper. Draper now says Foulkes and detectives ignored his information about a sexual motive behind the 1984 killing of Norwood, 56, in West Oak Lane.

Draper's account of Williams' alleged abuse by Norwood is the evidence being used by Williams' lawyers to try to block his scheduled Oct. 3 execution.

"Accomplice reverses his 1986 testimony to save Terrance Williams' life," by Mensah M. Dean in the Philadelphia Daily News.

MARC DRAPER, who has spent that past 28 years in prison for helping to beat a man to death, told a Philadelphia judge Thursday that he lied under duress from authorities when he testified against his accomplice and is now ready to tell the truth to save his friend's life.

"Being a man of faith, a man of God, I wouldn't want to see anybody die in that manner," a weeping Draper said of his childhood friend, Terrance Williams, 46, who is to be executed Oct. 3 for the 1984 murder of Amos Norwood, 56.

Draper, 46, the son of a retired city cop, is serving a life without parole sentence for his role in the murder. He was one of two witnesses to testify during the stay-of-execution hearing in Common Pleas Court. Andrea Foulkes, who prosecuted Williams, also testified.

And:

Foulkes, now a federal prosecutor, vehemently denied having told Draper to lie. She also disputed his claim that he had been promised a shortened prison sentence in exchange for his testimony.

Additional coverage includes:

"Pardons board could be last hope for Terrance Williams, as his Oct. 3 execution date nears," by Charles Thompson for the Patriot-News.

"Prosecutor takes stand in Williams' final death penalty appeal," by Emma Jacobs for WHYY-FM NewsWorks.

"Governor Corbett Ready To Proceed With Convicted Killer’s Execution," by Larry Kane of KYW-TV.

Earlier coverage of Terry Williams' case begins at the link.

Today's California Prop. 34 Roundup

The Sunday Sacramento Bee published Editorial page editor Stuart Leavenworth's "Why we changed stand on death penalty."

Yet there have been times when The Bee has stopped and taken a U-turn, reversing a longstanding editorial position. One of the biggest came last week, when we ended the editorial board's long-standing support for California's death penalty.

We didn't make this change lightly. It came after years of debate and discussion that preceded the current makeup of the editorial board. It came after many months of research and meetings with legal scholars and groups on both sides of the death penalty debate.

The position we took – that the death penalty is unworkable and unfixable in California – was crafted with several considerations in mind. We wanted to respect those Californians – and previous members of the editorial board – who believe that executions are a just punishment for convicted murderers who commit the most horrible of crimes.

But we also wanted to make a forceful argument that there is no way in California to carry out that punishment swiftly, equitably and in accordance with our laws and constitution. As we stated in the first installment of our editorials, "The death penalty in California has become an illusion, and we need to end the fiction – the sooner the better."

The SacBee also published four other views, "Responses from experts: Should death penalty be scrapped?."  It includes, "YES: Jesus taught us to forgive, not to exact vengeance," by Kathi McShane; "NO: Capital punishment needs to be mended, not ended," by Kent Scheidegger; "YES: For victims, human costs of this legal beast are too high," by Ron Briggs, and; "NO: We must act based on one of our seminal values: Justice," by Rod Pacheco.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has pro-con OpEds, "Capital Punishment Doesn't Equal Justice, " by Lawrence M. Hinman, and "Killers Should Stay on Death Row," by Bonnie M. Dumanis.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle reports, "Death penalty ban seeks to answer doubts," by Bob Egelko.

It's the nightmare of capital punishment, for supporters and opponents alike - an innocent person condemned to death and executed.

As Californians prepare to vote in November on Proposition 34, which would reduce all death sentences to life in prison without parole, both sides on the issue agree that the state has never executed a prisoner who was later proved to be innocent.

Still, doubts persist about the guilt of an inmate who was put to death in 1998. And five men sentenced to death under current California law were later cleared of the murder charges that put them on Death Row.

Those five cases illustrate "how easily someone who did not commit the murder could have been executed," said John Cotsirilos, lawyer for Lee Farmer, who was freed in 1999 after 17 years in prison.

And:

California has the nation's largest Death Row, with more than 720 inmates. Of the 13 who have been put to death since 1992, when executions resumed after a 25-year halt, little doubt was ever raised about the guilt of 12 of them. But one man, Thomas Thompson, was executed for a killing he may not have committed.

Thompson was convicted of raping and fatally stabbing Ginger Fleischli in 1981 in the Laguna Beach (Orange County) apartment he shared with Fleischli's ex-boyfriend, David Leitch.

Both men were tried separately. The prosecutor in Thompson's trial argued that Thompson had been alone with Fleischli and had the sole motive for killing her. Later, at Leitch's trial, the same prosecutor argued that Leitch had been there and had ordered Thompson to kill Fleischli.

Leitch was convicted of second-degree murder. At a 1995 parole hearing, he said he had seen Thompson and Fleischli having apparently consensual sex that night. If jurors had heard that testimony and believed it, they could not have convicted Thompson of the capital charge of rape-murder, and because rape was the alleged motive for Fleischli's murder, they might have cleared him altogether.

Jurors also weren't told that two inmates who said Thompson had admitted the murder were informants with questionable records.

The Orange County Register reports, "O.C.'s 'hanging judge' dies at 87."  It's by Larry Welborn.

He was Orange County's highest-profile, toughest and most quotable judge, and he sentenced more killers – nine – to death than any other local jurist.

In retirement, he came out against the death penalty, not for humane reasons but as a waste of taxpayer money.

Former Superior Court Judge Donald McCartin, 87, died Saturday near his retirement home in Bass Lake in Madera County.

His judicial career, colorful demeanor and critical assessment of the justice system were the subjects of a 2005 book titled "Perfect Justice," written by local true-crime author Don Lasseter and published by Seven Locks Press. It was subtitled, "a legendary judge's passionate defense of the ultimate criminal penalty."

Earlier coverage of Judge McCartin and his eventual opposition to capital punishment at the link.

Earlier coverage from California, including earlier SacBee editorials, begins at the link.  More on Prop. 34 at SAFE Caliornia.

Hugo Adam Bedau - New York Times Obituary

Today's New York Times carries the obituary, "Hugo Bedau, Philosopher Who Opposed Death Penalty, Dies at 85," by William Yardley.

Hugo Bedau, a philosopher who preferred to wrestle with the knottiest of public policy issues rather than reason from the remove of academia — most notably in confronting capital punishment, which he opposed as immoral, unjust and ineffective — died on Monday in Norwood, Mass. He was 85.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Constance E. Putnam. Professor Bedau’s half-century career encompassed several cycles in the national debate over the death penalty: its decline and eventual rejection by the Supreme Court in 1972, its resurrection by the court later that decade, and its suspension in several states more recently. His most ambitious work, “The Death Penalty in America,” revised several times, has been a standard text since it was first published in 1964.

Professor Bedau (pronounced beh-DOUGH) took up the issue as well in “The Case Against the Death Penalty,” a pamphlet distributed widely for many years by the American Civil Liberties Union. Written with the help of Henry Schwarzschild, a former director of the group’s Capital Punishment Project, the publication brought together a number of arguments against the death penalty: that it failed to deter crime (using supporting data); that it was fraught with racial bias, wrongful convictions and excessive financial costs; and that it was ultimately an act of “barbarity.”

“The history of capital punishment in American society clearly shows the desire to mitigate the harshness of this penalty by narrowing its scope,” the pamphlet said in a section titled “Unfairness.” “Discretion, whether authorized by statutes or by their silence, has been the main vehicle to this end. But when discretion is used, as it always has been, to mark for death the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, the members of racial minorities and the despised, then discretion becomes injustice. Thoughtful citizens, who in contemplating capital punishment in the abstract might support it, must condemn it in actual practice.”

The essay, heavily footnoted, was less than 9,000 words long. Professor Bedau’s curriculum vitae was more than 13,000.

“We called him the dean of death penalty scholarship,” said Michael Radelet, a death penalty expert at the University of Colorado who began working with Professor Bedau in the 1980s. “Bedau was the first guy to put it all together and the first to make the general empirical argument against the death penalty — that is, a little race, a little deterrent, a little innocence.”

And:

Ms. Putnam, a medical historian, said Professor Bedau was teaching at Princeton in the 1950s when the New Jersey Legislature was weighing measures in support of the death penalty. Struck by how little public debate the issue seemed to generate, he began to research capital punishment and eventually became immersed.

“It was anger, disappointment and frustration over discovering that something this significant in the so-called life of a society was going through the Legislature with so little public discussion or debate,” Ms. Putnam said.

Professor Bedau eventually testified on the issue before state legislatures and Congress, spoke to countless library groups, and delivered a series of lectures in 1994 as the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa professor of philosophy while at Tufts. The lectures were collected in a book, “Making Mortal Choices,” published by Oxford University Press in 1997.

“He wasn’t a front-line protester; that wasn’t his role,” Ms. Putnam said. “His contribution was clarity of thinking.”

Earlier news of the passing of Hugo Bedau is at the link.

Hugo Adam Bedau, 1926-2012

Mike Radelet of the University of Colorado passes on word of the death of Hugo Adam Bedau, one of the great scholars of capital punishment.  He was the Austin B. Fletcher Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University.   He edited several editions of The Death Penalty in America, beginning in 1964.  The most recent paperback edition was published in 2005.

Bedau was a founding member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and served on its board of directors for years, including several terms as chairman.

William A. Schabas posts of Bedau's passing at Human Rights Doctorate.

I'll update this post as more information becomes available.

Wednesday - Bernard Rapoport, 1917 - 2012

I'll be traveling to Waco today to attend the memorial service for Bernard Rapoport, known universally as B.

Among everything else he did in an oversized life, he was a devoted, dogged supporter of the Texas Observer, a lighthouse of Texas journalism since 1954:

We want to make sure that everyone in the Observer community knows that the public memorial for B is tomorrow (Wednesday, April 11) at noon in Waco. The memorial will take place at the Masonic Grand Lodge of Texas, located at 715 Columbus Ave. in Waco. All are welcome.

The family has generously asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to The Texas Observer, or to the Rapoport Scholars Program at the University of Texas.

Progressives in Texas have lost a great champion and friend.  The world has lost a true mensch.

Another Academic Tribute to David Baldus

"Race and the Death Penalty: A Tribute to the Life and Work of David C. Baldus," is the title of a program at the University at Albany on Friday, April 20.  It will mark the the addition of the Baldus' personal papers to the National Death Penalty Archive, at UAlbany.

Here's the program announcement:

The University at Albany 's School of Criminal Justice and the University Libraries are pleased to invite the public and the University community to an event to be held on Friday, April 20 at 3:30 in the Standish Room, on the third floor of the Science Library, to announce the addition of the personal papers of the late David C. Baldus, Joseph B. Tye Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, to the National Death Penalty Archive.

David Baldus's research and scholarship on the influence of race in the administration of the death penalty are unparalleled.  His study of racial disparities in the application of Georgia's death penalty served as the foundation of the landmark Supreme Court case, McCleskey v. Kemp (1987).  In that decision, by vote of 5-4, the justices upheld Georgia's death penalty law against constitutional challenge despite dramatic race-of-victim differences in capital charging and sentencing decisions that were revealed by "the Baldus study."  The McCleskey decision was issued a quarter century ago, on April 22, 1987.  Speakers at the April 20 event will reflect on the legacy of McCleskey v. Kemp and issues involving race and capital punishment as they recognize David Baldus's enduring commitment to equal justice under law and comment on the significance of including his papers within the National Death Penalty Archive.  Speakers will include:

Professor Catherine Grosso, Michigan State College of Law
Dr. Alice Green, Center for Law and Justice
Mr. David Kaczynski, New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
Mr. Brian Keough, M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany
Professor James Acker, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany

Discussion and a question-and-answer session will follow.  Refreshments will be available.  The event is free and open to the public.  For additional information, contact: Brian Keough at [email protected].

Last October, The University of Iowa College of Law held an Academic Conference and Tribute to honor his work and life; archived video is at the link.  Earlier coverage of David Baldus and his work is also available.

John Payton, 1946 - 2012

"John Payton, Lawyer Who Fought for Civil Rights, Dies at 65," is the New York Times obituary written by Dennis Hevesi.

John Payton, who as president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund guided it to several major victories before the Supreme Court, died on Thursday in Baltimore. He was 65 and lived in Washington.

The cause had not yet been determined, said Lee Daniels, a spokesman for the fund.

Named president in 2008, Mr. Payton was the defense fund’s sixth leader since it became a separate entity from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1940. He had been active in the civil rights movement since his days at Pomona College in the 1960s.

In 2010, he was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Lewis v. City of Chicago, in which a group of African-Americans seeking to be firefighters contended that they had properly filed a charge of discrimination against the city.

Mr. Payton argued that the cutoff score on a written examination to define the pool of qualified applicants had a disparate impact on minorities — a contention to which the city conceded. But the city had successfully argued in lower courts that the discrimination charge was filed after a statute of limitations had passed. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the lower court ruling.

A year earlier, in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, a municipal district in Austin, Tex., challenged the validity of Section 5, a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The so-called pre-clearance clause requires government entities previously judged to have a history of discrimination to receive permission from the Justice Department before making substantive changes to the voting process in their districts. Mr. Payton assisted in the arguments leading to the Supreme Court’s 8-to-1 decision upholding Section 5.

In a statement on Friday, President Obama called Mr. Payton “a true champion of equality” who had “helped protect civil rights in the classroom and at the ballot box.”

And:

“Democracy, at its core, requires that all of the people be included in ‘We the people,’ ”  Mr. Payton said in a 2008 speech in Michigan. “For that inclusive democracy to function, it is essential that we see each other as peers.”

LDF has more on John Payton's life and work at its website.

Troy Davis Memorial Service - Live Webcast

The NAACP is webcasting today's Celebration of Life for Troy Davis.  It is live, right now from the Jonesville Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia.

More from the NAACP at, "The World Will RememberTroy's Name."

An Update of the Iowa Batson Symposium & Baldus Tribute

Oranizers at the University of Iowa College of Law have announced details of an Academic Conference and Tribute Honoring the late David C. Baldus, Joseph B. Tye Professor of Law (1935-2011).  The event will be held Thursday, October 20, prior to the law school's Batson at 25 symposium.

Here's the schedule for the tribue to David Baldus:

Academic Conference
1 p.m.     Welcome: Gail B. Agrawal, Dean and F. Wendell Miller Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law
Speaker: The Honorable James E. Baker, United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces

1:20 p.m. First Panel
- Jeffrey A. Fagan, Professor of Law and Epidemiology, Columbia University
- Samuel R. Gross, Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law, University of Michigan
- Sheri Lynn Johnson, Professor of Law Cornell University
Moderator: L. Song Richardson, Associate Professor of Law, American University

2:40 p.m. Second Panel
- William J. Bowers, Director, The Capital Jury Project, SUNY Albany
- George Woodworth, Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Iowa
- Neil Vidmar, Russell M. Robinson II Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology, Duke University
Moderator: Emily Hughes, Professor and Bouma Fellow in Law, University of Iowa College of Law

Tribute
Levitt Auditorium, Boyd Law Building

4 p.m.     Welcome: Gail B. Agrawal, Dean and F. Wendell Miller Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law

Presenters:
- Dr. Lyell Henry, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Mount Mercy University
- George Woodworth, Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Iowa
- Catherine Grosso, Associate Professor of Law, Michigan State University
- Marcella David (vocal solo), Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International and Comparative Law Programs, University of Iowa College of Law
- Ann Laquer Estin, Aliber Family Chair, University of Iowa College of Law
 
Reception
5 p.m.     Reception in Boyd Law Building Lobby

Registration is now open for the Batson at Twenty-Five: Perspectives on the Landmark, Reflections on Its Legacy symposium.  It begins the evening of Thursday, October 20, and continues Friday, October 21 in Iowa City.

Earlier coverage of the two related events begins at the link.

An Update of the Iowa Batson Symposium

The University of Iowa College of Law has posted additional information on its symposium, "Batson at Twenty-Five: Perspectives on the Landmark, Reflections on Its Legacy.  The registration link, CLE information, and some other elements will be added to the website soon.

The Batson symposium will be held October 20 & 21 in Iowa City, Iowa.

You can view the schedule at the website or in Adobe .pdf format.

A separate panel is being planned to honor the life and work of David Baldus, the late University of Iowa scholar and law professor.

Earlier coverage is at the link.  More on Batson v. Kentucky, via Oyez.

 

Batson at Twenty-Five Symposium - This Fall

Organizers are putting the finishing touches on an important symposium and a tribute to the life and work of David Baldus.  Both will be held October 20th and 21st at the University of Iowa College of Law. 

Final details and a website will be available in the coming weeks.  I will post more information as it becomes available.

This is how the symposium is currently shaping up:

Thursday, October 20, 2011 - Afternoon panel
A panel will be devoted to David Baldus and his work.

Symposium Dinner
"Why Batson Usually Does Not Work" - Stephen Bright

Friday, October 21, 2011 - Symposium
There will be three panels discussing Batson v. Kentucky and its legacy.

James J. Tomkovicz is organizing the Batson symposium.  Eric G. Andersen and Emily Hughes are organizing the Baldus tribute panel.

Originally, David Baldus was to participate in the symposium.  George Woodworth, David Zuckerman Robert Dunham, Catherine Grosso, and Richard Newell are working on the unfinished paper and hope to present it at the symposium.

The papers will appear in a special edition of the Iowa Law Review.

Symposium participants include:

Stephen Bright
Alafair Burke
Robin Charlow
Roger Fairfax
Catherine Grosso
Sheri Lynn Johnson
Nancy Leong
Nancy Marder
Jason Mazzone
Barbara O’Brien
Melynda Price
Dru Stevenson
Andrew Taslitz
Tania Tetlow

More on Batson v. Kentucky, via Oyez.  Earlier coverage of the life and work of David Baldus begins at the link.

I'll be posting additional details as they become available.

Lura Lynn Ryan

The wife of former Illinois Governor George Ryan has died following a lengthy illness.

The AP post is, "Lura Lynn Ryan Dead: Wife Of Imprisoned Governor George Ryan Dies At 76, via Huffington Post.

"Lura Lynn Ryan, wife of former governor, dies at age 76," is the Chicago Tribune report this morning.

Former Governor Ryan's mailing address is:

George Ryan, Sr., 16627-424
FCI Terre Haute Satellite Camp
PO Box 33
Terre Haute, IN 47808

Randall Dale Adams, 1949 - 2010

The New York Times obituary is titled, "Randall Adams, 61, Dies; Freed With Help of Film.  It's written by Douglas Martin.

Randall Dale Adams, who spent 12 years in prison before his conviction in the murder of a Dallas police officer was thrown out largely on the basis of evidence uncovered by a filmmaker, died in obscurity in October in Washington Court House, Ohio. He was 61.

Mr. Adams had chosen to live a quiet life divorced from his past, and when he died on Oct. 30, 2010, of a brain tumor, the death was reported only locally, said his lawyer, Randy Schaffer. The death was first widely reported on Friday.

The film that proved so crucial to Mr. Adams was “The Thin Blue Line,” directed by Errol Morris and released in 1988. It told a harrowing story, and it had the effect of helping to bring about Mr. Adams’s release the following year.

“We’re not talking about a cop killer who’s getting out on a technicality,” Mr. Morris said when Mr. Adams was set free. “We’re talking about an unbelievable nightmare.”

And:

In March 1989, the Texas appeals court ruled Mr. Adams was entitled to a new trial because of the perjured testimony. Three weeks later, he was released on his own recognizance, and two days after that the Dallas district attorney dropped all charges.

Mr. Adams lived a peripatetic life afterward, first returning to his native Ohio, then moving to upstate New York, later returning to Texas, in the Houston area, and finally settling again in Ohio. Mr. Schaffer said Mr. Adams gave speeches against the death penalty and married the sister of a man on death row. He did not know if they were still married at his death.

Diane Jennings wrote, "Early Dallas exoneree Randall Dale Adams died in Ohio last year," for the Dallas Morning News.

Mr. Adams was “an ordinary guy caught up in extraordinary circumstances,” said Randy Schaffer of Houston, Mr. Adams’ former attorney. “I’m sure he never bargained for the role he played in American criminal justice.”

Mr. Schaffer said he didn’t hear about Mr. Adams’ passing until several months later, though they usually talked about once a year.

An Adams relative confirmed his death from a brain tumor, Mr. Schaffer said.

“The reason there was no publicity was he had moved to some small town in Ohio where nobody knew who he was, and he liked it that way,” Mr. Schaffer said.

Adams received no compensation from the state.  He did receive apologies from Texas lawmakers.  He testified at several legislative hearings in Texas, speaking on behalf of reform measures.  Related posts are in the exoneration index.

New York Times Obituary - David Baldus

"David C. Baldus, 75, Dies; Studied Race and the Law," by Adam Liptak appears in today's edition of the New York Times.

David C. Baldus, whose pioneering research on race and the death penalty came within a vote of persuading the Supreme Court to make fundamental changes in the capital justice system, died on Monday at his home in Iowa City. He was 75.

The cause was complications of colon cancer, his wife, Joyce C. Carman, said.

Professor Baldus’s work was at the center of a 1987 Supreme Court decision, McCleskey v. Kemp, which ruled that even solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty did not offend the Constitution. The 5-to-4 ruling closed off what had seemed to opponents of the death penalty a promising line of attack.

The Supreme Court had reinstated the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia after a four-year moratorium. Georgia and other states had in the meantime enacted provisions meant to address discrimination in capital punishment.

“It seemed to us that Gregg had indulged the assumption that race had been flushed out of the system,” said John C. Boger, who argued the McCleskey case for the defendant and who is now dean of the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Professor Baldus, a longtime faculty member at the University of Iowa College of Law, and two colleagues, Charles Pulaski and George Woodworth, set out to test that assumption. Their study examined more than 2,000 murders in Georgia, controlling for some 230 variables.

The study’s findings have often been misunderstood. They did not show that blacks were significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than whites. What the study found was that people accused of killing white victims were four times as likely to be sentenced to death as those accused of killing black victims. In other words, a death sentence often hinged not on the race of the defendant but on the race of the victim.

Professor Baldus’s work was meticulous, said Anthony G. Amsterdam, a law professor at New York University and an authority on the death penalty. “Dave had a unique genius for digging into masses of messy factual information and discovering crucial human forces at work behind the purportedly impersonal administration of criminal law,” Professor Amsterdam said. 

The study was presented to the Supreme Court by lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to die for killing a white police officer. “David was really the whole foundation of the case,” Dean Boger said.

But Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., writing for the majority, said individual criminal cases cannot be decided on the basis of social science research, however sound.

“In light of the safeguards designed to minimize racial bias in the process, the fundamental value of jury trial in our criminal justice system, and the benefits that discretion provides to criminal defendants,” Justice Powell wrote, “we hold that the Baldus study does not demonstrate a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias affecting the Georgia capital sentencing process.”

In 1991, after he retired, Justice Powell was asked whether there was any vote he would have liked to change.

“Yes,” he told his biographer, John C. Jeffries Jr. “McCleskey v. Kemp.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired last year and who was one of the dissenters, wrote about the case in December in The New York Review of Books.

“That the murder of black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynchings,” Justice Stevens wrote.

Earlier coverage of the life of David Baldus begins at the link.  More on the 1986 Supreme Court case, McCleskey v. Kemp, via Oyez.

More on David Baldus

"UI law prof Baldus passes away at 75," is the Daily Iowan obituary written by Brittany Trevick.

David Baldus wasn’t afraid to break the rules.

On a hiking trip to Canada with his wife, the two of them entered a trail not recommended for groups of fewer than six because of bears.

Instead of turning back, they continued on and shouted to scare off the bears.

“He was walking in front and shouting parts of Shakespeare,” said his wife, Joyce Carman. “The little parts that he loved so much.”

Baldus, a Joseph B. Tye Professor in the University of Iowa College of Law, died Monday morning after a 15-monthlong battle with cancer. He was 75.

He was a nationally renown scholar and lawyer, whose empirical work analyzed race discrimination in the United States, especially with concerns to the death penalty.

“His empirical work related to race and the death penalty was of really singular importance,” said UI law Professor Gerald Wetlaufer. “We’ll miss him a lot.”

Baldus was born in Wheeling, W.V. in 1935. He received a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1957. He loved traveling, sailing, and opera music, Carman said.

Baldus leaves behind two daughters, four stepchildren and eight grandchildren.

And:

A funeral will be held at Lensing Funeral Home in Iowa City in July.

"UI law professor David Baldus dies at 75," in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.  It's by Amy Schettler.

The University of Iowa College of Law has suffered a great loss with the death of renowned professor David Baldus, his colleagues said Monday.

Baldus, who has taught at UI since 1969, died Monday after a battle with colon cancer. He was 75.

"He had a life of accomplishment and achievement. It's a terrible loss for his colleagues and friends, not only here but throughout the state and throughout the country," said Josephine Gittler, a UI law professor who also attended graduate school with Baldus at Yale Law School.

Baldus was a nationally recognized authority on the death penalty and worked to illustrate inequalities and discrimination throughout the country on its administration, said Bill Hines, law professor and dean emeritus of the College of Law.

Hines said that work reflected Baldus' passion for seeking out equality.

"He was always so concerned about people being treated fairly and with dignity," Hines said. "As much as anything, his life's dedication to researching the death penalty and trying to rein in its administration was very inspiring."

Baldus' work will be recognized at a UI symposium Oct. 20-21.

The event will focus on the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Batson v. Kentucky, which ruled that jurors could not be excluded from a jury based solely on their race.

Organizers already had planned to recognize Baldus' work, but now it will carry special meaning, Hines said.

"Long time UI law professor dies Monday after battle with colon cancer," by Trish Mehaffey in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

University of Iowa Law Professor Josephine Gittler said she lost a friend she had known for 40 years and the law school lost one of it’s most dedicated teachers Monday.

“He was a wonderful friend and colleague, one that the law school community had great respect and affection for him,” Gittler said. “I was grateful for the opportunity to see him and say goodbye.”

Law Professor David Baldus, 75, of Iowa City, died early Monday from colon cancer. He had been at the university since 1969 and continued to work on research projects up until a few weeks ago, his colleagues said. He wasn’t teaching full-time but was co-teaching with another professor for the last year or so.

Baldus over the years taught criminal law, anti-discrimination law, capital punishment and federal criminal law, and he was nationally recognized for his research on the death penalty.

He wrote many papers, book chapters and studies “debunking the myths of the death penalty,” Bill Hines, law professor and former law school dean for 28 years, said Monday.

“It was all about the fairness of how it (death penalty) was administered and he found it’s virtually impossible to do it fairly,” Hines said. “His best known work was regarding race and how it affected who received capital punishment.”

Baldus conducted many studies regarding how capital punishment was administered. One well know study he conducted in 1983, along with other two professors, involved examining the presence of racial discrimination in death penalty sentencing, according to his bio information and various newspaper articles.

The study analyzed more than 2,000 murder cases in Georgia in the 1970s and Baldus examined the cases that occurred between two United States Supreme Court cases in 1972 and 1987. The study looked at the race of  the victim in each murder case to evaluate the presence of racial discrimination.

Baldus’ work found defendants accused of killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty than ones accused of killing black victims. The study also showed that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely than white defendants to receive the death penalty.

Hines said Baldus received national recognition for his results that were used by the defense in one case, McCleskey v. Kemp. Warren McClesky, a black man, was convicted in 1978 in Georgia for armed robbery and murder. He robbed a furniture store and killed a white police officer.

News of Baldus' passing is at the link.

David Baldus, 1935 - 2011

The University of Iowa College of Law reports:

Professor David Baldus died peacefully at home early this morning. Please join us in extending our deepest sympathies to the Baldus family and in feeling gratitude for the opportunity to have known this great man.

He was known for his studies on race and the death penalty, especially his landmark work in the 1986 Supreme Court case, McCleskey v. Kemp.  He was the co-author of Statistical Proof of Discrimination (1980) and Equal Justice and the Death Penalty (1990.)

He co-wrote the chapter on McCleskey v. Kemp for Capital Punishment Stories, and was a participant in 2007 symposium at UT Law which featured contributors to the book.

.

Marie Deans

"A Local Life: Marie Deans, 70, defender of the condemned," is the title of Colman McCarthy's remembrance in yesterday's Washington Post.

To many of the condemned men waiting to be electrocuted or drugged to death in a Virginia prison on charges of capital murder, Marie Deans was known as the “angel of death row.” She preferred the phrase “courageous fool.”

Her advocacy, which spanned more than three decades and was based on her steeled opposition to capital punishment, took many paths.

She pestered Washington and Virginia law firms to provide pro bono defense attorneys for inmates too poor to pay for post-conviction habeas appeals. She made hundreds of visits to Virginia’s grimy death row and more than 30 times accepted prisoners’ invitations to be in the death house for their final hours.

She was on hand, too, as a celebrator of justice when years of work helped free a falsely convicted prisoner — Earl Washington Jr. — from Virginia’s death row.

Washington, poor, black, illiterate and mentally disabled, was convicted of raping and murdering a Culpeper mother in 1982. He could not afford an appeals lawyer, and Virginia would not supply one.

It was Mrs. Deans who, after investigating on her own the arrest and trial records, found repeated errors suggesting a wrongful conviction. She scrambled to find a team of lawyers to save Washington. The defense attorneys maintained that Washington’s initial confession was bullied out of him because of his limited intelligence.

Irrefutable DNA evidence exonerated him. He had come within nine days of execution, marking the first time in memory that newly uncovered evidence led to the freeing of a death-row prisoner in the state. He was taken off death row in 1994, released from prison in 2001 and received an absolute pardon in 2007.

“Marie Deans brought hope and humanity to death-row inmates living under barbaric conditions,” said Donald P. Salzman, a criminal defense lawyer and litigator who now is pro bono counsel at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.

“Her indefatigable insistence on justice for Earl Washington Jr. led to his release from death row and eventual exoneration,” Salzman said.

At the time of her death in a Charlottesville hospice on April 15, after months of fighting lung cancer, Marie Deans, 70, was a major figure in the high stakes and often dispiriting world of death penalty abolition. Once immersed, she found the rituals of capital punishment to be void of mercy.

Up close, she saw it grounded in arbitrariness, racism and legal absurdities. “The death penalty,” she told interviewers from Amnesty International in 1989, “is something that is destroying the soul of our people. If people don’t know that, it just tells me how quickly it is destroying us.”

And:

In 1972 in Charleston, her mother-in-law, Penny Deans, was murdered by an escaped convict. At the scene of the crime, Mrs. Deans once recalled, she was told by a police officer not to worry: “We’ll find the bastard and fry him.”

Capture him, she said, but don’t kill him for me.

“He had a family, too,” she told The Washington Post in 1989. “If he was executed, it would be another murder. It would be worse in a way, because he would be put on death row and the family would have been told every day for 10 years — or eight years or six years or however long it takes — that he was going to be killed. I think that’s worse.”

In 1976, she formed Murder Victims’ Families Against the Death Penalty (now called Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation) and a few years later moved from Charleston to Richmond, in part because she knew the workload would be heavier.

"Celebrating the life of Marie Deans," is Todd Peppers' remembrance for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  He's a professor at Roanoke College.

On Friday, April 15, one of the nation's leading advocates for the abolition of the death penalty passed away quietly in a Charlottesville hospice. Her name was Marie McFadden Deans, and for decades she fought to bring fairness, justice and decency to what Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun once decried as "the machinery of death," namely, our country's bewildering and stubborn commitment to the barbaric practice of killing its citizens to show that killing is wrong. Marie was a tireless worker who never sought the limelight, but in her death we should pause and consider her contributions to fight against the death penalty regime.

Marie's devotion to abolishing the death penalty was sparked by the brutal murder of her beloved mother-in-law by an escaped convict. In the face of such a horrific loss, Marie responded by founding Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, an organization that sought to give a voice to families who believed that the death penalty was not the answer to the terrible loss of their loved ones. At the same time, Marie threw herself into work with Amnesty International and toured prisons across the country — documenting abuses and providing needed data to litigate the cruel and unusual conditions imposed on the forgotten inhabitants of death row.

In 1983, Marie founded the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons — an organization dedicated to fighting for basic legal rights for the men on death row.

And:

Marie's efforts not only focused on the men already on death row, but those men on trial for capital murder. Marie was incensed by a legal system which shackled indigent defendants with poorly trained defense attorneys and inadequate resources to hire expert witnesses. Marie became a mitigation expert, collecting relevant information on the backgrounds of capital defendants and weaving that information into a compelling narrative that would be presented to a jury weighing whether to sentence the defendants to life or death. Marie quickly established herself as a leading mitigation expert, and, largely due to her efforts, only two of the 200 men that Marie helped defend were ultimately sentenced to death.

Claude Jones' Ashes

"A brother's last wish: 10 years after his execution, Claude Jones' ashes are laid to rest amid new questions about his guilt," is the title of Cindy Horswell's report in today's Houston Chronicle.

For 10 years, Travis Jones faithfully carried the ashes of his brother, who he believed had been wrongfully executed in Texas, in a box with him most everywhere he went.

That box, which became Jones' constant companion, was finally lowered into a grave at White Oak Cemetery in Porter on Tuesday. It marked the 10th anniversary of his brother Claude Jones' execution. That was just as Claude wanted, a last wish that some family members initially viewed as "crazy" but now see as prophetic.

Until his last breath, Claude, a 60-year-old career criminal, denied being the one who entered a San Jacinto County liquor store in 1989 to fatally shoot and rob the owner, Allen Hilzendager.

Before the execution, Jones told his younger brother, Travis, that he did not want to be buried in a cemetery in Huntsville with other killers and rapists. He asked his brother to sprinkle a small portion of his ashes in

three spots: the Gulf waters in Kemah, his mother's grave in Houston and his ex-wife's grave in Humble, but then preserve the rest for 10 years.

"My brother promised 'all would come out good' after that. Good things would happen," said Travis, saying his brother refused to explain further and just repeated that things would turn out "good." "He'd gotten kind of religious. I don't know if he'd had some kind of vision or dream or what."

But a few weeks before the 10th anniversary of the execution, new DNA testing has raised questions as to whether Claude was innocent. Mitochondrial DNA tests determined a strand of hair — which had been the only physical evidence linking Claude to the crime scene - actually belonged to the murder victim instead.

And:

Travis Jones, 58, a carpet installer now living in Miami, was the only one of Claude Jones' seven brothers to attend the execution.

Neither Travis nor Claude's other six brothers had ever been in trouble with the law. For about 20 years, Claude's brothers lost track of him after he stormed out of the house as a teenager. He was the admitted black sheep of the family who ran with a rough crowd and had gotten hooked on drugs and alcohol, the family said.

In 1975, Travis decided to hunt down the oldest brother, Claude, after losing two younger brothers - one to leukemia and another who was fatally run over by a motorist. He found Claude in prison.

"We grew very close," said Travis, who lost his home and went into debt to cover his brother's legal expenses and his own transportation costs to regularly visit him in prison.

Even as Claude faced his death, he didn't waver over his innocence.

"He said that he'd die and go to hell before confessing to something he didn't do," Travis said. "But he never pretended to be a saint."

From age 19, Claude spent most of his life behind bars. Yet he admitted committing only one murder - when he set a fellow inmate on fire whom he accused of trying to rape him.

Every year, the Dallas Morning News editorial board selects a Texan of the Year.  Columnist Steve Blow has offered up his suggestion, "Steve Blow's Texan of the Year pick: Wrongly executed man showed fatal flaw in capital punishment."

My Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year is dead. And you killed him.

So did I – and all other Texans. Together, we took the life of Claude Jones in a Huntsville execution chamber on Dec. 7, 2000. And now we know we were wrong in killing him.

Jones, 60, was executed for the robbery and murder of a liquor store owner in 1989.

Let it be stipulated: Jones was a sorry human being and a lifelong criminal.

But that's beside the point. What is important is that we erred in executing him. It shouldn't have happened.

Jones' alleged accomplices testified against him. But under Texas law, accomplice testimony alone isn't enough for a conviction. It must be backed by other evidence.

And in Jones' case, that was a single strand of hair found at the crime scene. A forensic expert examined it by microscope and testified that the hair could have come from Jones but not the store owner.

But a DNA test performed earlier this year revealed that the strand of hair was not Jones'. His conviction and execution rested on false evidence.

But our system failed him twice.

As his execution date neared, Jones asked the governor's office for a 30-day reprieve to allow DNA testing. George W. Bush was governor at the time and had granted such requests.

But Bush's staff failed to include the crucial DNA request in briefing papers. He denied a reprieve.

So 10 years ago this week, we wrongly killed a man.

Earlier coverage of Claude Jones begins with the post, "Taking Notice of Texas and Claude Jones."

Longest Serving Texas Death Row Inmate Dies in Dallas

Today's Dallas Morning News reports, "Death-row inmate dies in Dallas awaiting new hearing." It's by Richard Abshire; reporter Jennifer Emily also contributed.

Ronald Curtis Chambers, who held the record for the longest stay on Texas' death row at 35 years, died Friday in Dallas.

Chambers, 55, was in the Dallas County jail to prepare for a new sentencing hearing when guards found him on the floor of his cell. He was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he died, said sheriff's spokeswoman Kim Leach.

Jurors convicted Chambers of capital murder in the slaying of a college student and sentenced him to death in 1975, 1985 and 1992. Those convictions were all overturned on appeal.

"There was never any material doubt about Chambers' guilt," said James Volberding of Tyler, who worked on his appeals from 1996 to 2008. "The only question was whether or not he should be executed."

Volberding said Chambers' case illustrates flaws in the state's death penalty system. He said court and prosecution errors caused the long delay, which he argues amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

"We need more experienced defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges," Volberding said.

And:

The Dallas County medical examiner's office has yet to determine Chambers' cause of death, and toxicology test results are pending. Leach said Chambers came to the jail with "a series of health complications."

In a 2007 reversal of Chambers' conviction, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that jurors should have had the option of a life sentence because of mitigating circumstances.

The AP report is, "Longest-serving prisoner on Texas death row dies," by Danny Robbins, via the Houston Chronicle.

Chambers had been in the Dallas County jail since May 2009 preparing for a sentencing trial scheduled for September 2011. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the new trial on the grounds that jurors hadn't received mitigating information when they imposed the death penalty in 1992.

According to the appellate court, jurors weren't properly told of Chambers' impoverished upbringing in a West Dallas housing project, his exposure to violence and drugs and his lack of role models.

Chambers' attorney, Richard Burr of Houston, said he had approached the Dallas County District Attorney's office with a deal in which Chambers would plead guilty to multiple life sentences. The plea would have meant Chambers never would be eligible for parole, Burr said.

"He was willing to give up any chance of parole to have the family of Mr. McMahan feel like he was appropriately punished," Burr said, adding Chambers was "deeply remorseful."

Dallas County District Attorney's office spokeswoman Jamille Bradfield said the office was "actively preparing to retry Mr. Chambers on punishment at the time of his death."

The 1992 trial marked the third time Chambers' death sentence had been overturned on grounds unrelated to his guilt. The first was because Chambers wasn't warned information from a psychiatric interview by a state expert could be used against him. The second was because jury selection had been racially tainted against a black defendant.

Chambers arrived on death row Jan. 8, 1976, three days before his 21st birthday. His death means 60-year-old Raymond Riles, who arrived a month later, is now Texas' longest-serving death row inmate.

Earlier coverage is here, here, and here.

The next post will highlight two recent examinations of incarceration and health issues.

Opinion Roundup

In Illinois, the Rockford Register Star carries the editorial, "Our View: Accept no substitute, abolish death penalty in Illinois," today.

Illinois legislators will be busy during the veto session. It is hard to believe there could be anything more important than the state’s $13 billion deficit and the worst-funded pension liability in the nation.

But neither one of those issues should weigh as heavily on legislators as the knowledge Illinois has wrongly sentenced men to death.

The Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is right: We must go further than extending the moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. We must abolish capital punishment in our state, now and forever.

Former Gov. George Ryan made Illinois the first death penalty state to suspend executions. He did so because he saw the moral and legal indictment in these numbers: Between 1977 and 2000, the state executed 12 people. During the same period, 13 inmates were released because of wrongful convictions.

Reforms have been enacted since the moratorium started. Advocates for the death penalty say the additional protections make remote the chances an innocent person will be convicted.

Oh yeah? Then why does the Illinois State Bar Association — which should have the highest confidence in lawyers — want to abolish the death penalty, too?

And:

According to a report released last week by the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee, state taxpayers have spent $100 million since 2003 to defend and prosecute death penalty cases.

Ensuring life sentences is a better use of our money. Execution in Illinois will never meet the standards of fairness and morality, much less accuracy. Tell your state legislator.

The Illinois General Assembly will be meeting in a veto session that lasts 6 days -- November 16 - 18, and November 30 - December 2.

James Clark posts, "LA County: America's Capital Punishment Capital," at California Progress Report.  He's the Death Penalty Field Organizer for the ACLU of Southern California.

In striking down America’s death penalty in 1972, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously compared capital punishment to being struck by lightning, arguing that death sentences were given to “a capriciously selected random handful.” For Californians, though, a better metaphor might be an earthquake.

The danger of earthquake, after all, is based on one's proximity to the fault line; death sentences likewise are determined by something as capricious and random as location. And the San Andreas, it turns out, is a fault line for more than just earthquakes: it’s also home to America’s surprising new death penalty capital, Los Angeles County.

LA County condemned 13 people to death in 2009. That’s not only more than any other county in the nation, it’s more than any state in the nation – even capital punishment heavyweights like Texas, Florida and Virginia. The problem isn’t limited to LA County either, as SoCal neighbors Orange and Riverside counties also have aggressive death penalty records, leading the ACLU to dub the three California’s “killer counties.” Bible Belt eat your heart out, the Sun Belt’s a scorcher.

Second Class Justice recently published a set of maps, posted below, that dramatically illustrate the geographic disparity in the death penalty and demonstrate that sentencing records like LA County’s are far outside the mainstream. In fact, just a small handful of counties use the death penalty at all – only 10 percent of American counties have issued a single death sentence in the last six years, and they’re almost exclusively from the South and Southern California.

California mirrors the rest of the nation, with the majority of California counties avoiding the death penalty altogether but a few rogue counties skewing the statewide statistics. According to the ACLU of Northern California’s report, Death in Decline ’09, death sentences have been steadily declining around the state and nation, except in a few counties like Orange, Riverside and most of all Los Angeles, where increasingly aggressive prosecutors are bucking the state and national trend.

At Open Salon, Margaret Summers posts, "Dr. Mario Obledo: A Leader in Death Penalty Abolition." 

This Veterans Day week, I’ve been remembering my first impressions of civil rights leader, death penalty abolitionist, and Korean War veteran, Dr. Mario Guerra Obledo. He was courtly. Reserved. Quiet. Polite. Respectful. I don’t remember his exact height, but to me he stood far above everyone around him.

One of 12 children born to Mexican immigrants in San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Obledo enlisted in the Navy in 1951, serving on a ship in radar technology. After the war, Dr. Obledo went back to his home state. He earned his undergraduate degree in pharmacy from the University of Texas in Austin, and later, his law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

Like many veterans of color, Dr. Obledo returned from fighting a war for democracy and freedom in another country to find that such rights and freedoms were not always upheld for people of color in the United States. Pete Tijerina, another Latino war veteran, returned from combat with an idea to start a civil rights organization in support of Latinos. He met Dr. Obledo at a social function. With help from a $2.2 million dollar Ford Foundation grant and assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the two veterans founded MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF launched Dr. Obledo’s civil rights activism. 

And:

In 2006, Dr. Obledo served on the advisory board of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, which examined whether the death penalty was administered fairly and with due process. To the extent flaws were identified in states’ death penalty systems, states could use the Project’s findings in reforming their systems, impose moratoriums, and/or launch more comprehensive self-examinations of death penalty-related laws and processes. The Project examined death penalty systems in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

While on the advisory board, Dr. Obledo illustrated how racial and economic disparities in the application of death sentences stem from years of racial and economic discrimination. “I think they should do away with the death penalty,” he said. “Most people convicted are minorities. People of color, or minorities. Only the poor people get executed. The people with money never get executed. That’s why the system should be changed. You would make sure no injustice would occur.”

And:

Dr. Obledo’s contributions to death penalty abolition and civil rights were many.  Dr. Obledo died suddenly this August after a heart attack at age 78. While others undoubtedly remember and laud Dr. Obledo for his civil rights activism in LULAC, MALDEF and the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, I will always remember, and appreciate, his having devoted a portion of his busy life trying to end the barbaric, racially and economically biased and ineffective crime-fighting tool that is capital punishment.

Earlier posts from James Clark and by Margaret Summers at the links; related posts in the editorial and blog blawg indexes

At UT Law Today

"Celebrating Judge William Wayne Justice's Life and Legacy," is the theme of two events sponsored by the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law at the University of Texas School of Law.

This afternoon a panel discussion, "The Arc of Justice - The Legacy of Judge William Wayne Justice and the Role of Lawyers in Social Reform,"  will be held from 3:30 to 5:30 pm in the Eidman Courtroom.

Panelists Include:

    * Michele Deitch, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and UT Law, on Ruiz v. Estelle (prison reform)
    * Lucas Guttentag, Yale Law School and the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the ACLU, on Plyler v. Doe (immigrants’ rights)
    * Elizabeth K. (“Betsy”) Julian, ‘73, Inclusive Communities Project, on Young v. Pierce (public housing desegregation)
    * Marianne (“Mimi”) Wesson, ‘73, University of Colorado School of Law, on Morales v. Turman (juvenile justice)
    * Moderated by: Lynn Blais, UT Law

Tomorrow afternoon at 4:00 pm, there will be a cenotaph dedication at the Texas State Cemetery, one of Austin's great treasures.

The public is invited to attend a ceremony dedicating a cenotaph at the Texas State Cemetery in Judge Justice’s honor. UT Law School Dean Larry Sager and the Law School’s William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law will host a reception at the State Cemetery immediately after the ceremony. All ceremony attendees are welcome to attend. Please join the family and friends of Judge Justice in recognizing his significant contributions to Texas history.

More on Judge Justice is here.  He was an authentic Texas hero.

Charlie Wilson, 1933 - 2010 - UPDATED

He was a charming, smiling character -- almost literally larger than life -- when he roamed the Texas State Senate and later the U.S. House of Representatives.  He represented a portion of East Texas centered around Diboll, just outside of Lufkin.  You didn't have to spend much time around him to know why he was called, "Good time Charlie."

George Crile wrote his amazing story in "Charlie Wilson's War," later turned into a movie starring Tom Hanks as Wilson.  No actor, however, could capture his incandescence; not even the Academy Award-winning Hanks.

People liked Charlie Wilson, and he used that asset to persuade people.  I had the great good fortune to see how he could take his passion and joy on an issue and transform it into action.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Charlie Wilson died today in his hometown.

UPDATE -- Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune talked with KUT News this afternoon about Wilson.  It was no overstatement when he said that we will never see another Charlie Wilson.

Judge William Wayne Justice, 1920 - 2009

He was a Texas judicial giant, and will be greatly missed.

The William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law at the University of Texas School of Law will carry forward his legacy.  The Law School has posted, "In Memoriam: The Honorable William Wayne Justice, 1920–2009."

"Federal judge who shattered old Texas dies at 89," is by AP writer April Castro, via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, whose rulings shattered old Texas by changing the way the state educated children, treated prisoners and housed its poorest and most vulnerable citizens, has died. He was 89.

His law clerk, Kelly Davis, said the judge died Tuesday in Austin.

The soft-spoken jurist spent three often tumultuous decades on the bench following his appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. To some, Justice was a judicial renegade who disregarded the public's will by imposing his own concepts on a conservative state.

But his decisions are widely credited for creating a modern Texas. They forced the state to dramatically expand and improve its prison and juvenile justice systems, and to dismantle racial barriers in public housing and education. He opened public schools to the children of illegal immigrants and provided bilingual education in rulings that were later used as the foundation of national policy.

"I'm basically a very shy, retiring person, but fate has put me in a situation where I've been in the midst of controversy," he wrote in his 1991 book, "William Wayne Justice, A Judicial Biography."

After only two years on the bench, he ordered the state in 1970 to eliminate racial segregation in public schools after many districts ignored desegregation federal policies. That ruling, U.S. v. Texas, affected more than 1,000 school districts and 2 million students statewide.

Justice ordered Texas to provide free public education for illegal immigrants and their children following a class action lawsuit filed in September 1977. The suit accused East Texas' Smith County of excluding children of Mexican decent from public schools because they couldn't show legal U.S. residency. Appeals led to a landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that extended the right nationwide.

Justice took control of the Texas prison system after a 1972 lawsuit filed by inmate David Ruiz alleged overcrowding and inhumane conditions. After a nearly year-long trial in 1980, Justice issued a sweeping 188-page ruling that said Texas prisons were overcrowded, understaffed and offered inadequate medical care. Justice also found that prison officials tolerated rampant violence among inmates, guards and inmates who worked as guards under a generations-old system known as building tenders.

He ordered changes and appointed a special master to make sure they were implemented. Justice found the state in contempt in 1987. Voters later that year approved a half-billion dollars in bond for prison construction, the first step in an unprecedented building program that today includes more than 100 prisons housing some 154,000 inmates.

Justice ended federal oversight of the system in 2002.

That same year, Justice rebuked the administration of then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush for failing to provide health care to children who already qualified for Medicaid.

"Judge Justice dies at 89," by Denise Gamino is at the Austin American-Statesman.

His destiny was all in a name.

"Judge Justice."

William Wayne Justice was a giant in Texas history, the foreman of an audacious legal assembly line that churned out bulging packages of civil rights, equal justice and opportunities for the least among us.

Justice, a soft-spoken federal judge who roared in his class action rulings on human rights over the past 41 years, died Tuesday in Austin.

He was 89 and was still serving as a U.S. district judge in Austin, although illness had kept him out of the office for months.

A memorial service is scheduled for Monday at 10 a.m. at St. David's Episcopal Church in downtown Austin. A public reception will follow. Private burial will take place in the judge's East Texas hometown of Athens.

The judge also will be honored later with a monument at the Texas State Cemetery. The dedication of that cenotaph, which has not yet been scheduled, will be open to the public.

Justice was a legend in his own time. The very mention of his made-for-Hollywood name could turn state officials and conservative taxpayers red with anger but melt the hearts of reform advocates fighting to better the lives of overlooked people who had no clout.

People either thought "Judge Justice" was an oxymoron or simply redundant.

But today, most agree that William Wayne Justice shoved Texas, against its will, into the mainstream of society.

His legal compassion forever changed the lives of millions of schoolchildren, prisoners, minorities, immigrants and people with disabilities in Texas. He ordered the integration of public schools and public housing. He outlawed crowding, beatings and inhumane medical care in prisons and youth lockups. He ordered that community homes be provided to people with mental disabilities who were living in large institutions. He expanded voting opportunities.

And that was just the tip of the docket.

And:

William Wayne Justice was "perhaps the single most influential agent for change in 20th-century Texas history," according to his official biographer, Frank Kemerer, who was a professor at the University of North Texas for almost 30 years.

"Through a series of momentous judicial decisions, his influence would sweep across the Texas landscape far beyond the geographic boundaries of his court and out into the nation," he wrote in "William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography" (University of Texas Press).

Justice was at the top of the list of so-called activist judges who, as a general group, are often accused by former President George W. Bush and other legal conservatives of interpreting the U.S. Constitution too expansively. But Justice took to heart a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1958 that, in essence, the Constitution and its amendments are "not static" and must draw "meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

"I was never underprivileged, but I have human feelings. If you see someone in distress, well, you want to help them if you can," Justice told the American-Statesman in 2006. "I hope people remember me for someone trying to do justice. That's what I've tried to do."

The late Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South to serve in the U.S. Congress when she was elected from Texas in 1972, once said Justice "helped officials in Texas state government see their duty clearly."

"William Wayne Justice, Judge Who Remade Texas, Dies at 89," is the title of the New York Times obituary written by Douglas Martin. 

Judge Justice had presided over cases in Austin until shortly before his death, having taken senior status there in 1998.

Judge Justice was a small-town lawyer active in Democratic Party politics when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the federal bench of the Eastern District of Texas in 1968. Sitting in Tyler, Tex., he came to be called the most powerful man in Texas by those who agreed with his largely liberal decisions and the most hated by those who differed.

In a 1998 column in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Molly Ivins made what she called the “painfully obvious point” that Judge Justice had lived up to his name, saying he “brought the United States Constitution to Texas.”

And:

If Judge Justice seemed high-handed, it was partly because he believed that the founding fathers had wanted judges to seize and command the higher ground. Perhaps not surprising, people reacted with hate mail, death threats, ostracism and bumper stickers demanding his impeachment.

“The plain fact of the matter is that the majority is sometimes wrong,” Judge Justice declared in an interview with The New York Times in 1982.

Frank R. Kemerer, who wrote “William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography” (1991), said in an interview on Wednesday, “He had a transcendent value, which was to advance human dignity and provide a measure of basic fairness.”

In many cases Judge Justice challenged official intransigence by applying the known law of the land, as he did in 1971 when he told school districts in East Texas to obey the law by integrating. Even 17 years after the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to be integrated, it was not unusual for students in all-black schools to have outhouses rather than indoor restrooms.

Other cases lacked precedent. In 1978, Judge Justice struck down a Texas law that let public school districts charge tuition for the children of illegal immigrants. When the ruling was upheld 5 to 4 by the Supreme Court in 1982, millions of children had the right to a free education.

“There was absolutely no case law on it,” Judge Justice said in an interview with The Star-Telegram in 1998. “I found no case, no statute that covered the point of law that I had to decide. So I guess I made my own little contribution.”

To many, Judge Justice defined the concept of activist judge. In the early 1970s, he had his law clerks — many of them from top law schools like Harvard and Stanford — sift through hundreds of inmate letters complaining of cruel and unusual punishment in Texas prisons. He pulled out eight and consolidated them into a single action, then appointed a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., William Bennett Turner, to handle the case. He asked the federal Justice Department to join with the inmates as a friend of the court.

The state defended a prison system with two doctors for every 17,000 prisoners, where 2,000 inmates slept on the floor and where inmate trustees, known as building tenders, essentially ran the cell blocks through coercion. It contended that Texas had, in fact, the best penal system in the nation.

In 1980, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, Judge Justice ordered major changes in the state’s prison system. In 1987, he held the state in contempt because the promised progress had been so meager.

In 2002, after Texas had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and improve prisons, Judge Justice released the Texas penal system from federal oversight.

Michael Toney,

Alex Branch reports, "Man convicted in bombing dies in wreck 1 month after his release," in the Sunday Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

A man who spent almost 10 years on Death Row before his capital murder conviction was overturned died Saturday in a one-vehicle rollover crash in Cherokee County in East Texas.

Michael Roy Toney died one month after his release from jail after the state’s decision not to retry him in the 1985 bombing deaths of three people in a Lake Worth trailer.

A spokeswoman for O’Melveny & Myers, the California law firm that handled Toney’s successful appeal, said Sunday night in a written statement that lawyers are saddened by his death.

"Our thoughts are with his family and many friends who supported him in his fight for justice," the statement said.

The accident occurred at 11:05 a.m. as Toney, 43, drove south on Farm Road 347 in a 2000 Ford F-250 pickup, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. The truck veered off of the east side of the road and rolled.

And:

On Death Row, Toney relentlessly protested his 1999 conviction for the bombing, one of Tarrant County’s most notorious crimes. On Thanksgiving 1985, Angela Blount, 15; her father, Joe Blount, 44; and her cousin Michael Columbus, 18, died when a bomb in a briefcase exploded.

And:

The case went unsolved for 14 years until a Parker County jail inmate told authorities that Toney confessed while serving time there on unrelated charges. The prisoner soon recanted, saying he made up the story to win early release.

No physical evidence connected Toney to the bombing. He was convicted largely on the testimony of his ex-wife and former best friend, who said they saw him plant the bomb.

Another prisoner, who also later recanted, testified that Toney told him that he was paid $5,000 to plant the bomb but that he left it outside the wrong trailer.

Later, Toney’s defense team uncovered 14 documents that Tarrant County prosecutors withheld from his defense during the trial, including records suggesting that investigators may have crafted witnesses’ accounts.

His attorneys have called Toney’s conviction one of the most "egregious cases" they have seen.

In December, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Toney’s conviction, saying his trial was unconstitutional because Tarrant County prosecutors improperly withheld evidence.

The Tarrant County district attorney’s office recused itself from the case. In September, the Texas attorney general dropped the charges against Toney but retained the option to retry the case after further evaluation of the evidence.

Toney was released from jail Sept. 2.

Earlier coverage begins with this post. 

Because the charges had already been dropped and there will be no new trial, I believe that Michael Toney's case meets the criteria for being exonerated, as set out by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Emily Jones, 1949 - 2009

The State Bar of Texas has announced that Emily Jones has died after a five-year battle with cancer. During her career in public and private law practice and as a program director at the Bar, she worked to expand and improve access to legal services.  LINK

Emily C. Jones, former director of Texas Lawyers Care, the State Bar’s legal services/pro bono support, and former director of the Texas Access to Justice Commission, passed away early this morning after a five-year battle with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. Known as a feisty and strong-spirited advocate for access to justice initiatives in Texas, Emily committed her entire career to helping low-income Texans gain access to legal assistance. More than that, Emily led by example — even while facing personal health obstacles — inspiring other Texas attorneys to do pro bono work.

Emily began her career as a legal aid attorney, working with East Texas Legal Services right out of law school. She later went into private practice as a civil rights attorney. Emily left law for a while, teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. She joined the State Bar in 1996 as a program attorney with Texas Lawyers Care and became the first executive director of the Texas Access to Justice Commission when it was created by the Supreme Court of Texas in 2001. In addition to her duties as director of the Commission and Texas Lawyers Care, Emily continued taking pro bono cases.

And:

In May, the Texas Access to Justice Commission honored Emily with the inaugural Emily C. Jones Lifetime Achievement Award for her work. The award recognizes an outstanding individual whose extraodinary spirit — like Emily's — and demonstrated commitment to legal services has improved society and inspired others.

Tim Curry, 1938-2009

"Longtime Tarrant district attorney Curry dies after lung cancer fight," is Aman Batheja report for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Tim Curry, Tarrant County’s top prosecutor and the longest-serving criminal district attorney in Texas, died shortly after midnight Friday at his home. He was 70.

Diagnosed with lung cancer in the summer of 2008, Curry underwent aggressive chemotherapy treatments. He was hospitalized at least once for complications stemming from his treatments and has been at home for the past few months.

Flags flew at half staff Friday morning at the Tarrant County Courthouse.

Mr. Curry took over the reins of Tarrant County’s prosecutors and legal staff in 1972 promising to clean up corruption. While attracting his fair share of controversy and political spats, Mr. Curry’s 36 years in the post were largely marked by widespread praise for his skillful competence and his lack of ego.

And:

According to the Texas constitution, Mr. Curry’s replacement will be appointed by the governor to serve until the next election.

The report notes that Alan Levy is the First Assistant District Attorney.

Mattox Funeral Arrangements Set

That's the title of this brief in this morning's Austin American-Statesman.

Jim Mattox, the former Texas attorney general who died overnight Wednesday, will lie in state in the Texas House chamber from 3 to 7 p.m. Monday, his former spokesman Kelly Fero said.

His funeral service is set for 11 a.m. Tuesday at First Baptist Church at 901 Trinity St. in Austin, to be followed by his burial at the Texas State Cemetery.

Not yet scheduled, but possible: a gathering of Mattox friends at Scholz Garten, also on Tuesday.

"It's going to happen spontaneously, if not formally," Fero said.

The Statesman also has this Guest Book in cooperation with Legacy.com.

An Empty Pair of Big Boots - UPDATED

Texas is a bit less flamboyant tonight.  Columnist, author, and salon host Molly Ivins died earlier today after a long bout with breast cancer and a horrific regime of chemotherapy this past year.  Molly was outraged by many things, occasionally Texas's use of the death penalty.  I've known Molly since 1975 when she was co-editor of the Texas Observer and we covered that year's session of the Texas Legislature. 

"We covered," -- well, I was just starting out in journalism, and she was already an established character and a respected journalist.

Molly knew how to put on the big Texas act, with an extra dollop of twang.  She knew how to be angry in a critical and constructive way, but best of all she knew how to have fun and laugh out loud enjoying living life among a community of friends.

I heard her tell the story several times when asked how tough it was carrying on as a progressive in Texas.  Molly referenced asking a death penalty attorney what the reward was in her work; often scorned by others for representing clients who were usually executed.  "The reward," the attorney answered, "is in the relationship with my colleagues doing this work.  They are the best, most dedicated people I've known, and I feel honored to be a part of this community.  That's the reward."

And I believe that sense of kindred spirit of community was a reason Molly often kept glancing at what was happening with the death penalty in Texas.  It was an interest beyond simply reporting the injustices of a broken criminal justice system.

She leaves behind many friends with many happy memories of times well spent, and now, a void.  Adios, amiga.  Happy trails.

The Austin American-Statesman has this.  The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Molly's home for years, has an editorial and several OpEds on Thursday's opinion section.