From the category archives:
University of Houston Law Professor David Dow joins Texas Public Radio‘s Terry Gildea on The Source to discuss the death penalty in Texas. Dow has written a new book about his experiences defending death row inmates called The Autobiography of an Execution.
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The sole eyewitness who testified at a 1995 trial that Richard Miles was a murderer now says the Dallas County prosecutor in the case coached him to do so, according to an affidavit obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
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Texas Tribune: Twila Busby was Hank Skinner’s soul mate. “We just fell together. We just clicked, man,” he says. The two were hardly apart after they met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They would kiss in public and cuddled up on the couch to watch thrillers. They were “sick in love,” Skinner says through a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window on Texas’ death row unit in Livingston.
A jury found that Skinner was so sick in love that, in a jealous rage, he strangled Busby, bashed in her head and face with an axe handle and then stabbed to death her two mentally disabled adult sons on New Years Eve 1993. He was sentenced to death for the three murders. His execution is scheduled for February 24.
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El Paso Times: Hundreds of murder victims in this ravaged city are all but
forgotten.
Nobody in officialdom knows who they are. Nobody in the outside world
cared enough to claim their bodies.
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NYT: A Texas judge who refused to keep a courthouse open to receive a last-minute death penalty appeal did not engage in serious wrongdoing and should keep her job, according to a judge reviewing ethics complaints against her.
Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals, was the center of controversy concerning the 2007 execution of Michael W. Richard, a convicted murderer.
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KUT: A new report finds almost one in five juvenile offenders in Texas say they’ve been sexually abused in custody. The Justice Department study says two Texas juvenile centers have some of the highest rates of sexual abuse in the nation. The findings come three years after widespread abuse was exposed at the Texas Youth Commission.
About 2.6% of youth (700 nationwide) reported an incident involving another youth, and 10.3% (2,730) reported an inci- dent involving facility staff.
About 4.3% of youth (1,150) reported having sex or other sex- ual contact with facility staff as a result of some type of force; 6.4% of youth (1,710) reported sexual contact with facility staff without any force, threat, or other explicit form of coercion.
Approximately 95% of all youth reporting staff sexual miscon- duct said they had been victimized by female staff. In 2008, 42% of staff in state juvenile facilities were female. (DOJ report [PDF])
DMN: U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R) hasn’t responded to a report that he sent a supportive e-mail to banker R. Allen Stanford hours after Stanford was charged with swindling $7 billion from investors.
But the wording attributed to Sessions “resembles” something he might say to a “person in crisis,” the congressman’s spokeswoman said Monday.
“I love you and believe in you. – Pete”
The Miami Herald reported Sunday that Sessions expressed his loyalty to Stanford at 11:31 a.m. on Feb. 17, hours after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged the banker with bilking thousands of investors.
“I love you and believe in you,” said the e-mail reportedly sent by Sessions, a Dallas Republican. “If you want my ear/voice – e-mail,” said the message signed “Pete.”
106: The number of death sentences projected to be handed down by judges and juries in 2009, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That number is the lowest since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. Death sentences reached a high of 328 in 1994. Over the last decade, the number has fallen by 63 percent. The drop was most striking in Texas, which averaged 34 death sentences a year in the 1990s and had 9 this year. Vic Wisner, a former assistant district attorney in Houston, said a “constant media drumbeat” about suspect convictions and exonerations “has really changed the attitude of jurors.” Still, executions continued apace. Fifty-two inmates were executed this year, compared with 37 in 2008. More than 3,200 inmates remain on death row (NYT).
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