I really had not planned to post another piece about Chief Judge Sharon Keller, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. But two posts by anti-Keller blogger Grits for Breakfast and an opinion piece by Houston Chronicle columnist Rick Casey concerning the “public warning” the Texas Commission of Judicial Conduct imposed on Judge Keller a couple weeks ago compelled me to put my two-cents into the fray. The judicial sanction was given to Keller because of her role in the handling of the botched appeal by condemned inmate Michael Wayne Richard on September 25, 2007. I have quite thoroughly explained my position in the Keller/Richard controversy in a number of posts on this website: here, here, here, here, and here.             Essentially what Grits n’ Casey are upset about is that the “public warning” administered to Keller by the13-member Commission was not severe enough. Out of one side of his mouth Casey called the warning a “historic slap on the wrist” while out of the other side of his mouth, in the very same breath, the anti-Keller columnist called it a “strongly worded condemnation.” What kind of double-speak is that? And Grits rambled on about the public warning, the second lowest sanction the ...

Derrick Jackson became the 15th person the State of Texas has put to death this year. He was convicted for the September 1988 double murder of Forrest Henderson and Alan Wortenberry who were tenors with the Grand Houston Opera. The case became known as the “Opera Murders.” The murders were brutal: Henderson was stabbed and bludgeoned to death with an iron pipe while Wortenberry, who was Henderson’s house guest at his Gateway Plaza-area apartment, had his throat slashed.             The murders remained unsolved for seven years. The only evidence left at the scene by the killer was a bloody handprint on the apartment’s doorknob. Jackson was linked to the crime in April 1995. He had been convicted and sentenced to 12 years for an armed robbery. Harris County law enforcement in 1995 had access to a new computer system that linked Jackson to the bloody handprint found at the Henderson/Wortenberry crime scene based on his 1995 fingerprints.             Three years later a Harris County jury found Jackson guilty of the murders and sentenced him to death. Twelve years later Jackson was escorted into the Texas death chamber, and without saying a word or even acknowledging his own family members, he was put ...

A Houston mother (if she can be called that) named Abigail Young was recently found guilty of reckless bodily injury in connection with the brutal dead of her four-year-old daughter named Emma Thompson. She was given the maximum 20 years allowable under the law. She had faced a possible life sentence for failing to protect her daughter from fatal abuse. The Houston Chronicle reported that when little Emma was taken to the hospital in June 2009 she had 80 bruises on her body, including vaginal tearing, three broken ribs, a busted lip, and a split in her skull. All of this horrific damage was inflicted upon the child by Lucas Coe, the live-in boyfriend of Young.             The day before Abigail Young’s conviction was reported in the Chronicle, the newspaper carried another “front page” story about a 35-year-old father named Alex McGowen Duncan who beat his six-year-old son, Tekerrious Jackson, to death because the child wouldn’t fall asleep. The beating was so horrific that the medical examiner’s office would later compare the child’s injuries to those incurred in car accidents. Sgt. Brian Harris, a detective with the Houston Police Department Homicide Division, told the Chronicle: “The saddest thing is, that because ...

Every so often you read or hear about a crime whose gravity, whose heinousness grabs you by the throat and offends every sensibility in your body. That’s the way I felt when I read about the brutal murder of a New Caney woman named Deborah Applegate in the Friday, July 9, 2010, edition of the Houston Chronicle. The 46-year-old disabled mother of three was apparently murdered by Robert Ellis Hinton.             The newspaper article did not disclose how the lives of these two individuals entwined or exactly how Applegate “janked” Hinton enough to cause him to kill her. What is clear, based on accounts from Applegate’s sister, Marie Shull, is that Applegate could not support herself; she depended upon Social Security benefits and the few jobs she could get taking care of other disabled people who could not independently get around.             Shull said it became evident her sister had disappeared in April when she did not show up for a Social Security benefits hearing. How much of a search Montgomery County authorities put together to determine what happened to Applegate is not clear. Too often victims of violent crimes simply disappear into the law enforcement woodwork of indifference because they are ...

              On Thursday, July 1, 2010, Michael James Perry became the 459th person put to death by the State of Texas since the state resumed executions in 1982. Two days before, June 30, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a last minute stay of execution to Jonathan Marcus Green. The state’s highest court of criminal appeals said more time was needed to determine whether Green was competent enough to be executed.             That’s a contradiction I have a real problem with about the death penalty. Perry, who was considered competent enough to understand his execution, was put to death while Green, who was incompetent to the extent that he could not understand his execution, was spared an appointment with death. What difference does it truly make that an individual is “too crazy” to understand the ramifications of the execution protocol that kills him? It’s rewarding mental instability (craziness) while penalizing mental stability (sanity)?             The death penalty is wrong no matter how it is imposed. I don’t think a society can boast of being more humane because it does not execute crazy people. And if Green is determined by mental health experts to be too crazy to execute, he will then ...

The State of Texas has executed 460 people since 1982. I feel certain that one or more of those condemned inmates were innocent. For example, Claude “Butch” Jones was executed on December 7, 2000, telling family members all the way to his death that he was innocent. The Houston Chronicle, in a report written by Cindy Horswell, reported two weeks ago that State District Court Judge Paul C. Murphy ordered DNA testing on a hair fragment found on the counter of a liquor store in Point Blank, a small community 65 miles north of Houston in San Jacinto County, where Jones allegedly murdered the owner during a robbery. The New York-based Innocence Project and an Austin-based newsmagazine, The Texas Observer, filed a petition some three years ago requesting what the Chronicle called “mitochondrial DNA testing” on the hair fragment.             The hair fragment is important. A Texas Department of Public Safety “expert” testified at Jones trial and could only state that “a cursory microscope examination” indicated that the hair fragment matched Jones’ hair. The Chronicle reported this was the only physical evidence that linked Jones to the murder of the liquor store owner. The new testing proposed by the Innocence Project ...

            The State Commission on Judicial Misconduct is a 13-member panel. The ethics commission convened last Friday, June 18, 2010, to determine if sanctions should be imposed on Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Chief Judge Sharon Keller for her role in the last-minute appeal of a condemned inmate named Michael Wayne Richard in September 2007.             The facts surrounding the Richard execution are these: The condemned inmate was scheduled for execution at the Texas death chamber on September 25, 2007. Executions are normally carried out at the Huntsville prison facility between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m. Richard was represented by death penalty expert and attorney David Dow and the Texas Defender Service. Dow and the TDS were aware of the state’s execution time frame.             On the morning of September 25 the United States Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari in two Kentucky death penalty cases and agreed to decide the issue of whether the three-drug protocol used in lethal injections was cruel and unusual punishment. Richard was the only condemned inmate in America scheduled to die that day. All death penalty experts across the country quickly understood that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the constitutional challenge to lethal injections created a ...

              Approximately fifteen minutes after midnight on June 18, 2010 four .30 caliber bullets tore through the chest of Ronnie Lee Gardner in the death house at a state prison in Draper, Utah. Associated Press reporter Jennifer Dobner said when the bullets pierced Gardner’s chest, he clenched his fist and tried twice to pull up his arm as if “he were lifting something.” The condemned inmate, who had spent nearly a quarter of a century waiting for the state’s final judgment to be carried out, was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m.             Gardner’s execution by firing squad marked the first time in 14 years that such an execution has been carried out in this country—the last being John Albert Taylor who was executed for the rape/murder of an 11-year-old girl. The five executioners—one of whom had a blank round in his rifle—were all police officers who had volunteered to carry out Gardner’s execution.             The execution was greeted by consternation by anti-death penalty groups from around the world who view firing squads as a throwback relic of old frontier days when they were popularized by the U.S. military. The European Union said in a statement that it profoundly regretted Gardner’s execution. Closer ...

On Tuesday evening, at approximately 6:10 p.m., David Lee Powell became the 458th person executed by the State of Texas—the 13th put to death this year. There were a number of things that distinguished Powell from other death row inmates—all of which were reported by the Houston Chronicle the day before his execution. First, he had been incarcerated 32 years before his execution—making him the sixth longest term inmate of Texas’ 322 condemned inmates. Second, Powell saw all 457 condemned inmates go to their death since Charles Brooks was executed on December 7, 1982—the date the state re-started its death penalty machine after the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which gave constitutional license to the death penalty. Third, Powell was one of the longest serving death row inmates put to death in this country—one year shy of the 33 year mark set my Jack               Powell was a convicted “cop killer”—a conviction that makes execution almost certain in Texas, no matter how long the inmate lives on death row. It didn’t matter that Powell had become a changed man during his three-decade confinement on death row. His attorney, Richard Burr, said he had lived an “exemplary life on death row.” ...

           This past March the ACLU of Northern California released a new report on the state of the death penalty in the United States. The report, titled Death In Decline ’09, found that the number of death sentences handed down in 2009 reached “the lowest level since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.”             While the news may have been encouraging to death penalty opponents, Texas proponents of the death penalty were not pleased because they lost “bragging rights” as the “death penalty capital” of the United States. Texas was unceremoniously usurped of its title by California who sent more people to death row in 2009 than it had in the previous seven years. With 694 inmates on its death row as of October 1, 2009, California already by far led the nation with the number of condemned inmates awaiting execution. But Texan death penalty supporters shouldn’t be too upset. They actually kill people here. The last person executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen who was put to death on January 17, 2006. Since that time Texas has executed 104 people.             Los Angeles County, along with Orange and Riverside counties, became known as the “killer counties” because they accounted ...