Let me state at the outset I do not know if Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly are guilty on the brutal murders of three eight year old boys: Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Chris Byers. The murders occurred in May 1993, apparently at or around a local playground known as Robin Hood Hills in Crittenden County, Arkansas where children were known to play. The playground at the time was near a major interstate. The horrible nature of the murders shocked the rural West Memphis community, and the crime was quickly linked to “satanic cult” worshipping and sacrifice (both of which were part of a national media craze in the early 1990s).             And that’s where Damien Echols came into the picture. He was a troubled teenager who always dressed in black, wore his hair in styles similar to “Satan worshippers,” and had some serious psychological problems. In fact, a local juvenile probation officer named Jerry Driver who was assisting the police at the crime scene immediately tagged Echols at the crime scene as the person probably responsible for the murders. Perhaps it was Driver’s initial assessment of the crime scene itself or the official belief that the murders of ...

              I first met Sister Helen Prejean in 1982 or ’83. She was visiting the Sonnier brothers at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Patrick Sonnier, the older of the brothers, was on death row awaiting his eventual execution in the state’s electric chair. Eddie Sonnier was serving a life sentence. The two brothers had been convicted for the brutal murder of a teenage couple in St. Martin Parish in 1977.             I was co-editor of The Angolite, the award-winning newsmagazine at the prison, and was also president of the local prison Jaycees chapter. The latter position allowed me access in the prison’s expansive “visiting room” to operate the Jaycees’ “coke and sandwich concession.” I met this demure, conservative little “nun” while she was visiting Eddie Sonnier, and as a matter of training, I was always extremely deferential to her. She, of course, had heard of the “award-winning Angolite” and its too celebrated “prison journalists.” That made for casual conversation.             All this was long before Sister Prejean’s phenomenal book Dead Man Walking and the Oscar winning movie of the same name; long before she gained international fame as “the death penalty nun” who would tirelessly advocate for an abolition of the ...

              On December 8, 1998 Melissa Trotter went missing in Montgomery County, Texas. Larry Ray Swearingen—an electrician from Willis, Texas—was arrested on December 11, 1998 on outstanding charges unrelated to Trotter’s disappearance Trotter’s body was found by hunters on January 2, 1999 in the Sam Houston National Forest. She had been strangled with a piece of pantyhose Swearingen was subsequently charged and indicted for the murder of Melissa Trotter. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in July 2000 for the Trotter murder.             Since his conviction, Swearingen’s attorneys have waged a relentless legal battle to establish the condemned inmate’s innocence. These efforts got a significant boost in 2007 when former Harris County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Joyce Carter, who performed the autopsy on Trotter and testified at Swearingen’s trial that Trotter had died 25 days before her body was found, changed her opinion and said Trotter had been killed within 14 days of her body being found. Accepting Carter’s second opinion as valid, which the State did not and countered with its own experts to refute Carter’s new findings, Swearingen could not have killed Trotter because he was already in jail when she was killed under Dr. Carter’s revised ...

              If any human being has thought about any crime that ccould be committed against humanity, another human being somewhere has already committed the dastardly deed. My job as senior paralegal with the John T. Floyd Law Firm requires that I do a lot of research, both in the area of the law and into the general events that impact our society. More often than not, it is interesting, challenging work, but there are times when poring through volumes of court decisions on LexisNexis or other legal research sites I come across cases whose facts are so horrific they do stagger the soul.             When I saw a January 19, 2010 Findlaw posting on the case Smith v. Bradshaw citing the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold a defendant’s death sentence for the murder and rape of a six-month old baby, I did not want to open the link and read the facts of the case. But I know legal research is not for the “faint of heart.” In all my years of doing legal research for inmates during my practice of “jailhouse law” in the Louisiana prison system, I came across many horrific cases in those thousands of ...

              On February 16, 2010 the State of Florida executed 45-year-old Martin Grossman for the murder of a wildlife officer in 1984. Grossman was the last person put to death in this country. It was a mundane execution, carried out against all the usual arguments opposing the death penalty.             Three days later two separate juries in Harris County returned guilty verdicts in capital murder cases with recommendations that the defendants be sentenced to life without the benefit of parole. One of the defendants, Steven Torres, was part of a Mexican drug cartel who paid two contract killers $1500 each to kill a rival gang member. The contract killers walked into a Houston restaurant and gunned down an innocent civilian mistaking him for the contract target. One of the shooters, Michael Belmarez, pled guilty and received a 25 year sentence in exchange for his testimony against Torres.             The defendant in the other murder case, Brian Ranard Davis, stabbed a 25-year-old woman repeatedly in the neck before pouring gasoline on her and setting her on fire. Harris County Assistant District Attorney Bill Hawkins told the jury: “You know she was alive and she burned to death. And she felt that in her ...

              His death did not come as a surprise to anyone. He was 94 years of age, almost blind, suffering from dementia, crippled, and deaf. His name was Leroy Nash, and he had been under a death sentence since 1983 for the 1982 murder of a coin shop operator in Phoenix during a robbery attempt.             Nash was no stranger to murder or prison. He received two consecutive life sentences in Utah in 1977 for a murder committed during a robbery in Salt Lake City. He had earlier spent 25 years in a Connecticut prison for shooting a police officer in that state. He was 15 years old when he committed his first robbery of record and sent to the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1930.             Altogether, Nash spent nearly 80 of his 94 years in one prison or another, and always for committing a violent crime.             “He was born in 1915 and he was sent to prison in 1930,” said Thomas Phalen, Nash’s attorney. “Think about it – he had 15 years of life in southern Utah, at a time when Utah and Arizona was the wild, wild West – and he went to prison in 1930, and he ...

That title is the theme of the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, a non-profit group seeking to abolish the death penalty in the State of Texas.             The TCADP will hold its annual conference at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday, February 20, 2010. The theme of this year’s conference is “Seizing the Momentum: Building Capacity, Community, and Coalition.”             The program will present the following awards:   Courage Award: To Judge Charlie Baird who “has demonstrated constant and courageous opposition to the death penalty” and who “consistently worked for justice while serving on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (1990-1998).” Courage Award: Father Mark Miller, Rev. Gene Collins, Rev. David Mossbarger and Rev. Roy Gentry who demonstrated “great courage in establishing a new TCADP chapter in Odessa. Media Award: David Grann, staff writer, The New York Magazine, whose “in-depth investigation of the Cameron Todd Willingham case” with his article “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” which “explored the case in its entirety and debunked all of the evidence used to convict/sentence Willingham to death.” Appreciation Award: Ron Carlson, a murder victims’ family member, who worked with the TCADP “during the 81st Legislative Session” and whose perspective “was particularly ...

              Anyone familiar with my personal background and literary accomplishments are aware that I spent more than four decades in the Louisiana prison system—six years of which were confined to the state’s death row before my death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in 1972. I know the difference between fact and bullshit. During those years of imprisonment, especially those spent on death row, I encountered a slew of self-centered, narcissistic inmates—those who believed the rest of the world should revolve around them and their case. They became so obsessed with manufactured injustices done to them that paranoia became a indelible feature of their personality—so much so that they lost all sense of reality. Reality was something they designed on a daily basis depending upon whatever events or crises were occurring in their lives at the moment.             Robert Alan Fratta is one of those inmates. I have written about Fratta’s case in two previous blogs. http://www.capitalpunishmentbook.com/?p=148 and http://www.capitalpunishmentbook.com/?p=198 It is obvious from a reading of those posts that I do not have much respect for Fratta and have utter disgust for the crime that sent him to death row—the contract killing of his wife. I survived those 40 years behind bars ...

              He was a 60-year-old Cuban named Luis Dubegal-Paez. He was an illegal immigrant housed in the Rolling Plains Detention Center near Abilene. He had been making “sick call” regularly since January 2008 while in the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Enforcement Service (“ICE”), complaining about intolerable pain in his chest. Nurses, not doctors, gave him cough medicine and Tylenol for the chest pains. Two months after Dubegal-Paez complained about the chest pains and received no medical assistance ICE inspectors toured the facility in which the detainee was housed to see if it met ICE’s “detention standards.” The inspectors found the medical assistance provided to the detainees was “acceptable,” despite the fact that the facility had only eight vocational nurses with limited nursing or doctor supervision—according to the Houston Chronicle (Feb. 5, 2010).             Several weeks after the ICE inspection, Dubegal-Paez collapsed and died of a heart attack in March 2008. The Chronicle reported: “The [Dubegal-Paez] case highlights what critics have called pervasive problems with ICE’s enforcement of detention standards.”             The Chronicle obtained through the Freedom of Information Act more than 800 pages of inspection reports which revealed ICE inspectors had given “positive reviews” to some of its detention facilities ...

Last Friday (Jan. 29, 2010) the Texas Forensic Science Commission conducted its first meeting under the leadership of Chairman John Bradley, the District Attorney of Williamson County. Bradley, who has become a lightning rod of criticism, was appointed to the Commission last September by Gov. Rick Perry after the governor’s controversial decision to remove former Commission Chairman Sam Bassett in the midst of Bassett’s efforts to conduct an open and full hearing in the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Willingham’s case has drawn immense national and international media attention since his February 1994 execution by the State of Texas because of a growing number of reports by forensic fire scientists which have concluded that Willingham did not intentionally set the fire that killed his three small children in a house fire in December 1991—a fire that led to Willingham’s capital murder conviction and eventual execution.             Bradley’s first official decision after his appointment was to cancel an October hearing Bassett had set in the Willingham case—a decision Bassett had made based on a report by famed Maryland forensic fire expert Craig Beyler which lent serious credibility to claims by media and anti-death penalty groups that the state of Texas executed an innocent ...