There are a number of uncertain things about the capital murder conviction of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis, but there is one thing certain: his supporters have been relentless in their efforts to convince the American and international public, through favorable media attention, that he is innocent of the August 19, 1989 murder of Savannah police officer Mark Allen McPhail. Davis’ innocence campaign, however, was dealt a serious setback by a recent comprehensive 172-page ruling by U.S. District Court Judge William T. Moore, Jr. who presides in the Southern District of Georgia (here and here). The U.S. Supreme Court last August ordered Judge Moore to conduct an evidentiary hearing on Davis’ claim of actual innocence.             There are several indisputable facts about the Davis case. First, several hours before McPhail’s shooting death, there was a shooting at a party in the Cloverdale neighborhood in Savannah. Davis was, in fact, at the Cloverdale party. He was implicated in that shooting incident by either direct eyewitness testimony or indirect witness statements saying the “shooter” wore a “white” shirt. The shooting seriously wounded Michael Cooper who was rushed to a local hospital. The shooting was reported to the authorities at 11:29 p.m. ...

            Three North Carolina executions carried out between 2001-2003 have recently been called into question because of a scandal that has rocked the crime lab of the State Bureau of Investigation.             John Hardy Rose was executed in 2001. He was convicted of sexually assaulting a neighbor after he stabbed and strangled her to death. He burned the body and disposed of it in a remote area in the western part of the state. Rose’s attorney, Ken Rose (no relation), has said that there was no doubt that his client killed the woman, the Raleigh News & Observer reported, “but there was a question of whether the killing was premeditated or impulsive.”             The defense attorney said the crime lab did not disclose “negative results” of a test for blood. This withholding of evidence was critical. “There was testimony that there was blood all over the apartment, but also testimony he cleaned up the apartment,” the attorney explained. “So, what was it the agents were actually looking at?”             Rose said the negative blood results test could have been used to mitigate his client’s sentence to life imprisonment or resulted in a lesser “second-degree murder” conviction.             Desmond Carter was executed in December 2002—the ...

            Peter Anthony Cantu became the 463rd inmate put to death by the State of Texas since 1982. His execution marked the 16th time this year Huntsville prison officials injected a lethal cocktail of chemicals to extinguish a human life.             A few celebrated Cantu execution, and while perhaps unseemly, it is understandable because this leader of a gang of young thugs called the Black and Whites committed perhaps the most calculated, coldblooded crimes in Houston history with the murders of two teenage girls on June 24, 1993. The Houston Chronicle reported that the gang that hot, muggy night were “conducting a fight-filled initiation ceremony for a prospective gang member across from T.C. Jester Park when [Jennifer] Ertman, 14, and [Elizabeth] Pena, 16, crossed their paths while taking a shortcut home. The girls were hurrying along railroad tracks in the dark in order to get home by their curfew.”             What Cantu and his five fellow gang members did to those two girls can only be described as brutal and horrific, and even 17 years after the crime  was committed, it still defies human comprehension. Its terrible memory hangs like a foreboding sadness over this city to this very day. The parents and ...

            There is a troubling phenomenon among prosecutors: as a group, they wholeheartedly embrace the concept of “finality of conviction.” In other words, once a criminal defendant is convicted, they resist all efforts to undo that conviction—even when the evidence is overwhelming that the defendant did not receive a fair trial (either through the use of perjured testimony or because favorable evidence was suppressed) or the evidence is compelling that the defendant is probably innocent (such as the forensic report issued just days before Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in Texas in February 2004 which concluded he was probably innocent).             The Columbus Dispatch reported on August 4, 2010 that prosecutors have resisted requests from Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and Attorney General Richard Cordray to have evidence in seven controversial cases subjected to DNA testing to determine guilt or innocence. Requests for DNA testing in these cases have also been rejected by various judges.             The tragedy here is that one of the cases involves an inmate named Arthur Swanson who died in prison in 2006, but who left behind documents in his prison cell which showed how long he had tried to secure DNA testing to prove he did not ...

David Garland is a professor of law and sociology at New York University. He has a book titled Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition scheduled for a Fall release. The Houston Chronicle carried a Sunday op-ed piece by Garland which featured what he called five surprising truths about the death penalty. The truths are fairly convincing that the penalty does not work.             One truth is that the death penalty is rarely imposed in this country today. There are now just 35 “death penalty states” in America—of which “one-third rarely sentence anyone to death and another third impose death sentences but rarely carry them out.” Garland notes that 80 percent of all executions which take place in this country occur in what was once known as the “Old South”—the confederate states of America—and that Texas is by far responsible for most of these executions. Garland attributes this national decline in the use of the death penalty to the fact that most states now have life without parole sentences which juries tend to favor as an option to the extreme punishment. He’s right. Texas in 2005 adopted a life without parole sentence, and the imposition of the death sentence ...

         Michael Anthony Green was released from penal custody on Friday, July 30, 2010, after spending 27 years in the Texas prison system for a rape he did not commit. He carried a lot of anger baggage built up over nearly three decades behind bars into the free world with him. Green has every right to be pissed off at the Texas criminal justice system, but the injustice done to him, no matter how blatant, is not a license to attack and openly impugn the integrity of the victim of the crime for which he was wrongfully convicted.          Let’s examine the bare facts of this case. By his own admission, Green was not a law-abiding citizen when he was arrested on the rape charge in 1983. He told Houston Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson (“Waking Up After a 27-Year Nightmare,” Aug. 1, 2010) that he spent his days playing video games and his nights stealing cars. It was that criminal lifestyle that put him in the proverbial “wrong place at the wrong time.”           The Houston Chronicle in yet another report said that on April 18, 1983 a woman, who was talking to her husband on a pay telephone at a gas station, was ...

           The San Francisco Chronicle reported about the release of a Field Poll last week that showed 70 percent of Californians support the death penalty—a three percent increase since the last statewide poll in 2006. Only 24 percent of those polled said they were opposed to the penalty with just 6 percent saying that had no opinion at all.             But Californians still remain fairly split about whether they would impose the death sentence as opposed to a sentence of life without parole. 42 percent in the most recent poll said they preferred life w/o parole for first degree murder while 41 percent favored the death sentence. California’s inability to administer the death penalty with any degree of frequency has had an obvious impact the feelings of its citizens about the penalty. That is evident by the fact that ten years ago 44 percent of Californians favored the death penalty for first degree murder while 37 percent favored life w/o parole.             While the fewest number of death sentences were handed down last year by juries in this country since 1973, according to the ACLU of Southern California, support for the death penalty has steadily increased in California over the past three ...

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 ...