Todesstrafe Texas Farley Matchett

The State of Texas killed Farley Charles Matchett - September 12th 2006

..... Roy E. Greenwood, an Austin lawyer appointed to represent Matchett in the Huntsville cases, said he remains puzzled about Matchett's guilty plea. He said Matchett should have been able to argue in court that he killed Anderson in self-defense, but was prohibited by the plea.

"Why he (Davis) pled him guilty and blew off all these legal issues never made sense to me," Greenwood said. "You just don't give up with plea of guilty."

Matchett, whose federal and state appeals all were denied, also faulted his trial attorneys for not presenting mitigating evidence for jurors to consider a lesser punishment. He also claimed that court-appointed appellate attorneys botched his appeals.

Excerpt: HoustonChronicle 09/10/06

The Death Penalty USA

People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Representation:

The quality of legal representation is related to the arbitrary application of the death penalty in that inadequate representation contributes to mistakes in capital sentencing.

People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty. . . . I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial.

- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2001)

After 20 years on (the) high court, I have to acknowledge that serious questions are being raised about whether the death penalty is being fairly administered in this country. Perhaps it’s time to look at minimum standards for appointed counsel in death cases and adequate compensation for appointed counsel when they are used.

- Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (2001)

The National Law Journal, after a study of death penalty representation in the South, concluded that capital trials are "more like a random flip of the coin than a delicate balancing of scales," because the defense attorney is "too often . . . ill-trained, unprepared [and] grossly underpaid." (M. Coyle, et al., Fatal Defense: Trial and Error in the Nation's Death Belt, Nat’l. L.J., June 11, 1990). States vary enormously in the quality of representation they provide to indigent defendants.

Source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=1328#Representation

Human Rights Record of United States in 2007

TCADP Report on Capital Punishment in Texas - IMAGES OF INJUSTICE -January 2007

Download at: http://www.tcadp.org/contents/webreport.pdf

Alabama and Texas Cited for Execution Problems
By Mimi Li
Epoch Times Staff Jul 02, 2008

In his visit to the U.S., United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston bashed the lack of transparency and accountability of death penalty cases in the United States, more specifically pointing fingers at Alabama and Texas.

Alston stressed, "A government open and accountable to its people is the foundational premise of a democratic state, and one certainly expects no less in the United States." He reiterated that "it's not laws and procedures that are lacking, but it is an openness and a preparedness to provide access to key information that is missing."

One statistic Alston found particularly troubling is the 129 individuals on death row who have been exonerated since 1973. Texas officials have even admitted to him that innocent people have been executed, he said, and added that Alabama had probably done so, too, but refused to acknowledge so. "It is entirely possible that Alabama has already executed innocent people, but officials rather deny than confront flaws in the criminal justice system."

Texas and Alabama have the distinction of having the highest number of executions and highest per-capita rate of executions, respectively. Perhaps it's for those reasons that Alston found "limited to little openness" in both Texas and Alabama on the issue of the death penalty.

Justice in Jeopardy

Alston stated that several issues were undermining due process and threatening justice. Among them included political pressure for judges to give out death penalties, imbalance of legal representation, and racial bias.

In Alabama, Alston noted, elected judges are allowed to change a jury's sentence of life in prison to death, and often do so.

"Alabama should relieve judges of this invidious role by repealing the law permitting judicial override. Instead juries should be permitted to play their historical role of protecting individual rights," Alson suggested.

Additionally, not just in Alabama and Texas but all over the country, minorities are being executed at a disproportionate rate. According to the ACLU, 43 percent of all executions since 1976 and 55 percent of those on death row are people of color.

As a result, Alston has sustained that "there was something wrong with the way the death penalty was being administered."

International Implications

Alston also spoke out against the legal actions brought about against enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. The Military Commissions Act under which they are charged did not meet due process standards agreed upon by the international human rights community. For example, enemy combatants would not receive adequate legal representation and evidence that would not otherwise be admissible, such as confessions under duress, would be allowed in trial.

Alston urged the United States to fix a "deeply flawed" Military Commissions Act and to comply with the highest international standards. He added that the United States had an "obligation" to do so because it was the "model for justice around the world."

Still, Alston is optimistic and sees many areas where the United States is praiseworthy. He asserted, "I hope that my criticisms will not be met with a defensive reaction, but instead bring about renewed consideration of improvement."

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-7-2/72791.html

Historic low number of death sentences in Texas
By MICHAEL GRACZYK Associated Press Writer

Dec. 4, 2008

HOUSTON — Texas juries have sent nine people to death row this year, the fewest in the state for one year since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 allowed capital punishment to resume, according to a report Thursday from an anti-death penalty group.

An annual review of capital case developments by the Austin-based Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty also called 2008 notable for executions that didn't occur, saying six lethal injections were stopped by last-minute reprieves because of questions about possible innocence, trial fairness or issues related to mental retardation or mental illness.

At the same time, 18 condemned inmates went to the nation's busiest death chamber this year, down from 26 a year ago. No executions were carried out until June, however, because of a de facto nationwide moratorium on capital punishment while the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether lethal injection methods were unconstitutionally cruel.

Two other prisoners, whose death sentences were overturned, were returned to death row by juries at new trials.

"2008 can only be characterized as yet another roller coaster year for the death penalty in Texas," said Kristin Houle, the coalition's executive director. "The state carried out a 'typical' number of executions in a record amount of time — averaging nearly one per week over a five-month period.

"Yet officials' zeal for executions was not matched by public desire for new death sentences, as evidenced by the continued steep decline in the number of new inmates arriving on death row."

Juries in Harris County, long the state's top contributor to death row, have condemned no one in 2008, a first in more than three decades. Most notably, a man convicted of killing a police officer was given a life sentence rather than death.

"A lot of it can be attributed to life without parole and people who plead," Roe Wilson, a Harris County prosecutor who handles capital case appeals, said Thursday.

Harris County accounts for 118 of the state's 354 condemned inmates. Dallas County is second with 40.

According to the coalition report, Texas was one of nine states to carry out executions this year but the only one to do more than four. Seven Texas inmates were removed from death row with sentences commuted to life.

Since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment in December 1982, 420 men and three women have been put to death.

The final execution of the year in Texas took place Nov. 20. At least 10 prisoners have execution dates already scheduled for next year, including at least six in January.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6147438.html

TX: Harris sends nobody to death row
By RICK CASEY
Houston Chronicle
Dec. 6, 2008
First I learn that Houston's air is getting cleaner.

Now I learn that we haven't sentenced a single scumbag murderer to death this entire year.

This is not the city I signed up for.

In 1999, Houston displaced Los Angeles as the smoggiest city in the nation. This year we set a record low with only 16 days exceeding federal standards for ground-level ozone, smog's main ingredient.

In 2003, the year I moved here, Houston sent nine murderers to death row.

That was 35 percent of the state's death sentences that year, an amount that is more than twice our 16.5 percent share of the state's population.

From 15 a year to zero
In 2004, we did even better, accounting for fully half of the 20 Texans who landed on death row.
Back in the 1990s, a less populous Harris County was even more prolific in sending murderers to meet their Maker — or not.

For the five years beginning 1993, Harris County condemned more than 15 annually, contributing 39 percent of the state's migration to death row.

But this year, which for capital crime trial purposes is basically over, we've contributed precisely zero percent to the state's nation-leading cadre of dead men walking.

The Rosenthal factor?
I know what you're thinking: That's what happens when at the beginning of the year you banish the tough-on-crime likes of Chuck Rosenthal for minor indiscretions such as using his office computer for racist, romantic and obscene e-mails. (Separate e-mails, not racist, romantic and obscene all in one.)
And, oh yes, defying a federal judge's direct order by erasing a couple of thousand other e-mails that could have proved even more entertaining.

But acting District Attorney Ken Magidson declines to take either credit or blame for the county's paltry annual contribution to death row.

Magidson said he personally reviewed each capital crime to see if prosecutors could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they met "the standards set by law" for the death penalty.

Only two death-penalty cases were presented to juries. In one of them, prosecutors agreed a plea bargain of 60 years during the trial. In the other one, the defendant was acquitted, more on which below.

Statistics from the past three years agree with Magidson's suggestion that he wasn't the difference. From 2005 through 2007, Harris County condemned just seven men, or 15 percent of the Texas total.

Prosecutors throughout the state appear to be seeking the death sentence less often. This year only 16 cases have come to trial (and one currently under way).

In addition, juries appear to be showing more skepticism. One found the accused not guilty. One jury hung on the question of guilt. Four juries found the accused guilty but chose life sentences without possibility of parole.

One was the jury in the sole Harris County death penalty case — that of Juan Quintero, an illegal immigrant convicted of shooting a police officer four times in the head during a traffic stop.

"When you have a Texas jury refusing to give the death penalty to an illegal immigrant who killed a cop — if the significance of that doesn't speak volumes, nothing will, " said David Dow, an anti-death penalty activist and professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Dow believes that Texas juries have joined the national mainstream. The recent passage in Texas of the sentence of life without parole offers some jurors a satisfying alternative to death (which is why Rosenthal and other Texas district attorneys long opposed it).

What's more, say Dow and others, with the advent of highly publicized DNA-based exonerations, jurors across the country have become more concerned about imposing the death penalty.

In August, Michael Blair was released after 14 years on Texas death row. DNA evidence cleared him of the 1993 rape of a 7-year-old girl.

Dow notes that while Texas jurors seem to have joined the rest of the nation in increasing concern about the finality of the death penalty, state officials "seem to be uniquely stubborn."

In other states, executions have been slowed. But not in Texas. According to figures compiled by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Texas this year has performed 18 executions, exactly the number as the rest of the nation combined.

The runner-up was Virginia with four. Florida executed only two.

Texas already has 11 executions scheduled for next year, running only into March.

Only one is from Harris County. Tarrant County has three.

So it looks like we may lose our title as the Death Penalty Capital of America.

You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/

Harris County Death Penalty Study (pdf)

April 29, 2008

New Look at Death Sentences and Race
By ADAM LIPTAK

About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts for more than 100 of those executions. Indeed, Harris County has sent more people to the death chamber than any state but Texas itself.

Yet Harris County’s capital justice system has not been the subject of intensive research — until now. A new study to be published in The Houston Law Review this fall has found two sorts of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and one surprising.

The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.

But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.

It has never been conclusively proven that, all else being equal, blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites in the three decades since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Many experts, including some opposed to the death penalty, have said that evidence of that sort of direct discrimination is spotty and equivocal.

But the author of the new study, Scott Phillips, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver, found a robust relationship between race and the likelihood of being sentenced to death even after the race of the victim and other factors were held constant.

His statistics have profound implications. For every 100 black defendants and 100 white defendants indicted for capital murder in Harris County, Professor Phillips found that an average of 12 white defendants and 17 black ones would be sent to death row. In other words, Professor Phillips wrote, “five black defendants would be sentenced to the ultimate sanction because of race.”

Scott Durfee, the general counsel for the Harris County district attorney’s office, rejected Professor Phillips’s conclusions and said that district attorneys there had long taken steps to insulate themselves from knowing the race of defendants and victims as they decided whether to seek the death penalty.

“To the extent Professor Phillips indicates otherwise, all we can say is that you would have to look at each individual case,” Mr. Durfee said. “If you do that, I’m fairly sure that you would see that the decision was rational and reasonable.”

Indeed, the raw numbers support Mr. Durfee.

John B. Holmes Jr., the district attorney in the years Professor Phillips studied, 1992 to 1999, asked for the death sentence against 27 percent of the white defendants, 25 percent of the Hispanic defendants and 25 percent of the black defendants. (Professor Phillips studied 504 defendants indicted for the murders of 614 people. About half of the defendants were black; a quarter each were white and Hispanic.)

Mr. Holmes was, Professor Phillips said, selective but effective: he asked for the death sentence against 129 defendants and obtained 98.)

But Professor Phillips said that the numbers suggesting evenhandedness in seeking the death penalty did not tell the whole story. Once the kinds of murders committed by black defendants were taken into consideration — terrible, to be sure, but on average less heinous, less apt to involve vulnerable victims and brutality, and less often committed by an adult — “the bar appears to have been set lower for pursuing death against black defendants,” Professor Phillips concluded.

Professor Phillips wrote about percentages and not particular cases, but his data suggest that black defendants were overrepresented in cases involving shootings during robberies, while white defendants were more likely to have committed murders during rapes and kidnappings and to have beaten, stabbed or choked their victims.

When the nature of the crime is taken into account, Professor Phillips wrote, “the odds of a death trial are 1.75 times higher against black defendants than white defendants.” Harris County juries corrected for that disparity to an extent, so that the odds of a death sentence for black defendants after trial dropped to 1.49.

Jon Sorensen, a professor of justice studies at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, said he was suspicious of Professor Phillips’s methodology.

“It’s bizarre,” Professor Sorensen said. “It starts out with no evidence of racism. Then he controls for stuff.”

Moreover, Professor Sorensen said, Professor Phillips failed to take account of other significant factors, including the socioeconomic status of the victims.

Professor Sorensen said he remained convinced that racial disparities, if they exist at all, “are victim-based only,” as earlier studies have found.

This discussion, at least where the courts are concerned, is entirely academic. Twenty-one years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that even solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty did not offend the Constitution. The vote was 5 to 4, and the case was McCleskey v. Kemp.

That ruling closed off what had seemed to opponents of the death penalty a promising line of attack, and they are still furious about it, comparing it to the court’s infamous 1857 decision that blacks slaves were property and not citizens.

“McCleskey is the Dred Scott decision of our time,” Anthony G. Amsterdam, a law professor at New York University, said in speech last year at Columbia.

“It is a decision for which our children’s children will reproach our generation and abhor the legal legacy we leave them,” said Professor Amsterdam, who worked on the McCleskey case and many other capital punishment landmarks.

The majority opinion in McCleskey was written by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. After he retired, his biographer asked Justice Powell whether, given the chance, he would change his vote in any case.

“Yes,” Justice Powell said. “McCleskey v. Kemp.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/us/29bar.html?ref=us

Dec. 8, 2005

When the State Murders Murderers

Column: Martin LeFevre, Scoop

The United States just executed the 1000th person since the death penalty was reinstated and Gary Gilmore was killed by firing squad on January 17, 1977. Besides the Gulf Wars, no other factor has contributed more to the moral and spiritual decline of America than these thousand State-sanctioned murders.

When the State murders murderers, it makes accomplices of all its citizens. As the Los Angeles Times said in a recent editorial, "The reason to oppose capital punishment has to do with who we are, not who death row inmates are. The death penalty is inappropriate in all situations because it is unbefitting of a civilized society."

The death penalty defines the cultural divide in America, reflecting sharply divergent worldviews by its defenders and decriers. But the debate is confined to secondary issues such as deterrence and fairness. That is, nearly all the arguments for and against miss the point.

Whether carried out by hanging, electrocution, gas, or lethal injection, ending someone's life is an act of collective savagery that saps the spirit of a people and stains them with the very toxins they seek to extirpate.

Why is that so? Because when the State puts someone to death, the poison of an individual's murder is spread throughout the society, and enters the bloodstream of the people, diminishing them and eroding the psychological, emotional, and spiritual health of the people as a whole.

The erosion of civility, fellow feeling, and basic human concord in the United States in the last quarter century is directly related to the shadow of death that has progressively fallen over the land as the drumbeat of executions have piled one on top another.

The amoral impulses of hate and vengeance that give rise to individual murder are drawn from the same source as State-sanctioned murder, even if they are called by the more palatable names of retribution and punishment. When the State kills, it disperses throughout the land the toxins that give rise to despicable crimes in the first place, and no citizen is immune from their effects.

The measure of the social health of a country is how it treats the least and worst of its citizens. The abolishment of the death penalty is a sign of civilization in a country; the reinstatement of the death penalty was a huge step backward for America.

To be a civilizing influence, the State must respond with humaneness to inhumanness. Indeed, the more vile the crime, the more necessary it is for the State to be civilized in its response. That is not some high-minded morality, or adherence to religious injunctions against taking human life. Rather than mitigating evil, the death penalty degrades a people, and increases the inhumanity and barbarity of a society.

Of course, it is an outrageous hypocrisy, in this supposedly religious country, that many of the same people who call themselves followers of Jesus are the most ardent proponents of State-sanctioned murder. As journalist Michael Rowland said, "A large proportion of Americans are devout Christians, proudly living their lives according to the scriptures. But the commandment prohibiting killing is conveniently ignored when it comes to punishing people for serious crimes."

The prevailing attitude of Americans is summed up best by John McAdams, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University: "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call."

The primeval human reaction to violent crime is one of vengeance, retribution, and punishment. However the State's responsibility is to protect its citizens, not carry out their basest impulses. That's why injecting the emotions of the victims of violent crimes into the equation is wrong and perverse.

In addition to prevention, redressing the wrongs perpetrated upon the victims of crime (as much as possible) must be at the forefront of the State's prosecution of criminals. If not, the State is failing its citizens. Putting the emotions of victim's families on the scales of justice doesn't further that goal. If the desire for vengeance and retribution by the victim's relatives are truly important factors in the equation, then the State might as well sanction revenge killings by the relatives.

The State, and its laws, are the _expression of the entirety of the citizens that reside in it. The perennial question is, how are "law-abiding citizens" to deal with people who break the law, especially those who commit heinous crimes, such as cold-blooded murder, rape, and pedophilia?

We need to rethink not only the primitive reaction of the death penalty, but also the entire notion of punishment, which is always tinged with retribution. In the end, the choice is not between punishment and rehabilitation, but between vengeance and prevention.

---

Source : Scoop (Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.)

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0512/S00105.htm

STATES WITH THE DEATH PENALTY

Alabama Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Idaho Indiana Illinois Kansas * Kentucky	Louisiana Maryland Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New York * North Carolina Ohio Oklahoma	Oregon Pennsylvania South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas "EXTRA" Utah Virginia Washington Wyoming ALSO - U.S. Gov't - U.S. Military
STATES WITHOUT THE DEATH PENALTY
Alaska Hawaii Iowa Maine Massachusetts	Michigan Minnesota New Jersey* North Dakota Rhode Island Vermont	West Virginia Wisconsin ALSO - Dist. of Columbia

There are currently 36 states (incl. FED and Military) with the Death Penalty in the USA

New Jersey abolished in 2007!!!

March 18, 2009, is Death Penalty Abolition Day in New Mexico!!!

Stop taking Lives in the name of Justice - Abolish Capital Punishment

US Capital Punishment, 2005