Texas

Douglas Feldman to become 503rd inmate put to death since reinstatement

Fri., July 26, 2013

Just two months after his 40th birthday, Dallas County resident Douglas Feldman, rode his motorcycle up next to the cab of an 18-wheeler and fired a half-dozen rounds into the passenger area, killing 36-year-old driver Robert Everett.

Reportedly, Feldman was riding his Harley-Davidson on Dallas’ Central Expressway in August 1998 when Everett sped up next to him and then abruptly changed lanes in front of Feldman, nearly clipping him. Feldman was enraged, according to court records, pulled out a pistol and fired several rounds into the back of the truck before reloading the weapon and speeding up to parallel with the cab to shoot Everett. Feldman then fled. Less than an hour later, and about 11 miles from the scene of Everett’s murder, Feldman passed an Exxon service station, where 62-year-old Nicolas Velasquez, a tanker driver, was replenishing the station’s gas supply. Feldman rode into the station and fired two rounds into Velasquez’s back, killing him; the sight of the man next to the truck sent him back into a rage, he testified at his 1999 trial. More than a week later Feldman shot Antonio Vega, as Vega stood next to an 18-wheeler outside a Jack in the Box restaurant; again, Feldman said the sight of the truck was what compelled him to shoot. Vega survived. A bystander to the Vega shooting called in Feldman’s license plate number and police were able to match Feldman’s gun to all three shootings. Feldman was arrested and charged with capital murder.

Feldman admitted to police that he was responsible for the shootings, and at trial testified in his own defense, “noting that he had not forgiven Mr. Everett for his trespasses,” reads a Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion in the case. “Feldman explained that he had shot Mr. Velasquez because the man was standing beside an [18-wheeler], which caused Feldman to ‘explode again in anger.'” Feldman was convicted and sentenced to die. On July 31, he will become the 503rd inmate put to death in Texas since reinstatement, and the 11th inmate killed by the state this year.

On appeal, Feldman argued that qualified jurors had been improperly excluded from the jury pool, that his attorney failed to present evidence that he suffered from bipolar disorder as possibly mitigating evidence, and that his trial judge erred by not allowing jurors to consider a lesser charge of murder (which would spare Feldman’s life), among other arguments. According to Feldman the murders arose out of a “sudden passion” and thus mitigated his culpability. “Even though sudden passion arising from an adequate cause is not a legally valid defense to capital murder under Texas law, it is definitely a factually valid rational explanation of the causal events leading up to the offense,” Feldman argued in a subsequent, handwritten appeal he filed on his own with the Fifth Circuit. That appeal, too, has been rejected, clearing the way for Feldman’s execution at the end of the month.

Scheduled Executions in Texas

By On July 17, 2013

Texas has passed 500 executions in the modern era since the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty was constitutional. Texas conducted its first execution after the ruling in 1982.

To express your opposition to any execution, you can contact Governor Rick Perry’s office at 512 463 2000. If you call after business hours, you can leave a voice mail message. During business hours, someone should answer the phone. You can also send a message using a form on Perry’s official website.

503) Douglas Feldman, July 31, 2013

TDCJ Info on Feldman

Letter from Feldman to Gawker.com

504) Robert Garza, September 19, 2013 (Law of Parties case)

TDCJ Info on Garza

505) Arturo Diaz, September 26, 2013

TDCJ Info on Diaz

506) Michael Yowell, October 9, 2013

TDCJ Info on Yowell

507) Rigoberto Avila Jr, January 15, 2014

TDCJ Info on Avila, Jr

TEXAS -SUZANNE MARGARET BASSO EXECUTION SET FEB. 5, 2014 EXECUTED 6.26 PM

HOUSTON (July 24, 2013)–State District Judge Mary Lou Keel has set a Feb. 5, 2014 execution date for Suzanne Basso, 59, who’s held on women’s death row in Gatesville.

Suzanne Basso (Texas prison photo)

In July of 1997, 59-year-old Louis “Buddy” Musso, the victim in this case, first met either [Basso] or her son, James “J.D.” 0′ Malley, at a church carnival in New Jersey.

Musso, though mentally retarded, lived independently, held a job at a local grocery store, and handled his own financial affairs. In June of 1998, Musso left New Jersey to live with [Basso] in Jacinto City, Texas. Shortly after Musso moved in with [Basso], Al Becker, Musso’s Social Security representative payee and friend of twenty years, began having difficulty contacting Musso. Becker had numerous telephone conversations with [Basso], but [Basso] eventually refused to allow him to communicate directly with Musso. Concerned about Musso’s welfare, Becker sought assistance from various state agencies, but was not able to gain any further information about Musso’s situation. In July of 1998, [Basso] unsuccessfully attempted to designate herself as Musso’s representative payee of his Social Security benefits. On an application for a life insurance policy on Musso, [Basso] was named beneficiary, and she had described herself as Musso’s “wife to be.”

After Musso’s death, police found certificates of insurance for policies in Musso’s name, including one that provided $65,000 in the event of Musso’s death from violent crimes. They also discovered a document entitled Musso’s “Last Will and Testament,” which purported to leave Musso’s entire estate to [Basso] while “no one else [was] to get a cent.” In the days leading up to his death, Musso suffered tremendous abuse at the hands of [Basso] and her five co-defendants. [Basso] would take Musso to the apartment of co- defendants Bernice Ahrens, Craig and Hope Ahrens (Bernice’s son and daughter), and Terence Singleton (Hope’s fiancé), where Musso was forced to remain seated or in a kneeling position on a plastic mat in the hallway for hours.

Whenever Musso attempted to get off the mat, O’Malley would beat or kick him. O’Malley, Singleton, Bernice, and Craig beat Musso, and O’Malley, while wearing combat boots, kicked him repeatedly. [Basso] beat Musso with a baseball bat on the buttocks, back, and groin area, and both she and Hope struck him with a belt and buckle. After hearing that Musso had been “misbehaving” while she was away from the apartment, [Basso], who weighed over 300 pounds, repeatedly jumped on top of Musso while he was on his hands and knees, causing him to fall flat on the ground.

At one point, Musso requested that someone there call an ambulance. Even though Hope, as she later admitted,recognized the extent of Musso’s injuries, he received no medical attention. Someone (the evidence suggests either O’Malley or Singleton and Craig) bathed Musso in a solution of bleach and Pine- Sol cleaning fluid, using a wire brush on his body.

Apparently, his killers were giving Musso this kind of “bath” when he died.

On the morning of August 28, 1999, Musso’s body was found dumped near a roadway in Galena Park. Because Musso’s clothes lacked any blood stains, and his only shoe was on the wrong foot, investigators believed that his body had been dressed after he died.

The medical examiner reported an extraordinary number of injuries to Musso’s body and was unable to count the “hundreds” of bruises that covered Musso from head to toe.

The palms of Musso’s hands and the soles of his feet were bruised, while his back and buttocks showed numerous lash marks indicative of his having been whipped. Musso’s severely blackened eyes resulted from a “hinge fracture” to his skull, which probably was caused by a blow to the back of the head. He had sustained broken bones in his nose, ribs, and throat. Marks on his back appeared to be cigarette burns, but may have been caused by a hot poker, and the medical examiner noted areas of skin abrasion possibly attributable to contact with a cleaning solution or scrub brush.

The cause of death was believed to have been a skull fracture from an unknown object, which left a large, X-shaped laceration in Musso’s scalp. On the evening before Musso’s body was discovered, [Basso] began what evolved into a lengthy attempt to establish that Musso had run away.

She made several phone calls to people, including Becker, a niece of Musso’s, and the local police, expressing concern about Musso’s whereabouts. [Basso] claimed that Musso probably had run away with a “little Mexican lady” that he had met at a laundromat and said that she was “getting kind of worried” about him. In a written statement to police, [Basso] later confessed to having driven Bernice Ahrens’s car, with Musso’s body in the trunk, to the site where O’Malley, Singleton, and Craig Ahrens dumped the body. She also admitted driving the car to the dumpster where the others disposed of additional incriminating evidence, including bloody clothes and rubber gloves, which the police had found as a result of O’Malley’s confession.

UPDATE CLICK HERE

Texas man executed for killing during 2002 hold up- Quintanilla EXECUTED 7:32pm

July 16, 2013

Texas Execution

John Manuel Quintanilla received lethal injection for gunning down 60-year-old Victor Billings at a game room in Victoria, about 125 miles southwest of Houston. The 2002 slaying came just a few months after Quintanilla had been released from prison after serving a sentence for several burglary convictions.

Asked to make a final statement before his execution, Quintanilla told his wife he loved her.

“Thank you for all the years of happiness,” he said.

He never acknowledged his victim’s friends or relatives, including two daughters, who watched through a window.

As the lethal drug began taking effect, he snored about a half dozen times, then stopped breathing. At 7:32 p.m. CDT — 15 minutes after being given the drug — he was pronounced dead.

Quintanilla’s wife, a German national who married him by proxy while he was in prison, watched through an adjacent window and sobbed.

Quintanilla, 36, became the ninth Texas inmate to receive lethal injection this year and the 501st since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982. His was the first of two executions set for this week; the other is planned for Thursday.

Quintanilla’s punishment was carried out after the U.S. Supreme Court refused two last-day appeals.

His lawyers contended his confession was coerced by authorities threatening to also charge one of his sisters and that the statement improperly was allowed into evidence at his trial in 2004. The lawyers obtained affidavits from two jurors who said the confession was a key to their decision to convict him.

“It is clear that Quintanilla would not have been convicted of capital murder if his confession had not been admitted — a fact confirmed by two of his jurors,” appeals lawyer David Dow told the high court.

The appeal also argued Quintanilla had deficient legal help during his trial and in earlier stages of his appeals, and that his case would give justices the opportunity to define filing rules in light of recent death penalty rulings from the court.

The Texas attorney general’s office said the appeal was without merit and improperly filed, and that the juror affidavits also were improper.

“There wasn’t any coercion whatsoever,” Dexter Eaves, the former Victoria County district attorney who was lead prosecutor at the trial, recalled last week. He also said that while the robbers, who fled with about $2,000, were masked, witnesses were able to “describe very clearly who the triggerman was.”

Court records show Billings, a retired chief deputy from nearby Edna in adjacent Jackson County, was at the game center with his wife on the Sunday before Thanksgiving in 2002 when the gunmen came in through a back door. Billings approached one of them and grabbed the barrel of the gunman’s rifle “so no one else was going to be hurt and paid for it dearly,” Eaves said.

He said Billings was shot three times, the last one fired while he was on his knees.

“A very cold killing,” Eaves said.

During questioning by detectives for an unrelated robbery some two months later, Quintanilla made references to the still unsolved Billings case, then led authorities to a canal where divers recovered items used in the holdup.

“They had the mask, the guns and his statements saying who did what,” Jim Beeler, Quintanilla’s lead trial lawyer, said. “He told them everything.”

Beeler said the trial judge overruled his objections and ruled the statements proper and admissible into evidence. He also said Quintanilla signed affidavits ordering that his defense team present no mitigating evidence during the punishment phase of his trial, where jurors deciding his sentence could have considered he had virtually no parental supervision while growing up.

“You want to argue your case, completely and totally,” Beeler said. “In that situation, we’re not being allowed to present our case, based on our client.

“It’s extremely frustrating.”

Prosecutors bolstered their case for Quintanilla’s future dangerousness by presenting evidence he attacked a jailer with a homemade weapon while awaiting trial.

“He did not do himself any favors,” Eaves said.

Quintanilla’s accomplice, Jeffrey Bibb, 33, is serving 60 years for murder and 50 years for aggravated robbery.

On Thursday, another Texas inmate is set for lethal injection. Vaughn Ross, 41, is to be executed for a double slaying in Lubbock in 2001.

Death by Numbers: The 500th Execution by the State of Texas by Gemma Puglisi

On June 26th, the state of Texas executed its 500th inmate. Kimberly McCarthy, 52, was found guilty of murdering her 71-year-old neighbor, a retired college psychology professor back in l997. McCarthy, a crack cocaine addict, robbed, beat, and stabbed Dorothy Booth, after asking for a cup of sugar. Throughout McCarthy’s trial, her former ex-husband, Black Panther Party founder Aaron Michaels, testified on her behalf. The two were separated before Booth’s murder.

All a tragic story. After reading about the case and the execution, I learned more. This has all become important to me after knowing former death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis. I became friends with Davis simply by reading about his case back in 2007. In 2011, “Troy” was executed by the state of Georgia for the murder of Police Officer Mark MacPhail. Officer MacPhail was white, and the father of two young children. Troy always maintained his innocence. There was never any evidence linking him to the crime other than witnesses who said he did it. Years later, seven of the nine recanted stating that they were coerced by the police. Despite so many unanswered questions — and support from Amnesty International, the NAACP, Desmond Tutu, former President Jimmy Carter, and literally millions of supporters, Troy was executed on Sept. 21, 2011.

Dorothy Booth’s death was horrible. She and her family deserved justice. No question. As I researched McCarthy’s case and read more about it, I learned that her attorney Maurie Levin had asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to halt the execution, because black jurors were excluded from her trial by Dallas County prosecutors. The jurors in her case were all white except for one.

After Troy’s execution, I find myself talking to attorneys who have worked tirelessly to seek justice for death row inmates — and may not have had fair trials. In 2010, a call led to my meeting attorney James Rocap — who represented Teresa Lewis — the first women executed in the state of Virginia in 50 years. (Lewis’ case was controversial because of her mental capacity. Supporters said she was borderline mentally retarded. Lewis was found guilty of having her husband and stepson murdered. It was believed she was not capable of orchestrating the murders because of her mental capacity.) Despite all this, she was executed Sept. 23, 2010 — almost exactly a year before Troy.

In a statement issued following the execution of Kimberly McCarthy, attorney Levin said: “500 is 500 too many. I look forward to the day when we recognize that this pointless and barbaric practice, imposed almost exclusively on those who are poor and disproportionately on people of color, has no place in a civilized society.”

That is the tragedy of Texas’s 500th execution. That state leads the country in most executions. We are a civilized society, and the death penalty is barbaric and senseless and in so many cases. There is no question that those who kill should be accountable for their horrible actions. And prison is that punishment. There are too many cases today where there is doubt, many unanswered questions, and injustice.

Troy’s dream was that executions end. I couldn’t help but think of him when I read about this recent news.

I pulled out a letter he mailed me months before his execution. He said, “Deter prejudice, hatred and racism by ending the death penalty now. ‘An eye for an eye’ leaves the entire world blind. How can the U.S. be a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world when Justice includes the death penalty… we lose all credibility with the death penalty.”

Young Killers in Texas Await Change in Mandatory Life Sentences

NEW BOSTON, Tex. — Scottie Forcey nervously drummed his fingers behind the thick glass in the Telford Unit’s visiting room as the camera shutter snapped, capturing images of the 21-year-old convicted murderer.

“I want some pictures. I ain’t seen myself in like” — he paused to count on his fingers — “five years. I know I look different. Check it out.” He pressed his prison ID card against the glass. In the photo, a plumper, baby-faced 17-year-old stared at the camera.

Mr. Forcey was convicted in 2009 of fatally shooting Karen Burke, a 52-year-old Alvarado convenience store clerk. He is the youngest of 23 Texas Department of Criminal Justice inmates who received mandatory sentences of life without parole for committing capital murder when they were younger than 18.

Now, as legislators work to comply with a United States Supreme Court ruling, those inmates could become eligible for parole after serving 40 years.

The justices ruled last year that sentences of life without parole for 17-year-old murderers violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Either the courts or Gov. Rick Perry could change such sentences in Texas. But both are waiting for legislators to decide what punishment juveniles like Mr. Forcey should face. Lawmakers, who failed to pass legislation in two sessions this year, are trying now for a third time.

In Texas, 17-year-olds have faced the same sentencing options as adults convicted of capital murder: the death penalty or life without parole. In 2005, the Supreme Court prohibited the death penalty for anyone under 18, deciding that the less-developed brains of juveniles rendered them less culpable. That left only life without parole as the punishment for 17-year-olds.

After the court’s decision last year, in Miller v. Alabama, prosecutors said they had no sentencing options for 17-year-old killers. They asked lawmakers to make them subject to the same punishment Texas law requires for 14- to 16-year-old capital murderers: life with parole eligibility after 40 years.

Lance Long, a Harris County assistant district attorney, recently told lawmakers that until they decided on a sentencing option, such murder trials were being delayed across Texas.

“None of these cases are anything but very, very, very serious,” Mr. Long said.

The Texas Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee has approved a bill that would require a sentence of life with parole eligibility after 40 years. The House, however, has indicated it wants to give juries the option to sentence 17-year-olds to life without parole if other factors — like evidence of abuse or mental illness — are considered.

In previous sessions this year, both chambers approved bills addressing the sentencing question, but time ran out before they could get final approval.

Mr. Perry has told prosecutors that when lawmakers decided on a new sentencing bill, he would consider recommending commutation for inmates like Mr. Forcey who were sentenced under the old law.

“It really only seems fair and just,” said Justin Wood, the legislative liaison for the Harris County district attorney’s office in Houston.

Mr. Forcey, meanwhile, contends that he did not pull the trigger in Ms. Burke’s murder in 2008. He said he was targeted because he ran with the wrong crowd.

Now, he said, “I wouldn’t put myself in that situation.”

Mr. Forcey has spent most of the last four years in isolation, punishment for fights he said were constant when he first arrived.

“I grew up back there,” he said.

Asked about the possibility that his sentence could be commuted, Mr. Forcey was ambivalent. Forty years, he said, is too long.

Then a wide smile spread across his face. He figures he will be out by December. Mr. Forcey spent those years in isolation researching his case, he said, and plans to file an appeal.

“My mind’s already set,” he said. “I’m going home — wherever home is.”

Texas: From America’s Busiest Death Chamber, a Catalog of Last Rants, Pleas and Apologies Texas Department of Criminal Justice

Karl Eugene Chamberlain went to his neighbor’s apartment that night in Dallas under the pretense of borrowing sugar. He returned later, forced her into a bedroom, bound her hands and feet, raped her and then used a rifle to shoot and kill her. His victim, Felecia Prechtl, 29, was a single mother with a 5-year-old son.

11 years after he was convicted of capital murder, Mr. Chamberlain, 37, was strapped to a gurney in Texas’ execution chamber at the Walls Unit prison here and was asked by a warden if he had any last words. “Thank you for being here today to honor Felecia Prechtl, whom I didn’t even know,” he told her son, parents and brother on June 11, 2008. “I am so terribly sorry. I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am.”

His words did not die with him. Texas wrote them down, kept them and posted them on the Internet.

The state with the busiest death chamber in America publishes the final statements of the inmates it has executed on a prison agency Web site, a kind of public catalog of the rantings, apologies, prayers, claims of innocence and confessions of hundreds of men and women in the minutes before their deaths.

Charles Nealy asked to be buried not to the left of his father but to the right of his mother. Domingo Cantu Jr., who dragged a 94-year-old widow across the top of a chain-link fence, sexually assaulted her and then killed her, told his wife that he loved her and would be waiting for her on the other side.

The condemned praised Allah and Jesus and Sant Ajaib Singh Ji, a Sikh master. 3 cheered for their favorite sports teams, including Jesse Hernandez, whose execution last year made headlines after he shouted, “Go Cowboys!” They spoke in English, Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Gaelic, German (“Meine schone prinzessin,” said Mr. Cantu, German for “my beautiful princess”). They quoted the Koran and the Bible, but also Todd Beamer’s phrase aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

“Sir, in honor of a true American hero, ‘Let’s roll,'” said David Ray Harris, who was dishonorably discharged from the Army and was executed in 2004 for killing a man who tried to stop him from kidnapping the man’s girlfriend.

The execution on Wednesday of Kimberly McCarthy – a 52-year-old woman convicted of robbing, beating and fatally stabbing a retired psychology professor near Dallas – was the 500th in Texas since December 1982, when the state resumed capital punishment after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. In those 30 years, Texas has executed more people than Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma and Virginia combined.

The state’s execution record has often been criticized as a dehumanizing pursuit of eye-for-an-eye justice. But three decades of last statements by inmates reveal a glimmer of the humanity behind those anonymous numbers, as the indifferent bureaucracy of state-sanctioned death pauses for one sad, intimate and often angry moment.

“I hope that one day we can look back on the evil that we’re doing right now like the witches we burned at the stake,” said Thomas A. Barefoot, who was convicted of murdering a police officer and was executed on Oct. 30, 1984.

Among the death-penalty states, Texas and California are the only ones that make the last words of offenders available on their Web sites. But only Texas has compiled and listed each statement in what amounts to an online archive. The collection of 500 statements, which includes inmates’ verbal as well as written remarks, has been the subject of analysis, criticism and debate by lawyers, criminal justice researchers and activists who oppose the death penalty.

It has spawned at least one blog, Lost Words in the Chamber, which has regularly posted the last statements since 2011. Officials with the prison agency, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said there were 3 million page views of inmates’ final words last year.

“It’s kind of mesmerizing to read through these,” said Robert Perkinson, the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire” and a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “Most people about to be executed haven’t had a lot of success in school or life. They’re not always so skilled at articulating themselves. There are plenty of cliches, sometimes peculiar ones, like the Cowboys reference. But I think many of these individuals are also striving to say something poignant, worthy of the existential occasion.”

The last statements are not uttered in a vacuum – they are heard by lawyers, reporters and prison officials, as well as the inmates’ families and victims’ relatives. But the power of their words to change the system or even heal the hearts of those they have hurt is uncertain.

Nearly 7 years after he murdered a Houston city marshal who caught him with cash and loose change stuffed into his pockets from the bar he had just robbed, Charles William Bass refused his last meal and told the warden in 1986, “I deserve this.” “I think he was correct,” said Mr. Baker, 63, a minister at the Church of Christ in Emory, Tex., who was 29 when his father was killed. “It’s called capital punishment for a reason.”

Strapped to a gurney in a spare brick room painted dark green, the inmates nowadays speak into a microphone attached to the ceiling, their arms stretched out and buckled into a T-shaped gurney so the drugs flow easily from the IVs into their veins. With the victims’ and the inmates’ witnesses in place in 2 separate rooms, the warden asks the inmate if there is a last statement. The last words are not recorded, but transcribed by hand by staff members listening inside the warden’s office.

Jim Willett, 63, a retired Walls Unit warden, said none of the 89 statements he heard from 1998 to 2001 changed his support for the death penalty.

“You can hear it in their voices sometimes and in their delivery that they are sincerely hurting for the pain that they put their own family through,” said Mr. Willett, the director of the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville. “I saw the strangest thing one night. You got this little wall here like this, separating those 2 witness rooms. One night I saw the daughter of the inmate and the daughter of the victim, and they were both leaning against that wall. They were that far apart and didn’t even know it.”

Jason Clark, a spokesman for the prison agency, said the last statements were posted to respond to the demand for that information by the public and journalists. But opponents of the death penalty call it a perverse tradition.

“The death penalty is a process, not an act, and posting the final words of a condemned person after a process which has usually lasted a decade or more is simply a disservice,” said Rick Halperin, director of the Embrey Human Rights Program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “How is one to assess the phrase of ‘Go Cowboys!’ from a man on a gurney?”

Freddie Webb said 1 word – “Peace” – but James Lee Beathard, who murdered his accomplice’s father, stepmother and half-brother, said 684 of them in December 1999, in a rambling statement that mentioned the embargoes against Iran and Cuba. He viewed his final minutes the way others had – as a fleeting moment on a stage, with a silent, watchful audience. “Couple of matters that I want to talk about,” he said, “since this is one of the few times people will listen to what I have to say.”

(source: New York Times)

Ex-Texas Warden Reflects After 140 Executions-Charles Thomas O’Reilly

June 27, 2013  AP

Charles Thomas O’Reilly supported capital punishment when he oversaw his first Texas execution. And he still supported it after his 100th.

In six years as warden of the Huntsville Unit, the prison that houses Texas’ death chamber, O’Reilly supervised about 140 executions — more than any other warden in state history.

Now retired, he reflected on his career this week as the nation’s busiest death penalty state as the state executed its 500th inmate since resuming capital punishment in 1982.

The 62-year-old said he has no regrets about a process he considered to be a relatively unemotional and small part of his job.

“If you do 140 of them and then decide you can’t do them, then I think you’ve pushed it a little too far,” O’Reilly said during an interview with The Associated Press in Forney, about 175 miles away from Huntsville. “If you can’t do it, you should have made that decision after one, or maybe two.”

O’Reilly, who retired in 2010, recalled meeting condemned inmates when they arrived at Huntsville the afternoon of their executions.

“I’ll tell him that we’re going to treat him with as much dignity as he’ll allow us to,” O’Reilly said. Then at 6 p.m., he would return to the inmate’s holding cell and say two words: “It’s time.”

Texas 500th Execution Warden.JPEG

A five-man team walked each inmate to the death chamber and tied the prisoner to a gurney. Other staff members ran IV lines for the execution drugs.

Before the lethal injection began, O’Reilly would ask the inmate for any last words. He liked to give each inmate about three minutes, though he rarely cut anyone off.

Once the inmate’s final statement was complete, O’Reilly used a hand-held clicker to signal to the drug room that it was time to start. Minutes later, he would signal to a doctor to check the inmate’s pulse and declare him dead.

Relatives of the condemned inmates and victims typically watched through a window.

“There’s not a lot said,” O’Reilly said. “Everybody knows their job, knows how to do it, when to do it.”

He does not remember the name of the first inmate executed during his tenure, but a few names stand out. They include Frances Newton, the only woman executed on his watch. Condemned to death for killing her husband and two children, she was executed in 2005, becoming just the third woman put to death since Texas resumed capital punishment.

O’Reilly said he was more concerned with making sure executions were done professionally. He recalls the professionalism of the prison chaplain and the staff he hand-picked to assist with executions.

Speaking in a low Texas drawl, O’Reilly’s voice hardens when asked about his personal views on the death penalty. He said it’s the appropriate way to deal with society’s worst criminals, such as someone who rapes and kills a 7-year-old girl.

“As far as I’m concerned, that person probably got a just punishment for the crime that he committed,” O’Reilly said. “Like me or anybody else, we all have to take responsibility for our own actions. Our actions are our choice. The consequences for those actions are not our choice.”

Although the fight over the death penalty is often heated, O’Reilly said the process of an execution is quiet and simple.

“It doesn’t take long. There’s not a lot said,” O’Reilly said. “All you’re going to do there is watch a guy go to sleep.”

Texas town where detention and death is a way of life

Texas town where detention and death is a way of life

With 7 prisons, a cemetery for dead inmates and its infamous execution chamber, the business of detention and death is a way of life in the Texas town of Huntsville.

In this neat and tidy city north of Houston, prisoners recognizable by their white uniforms, maintain public green spaces under a blazing sun and the gaze of a guard, sitting on the edge of a car.

“These are trustees,” says the corrections officer. The inmates in question are low-level criminals convicted of crimes such as car theft or burglary.

Out of Huntsville’s population of 38,000 people, 14,000 are prisoners while a further 6,000 are guards or employees of the Texas Justice Department.

Instead of tourist signs pointing out antique shops, the tomb of famous Texas Governor Sam Houston, or other places of interest, a visitor is guided to the various prisons: the Wynne Unit, the Byrne Unit, Hollyday Unit.

“Prison, it’s an industry here,” says Kathreen Case, executive director of the Texas defender service. “It is their industry, it is amazing how many people can earn their lives out of it.”

Prisons generate 16.6 million dollars in wages per month, while nearly 200 educators from the Windham School District contribute another 740,000 dollars each month to the local economy, according to the local Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s a prison town, everybody knows somebody that works in the prison system,” says Gloria Rubac, an activist who campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty in Texas. “It’s a very prison-oriented town.”

Prisoners are put to work in a number of schemes, doing everything from manufacturing their own clothes or the uniforms of prison guards to feeding and raising chickens.

“If we didn’t have the prison system and if we didn’t have the university, I don’t know if you’d even have a traffic light in this town,” said Jim Willett, former warden and commissioner at the Walls Unit, the oldest of 7 prisons.

An imposing building guarded by high red brick walls, the Walls Unit is set just a short distance from downtown Huntsville.

In the northeast corner of the building, topped by a watchtower, is the execution chamber, reveals Willett, who gave the green light to 89 executions in his 30-year career.

The clock on the facade of the building is the usual gathering point for anti-death penalty activists ahead of each execution.

They will gather again here Wednesday for the 500th execution scheduled since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the United States in 1976.

Previously, those sentenced to die were also imprisoned at the facility, but due to over-crowding amid soaring convictions, they were transferred to the Ellis Unit and later to the maximum security Polunsky Unit.

A few hours before execution, the prisoner is taken from death row, a concrete fortress topped by razor wire where narrow slits are the only openings to the outside world, and transferred to the Huntsville execution chamber.

The condemned prisoner’s final journey is a scenic route along the shores of Lake Livingston, surrounded by cedar forests. The precise route of a prisoner’s final journey is never revealed for security reasons.

Since his retirement, Willett has taken over responsibility as curator for the Huntsville prison museum, one of the most popular stops on the tourist trail, where exhibits include the final words of those executed.

Pride of place is given to “Old Sparky” the nickname for the electric chair, which was responsible for sending 361 prisoners to their deaths before its use was discontinued in 1965.

Large syringes and straps on display reflect Texas’s transition to the use of lethal injection as the preferred method of execution.

A gift shop sells mugs and T-shirts with death row symbols as well as novelty items notable for their black humor, including “Solitary Confine-mints.”

A couple of blocks away is Hospitality House, a charitable organization run by 2 baptist pastors which aims to offer support to the families and loved ones of those who are condemned to death.

“The families shouldn’t be punished,” says Debra McCammon, the executive director of Hospitality House, describing them as “the other victims of crime.”

It is also here that the prison chaplain prepares families in order to avoid “hysteria or panic” during executions.

A guided tour of the city’s jails ends with the cemetery of prisoners, situated on a green hill shaded by sycamore trees.

Some 3,000 concrete crosses have been erected at the site since the 1st burials in the 19th century. Many graves are anonymous, while some are identified only by their prisoner number.

Others carry a single 1-word epitaph: “Executed.”

(source: Global Post)

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Execution date moved for El Paso man convicted of killing boy -Rigoberto “Robert” Avila Jr.

June 24, 2013 elpasotimes.com

 

The execution date for an El Paso man convicted in the 2000 death of his then-girlfriend’s 19-month-old son has been rescheduled again.

The request was made by his attorneys who wanted more time to explore the possibility he may be innocent.

Rigoberto “Robert” Avila Jr., 40, has been on Texas’ death row since 2001 after his capital murder conviction in the Feb. 29, 2000, death of Nicolas Macias.

In 2001, a state district court jury sentenced Avila to death after convicting him in Nicolas’ death. Prosecutors had alleged Avila fatally beat Nicolas while Avila was baby-sitting Nicolas and his sibling.

At the time, Avila was dating the children’s mother, who was attending classes when Nicolas was injured. Nicolas’ mother, Marcelina Macias, has declined interview requests from the El Paso Times.

Avila was initially scheduled to be executed on Dec. 12 — which happened to be the Catholic Church’s feast day for Our Lady of Guadalupe — but was rescheduled for April 10. After defense attorneys asked for more time to explore scientific evidence in the case, Avila‘s execution was rescheduled again for July 10.

Cathryn Crawford and Kathryn Kase, attorneys with the Texas Defender Service who are representing Avila in his appeals, requested that Avila’s July 10 execution date be withdrawn to allow them to explore the possibility Avila may be innocent, based on a scientific study that Nicolas was injured by a sibling.

District Attorney Jaime

Esparza did not oppose the request, which was granted by 41st District Judge Anna Perez last week. Perez also scheduled a new execution date in January 2014.

Avila’s attorneys commended Esparza for not opposing their request for more time. Esparza declined to comment on the request, but said he allowed prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Avila based on Nicolas’ brutal death. At the time, jurors did not have the option of sentencing Avila to life in prison without parole.

According to testimony by two medical experts at Avila’s trial, Nicolas had severe internal injuries, including a severed pancreas, that were caused by the same amount of force seen in high-speed traffic crashes. They also testified Nicolas’ injuries could not have been caused by an accident.

One witness, pediatric surgeon Dr. George Raschbaum, testified the only way a 4-year-old child could have caused Nicolas’ injuries was if he had jumped on Nicolas from a height of 20 feet.

During an El Paso Times editorial board meeting last week, Crawford said testing by their defense expert indicates Nicolas’ injuries could have been caused by a 4-year-old child jumping from a height of 16 to 24 inches. The bed in the bedroom Nicolas and his sibling were playing in was 18 inches high.

“It is very clear that physically, this is a very possible scenario,” Crawford said. “We’re hoping to present the evidence to the court to determine if the jury had heard this, would they have possibly found him not guilty. That’s all we’re asking for.”

Crawford and Kase stopped short of saying Avila is innocent, but said they are exploring the possibility Nicolas was fatally injured by his 4-year-old sibling, who was mimicking wrestling moves both had seen on pay-per-view a few days earlier.

According to preliminary biomechanical testing conducted by a defense expert, Crawford and Kase said, it is possible Nicolas could have suffered his injuries after his sibling leaped from a bed onto the boy, who was lying on the floor.

However, the biomechanical testing was not available to Avila’s defense attorneys at the time of his 2001 trial, and according to Senate Bill 344, a state law that will take effect Sept. 1, a defendant is entitled to a court hearing based on “relevant scientific evidence” not available at the time of the defendant’s trial.

Crawford said she and Kase are also looking into the possibility that Avila unknowingly signed a confession where he admitted to hitting Nicolas.

Avila had initially told then-El Paso police homicide Detective Tony Tabullo that Nicolas and his sibling were playing in a bedroom while Avila was watching television in a different room when Nicolas’ sibling told Avila the boy was not breathing.

Crawford said in the first statement, Avila initialed each paragraph indicating he had read them. She said Avila’s first statement was consistent with what he told police and paramedics at the scene and what Nicolas’ sibling described during an initial interview with a police investigator.

During the early morning hours of March 1, 2000, while Avila was still at police headquarters, Tabullo learned of a bruise on Nicolas’ abdomen that paramedics interpreted as a shoe mark, Crawford said.

Crawford said Tabullo, who retired from the police department in 2003, had Avila sign a second statement that said Avila confessed to beating Nicolas. Avila signed the second statement because he trusted it was the same as the first.

Kase and Crawford also noted Avila had no previous criminal or violent history and was a Navy veteran.

Crawford and Kase said they expect to file more extensive documents once the new law becomes effective in September. Kase said Avila’s case will very likely be the first case heard under the new law.