Wrong Man Executed? Most Of The Murderers Or Just Most Of The Executions In Texas?

“A guilty man, punished, is an example for the mob; an innocent man, convicted, is the business of every honest person.”

-Jean de La Bruyere (1688)
http://www.corporatecrimecontrol.com/criminaldefense.htm



GUILT INDETERMINATE





Nation



Frances Newman

Woman Executed for Texas Family Slayings


By MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press Writer

September 15, 2005, 5:51 AM EDT

HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- Frances Newton was executed Wednesday for the fatal shootings of her husband and two children 18 years ago, becoming the third woman, and first black woman, to be put to death in the state since executions resumed in 1982.

Strapped to the death chamber gurney and with her parents among the people watching, she declined to make a final statement, quietly saying "no" and shaking her head when the warden asked if she would like to speak.

Newton, 40, briefly turned her head to look at her family as the drugs began flowing. She appeared to try to mouth something to her relatives, but the drugs took effect. She coughed once and gasped as her eyes closed. She was pronounced dead eight minutes later.

One of her sisters stood against a wall at the rear of the death house, her head buried in her arms. Her parents held hands and her mother brushed away a tear before they walked to the back of the chamber to console their other daughter.

"She's back with her family, in her mind," said John LaGrappe, one of her attorneys, who met with Newton less than two hours before she was executed and described her as "strong and optimistic. ... It's her faith in God."

He characterized her as the victim of laws that denied her access to the Supreme Court and blamed state-appointed lawyers early in her appeals process for missing deadlines that barred Newton from raising legal claims.

"It's a sad statement about the judicial process," he said.

Without dissent, the Supreme Court declined a pair of appeals about an hour before Newton was scheduled to be taken to the Texas death chamber.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which last year paved the way for Gov. Rick Perry to issue a reprieve about two hours before Newton was set to die, on Monday unanimously rejected a request that her death sentence be commuted to life in prison. Perry rejected another delay in the execution Wednesday afternoon.

She also lost appeals in state and lower federal courts. Her execution was the 13th this year in Texas. She was the 11th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court in 1976 allowed the death penalty to resume.

Newton didn't deny putting a gun in her 7-year-old son's knapsack and stashing the bag at an abandoned house. But she and her lawyers argued the .25-caliber blue steel revolver she hid was not the one used to fatally shoot her son, Alton; her 21-month-old daughter, Farrah; and her husband, Adrian, 23, at their Houston apartment.

Newton all along insisted she was innocent, and the claim about the gun was among several in her appeal to the Supreme Court. She also contended her trial attorneys were incompetent and evidence at her trial improperly was destroyed.

"I know I did not murder my kids and my family," she told The Associated Press in a death row interview. "It's frustrating ... nobody's had to answer for that."

Prosecutors called Newton's appeals meritless, noting that a second gun never was recovered, that repeated ballistics tests confirmed the gun she hid was the murder weapon, and that any destruction of evidence was not improper.

Prosecutors said an insurance payoff was the motive for the slayings.



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Tabacco: Whether Frances Newman was guilty of murder is not the question. Nor is the question whether she had inadequate legal representation. In Texas, it is possible for anyone with excellent legal representation to still be convicted and executed. The question is how Texas or any other State can convict and execute anyone at all. The corollary, for those bloodthirsty disciples of the Old Testament, is how Texas or any other State can convict and execute anyone, who might be innocent. Circumstantial and sometimes eyewitness evidence is not enough for a juror of good conscience to send anyone to his or her death, when he or she “may” be innocent.

Of course, the law doesn’t require absolute proof of guilt, just a preponderance of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise. The Courts won’t admit that. They say “beyond a reasonable doubt”. But many have been executed, who were found “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”, only to be found ‘innocent’ after they were executed.

Juries convict because they don’t like a defendant. Is that jurisprudence? They acquit because they do like a defendant. The American electorate chooses a President in much the same manner. Both are reprehensible manifestations of ‘democracy’. Isn’t it possible for a defendant to be unlikable and innocent? Isn’t it possible for a President to be competent and unattractive with less than adequate verbal skills? Lest you answer that last question, “No”, please remember that the profile, just presented, was that of Abraham Lincoln. He would never get elected today, in our current version of democracy, for just those capricious, specious and irrelevant reasons.


INNOCENCE EXECUTED – OR

FREED FROM DEATH ROW


Tabbaco: Proof of the Jurisprudence’s “Fatal & Irrevocable Errors” is hard to come by. Prosecutors don’t want to follow up when executions have already taken place, often because of their own overzealousness or underhanded and illegal actions. Judges feel embarrassed, as do witnesses. The “System” has been compromised; the innocent deceased is ignored as much as possible. But if so many people have been freed from Death Row, mainly due to DNA testing, we know many have been executed, who were innocent of any crime, but for whom DNA came too late.




DEATH ROW: 600 Have Been Executed, but How

Many Were Guilty?


Why Death Penalty Supporters Are Abandoning Capital Punishment

Tom Wicker was a columnist for the New York Times for twenty-five years before retiring in 1991. He is the author of more than a dozen books including, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream.


Governor George Ryan of Illinois supports the death penalty, as do apparently most Americans. But he's drawn the proper conclusion from abundant evidence and declared a moratorium on executions in his state because the administration of capital punishment "has proven so fraught with error."

Error, moreover, of the most indefensible sort - thirteen Illinoisians sentenced to death since 1977 but later found innocent and freed; a total of eighty-five Americans sent to death row since 1973, but later exonerated.

More than 600 persons have been executed in this country since 1977, but the evidence of error on which Governor Ryan acted suggests all too plainly that many of the 600 may well have been innocent of the crimes for which they were sent to the gas chamber or the electric chair or the lethal-injection gurney.

In 1987 alone, ten persons facing execution were found to be innocent after all. Last year, the total was eight.

Governor Ryan courageously took a step that more and more Americans are coming to consider both cautious and just. It's not a matter of being against the death penalty on religious or humanitarian grounds, or even of considering execution the "cruel and unusual punishment" forbidden by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. It's a question of fairness, as even some of those who favor the death penalty will concede.

It isn't even solely a matter of innocent persons - too often - being convicted and executed for crimes they did not commit, although that's clearly the worst administrative problem with the death penalty. Imposition of capital punishment also varies from state to state among the thirty-eight that permit executions, with some murderers being sentenced to death for a particular crime in, say, California, but others receiving lesser penalties in other states for a similar crime. Convicted murderers in the other twelve states, of course, never suffer execution.

In cases involving multiple defendants in a crime that resulted in a murder, instances have even been recorded in which the person who pulled the trigger or sank the knife was spared the execution as a reward for testifying against a partner in the crime - who was then executed.

As in most matters of criminal justice in America, moreover, there's a real racial question. Statistics show that blacks, who kill whites, are more often executed, no matter what the circumstances, than whites, who kill blacks. Overall, members of minority groups are more likely to be given the death penalty than are others.

Instances abound, moreover, in which persons sentenced to death have received an inadequate legal defense, in which the appeals of convicted persons have been denied on technical grounds (such as having been filed after an arbitrary date), and in which affluent defendants have been able to engage expensive defense lawyers although the poor are assigned sometimes indifferent or hostile public defenders.

On the other hand, there is no statistical or other evidence to support the almost theological belief of many Americans that the death penalty is a "deterrent" to murder and other violent crimes. Comparisons between states that conduct executions and those that do not impose the death penalty fail to support this belief; so does the demonstrated fact that most murders are crimes of momentary passion unlikely to be "deterred" by rational considerations of the consequences.

Illinois is by no means the only state in which the administration of the death penalty is "fraught with error." In twelve other death-penalty states, bills are pending that would stop executions. A moratorium bill was passed in Nebraska last year, based on racial disparities in executions; it was vetoed by Governor Mike Johanns. The U.S. Supreme Court also has refused to accept evidence of racial unfairness as grounds for outlawing the death penalty.

In Illinois, in nine of the cases of persons freed from the state's death row since 1977, the necessary new evidence was found by students and professors at Northwestern University. That's a badge of honor for them but a poor testimonial to the diligence of prosecutors, defense attorneys and courts in Illinois. The state prosecutor's office, perhaps as a consequence, has not demanded a death penalty for a defendant since April 1998.

The most serious opponents of capital punishment have long believed that if it were ever to be declared unconstitutional, it would be on the grounds of fairness and owing to proof that the administration of the death penalty, in Governor Ryan's words, is indeed "fraught with error." When the Supreme Court found capital punishment unconstitutional in 1972 (it was later reinstated), three of the justices making up the five-man majority held in separate opinions that the death penalty as then administrated was too arbitrary to pass a constitutional test.

Justice Harry Blackman, shortly before his retirement from the Supreme Court, issued a statement in which he regretted upholding the death penalty and said he had concluded that its administration was so "random and arbitrary" that it could never be made "consistent with the Constitution."

The justices' reasoning and that of Governor Ryan generally reflect the words of the late Charles Black, Sterling professor of law at Yale, in his Holmes Lectures at the Harvard Law School in 1977:

"Mistake and arbitrariness in death-penalty cases are not fringe problems, susceptible to being mopped up by minor refinements, but are at the very heart of the matter and are insoluble by any methods now known or now foreseeable."

Published: Feb 03 2000
http://www.tompaine.com/scontent/2719.html

Republican Governor, George Ryan of Illinois, imposed a moratorium on executions in Jan., 2003, and commuted the sentences of 167 inmates on Death Row before leaving office.


Gov. Ryan ignited national and even international debate Saturday by taking all 167 prisoners off Illinois' Death Row, blowing away the modern record of eight commutations set by former Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste. Ryan gave 160 men and 4 women life sentences without the possibility of parole. Three men received reduced sentences that could allow them to be released shortly. A day earlier, Ryan gave outright pardons to 4 other men on Death Row, bringing to 171 the total spared potential lethal injections. The extraordinary move prompted outrage and anguish from prosecutors and some murder victims' families, who received letters from Ryan on Saturday morning telling them what he was about to do.
http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/illinois.htm



September 15, 2005

BY NATASHA KORECKI Federal Courts Reporter


About 300 prospective jurors who entered the downtown federal courthouse Wednesday learned they could be chosen to sit on one of the biggest public corruption trials in Illinois history.

Ryan, 71, who served two terms as secretary of state and one as governor, is headed to trial on charges he accepted cash, gifts, vacations and other perks while in office, and in return steered contracts to his friends. Warner is accused of shaking down state vendors for lobbying business.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-ryan15.html

Tabacco: I find this extremely suspicious! Is it warranted, or is it retribution for the Death Row releases?






Why is there no legal redress against District Attorneys, who prosecute individuals unfairly?

1- Withholding of any evidence from defense attorneys (too often, DA’s say after the fact, “We didn’t think that information was relevant to the defense”).

2- Deliberate use of convicted felons’ perjured testimony to convict another defendant

3- Offering of bribes, such as reduced prison time or no time at all, to acquire perjured testimony

4- Threatening convicted felons with prison time if they do not testify falsely

5- Use of any evidence at trial they know to be false


Incidentally, the United States stands almost alone in the use of Capital Punishment among civilized nations.

Three Congressional acts are necessary to prevent the deaths of innocent people through execution:

I- A Federal Law criminalizing illegal and unfair actions, including the bribing and pressuring of convicted felons to serve as false witnesses, and the withholding of evidence from defense attorneys by Prosecutors (District Attorneys & their staffs; if convicted, punishment would be commensurate with the penalty given the person, unfairly prosecuted). This Federal Law would apply to all prosecutions, not just capital crimes.

II- Federal “guidelines” re the qualifications of Public Defenders in capital murder cases must be universally consistent.

III- A Federal Law making capital punishment illegal throughout the United States.

In short,

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MUST GO!


Please refer to a prior published Article, “Plan! To End War & Capital Punishment (Sanctioned Murders) In The USA –I” @: http://tabacco.myblogsite.com/



T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)

tags: capital punishment  dna  death