Banned in Texas prisons: books and magazines that many would consider classics

Ask the Texas Department of Criminal Justice how many book and magazine titles it has reviewed over the years to determine if the reading material is suitable for its inmates, and officials will give you a precise number: 89,795.

Ask how many authors are represented on the list, and they can tell you that, too: 40,285.

But ask how many of those books and magazines have been rejected because prison reviewers decided they contain inappropriate content, and prison officials will tell you that information is unavailable: "There's just no way to break that out," said Tammy Shelby, a program specialist for the prison agency's Mail System Coordinators Panel.

But after the Statesman reviewed five years' worth of publications — about 5,000 titles — whose rejections were appealed by inmates to the agency's headquarters in Huntsville and obtained through open records requests, one thing is clear: Texas prisoners are missing out on some fine reading.

Novels by National Book Award winners Pete Dexter, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx and William T. Vollmann have been banned in recent years. Award finalists Katherine Dunn and Barry Hannah are on the Texas no-read list, too, as are Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren and John Updike.

Prisoners can't peruse certain books by Pablo Neruda and Andre Gide, both Nobel laureates. "Krik? Krak!" by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, who last year won a MacArthur "genius" grant, is prohibited behind Lone Star bars. Books of paintings by some of the world's greatest artists — da Vinci, Picasso, Botticelli, Michelangelo — have been ordered out of state correctional facilities.

Texas prison officials said restrictions on reading material are for the good of both guards and inmates. "We have to protect the safety and security of our institution, but also aid in the rehabilitation of our offenders," said Jason Clark, an agency spokesman.

"And what may not be judged inflammatory in the public at large can be inflammatory in prison."

Texas inmates can receive published material only from publishers or bookstores. Each year, family members, friends and nonprofit organizations arrange to send thousands of books and magazines to prisoners.

Common requests include dictionaries, pulp fiction — Westerns and Star Trek, in particular — and legal and health books, said Scott O'Dierno, who manages Austin-based Inside Books, which has been sending the written word to Texas prisoners for 11 years.

When a book arrives at a Texas prison mailroom, an employee first checks the database to see if the book is already prohibited. If not, said Shelby, "he'll flip it over and read the back." If that provides insufficient information to make a decision, "they scan through it looking for key words" or pictures that would disqualify the publication.

"You can pretty much tell by reading the first few pages," she said. "We rely on them to use their judgment."

Perhaps the most common reason for diverting books from Texas prisoners is sex, portrayed in images and words, although prison officials have struggled to define what's permissible. Inmates could receive magazines like Playboy and Penthouse until 2004, when they were banned, Smith said.

A book or magazine also would be rejected if it "would encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior."

In 2007, the "homosexual" reference was deleted, though not before it ensnared "Brokeback Mountain," Proulx's prize-winning love story about two cowboys. ("Homophobia: A History," on the other hand, was approved in 2006.) Written descriptions of other sexual practices — sadomasochism, rape and incest — remain grounds for summary rejection.

State prison administrators have taken an even harder line with images. While pictures of naked buttocks are permitted, depictions of genitalia and women's bare breasts are not.

Art has proved especially tricky to regulate. Shelby said she tries to educate mailroom workers to keep their hands off books of paintings featuring naked adults. Yet many great works also display naked children, and books featuring the work of some of the world's best-known artists, including Caravaggio and Rembrandt, have been blocked.

"Things that would be in the Vatican aren't allowed in TDCJ," said O'Dierno, who said his organization has used magic markers to obscure body parts before mailing some books to a Texas prison. In 2006, censors rejected "The Sistine Chapel Coloring Book."

Click here to read this feature in full.

Source: The Statesman, January 31, 2010

Trouble on death row

On New Year’s Day, 2010, convicted murderer Leeland Mark Braley was found hanged dead in his cell on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. His apparent suicide, currently under investigation by the Department of Corrections, marked the third non-execution death on the row since October 2009. Since Braley’s death, new restrictions, meant to enhance security within the prison, have been placed on inmates’ privileges including the revocation of contact visits with family and loved ones for all prisoners.

Advocates for the inmates and their families, however, say the restrictions, especially the elimination of nearly all physical contact with anyone from outside the prison walls, goes beyond the limits of humane punishment or reasonable security measures.

Click here to read this feature in full.

Source: The Sunday Paper, January 31, 2010

Iran puts 16 protesters on trial

Tehran, Iran (CNN) -- Sixteen opposition protesters went on trial Saturday in Iran on charges that they tried to overthrow the government, state-run media said.

Their court appearance came two days after the government executed two dissidents -- an act that drew international condemnation.

There was no immediate word on the outcome of Saturday's court appearance.

The demonstrators face charges linked to anti-government protests during the December 27 observances of Ashura, a major Shiite Muslim holy day. They are accused of plotting against the establishment, rioting and conspiring against the ruling system, and violating security regulations, according to the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency.

The Ashura clashes between security forces and anti-government demonstrators were the bloodiest since the post-election protests last summer.

The 16 also are accused of sending videos of the demonstrations to "foreign hostile networks," according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Five of the defendants, including two women, are accused of "moharebeh," or defying God, a charge that could carry the death penalty, the ISNA said.

Opposition protests were launched after the disputed June 12 presidential election that gave hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The government denies accusations of fraud.

About 4,000 people have been arrested in the post-election crackdown. As of January 24, the government had confirmed the deaths of at least 37 people in the protests or in detention, seven of those deaths happening on Ashura.

On Thursday, authorities hanged Mohammed Reza Ali Zamani, 37, and Arash Rahmanipour, 20, who had been convicted of being enemies of God and plotting to topple the Islamic regime.

The two were convicted in mass trials of opposition supporters in August, but Rahmanipour's lawyer said the young man was arrested two months before the election.

In coming weeks, Iranians will hold mass rallies around the country to celebrate the 31st anniversary of "Revolution Day" on February 11, when the Islamic Republic of Iran was created.

Source: CNN.com, Janauray 30, 2010

Two hanged in Tehran

Iran Human Rights, January 30: Two young men were hanged in Tehran’s Evin prison around noon today (Saturday). Iran Human Rights had earlier today warned about their scheduled execution.

According to the state run Iranian news agencies the men were identified as "Masoud L." (19) and "Mohammad S." (21) and were convicted of raping a woman in the Lavasan area north of Tehran in the fall 2009.

The state run Fars news agency wrote that "the men were hanged with a blue noose in the court yard of the Evin prison".

Source: Iran Human Rights, January 31, 2010

Iran: More than 2000 people gather outside Evin prison

According to reports received from Human Rights and Democracy Activists in Iran, more than two thousand people, comprising of prisoners’ families, Mourning Mothers, and supporters have gathered outside Evin prison tonight. The crowd is asking for an end to executions.

On Saturday January 30, 2010, a big crowd that included recently freed prisoners joined the families of prisoners to voice outrage at executions of two political prisoners and rumors of more hangings to follow. The demonstrators demanded not only an end to executions but also the unconditional release of all political prisoners. The crowd was so big that from the bottom of the hill to the main gate of Evin was packed with people.

By 9:00 pm, there were more than 2000 people gathered at the main gate of Evin prison. They plan to continue their demonstration there until midnight. The Mourning Mothers who usually gather every Saturday at Laleh Park decided to take their protest to the very gates of the notorious Evin prison. The prisoners among the crowd spoke of mistreatment in the prison and said they will not rest until those inside Evin walls are freed.

The families of prisoners were told that tonight twenty-three of the detained will be freed. At the time of the posting of this note a few have been released. One of the freed was a 23 year old woman. The woman expressed her thanks to the gathered crowd and knelt down and kissed the ground. This made the crowd cheer.

Many of those being released seemed upbeat and had wide smiles on their faces when leaving the morbid gates of Evin. Each released prisoner was met with cheers and ovation by the crowd. The prison guards were taken aback by the presence of so many and threatened to stop releasing prisoners if the crowd did not stop their cheering!

More here.

Source: Persian2English, January 31, 2010

Texas Polunsky Unit: 3 shot in escape attempt

Three people are hospitalized with gunshot wounds following an escape attempt at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Polunsky Unit in Livingston.

The escape attempt, involving 5 inmates, occurred just after 9 p.m. on Friday. Guards fired several shots from a surveillance tower, striking 3 of the 5 would-be escapees. The other 2 were taken into custody.

TDC has not released the condition of the 3 inmates who were shot, but 2 Life Flight air ambulances were called in, and then grounded because of weather. The inmates are at a Livingston hospital.

The entire prison complex, which includes death row, Administrative Segregation, and general population was on lockdown as of 11:30 p.m. Friday.

Source: Montgomery County Police Reporter, January 30, 2010

More on Polunksy Unit here.

Click here to see recent annotated pictures of the 'living' conditions on Texas' Death Row. These photos were obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

Five inmates at a prison in Livingston reportedly tried to escape

LIVINGSTON, TX (KTRK) -- Five inmates at a prison in Livingston reportedly tried to escape Friday night and three of them were shot by prison guards.

It happened at around 9pm Friday night at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Polunsky Unit. Prison officials tell us the five general population offenders were returning to their housing area from a church service when they tried to make a run for it. They got over an interior fence and were attempting to scale a fence along the prison perimeter.

Prison personnel began firing at the inmates, hitting three of them. All five inmates were captured inside the perimeter.

The TDCJ released the names of the five inmates: Michael Dueitt, 27, serving a life sentence for capital murder; Juan Quintero,36, serving a life without parole sentence for capital murder; Donald Gower, 41, serving a life without parole sentence for capital murder; Terry McDonald, 29, serving a life sentence for murder; and Albin Zelaya-Zelaya, 29, serving a life sentence for burglary with intent to commit a felony.

Dueitt, Zelaya-Zelaya, and McDonald suffered gunshot wounds and were taken to area hospitals for non-life threatening injuries. Their conditions are unknown at this time.

Quintero and Gower were treated for multiple lacerations and are back at the unit.

All five offenders could face felony attempted escape charges.

The Polunsky Unit is still locked down at this time.

Source: abc13News, January 30, 2010

Texas forensic panel is mum on execution

A state agency reshuffled by Gov. Rick Perry as it prepared to review a report linking bad science to the execution of an innocent man spent its first meeting hammering out policy language and trading jabs over commission structure.

No mention was made during Friday's meeting of the Texas Forensic Science Commission of the controversial report concerning Todd Willingham, put to death in 2004  for murdering his children by burning down the family home.

The report by arson expert Craig Beyler put the investigation into question, as did a report presented to Perry hours before Willingham's execution.

Death penalty opponents accused Perry of replacing three members of the commission, including Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley as chairman to replace defense lawyer Sam Bassett, to scuttle an investigation that could hurt Perry during the Republican primary.

Bassett told media he felt pressured to back off on the investigation, and the blogosphere in recent days buzzed with speculation that Bradley chose to meet in distant Harlingen to deter media coverage.

Perry's responded that the three terms expired. He said he stood by the execution of Willingham and that the media jumped to conclusions about the report.

Bradley said he chose Harlingen out of respect for the members' geographic diversity — the newest member, Dr. Norma Farley, is medical examiner for Hidalgo and Cameron County. He said he also wanted state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, who wrote legislation creating the committee, to open the meeting.

A few groups who were active against wrongful convictions made it to the meeting, including the New York City-based Innocence Project, and the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement. Members of the latter group sat at the side of the small meeting room with signs reading “No More Cover Up!”

The Innocence Project is tracking two cases reviewed by the Commission, director Stephen Saloom said.

“Clearly there's been a huge delay, and clearly some of the commission members would have liked to have taken them back up today,” he said. “But the chair put other matters on the agenda.”

That agenda started with introductions, followed by a history of a fledging agency that didn't accept complaints for review until June 2008. As Bradley has explained in an editorial on the commission's Web site, the commission lacked standards and procedures including definitions of professional negligence and misconduct.

Tensions sparked as the commission worked painstakingly through approving those policies and procedures, debating everything from if and how a vice chair should be named, whether the commission had the authority to define misconduct or negligence, or if it were right for the chairman to have published an agenda and editorial without the commission's full approval.

Bradley said he had to make some decisions without a quorum to move things along without violating the state's open meetings law.

“We should continue to follow more of a parliamentary procedure ... where the chairman is essentially another vote,” Commissioner Sarah Kerrigan said.

The Commission was expected to return to case reviews at its next meeting, scheduled for April 23 in Fort Worth.

Future meetings were planned for Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. Harlingen, deemed inconvenient, was left out of the mix.

Source: mysanantonio.com, January 30, 2010

KY moves one step closer toward reinstating death penalty

On Friday, Kentucky moved one step closer toward reinstating the death penalty.

Recently the State Supreme Court put a halt on executions until the protocol surrounding the entire execution was made public.

In the days and then hours leading up to an execution there are procedures followed by the Department of Corrections and for years those procedures have been confidential. But the Supreme Court said it should all be public and Friday it was the public’s one chance to voice opinion on those rules.

No one there agreed with the death penalty but hoped to make it more humane. They even revisited old arguments settled by the U.S. Supreme Court that involved drugs used to execute Kentucky inmates and challenged what witnesses are allowed to see; requiring better witness access from beginning to end and better accommodations for families and the condemned.

The attorney, who challenged the state's protocol and won, was also there with more questions so that Kentucky's protocol will follow other states. They are laws and protocol that all may not agree upon but will be carried out in the light of day.

Next the Department of Corrections will review the comments then publish Kentucky's protocol for administering the death penalty. If the general assembly approves it and the governor signs it, then Kentucky's death penalty will be reinstated.

Source: WHAS11.com, January 29, 2010

Kansas Senate takes up repeal of death penalty

TOPEKA — The full Senate will have the chance to debate the death penalty after a panel endorsed a bill abolishing capital punishment in Kansas.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 7-4 to move along Senate Bill 375 on Friday.

It would eliminate the state's 1994 death penalty law and would replace the crime of capital murder with aggravated murder, punishable by life in prison without parole.

It would apply to crimes committed on or after July 1.

Several lawmakers said the bill still has a difficult path ahead.

Senate Republican Leader Derek Schmidt of Independence urged senators not to move the bill forward, saying it is unlikely to make it to the governor's desk this year.

Although the Senate grappled with the issue last year and has had time to think about it, the House has not had the same opportunity, he said.

"The question is not is the death penalty going to be repealed this year," he said. "The question is, at what point does it stop this year?"

Others disagreed.

"People need to be able to review something as serious as a death penalty consideration, because this is truly life and death we are talking about," said committee Chairman Tim Owens, R-Overland Park.

Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994. Ten men are on death row, but no one has been executed in the state since 1965.

Opponents of capital punishment have argued it is costly and does little to deter violent crimes. Supporters of the death penalty — including prosecutors and victims' family members — have argued that lawmakers can't put a price on justice.

Sen. Les Donovan, R-Wichita, said he voted to reinstate the death penalty and has been a strong supporter of capital punishment. He said he doubted the figures that show death penalty cases are more expensive, but he did question the deterrent factor.

"It doesn't seem to have slowed down the rate of people doing these horrible crimes," he said.

Donovan voted to send the measure out of committee but said he wasn't sure how he would vote during the full senate vote.

Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, said she voted against the measure in committee because that is how she plans to vote when the bill reaches the Senate floor.

Voting yes were Republican senators Dwayne Umbarger, Thayer; John Vratil, Leawood; Mary Pilcher Cook, Shawnee; Donovan, Wichita; Owens, Overland Park; and Democratic senators Laura Kelly, Topeka and David Haley, Kansas City.

Voting no were Republican senators Schodorf, Wichita; Schmidt, Independence; Julia Lynn, Olathe; and Terry Bruce, Hutchinson.

The panel tabled a second bill debated by the Senate last year then returned to the committee with questions about how it might affect current death row inmates if a sentence were overturned.

Source: The Wichita Eagle, January 30, 2010

U.S. Drops Plan for a 9/11 Trial in New York City

The Obama administration on Friday gave up on its plan to try the Sept. 11 plotters in Lower Manhattan, bowing to almost unanimous pressure from New York officials and business leaders to move the terrorism trial elsewhere.

“I think I can acknowledge the obvious,” an administration official said. “We’re considering other options.”

The reversal on whether to try the alleged 9/11 terrorists blocks from the former World Trade Center site seemed to come suddenly this week, after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg abandoned his strong support for the plan and said the cost and disruption would be too great.

But behind the brave face that many New Yorkers had put on for weeks, resistance had been gathering steam.

Click here to read this feature in full.

Source: The New York Times, January 30, 2010

Bangladesh Executes Killers of Independence Leader

5 former army officers convicted of killing Bangladesh's founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, have been hanged. They were executed nearly 35 years after he was assassinated, in an army coup. The five men were executed in the early hours of Thursday in Dhaka Central jail, as hundreds of police and security forces stood guard outside.

Roads outside the prison were closed to traffic. The executions took place the night after the Supreme Court dismissed their appeals for a review of the death sentence.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was gunned down, along with several members of his family, in an army coup in 1975 - 4 years after Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan. Mr. Rahman, who led the country's freedom struggle, was its 1st president.

The 5 men executed did not deny their role in his death, but were given immunity for two decades by subsequent governments which benefited from the coup.

Their trial only began in 1996, after their immunity was revoked by a government led by the assassinated leader's daughter, Sheikh Hasina.

The chief state attorney, Mahbubey Alam, says the executions have finally pulled the curtains down on one of history's most gruesome killings.

Dozens of supporters of the ruling Awami League party - which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman helped found - held placards in Dhaka saying "Justice at Last."

A top leader of the Awami league party, Abdul Jalil, says the executions show that nobody can escape the law.

"Maybe it is delayed, but any person committing crime in the society of Bangladesh will be found out and will be brought to justice," he said.

The 5 men were sentenced to death in 1998. But various appeals delayed the death sentence. However, Sheikh Hasina vowed to complete the trial when she returned as the country's prime minister, last year.

Bangladesh's short history has been marred with political violence, deep political rivalry between its main parties and spells of rule by army generals during which democracy has been suspended. The present government, led by Sheikh Hasina, came to power after the country was under an emergency administration for almost 2 years.

Source: Voice of America News, January 29, 2010

Iran: first executions after election protests

2 of the people who have been sentenced to death in connection to the post-election protests in Iran, were hanged early this morning.

According to the state run news agency ISNA, the men were identified as Mohammadreza Alizamani (37) and Arash Rahmanpour (19), and both were convicted of disruption of order and Moharebeh (at war with God) through membership in the "Monarchist Association".

The 2 were among 11 people who had been sentenced to death on charges including moharebeh (waging war against God), efforts to overthrow the Islamic establishment and membership of armed groups, said the report.

The executions were the first carried out officially for election-related incidents.

However, there are some reports indicating that some of those sentenced to death in the 1st trials after the election protests, had been arrested several months before the elections.

Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, Spokesperson of Iran Human Rights said: "We strongly condemn this morning's executions and urge the world community to do the same. If the world community does'nt react strongly now, many of those who have been arrested in connection with the demonstrations, will soon be facing execution." He added :" Violence and executions are the only ways Mr. Khamenei and the rest of the Iranian regime know of  that can save their regime."

Source: Iran Human Rights, January 28, 2010

Sudden and Unannounced Execution of Two Political Prisoners

Nasrin Sotoudeh, attorney of Arash Rahmani Pour, told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran: "Arash's father spoke to me on the telephone today and he had not been informed of the execution. This shows that not only was the execution carried out in secrecy, but not even the families were informed. The law necessitates the Judiciary to inform the family of a defendant and to allow for due judicial and legal processes to take place in the presence of the defendant and his attorney. All of this was foregone in my clients case and we heard about this in the media after the fact."

Only hours after her client's execution, Sotoudeh told the Campaign: "As Arash Rahmani Pour's attorney, I was shocked to hear of his sudden execution. According to the law, no verdict can be carried out prior to its being served to the defendant. This verdict was issued in secrecy and and it was sent forward in secrecy from those who should have been informed about it, and it was only announced by the judiciary's web site after it had been carried out. Arash's sentence had no reason other than to create fear and intimidation. Despite what has been announced on the Revolutionary Court's web site, Arash was not arrested in the post-elections events. He had been arrested in April, 2 months before the [June 15] elections at his home and at the time of his arrest, he was only 19. Many of the charges made against him pertained to the time when he was not yet 18. To be sure, Arash's case is a juvenile crime execution, only this time a political prisoner was executed because of what he did before he was 18. During his entire arrest, imprisonment, and trial, there was a lot of pressure and many promises. First Arash's sister was arrested. She was in prison for 2 months. She was then acquitted and released, but pressures she had endured during her detention caused her miscarriage. In the only meeting I was allowed to have with Arash for 15 minutes, he told me that during 2 of his interrogation sessions, his sister was brought to the interrogation room and seated opposite him. He was then told that if he wanted to be released he had to confess to the things that he was told. I was Arash's attorney, but I was never allowed to participate in his trial. I insisted to be allowed to attend a trial session in August. Security Officers threatened to arrest me and took away my attorney license, which they returned to me later."

The Tehran Revolutionary and General Courts' web site announced that after "riots and anti-revolutionary actions of recent months, especially Ashura," branches of the Tehran Islamic Revolutionary Courts have put several individuals on trial and have reached the verdict of death sentence in 11 cases. This report adds: "Sentences of 9 other convicts of recent riots are in appeals courts and should the sentences be finalized, they will be carried out according to policy. Heretics [moharebeh] and attempts to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran and membership in the armed anti-revolutionary group, the Monarchy Society of Iran, and the terrorist group, MKO, are some of the charges against the said individuals."

Sotoudeh added: "In a letter I wrote to Head of Judiciary at the time, I stated that if such pressure is carried out against lawyers, it is hard to fathom what kind of pressure is carried out against the accused. At the same meeting where they kept me from attending the trial session, they asked Arash's father to convince him to stand in front of a camera, and when his father resisted, he was threatened that if he didn't convince his son to confess, he, himself, would be arrested on the spot. Therefore I have one question: if Arash had committed such a serious crime to warrant a death sentence, why was it necessary to put so much pressure on him? Why was there so much pressure to force him to confess to things he hadn't done? For these reasons this sentence was completely illegal and unfair."

Regarding Saeed Mortazavi's role and the need to review all such cases in view of charges made against him in a parliamentary report, she said: "I was allowed to review the case once. I discovered that criminal cause was not established in the file. Arash's indictment had been signed in an irregular process by Mr. Mortazavi who was the Tehran Prosecutor at the time. If Mr. Mortazavi's charges are under review in the Judges' Court

after the report of Parliament's Special Committee, all sentences issued under his indictment must be stopped and reviewed. I use this opportunity to state my concern for other death sentences issued. My clients Reza Khademi and Yaghoub Porkar have both received death sentences. The society has to be alerted. I am concerned that my clients will be executed."

Sotoudeh said: "I think all these sentences were made to create fear and intimidation. After the events on Ashura and the fear they have created in the rulers, they hurriedly made these sentences, encouraging and demanding judges to hand out heavy sentences. They even announced that they were taking a bill to the Parliament to change the laws so that executions could be carried out five days after a sentencing."

Pace of Political Executions Accelerating

The execution of two men charged with crimes in connection with alleged membership in illegal anti-government organizations, and the announcement of death sentences for 9 other persons arrested for protest activities, are part of a growing wave of political executions in the Islamic Republic, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today.

Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani (37) and Arash Rahmani Pour (19) were executed on 28 January. According to his indictment (translated by the Campaign here), Zamani's conviction for the capital crime of Mohareb, or "taking up arms against God," was based on his membership in the pro-Royalist group, Anjoman-e Padeshahi-e Iran, and on allegedly meeting in Iraq with United States operatives and receiving money from a source based in the US, all for the purpose of instigating unrest in Iran. According to his lawyer, the other defendant, Arash Rahmani Pour, had been forced to confess to membership in the same group.

"Given the high number of political prisoners and the spike in capital punishment since protests began, the threat of a great number of political executions is acute," according to Aaron Rhodes, a spokesperson for the

Campaign.

Leading Iranian clerics and politicians have repeatedly called for harsh punishments, including the death penalty, for protesters, and for legal measures to expedite executions.

Iranian authorities executed 2 Kurdish men, Ehsan Fattahian and Fasih Yasamani on 11 November 2009 and 6 January 2010, respectively, after trials that did not meet international standards and a failure to present

evidence that linked them to capital crimes. Fattahian's sentence was imposed by an appeals court. Shirin Alam Holi, a female Kurdish activist, was sentenced to death earlier in January. Around 20 other Kurdish political activists have received death sentences.

Neither of the men executed today were involved in the political protests following the disputed June 2009 presidential elections, and the Campaign believes their cases were opportunistically mixed into mass trials of protesters because of their association with highly unpopular insurgent groups.

"It may be assumed that these executions were choreographed both to intimidate Iranian citizens from participating in further demonstrations, and to create a mental opening for the execution of demonstrators," Rhodes said.

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, while opposing the death penalty in all cases, deplores the excessive use of the punishment in the Islamic Republic, particularly since the June 2009 protests began. The Campaign calls upon the Iranian Judiciary to institute an immediate moratorium on executions, in line with the United Nations General Assembly moratorium approved in 2007.

Source for both : IranHumanRights, January 28, 2010 

2 political prisoners hanged in Iran today

Mullahs judiciary sentences 11 political prisoners to death; Maryam Rajavi: People's courageous uprising will continue until overthrow of the regime despite these barbaric crimes.

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, described death sentences issued for 11 political prisoners on the bogus charge of "mohareb" (waging war on God) and the hanging of 2 as a new phase in the medieval regime's barbarity. She stressed that this was a clear sign of the regime's weakness and exasperation in face of the nationwide uprising. Resorting to such crimes would only strengthen people's resolve to change the religious dictatorship, she added. The People of Iran and youths in particular will no doubt continue with their courageous uprising until the overthrow of the clerical rule in its entirety and establishment of freedom and democracy in their country, Mrs. Rajavi emphasized.

The 2 political prisoners were hanged today for "organizing protest demonstrations" and having links to "recent riots," although they had been arrested months before the nationwide uprisings that were sparked by the sham elections in June. They had been imprisoned throughout this period.

The mullahs' Deputy Minister of the Intelligence and Security said yesterday, "More than 20 members of the Mojahedin (PMOI) who were involved in organizing riots have been arrested and are charged with moharebeh."

Earlier, the Judiciary's First Deputy had said, "In light of the fact that the movement is an organized movement, anyone who helps it in any way or under any circumstances, would deserve the title of Mohareb." (State-run TV Channel 2, December 30, 2009)

Mrs. Rajavi called on the United Nations Secretary General, UN Security Council, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and all other relevant international bodies to take urgent measures to prevent killing of political prisoners and those detained during recent uprisings. She reiterated that inaction on the part of the international community toward the bloodthirsty regime would embolden it to continue with killings and atrocities.

She called for the referral of the regime's human rights violations and brutal suppression of the people's uprising to the UN Security Council for the adoption of binding measures including bringing to trial the regime's leaders and those responsible for suppression, killing and torture. Political and economical ties with the regime must be made conditional on full improvement of the human rights situation in Iran, she reiterated, adding that it is the minimum the Iranian people expect from the international community.

Iranian regime executes more in the run up to February uprisings

Hanging of at least 16 prisoners following Ashura uprising on December 27

The mullahs' regime, fearful of heightening of the popular uprising in February and to create an atmosphere of intimidation, once again has increased the number of executions.

In Esfahan, on January 27, Jamshid Hadian, a 51-year-old prisoner was hanged before the bewildered eyes of the people outside the mullahs' revolutionary court. He was accused of killing Ahmad Reza Tavallai, Esfahan's deputy prosecutor, by firearms on March 16, 2009.

In Zahedan, provincial capital of Sistan and Baluchistan, Khodayar Rahmat Zehi Shahnavazi, 35, a Sunni prisoner was hanged after four years of imprisonment. He was arrested in front of his house following an explosion.

In Ardebil, a prisoner was hanged on January 22 after 2 years of imprisonment.

A prisoner in Tabriz indentified as Rahim Mohammadi, was executed on January 20 without notifying his lawyer or his family.

In Khash, Allahnazar Shahli, a 26-year-old man from Baluchistan, was hanged.

Hanging of Ardehsir Keshavarz, a 35-year-old Kurd in Karaj's Gohardasht prison, accused of killing a member of the State Security Force in Kermanshah on December 30, 2009, hanging of 3 prisoners in Khorvin prison of Varamin on January 4, execution of Fasih Yasamani, a 28-year-old Kurdish prisoner after close to 2 years imprisonment in Khoi prison and execution of 6 prisoners in Esfahan Central prison on January 9, are amongst the executions taking place after the people's uprising on holy day of Ashura (December 27).

The mullahs' regime is trying in vain to prevent the continuation of the brave uprising of the Iranian people and youths who have targeted the regime in its entirety by chanting "Down with Khamenei" and "down with the principle of velayat-e faqih (supreme leadership)."

Source for both: Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran

Number of Kurdish Political Prisoners Sentenced to Die Reaches 21

A campaign to defend the political and civil rights of prisoners announced that Aziz Mohammadzadeh, another Kurdish political activist, has been sentenced to death. According to a report prepared by this campaign, Mr. Mohammadzadeh was accused of attempts against national security and Moharebeh (waging war), and his sentencing was issued by the court in the city of Saghez.

Mr. Mohammadzadeh is the son of Ali and he is 26 years old. Mr. Mohammadzadeh is a resident of the city of Baneh who was detained by agents from the Ministry of Intelligence on October 13, 2009, in this city; he was taken to a detention center managed by the Intelligence Ministry. For three months, Mr. Mohammadzadeh was subjected to mistreatment inside the detention center before he was transferred to Saghez Prison.

Readers are reminded that at the present time Mr. Mohammadzadeh is being held in solitary confinement inside the jail, and his health is reported to be poor.

Last week, two other Kurdish activists, Mohammad-Amin Abdullahi and Ghader Mohammadzadeh, from the village of Mirvabad, in the vicinity of the city of Bukan, were sentenced to death by the appeals court in the city of Oromieh.

Including the death sentences of these 3 activists, the number of political and civil rights activists sentenced to death now stands at 21. The identities, holding prison and form of execution of the other 18 prisoners condemned to die are as follows:

1. Zaynab Jalalian, resident of Maku, Kermanshah Prison, hanging

2. Shirko Moaarefi, resident of Baneh, Saghez Prison, hanging

3. Habib Latifi, resident of Sanandaj, Sanandaj Prison, hanging

4. Sami Hosseini, resident of Salmas, Oromiah Prison, hanging

5. Jamal Mohammadi, resident of Salmas, Oromiah Prison, hanging

6. Rostam Arkia, hanging

7. Rashid Akhkandi, hanging

8. Hossein Khazri, resident of Oromieh, Oromiah Prison, hanging

9. Farzad Kamangar, resident of Kamyaran, Tehran Evin Prison, hanging

10. Ali Haydarian, resident of Sanandaj, Tehran Evin Prison, hanging

11. Farhad Vakili, resident of Sanandaj, Tehran Evin Prison, hanging

12. Mostafa Salimi, resident of Saghez, Saghez Prison, hanging

13. Anvar Rostami, hanging

14. Iraj Mohammdi, resident of Miandoab, Oromieh Prison, firing squad

15. Mohammad-Amin Agoshi, resident of Pianshahr, Oromieh Prison, firing

squad

16. Ahmad Poladkhani, resident of Piranshahr, Oromieh Prison, firing squad

17. Hasan Talei, resident of Maku, hanging

18. Shirin Alam Houei, resident of Maku, Evin Prison, hanging

Source: Iran Human Rights Voice, January 2010

White House condemns Iran executions

The White House is condemning Iran for executing two men accused of involvement in an armed anti-government group.

White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton says the executions represent a new low in Iran's crackdown on peaceful dissent and will further isolate Tehran.

The executions mark an escalation in the Iranian government's crackdown on its opponents following last year's disputed presidential election.

The 2 men who were hanged on Thursday were arrested before the election and did not appear to be protests after the vote. But they were put before the same mass trial as opposition leaders and activists arrested amid the crackdown.

Source: Associated Press, January 28, 2010

The Injustice of Today's Executions in Iran

Arash Rahmanipour, 1 of the 2 victims executed today, was only 19 years old. He was arrested in March/April 2009 2 months before the fraudulent elections in June which has led to protests throughout Iran since. Yet today the junta administrations prosecutor, inconsistent as ever like bad liars always are, said Arash Rahmanipour was executed for his role in the Ashura protests. Presumably the 19 year old Arash was directing the Ashura protests from his cell while he was being interrogated!

What Arash was accused of, contacts with a terrorist group outside Iran, was supposed to have happened when Arash was a minor and under 18 years old. Even under Islamic Republic penal code, the punishment for contacts with terrorist groups is not death but prison sentence.

Arash was arrested along with his family members. His pregnant sister was also arrested and was frequently put in the same room with Arash when he was being interrogated. His father was also threatened that if he did not persuade his son to sign the confessions, he too would be arrested. Arash's father was also misled to think if Arash does sign the confessions all family members would be released.

Even though Arash's charges were nothing to do with the post-election protests, he was bundled in with the rest of the accused in the mass show trials that make Stalin look like Mother Theresa. In his televised recants it seemed obvious that Arash was reading from a text. He may have even given a clue within the narrow margins he had, when he referred to London as the 'country of London'.

His lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who has exposed much of the above points said she was given 15 minutes only to meet her client and review his file, where she saw no evidence of any of the charges made against him. She was not even allowed to be present during Arash's show trial. The judiciary process for the appeal had not yet come to an end and Arash's family were never notified about the execution. They first heard about the execution of their loved one on the news.

5 Human Rights Groups Launch Worldwide "346 NO EXECUTIONS' CAMPAIGN"

Today, 5 human rights advocacy groups in 5 Western nations announced the official launching of the 346 No Executions campaign, a coordinated worldwide effort to inspire at least 346 citizens in each member nation to submit letters of petition to their respective foreign ministries, specifically requesting that diplomatic pressure be applied to the government of Iran to abolish its death penalty. The Iranian regime routinely carries out government-sanctioned executions in arbitrary, capricious and inhumane fashion to homosexuals, women, young girls, religious minorities, minors and now Green protesters, all of which are in defiance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Iran is a signatory.

The 5 participating groups in the 346 No Executions campaign to date are: The Iranian Homosexual Human Rights Councils (Canada, United States), OutRage! (United Kingdom), The Hirschfeld-Eddy Foundation (Germany) and the Everyone Group (Italy). The participants hope to recruit more human rights groups in other countries to the campaign as word spreads. '346' is derived from the official figure of executions carried out in Iran in 2008, according to the latest Amnesty International report.

Mr. Arsham Parsi, who represents the campaign as communications director of the Iranian Homosexual Human Rights Councils, recently stated that AI's official figure of 346 does not accurately reflect the actual number of executions carried out annually by the Iranian regime:

"346 is a conservative estimate," Mr. Parsi stated in a recent interview. "The unofficial number is likely much higher. Iran must stop taking innocent lives in such cavalier, arbitrary and brutal ways. Our campaigns mission is to petition member governments to apply diplomatic pressure on Iran to cease and desist with these barbaric and unjust executions.

"It is the express goal of the 346 No Executions campaign to bring these arbitrary executions in Iran to an end. We seek to do this through letters of petition and by expanding the campaign to other nations, particularly in the European Union. Many EU member states conduct a great deal of commercial trade with Iran, yet the EU is also signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This dichotomy between principles and actions represents a clear conflict of interest in the EU vis-a-vis trade with Iran and the fundamental human rights EU member nations swore to uphold in the Universal Declaration.

"It is our hope that these letters of petition will compel as many governments as possible to address the situation in Iran, and will as a result apply diplomatic pressure on the regime to uphold its own legal, moral and human rights obligations under the Universal Declaration. We also hope that by increasing awareness of this intolerable situation in Iran to concerned citizens and human rights advocacy groups around the globe, that even more governments will pressure Iran. There is great strength in numbers."

For more information on the 346 No Executions Campaign, members of the press and the media are welcome to inquire further at info@noexecution.com and http://www.noexecution.com/

If you are a member of a human rights organization or NGO and would like launch your own 346 No Executions campaign in your country, we will gladly assist you. Please contact Mr. Arsham Parsi direct at info@noexecutions.com. Thank You.

346 No Execution Campaign

http://www.noexecution.com/

info@noexecution.com

Source for both: planet-iran, January 2010

'Shocking' execution of Iran protesters condemned

At least 9 other people are on death row following post-election unrest

Amnesty International has condemned the execution of 2 men arrested during protests that followed Iran's disputed presidential election last year.

Mohammad Reza Ali-Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour were hanged on Thursday after being convicted in unfair trials of "enmity against God" and being members of Anjoman-e Padeshahi-e Iran (API), a banned group which advocates the restoration of an Iranian monarchy.

They are the 1st executions known to be related to the post-election violence that erupted across Iran in June and has continued since.

"These shocking executions show that the Iranian authorities will stop at nothing to stamp out the peaceful protests that persist since the election," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director.

"These men were first unfairly convicted and now they have been unjustly killed it is not even clear they had links to this group as their 'confessions' appear to have been made under duress."

According to the Iranian authorities, at least nine other people are currently on death row in Iran after being sentenced to death in similar post-election 'show trials'.

"Our fear is that these executions are just the beginning of a wave of executions of those tried on similar vaguely worded charges," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.

Mohammad Reza Ali-Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour were convicted of enmity against God by Tehran's Revolutionary Court in October. They were also convicted of "propaganda against the system", "insulting the holy sanctities" and "gathering and colluding with intent to harm national internal security".

Mohammad Reza Ali-Zamani was accused of illegally visiting Iraq where he was alleged to have met US military officials.

Arash Rahmanipour's lawyer says he played no role in the election protests and was forced to confess in a "show trial" after members of his family were threatened.

The 2 men's lawyers were not informed of their clients' executions, as is required by Iranian law.

"These executions highlight how the justice system is used as an instrument of repression by the authorities. They are sending a warning to those who may wish to exercise their right to peacefully demonstrate against the government, not to go out in the street, said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.

Further anti-government demonstrations are widely expected to take place on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on 11 February.

According to Iranian officials, over 40 people have died in demonstrations since the election, which were violently repressed by the security forces. Amnesty International believes the number to be much higher. More than 5,000 people have been arrested, many of whom were tortured or otherwise ill-treated.

Scores have been sentenced to prison terms, and in some cases flogging, after unfair trials, and at least 11 have been sentenced to death. 1 man Hamed Rouhinejad - has had his death sentence commuted on appeal in January 2010.

Source: Amnesty International, January 2010

Troy Davis' attorneys seek police file - Petition charges file will prove Davis' innocence

Lawyers for Troy Anthony Davis want a federal judge to force prosecutors to turn over police files they say conceal evidence not produced in his trial in the 1989 slaying of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail.

Those files contain material "corroborating the evidence of his innocence to be introduced at the hearing in this matter," the defense petition filed in U.S. District Court Monday states.

They also argue the police files will support Davis' allegations that Sylvester "Red" Coles committed the crimes for which Davis was convicted.

The Georgia attorney general's office, which is handling the appeal, has until Feb. 12 to respond.

Davis, 38, remains on Georgia's death row at Jackson on his 1991 conviction and death sentence in Chatham County Superior Court in the MacPhail slaying.

The victim, 27, was working off-duty at the Greyhound Bus Terminal/Burger King on Oglethorpe Avenue early Aug. 19, 1989, when he was shot twice and killed. He was rushing to help a homeless man under attack over a beer.

After prolonged appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court in August sent Davis' case to U.S. District Court with instructions that a judge must take testimony and determine where any evidence not available at the original trial "clearly establishes (Davis') innocence."

Chief Judge William T. Moore Jr., who is handling the case, has not set a hearing date.

The filing is part of a back and forth with the state for information to be used at the hearing.

Davis' lawyers contend seven of nine state witnesses have recanted their testimony, creating sufficient doubt about the verdict that an innocent man may be executed.

They also claim to have nine new witnesses not heard at the 1st trial.

The state contends the new evidence is simply rehashed argument already repeatedly rejected by appellate courts.

Davis' appellate team is expanding its inquiry beyond the MacPhail slaying to include the attack on Larry Young in the parking lot to which MacPhail was responding, and the assault on Michael Cooper at a party in Cloverdale hours before.

Davis' convictions included charges stemming from those 2 attacks.

Coles, who was at the MacPhail shooting scene, was never charged. He and his attorney went to police to accuse Davis only after he learned police "were on his trail," the Davis petition stated.

His petition also includes arguments that "certain state witnesses lied at trial as the result of police pressure" and Davis' defense lawyers did not have the entire file at his trial.

Savannah-Chatham police have repeatedly denied access to the files made under the state Open Records Act, the petition states.

TROY DAVIS CASE: WHAT HAPPENED

Off-duty police officer Mark Allen MacPhail was shot twice with a .38-caliber pistol as he rushed to assist a homeless man being beaten in the parking lot of the Greyhound Bus Terminal/Burger King restaurant on Oglethorpe Avenue early on Aug. 19, 1989.

MacPhail never unholstered his weapon. No murder weapon was recovered.

Prosecutors said Davis, then 20, shot MacPhail once in the heart while he was standing, then a 2nd time in the face as he lay on the asphalt parking lot surface.

Witness testimony said the gunman smiled as he fired the second shot into the fallen officer.

Davis fled to Atlanta ahead of a massive manhunt, then surrendered to authorities on Aug. 23, 1989.

Lawyers for Davis contend 7 of the 9 witnesses who testified against the defendant have recanted their testimony, which the defense contends was coerced by police.

They said Davis was the victim of mistaken identity, blaming Sylvester "Red" Coles for the shooting. Coles was placed at the bus station where the fatal shooting occurred but was never charged.

Testimony had Coles running from the scene as MacPhail ran past him to the homeless victim.

Source: Savannah Morning News, January 28, 2010

UK appalled by hangings in Iran

Foreign Secretary David Milliband said Thursday it was "appalled" by the reported hanging of 2 men in Iran convicted of being Mohareb (enemies of God), the first executions of dissidents since post-election protests.

"I am appalled by reports that Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani and Arash Rahmani Pour were hanged this morning in Iran," said Miliband.

"The trials and now these subsequent executions undermine Iran's claimed commitment to justice, human rights and democratic values."

Their executions were the first reported hangings of people tried after the wave of protests that broke out following the disputed June 12 re-election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Miliband praised the determination of protesters, saying they showed "the strength of desire for democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms amongst ordinary Iranians."

"These latest executions appear to be politically motivated and yet another attempt by the regime to silence dissent," he said.

"I call on the Iranian Government to meet the human rights obligations to which it is committed."

Source: Agence France-Presse, January 29, 2010

Hank Skinner: Case Open

Twila Busby was Hank Skinner’s soul mate. “We just fell together. We just clicked, man,” he says. The two were hardly apart after they met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They would kiss in public and cuddled up on the couch to watch thrillers. They were “sick in love,” Skinner says through a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window on Texas’ death row unit in Livingston.

A jury found that Skinner (pictured) was so sick in love that, in a jealous rage, he strangled Busby, bashed in her head and face with an axe handle and then stabbed to death her two mentally disabled adult sons on New Years Eve 1993. He was sentenced to death for the three murders. His execution is scheduled for February 24.

The 47-year-old doesn’t deny he was in the small house in the tiny West Texas town of Pampa on the night of the murders or that the blood on his clothes that night belonged to 41-year-old Busby and her sons. But Skinner and his lawyers say there’s no way he could have killed anyone; he was so loaded on vodka and pills that he was nearly comatose. They argue that his appointed trial attorney, a former district attorney who had previously prosecuted him for theft and assault, failed to adequately investigate other potential suspects. They insist Texas is about to execute an innocent man — and the state has evidence that could prove it.

The night of the murders, police collected, among other items, clippings from Busby’s broken fingernails, a rape kit, two knives from the crime scene, a bloodstained dishtowel and a man’s windbreaker with sweat and hair on it, but most of it has never been DNA-tested. During Skinner’s trial, prosecutors tested some blood and hair from the scene, but not the fingernails, rape kit, knives, towel or windbreaker. Over the last decade, the state has fought Skinner in court to keep it that way. Prosecutors in Gray County and lawyers for the Texas Attorney General’s Office say Skinner had his chance at trial to test the evidence, but he declined, and the jury spoke; now it's time for him to face the consequences. “It’s already been handled,” Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer says. She’s the third DA in Pampa to deal with Skinner, who has sued her in federal court seeking to force release of the DNA. “He doesn’t need to keep trying it over and over and over again. It’s already been handled.”

Skinner’s execution date approaches as Texas faces renewed scrutiny of its famously busy death row and the science used to convict the accused. Since 1973, just 11 death row inmates have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, while more than 440 have been put to death. The New Yorker last year touched off a national debate about how many of those killed might have been innocent by posthumously profiling Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 after a jury convicted him of killing his three young children by arson in 1991. Before Willingham was executed, according to the story, the state ignored expert reports contending that the fire may have been accidental and calling the method used to prove that it was arson "junk science." A Texas Observer story earlier this month revealed that a psychologist the state has relied on to test the mental capacity of more than a dozen death row inmates used faulty methods to boost IQ scores so the men could meet the legal standard for the death penalty. And in Dallas County, maverick District Attorney Craig Watkins has launched a Conviction Integrity Unit that has reviewed more than 400 cases in which DNA from the crime scene was still available to be tested and has discovered at least 15 wrongful convictions.

In Skinner’s case, attorneys argue that prosecutors selectively used DNA testing to put a potentially innocent man on death row, and that the state is manipulating a 2001 law that allows post-conviction DNA testing to keep him on the path to the death chamber. “The case against him is not open and shut, it’s not ironclad,” says attorney Rob Owen, co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Capital Punishment Clinic. “And in a reasonable system, we ought to go the extra mile to rule out the possibility that he is an innocent man before going forward with the execution.”

New Year’s Nightmare

Skinner and Busby had plans that New Year’s Eve. They were supposed to go to a friend’s house together, but Skinner got his celebration started early. By the time the friend stopped by the house to get them, Skinner was already passed out on the couch. He was so intoxicated from a codeine and vodka cocktail that even when the friend yanked repeatedly on his arm and hollered at him, Skinner didn’t budge.

So Busby went without him. Friends at the party said Busby’s intoxicated uncle, Robert Donnell, began stalking her there. The two had a predatory incestuous relationship, according to several people who have testified in Skinner's case. A private investigator who looked into Donnell’s past found a long criminal history, including convictions for vehicle theft, embezzlement and burglary. He had served prison time, usually carried a large knife and told stories about having killed a man in a pool hall fight in Oklahoma. Busby’s friends described him as “scary” and said she had called them several times over the years to protect her from his frightening advances.

Agitated by Donnell’s come-ons at the party, Busby left for home — the last time anyone admits to having seen Busby alive. Donnell left the party shortly after, witnesses said, and there has never been a full accounting of his whereabouts that night.

Neighbors called police just before midnight when Busby’s 22-year-old son, Elwin “Scooter” Caler, showed up on their porch in his underwear, bleeding from multiple stab wounds. Police followed a trail of blood back to Busby’s house and walked in on a grisly scene. She was sprawled on the living room floor, her face and head beaten to a pulp; blood was splattered across the room. Her other son, 20-year-old Randy Busby, lay dead in his bunk bed, stabbed three times in the back.

Immediately, Gray County Sheriff Randy Stubblefield identified Skinner as the primary suspect. He sent deputies to look for him in the attic and called in a dog to sniff out a crawl space below the house. They arrested him blocks away hiding at a frightened former girlfriend’s house, blood on his clothes, a deep gash in his hand.

The State’s Case

Andrea Reed, the ex-girlfriend, was the state’s star witness during the 1995 murder trial in Fort Worth (it was moved because of the presumably prejudicial attention the crime received in Pampa). Reed said Skinner was an alcoholic and a drug user. A recovering addict herself, she had sponsored him and Busby in AA but tried to stay away from Skinner, she said, because he had fallen off the wagon.

The night of the murders, she told jurors, Skinner showed up at her trailer house banging on the front door, intoxicated and disoriented, with blood on his clothes and his hand cut. He told her he had been shot in the gut and stabbed in the shoulder, chest and arm. He ordered her to stitch up his hand, she said, and threatened to kill her if she called the police. “I told him the only thing I had was fishing line. And he had to get the fishing line, and I brought the Ambesol to deaden it,” Reed testified. “And he kept heating and bending needles.”

As Reed attempted to stitch his wound, Skinner told her wild stories about how he’d gotten injured. First he said he had been drinking vodka and smoking crack with Busby when “some Mexicans” came to the front door brandishing knives. At another point in the more than three hours he spent at her house, Skinner told Reed that he had caught Busby in bed with her ex-husband. He started to tell yet another story about a man breaking into the house, Reed said, but he didn’t finish that one. Then, after swearing her to secrecy, Skinner told Reed he thought he had killed Busby. “He said he thought he had kicked her to death,” she told the jury.

John Mann, then the Gray County District Attorney, showed jurors DNA testing on blood that covered swaths of Skinner’s clothes, and on blood and hair from Randy Busby’s bedding and body. The DNA put Skinner in the house at the time of the murders. His bloody palm prints were also found at the scene.

Though toxicology tests indicated Skinner had nearly lethal levels of drugs and alcohol in his system, the prosecution argued the habitual user had enough tolerance that he would have been capable of killing Busby and the boys. After all, he had the physical strength to walk several blocks to hide out at Reed’s house and the mental clarity to keep her from calling the police.

The jury condemned Skinner to death in less than two hours.

“Hellfighters”

Skinner grew up in Virginia and moved to Pampa in 1981 after divorcing his first wife. He wanted a clean start and had heard good things about the oil business. “I’d seen [“Hellfighters”] with John Wayne, Boots and Coots, Red Adair and all that, you know. And so, man, I wanted to come out here to Texas,” he says. A jack-of-all-trades, Skinner says he made good money doing everything from welding to drywall and working on cars. He also did paralegal work for a local criminal attorney, helping out friends who'd gotten tossed in the clink. That, he says, is how he made enemies in the Pampa law enforcement community.

Of course, his hard drinking and partying ways also caught the attention of local officials. He had a history of committing petty crimes and had been prosecuted for car theft and assault. “I look at everything as an opportunity, and I live life like an adventure," Skinner says. "Somehow or another, man, I irritate people with my lifestyle,” Police turned to him as a suspect in the murders because it was convenient, Skinner says, and “because I was a pain in their ass.”

Skinner contends he was unconscious on the couch, still reeling from the effects of the liquor and the pills, when the murderer attacked his girlfriend and her sons. His blood alcohol content was .24 — three times the legal level of intoxication, .08. Toxicology tests showed Busby was also drunk at the time of the murder and that she struggled mightily, breaking her fingernails as she tried to fend of her attacker. And her boys, though mentally challenged, were physically huge. Caler was more than six-feet tall and weighed more than 220 pounds; Skinner is only five-eight. “This whole case is nothing but a pack of lies from the beginning to the end,” Skinner says.

The way he tells it now, a bleeding and dying Caler managed to rouse him from his chemical-induced lethargy, probably by splashing water in his face. Startled, Skinner says he fell off the couch onto shards of glass from a light fixture the killer broke while wielding the axe handle against Busby. That’s how he got the cut. “It hurt me so bad I jerked my hand back, and when I did I fell the rest of the way,” he says, displaying the scar on the palm of his hand. “And when I was laying flat on the floor, that’s when I saw my girlfriend and what was done to her."

With the ailing Caler propping him up, Skinner says, he left the house to look for help. Caler went to a nearby neighbor’s house, while Skinner headed for the party to get help from the men there. In his stupor, Skinner says he could only walk a few steps before he would fall to the ground. Then he would crawl and try to walk again, only to fall back down and crawl a little farther. He only made it as far as Reed’s house, he says.

Skinner says Reed helped him willingly that night and that he never threatened her. And in a 1997 affidavit, Reed recanted her incriminating trial testimony. She claimed she was intimidated into testifying against Skinner by the police, who told her, she said, that she could face charges if she had helped him. She said Skinner didn’t threaten to kill her and was too intoxicated to carry out such a threat or to have murdered three people. “I believe that his statement about kicking Twila to death was just a drunken fantasy, like the other violent stories that he told me to explain how he was injured,” Reed wrote.

Skinner has always proclaimed his innocence, but state and federal courts have rejected 15 years of his pleadings. Still, as his execution date draws near, Skinner and his advocates continue to wage a legal fight for additional DNA testing. Only then, they say, will Texas know whether Skinner or a third person was the real killer. “They have no right to kill me,” Skinner says, “because I’m innocent, innocent, innocent.”

Visit Hank Skinner's Website

Source: The Texas Tribune, January 28, 2010

Case Open: The Investigation

[Editor's note: Hank Skinner is set to be executed for a 1993 murder he's always maintained he didn't commit. He wants the state to test whether his DNA matches evidence found at the crime scene, but prosecutors say the time to contest his conviction has come and gone. Now he has less than a month to change their minds. We told the story of the murders and his conviction and sentencing in the first part of this story.]

It makes sense to Greg Jonsson that police in Pampa set their sights on Hank Skinner when they found Skinner's girlfriend and her two sons violently murdered on New Year’s Eve in 1993. Skinner was a hard-drinking, hard-partying guy who had seen the inside of a jail cell more than a few times. He was in the house at the time of the killings, he had blood all over his clothes, and police found him hiding out in an ex-girlfriend’s house. “If I was a police officer, I would have looked at Hank Skinner, too,” says Jonsson, one of eight Northwestern University students who traveled from Illinois to Texas to investigate the case in 2000.

A decade later, Jonsson worries the authorities decided too quickly that Skinner was their man. “I didn’t come away knowing he’s innocent, but I didn’t come away knowing he’s guilty,” Jonsson says. “You’d hope that was the case with someone about to be put to death.”

Skinner is scheduled to be executed on February 24 for the murders of Twila Busby and her two mentally disabled adult sons. Skinner and his lawyers insist he was too intoxicated from liquor and pills that New Year’s Eve to have killed three people, and they contend his defense lawyer — a former district attorney who had previously prosecuted Skinner for theft and assault — did a shoddy job representing him at trial. They’ve been pleading with the state for 15 years to release DNA evidence they believe could exonerate Skinner and keep Texas from killing an innocent man.

Prosecutors in Gray County and lawyers for the Texas Attorney General’s Office argue that Skinner had his chance in 1995 to have the DNA tested at his original trial. “There were 12 people that sat in the jury and they listened to the evidence and they found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer, the third Pampa DA to deal with the case.

Protess’s Probe

Northwestern University professor David Protess got acquainted with Hank Skinner in 2000 as then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for president. Protess teaches a journalism class in which students investigate inmates’ innocence claims. The work of his students led to the exoneration of 11 Illinois inmates, including five who were on death row, between 1996 and 2000. The Republian governor of Illinois during that period, George Ryan, cited their work when, in January 2000, he declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois.

Amid rising national questions about the death penalty that were largely raised by the students’ investigations, Bush was defending Texas’ death chamber, the busiest in the nation. He insisted that Texas had not and would not kill an innocent person under his watch.

To test that proposition, Protess sent a crew of eight journalism students to Texas to investigate Skinner’s case. They spent time in Pampa, interviewed residents about the heinous murders and visited Skinner on death row. Today, they say they came away with more questions than answers about what happened to Busby and her sons. And they have grave lingering concerns about the state's plans to execute Skinner.

Jonsson, now a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was a senior at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism when he visited Pampa. “It’s just small, like a rough-around-the-edges town,” Jonsson says, nursing a cup of coffee at a St. Louis coffee house and recalling his first and only time in Texas. He and his classmates interviewed Andrea Reed, the state’s star witness, who at trial testified that Skinner admitted to killing Busby. They talked to the widow of Robert Donnell, Busby's uncle, who had an incestuous relationship with her and stalked her at a party the night of the murders. They visited friends and neighbors of Skinner and the victims. They dug through case files, reviewed evidence and tried to reconstruct the case to see whether their investigation led to the same conclusion as the jury. “We didn’t come in thinking he’s innocent,” Jonsson says. “We did come in thinking it’s possible mistakes were made.”

The students came away with three big questions. First, why didn't law enforcement more fully investigate Donnell as a suspect? Second, why didn't Skinner’s lawyers test what they saw as crucial DNA evidence from the crime scene: Busby's fingernail clippings, a rape kit, two knives, a bloodstained dish towel and a man’s windbreaker with hair and sweat on it. “There was a pile of it here that hadn’t been tested,” Jonsson says. “That was sort of disconcerting.” Third, what about the potential conflict of interest with the lawyer appointed to represent Skinner at trial? Harold Comer was a former Gray County District Attorney who had previously prosecuted Skinner for car theft and assault.

Donnell was already dead by the time the Northwestern students got to Pampa: He died of massive head injuries in a wreck on Interstate 40 in Oklahoma in January 1997. But they interviewed his widow, who said he became violent when he drank. Others in the community claimed Donnell had raped Busby. They said he often wore a windbreaker similar to the one found at the crime scene. Neighbors also reported seeing Donnell cleaning his truck with a hose and stripping the carpet from it within a week of the murders.

During the trial, though, jurors heard little about Donnell’s violent past. They heard nothing about his sudden desire to have a tidy vehicle. And neither prosecutors nor Skinner’s attorney tested DNA on the fingernail clippings or the windbreaker or the rape kit or the knives found at the scene, which could have revealed whether Donnell, or another person, could be implicated in the crime.

The students also interviewed Reed, Skinner’s ex-girlfriend. Skinner spent about three hours at her house before police arrested him the night of the murders. When they interviewed her, Jonsson says, she explained that she felt intimidated by police and worried that she could somehow be implicated in the crime if she didn’t testify against Skinner. In 1997, she recanted her incriminating testimony, writing in an affidavit that she had lied at trial, and that Skinner’s admission that he kicked Busby to death was one of several fantastic stories he made up in his drunken stupor the night of the murders. “She’d basically been given guidelines for what she was going to say” at trial, Jonsson says. “To us, she seemed sincere.”

Comer, Skinner’s court-appointed attorney, failed to find and fight for evidence that could have vindicated Skinner at the trial, says professor Protess. “My students found on one trip to Pampa … more information than the former prosecutor did,” he says. And no wonder, he says, when the very lawyer who had worked to convict Skinner twice before was now expected to defend his innocence. Comer was the DA in Pampa from 1988 until 1992, when he resigned. That same year, the State Bar of Texas suspended Comer for mishandling public money from a seized drug fund. “He basically didn’t put up a defense,” Protess says.

Emily Probst, another of Protess’s students, interviewed Skinner on death row and spent time investigating the case in Pampa. She came away not convinced that Skinner was innocent but persuaded that too many questions remained unanswered to condemn the man to death. “I still feel like the full truth in this story is untold,” says Probst, who is now a producer for CNN’s investigative and documentary unit.

The students’ investigation and Associated Press reporting on the case drew national attention in 2000 to Pampa and Gray County District Attorney John Mann, who succeeded Comer and prosecuted Skinner. Facing national scrutiny, Mann agreed to test more of the DNA collected from the crime scene.

Mann, who has since died, sent blood from a notebook at the crime scene, hair from Busby’s hands, bloodstained gauze and other items to private testing company Gene Screen Inc., in Dallas. The knives, Busby’s fingernail clippings and rape kit, the windbreaker and bloody dishtowel were not tested. When Skinner’s appellate lawyers requested additional testing, according to a 2000 Associated Press story, Mann said, “Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.” But they never did get it, and the report from Gene Screen’s tests provided little new information about Skinner or any other potential suspects.

Court fight

Since 1998, Skinner has filed appeal after appeal seeking to prove that his defense was inadequate and begging the courts to force testing of the additional DNA. Each time, the courts have ruled against him.

In a July 2009 opinion, justices on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said that Comer provided constitutionally adequate representation for Skinner. The court said Comer did present Donnell as a potential suspect to jurors, and although he did not dig up all the evidence Protess’s students found, the attorney performed within legal standards. Skinner has appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Contacted at his home recently, Comer, who is still a practicing lawyer in Pampa, says he was proud of the case he built for Skinner and disappointed that jurors sentenced him to death. “My opinion as a lawyer was the evidence was insufficient to convict him. I still feel that way,” Comer says. His defense of Skinner in 1995 was based on convincing jurors that the state did not have enough evidence to prove he was the killer. What little DNA testing the prosecutor had done was incriminating, showing that Skinner was at the scene the night of the murders. Comer didn’t want to take the risk of poking holes in his own case by testing more evidence that might come back with Skinner’s DNA. “I’m not new at this. I’ve tried four or five capital cases. I’ve been at it 50 years, so I have an instinct, or a feeling, for what’s good for my client,” Comer says. “I don’t second-guess that decision at all.” He says he respects the decision of Skinner’s new attorneys, Rob Owen co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Capital Punishment Clinic and Doug Robinson of Washington, D.C., to go after the DNA. But he doesn’t agree with it. “I guess the proof’s in the pudding. If the courts allow the testing, and it does come out exculpatory, we got egg on our face,” Comer says, “but I still would have made the same decision.

So far, though, the courts have not allowed additional DNA testing. When legislators in 2001 passed a law allowing for post-conviction DNA testing in cases where such evidence existed but had never been examined, Skinner hoped the measure would finally force the state to turn everything over. The law allows for testing in cases where technology wasn’t available at the time of the trial or where untested evidence has the potential to exonerate. State and federal courts so far have ruled that Skinner’s case doesn’t meet those guidelines.

Skinner’s first motion for post-conviction DNA testing was denied, and on appeal the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that new testing was unlikely to show anything different from previous DNA tests that put Skinner at the scene of the crime. Skinner filed a second request for DNA testing in 2007, citing new legal developments and evidence that Gene Screen’s DNA tests in 2000 were flawed. Again, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied the motion. The court said Skinner was at fault for not having requested testing of the DNA at his original trial in 1995. Skinner then sued current Gray County D.A. Switzer, hoping a federal court would force her to turn over the DNA. “The fact of the matter is he had very good trial attorneys, and they made decisions and strategies at the time that the courts have upheld and said, ‘Yes, that is good trial strategy,’” Switzer says. “There are steps in place that he could have employed and some of which he did employ, and they’ve been handled.” A federal judge dismissed the case against Switzer this month, and Skinner attorney Rob Owen says he plans to appeal.

When legislators adopted the 2001 post-conviction DNA law, they worried the measure would start a flood of requests for testing. State Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, who wrote the bill, says guidelines were implemented to ensure fairness and prevent abuse in the system. John Bradley, chairman of the Texas Forensic Science Commission and the Williamson County District Attorney, says Skinner’s case is a perfect example of why those criteria are necessary. “There’s 155,000 people in prison,” he says. “If you change the rules so you can having testing any time, you’re going to get 155,000 applications tomorrow, because what have they got to lose?”

Owen says he is hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene in Skinner’s case. “It’s about a one-in-100 shot,” he says. The decision not to test the DNA back in 1995 was one ex-prosecutor Comer made, Owen says, and Skinner shouldn’t be executed for a wrong that could be righted now. “There was good reason to doubt Hank’s guilt even then, and the concerns have only grown,” he says. Besides, he wonders, what has Texas got to lose? If the DNA tests don’t exonerate Skinner, the execution can go forward as planned. If the evidence proves he didn’t do it, then Texas avoids killing an innocent man. “The idea that we’re going to not find out, that’s … irresponsible,” he says.

As the February 24 execution date draws near, Skinner says he’s beginning to tire of this 15-year fight to prove his innocence. He’s tried to accept the possibility that needles filled with a lethal chemical concoction will take him to his end. But, he says he can’t. “Every time I try to think about them trying to kill me, I just think next, well, I didn’t do it.”

Source: The Texas Tribune, January 29, 2010


TO SUPPORT HANK'S CLEMENCY PETITION:

The clemency petition is seeking a commutation of Hank's death sentence to life in prison in order to enable him to prove his innocence and seek a pardon.

The letters can be mailed in support of his clemency petition starting February 4th and to arrive no later than February 17th.

Please write the following reference "Attention: Hank Skinner Case - #999143" on each page of your letter (as well as the covering page if you send it by fax) and on the front of the envelope.

Clemency Section

Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles

8610 Shoal Creek Blvd.

Austin, TX 78757-6814

USA

Fax (512) 467-0945

DO NOT SEND YOUR LETTER TO INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE BOARD, IT WOULD SIDETRACK YOUR LETTER AND IT MIGHT NOT EVEN REACH THE BOARD IN GOOD TIME TO BE CONSIDERED.

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

All the details of the case are available on the website, however, here are some of the points you can raise:

Hank was sentenced to die on the basis of a perjured testimony and circumstancial evidence.

The accusation theory relied on that one witness, who later recanted and explained how she was threatened to make a false statement to the police and give a deposition at trial which was based on a script supplied by the district attorney's office.

The little forensic analysis done before his trial excluded him as the killer.

The additional and minimum testing done during his post conviction appeals excluded him too.

The available scientific evidence proves his physical incapacitation at the time of the crime.

The important quantity of evidence remaining to be tested is essential to reveal the truth about his innocence.

His motions for DNA testing have been denied although he has always offered to pay for the costs.

The state of Texas has a very poor record in terms of wrongful convictions and DNA exonerations.

The interest of justice is to find out the truth and to not execute an innocent.

The state is withholding the untested evidence that can prove Hank's innocence.

The commutation of his death sentence is the only way for justice to be served.

For more information about the case, visit: http://www.hankskinner.org/