The Supreme Court has turned down David Powell. Things look grim but we can't give up yet.
The D.A. in Austin has an office that practices restorative justice. David's case should be perfect for this. Call Tuesday and remind Rosemary Lehmberg to have the courage to do the right thing and ask the judge to withdraw the execution order.
Phone: (512) 854-9400
Fax: (512) 854-9695
Source: Abolish!, June 15, 2010
Appeals Court Denies David Lee Powell Bid for Life Sentence
An appeal from convicted murderer David Powell has been denied by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Powell, who was convicted of killing Officer Ralph Ablanedo in 1978, had appealed to the court to give him a life sentence instead of death by lethal injection.
Austin police officer Ralph Ablanedo had just let a driver go with a ticket for having no rear license plate when the reply to his background check came through, revealing her passenger had outstanding warrants for theft and passing bad checks.
When Ablanedo again pulled over the red Ford Mustang, passenger David Lee Powell grabbed an AK-47 and fired through the rear window. Ablanedo was hit 10 times, his protective vest no match for the firepower of the Soviet-made assault rifle.
32 years later, Powell, now 59, is scheduled to die Tuesday evening for killing the 26-year-old officer.
"We're looking forward to it finally being over, no question about that," said Bruce Mills, who was Ablanedo's backup that night in May 1978 and accompanied his mortally wounded partner to the hospital. "The word we keep describing is relief."
Only five of the 322 prisoners now on Texas death row have served more time there than Powell. The lethal injection would make him by far the longest-serving inmate executed in Texas and one of the longest-serving in the nation put to death. A Georgia inmate, Jack Alderman, spent more than 33 years on death row before he was executed in 2008.
Powell would be the 13th Texas inmate to die this year and the 460th since the state began carrying out executions again in 1982. Back then, Powell already had been on death row 4 years.
"The senseless death of Ralph Ablanedo has weighed heavily on my soul always," Powell said in a handwritten letter to the officer's family that is part of his court file. "When I killed Officer Ablanedo, I killed some part of myself. I have known no peace since."
Powell's lawyers say he has had an "exemplary life on death row," showing a positive attitude, helping other inmates and protecting corrections officers from assault by other inmates. In a last-ditch bid to courts to save him, they argued Powell's good behavior during more than 3 decades in prison shows jurors erred when they decided he would be a continuing threat to society and should be put to death.
But a plea for clemency from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was unsuccessful. After the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected an appeal Monday, Powell's attorneys turned to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court rejected an earlier appeal from Powell last year.
"Certainly it is an uphill battle when you have the offense alleged being the death of a police officer, especially in the manner this police officer was killed," Gerry Morris, one of the defense attorneys at Powell's 3rd trial, said last week.
Powell has been sentenced to death 3 times, most recently in 1999. The Supreme Court had overturned his original conviction from 1979, and the Texas appeals court threw out his death sentence from a 1991 retrial.
Powell grew up on a dairy farm near Campbell in Hunt County, graduated a year early as valedictorian from his small high school and went into the honors program at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in physics and math and aspiring to be a doctor. Court records show he got hooked on methamphetamines and never finished college.
"I was infected with the spirit of the times," Powell said in a video made recently to advocate for keeping him alive. His actions, he said, were a "betrayal of all my values."
Ablanedo, who had been a police officer for 5 years, described the car before he died. Powell and his girlfriend, Sheila Meinert, were arrested after a shootout with police. Meinert testified Powell gave her a hand grenade and told her to remove tape from it. She said she became hysterical and shoved it back at him.
Officers testified Powell threw the grenade and started running. The grenade, found about 10 feet from a police car, failed to explode because a safety clip hadn't been removed. Authorities later found Powell had a .45-caliber handgun in the car and about $5,000 worth of illegal drugs.
"If only I could go back and rewrite what happened that night," Powell said. "But I can't undo what I've done."
Meinert received 15 years in prison for attempted capital murder, served just over four years and was paroled in 1989. Mills eventually married his partner's widow and adopted their 2 sons. They all planned to be in the death chamber Tuesday evening to witness Powell's execution.
"The whole thing about such a model prisoner and great behavior, that is absolutely irrelevant," Mills said. "It's appalling to me to say the jury was wrong.
"The sentence needs to be carried out. It's time."
Online: David Powell http://letdavidlive.org/
Source: myfoxaustin, June 14, 2010
Elusive justice in the death chamber
Austin police Officer Ralph Ablanedo didn't deserve to die. He was doing his job when he made his last traffic stop, on May 18, 1978.
David Lee Powell legal case May 18, 1978 Powell fatally shoots Austin police Officer Ralph Ablanedo with an AK-47.
The officer had been tailing a red Ford Mustang that had no rear license plate. Had he known a heavily armed methamphetamine dealer was in the car, Ablanedo might have waited for backup before pulling it over. Had the officer known an AK-47 was trained on him, he would have taken cover. He wouldn't have died before his wife and two young sons could reach the hospital to say goodbye.
Killer David Lee Powell's cruelty destroyed a life and a family. Jurors at his 1978 murder trial – the first of three – had no trouble establishing guilt and imposing a death sentence.
Today, he is scheduled for execution in Huntsville, more than 32 years after the murder. That is a state record for length of time between crime and execution, casting Texas' system of putting murderers to death in bizarre light.
Powell's record stay on Death Row mocks society's expectation that justice be sure and swift. His case is by no means an anomaly: Eight other Death Row inmates committed their heinous crimes in the 1970s, and 26 more in the 1980s.
Supporters of the death penalty cite its deterrent value, but it's a strange argument to make if the state struggles for decades to finally send people to the executioner's chamber. That struggle is necessary when the criminal justice system appears uncertain, uneven and error-prone in capital cases – so much so that this newspaper finds it impossible to support capital punishment.
As a presidential candidate, Gov. George W. Bush said in a debate that he supported the death penalty, because, "If it's administered swiftly, justly and fairly it saves lives." Today, death row in Texas holds 51 people who were sent to death row in Bush's first term – as governor. A more swift system, though, is unlikely to be just or fair.
Powell's three-decade stay on death row also draws into question the legal requirement that jurors must find that a defendant possesses "future dangerousness." Powell's attorneys argue that since he has been a model prisoner with a record of helping others behind bars, jurors reached the wrong conclusion on the threat he poses.
If the death penalty erases no real threat and fails as a deterrent, it serves no purpose other than retribution.
There is no debate that Powell's crime was a cruel act and he should pay an extraordinarily high price. Today, jurors have an option that juries didn't in Powell's 3 trials: life without the possibility of parole. Essentially, that's a sentence of death by prison, a punishment that better fits his crime.
Source: Editorial, Dallas Morning News, June 15, 2010
'Exemplary' inmate to be put to death in Texas
WASHINGTON — Death row inmate David Powell, 59, is scheduled to be executed in Texas on Tuesday for a murder he committed 32 years ago, despite calls for clemency from supporters who say he has repented his crimes and reformed his life.
Powell was deemed a dangerous criminal when he was arrested in 1978 at the age of 27 for the murder of police officer Ralph Ablanedo.
Powell's unusually long stay on death row is a result of various legal proceedings in his case, all of which have affirmed his death sentence.
But supporters said that David Powell's 32 years on Death Row have proved the power of human redemption.
Amnesty International is one of many advocate groups pleading his case, saying in a report that over time, Powell has become "a model prisoner and an extraordinary human being."
"For more than three decades he's lived an exemplary life on death row, embodying and living human virtues as few of us do," the human rights group said urging state officials to commute his death sentence to life in prison.
"People can change. Will Texas?" the report asked, saying that now elderly, Powell poses no danger to anyone and has shown deep remorse for his crimes.
Defense attorneys said that Powell at the time of the murder was a high on drugs and that he kicked his habit once in prison.
The Amnesty International report also cites testimony gathered from prison guards, inmates and a psychotherapist -- all attesting to the genuineness of Powell's transformation.
Even an Austin Texas policeman in letter to Powell's attorney, wrote that "the man who will be put to death... is not the man who committed the crime."
"This David Powell is an elderly man who has shown what I believe to be true understanding and remorse for the crime," the officer said.
But so far, the pleas for clemency have not been heeded by penal officials in Texas, the state with the most executions and which currently has more than 300 inmates on Death Row.
If his execution goes forward, Powell will be the 28th person put to death in the United States in 2010.
Source: Agence France-Presse, June 15, 2010
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