Death Penalty News

And it might not matter how mentally ill they are It's been many years since Texas attempted two executions in the span of three days but the state will attempt to do just that next week. Without court intervention, Gary Green will die March 7 and Arthur Brown two days later, on March 9. The attorneys representing the inmates have been reluctant to discuss the arguments they'll make in court to try to save their clients' lives. But, as is true for almost everyone on death row, there was little mitigating evidence presented at their trials to demonstrate the hardships these men endured. Such evidence could have persuaded their juries to sentence them to life.

A judge called his actions in a death penalty case "shocking prosecutorial misconduct that destroyed any semblance of a fair trial.” Clinton Young was convicted by a Midland County jury of capital murder in 2003. He is being held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, where he is kept in solitary confinement. Weldon Ralph Petty Jr., a chain-smoking bespectacled attorney, was a quiet fixture at the Midland County courthouse for 2 decades. By day, he often appeared before judges as an assistant district attorney in the 11-story brown brick courthouse in the heart of the oil boomtown. But by night, he worked as a paid legal assistant for those same jurists—sometimes advising them how to handle criminal cases he also was prosecuting. For more than a decade, Petty, 78, committed “brazen misconduct” by simultaneously acting as a prosecutor and a paid adviser to supposedly impartial judges, according to a scathing judicial opinion issued April 28. The opinion calls for overturning Midland County...

Death row exoneree Anthony Graves, along with capital defense lawyers, legal groups and former federal judges, criticized Texas' request to speed up federal death penalty appeals by pointing to the cases of men who were taken off death row long after their sentences were handed down. Anthony Graves spent 12 years on death row before a conservative federal court tossed out his wrongful capital murder conviction. Texas courts had previously rejected all of his appeals. “I had to get out of the state of Texas and into the federal court system to get help,” he told The Texas Tribune Friday. “If it was up to the state itself, I would have been executed.” It’s a point he made in arguing against a pending request by the state to speed up the federal appeals process in death penalty cases. He’s not alone: Several lawyers, former judges and legal groups have asked the federal government to deny the request by bringing up the cases of people, like Graves, who were taken off d...

Texas is seeking to speed up executions with a renewed request to opt-in to a federal law that would shorten the legal process and limit appeals options for death-sentenced prisoners. Defense attorneys worry it would lead to the execution of innocent people and - if it's applied retroactively, as Texas is requesting - it could potentially end ongoing appeals for a number of death row prisoners and make them eligible for execution dates. "Opt-in would speed up the death penalty treadmill exponentially," said Kathryn Kase, an longtime defense attorney and former executive director of Texas Defender Services. But a state attorney general spokeswoman framed the request to the Justice Department as a necessary way to avoid "stressful delays" and cut down on the "excessive costs" of lengthy federal court proceedings. Robbie Kaplan, co-founder of the #TimesUp movement, says sweeping changes to laws in recent years have dissuaded attorneys f...

Anthony Graves was convicted in 1994 for killing 6 people in 1992. He was exonerated in 2010 after having served 18 1/2 years in prison, 16 of which were spent in solitary confinement and 12 of which were on death row.  The prosecutor in Graves' case was eventually disbarred for misconduct, and Texas had to pay Graves $1.45 million in compensation for the damage the state had done to him. 

Written by a wrongfully convicted man who spent 16 years on death row and 12 years in solitary confinement, a powerful memoir about fighting for--and winning--exoneration. Infinite Hope is an argument against the death penalty through one man's personal story. It is about a man enduring a life on death row year after year, when he knows that he is one hundred percent innocent and that his exoneration is unlikely. Anthony Graves' unbelievable saga started in 1992 when, at 26 years old, he was arrested for killing six people in Somerville, Texas.  Despite his air-tight alibi, his unwavering insistence that he had no knowledge of the crime, and a lack of physical evidence linking him to the scene, Graves was arrested, charged with capital murder, and eventually sentenced to death. He spent nearly two decades defending his innocence from behind bars.  With the help of a hard-charging journalist, Graves' story of injustice and the astounding malfeasance he en...

Typical Texas death-row cell (Source: Minutes Before Six ) Anthony Graves emerged from solitary confinement over 6 years ago to become a national crusader for justice reform, but it took a recent report by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin to add new urgency to his campaign to reform the practice in his own state. Graves spent more than 18 years in the Texas prison system, including 16 years in the all-solitary Allan B. Polunsky Unit, after being convicted for murders that he didn't commit. He was released in 2010 after DNA evidence helped exonerate him - but the trauma of his nearly 2 decades behind bars is with him still. Graves started his own foundation - with about $250,000 the state compensated him for the years he was wrongfully imprisoned - to support his efforts. His argument that solitary confinement on death row is inhumane has been reinforced by the study published earlier this spring by the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Texas Sch...

Texas death row, Polunsky Unit, Livingston, I was three weeks into life on death row when a killing came calling. Over the course of my twelve years there, I’d eventually see the state kill more than three hundred and fifty men. The first was Warren Bridge, known then as inmate number 668. Warren was white, and tipped the scales at less than 140 pounds. He was only nineteen when he robbed a convenience store and killed the clerk. At thirty-two he’d exhausted his appeals and had an execution date looming. Warren’s execution offered a chance to consider the death penalty not in its abstract form, but in the reality laid painfully bare in front of me. Platitudes retreated at the sight of what was actually happening there on that day. The state was preparing to kill a man. I didn’t know how I felt about the death penalty at the time. Most people don’t give much thought to capital punishment, and prior to my time on death row, I was among that lot. I never had time to consider the ...

On the morning of April 15, Pat Hartwell drove up from her home in Houston, Texas, to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Austin, where the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which runs the state's prisons, was holding a board meeting. The board only offers a public comment period during 2 of its meetings each year, and this would be the 1st time in 2016 that the public would have a chance to air grievances or concerns about agency operations, for example, or prison conditions. For Hartwell, a well-known anti-death penalty activist in Texas, the timing of the meeting was opportune; roughly a week earlier, word had spread among prisoners, family members, and activists that the director of the TDCJ had established a new rule forbidding any prisoner from maintaining a social media presence. Hartwell has for years maintained a Facebook page for a death row inmate she is certain is innocent, and she wanted some answers. In a section of the 146-page Offender Orientation Handbook rese...