Death Penalty
I Ordered Death in Georgia
By Allen Ault, The Daily Beast 25 September 11
The state's former DOC commissioner on 'rehearsed murder.'
I can't always remember their names, but in my nightmares I can see their faces. As the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections from 1992 until 1995, I oversaw five executions. The first two were Thomas Dean Stevens and Christopher Burger, accomplices in a monstrous crime: as teenagers in 1977, they robbed and raped a cabdriver, put him in the trunk of a car, and pushed the vehicle into a pond. I had no doubt that they were guilty: they admitted it to me. But now it was 1993 and they were in their 30s. All these years later, after a little frontal-lobe development, they were entirely different people.
On execution days, I always drove from Atlanta to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. I knew death row well: 20 years earlier, I had built it. The state had hired me as the warden of Georgia Diagnostic in 1971, where I renovated a special cell block for especially violent offenders. After I left Georgia in 1977, the state reinstated the death penalty and turned the cell block I had developed into death row.
The state executed Stevens first, in June 1993, and then Burger in December. In both instances, I visited them in a cell next to the electric-chair chamber, where they counted down the hours until they died. They were calm, mature, and remorseful. When the time came, I went to a small room directly behind the death chamber where the attorney general worked the phones, checking with the courts to make sure that the executions were not stayed. Then we asked the prisoners for their final words. Stevens said nothing, and Burger apologized, saying, "Please forgive me." I looked to the prison electrician and ordered him to pull the switch. Last Wednesday, as the state of Georgia prepared to execute Troy Davis despite concerns about his guilt, I wrote a letter with five former death-row wardens and directors urging Georgia prison officials to commute his sentence. I feared not only the risk of Georgia killing an innocent man, but also the psychological toll it would exact on the prison workers who performed his execution. "No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt," we wrote in our letter.
The men and women who assist in executions are not psychopaths or sadists. They do their best to perform the impossible and inhumane job with which the state has charged them. Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very much like posttraumatic stress. Many turn to alcohol and drugs. For me, those nights that weren't sleepless were plagued by nightmares. My mother and wife worried about me. I tried not to share with them that I was struggling, but they knew I was.
I didn't grow up saying, "I want to work in prisons." I had never even been in a prison or a jail before I became warden of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. The commissioner at the time hired me to revamp the system, to implement case management, and work with inmates to make them safer. I had always worked in helping professions, and my main goal in corrections was always to reduce recidivism, so that inmates would leave prison better than they arrived. Over this course of time, the death penalty figured larger and larger into my work. I never supported it, but I also did not want to let it distract me from improving overall prison conditions. Death-row inmates are, after all, only a tiny fraction of the prison population.
When I was required to supervise an execution, I tried to rationalize my work by thinking, if I just save one future victim, maybe it is worth it. But I was very aware of the research showing that the death penalty wasn't a deterrent. I left my job as corrections commissioner in Georgia in 1995 partially because I had had enough: I didn't want to supervise the executions anymore. My focus changed to national crime policy and then to academia, where I could work to improve the criminal-justice system without participating in its worst parts. Today, I am the dean of the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University.
Having witnessed executions firsthand, I have no doubts: capital punishment is a very scripted and rehearsed murder. It's the most premeditated murder possible. As Troy Davis's execution approached - and then passed its set hour, as the Supreme Court considered a stay - I thought of the terrible tension we all experienced as executions dragged into the late hours of the night. No one wanted to go ahead with the execution, but then a court stay offered little relief: you knew you were going to repeat the whole process and execute him sometime in the future.
I will always live with these images - with "nagging doubt," even though I do not believe that any of the executions carried out under my watch were mistaken. I hope that, in the future, men and women will not die for their crimes, and other men and women will not have to kill them. The United States should be like every other civilized country in the Western world and abolish the death penalty.
****
Pending Executions
EXECUTIONS SCHEDULED FOR 2011
I Ordered Death in Georgia
By Allen Ault, The Daily Beast 25 September 11
The state's former DOC commissioner on 'rehearsed murder.'
I can't always remember their names, but in my nightmares I can see their faces. As the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections from 1992 until 1995, I oversaw five executions. The first two were Thomas Dean Stevens and Christopher Burger, accomplices in a monstrous crime: as teenagers in 1977, they robbed and raped a cabdriver, put him in the trunk of a car, and pushed the vehicle into a pond. I had no doubt that they were guilty: they admitted it to me. But now it was 1993 and they were in their 30s. All these years later, after a little frontal-lobe development, they were entirely different people.
On execution days, I always drove from Atlanta to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. I knew death row well: 20 years earlier, I had built it. The state had hired me as the warden of Georgia Diagnostic in 1971, where I renovated a special cell block for especially violent offenders. After I left Georgia in 1977, the state reinstated the death penalty and turned the cell block I had developed into death row.
The state executed Stevens first, in June 1993, and then Burger in December. In both instances, I visited them in a cell next to the electric-chair chamber, where they counted down the hours until they died. They were calm, mature, and remorseful. When the time came, I went to a small room directly behind the death chamber where the attorney general worked the phones, checking with the courts to make sure that the executions were not stayed. Then we asked the prisoners for their final words. Stevens said nothing, and Burger apologized, saying, "Please forgive me." I looked to the prison electrician and ordered him to pull the switch. Last Wednesday, as the state of Georgia prepared to execute Troy Davis despite concerns about his guilt, I wrote a letter with five former death-row wardens and directors urging Georgia prison officials to commute his sentence. I feared not only the risk of Georgia killing an innocent man, but also the psychological toll it would exact on the prison workers who performed his execution. "No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt," we wrote in our letter.
The men and women who assist in executions are not psychopaths or sadists. They do their best to perform the impossible and inhumane job with which the state has charged them. Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very much like posttraumatic stress. Many turn to alcohol and drugs. For me, those nights that weren't sleepless were plagued by nightmares. My mother and wife worried about me. I tried not to share with them that I was struggling, but they knew I was.
I didn't grow up saying, "I want to work in prisons." I had never even been in a prison or a jail before I became warden of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. The commissioner at the time hired me to revamp the system, to implement case management, and work with inmates to make them safer. I had always worked in helping professions, and my main goal in corrections was always to reduce recidivism, so that inmates would leave prison better than they arrived. Over this course of time, the death penalty figured larger and larger into my work. I never supported it, but I also did not want to let it distract me from improving overall prison conditions. Death-row inmates are, after all, only a tiny fraction of the prison population.
When I was required to supervise an execution, I tried to rationalize my work by thinking, if I just save one future victim, maybe it is worth it. But I was very aware of the research showing that the death penalty wasn't a deterrent. I left my job as corrections commissioner in Georgia in 1995 partially because I had had enough: I didn't want to supervise the executions anymore. My focus changed to national crime policy and then to academia, where I could work to improve the criminal-justice system without participating in its worst parts. Today, I am the dean of the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University.
Having witnessed executions firsthand, I have no doubts: capital punishment is a very scripted and rehearsed murder. It's the most premeditated murder possible. As Troy Davis's execution approached - and then passed its set hour, as the Supreme Court considered a stay - I thought of the terrible tension we all experienced as executions dragged into the late hours of the night. No one wanted to go ahead with the execution, but then a court stay offered little relief: you knew you were going to repeat the whole process and execute him sometime in the future.
I will always live with these images - with "nagging doubt," even though I do not believe that any of the executions carried out under my watch were mistaken. I hope that, in the future, men and women will not die for their crimes, and other men and women will not have to kill them. The United States should be like every other civilized country in the Western world and abolish the death penalty.
****
Pending Executions
EXECUTIONS SCHEDULED FOR 2011
| December | ||
| 6 | OR | Gary Haugen - (Tentative, Volunteer) |
| January | ||
| 5 | OK | Gary Welch |
| 18 | OH | Charles Lorraine |
| 26 | TX | Rodrigo Hernandez |
| February | ||
| 1 | TX | Donald Newbury |
| 22 | OH | Michael Webb |
| 28 | TX | Anthony Bartee |
| 29 | TX | George Rivas |
| March | ||
| 7 | TX | Keith Thurmond |
| 18 | SD | Briley Piper - (Stay Likely) |
| 28 | TX | Jesse Hernandez |
| April | ||
| 18 | OH | Mark Wiles |
| June | ||
| 12 | OH | Abdul Awkal |
| July | ||
| 26 | OH | John Eley |
| September | ||
| 20 | OH | Donald Palmer |
| November | ||
| 13 | OH | Brett Hartmann |
****
Stop the execution of this British Grandmother
FACT SHEET FOR LINDA CARTY
British citizen Linda Carty was convicted and sentenced to die by lethal injection for the 2001 murder of Joana Rodriguez. On 16 May 2001, three men broke into the apartment of Rodriguez and her partner Raymundo Cabrera, demanding drugs and cash. They abducted Rodriguez and her four-day-old son, Ray, who was later found unharmed in a car, while Rodriguez had suffocated. The perpetrators struck a deal with the prosecution to save their own lives by trying to shift the blame onto Linda.
Linda was forced to accept a local court-appointed lawyer, Jerry Guerinot, whose incompetence has already led to 20 of his clients ending up on death row, more than any other defense lawyer in the US. Guerinot's catalogue of serious failings in Linda's case includes:
• Failure to spot obvious flaws and inconsistencies in the prosecution case;
• Failure to spend more than 15 minutes with Linda before the trial;
• Failure to investigate key mitigating evidence;
• Failure to inform Linda, a British citizen, of her right to consular assistance; and
• Failure to inform Linda’s husband of his right not to testify against his wife;
Based on the testimony of their informants, the prosecution’s theory was that Linda was afraid of losing her husband and thought that if she had another baby he would stay. They allege she was unable to get pregnant, and had hired three men to kidnap Rodriguez and that she planned to "cut the child out" of the pregnant mother. - a baby of a different race to Linda.
The theory is ridiculous: Joana Rodriguez had already given birth to the child, as Linda clearly knew, being her neighbor. Since the baby would be a difference race to Linda, she could not possibly pass it off as her own. When the prosecution produced "the scissors" that Linda was supposedly going to use to cut the child out, Guerinot failed to point out that they were bandage scissors, with a rounded end, obviously useless for any such purpose.
Despite the fact that Linda’s life was at stake, an investigator from Guerinot’s office spoke to Linda for the first time, just briefly, only a couple of weeks before her trial. Guerinot himself met with Linda for only 15 minutes before trial. According to Guerinot he tried to talk to Linda but she refused until bribed with a bar of chocolate. As with so many matters, Guerinot could not even make up a story effectively – Linda is allergic to chocolate.
During the 80s, Linda worked as a hair stylist, and the chatter of women associated with local drug dealing led Linda to work as a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Linda has always asserted her innocence of the murder charges, and believes that she was framed because of her work with the DEA.
Under the Vienna Convention on the Right to Consular Assistance and a bilateral treaty between the UK and the US the US has undertaken an obligation to the UK to notify British consular officials whenever a British national is detained and notify the national of their right to consular assistance. The British consulate was not informed that Linda had been arrested and was being charged with capital murder; neither was Linda informed of this right to consular assistance. Guerinot clearly knew that Linda was not from the US but failed to do anything about it. The British government has filed friend of the court briefs before the US Court arguing that had they been notified of Linda’s arrest they would have assisted in obtaining meaningful and effective legal representation by consulting Reprieve at an early stage (i.e., Guerinot would never have been the lawyer), and attempted to persuade prosecutors not to seek the death penalty.
Indeed at the time of Linda’s arrest the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was already working closely with Reprieve. After Linda’s conviction Reprieve has gathered significant evidence in Linda’s case and Reprieve believes that had this evidence been presented at trial she would neither have been convicted of capital murder, nor been sentenced to death.
Guerinot never spoke to Linda’s common-law husband, Jose Corona. Corona was called as a witness by the Prosecution. It was never explained to him that there is a marital privilege and under that privilege he had the right to refuse to testify. Had Guerinot informed him, Corona would never have testified. The prosecution tried to make much of some very unreliable gossip about Linda, and he did not want to help them secure this unfair conviction.
Linda is one of 10 women on death row in Texas. She is incarcerated at Mountain View Unit. The last woman to be executed in Texas was Frances Newton (14 September 2005). The last British woman to be executed was Ruth Ellis who was hanged at Holloway Prison on 13 July 1955. Since executions were resumed in the US in 1977 after a 5 year moratorium, 11 women have been executed, 3 of them in Texas.
[PLEASE SEND LETTER TO REPRIEVE AT PO BOX 52742, LONDON, UK EC4P 4WS, WHO WILL FORWARD IT TO GOVERNOR PERRY]
Office of the Governor
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711-2428
[DATE]
Dear Governor Perry
I write to express my deep concern for British Grandmother Linda Carty, who is facing execution in Texas.
[Add personal message to Governor Perry explaining why he should not execute Linda]
I am pleading for her life to be spared, and my heart is with her
family at this terrible time. Linda's death would destroy her child,
her grandchildren and the rest of her family. I know that you care
deeply about family and I would like to join Linda's daughter in
begging for mercy for her mother. It would be also a very sad loss for
the British people.
This is a case, about humanity and compassion -- values that we share
with Texas. My plea to you is based on the greatest respect for Texas
and those shared values.
Yours sincerely, ______________________________
[YOUR NAME] ---------------------------------------
Here's a link you can also use to help save Linda's Life.
http://isearch.igive.com
