Death Row Report

The State of Texas executed William Joseph Berkley yesterday through lethal injection in Huntsville. Berkley is the sixth prisoner to be executed in Texas this year, according to the El Paso Times Webpage.

Berkley was convicted of raping and shooting the 18 year-old high school student Sophia Martinez in 2000. He denied the murder on Martinez to the last. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to revise his case yesterday before the execution.

Before he was administered the lethal injection, Berkley thanked his girlfriend, his parents, his lawyers and his spiritual advisors. He did not address Martinez’ family who were there to watch the execution.

As a child of an American soldier, Berkley was born on a military base in Germany, as Mail Online reported. He moved to the U.S. when he was in fourth grade. Althoug Berkley had a double citizenship with Germany, the German government did not intervene in the execution.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of death row inmate Charles Dean Hood yesterday after it came to light that the district attorney and the judge handling his case had a sexual relationship, as the Dallas Morning News reported. The decline was issued without further comment.

Hood was convicted for shooting  Ronald Williamson, 46, and his girlfriend Traci Lynn Wallace, 26, in their home in Plano and stealing Williamson’s car. At the time of the murders, Hood lived with Williamson and Wallace. He has been on Texas death row since 1990.

Judge Verla Sue Holland and district attorney Tom O’Connell confirmed that they had a sexual relationship. However, they claimed that their relationship had ended before they handled Hood’s case and had instead developed into a friendship.

Hood’s attorneys called the U.S. Supreme Courts refusal to review the case a “fundamental injustice.”

“We are disheartened that the United States Supreme Court ruled not to hear the case of Charles Hood in which the trial judge and district attorney who prosecuted Hood engaged in a secret, long-term, extra-marital affair,” one of Hood’s attorneys said.

The director of the Texas Defender Service, Andrea Keilen, does not support the decision of the Supreme Court.

“No one should be prosecuted for a parking ticket, let alone for capital murder by the district attorney who has had a sexual affair with the judge handling the case,” Keilen said.

The Supreme Court and the district attorney’s office did not comment on the new developments in Hood’s case.

Because of various appeals, Hood’s execution date has been pushed back five times so far. His currently expected execution date has not yet been disclosed to the public.

When I ask people what they like about the death penalty many of them say that it saves money. The tax payer, they say, shouldn’t have to pay for a murderer’s food, shelter and health care. The truth is, however, that the death penalty costs much more than a life imprisonment without parole. The money argument is a myth.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, each Texas death penalty case costs approximately $2.3 million. In contrast, imprisonment for 40 years in a single cell would costs only one third of that amount. Without the death penalty, Texas could save millions of dollars every year – millions of dollars that could be invested into the prevention of crime.

I suggest that crime can be prevented through investing into education.

This graph is taken from the Prison Policy Initiative. It shows that while only 4% of the “normal” U.S. population are illiterate, as many as 19% of prisoners are. Apparently, a great number of inmates are uneducated. They are uneducated because they are poor and can’t afford a good education. They are poor, because they are uneducated and don’t have the opportunity to climb the social ladder. It’s a vicious circle.

The only way to break the circle is to educate people, because educated people are less likely to commit crimes. Of course, education is expensive but the money is there. It just has to be used differently. Insted of spending it on executions, it could be used to help children from poor families to get a good education that enables them to make a living and keeps them from ending up in prison or on death row.

One argument that supporters of the death penalty often use to defend their opinion is that the execution of criminals deters crime. Opponents, on the other side, usually claim that the death penalty does not keep potential offenders from committing crimes.

Who’s right?

This question is a difficult one. In the seemingly endless expanse of the internet one can find graphs that support the deterrence theory and graphs that rebut it.

Let’s have a look at both.

This first graph, which is taken from the P.a.p.- blog, shows that states that practise the death penalty have considerably higher murder rates than states that don’t practise it. It suggests that the death penalty does not deter crime.

However, the graph below,  which is taken from the P.a.p.-blog as well, seems to show the opposite. This graph shows how the number of murders and executions stand in relation to each other over time. It suggests that more executions result in less murders and it could be interpreted to support the deterrence theory.

In my opinion, both graphs are flawed in a way because they don’t (and can’t possibly) show whether murder rates and execution rates stand in any causal relation.

So, the question whether the death penalty deters crime or not cannot be answered – at least not with the statistics I found. But, do we really need to know whether the death penalty deters crime?

In my opinion, we do not.

Deterrence should not be factor in deciding whether the death penalty is okay or not in the first place. Why? Because assuming that it is okay to kill in order to deter from crimes that have not even been committed yet is unfair.

If deterrence is used to justify the death penalty, then executions become a means of communication with society – to educate and to get a message across. Using the punishment of an individual to communicate with a disperse audience of potential criminals sounds pretty unfair to me. And, you may recall, the 14. Amendment to the U.S. constitution prohibits unfair punishments.

The fact that other people might be deterred from committing hypothetical crimes cannot be a factor in assessing the benefit of executing criminals.

Opinions?

Joshua Maxwell was executed through lethal injection today, March 11, in Huntsville, Texas. The 31-year old was convicted for shooting and robbing a Sheriff’s officer in 2000.

According to the Houston Chronicle Maxwell is originally from Indiana, where he had a juvenile record. He had been convicted of theft, possession of firearms and trespass and served some time in prison. Five months after his release he and his girlfriend killed a 45-year old FedEx mechanic from Indiana. Four weeks later they murdered Bexar County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Rudy Lopes and dumped his body behind a mall in San Antonio. They were caught when they were pulled over for running a red light a week later.

Maxwell’s girlfriend was sentenced to life, while Maxwell was sentenced to death for the murder on Lopes. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to revise the case last week.

“I need to be locked up, no doubt about it. But me dying isn’t going to solve anything,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell was executed today through lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m. CST.

His last words were

“The person that did that 10 years ago isn’t the same person you see today. I hurt a lot of people with decisions I made. I can’t be more sorry than I am right now.”

These words came from defense attorney John Keirnan after Texas judge Kevin Fine ordered the death penalty unconstitutional on  Thursday, March 4 in Houston. According to the Tex Parte website Fine came to this decision in the course of a capital murder trial. The defendant, John Edward Green Jr.,claimed that the death penalty violates the 8th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. constitution.

The 8th Amendment says: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, the death penalty has been found “cruel and unusual” by the U.S. Supreme Court before and, accordingly, the death penalty has been ruled unconstitutional.  But this decision has been revised.

The 14th Amendment is much longer and complicated. Among other things, it grants American citizens the right to a fair trial.

The defendant and his lawyers argue that the death penalty makes the execution of innocent people possible and should therefore not exist as an option for punishment in the first place.

“What he [Judge Fine] is saying, and what the motion is saying, is that you can’t administer the Texas death penalty fairly in Texas,” said Keirnan, one of the defendant’s lawyers in an attempt to explain the decision of the judge.

Judge Fine has revoked his order yesterday, but, according to the defense attorneys in the Green case,  he is still of the opinion that the death penalty violates the U.S. constitution. On April 27, he will hold a meeting with the state and the defense in order to disuss whether the death penalty is indeed unconstitutional.

What do you think? Does the death penalty violate the 8th and 14th Amendments? Is the death penalty “cruel and unusual”? And, does the death penalty infringe the right to a fair trial?

I know, facts are not the most interesting thing to read, but before starting an actual discussion, I thought it would be a good idea to provide some information about the death penalty in the U.S. and particularly in Texas. Unfortunately, the information that can be found on the web is often contradictory, but I tried my best to find reliable sources that can be trusted in.

First of all it is important to notice that not all states have a death penalty. Out of the 50 states, 15 have abolished it, while 35 states still practice the death penalty – with high variations in frequency. Some states, like Montana, haven’t practiced the death penalty in years, but future executions are still possible.

The state that carries out the most executions in the U.S. is Texas. Since 1976, the state of Texas executed a total of 450 inmates – a multiple of all executions in any other state. From a peak in 2000, when 40 people were executed, the number of executions in Texas has been declining steadily. In 2009, the state of Texas executed 24 people.

Interestingly, Texas did not always have a death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be a “cruel and unusual punishment”. The infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments” is forbidden under the U.S. Constitution, the death penalty was therefore declared unconstitutional. All inmates on death row were sentenced to life. However, Texas death row remained empty for only one year. In 1974, the decision was revised and the death penalty was reestablished. About 330 inmates are currently awaiting their execution on Texas death row.

The five different execution methods practiced in the United States are lethal injection, electrocution, firing squad, lethal gas, and hanging. Today, all executions in Texas are carried out through lethal injection. Thereby, the person is strapped to a stretcher and successively injected with three different substances. The first one is a sedative, the second one collapses the lungs and the third one stops the heartbeat. It takes approximately 7 minutes for death to occur. People disagree on whether this method is “cruel and unusual” and therefore unconstitutional.

Although a lot information about executions is public, there is virtually no media coverage and one has to actively search for information to get some. When I started researching, I was surprised how much information I could actually access. With so much information being available, there is only one question that remains open: How can it be that this year alone, three people have been executed in Texas and no one knows about it? This coming Wednesday, on March 11, the fourth person, Joshua Maxwell, will be executed and two more are going to follow this month. Why are none of these executions reported on? Could it be that more media coverage would result in unwanted attention and even rebellion against the death penalty?

Hello eveyone! My name is Annika and I’m an English and communications studies major at Texas Lutheran University. Within the scope of my Advanced Journalism class, I have to create and maintain a blog – and here it is! We got to chose the topic of our blogs ourselves, and I decided to write about the death penalty. Maybe you’re wondering why I chose a somber topic like this, when there is so much more fun things in the world to write about.

To explain my choice, I have to give you some background information about myself. I’m not originally from Texas. In fact, I’m an exchange student from Germany, and I’m going to college here for a year. Being and English major, I have to go abroad to an English speaking country and I decided to study in the United States. A good friend of mine once visited friends in Texas and ever since told me how wonderful it was. So I applied for Texas. She was right – Texas is awesome and enjoy every day I am here.

As with every country in the world, people have prejudices and stereotypes in their heads. When German people think about Texas, they think about horses and cowboys. Just like that, people from Texas probably believe that Germans wear Lederhosen and eat Bratwurst most of the time. Unsurprisingly, none of that is true.

There is, however, something else many  people -including me- think about, when they think about Texas: The death penalty. My brother was a member of Amnesty International, so I heard about the topic at an early age and as I got older, I started reading and forming my opionion about it.

It is not a secret that I oppose the death penalty. I believe that a government does not have the right to kill anyone in the name of its people. Having this opinion at home is easy, as I never met anyone who opposed me. So when I came to Texas, I expected to meet many people with controversial opinions about the death penalty. I expected a lot of media coverage about the executions and I expected heated discussions in the media and on campus. But, to my surprise, I encountered none of that.

I do believe that the people in Texas and the rest of the world have an opinion about this topic and I would like to use this blog to initiate discussion. In the coming weeks, I will write about myths and facts concerning the death penalty and I hope that many people will share their thoughts on the topic with me.

Hello This is my blog!