concrete
12-02-2007, 05:39 PM
LETHAL INJECTION
Texas reaches milestone: 25 years, 405 executions
BY JOHN MORITZ
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
Star-Telegram archives (1986)
The death chamber at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, like others around the United States, is idle while the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether lethal injection violates the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
HUNTSVILLE -- No prison warden in America has ordered more executions than Jim Willett. And perhaps no warden anywhere has searched deeper into his soul in wondering if he was doing right by the state, right by the inmate, right by the crime victim and right by his God.
"An overwhelming feeling comes over you as you give the signal to take a perfectly healthy human being and cause his death," said Willett, who ran the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Walls Unit in Huntsville from 1998 until he retired in 2001. "You can't help but wonder whether what you're doing is right."
The former warden's reflections come as Texas prepares to mark this week's 25th anniversary of the resumption of the death penalty. And they come during a rare lull in the pace of executions in Huntsville as the U.S. Supreme Court once again weighs the question of whether the execution process passes constitutional muster.
Willett, a 30-year corrections professional who now runs the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, presided over 89 of the 405 Texas executions that have been carried out by lethal injection since Dec. 7, 1982, at one of the oldest and most foreboding lockups in the nation. He'll mark the anniversary Friday with a symposium and panel discussion at the museum involving former prison officials, advocates both for and against the death penalty, and a journalist who has witnessed nearly all the executions carried out in the United States' most active death chamber.
Willett's time at the Walls, which ended in May 2001, was the busiest three-year period in the state's modern application of the death penalty. He arrived shortly after the Feb. 3, 1998, execution of pickax killer turned born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker and remained on the job through the politically turbulent times when then-Gov. George W. Bush was in hot pursuit of the presidency.
That year, 2000, saw the high-water mark in executions when 40 inmates went to their deaths at the Walls.
The 'killing machine'
Huntsville's death chamber reopened 25 years ago, in the same stark red-brick building that had once housed the electric chair, which the state used to execute 361 inmates from 1924 to 1964.
Just after midnight on Dec. 7, 1982, Fort Worth's Charlie Brooks was strapped to a steel gurney for killing 26-year-old David Gregory after kidnapping him six years earlier from Danny Sides Used Cars on East Lancaster Avenue on the pretext of road-testing a Pontiac Grand Prix.
Gregory, a married father of two, was shot to death a couple of miles away at the Lincoln Motor Hotel on East Rosedale Street.
Brooks, 40, would become the first inmate in the nation to die by lethal injection as Texas and most of the other states with capital punishment laws looked for a new, more humane way to put killers to death. Now, a quarter century later, executions across the country are on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether lethal injection is as humane as its advocates say.
After Brooks' execution, the Texas death chamber would remain dormant for 15 months. And for the remainder of the 1980s, only a handful of inmates each year would be administered the lethal three-drug cocktail that would first put them to sleep, then paralyze them and finally stop their hearts.
But by the latter half of the 1990s, the pace of executions quickened dramatically and the Texas prison system was derisively called the "killing machine" by a growing legion of death penalty opponents.
"You lose so many friends here that pretty soon you really don't want to too many close friendships anymore," said Ronald Chambers, a 51-year-old Dallas killer who arrived on Death Row in January 1976 and is now the longest serving of the state's 371 condemned inmates. "Their day comes up, and away they go."
A 'circus' in Huntsville
Larry Fitzgerald, a Fort Worth radio reporter in the 1960s and '70s who served as a prison system spokesman from 1995 until 2003, said that as the number of executions in Texas climbed, so did the attention from the world's media. "When Karla Faye Tucker was executed, it was an absolute circus in Huntsville," said Fitzgerald, now retired. "We had crews from CNN and all the networks. We had just about every outlet in Texas and who knows how many Europeans crawling all over the prison grounds."
Tucker's girl-next-door features and her behind-bars embrace of religion had managed to unite death penalty opponents on the left and Christian conservatives on the right in calling for her to be spared the executioner's needle. And as the first Texas woman to face lethal injection, she put the spotlight on the state's application of the death penalty like no other inmate before her.
Death penalty critics were outraged that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was not required to hold hearings to consider requests for clemency. Forces on both sides of the issue were surprised by how little power Texas governors have to halt an execution.
Under the law, a governor may grant only a one-time 30-day reprieve. A governor may commute a death sentence or grant clemency only upon the recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Willett said that while Tucker's case generated all the publicity -- perhaps because she was an attractive woman and perhaps because of her self-proclaimed faith -- her case was hardly unique. "I'd say 60 to 70 percent of the men are the same way," Willett said. "They find Christianity or some other religion and are ready to accept their fate."
If Tucker, the 145th Texas inmate to be executed since 1982, elicited some measure of sympathy, serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff invited only scorn. McDuff was the only inmate ever to be freed from Death Row for one murder and sent back for another. His original death sentence, for killing an Alvarado teen in 1966, was commuted to life after the Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment in 1972.
He was paroled in 1989 and soon returned to a life of violence. He was condemned a second time for a string of murders that included the abduction and torturing of one woman in Waco and another in Austin.
Fitzgerald recalled visiting McDuff before his Nov. 17, 1998, execution so that he could brief reporters on the killer's final hours.
"I remember he asked me one question: 'Did I outdraw Karla Faye?'" Fitzgerald recalled. "I said, 'No, McDuff, you did not.' There were a lot of media in Huntsville that night. But it was nothing like Tucker."
Neither of those two high-profile events could match the intensity that accompanied the June 22, 2000, execution of Gary Graham, an African-American who was convicted of gunning down a man outside a Houston grocery store in 1981. Graham's claim of being railroaded by a racist criminal justice system won him support among such celebrities as actor Danny Glover and Bianca Jagger, the ex-wife of rocker Mick Jagger, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
While a flurry of last-ditch appeals delayed the execution by nearly three hours, Department of Public Safety troopers in riot gear worked feverishly to keep separated the hundreds of demonstrators from both sides of the capital punishment debate who descended on the Walls Unit. At one point, an armed contingent of the New Black Panthers marched in the streets around the prison.
"There could have very easily been a riot on the streets of Huntsville that night," Fitzgerald said.
The long wait
Although executions have become commonplace over the years, few people realize the effect they have on the families of both the crime victims and the inmates, said Lois Robison, a retired schoolteacher from Burleson whose son Larry Keith Robison was put to death on Jan. 21, 2000, for killing five people during a 1982 rampage in Lake Worth.
"Not long after Larry was arrested, my husband said to me, 'We're no longer Ken and Lois Robison the schoolteachers; we're Ken and Lois Robison the parents of a mass murderer,'" said Robison, a death penalty opponent who said her son suffered from severe mental illness.
During the 18 years her son waited on Death Row, Robison said family relationships were sometimes strained to the breaking point over her efforts to have the sentence reversed even while Larry Robison pushed for the execution to go forward.
"We've gotten past that, thank God," Robison said. "But it took a tremendous toll on all of us."
The wait was no easier for Edward Bolden, whose 17-year-old son, Allen, was abducted and killed in 1985 in Fort Worth. The killer, Juan Soria, was executed in July 2000, but not before his death sentence was appealed, overturned and finally reinstated.
"I'll never have to get up and look at a letter from yet another court, from yet another attorney, filing yet another appeal, most of which were just asinine," said Edward Bolden on the night his son's killer was put to death. "I'm still short a son."
On the fence
Willett, who was the correctional officer liaison with a Huntsville funeral home during the execution of Brooks in 1982, said he was reluctant to accept the post of Walls Unit warden when he was first approached about the job. He said that having the responsibly to preside over executions carried little appeal and that he took the job only after prayerful reflection.
"Prior to going in [as the Walls' warden], I don't think I ever thought a whole lot about it, the right or wrong of it," Willett said. "I think I went in pretty much sitting on the fence about it and left the same way, and still am that way today."
Online: Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org
Texas Department of Criminal Justice, www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/deathrow.htm
Texas executions
Between Dec. 7, 1982, and today, Texas has executed 405 inmates, including three women. Nearly half of those executed, 196 were white; 144 were black, 63 were Hispanic and two were classified as "other."
The population of Death Row in early November was 371, including 10 women. Two of the women were convicted of murders in Tarrant County.
Since Texas reinstituted the death penalty in 1973, at least 240 condemned inmates left Death Row before their executions were carried out. Most had the sentence reduced or commuted.
From 1924 to 1964, when Texas carried out executions with the electric chair, 361 inmates were put to death. Texas surpassed that mark with lethal injection on March 29, 2006, when Kevin Christopher Kincy was executed for the 1993 robbery and slaying of Jerome Harville in Houston.
The most active year in the nation's busiest execution chamber was 2000 when 40 inmates went to their death. During the first 10 years that Texas resumed executions, 39 inmates were put to death.
The process
Executions are ordered by the judge in the trial court where a condemned inmate was convicted and sentenced. Each death sentence is automatically appealed. Subsequent appeals often follow and lawyers for a condemned inmate offer arguments such as wrongful conviction, ineffective counsel at trial, errors in trial procedure or improper jury selection.
The governor's power to halt an execution is limited by the Texas Constitution to granting a one-time 30-day reprieve. A governor may commute a death sentence or grant clemency only upon the recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Notable cases
Charlie Brooks of Fort Worth, on Dec. 7, 1982. The first U.S. inmate to die by lethal injection and the first Texas inmate to be put to death after the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on executions was lifted. He was condemned for kidnapping and killing Fort Worth auto mechanic David Gregory in December 1976.
Karla Faye Tucker, on Feb. 3, 1988. She was the first Texas woman to be executed by lethal injection. Tucker, condemned for the pickax murder of a Houston couple in 1983, became a cause celebre across the political spectrum because of her conversion to Christianity while on Death Row.
Kenneth Allen McDuff, on Nov. 17, 1988. The only inmate to leave Death Row for one murder and be sent back for another. He was originally condemned for the 1966 killing of an Alvarado teenager but was paroled after his sentence was reduced to life in prison after the 1972 Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional. He was condemned again after a post-prison crime spree.
Joseph Stanley Faulder, on June 17, 1999. He became the first Canadian citizen in more than 50 years to be executed in the United States despite protests from officials in his home country that he had not been afforded an opportunity to speak with a representative from the Canadian government after his arrest for the 1975 beating and stabbing death of a Gregg County woman.
Gary Graham, on June 22, 2000. The execution took place during a massive demonstration by the New Black Panthers and a counterdemonstration by the Ku Klux Klan outside the death chamber in Huntsville. Graham's defenders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Bianca Jagger, said he was wrongly convicted by a racist criminal justice system for the 1981 robbery and killing of a Houston man. His detractors accused Graham of playing the race card.
http://www.star-telegram.com/629/story/336235.html
Texas reaches milestone: 25 years, 405 executions
BY JOHN MORITZ
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
Star-Telegram archives (1986)
The death chamber at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, like others around the United States, is idle while the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether lethal injection violates the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
HUNTSVILLE -- No prison warden in America has ordered more executions than Jim Willett. And perhaps no warden anywhere has searched deeper into his soul in wondering if he was doing right by the state, right by the inmate, right by the crime victim and right by his God.
"An overwhelming feeling comes over you as you give the signal to take a perfectly healthy human being and cause his death," said Willett, who ran the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Walls Unit in Huntsville from 1998 until he retired in 2001. "You can't help but wonder whether what you're doing is right."
The former warden's reflections come as Texas prepares to mark this week's 25th anniversary of the resumption of the death penalty. And they come during a rare lull in the pace of executions in Huntsville as the U.S. Supreme Court once again weighs the question of whether the execution process passes constitutional muster.
Willett, a 30-year corrections professional who now runs the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, presided over 89 of the 405 Texas executions that have been carried out by lethal injection since Dec. 7, 1982, at one of the oldest and most foreboding lockups in the nation. He'll mark the anniversary Friday with a symposium and panel discussion at the museum involving former prison officials, advocates both for and against the death penalty, and a journalist who has witnessed nearly all the executions carried out in the United States' most active death chamber.
Willett's time at the Walls, which ended in May 2001, was the busiest three-year period in the state's modern application of the death penalty. He arrived shortly after the Feb. 3, 1998, execution of pickax killer turned born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker and remained on the job through the politically turbulent times when then-Gov. George W. Bush was in hot pursuit of the presidency.
That year, 2000, saw the high-water mark in executions when 40 inmates went to their deaths at the Walls.
The 'killing machine'
Huntsville's death chamber reopened 25 years ago, in the same stark red-brick building that had once housed the electric chair, which the state used to execute 361 inmates from 1924 to 1964.
Just after midnight on Dec. 7, 1982, Fort Worth's Charlie Brooks was strapped to a steel gurney for killing 26-year-old David Gregory after kidnapping him six years earlier from Danny Sides Used Cars on East Lancaster Avenue on the pretext of road-testing a Pontiac Grand Prix.
Gregory, a married father of two, was shot to death a couple of miles away at the Lincoln Motor Hotel on East Rosedale Street.
Brooks, 40, would become the first inmate in the nation to die by lethal injection as Texas and most of the other states with capital punishment laws looked for a new, more humane way to put killers to death. Now, a quarter century later, executions across the country are on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether lethal injection is as humane as its advocates say.
After Brooks' execution, the Texas death chamber would remain dormant for 15 months. And for the remainder of the 1980s, only a handful of inmates each year would be administered the lethal three-drug cocktail that would first put them to sleep, then paralyze them and finally stop their hearts.
But by the latter half of the 1990s, the pace of executions quickened dramatically and the Texas prison system was derisively called the "killing machine" by a growing legion of death penalty opponents.
"You lose so many friends here that pretty soon you really don't want to too many close friendships anymore," said Ronald Chambers, a 51-year-old Dallas killer who arrived on Death Row in January 1976 and is now the longest serving of the state's 371 condemned inmates. "Their day comes up, and away they go."
A 'circus' in Huntsville
Larry Fitzgerald, a Fort Worth radio reporter in the 1960s and '70s who served as a prison system spokesman from 1995 until 2003, said that as the number of executions in Texas climbed, so did the attention from the world's media. "When Karla Faye Tucker was executed, it was an absolute circus in Huntsville," said Fitzgerald, now retired. "We had crews from CNN and all the networks. We had just about every outlet in Texas and who knows how many Europeans crawling all over the prison grounds."
Tucker's girl-next-door features and her behind-bars embrace of religion had managed to unite death penalty opponents on the left and Christian conservatives on the right in calling for her to be spared the executioner's needle. And as the first Texas woman to face lethal injection, she put the spotlight on the state's application of the death penalty like no other inmate before her.
Death penalty critics were outraged that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was not required to hold hearings to consider requests for clemency. Forces on both sides of the issue were surprised by how little power Texas governors have to halt an execution.
Under the law, a governor may grant only a one-time 30-day reprieve. A governor may commute a death sentence or grant clemency only upon the recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Willett said that while Tucker's case generated all the publicity -- perhaps because she was an attractive woman and perhaps because of her self-proclaimed faith -- her case was hardly unique. "I'd say 60 to 70 percent of the men are the same way," Willett said. "They find Christianity or some other religion and are ready to accept their fate."
If Tucker, the 145th Texas inmate to be executed since 1982, elicited some measure of sympathy, serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff invited only scorn. McDuff was the only inmate ever to be freed from Death Row for one murder and sent back for another. His original death sentence, for killing an Alvarado teen in 1966, was commuted to life after the Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment in 1972.
He was paroled in 1989 and soon returned to a life of violence. He was condemned a second time for a string of murders that included the abduction and torturing of one woman in Waco and another in Austin.
Fitzgerald recalled visiting McDuff before his Nov. 17, 1998, execution so that he could brief reporters on the killer's final hours.
"I remember he asked me one question: 'Did I outdraw Karla Faye?'" Fitzgerald recalled. "I said, 'No, McDuff, you did not.' There were a lot of media in Huntsville that night. But it was nothing like Tucker."
Neither of those two high-profile events could match the intensity that accompanied the June 22, 2000, execution of Gary Graham, an African-American who was convicted of gunning down a man outside a Houston grocery store in 1981. Graham's claim of being railroaded by a racist criminal justice system won him support among such celebrities as actor Danny Glover and Bianca Jagger, the ex-wife of rocker Mick Jagger, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
While a flurry of last-ditch appeals delayed the execution by nearly three hours, Department of Public Safety troopers in riot gear worked feverishly to keep separated the hundreds of demonstrators from both sides of the capital punishment debate who descended on the Walls Unit. At one point, an armed contingent of the New Black Panthers marched in the streets around the prison.
"There could have very easily been a riot on the streets of Huntsville that night," Fitzgerald said.
The long wait
Although executions have become commonplace over the years, few people realize the effect they have on the families of both the crime victims and the inmates, said Lois Robison, a retired schoolteacher from Burleson whose son Larry Keith Robison was put to death on Jan. 21, 2000, for killing five people during a 1982 rampage in Lake Worth.
"Not long after Larry was arrested, my husband said to me, 'We're no longer Ken and Lois Robison the schoolteachers; we're Ken and Lois Robison the parents of a mass murderer,'" said Robison, a death penalty opponent who said her son suffered from severe mental illness.
During the 18 years her son waited on Death Row, Robison said family relationships were sometimes strained to the breaking point over her efforts to have the sentence reversed even while Larry Robison pushed for the execution to go forward.
"We've gotten past that, thank God," Robison said. "But it took a tremendous toll on all of us."
The wait was no easier for Edward Bolden, whose 17-year-old son, Allen, was abducted and killed in 1985 in Fort Worth. The killer, Juan Soria, was executed in July 2000, but not before his death sentence was appealed, overturned and finally reinstated.
"I'll never have to get up and look at a letter from yet another court, from yet another attorney, filing yet another appeal, most of which were just asinine," said Edward Bolden on the night his son's killer was put to death. "I'm still short a son."
On the fence
Willett, who was the correctional officer liaison with a Huntsville funeral home during the execution of Brooks in 1982, said he was reluctant to accept the post of Walls Unit warden when he was first approached about the job. He said that having the responsibly to preside over executions carried little appeal and that he took the job only after prayerful reflection.
"Prior to going in [as the Walls' warden], I don't think I ever thought a whole lot about it, the right or wrong of it," Willett said. "I think I went in pretty much sitting on the fence about it and left the same way, and still am that way today."
Online: Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org
Texas Department of Criminal Justice, www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/deathrow.htm
Texas executions
Between Dec. 7, 1982, and today, Texas has executed 405 inmates, including three women. Nearly half of those executed, 196 were white; 144 were black, 63 were Hispanic and two were classified as "other."
The population of Death Row in early November was 371, including 10 women. Two of the women were convicted of murders in Tarrant County.
Since Texas reinstituted the death penalty in 1973, at least 240 condemned inmates left Death Row before their executions were carried out. Most had the sentence reduced or commuted.
From 1924 to 1964, when Texas carried out executions with the electric chair, 361 inmates were put to death. Texas surpassed that mark with lethal injection on March 29, 2006, when Kevin Christopher Kincy was executed for the 1993 robbery and slaying of Jerome Harville in Houston.
The most active year in the nation's busiest execution chamber was 2000 when 40 inmates went to their death. During the first 10 years that Texas resumed executions, 39 inmates were put to death.
The process
Executions are ordered by the judge in the trial court where a condemned inmate was convicted and sentenced. Each death sentence is automatically appealed. Subsequent appeals often follow and lawyers for a condemned inmate offer arguments such as wrongful conviction, ineffective counsel at trial, errors in trial procedure or improper jury selection.
The governor's power to halt an execution is limited by the Texas Constitution to granting a one-time 30-day reprieve. A governor may commute a death sentence or grant clemency only upon the recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Notable cases
Charlie Brooks of Fort Worth, on Dec. 7, 1982. The first U.S. inmate to die by lethal injection and the first Texas inmate to be put to death after the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on executions was lifted. He was condemned for kidnapping and killing Fort Worth auto mechanic David Gregory in December 1976.
Karla Faye Tucker, on Feb. 3, 1988. She was the first Texas woman to be executed by lethal injection. Tucker, condemned for the pickax murder of a Houston couple in 1983, became a cause celebre across the political spectrum because of her conversion to Christianity while on Death Row.
Kenneth Allen McDuff, on Nov. 17, 1988. The only inmate to leave Death Row for one murder and be sent back for another. He was originally condemned for the 1966 killing of an Alvarado teenager but was paroled after his sentence was reduced to life in prison after the 1972 Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional. He was condemned again after a post-prison crime spree.
Joseph Stanley Faulder, on June 17, 1999. He became the first Canadian citizen in more than 50 years to be executed in the United States despite protests from officials in his home country that he had not been afforded an opportunity to speak with a representative from the Canadian government after his arrest for the 1975 beating and stabbing death of a Gregg County woman.
Gary Graham, on June 22, 2000. The execution took place during a massive demonstration by the New Black Panthers and a counterdemonstration by the Ku Klux Klan outside the death chamber in Huntsville. Graham's defenders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Bianca Jagger, said he was wrongly convicted by a racist criminal justice system for the 1981 robbery and killing of a Houston man. His detractors accused Graham of playing the race card.
http://www.star-telegram.com/629/story/336235.html