Texas, 1983-1999, Undated

EXECUTION ALERTS

TEXAS Thursday Hareh 12 12:01 am CST —- Lethal Injection

JOHN HENRY SELVAGE, a black male, age 36, is scheduled to be e
In Texas on March 12th for the 1979 murder of a deputy sheriff
a jewelry store robbery in Houston. The victim was an hispanic ma.
He was apparently tried by an all white jury and there were codefend:
that did not receive the death penalty.

SUGGESTED ACTIONS: Contact the Governor and the Board of Pardo:
TEXAS Wednesday March 4 12:01 -aik cSt f Léthal Injection™

(ok oe ;

ELISEO MORENO, an hispanic male, 27 years;old, ig ‘cheated to be executed
March 4th for the shooting death of a Dept. of Public Safety Trooper and
five other people in 1983. The trooper was 25yf. old,white male. No
details on the other murders are available. Moreno ‘has taken his “7 -
attorney off the case and is dropping all appeals. ~He- refuses visits

from ministers and attorneys and will not reconsider his decision to be
executed because he believes he must atone for his sins in this way. His
address is Eliseo Moreno #759, Ellis I Unit, Huntsville, Texas 77343.

2 he changes his mind attorneys are prepared to obtain a stay. (late
notice on this case is on the advice of those close.to thecase)

d Parole

TEXAS Thursday “~~ March 26 — 12:01 am CST . Lethal Injection 5

CLARENCE LEE BRANDLEY, a black male, age 35, is scheduled to be executed
March 26 for the rape and murder of a white female high school student in
1980. Mr. Brandley had two trials. The first one ended in a hung jury.
It is believed both juries were all:white and there are racial overtone
throughout the case and the publicity surrounding it. There is also go
reason to believe he may be innocent such as a lack of any physical
evidence and no witnesses. When a prior warrant was inzeffeect a woman
came forward and said that her husband had done the crime. He was gi
a lie detector test and failed it but nothing else was followed”
The Board of Pardons and Pardéle has refused to review this case.

SUGGESTED ACTIONS: Write the ie of Pardon and Parole and ask th
they at least review Mr. Brandley's case. nee

CONTACTS for TEXAS cases ie gGov. Bill Clements:
State Capitol
Austin, Texas
512-463-

512-459-2700.
formation on any of the Texas.
roject in Houston— 713-527-8942

Elliott was scheduled to be executed in
ved a stay from the U.S. SUP.Ct.
rnandez was executed om vanuary 20th in Texas.

For undates and

the Justice and

fh

NEAN update: DeCourcy Squire W211 be doing the alerts fo
¥ them for April and June. (DeCourcy—402
“
Texas. killer 2gand — Hiiore than any othel' stute
— sitive Texas resuitied the death
penalty th 1982. ;
“He is sorry for what he’s done," |

his father, Felipe, told the Houston

to be put to death this year and the |

y
NS

ws executed with

i

Chronicle.

-s lethal injection

Moreno had told the judge who
= scheduled fils execution date thal
he wiinted to appeals,

<

he was struck by four others, in-
cluding i filial shot to the head at
vlose rage while he lay wounded

“But he said he put his life In. Bae #2 yetssaee
Gou's hands. If {t's God's will, then aE s Se 3 Reg 23 $
Ss He's reidy. He's not going to fight : .g 920 88 gesse aa
a hack.” ay ‘ § Bee gs GoSug5g88

i 4 ‘ z eon 2 5
HUNTSVILLE, ‘texas — A tian Boyel was the thd Uf Blk peuple i a be Gog - 8 oe She
who killed a state trooper and five — prosecutors said Moreno Killed dur- FS Bre gee as £ 33 Fie
other peuple during a L60nile fait Ing a erlttie spree that stated th | i eas g S a Be a 3 ae
page Uf kidnappitty ant iiukder — College Station with the sluyligs of og gs & SEE Ss 23 afk 3
Y yurned effors tw sive hls uw life his brother-in-law, Juans Gaza, and | by 4 Be0 gam oS ealias
and was executed Tuesday. Garaa’s wife, Esther, f Bo 4 Be g Bees Seeseee
Eliseo Motetio, who repaired Boyd, 25, was shot to death after | g g Be int Le Be 2 a0 age 3
¥ jawn mowers in Donna, Texas, was pulling over Moreno for a traffic ' 4 = aoe B26 eee Bg SE
~ injected with the lethal drugs just vivlullurt neur Hempstead. t ¢ BE 4 7: 3a 78 8a 4 BB
after 10 ph, PST und wes Pro- —— Acvorting to trial testimony, B 3 SE “Sasa 8:
nouncetl deat Wy 1019 pt, Attor- — Hoyd's bulletproof vest deflected SES
s ney Gertetul Jin Mattox sald. tw of the shots from Moreno’s 58
.857-caliber Magnum revolver, but auf

Ba

2

22 1b

7

ere because Pm

2:13 A.M. Mr.
terms for the

fe also received

gasped three times. He | wife,

peared happy and al-
pronounced dead six minutes

to the laws of Texas be-

of sin are death. ’'m willing to

Prosecutors said the rampage had | dri

d 6 in’83 Is Executed by Injection !

wife. The authorities suggested that he} block.

2
4
aa 8
sf 8
33 2
Tis lawyer. Rithotd Tindal, re- a 3% a
TE called Moreno saying to him: "the oi the side of the road. 29 3 e esta 23
wages of sin are death, utd fm Also shot to death were Ann feos 8 geese. ode
ready to accept that fate. They tan Bennatl, 70, a retired nurse inj N es & £ 3 Bea Be 5 g5
lake my body put fot thy soul. My Hempstead: her sister, Allie Wil- 83 E| Sagr s8se EOASe Bss
+ soul is the Lord. kins, 7); und Bennatt’s broth. Q g % be Ep 3 ge beg re gab
Moreno was executed for the fa-_ er-in-law James Bennatt, 62. NI ge g B38 ggo%n Bo a2
tal shooting of Texas Department Another Hertipsteud family Ba 2 eo g- SSSR BG See Bee
of Publie Safely Sooper Russell member was abducted and forced Ly Pea oo EbSeeLaR To a8 5
Lynn Boyd ort Oct, 11, 1983. ty drive Moreno aout 70 nies to 5 PeSSees SESS Base 225
“There's not a whole lot more] Pasadena, where he freed them ~ ons TRabS OGud bo
could do, of should,” Tindal said, and abduvted another man at gun =): gees S oysess a3 € ag eg é
- referring to legal delays of the exe- point. Police finally Halted him yo ve or g oa Es 38 E 8 g ee BU SEE
cution. without incident at a roadblock itt hd Sega <E gAete seeag wae
“{t' kind of a mofal dilemma I Whatton Cotinty. ae se gg8es 8 hes coe
x eel th in, But He's requested tl, 4,,, @ fo) Be #3 geese gages Ske
, zi rosecutors salt the ratipage esto CER 578 8SaFo ote
and I feel I should adhere to his qui. 4 " I t Bee 2g ego. Sake EES
svlshiea.” as set off by marltal problems be- W 38 geo SEBASER: BETS SSE
. tween Moreno and fis esttanged | y) &8362 SSckocasuahse mas
Q Moreno, 27, played dominoes Wife. They suggested Moreno was &} wes 5 mg Sey o gs S28 ge
and met relatives before his trans- en route to the Rio Grande Valley Fad QS 4 aed 8 as eg on ee Sa 8R ekg
fer to a holding cell outside the to kill his wife when he was arrest | | : = BSase neg Begg eses Be Soe
‘Texas déath chamber. He also read ed. B38 3/32 S8oeS 133 gasses
the Bible and watched reruns of Raul Garza, Juan Garza’s broth. . AES § 35 5 aks ef ee ee UBT ES
“Dennis the Menace” on TV, Cor- er, said Moreno metlted the lethal Re Bia gages Sues esveegesee
rections Departinent spokesman injection. 1433 By 83 SSReS SSESA Ss
David Nunnelee saitl. “It’s linte he get whiut He de- ee aa es
He was the second 'I'exas inmate _ served," Garza said. i

AGE 4A — MONDAY, APRIL

12, 1999

7
Your local newspaper since 1850

THE HUNTSVILLE ITEM

DAVID LYONS, Publisher RUSSELL SURNETT, Managing Editor
‘M ROBBIE MAGNESS, Assistant Managing Editor

The Huntsville Item is a division of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.

Inmates not being |
treated correctly

Huntsville, Texas ... Texas

Department of Criminal Justice

vw Bllis Unit

This is where death row

inmates are housed. This is sup
posedly where socicty’s most
dangerous criminals are kept.
This is where a breakout
occurred last November. What
has changed since then, you may
ask. Well, I'll tell you...

Since that time, things have
deteriorated considerably. Yes,
the warden and most of the
guards have changed. Yes, there
have been some improvements
in the physical security of the
unit. However, no one has told
the inmates whats going to hap-
pen and yet everything they
were accustomed to has
changed. Rumors are running,
rampant’ about possible moves
and continued and ongoing
restrictions.’ Prisoner morale is

‘at an all-time low. Conditions
inside the unit have worsened
considerably. Right now, the Ellis
Unit is an explosion looking for a
time and place to happen. And

the politicians and thé” Texas.

Department of Criminal Justice
will reap the grim results. When
thé truth is finally known, I seri-
ously doubt that there will be
another Bush in the White House
ih the near future, if ever. é
\ From. what I know, since’last
November, these very dangerous
criminals have been in lockdown,
23 hours a day. More than half
the death row inmates have been
housed |in this manner with two

lax. 4 4

According to the Ruiz stipula-
tion, inmates classified as work
capable, not necessarily partici-
pating in the work program, ‘will
be given 14 hours per day out-of
cell time, Monday through
Friday of each week,'10 hours
per day out-of-cell time Saturday...
and Sunday of each week and
shall have the opportunity to
recreate outdoors for at least
four of the 14 hours per day out-
of-cell time provided. None of
these conditions are being met.

Would breaking the rules be a
way to finally.be housed in a cell
by yourself, at least for a little
while? It's a thought, probably,
one that dn inmate in a double
cell has had at least once, or
twice, or maybe even three times

Further, the new guards have
an attitude. They are constantly
needling the death row, inmates
with statements like “Hefe’s your

“dog food” when they bring them

meals. This is just a small sem-
ple of the mental torment that
these inmates are put through

“on a regular basis, day in and

day out.

Recently, within the past two
months, they have been refused
religious services. There are no
religious services permitted and
no Bible study. I am sure this
measure is designed to curtail

men in a cell. This-is-~almost-» another :breakoutyputlvreally-

about how much: greater the
strain will become
summer approaches and tem-
peratures inside Ellis Unit soar
to 110 degrees. This is, of course,
a unit without air conditioning.
Doesn't this make for a warm
and fuzzy picture?

Since the breakout, the work
program has been halled. There
is absolutely nothing to break the
monotony of one day to the next.
‘This was not a program that the
inmates were paid for. No,
rather, it was a profitable, pro-
gram for the Texas Department
of Criminal Justice, allowing
inmates to contribute to their
upkeep which relieves some of
the tax burden on the citizens of
Texas. Inmates had to earn the
right to work for the State of
‘Texas. It was also 2 way to
insure their conformity ;to the
rules in order to continue on the
work program. But now itis also
gone ... and what makes them
want to conform to the rules
now? [ta
‘The work program has been a
resounding success for almost 15
years. In my opinion, the escape
was not the fault of the work
program, but was due to a lack
of security and a failure to follow
prescribed procedures by the
guards. There was an escape
attempt in 1997 from the same
area, however, the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice
did nothing to correct the prob-
lem. The death row, prisoners
were allowed in the recreation
yard without the supervision of
any guard. They were not count-
ed as they went to recreation or
as they returned to the indoors.
A simple procedural change
could have prevented the escape.
But let's punish the prisoners
because the guards and warden

fail to see what the connection is

e-Taxad nr} between religious:serviced and a
~ jailbreak T tougheuiariewoulay

‘be the other way around — that
a religious influence would teach
a better way, not leave nothing
left but violence.

‘Again, according to the Ruiz
stipulation, work’ capable
inmates shall have the opportu-

‘nity to attend weekly religious
services in the dayroom.

Additional items that are
being denied to the inmates
since last November that are
part of the Ruiz stipulation
include the fact that inmates are
being denied access td all mate-
rials available in the uhit library, ,
including books, newspapers,
periodicals and education and
‘reference materials, they are
being denied access to,the unit
law library and the basic Jaw
library.” They are now also
restricted from purchasing
watercolors, pencils, pens and
brushes. Again, all items agreed
to in the Ruiz stipulation.

It is true that sdciety doos not
owe these men and women a
beautiful life. However, they are
owed a tolerable existence, Thei
fate is terrible enough, without
grabbing their heads and rub-
bing their noses in it 24 hours a
day. Another basic change is that
work classified inmates are no
longer able to cat their meals at
tables in the day room. Again,
this is a right set down in the
Ruiz stipulation. This treatment
is enough to make a person go a
little, or maybe a lot crazy, don’t
you think? And who will be hurt
when that happens? My guess is
a lot pf the inmates and a lot of
the -prison personnel. And who
will win? No one. We will all lose.

: iy * "
utrene Rekltzke is a resident

9A /the Houston Post/Tues., February 24, 1987 2%

Supreme Court
ruling may aid
5 TDC inmates

On death row for murders

By DOUGLAS FREELANDER
Pest Reporter

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling
Monday improved the prospect of
new trials for five young men on
Texas death row — two of them
from Harris County — who were
sentenced to die for murders they
committed when they were 17
years old.

The court also ordered ancther
death row case from Harris Coun-
ty back to state district court for a
‘review to see if black jurors were
disqualified because of racial bias.

For the first time, the court
iagreed — in an Oklahoma case —
to decide whether siates may exe-
cute convicted Killers who were
under 18 when they committed
their crimes.

There are 36 juvenile offenders
on death row around the country,
said Tanya Coke of the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund in New York
whe called the Supreme Court de-
cision “encouraging.”

“We're seeing a heightened pub-
lic concern about the issue. The
court has taken notice of an egre-
gicus wrong — the fact that we
still sentence to death juveniles for
these crimes,” she said.

Texas has already executed two
convicts who were under age 18
when they committed murder.
Five others are among about 250
condemned convicts on death row
‘in Huntsville. Two of them there
for slayings in Harris County are:
! Rebert Anthony Carter, 23, was

‘convicted in the fatal shooting of
Syivia Reyes, 18, as Reyes tried to

:stop him from robbing the service
‘station where she worked as a
clerk; and Gary Graham, 23, was
‘convicted of shooting a 53-year-old
‘San Antonio man to death during a
«robbery in Houston.
‘ he others are Joseph John
‘Cannon, 27, sentenced to die for a
murder in Bexar County; Johnny
Frank Garrett, 23,. convicted of
strangling a nun in Amarillo, and
Curtis Paul Harris, 25, who was
given death for beating a man to
:death in Brazos County.

Charles Rumbaugh and Jay
Kelly Pinkerton, both of Amarilic,
were given lethal injections in 1985
and 1986, respectively, for crimes
committed when they were 17.

The Oklahoma case involves
William Wayne Thompson, 19, who
was sent to death row for a mur-
der he committed when he was 15.

Thompson’s lawyers said impo-
‘Sition of the death penalty against
‘minors violates the Eighth
Amendment ban against cruel and
‘unusual punishment.

: Lawyers for Oklahoma argued a
judge should have discretion tc de-
‘cide if a juvenile is mature enough
‘to be tried as an adult. ee

According to Amnesty Interna-
tional, the United States is one of
very few countries where people
are sentenced to death for crimes
committed as juveniles.

The Supreme Court refused last
year to halt the execution in South
Carolina of James Terry Roach for
a murder committed in 1977, when
he was 17.

To date, Roach, Rumbaugh and

‘i are the only individuals
among the 69 U.S. prison inmates
executed since 1977 who were un-
der 18 when their crimes were
committed.

Texas law says a person has to
be at least 17 before he can be
sentenced to death.

The court also ordered a review
of the conviction of Arthur Lee
Williams Jr. in Harris County to
see if blacks were disqualified
from his jury because of their
race.

Harris County Assistant Dis-
trict Attorney Keno Henderson
said he is confident he can prove
he struck five blacks from the jury
panel for legitimate reasons,

Henderson said at the time of
Williams’ 1983 trial the Supreme
Court had not established its rule
that prosecutors may not disquali-
fy potential jurors based on race.

The so-called “Batson rule”
came dewn in 1986. Last month the
Supreme Court said it could apply
retroactively to cases still on ap-
peal.

Williams, a 27-year-old black,
was sentenced in February 1983 to
die by lethal injection for the mur-
der of white Houston police officer
Daryl Wayne Shirley, 4.

in other action Monday, the Su-
preme Court:

O Refused to revive a $20 mil- .

Hon lawsuit filed in 1979 by Linda

Fredrickson of Dallas against |

Hustler magazine for publishing
nude photos of her two children.

O Refused to hear an appeal by
seven people ordered imprisoned
in 1985 for 30 days for refusing to
siand when a Jefferson County

Court-at-Law Judge Donald Floyd ~
courtroom.

entered his

O Refused to become involved
in a dispute over a Minnesota
abortion lew setting a 48-hour
waiting period on minors secking
abortions and requiring their par-
ents be notified.

O Let stand the 1984 Cable Com-
munications Policy Act, prohibit-
ing a TV station’s owner from ac-
quiring interest in a cable system
serving the same area.

Post reporter Janet Elliott also
contributed to this article.

aalez

TATE

Execution
critics blast

Texas record |

AUSTIN (UPI) — Because Texas
jeads the nation in criminal executions,
leaders of Amnesty International’s
worldwide campaign io abolish the
death penalty promised Wednesday to
focus on the state’s sentencing proce-
dures.

Since 1979, Texas has executed 20
prisoners and has the largest criminal
population waiting on death row in the
nation.

In a report on the use of the death
penalty in the United States, Amnesty

international cited racial disparity in

sentencing as the biggest problem with
capital punishment.

“In Texas, blacks who killed whites
were six times more likely to be sen-
tenced to death than whites who had
killed whites,” said John Pojman, coor-

dinator of the organization’s Texas |

State Death Penalty Program.

Pojman aiso deplored sentencing ju-
veniles to death and noted six 17-year-
olds are on Texas’ death row.

“Amnesty knows of only five other
such executions of children since 1980,
two in Pakistan and one each in
Rwanda, Barbados and Bangladesh,”
Pojman said.

Rep. Debra Danburg, D-Houston,
said she does not believe many Texans
realized some of the people on death
row had not killed anyone.

“Even if the religious doctrine to
which you hold is an eye-for-an-eye, a
tooth-for-a-tooth ... you may not real-

ize that in fact in Texas we can and do |
execute people who have never killed a -

person in their lives, and this is a seri-

|

j
i
|
f

ous injustice that needs to be ad-

dressed,” she said.

Denburg said bills introduced in the

Texas Legislature that would extend
the application of the death penalty to
other offenses would not meet with
public approval.

Will Gray, a Houston lawyer who is
opposed to capital punishment, criti-
cized state judges for assigning volun-
teer lawyers to capital punishment
cases,

* Gray said defendants with court-ap-
pointed lawyers do not receive fair tri-
als and are more likely to receive
death sentences than these who have
privaie attorneys.

Arguments that capital punishment
deters crime were dismissed by the
Rev. Walker Railey, minister at Dalias’
First United Methodist Church, as a
“political, sidestep of an emotional is-
sue.”

rouse Dili exer pis
killers’ accomplices |

from death penaltv
“By ANNE MARIE KILDAY Hp ST Mv, 7A |

Houston Chronicte Austin Buresu

’ AUSTIN — A bill that would shield CH Kon [LE

murder accomplices from the death

ity, unless they participated in the 4
illing, was a roved by voice vote 3 On 17
Wednestey in the Texas House. -
The bill by Rep. Larry Evans, D-
Houston, now goes to the Senate for
conalder on: i
The bill was prompted by the case o!
Doyle Skillern, aie was executed in

senuaty 1985, for a murder he did not’

‘commit while the trigger man was sen-

tenced only to life in prison. |

‘Trial testimony showed that Skiflern |

_ was waiting in'a stolen car in 1974 /

when Charles Sanne shot an under-

cover narcotics officer six times. Both

Skillern and Sanne were convicted of

first degree murder, but Skillern was

iven the death penalty and Sanne i

w a life sentence. j

‘The bill would shield accomplices in i

capital murder cases by requiring ju, i

. ries to decide whether the defendan!
caused the death of the victim if an

other person had been charged in the !

case.

‘The bill does not apply to murder
for-hire, and it does not apply to ay .
accomplices who actually cause a mur

, der by urging someone else to commi
the crime. ‘

2
y

sna

ra S exas County Sheriffs
GONZALES COUNTY py

-ales County was created March 17, 1836 as one of the original counties. It was named for Rafael Gonzales,
¢ Coahuila and Texas in 1825. The county was organized in 1837 with Gonzales as the county seat. There
oen thirty-four men who have served as sheriff with five of them being elected twice.

a weds { foun

LLAMA. HALL was elected on February 4, 1839 and served until February 17, 1840.
a. FRED KELSO was elected on February 17, 1840; re-elected February 1, 1841 and served until February 6, 1843.

=NRY McCULLOCH was elected on February 6, 1843 and served until February 3, 1845.

;HEW CALDWELL was elected the first sheriff but there were no dates in the State Election Register. The first county
\d were dated October 29, 1838. He served until February 4, 1839.

<xMUEL BARROW was elected on February 3, 1845; re-elected July 13, 1846 and served until August 7, 1848.
gOSES HESSKEW was elected on August 7, 1848 and served untii March 20, 1849 when he resigned.
CUNTON E. DeWITT was elected on June 6, 1849; re-elected August 5, 1850 and served until December 30, 1850.

SaMUEL BARROW was elected on December 30, 1850 according to the county records but this is not in the State Election
Register He served until March 27, 1852 when he died.

WILLIAM L. BARROW was appointed but there are no dates given. The appointment was probably around April 1, 1852
following the death of Sheriff Samuel Barrow; he was elected August 2, 1852; re-elected August 7, 1854 and served until
January 29, 1855 when he resigned. There is an entry in the Commissioner's Court Minutes dated November 19, 1855
that says he was “allowed $45 for execution of Frank Hill and furnishing gallows. " Apparently the execution took place

before he resigned the office.

A.M. GRISWOLD was appointed after Sheriff Barrow resigned but there were no dates in the State Election Register; was
elected August 6, 1855 and served until September 27, 1856 when he resigned.

AUGUSTUS D. HARRIS was appointed on October 13, 1856; was elected August 2, 1858 and served until August 6, 1860.
A. T. BASS was elected on August 6, 1860 and served until April 1862. There was no reason given for his leaving office.
WILLIAM A. HALL was appointed on April 16, 1862 and served until August 4, 1862.

T. L. WITTER was elected on August 4, 1862 and served until August 1, 1864. According to the Commissioner's Court
Minutes dated October 8, 1863 he was paid $125 salary for the term August 1862 - August 1863.

£. ROARK WALKER was elected on August 1, 1864; appointed August 15, 1865 by Governor A. J. Hamilton; re-elected
June 25, 1866 and served until April 27, 1869 when he was disqualified.

H. J. POLLY was appointed on April 27, 1869 by General J. J. Reynolds’ Special Order # 99 and served until December 3,
1869.

JAMES T. MATHIEW was elected on December 3, 1869 and served until November 10, 1871 when he was "removed".
There was no reason given for his removal.

WILLIAM E. JONES was appointed on November 10, 1871 and served until November 8, 1872.

GREEN DeWITT was elected on November 8, 1872; re-elected September 26, 1874 and served until February 15, 1876.

A. T. BASS was elected a second time on February 15, 1876; re-elected November 5, 1878 and served until November 2,
1880.

JAMES C. JONES was elected on November 2, 1880 and served until June 1882 when he died.

BARRY G. ANDERSON was appointed on June 12, 1882 and served until November 7, 1882.

DANIEL C. PRICE was elected on November 7, 1882 and served until November 4, 1884.

WILLIAM E. JONES was elected on November 4, 1884; re-elected November 2, 1886, November 6, 1888 and served until
November 4, 1890.

ROBERT M. GLOVER was elected on November 4, 1890; re-elected November 8, 1892 and served until November 6, 1894.

WILLIAM E. JONES was elected a second time November 6, 1894 and served until November 3, 1896.

_ 209, .

Cidmalo Cre, shy

Texas County Sheriffs
November3, 186and served until November

SAM HOUSTON REESE was appointed on November 14, 1894; was el
8, 1898. Sheriff Reese was born ‘August 4, 1859 and was martied to Kern Townsend, who was born August 4, 1858 and

died November 13, 1944. He was killed in Columbus, Texas March 16, 1899. He and his wife are buried in the Weimar

_.. (Texas) Cemetery. The information and photo were courtesy of his daughter Lilian Estelle Reese of Columbus, Texas.
She is the author of Flaming Feuds of Colorado County. The author recalls sitting with her several times and listening to

-- » per stories of the Colorado County feuds and her father’s involvement in them.
WILLIAM THOMAS "WILL" BURFORD was elected on November 8, 1898; re-elected November 6, 1900 and served until
November 4, 1902. The photo, taken about 1930, of Sheriff and Mrs. Burford are courtesy of his grand-daughter Mrs.
__ James Hopkins of Garwood, Texas. -
WE. "DICK" BRIDGE was elected on November 4, 4902: re-elected November 8, 1904, November 6, 1906 and served
until November 3, 1908. He died September 16, 1918 and is buried in the Columbus (Texas) Cemetery. The photo of
|, Sheriff Bridge is courtesy of the Nesbit Memorial Library, Columbus, Texas, Patty Woolery-Price, Librarian.

ETHELBERT BRUCE MAYES was elected on November 3, 1908; re-elected November 8, 1910, November 5, 1912,

__..November 3, 1914 and served until November 7, 1916.
TERRY J. BALHOM was elected on November 7, 1916 and served until November 5, 1918.

JOHN F. WEGENHOFT was elected on November 5, 4918; re-elected November 2, 1920 and served until January 1, 1923
His tombstone in the Columbus Cemetery shows he was born April 30, 1873 and died November 27, 1947.

ADAM BURTTSCHELL was elected on November 7, 1922; re-elected November 4, 1924 and served until January 1, 1927

It was during his first term, on March 9, 1923, that the last public hanging took place in Colorado County. His tombstone

in the Columbus Cemetery shows he was bor November 14, 1871 and died February 18, 1946. His wife, Mary, was bor:
November 15, 1873 and died November 16, 1956. She is buried beside him.

FRANK FRED HOEGERMEYER was elected on November 2, 4926 and served until January 1, 1929.

7. W. HILLMER was elected on November 6, 4928 and served until January 4, 1931

FRANK FRED HOEGERMEYER was elected a second time on November 4, 1930; re-elected November 8, 1X2
November 6, 1934and served until January 1, 4937. The author met "Mr. Frank’ some twenty-five years after he was she™
and spent several hours, on different occasions, with him and his wife talking about the times when he served as she
He was a most interesting man to talk to, to say the least!
Sheriff Hoegermeyer was born June 20, 1885 at New Bileau, Colorado County, Texas, the son of Charles F: and Hus
Engle Hoegermeyer. The father was born in Brenham, Texas and the mother in DeWitt County, Texas. On February **
1937 in San Antonio, Texas, he married Mae Gates, the daughter of William and May Gates of Crystal City, Texas The
had no children.
He was a member of the Masonic Lodge, Eastern Star, the old Odd Fellows Lodge at Eagle Lake, Texas, the Knig
Pythias and the Woodmen of the World. He was also a member of the Columbus, Texas Chamber of Commerce
served as City Marshall at Eagle Lake, Texas from the time he was elected as sheriff in November 1924 until he took
on January 1, 1925. This is the only other lawman’s job he ever held. The information was given by Sheriff 204 aia
. Hoegermeyer in an interview at their home about 1960. The photos were taken by the author at that interview.

ETHELBERT BRUCE MAYES was elected a second timeon November 3, 1936; re-elected November 8, 1938 and
until January 1, 1941. The author met Howard Mayes, son of the sheriff, at Oakland, Texas in November 4960. He"
photo of his father taken some fifty years before that as well as one of the Sheriff's Association of Texas conve
in 1912. My grandmother, Nettie Tige of Eagle Lake, Texas, had known Sheriff Mayes and his son Howard for M2 *
She went with me and she and Howard Mayes had a good visit. Ithad been many years since they had see? est ~ _
HARVEY LEE was elected on Novernber 5, 1940; re-elected November 3, 1942, November 7, 1944, Novernd= ee
November 2, 1948 and served until January 1, 1951. Sheriff Lee was born near Oakland, Texas 07 October soil Z
married Hilda F Thumann in the Luthern Church at Weimar, Texas on February 6, 1929. Their children 2! elles
and Hilliard T. He was constable at Weimar, Texas "about 1935 or 4936 for about three years, don't rernembe i
Harvey Lee is the first sheriff remember meeting. He was a friend of my family who lived in Eagle Lake. TOSS a
Iwas about ten years old and a faithful attendee of the Saturday westems at the local theatre. N tess to.

a lasting impression on me.

JAMES OSBORNE "BOYCHE" WALKER was elected on November 7, 1950; re-elected November ea Wont ae
1954, November 6, 1956, November 8, 1960, November 3, 1964 and served until January 1, 1969. Sher De al
a total of eighteen years which is the longest in the history of Colorado County. ‘Sheriff Walker was .

418

Texas County Sheriffs

COLLIN COUNTY

and was named for Collin McKinney, signer of the
n July 13, 1846 with Buckner as the county seat until

Collin County was created April 3, 1846 from Fannin County
en men who have served as shertif with one

Texas Declaration of Independence. The county was organized o!
4848 when McKinney became the county seat. There have been thirty-sev

of them serving twice.

KING S. CUSTER was elected the first sheriff on July 13, 1846 and served until August 7, 1848.

ROBERT FITZHUGH was elected on August 7, 4948; re-elected August 5, 1850, August 2, 1852 and served until August
-- 7, 1854: ° e we

JAMES H. LOVEJOY was elected on August 7, 1954; re-elected August 4, 1856 and served until August 2, 1858.

>) yQSIAH H. DOAK was dlected on August 2, 1858 and served until August 6, 1860.

JAMES L. READ was élected on August 6, 1860; re-elected August 4, 1962 and served until August 1, 1864.

JOSIAH NICHOLS was elected on August 4, 1864; was appointed August 8, 1865 by Governor A. J. Hamilton and served

until March 1866 when he resigned.

WILLIAM C. HALL was appointed on March 27, 1866 by Governor A. J. Hamilton and served until June 25, 1866.

SIMON P. BURNS was elected on June 25, 1966 and served until November 19, 1867 when he was removed by Genera
J.J. Reynolds’ Special Order # 207.

GEORGE A. WILSON was appointed on November 19, 1
until December 3, 1869.

867 by General J. J. Reynolds’ Special Order # 207 and served

WILLIAM NELSON BUSH was elected on Decer nber3, 1g6gand served until December 2, 1 873. He was bom inKentucs
lew, only white man ever legally executed in Collin County, “35

on May 27, 1833. He was sheriff when Stephen M. Ball
hanged in McKinney on May 24, 1872. This information was courtesy of Elizabeth Bush Roberts of McKinney. Texas ae

great grand-daughter of Sheriff Bush.

WILLIAM W. MERRITT was elected on December 2, 1873; re-elected February 15, 1976 and served until November s
1878.

WILLIAM WORDEN was elected on November 5, 1878; re-elected
November 4, 1884-

GABE S. BECK was elected on November 4,1
was a deputy in 1873 and in 1889 was appointed a U.S. Marshall by Pre:

November 2, 1880, November 7, 1982 and seved vo

ge4: re-elected November 2, 4886 and served until November 6, 1888 =
cident McKinley. Sheriff Beck was pom Aue

31, 1855.
Ww. SCOTT PHILLIPS was elected on November 6, 1888; re-elected November 4, 1890 and served until November &
1892.
os

November 8, 1892; re-elected November 6, 1894 and served until November 3: #

J. L. MOULDEN was elected on
ber 3, 1896 and served until November 8, 1898. Sheriff Coffey was bon 9 kere

Ww. S. COFFEY was elected on Novern!

on July 9, 1842.
J. W. PAFFORD was elected on November 8, 1898; re-elected November 6, 1900 and served until November 4
wet

TOM M. BEVERLY, SR. was elected on November 4, 4902; re-elected November 8, 4904 and served until Ne

1906.
GEORGE M. EUBANKS was elected on November 6, 1906; re-elected November 3, 1908 and served unt Nev
1910. west

8, 1910; re-elected November 5, 1912 and served until Nov

A. T. ROBERTSON was elected on November ®
a Nqne®
3, 1914; re-elected Novernber 7, tg1eand served ult Now

ALBERT McCAULEY was elected on November
1918.

ED BLAKEMAN was elected on November 5, 1918; re-elected November
W. F. BISHOP was elected on November 7, 1922 and served until January 4, 1925.

44184
2, 1920 and served until January ee

t
i
H
H
i
i
i
4
i
:
H

sees. en 7

WILLIAI
ED BLA
1, 19

GEORG
1937

EURAM
W.E. Bi

WILLIA!
1945

LEVI Cl
Texas County Sherifis

LEE COUNTY

Lee County was created in 1874 from Washington, Burleson, Bastrop and Fayette Counties and was named for
General Robert E. Lee. The county was organized in 1874 with Giddings as the county seat. There have been thirteen
men who have served as sheriff during the history of the county, with two of them serving twice. The following came
from both the State Election Register and the county records. Any differences will be noted.

JAMES McKEOWN was elected the first sheriff on June 2, 1874 and served until February 15, 1876. The first county records
are dated July 27, 1874.
JAMES M. BROWN was elected on February 15, 1876; re-elected November 5, 1878, November 2, 1880, November 7,
“4982 and served until November 4, 1884. On October 11, 1878 Sheriff Brown had the dubious honor of being the sheriff
who hung the outlaw Bill Longley. Sheriff Brown told the crowd that this was the first legal hanging in the county and he
hoped the last, The line drawing of Sheriff Brown appeared in the Chicago News-Record of September 7, 1892 at the
time of his death. The drawing is courtesy of Chuck Parsons of South Wayne, Wisconsin. Mr. Parsons’ guess is that it
may have been drawn from a photograph one of Sheriff Brown's sons had and was in Chicago at the time. At this time t

is the only known likeness of Sheriff Brown.

WILLIAM M. BROWN was elected on November 4, 1884; re-elected November 2, 1886 and served until November 6,
1888.

©. A. BEXLEY was elected on November 6, 1888 and served until November 4, 1890.

JAMES $. SCARBOROUGH was elected on November 4, 1890; re-elected November 8, 1892, November 6, 1894 and
served until November 3, 1896.

1. W. SPARKS was elected on November 3, 1896; re-elected November 8, 1898, November 6, 1900 and served unt?
November 4, 1902.

JAMES S. SCARBOROUGH was elected a second time on November 4, 1902; re-elected November 8, 1904, November
6, 1908, November 3, 1908 and served until November 8, 1910. He was also Sheriff of Kleberg County from 1914 - 1922

W. D. SCARBOROUGH was elected on November 8, 1910; re-elected November 5, 1912, November 3, 1914, Novembs
7, 1916 and served until November 5, 1918.

JOHN.T. CARLISLE was elected on November 5, 1918; re-elected November 2, 1920, November 7, 1922, November +
4924, November 2, 1926 and served until January 1, 1929.

JOHN J. BURTTSCHELL was elected on November 6, 1928; re-elected November 4, 1930, November 8, 1932 and senee
until January 1, 1935.

ERNEST W. ALLEN was elected on November 6, 1934; re-elected November 3, 1936 and served until January 1, 1939

JOHN J. BURTTSCHELL was elected a second time on November 8, 1938; re-elected November 5, 1940, Novembe 3
1942, November 7, 1944, November 5, 1946, November 2, 1948 and served until January 1, 1951. Sheriff Burtsc=
served a total of eighteen years which is the second longest time in the history of Lee County.

VERNON A. GOODSON was elected on November 7, 1950; re-elected November 4, 1952, November 2, 1954, Nover

6, 1956, November 8, 1960, November 3, 1964, November 5, 1968, November 7, 1972 and served until January 1, 0FF
when he retired, Sheriff Goodson served twenty-six years which is the longest in the history of the county.

CHARLES "LUCKY" THOMPSON was elected on November 2, 1976 and served until December 19, 1
resigned.

JOE G. GOODSON was appointed on December 20, 1978, elected November 4, 1980; re-elected November
November 8, 1988 and is currently serving as sheriff. Sheriff Goodson is the son of former sheriff Vernon A. Goose”
was born February 14, 1944 and has been a lawman for ten years. He and his wife Brenda live in Giddings. Their c="
are Walt, Jill and Sarah. :

978 whes!

330

Tuesday February 18 9:23

TX death row inmate drops inheritance

HOUSTON, Feb. 18 (UPI) _ A man on Texas death row for murdering five relatives and setting their bodies on fire
signed away his share of the family's $600,000 inheritance upon the urging of an attorney in probate court.

Robert ““Bob" Coulson's share of the estate will be forfeited to create a trust fund for the only other surviving family
member, a 4- year-old boy.

Coulson, 28, is on Texas death row for the 1992 killings. He signed away his inheritance right during the fourth day
of a trial in which he had fought to keep it.

The waiver that he unexpectedly signed includes a denial that Coulson “‘directly or indirectly caused the deaths of
my family."

The money will go to the boy, the only other surviving family member. Coulson was convicted of killing the boy's
mother, Sarah Coulson, only a month after the boy was born and given up for adoption.

Testimony from the murder trial indicated Bob Coulson's motive for killing his family was his desire for the
inheritance. He is a college dropout who had been supported by disability checks for a knee before the slayings.

On Nov. 13, 1992, five bodies were found inside the family home. The victims were his adoptive parents: Otis
Coulson, 66, and Mary Coulson, 54; their daughter, Sarah, 21; Robert Coulson's pregnant biological sister, Robin
Wentworth, 25, and her husband, Richard Wentworth, 27.

Accomplice Jarad Althaus says Coulson disabled the family members with a stun gun, suffocated them, poured
gasoline over the bodies and set them ablaze.
By RICHARD CARELLI

WASHINGTON (AP) - Four of the Supreme Court's nine justices put
Texas and its courts on notice Monday: They're carefully watching
how the state lets juries choose between death or life in prison
for convicted murderers.

The extraordinary waming came as the nation's highest court
rejected the appeal of Texas death row inmate Arthur Brown Jr.,
convicted of four drug-related murders in Houston five years ago.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had upheld Brown's death
sentence.

In an opinion accompanying the order rejecting Brown's appeal,
Justice John Paul Stevens criticized Texas’ capital sentencing law
- one that has helped make Texas the nation’s far-and-away leader
in executions.

Of the 59 executions in the United States this year, 31 have
been in Texas. Since the Supreme Court ended a four-year legal
moratorium on capital punishment in 1976, 417 have been executed -
138 of them in Texas.

“Although juries are required to assess a capital defendant's
“future dangerousness' before sentencing him to death," Stevens
noted, “he is prohibited from presenting truthful information to
ihe jury about when he would be eligible for parole if sentenced to
life."

Stevens, whose opinion was joined by Justices David H. Souter,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, noted that Brown would
have had to spend 35 years in prison before being eligible for
parole if sentenced to life.

Brown sought to have the jury leam of that fact but was
prevented from doing so by Texas law.

Stevens’ opinion cited a 1994 Supreme Court ruling that said
convicted murderers can tell sentencing juries when there's no
chance they could be paroied if sentenced to life in prison, and
added “there is obvious tension between this rule and our basic
holding’ in that decision.

And he noted that under Texas law, juries considering
punishments in cases not involving a possible death sentence must
be told when a defendant would be eligible for parole.

~Perversely,” Stevens said, the rule is different in capital
cases. “The Texas rule unquestionably tips the scales in favor of
a death sentence that a fully informed jury might not impose,” he
said.

The four justices did not disagree with the court's action in
Brown's case, however. In fact, only four votes are needed fo grant
review to such appeals.

Instead, Stevens said, their purpose was to drive home the point
that the court doesn't always grant review even when it thinks a
fower court was wrong.

“The likelihood that the issue will be resolved correctly may
ierease if this court allows other tribunals to serve as
d8Botdtéries in which the issue receives further study before it is
addressed by this court,” Stevens wrote.

The case is Brown w. Texas, 96-9187.

AP-NY-10-20-97 1537EDT

Copyright 1997 The Associated Press. The information

‘Saturday October 19, 1998 America Online: Galba33_— Page: 4
The man was dismissed and a new altemate selected before noon.

Testimony is scheduled to resume this moming. The jury has been
sequestered.

(source: Philadelphia Inquirer)

Wednesday October 16, 1898 America Online: Galba33

Page: 2

Tt 1997 - et 18, NO. 8 - $6.00 LAN
‘A PUBLICATION OF AMERICAN LAWYER WYER HEDIA, Le

‘18 TEXAS LAWYER.

MAY 5, 1997
€

Death Train

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

can't make up for flaws in their client's
1987 trial. The jurors who sentenced
‘Washington knew nothing of his mental
retardation. His current crop of counsel
say Washington's court-appointed trial
lawyer, W. Tyler Moore Jr. of Bryan,
should have mounted evidence of fetal
alcohol syndrome and horrific child-
‘hood poverty. Moore said at a 1995 fed-
eral writ hearing that if he had it to do
over again, he would have Washington
mentally evaluated. But at the time he
‘was afraid to open that door because the
jury might hear details of his client’s his-
tory of aberrant behavior.

“Moore isn't the only lawyer on the
receiving end of such criticism. Even
the Paul, Weiss lawyers are catching
flak for failing to raise a key issue in
their 1993 habeas writ on behalf of
‘Washington, an issue theyre. now pur-__
suing: that a national consensus has

petition because it didn't satisfy the 1995
‘habeas reform legislation’s requirement
that a successive writ contain evidence
‘that was factually or legally unavailable
‘when the first writ was filed.

And so Washington waits. For
clemency — or death.

“Washington's is an atypical case. But
in many ways, so are all death cases. As
Texas Lawyer discovered in an examina-
tion of nine other cases, the quality and
quantity of the trial and appellate
lawyering capital defendants receive
-varies wildly. That legal representation
‘has been thrust front and center now
that a flurry of court action has cleared
the way for Texas to stoke the execu-
tion engine again. A challenge to the
new habeas setup had sidetracked the
death train for more than a year, but
that appeal has been rejected and Texas
appears headed toward a record num-
ber of executions this year. Texas
Lawyer examined the lawyers repre-
senting the first group of inmates slated
for execution since the habeas appeal
failed. Clearly, the death train now is on
an even faster track than ever: Seven

demned men have well-respected crim-
inal defense veterans by their sides at
‘rial and on appeal. Others make do
with underpaid courtappointed coun-
sel. Some garner the attention of big-
firm litigation teams like Washington's,
which plow thousands of hours and dol-
lars into their pro bono cases (though
these lawyers often have little or no
criminal experience). Others must get
by with the bare minimum and their
lawyers sometimes have to dip into
their own pockets for expert and inves-
tigation fees and even for a client’s new
suit of clothes for trial. As the ABA
noted earlier this year when it recom-
mended @ moratorium on executions,
any system pursuing such momentous
business in so uneven a manner has to
be eyed with suspicion.

Good, bad or indifferent, the death
lawyers do have one thing in common:
Nearly all speak of the pain of fighting
for'a client they know is likely to die.
One volunteer lawyer says she was dis-
mayed at the reaction of colleagues
when she expressed her frustration ata

~~ system that refused to Hear claims

prolong Death Row inmates’ lives, the,
state and federal habeas reforms are”
making the days leading up to execu-
tions much less hectic. Lawyers at the
Attorney General's Office who answer
the applications, and those at the Court
of Criminal Appeals who review the
writs, are seeing much less activity
before executions, which now are car-
ried out in the early evening instead of
the middle of the night.

“it seems to be the rare case in
which there is lastminute litigation,”
says Peggy Griffey, chief of the AG’s
Capital Litigation Division.

‘And so the death train gathers
steam, The six inmates executed in
April represent a onemonth record.
Seven inmates are scheduled to die in
May and another eight are set for June.
“Those cases alone would wipe out the
record 19 prisoners killed in 1995.

And there’s no end in sight.

Caveat: The hours and costs listed
here are for the defense only and should
‘be read merely as the best estimates

- possible. Many of the numbers were

developed against executing the mental- inmates are dead already; two others about defects in her clients trial "They unavailable or incomplete; furthermore,

retarded. have had their death dates stayed. just wanted to know if the guy was dollar values obviously aren't strictly

Forget it The Court of Criminal The study reveals a pattern of high- guilty or not,” M. Susan Hardie says. comparable over two decades, &%

Appeals rejected Washington's April 28 ly uneven representation. Some con- Although lawyers stil struggle to —JANET ELLIOTT
APRIL 2: DAVID LEE HERMAN

ATTORNEYS:

which the excon matteroffactly
described how he raped and mur-
dered a Rice University student. He
and two companions decided to kill
her after the rape because she could
identify them, he calmly told detec
tives a

‘The jury took less than a halfhour
to send Barefield to Death Row. He
was executed March 12, the first con-
victed killer to die when executions
resumed after the habeas appeal was
rejected.

Barefield’s trial counsel and first
appellate counsel were courtappoint-
ed. About five years ago, Edmon G.
“Sandy” Hall, the venerable name
partner in McAllen’s Atlas & Hall,
took over the case.

“Our firm volunteered when the
time came that the Texas Resource
Center couldn't fill the demand,” he
says. Hall took the lead because he
was one of the few lawyers at the civil
tigation firm with criminal experi-
ence, even though that criminal expe-
rience was a brief stint as 2 prosecu-
tor back in 1951.

Hall made the usual motions and
appellate arguments, including one
state writ of habeas corpus, but was
hampered by the lack of evidence
developed at trial. “This guy, the actu-
al trial and punishment phase, not

WARGH 12: JOHN KERHEDY BAREFIELD

‘Trial — Jack Peaman and

Vie Pecorino
Appellate — Edmon 6, “Sandy” Hall
Unknown

Voknowa

including picking a jury, was about
five hours.” Hall says. “To me, that
‘was incredibly short”

“The chilling facts of the case prob-
ably made any other outcome urlike-
ly — the prosecution's punishment-
phase evidence included testimony
from five victims of other rapes and
robberies by Barefeld, and in his
videotaped confession he said he
‘viewed his nightly cruising of apart-
‘ment complexes searching for vic”
tims as his way of “making money.”

Convincing a jury that Bareield
didatt constitute a continuing threat
to society might have been an impos
sible task, but Hall stll wonders.

“Hie had two co-defendants who
participated in it” he says, referring
fo the rape and murder for which
Barefield was executed. “One of
them was never tried for it and the
other got 40 years. Both retained
very competent counsel on their
own. You have to wonder if there
‘would have been different results if
{Barefeld) had his own lawyer”

Hall took the case pro bono, and.
says he doesn't now how many hours
he put into it. He admits he’s a death-
penalty supporter, and that atimes he
twas ambivalent about the case.

“My job was o see that the system
worked properly” he says. “But I
think, personally, the best attorney for
these cases will be one who's 20 per-
cent opposed to the death penalty.”

RICHARD CONNELLY

HOURS:
COST:

didn’t have bad company at his
defense table.

From his capital murder trial for
the 1989 robbery and fatal shooting
of a bookkeeper at an Arlington top-
less club until his execution last
monthgjudges found some of Tarrant
County's best criminal defense attor-

“Heys to take up his cause: ——-

“One of the things you look at is
ineffective. assistance of counsel.
But Allan Butcher and Bob Ford
before me never raised [it], which is
pretty unusual in these kind of
cases,” says Jack Strickland, the last
criminal defense lawyer to handle
Herman's appeal

More than $125,000 in Tarrant
County funds were spent on
Herman's defense, not including
money his family spent on lawyers.
Courtappointed attorneys spent an
estimated 1,600 hours on his case,
doing a majority of the work.

‘Herman's courtappointed attor-
neys included:

» David Bays, who now practices
in Houston. Bays was Herman's lead
counsel during trial and is said to
have done a thorough job.

* John Beatty and Butcher, two
of Fort Worth’s busiest and most.
experienced death penalty appellate
attorneys. They shared Herman’s
direct appeal.

ATTORNEYS: Trial — David Bays and Judith Bridges

Appelate — John Beatty, Alan Butcher,
Bob Ford and Jack Strickland

1,600

‘More than $125,000

 Stricldand and Ford, both for-
mer prosecutors. The pair worked
on Herman's federal and two state
habeas corpus writs, respectively.
They now are two of Tarrant
County's betterkmown criminal
defense trial attorneys.

Still, none of them seemed to
slow down Herman's date with
death. if anything, Herman died
two years ahead of schedule
‘because_.of habeas _reforms,
‘Strickland says.

And Herman himself even tried
to speed up the inevitable by taking
matters into his own hands. On
April 1, the day before his sched-
‘uled execution, Herman took 2
prisonissue razor and sliced his
throat and wrists in a failed suicide
attempt

Although his appeals already
were completely exhausted, the sui-
cide attempt created the ironic
argument for appellate attorneys
that Herman was not mentally com-
petent enough to be put to death.

“That gave us 2 hook to get back
to state court,” Strickland says.

But the same courts promptly
rejected the stay requests, just as
they had previous appeals claiming
jurors had erred when sentencing
Herman to die based on his future
dangerousness.

On April 2, Herman was put to
death as scheduled.

—JOHN COUNCIL

aAY 5, 1997

TEXAS LAWYER Wf

APRIL 3:
‘ATTORNEYS:

efense lawyer Raoul Schone
mann had his hands full with a
pro bono effort to save David
Spence from execution when he
Tearned that a businessman had
launched his own investigation to
exonerate Spence.

Spence was put to death April 3 for
the 1982 stabbing deaths of three teen-
agers — two girls and a boy —ia
highly publicized McLennan County
case Imown as the Lake Waco mur
ders.

Spence was convicted in two
trials — first in Waco in 1984 for one
girl's slaying and again in Brazos
County on a change of venue in the
boy's murder in 1985. Four state and
‘two federal habeas writs were filed on
Spence’s behalf.

Testimony from an expert who
matched Spence's teeth to bite marks

thee

DAVID WAYNE SPERGE

Trial — Russell Hunt Se, L. Hayes

More than $35,000

on the girls’ bodies, along with jail
inmates who say Spence confessed the
crimes in detail to them, clinched con-
victions in both trials.

Spence’s courtappointed lawyers
in the first trial, Waco criminal defense
specialist Russell Hunt Sr. and civil
lawyer L. Hayes Puller Hl, a share-
holder in Waco’s Sheehy, Lovelace &
‘Mayiield, brought their own expert to
refute the bitemark evidence.

‘Prosecutors pulled out all the stops
again in the second trial. Overall, both
trials cost McLennan County at least
$1 million, according to the auditor’s

ice.

“The second trial also featured testi
‘mony from two co-defendants, Gilbert
and Tony Melendez, who participated
in the rapes and murders, although
Gilbert Melendez later recanted, cre~
ating one of Spence’s key appellate
innocence claims. Spence’s lead court-

appointed counsel in the second case,
‘William W. Vance, now a court master
in Brazos County, says he received
bout $25,000 at trial and $10,000 for
Spence’s direct appeal; he estimates
he spent at least three months work-
ing on nothing but the case.

‘Schonemann, who worked for the
‘Texas Resource Center at the time,
took on Spence’s appeal in 1991. Ina
federal writ that gained him an eviden-
tiary hearing, Schonemann took a
Kitchen-sink approach, attacking the
inmates’ testimony as given in
exchange for special privileges that
weren't disclosed and accusing police
and prosecutors of suppressing excul-
patory evidence.

After the federal court and the 5th
US. Cirenit Court of Appeals rejected
all claims in March 1996, Schonemana
went back to the Court of Criminal
Appeals with another writ that raised
virtually identical claims of actual inno-
cence and prosecutorial misconduct
The CCA rejected the writ with a
threedine order.

“They didn't give it much atten-
tion,” says Jordan Steiker, a University
of Texas School of Law professor
who's co-director of the school's capi-
tal punishment clinic and assisted
‘Schonemann on the case.

Waco insurance executive Brian
Pardo, meanwhile, began his own

investigation to try to prove Spence’s
innocence after meeting Spence dur-
ing a visit to Death Row in Huntsville
last October.

Pardo estimates he spent about
$3,000 — which included payment for
a blood-spatter expert who reported
that spatters near the bodies showed
the victims weren't dumped where
they were found, as prosecutors and
police investigators said — as well as
$8,000-$10,000 in time spent by his
employees.

Although Schonemann cited the
analyst's report, along with an affidavit
from a witness who came forward and
said she saw the victims with another
suspect the day they were killed, in the .
last state writ, he says he didn’t con-
sider that evidence crucial to his case.

“The only thing I got from them
was the bloodspatter report.
Otherwise, much of the investigation
‘that they did, Ihad already done. They
were talking to witnesses Id already
talked to,” Schonemann says.

‘Schonemann, who works part time
at the UT law school capital punish-
ment clinic, estimates he spent over
$1,000 on copying and related costs in
the final two years of the case. “It [the
case] was over six years of my life,” he
says. “More than any other case, it was
very consuming and very demanding.”

— SUSAN BORRESON

APRIL 14:

ere’s little doubt that Billy

Joe Woods brutally murdered.

a frail 62-year-old woman by

bludgeoning her with a frying pan

while robbing her apartment — he

was all but caught in the act, and the
forensic evidence was damning.

But the legal help he got in trying
to stave off the death penalty was,
until relatively late in the process,
very much open to question.

His courtappointed appellate
lawyer was disbarred for financial mis-
conduct, a trait he evinced in Woods’
case when he convinced Woods’ adop-
tive parents to deed over to him 25
acres of land as part of his fee for his
(courtappointed) work. The lawyer
told Woods’ parents he needed the
money to fly to Washington, D.C., to
meet with one of the U.S. Supreme
Court justices who eventually would
decide their son’s case, the father tes-
tified in an affidavit,

BILLY JOE WOODS

Trial — Michael Thibodeamx and
Fred Heacock
Appellate — Marion McDaniel,
WM. Susan Hardie and 19 others
Thonsands

Unknown

‘Woods’ trial attorneys introduced
no witnesses or evidence at the pun-
ishment phase of the 1976 trial; in
fact, in his closing argument, one of
his attorneys told the jury, “No, I did-
n’tbring you his parents, nor anybody
to tell you what a good guy he is,
because he isn’t.”

Tn two separate affidavits, the trial
lawyers first said no punishment.
phase witnesses were produced
because “evidence of Mr. Woods’
‘emotional problems would compel
the jury to find that Mr. WoodS was
Tikely to commit future acts of vio-
lence”; later — after ineffective-assis-
tance claims were raised — they said,
“We would have loved to have had
someone testify at the punishment
stage,” but no one could be found
‘who was willing to do so.
one of

tence. “I thought we had preserved
some reversible error in that case,
but the appellate court didn’t see it
that way,” says Thibodeaux, now an
in-house counsel for a real-estate
company.

After three hours of deliberation, a
Harris County jury imposed the first
death penalty in the county since the
U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the
state’s capitalpunishment law.

‘That began a stretch of more than
20 years on Death Row for Woods.

Tt took awhile, but in 1988 — 12
years after his conviction — Woods
‘got topflight lawyers, a team of as
‘many as 12 attorneys from large
Houston firms who zealously battled
for him through the appellate
process. One federal and four state
writs ultimately were filed on his
behalf.

‘When Woods finally was killed by
the state April 14, his lead attorneys
were Marion McDaniel, a partner in
Liddell, Sapp, Zivley, Hill & LaBoon,
and M. Susan Hardie, a partner in
Burns, Wooley &
Marseglia. Both came on the case
when they worked for Butler &
Binion, which volunteered assistance
after the American Bar Association
put out an urgent appeal for lawyers
to represent indigent Death Row
inmates.

‘Hardie says the team pushed hard
on two issues: Penry claims that

Woods’ diminished mental capabili-
ties, along with a sad history of abuse
and neglect, should have been con-
sidered by the jury as mitigating
issues; and an objection to the trial
testimony of a psychiatrist who exam-
ined Woods without the defendant
receiving a Miranda warning.

‘The team, whose size fluctuated
through the years, put in “thousands”
of pro bono hours on the case, Hardie

says. ‘

“Our goal was not to put Billy Joe
back on the street,” she says. “It was
to get him a fair trial. And if second
jury reached the same conclusion, so
be it”

Hardie, a bankruptcy and com
merciallitigation lawyer, says the
experience was “tremendously
enriching” but frustrating. “I wes
extremely disappointed and cha-
grined about the whole system — I
thought we had a viable claim, and I
was very disappointed that court after
court refused to recognize it,” she
says.

“The most disconcerting thing
was talking with other lawyers, who
never wanted to know if something
had gone wrong in the system. They
just wanted to know if the guy was
guilty or not.” she says. “It was dis-
concerting having to defend yourself
to lawyers who youd expect to be
believers in the

— RICHARD CONNELLY

18 TBXAS LAWYER.

MAY 5, 1997

APRIL 16:
' ATTORNEYS:

ven from the grave, Kenneth
Gentry complained about court-
‘appointed lawyers.

In a Dallas Morning News story
printed four days after his execution,
Gentry groused in an interview about
the quality of lawyers offered to desti-
tute defendants.

“When a good lawyer would cost
$100,000 to $1 million, a courtappoint-
ed lawyer gets only $15,000 or so. So
just how hard do you think a lawyer
will work?” Gentry asked.

‘The attorneys’ bills in Gentry’s
case file indicate that just over $50,000
in Denton County funds were expend-
ed om his defense — still pretty cheap,
even at mid-1980s rates. Based on
those expenditures, courtappointed

KENNETH GENTRY

Wonning, Timothy R. Vaughan and
Margaret Weinkanf
More than 1,500
More than $100,000

lawyers probably spent more than 650
hours working to save Gentry’ life.
Pro bono lawyers spent another 850
hours on his federal and two state
habeas corpus writs and were com
pensated $00,000 for their wotk on the
federal writ.

But sparing Gentry rom he death
chamber was a pretiy tall order at any
price.

Alter escaping from a |eeorge
prison, Gentry went on a ‘robbery
spree throug the southern United
States in the early 1980s. To avoid the
Taw, he concocted a bizarre scheme to

kdl another-person and steal his iden= ~

tity. His victim was hitchhiker Jimmy
Don Ham, who was slain in 1983 and
dumped into Lake Lewisville. Gentry
later gave a videotaped confession

about the crime to police, which was
‘shown to jurors.

Gentry’s appellate team argued
‘that his trial lawyers were no match for
prosecutor Alan Levy, then a Denton
County assistant district attorney.
Levy, known as 2 methodical lawyer
and ferocious cross-examiner, now is
one of the top felony prosecutors in
‘Tarrant County.

Pro bono lawyers Prater Monning,
Timothy R. Vaughan and Margaret
Weinkauf, then of Dallas’ Gardere &
‘Wynne, who handled Gentry’s habeas
corpus writ, argued that Gentry's trial
team was far from prepared to take on
Ley. *

“There was no question but that
they did not work very hard,”
Monning says.

In particular, Monning complained

that solo practitioners Richard Pod-
gorski and Gary Patton didn't bother to
call witnesses in Gentry’s trial who
may have been able to explain the
defendant's troubled past and his sub-
sequent criminal acts.
-~“hre 1990 court affidavit filed by
Podgorski, he responded that there
weren't many witnesses who would
have helped Gentry.

“It is my opinion, for all that we

could gather from our investigation,
that there was not one person whom,
the defense could call as a witness
regarding Gentry’s past that would
help Gentry more than it would hurt
him,” Podgorski wrote.

“The pro bono lawyers also had big
problems with the pretrial investige
tion his lawyers performed — espe-
cially the fact that they didn’t have an
investigator working on the case.

“Mr Patton and myself did not ask
for an investigator but instead invest-
gated the leads ourselves,” Podgorski
wrote. “We believed that it would be
better for us to pursue any possible
testimony on a firsthand basis. After
said investigation, it was determined
that there did not exist any substantial
mitigating factors.”

Complaints about the vigor of
Gentry’s direct appeal also were
rebuked by the attorney who handled
that job, solo practitioner Tom Whit-
lock.

“I devoted many hours knowing
Mr. Gentry's life depended on me,”
‘Whitlock wrote in a response. “I
undertook his appeal with pride and
devotion with one goal in mind...
reversal.”

—JOHN COUNCIL

STATE HABEAS SCHEME SP

FEDS UP EXECUTIONS, AS PROMISED

‘Texas’ habeas reform scheme got off to an incredibly
shaky start in 1995 after state budget cutters reduced
funding to pay lawyers ftom $4 million to $2 million.

Concemed it would run out of money before the
Legislature met again in 1997, the Court of Criminal
Appeals waited seven months after the law went Into
effect before starting to appoint lawyers to represent
Death Row inmates on habeas writ petitions.

But the court soon ran through the limited poo! of
attorneys who had asked for the appointments. Concem
over fees being potentially capped at $7,500 and cowed
by a lengthy appiication, only 50 of the 400 lawyers who
were sent the application returned it.

The court then began forcing attomeys to take the
cases, which prompted an expected uproar. But it did get
defense lawyers’ attention. When the court assured
lawyers their fees" woilldn’t be arbitrarily capped, many
decided to seek appointments.

Three judges even lost their briefing attorneys when
the lawyers decided they could make a living by going
into private practice and seeking the court appoint-
ments.

In addition, 2 constitutional challenge to the habeas
reform statute led to execution stays for all condemned
inmates. The court upheld the law last fall.

Now, the law has been fully implemented and is
starting to produce the speedier executions lawmakers
had promised. Texas executed a record six inmates in
April, a pace that should continue through most of the
year.

Of the seven convicted killers executed this year, all
but one had been on Death Row for more than nine years
and one had been there 20 years. Supporters of the law
are welcoming the executions as long overdue,

“I had a lot of critics,” says Court of Criminal Appeals
Presiding Judge Michael McCormick, who made many of
the early decisions about implementing the reforms. “But
| always said it would work.”

Judge Charles Baird chairs a three-judge committee
that meets once @ week to appoint lawyers, process fee

‘and pay vouchers’ and resolve legal motions. Ihe com-
mittee allowed many lawyers to file skeletal writs this
month to meet an April 24 deadline related to the federal
habeas reforms! The skeletal writs preserve the inmates’
right to federal habeas review.

Other judges on the committee are Sharon Keller and
‘Stephen Mansfield,

Baird says about one-fourth ofthe lawyers who were
drafted by the court have been allowed to decline the
‘appointments. The court has made 171 appointments.

Ihe law limiting convicted capital murderers to one
state habeas writ was written to apply retroactively to all
Death Row inmates. Thus, once the stays related to the
constitutional challenge of the law were lifted, many
inmates had exhausted their appeals.

For persons sentenced to death after Sept. 1, 1985,
their automatic direct appeal to the Court of Criminal
Appeals will run simultaneously with their state habeas
pplication, to be heard in the trial court. The faw carries
Strict timelines on the filing of the writs.

Once the stays related to the constitutional
challenge of the law were lifted, Many i inmates _
had exfiausted their appeals.

Three criminal! defense lawyers have formed a non-
profit corporation to assist the lawyers representing the
defendants on their appeals, Austin’s David Schulman
says even lawyers like himself with experience handling
capital cases are having trouble navigating the new
reform system. Schulman, Austin’s Roy Greenwood and
San Antonio's Cynthia Hujar Orr are the directors of the
Texas Capital Litigation Project.

Schulman says the organization fills a void created
wien Congress| de-funded the Texas Resource Center.
Lawyers will be able to get advice on procedural matters
and information| about ‘motions that have been success-
fully used in other cases, Schulman says.

More good news is coming from the Legislature.
McCormick says budget writers have committed to fully
‘funding the law with a $4 million appropriation.

Court of Criminal Appeals Clerk Troy Bennett says the
court has paid fees ranging from $7,500 to $26,000 to
fawyers who have completed their appeals work.
Expenses for each case have been in the $3,000 to
$5,000 range, Bennett says.

While most people have focused on limitations on
successive writs contained in the state and federal
reforms, some experts say the most important change is
in the federal courts new standard of review.

University of Texas School of Law Professor Jordan
Steiker says the standard will allow federal courts to look
at not whether the outcome of a defendant's trial was
right, but only whether it was reasonable.

“its the gutting of the substantive review standard
that will be much more significant in the long run,” says
Stetker, co-director of the law school's capital punish
ment clinic. “The courts wil look to see if something was
contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly
established federal faw.”

With the federal courts giving greater deference to state
court decisions, that leaves condemned inmates’ fates in
the hands of the elected state judges who might fear voters’
‘wrath for overtuming capital murder convictions.

“t's a litte scary for anyone concemed about the
enforcement of constitutional rights,” says Steiker.

— JANET ELLIOTT

MAY 5, 1997,

APRIL

uestionable searches, a dis-
credited pathologist. and
weak evidence of sexual
‘and kidnapping — elements
that elevated the state’s case to cap-
ital murder — dominated the
appeals of Benjamin Herbert
Boyle’s 1986 death sentence.

Along the way, Boyle's convic-
tion was overturned — a decision
that stood for only 19 months —and
he gained a new appellate claim
after it was revealed that one of the
‘key witnesses in his case, former
‘Lubbock County Medical Examiner
Ralph Erdmann, had falsified
numerous autopsy and pathology
reports.

But efforts by five lawyers who
represented the Oklahoma trucker
in his direct appeal, two successive
state habeas writs and federal writs
ultimately failed. As his victim’s
mother and sister watched, Boyle
‘was executed April 21 for raping
and strangling a Fort Wortharea
‘woman who accepted his offer of a
ride to Amarillo. The convicted
killer had spent more than 10 years

experience, was
appointed to represent Boyle on the
charge, which originally was mur-
der. After he successfully quashed
‘two murder indictments, McKinney
says, the state came back with a
charge of capital murder.

McKinney says he was paid
$17,000 for Boyle’s 1986 trial, and
his co-counsel, Tom Priolo, was paid
$15,000. But McKinney says he
spent $2,000 of his trial fee on inves-
tigatory costs.

McKinney was the sole lawyer
on Boyle’s direct appeal and was
paid another $12,000. He raised 29
points of error; the Court of
Criminal Appeals didn't rule on the
case for almost three years.

But when the court did rule, it
was a victory for McKinney and his
client. The court reversed the con-
viction, finding the search of Boyle’s
truck — a search which produced

Judge Rusty Duncan, the court
ruled that authorities lacked proba-
ble cause to arrest Boyle in Diboll
and his subsequent consent to the
search was a direct result of the
unlawful arrest.

What happened next, as much
as anything else, cemented

BENJAMIN HERBERT BOYLE

‘ATTORNEYS; Trial — ~ Wiliam R, MeKinney Je and

McKinney's vow to never again
‘become involved in z death penalty
case.

‘The court announced it would
rehear the case to allow the state to
pursue an argument it had not
before raised: that a third party, the
owner of the trucking company, had.
authorized the search. The state
sought to raise that argument after
spotting it in a footnote in Duncan’s

opinion.

‘On May 15, 1991, following a car
wreck that killed Duncan and the
death of Judge Marvin Teague, who
had joined Duncan's opinion, a dif
ferently constituted Court of

Criminal Appeals reinstated Boyle's
conviction. The opinion by Judge
Chuck Miller stated that the court
had legal authority to consider the
newly raised third-party consent
issue “in the interest of justice.”

“It's kind of hard to explain to
your client after the case had been
reversed as to how they'd changed
their mind,” McKinney says.

McKinney later would be
accused of ineffective assistance
during the trial because he failed to
present potentially mitigating evi
dence of Boyle’s mental ilness, fam-
ily background and substance
abuse.

‘The lawyers who’ in two state
writs raised the ineffectiveness
issue, along with attacking

Erdmann’s testimony that he had
found semen én the victim's mouth,
were two lawyers recruited by the
‘Texas Resource Center to handle
‘the case pro bono, Carlton McLarty
of Lubbock and Warren Clark of
Amarillo. They were assisted by
Lynn Lamberty, a Resource Center
stafflawyer.

McLarty and Clark later turned
the case over to Judith Rochlin, a
California lawyer, who handled the
federal writs.

‘McLarty, now an assistant feder-
al public defender in Dallas, says he
believes Erdmann totally made up
the evidence of rape. He says the
state also had problems with its kid-
napping theory because Gail
‘Lenore Smith’s stepbrother and his
wife had watched Smith hitch a ride
with Boyle on Oct 14, 1985. They
had noted the name of the trucking
company on the cab door and gave
that information to police after
‘Smith’s nude body was spotted near
the side of a highway near Amarillo
by another truck driver the next
day.

— JANET ELLIOTT

‘TEXAS LAWYER

MAY 5, 1997

APRIL 29:

‘ith a battery of civil lawyers

W fighting for years to win his

freedom, Ernest Orville Bal-

dree was better off than many of the
other condemned on Death Row.

Dallas-based Winstead Sechrest &
Minick in 1990 volunteered to repre-
‘sent Baldree on habeas writs for the
1986 robbery and slayings of a
‘Navarro County couple, Homer and
Nancy Howard.

‘The firm took on the case pro bono
at the request of the Texas Resource
help in capital appeals at the time.

‘Although the firm withdrew from
representation five years later, lawyers
‘there obtained two stays of execution
police coerced witnesses to lie and
prosecutors knowingly presented false
testimony. Prosecutors and police
denied the accusations.

By most standards, the trial was 2

ERNEST ORVILLE BALDREE

Trial — Kerri Anderson-Donica and
Simmy Morris
‘Appellate — Warren Fields, Kemp W. |
Gorthey, Jeff Pokorak, Lynn Lamberty, |
<immy Morris and Rite Radostitz |
Unknow

Wore thas $235,000

defense lawyer's nightmare. Baldree, a
parolee with at least 13 prior convic-
tions, made an oral confession to|two
sheriff's deputies, at his own request,
which led police to the recovery of a
22caliber rifle apparently used in the
slaying. Two jail inmates also said
Baldree confessed to them. |
“Frankly, the evidence was rather
overwhelming,” says Kerri Anderson-

along with the late Jimmy Mortis, a for-
mer Navarro County district attorney.

‘Though Baldree’s lawyers present-
ed no evidence at the guilt/innocence
stage, they presented the standard
family members’ testimony sate
punishment phase.

Morris and Anderson-Donica, who
now serves as city attorney | for
Corsicana and also has a private prac-
tice, each received the standard rate
for courtappointed counsel in capital
cases: $2,000. Morris received an. addi-

tional $1,000 for the direct appeal, the
Navarro County district clerk’s office

says.

‘When Winstead Sechrest took on
‘the case, Warren Fields, a first-year
associae whose criminal experience
had been writing a brief on 2 capital
case for a federal appeals judge, and
Kemp W. Gorthey, who had handied
one federal criminal case, emerged as

were no ballistics tests to show that
shell casings found at the scene
matched the weapon. The state aad
federal writs also demanded eviden-
tiary hearings after the jeil inmates
who testified recanted and said they
were coerced by police.
[remember trial counsel was very

_ handicapped with respect to what the

state would give them,” says Fields,
who consulted throughout the case
with Texas Resource Center lawyers.
“They were given a Death Row case,
where every known witness says the
‘guy did it The state's withholding evi-
dence, in my opinion, related to the
shell casings to match up the rifle, and
they're supposed to defend this guy. I
think F Lee Bailey would have had a
tough time.”

Yet all relief was denied by state
and federal courts. Fields and Gorthey
already had left the firm by the time

the federal writ failed. Stuart Reynolds,
shareholder in the litigation section of
the Dallas office of Winstead Sechrest,
who arrived at the firm in 1995, drafted
the motion to withdraw as Baldree’s
counsel

“Because none of the attorneys who
had actively worked on the case were
still at the Jaw firm, our firm deter
mined that there needed to be a fresh
look at this,” Reynolds says. He says he
could not give an exact figure for how
much the firm spent on the case, “but
people who were familiar with it over
the years estimated that we had put in
about $200,000 worth of time in our
normal billable rates and probably
incurred expenses of about $25,000.”

Reynolds says Texas Resource
Center officials told him they would
take the case or find someone who
could. Enter Jeff Pokorak, professor at
‘St. Mary's University School of Law.

Pokorak followed two other former
Resource Center lawyers, Lynn Lamb-
erty and Rita Radostitz, who were
appointed briefly by the 5th Circuit to
file an appeal and make oral argument,
respectively. Radostitz, who used to
work for the Resource Center, says she
was paid $5,000 plus expenses for her
work. Pokorak took over the case pro
bono after the 5th Circuit denied relief
and a new execution date was set.
Baldree was executed as scheduled
April 29.

— SUSAN BORRESON

‘ATTORREYS:

APRIL 24 — RESET FOR JURE 24

BRIAN KEITH ROBERSOK
‘Wiel — Katteen Decker, deantie tee,

"f.Brian Keith Roberson had his

way, he would have been saddled

‘with two attorneys with no experi-
ence defending death penalty cases
wher he went to trial in 1987 for the
robbery-slaying of an elderly Dallas
couple.

Roberson. and. his family were
comfortable with private defense
attorneys Kathleen Decker and
Jeanette Drescher. And they rejected
an experienced courtappointed law-
‘yer because they thought he was too

busy, to handle Roberson’s. death
penalty case.

But then Dallas County Criminal
District Court Judge Ron Chapman,
‘who now serves on the Fifth Court of
Appeals, intervened and appointed
capitalmurder defense veterans
‘James K. Johnson and Larry Mitchell
‘to help defend Roberson.

‘St was a very strange case where
he had both courtappointed and
retained lawyers,” recalls Drescher,
who now works as a Dallas County
public defender. “It didn't hurt my
feelings. We didn’t turn down the
assistance.”

According to court records, court-
appointed lawyers were paid at least
$50,000 to defend Roberson. They
spent an estimated 600 hours on his
case.

‘They seemed to do a good job.
‘There are no motions in the record

arguing ineffective assistance of
counsel. And Janice Warder, a former
Dallas prosecutor assigned to Rober-
son’s case who's now the judge of
Dallas County Criminal District
Court No. 1, where Roberson was
tried, remembers that his defense
team was solid.

“{ don't think you could say this
was a case that anything was spared
to make sure he had adequate rep-
resentation,” Warder says. Rober-
son's case was remaved to another
Dallas. district court after Warder
took the bench.

Defending Roberson was a tough
job for any attorney. A drug user
who had a long juvenile record,
Roberson was accused of murdering
and robbing 78yearold James
Boots and his wife, Lillia, 75, in
1986. After stabbing the couple
numerous times, Roberson stopped
to take jewelry from them before
fleeing their home. He later con-
fessed to police.

Brook Busbee, an experienced
Dallas solo defense attorney who
has handled many capital. cases, is
representitig Roberson on his sole
state habeas corpus writ. The last
habeas corpus hearing she request-
ed was denied two weeks ago.

Roberson’s execution date has
been postponed until June 24th.

—JOHN COUNCIL

HAY 5, 1897

TRKAS LAWYER 21

dying declaration from a victim
shot in a robbery helped clinch
2 death sentence for John
Albert Burks, but his appellate attor-
ney hopes another statement from the
victim will win his release.

“The comments the victim made to
family members was introduced into
evidence over the objections of Burks’
courtappointed trial counsel, two
experienced trial lawyers who have
been spared the common ineffective
assistance of counsel claim on appeal.

‘Burks was convicted in the January
41989 robbery and shooting death of a
prominent Waco businessman, Jesse
Contreras, who ran a mom-and-pop tor-
till factory on the south side of town.

‘Aker Burks was charged in the
slaying, 54th District Judge George
‘Alien tapped two Waco criminal

APRIL 29 —

STAYED
JOHN ALBERT BURKS

—

Trial — Hoagie Karels and Ken Ables
Appellate — Ken Ables, Walter “Skip”
Reaves de and Gell Kingarey
Hundreds»

More than $16,800

defense lawyers for his defense:
Hoagie Karels and Ken Ables, a former
prosecutor who had represented
defendants in two other capital murder

cases.

Ables, who also represented Burks
on direct appeal, says he devoted five
‘months to the preparation of the case and
‘the trial and another several hundred
hours to the appeal. Ables received
$16,800 for his work at trial, he says. But
‘that amount doesn't include the outof
pocket expenses associated with trying a
capital case —money for Burks’ new suit
or service of an outofcounty subpoena,
for example, Ables says.

Although the gunman wore a stock-
ing cap and a long-sleeved shirt,
Contreras told his wife and daughter
as he lay bleeding from three gunshot
wounds that a black man had shot him.
Burks is African-American.

With no positive identification of
Burks from the victim or witnesses,
who said they saw a black man run
from the factory to a waiting car, and
accomplice testimony from a co-defen-
dant who got complete immunity, the
de‘ense strategy was simple: The state
had the wrong man.

“We did put on a defense alibi, that
he wasn't there, couldn't have been
there. Family members testified to
that,” Ables says.

“We worked our hearts vul.”

But the state also had testimony
from Burks’ aunt, who said Burks told
her he had shot Contreras, along with
several witnesses who say Burks asked
them in the weeks before the murder
for 25caliber bullets. Contreras was
shot with a 25caliber gun.

“They put on a very vigorous, spir-
jted defense, attacking the identity,
credibility of the wimesses who saw
the car, and of course, the accomplice
testimony — they really attacked that,”
says Ralph Strother, a former Mc
‘Lennan County assistant district attor-
ney who prosecuted the case.

‘Ables unsuccessfully attacked the
accomplice testimony and the state
ment of Contreras on direct appeal. But
Burks’ sole state habeas writ, which
was filed by Waco solo practitioner
Walter “Skip” Reaves Jr, raised what

Reaves called previously undisclosed
evidence.

Reaves, who was appointed by Allen
to represent Burks on the state writ,
says the notes of hospital nurses who
treated Contreras shortly after the
shooting said that Contreras told them
that his ldler spoke Spanish with a bad
accent. Burks doesn’t speak Spanish,
Ables says.

‘The Texas Court of Criminal Ap-
peals denied relief, and an execution
date was set for April 30, But « federal
judge granted a stay April 11 and
appointed Reaves, who specializes in
appellate work and is board certified in
criminal law, and Waco criminal defense

Kingarey and Reaves will be paid
the standard federal court rate — $125
an hour plus expenses. Reaves seys he
‘spent about 150 to 200 hours working
on Burks’ state writ, at about $50 to $60
an hour. Reaves says he has until July 10
fle the federal writ, which will raise the
new evidence issue.

‘As for Ables, he stopped accepting
court appointments on capital cases.
“After you do as many [capital cases) as
are inside of you, you don't do anymore,
because it just takes so much out of

you,” he says.
— SUSAN BORRESON

THE COURIER-JOURNAL * KENTUCKY / METRO + MONDAY, MAY 5, 1997

Slain woman’s father now aids inmates

awaits its first use since 1962, port for capital punishment sliding vens arrives at the penitentiary. He is
Condemned man “My mind ree heart ate right,” omy He hep! thinkng why he free Me go practically wherever ts
‘. McQueen said recently. “if it’s my. did not pick up the fife and avenge wants in t e imposing limestone pris-
wants him, at hand time to die, it’s my time. I would rath- his daughter when he found her killer on AGE ve jas of praying with
E murderers ant

i er have Paul there than anyone. He unconscious. other felons, he feels
during last hours gives you a sense of the goodness of ““[ had the opportunity to do it, and safe in the prison.
. ‘ eople.” I chose not to,” he said. “We look out for Paul,” explained
Associated Press Stevens remembers the phone call “7 am not a violent person. It went Larry Hansen, a convicted murderer
. at 2 a.m. on July 1, 1969. Something opine my grain to kill someone. who sometimes eats: lunch with Ste-
EDDYVILLE, Ky. — Harold was terribly wrong at the house three ‘would 1 want someone else to do vens in the cafeteria.
McQueen will be holding the rosary doors away, where his 20-year-old it through the death penalty?” McQueen is a burly, tattooed man
of a murder victim — but not his vic- daughter was baby-sitting. Stevens thought about what his with a mane of hair flowing over the
tim — as he goes to the electric chair, The children’s grandmother, who daughter would want him to do. collar of his red death-row uniform.
perhaps as early as this summer. lived: at the house, came home and She had applied to work in. a He and an accomplice were con-

"The rosary’s owner, Cynthia Ste- found Cynthia stabbed, She called Catholic mission at an Indian reserva- victed of robbing the convenience
vens, never met McQueen, who was Stevens, who rushed over and found _ tion in South Dakota. Her acceptance store and fatally shooting a. clerk,
‘convicted of a 1980 robbery and kill- his daughter dead. The killer —.the letter came a week after she died. Becky O’Hearn. The accomplice got

~ -ing- at -a- convenience. store in Rich-_father_of the children Cynthia had Her religious faith played an impor- 20 years in prison and is already out.

mond, But McQueen and Stevens, been: watching — was passed out, ~tant-part-in-her father’s recovery. Ev. _ Now McQueen is down to his last ap-

who was raped and murdered in 1969, drunk, lying atop kitchen utensils. ery time he suffered a flashback of peal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If he —

were close enough in age to have — At first, Stevens insisted on the the murder scene, he would repeat loses and the governor denies his re-

been in high school at the same time. death penalty for the killer, Jack the prayer, “Jesus, I love you,” and quest for clemency, he will be put to
‘They lived about 200 miles apart Gatewood. the image would go away. leath,

he in Berea; she in Evansville, Ind. Estranged from his wife, Gatewood So Stevens, who moved to Dawson Stevens said he has written to the
‘Their bond is Stevens’ 75-year-old had ‘shown up at the house and raped Springs in Western Kentucky, fol- governor, pleading for McQueen's

father, Paul Stevens, who will give Cynthia, then Stabbed her in the heart lowed in Cynthia’s footsteps. life.

McQueen the rosary — a silver cross with’a kitchen knife. A jury convicted He took up missionary ‘work in Meanwhile, he has reluctantly ac-

with bronze beads, which Catholics him'of rape and murder. 1986, going to the penitentiary in cepted McQueen's request for Stevens

use to keep count of their prayers. Ghtewood got a death sentence, but Eddyville as a volunteer chaplain, to be with him in the final hours be-
And it is Paul Stevens, a volunteer the murder count was reduced to sec- Now he believes killers should pay for fore his execution.

pean chaplain, who plans to be at ond-degree murder because ofatech- their crimes, but not with their lives. “I told him it would be hard on
icQueen’s side in the small, stark nicality, and he spent seven years in He thinks Cynthia would have felt the me,” Stevens said. “He is like one of

room in the Kentucky State Peniten- prison. same way. my family. I will give him: the love he

tiary where Kentucky's ‘electric chair ‘In time, Stevens felt his own sup- Every Thursday at 7:30 a.m,, Ste- needs in his final moments.”
AMERICA’S CONDEMNED

DALLAS
F2i0Ay,

Despite macabre aberrations —
flames leaping from the mask of a
man electrocuted in Florida, a
botched and uncommonly long ex-
ecution in Missouri, and an omi-
nous threat made from a gurney in
Arkansas — Mr. Gentry’s execu-
tion, like most others, went off qui-
etly without incident.

Many of the condemned, hav-
ing chosen to remain silent about
their crimes, arrived on death row
as riddles to the public. Mr. Gentry
and the 29 others volunteered in-
formation — sometimes a glimpse,
sometimes a life story — to The
‘News before they were executed.

Electric chair, March 25, 1997
Florida State Penitentiary, Starke
14 years on death row

Mr. Medina, a Cuban of African
descent, came to the United States
in 1980 during the so-called free-
dom flotilla. He was convicted of
the fatal stabbing in 1982 of
Dorothy James, a 52-year-old school-
teacher who had befriended him.

Ina letter to The News, he com-
plained that, early in his case,
lawyers had failed to raise issues
in court that “could have had my

of this,” he wrote. ‘TIl keep it short.
‘Take it easy. That's whatIdo.”
Shortly after Mr. Medina was
strapped into the electric chair,
the jolt of electricity that killed
him also ignited the mask that con- ,
demned men wear for execution.
The flame renewed the debate
over whether electrocution is hu-
mane.

Michael Cari George, 39 EM

Lethal injection, Feb. 6, 1997
Greensville Correctional Center,
‘Va.

Jarratt,
Six years on death row

‘Mr. George, a former compister
‘operator, was convicted of the sex-
ual torture and murder of 15-year-
old Alexander Eugene Sztanko,
who was abducted while riding his
dirt bike in his neighborhood.

Mr. George, who had previous
convictions for involuntary
manslaughter, abduction and

handcuffed the teenag-
er to a tree, shocked his genitals
with a stun gun, stole his billfold
and shoes, then shot him in the
head.

‘Mr. George was reared by his

Moen ing
~Y-2S-92

mother. He told The News: “Chil-
‘dren grow up with only one parent
(or Corpeith no parents) to nurture

and guide them, ... No one shows
‘them ‘that their lives are valuable.

ey feel unloved and unwant-
©, as if no one could care less
‘whether they live ordie. .. As are-
sult, life has little or no value to
them — neither their own lives
nor the lives of others.” :

Eric “Cockeye” Schneider, 35

Lethal injection, Jan. 29, 1997
Correctional

‘Mr. Schneider, who owed his
nickname to having been clubbed
in the eve with a police baton,
called The News frequently during
the jweeks before his execution. A

‘abuser and an ama-
teur musician who formed a prison:
band of death row inmates, Mr.
Schneider was optimistic until the
‘ast athe would be spared execu-

ae governor's going to give it
[a stay of execution] to me" he said
in his last phone call, two days be-
fore|the execution. “l got too many
people behind this.”

attorneys fought fruitlessly
to obtain a stay, arguing that prose-
cutors misled jurors and that Mr.
‘Schneider was mentally incapable *
of masterminding a robbery. As his
appointment with the executioner
‘Grew near, the defendant worked
‘on a diary about his life for his 2-
year-old,son, who, was; Mr. Schnei
der Said, coniceived on death row
during a loosely supervised con-
tact visit,

fr. Schneider said he lacked
the ability to control his anger but
said he was innocent of the double
murder in January 1985 that sent
hhim to death row. He was convict-

E. Thompson, 55, and
R Schwendeman, $3, dur-
ing a robbery at their antique-
filled home in House Springs, Mo.
Mr. Schwendeman, a bullet
‘wound in his forehead, was found
in the basement. Mr. Thompson,
stabbed 10 times, was found in the
backyard swimming pool.

Randy Greenawalt, 47

Lethal injection, Jan. 23, 1997 - ~
Prison Complex

at
48 years on death row

\.__After escaping from prison in
1978 while serving a life sentence
for a 1974 murder, Mr. Greenawalt
and a gang of four others. kid-
napped and killed a good Samari-
tan and his family who had
stopped to help them when their
stolen getaway car broke down in
the desert John Lyons, 24, his wife,
Donnelda, 23; their toddler,
Christopher; and the Lyonses’
niece, 15-year-old Theresa Tyson,’
‘were shotgunned to death,

During his almost twa decades
on death row, Mr. Greenawalt,
once @ hard-drinking truck driver,

said he became a devout Christian”

who lamented not turning to his
faith earlier.

“If a person learns to follow the
Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit and
is willing,” he wrote, “there is great
Dlessing in life.”

Billy Wayne Waldrop, 44

Eléctrocution, Jan. 10, 1997
Holman Prison, Atmore, Ala.
14 years on death row

Mr. Waldrop was convicted of
‘Killing three men during his drug-
addied life. He fatally stabbed two
in 1973, carving his initials into
both of their bodies. Released from
prison, the erstwhile construction
worker killed 72-year-old Thurman
Macon Donahoo during-a robbery’

of his home in Alpine, Ala, in 1982.

Mr. Waldrop first began using
drugs as a grade-school student
and went on to abuse’ whatever
was handy: marijuana, speed, hero-
in and cocaine. A few months be-
fore his arrest, he was shot in the
head in an unrelated incident, and
he contended that prosecutors
framed him for Mr. Donahoo’s
murder. :

‘Like many others on death row,
‘Mr, Waldrop professed to have had
a religious conversion. “Whatever

ING NEWS

the eventual outcome, the state of
Alabama will never kill me,”
wrote, citing a New at ae ee
verse about everlasting life.-“1H'
light of that, I consider my degth'?
row experienceto bea blessing™

Mr, Beaver pleaded guilty and
‘was sentenced to die for the 1985
shooting of a Virginia State Police
‘trooper, Leo Whitt, The 2-year. vet.
eran was shot after he stopped.
Beaver, who had escaped from,a
drug treatment center, Mr. Beaver
was high on drage and driving a
vehicle with only one license plate.

Before turning violent, the for-
mer construction worker had-3
long string of burglary cont
tions. He told The News that crite’
for some is an emotional rush: “Dé”
pending on what the crime of
‘there is a certain high or adrena!
line rush that accompanies the’ ap?
tions.”

He also said he had imanijel!!
while on death row. "I was 19 year
old when my crime occurred,” He!”
Wrote. “Iam not the same persoy 7
was then.”

et

Larry Lonchar, 45

Bectrocution, Nox 24, 2906 ot

Georgia Diagnostic and
Classification Prison in Jackson

‘Nine years on death row

Mr. Lonchar came ‘close to
death twice before he was execut-
ed. Once in 1993, and again in 1995,
he waived his appeals and ex-
pressed a desire to be executed,
‘only to change his mind and file
lastaainute appeals that delay:
his execution.

He was convicted of killing
Charles Wayne Smith, 54; Mr.
‘Smith’s girlfriend, Margaret Louise
‘Sweat, 45; and Mr. Smith's son,
Steven Wayne Smith, 24, over a
$10,000 gambling debt. Mr. Lon.
char, who had previous conve”!

PHOTOGRAPHY B

Y DavioDd

LEESON

uons for burglary and robbery, also
said he had a history of psychiatric
péoblems.stemming from his par-
ents’ divorce.

Describing one of his close en-
couniers-with the electric chair, he
wrote of being taken to the death
house and being “all prepared” up
until the fina! half-hour when he
was talked into starting a last-
minute, and temporarily successful,
ona 7 :

“Won't happen this time!” he
wrote. “Just have too many reasons
why it’s best for me to die?”

lusan Willianr Frank Parker, 4:

*othal injection, Aug. 8, 1996
‘Cummins Unit, Varner, Ark.
44 years on death row.

Mr. Parker, constimed by the
idea that his in-laws had under.
mined his marriage, stalked and
killed them Nov. 5, 1984, at their
home in Rogers, Ark. After fatally
shdoting James and Sandra Warren,
Mf, Parker, a heavy cocaine abuser,
iucted his estranged wife, Pam,
took her at gunpoint to the po-
licg station. He wounded Officer
ay,Feyen, and before the siege
engled, he had also shot his wife in
domen. Both victims recov-

| On death row for more than a
decade, Mr. Parker became a Bud-
dhist and spoke frequently of hia re
morse. “I was 30 years old and was

going through my third divorce,” -

"Mr. Parker said in his question-
naire. “It became too much psycho-
logicaliy, and I lost it.

1 “The death penalty was never a
concern to me, until now. Call it my

(Susan Parker was profiled on
in Thursday's editions.)

-As a young man, Mr. Bettle
trolfed the streets of St. Louis learn-
ing lessons and picking up habits

that would haunt him throughout
life, He was convicted in 1980 of rap-
ing and Killing Birdie Lee Johnson,
an 80yearold neighbor who called
‘him by the nickname “Sweet Boy.”
‘Ms. Johnson, according to Press re-
ports, was discovered in her home
with a butcher knife protruding
from her head and aumerous stab
wounds. “

Mr. Battle, a juvenile delinquent
who gave his life over to the drugs
he easily obtained on the streets,
told The News that he felt trapped
by his environment. He said he
needed “a larger view of the world”
to learn that “the convictions and
Practices of the ghetto are not ac-
ceptable all over.”

Lethal injection, July 34, 1996
Potosi Correctional Center,

Mineral Point, Mo.
12 years on death row

Mr. Nave was convicted in the
shooting death of his landlord,
Geneva Roling, in Jefferson City.
‘The shooting took place less than a
year after his parole from prison
for robbery and rape. After shoot-
ing Ms. Roling, Mr. Nave took four
women hostage at a nearby hospi-
tal and sexually assaulted them be-
fore he was arrested.

Mr, Nave, who said a relative
also served Ume for murder, says
his criminal conduct was the re-
sult of a lifetime of drag and alcon
hol abuse. He started drinking in
grade school and using drugs in
high school, eventually coming to
prefer cocaine, speed and heroin.

“My social problems have been
caused by the use of drugs and al-
cohol,” Mr. Nave told The News.
“I'm sure the victims of alcohol-
and drug-induced:death row in-
mates wished society would have
recognized a disease that can so
control a person’s actions that
they can murder at will while
under the influence. P've known
Killers who have woke up after a
drank and have no idea they had
killed someone.”

Fred H. Kornahrens, 47:

“For years, I suffered one set-
back, problem and loss after anoth-
er,” Mr. Kornahrens wrote. “Among
other things, my... . [father] was
killed by drug dealers” and his mar-
riage broke up. “It’s a long story,
and the pain and stress of it ail
made me sick.

“Iwas not aware how sick I had
become until I lost.control of my ac-
tions.” #

Lethal injection, July 17, 1996
Greensville Correctional Center,
Jarratt, Va.

Eight years on death row

A bisexual bartender who had
abused a pharmacopeia of drugs
since he was in grade school, Mr.
Savino, was sentenced to die for
killing Thom McWeters, his 64:year-
old lover. Mr. McWaters was beaten
with a hammer and stabbed with
butcher knives. Mr. Savino, accord-
ing to a report, said he killed his
lover over his frequent demands
for sex. He told The News that he
Killed Mr. McWaters during a rob-

His life, he wrote, was warped
by sexual abuse and drugs, and he
said a priest molested him, “Never,”
he wrote, “use any drugs!”

{s
-

=

— oe

Daren. Lee Bolton, 29°

Unlike many who'draw out
their time on death row with repeti-
tive appeals, Mr. Bolton “volun-
tered” to be executed. Sentenced to .
death Feb, 22, 1993, for the kidnap-
ping and stabbing death of Zosha
Lee Pickett, 2, who was abducted
from her bedroom in Tucson in
1986, he was executed just a little
‘more than two years later. He aiso
had been charged'with the death of
‘another Tucson girl, 7-year-old
Cathy Fritz, in 1982, but that case
‘Was never tried.

An alcohol abuser and dope
smoker, Mr. Bolton told The News
that he suffered from psychiatric
problems stemming fron his par-
ents’ divorce and that he once had
his head “put through a plaster
wall” for bringing home average
grades on a report card. He said he
wished he could spend time coun-
seling troubled teens “to try to keep
‘them from ending up here.”

lea ye

Lethal injection, Feb. 21, 1996
Potosi Correctional Center,
Mineral Poirit, Mo.

10 years on death row
Mr. Sloan was convicted of.
killing his 9-year-old brother, Jason,
in 1985, and was suspected of also
Killing his parents, Judith and Paul,
and another brother, Timothy, 18.
In his questionnaire, Mr. Sloan
complained of physical abuse by his
father, and said he might have
turned out differently if he had
“moved away from home.”
“Lam not a criminal. I know I
was convicted of murders, birt Iwas
never into crime or would be into

. crime. It was something in my fami-

ly that made me do the murders.”

bis]

Johi Albert Taylor, 36
1

Firing squad, Jan. 26,1996 |
‘Southpoint Facilities, Utah State :
Prison at Draper
Five years on death row

When Mr. Taylor was executed
his death was national news be.
tause he insisted on being executed
by firing squad. He told The News
that he considered a firing squad
most humane. He-joined Gary
Gilmore, the first person executed:
after the death penalty was reinstat.
ed in 1976, as the only condemned:
men to die before afiring squad. j

Utah is the only state that stilt
uses riflemen to carry out exect-|
tions, As political pressure mounts
to do away with the firing squad, |
the chance increases that Mr. Tay-|
lor will go down in history as the,
last person to be executed in the.
United States by gunfire. :

Mr. Taylor was convicted in the
1989 rape and strangulation of
Charla Nicole King one day before :
her 12th birthday. Asa juvenile, Mr.
‘Taylor was in trouble for burglary,
mail fraud and shoplifting. As an
adult, he was convicted of ‘weapons
and burglary charges but apparent-

__ lyreceived probation.

During his childhood, Mr. Tay-
lor related, he was gang-raped by
strangers and physically abused by
arelative. “I was stripped naxed and
Placed in an aluminum shed in the
middle of winter in Colorado for,
seven days,” he said.

4
Lethal injection, Jan. 23, 1996
Greensville Correctionai Center,
Virginia
Nine years on death row
Mr, Townes, a black man con-
victed of killing a 32yearold white
woman, believed the death penalty
is immoral because it is not applied
‘equally to all people accused of capi-
tal crimes.

“As long as there exists underly-
ing factors such as race, sex, eco-
nomical status gr political inflo-
ence in determining who shall or
Please see SOME on Page 264.

PHOTOGRAPHY B

XY DAVID

LEESON x
‘The Dalles Morning News

Friday, April 25, 1997

A

Some go to their d
others accept responsibility:

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25a,

DEATH ROW
: PERSPECTIVE
“Artist’s-eye view of the death
penalty” is a drawing by former
‘Texas death row inmate David
Lee Herman,

shall not be prosecuted for capital
murder," he wrote a year before his
execution, “the death penalty can
never be cdnsidered morally or so-
cially acceptable as a direct conse-
quence of the arbitrary, capricious
and discriminatory manner in
which it is misapplied upon the
people of color and the poor in
America,”

Mr. Townes, previously convict-
ed of three robberies and a maim
ing, was sentenced to death for the
1985 murder of Virginia Goebel, a
mother of two, during a vonve-
nience store robbery,

Lethal injections usually are ad-
ministered in a prisoner's arm, But
officials could not find a suitable
vein in the arm of Mr. Townes, a
one-time heroin user, and inserted
the needle in his right foot

eaths proclaiming in

Ronald Keith Allridge,.34
+ Lethal injection, June 8, 1995
The Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas
Nine years on death row
: Mr, Allridge was ‘convicted of
murder for the 1985 shotgun slay-
ing of Carla McMillen, 19, during a
Inte-xnight holdup at a Whataburger
in Fort Worth,

Mr. Allridge and his brother,
James Vernon Allridge Ill, were
members of a gang responsible for a
series of robberies in 1985, James
Allridge drove the getaway vehicle

-|--during the robbery in which Miss

McMillen was killed, Ronald All-
ridge was at the wheel-when James
killed a clerk at a convenience store
robbery that netted $300, Ronald
Allridge had been released from
prison in 1983 after serving six
years of a 10-year sentence for an
unrelated 1976 murder he commit-
ted when he was 16,

“I feel some people commit
crimes because they feel it is a ne-
cessity,” Ronald Allridge wrote, "I
feel others just enjoy the feeling of
power or enjoy the material gain,”

Mr, Allridge, an accomplished
robber who grew up in a large mid-
dle-class family, said he might have
been a better person had he stuck
with the last regular job he had —
at Domino's Pizza,

.

Lethal injection, May 3, 1995
Potosi Correctiorial Center,
Mineral Point, Mo.

14 years on death row

Mr, Foster was convicted for the
1983 robbery and slaying of Travis
Walker, 26, The two men were mem-
ers of the same softball team,

As a child, Mr. Foster's sclence
fair project had been featured in a
local newspaper, but he dropped
out in the Lith grade; opting for a
life of drugs, alcohol and crime,
‘The former maintenance man

“racked up four prison sentences be-
fore killing his friend during a rob-
bery.

People enjoy crime| he said, be-
cause it allows a person to pit “your
mind against someone else,”

In his questionnaire, Mr, Foster
sajd he believed that lethal injec-
tion was the most humane form of
execution. When it came time to ex-
ecute Mr, Foster, however, prison
officials first had trouble finding'a
good vein on the one-time drug
abuser, then had to loosen an over-
ly tight restraining strap which had
slowed the flow of lethal chemicals
to his body, Death from lethal injec-
tion usually occurs in minutes, In
Mr. Foster's case, it took almost half
an hour, :

nocence;

William Stumpp, Mr. Snell “da?
scribed himself to The News af
family man, married for 47 yi
who believed “in law and order
the death penalty," .

Lethal injection, April 6, 1995 ols
‘The Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texag
16 years on death row 5190
Mr. Mays was convicted for the!
1979 robbery and murder of Jertya
Lamb, a 34-year-old food services
worker in Wichita Falls, alo
Mr, Mays, an oilfield roughneck
and convicted robber, was tri
four times for Mr. Lamb's ‘death

One was declared a mistrial, Two

fourth led to his execution.»

He grew up.in a world of drigg,
violence and crime, In comments
written four months before he's”
executed, he expressed hope that,

‘one day he would obtain his fr

were overturned on i)

“dom “so Tl have a future to accOnfe

plish something good.”

“People think life here is {89”
easy,” he wrote, “but I wouldn't
Wish this life on my worst eneniy*.
Robert Sidebottom, 33

Lethal injection, Nov. 15, 1995
Potosi Correctional Center,

‘Stoned on drugs, Mr. Sidebot-
tom, the courts found, killed his 74
yearold grandmother, May Sidebot-
tom, in 1985 after an argument over
$5.In an interview before his death,
Mr. Sidebottom said he really wasn't
sure exactly what happened that
day. He and a friend were at his
grandmother's house, but his mem-
ory, he said, was fogged by “drink-
ing and doing dru:

“I was there,” he said. “Tm not
real sure about .. . [who killed his
grandmother]. I'm pretty sure it was
‘him (the friend]. I don’t think I did”

“Dennis Wayne Stockton, 54

” Lethal injection, Sept. 27, 1995
Greensville Correctional Center,

Mr. Stockton — sentenced to
die for 2 1978 contract murder of a
Virginia teenager, Kenneth Ard-
ner — became the 300th person to
be executed since the practice re-
sumed in the United States in 1977.

‘He published a prison newslet-
ter, Passin’ Thoughts, and the issue
‘he sent The News incinded 2 long
fantasy piece about how he had es-
caped from death row, lived in the
woods, married 2 young homeless
woman and adopted her young
son.

‘He consistently maintained his
innocence and blamed his convic-
tion on “crooked lawmen,” “I em
on death row, sentenced to die for
a crime (murder for hire) I'm not
guilty of. P've been saying this long
defore it became fashionable to do
so. I'm the victim of crimes by

(Copyighs 1985 by Dave Herman)
members of law enforcement. I
want to be free.”

‘Vernon Lamar Sattiewhite, 39

Lethal injection, Aug. 15, 1995
‘The Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas
Nine yoars on death row
“Mr. Settiewhite was convicted
in San Antonio for the 1986 slaying
of his former girlfriend, Sandra Sor-

ell as she was walking to nursing
school, grabbed her by the head,
dragged her several hundred feet,
then shot her twice in the head.
‘Turning his gun on himself, he re-
peatedly pulled the trigger only to
‘have the weapon misfire.

In his questionnaire, Mr. Sat-
tiewhite spoke of the loss he felt;
from his own mother's death when
he was 4. Ironically, Mr. Sat-

girlfriend's two children the loss he
endured as a child.

“I would have been better if my
mother hadn't died when I was 4.”
he wrote. If he could be freed for
one day, he said, he would spend it
with his own son.

‘Ms. Sorrell was the second per-
son Mr. Sattiewhite bad killed. The
former forklift operator and 10th-
grade dropout previously was con-
icted of murder in 1977 and re.
ceived a five-year sentence.

John Fearance Jr.,40

Lethal injection, June 20, 1995
‘The Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas
16 years on death row

Mr. Fearance was convicted for
the Dec. 23, 1977, slaying of 2 neigh-
bor, Larry Faircloth, 2, a printing
company executive, during a bur-
glary in Dallas.

in his questionnaire, Mr. Fear-
ance, a marginally literate ninth-
grade dropout who wrote that he
suffered from “brain danger (sic),”_
claimed to have suffered a “psycho
ic break” following an argument
with his wife over 2 casserole. She
had put meat in the dish; he wanted
it on the side. After arguing with
his wife, he broke into Mr. Fair-
cloth’s home and stabbed him 19
times.

Mr. Fearance, a carwash work-
er, bad previously been convicted
of theft and attempted rape. His last
words: “I made a mistake 18 years
ago. I lost control of my mind, but 1
didn’t mean to hurt anyone. i have
no hatred toward humanity. I hope
He will forgive me for what I done.
Ididn't mean to.”

Holman Prison, Atmore, Ala.
18 years on death row’ -

Mr. Weeks was sentenced to
death after stealing 2 car and
Killing its driver, 24year-old veteri-
nary student Mark Anthony Batts of
‘Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Mr. Weeks, a former bricklayer,
‘had a long history of psychiatric
problems and maintained that he
shared his cell with an angel. “I sac-
rificed one life in order to save and
reconcile them both,” he wrote.
“This is psychotic”

Lathat injection, May 10, 1995
Montana State Prison
at Deer Lodge
20 years on death row

Interviewed the week of his ex-
ecution, Mr. McKenzie was eager to
talk and had encouraged a reporter
to “hurry” to the prison at Deer
‘Lodge before his death. Sitting ina
small room with his hands chained
to his waist, Mr! McKenzie, with no
expression of emotion, denied in-
volvement, as he had for 20 years,
in the murder that sent him to
death row. Convicted of kidnap-
ping, torturing and murdering 23-
‘year teacher Lana Herding in 1974,
Yhe loner became the first man to
‘de executed in Montana in more
than 40 years.

Once a relatively fit man stand-
ing almost 6 feet tail and weighing
190 pounds, he bloated on death
TOW to 265 pounds of sallow flesh.
For his last meal, he ordered an en-
tire beef tenderloin, french fries
and a half gallon each of whole
milk and orange sherbet.

Strapped to @ gurney in the
makeshift mobile home that Mon-
‘tana officials use for e death house,
Mr. McKenzie died listening to a
Marty Robbins recording through a
pair of stereo headphones. He told
The News that he imagined death to
‘bez void with endlesssleep.

Mr. Zettlemoyer was convicted
of the 1980 murder of Charles De-
Vetsco, 29, of Sunbury, a onetime
friend who had agreed to testify
against him in a robbery trial. Mr.
DeVetsco was Kidnapped, taken to a
‘wooded area and slain. According
to the victim's mother, Mr. Zettle-
moyer told officials that he had
een “killing rats.”

Mr. Zettlemoyer, previously con-
victed of robbery, was the first per-
son to be executed in Pennsylvania
since 1962,,

While in prison, the former jeni-
tor said that he became a devout
Christian and that his Bible was his
most cherished possession. He said
he would have been a better person
had he “become e Christian much
earlier in my life”

Richard Wayne Snell, 64

Lethal injection, April 19, 1995

‘The morning of the day he was
executed, Mr. Snell, an avowed
white supremacist, was smiling and
chuckling as death house television
carried breaking news of the worst
act of terrorism in US. history: the
bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in OKMahoma City.

For a final meal, he consumed
six pieces of fried crappie, part of a
‘white onion, salad and five hush
puppies. In his last words, the con-
victed double murderer issued an
ominous warning to then-Gov. Jim
Guy Tucker, who had rejected his
id for clemency.

“Look over your shoulder,” Mr.
Snell said, according to 2 death
house prison log that recorded his
Jast words. “Justice is on the way. I
wouldn’t trade places with you or
any of your political cronies...
Hail his victories. am at peace.”

Mr. Snell had been Tinked to as-
sorted ultra rightwing and racist
organizations. Twice sentenced to
death, he was convicted of killing a

. Dlack Arkansas state trooper, Louis

Bryant, and a Jewish pawnbroker,

bert Tobey, 2 éi-yearold sir trafit:
controller from Abilene. Mr.
was stabbed and his beadswab!
crushed with a heavy object.

Six weeks before his execution!
Mr. Russell expressed remorse for
Baving “ken a Lie’ and eal DF
longed for the stable family life he!
never had as a child. He said hi
spent four years at the Abilene Boys
Ranch and was, at other time |
alone “for days ata time.”

“Tbelieve that if I had of been,
given 2 home where there were!
strong (lawful) morals and less
no drugs, parties and the like,
would have grown up into a prédue
tive person.”

‘20-year-old Wesleyan College cheer:
leader, Whelette Collins, Mr. Siith|
Decame only the second white per-
son since’1976 to be executed for
the murder of a black person,
“Mr. Smith described himself a a
suicidal, bisexual restaurant work
fer who was teased and assaulted by
other children growing up. Reared
ina middleclass family by his nat-
ural parents, he had a history of
criminal conduct. Before comm
ting murder, he had been convi
of ase forgery, burglary

three cheetleaders, raping
killing one — Miss Collins
her friends were locked in

standing of people.” Free for
he said, he would be “leaving
county.”

TheDallas Morning News Friday, April 25,

1997 A

Inmates put to death |
_ blamed drugs, lack of stable childhood. :

CONTINUED PROM PAGE 1A, i

FOR AND AGAINST fi ry 5 a
Joey Watley and q
‘Ti-Betty Matthews argue ‘ ‘
about capital punishment
outside The Walls Unit. Mr
Watley is a proponent
of capital punishment,
and Ms, Matthews,
a prison minister, opposes it,
‘The two were arguing
during a demonstration *
at the execution _,
of David Lee Herman,”

Sec

pare aiameea |
AMERICA’S CONDEMN

WHEN THE SYSTEM FAILS

. CUBAN IMMIGRANT FREED 14 YEARS AFTER DEATH SENTENCE
By Dan Malone

‘ ‘Soff Writer of The Dales Morning News
: © 1997, The Dllas Morning News
“AS

o
VEGAS — Roberto Hernandez Miranda, like many immigrants, had the most American”

of dreams: He wanted a decent job, a house to call home and freedom.

~ ; 77, Nevada's Supreme Court occasionally questioned whether the
DEATH ROW INMATES: : state was about to execute an innocent man, But the full
IN THEIR OWN WORDS court consistently voted to uphold his conviction.

BOOK I! THE FACES OF DEATH ROW “When they put me in prison," Mr. Miranda, now 53, said,

“they killed everything I dreamed of. Those dreams are dead.”
CHAPTER 4: FREED AFTER 14 YEARS Finally, a judge new to the case reviewed recently discoy- ..

What he got was a-by-14 cell at Ely State Prison in the des- ered evidence and ruled that Mr. Miranda's conviction was
olate copper and gold mining country of central Nevada, unconstitutional. Last September, Mr, Miranda emerged —

While Mr. Miranda languished on death row, justices on Please aee CASE on Page 124. FRESH AIR AND FREEDOM

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID LEESON
‘The Dallas Moming News

released from death row in Nevada, The charges against him were dismissed.
BRE aes

* Former inmate Roberto Miranda celebrates his new-found liberty after being

DAUAS SORNNG NewS
wen. Afkic 23, 199%
make my dream come true,” Mr. Mi-
randa said recently. “But now I
don't know...

“I don't know if I'll be in this
apartment, be able to pay rent, to get
a job. I don't know if people will
change their minds about me.”

Mr. Miranda said he has been
‘unable to get a new job despite two
dozen applications. Last week, he
said, he went three days without
food. On Sunday, he said, he was
days away from living on the
streets, just as he had in Havana,

‘Thomas Ferraro, now assigned
to an organized crime and drug en-
forcement task force in San Diego,
said it is possible that Mr. Miranda
did not receive an adequate de-
fense, but he said he remains con-
vinced he committed the murder.

“No single court found that this
defendant did not commit the mur-
der,” Mr. Ferraro said. Having the
case overturned because of inade-
quate counsel, he said. is “not even
close to being a statement of inno-
cence on the part of the defen-
dant”

Itis foolish, he said, to seek “per-
fect justice” and give appellate
lawyers a “bottomless pit" of money
when the defense lawyers whose
work they attack are denied even a
fraction of those funds at trial.

“Adolf Hitler could not be sen-
tenced to death under the kind of
systems we've set up.” the career
prosecutor said. “There is no such
thing as perfect justice here on
earth. We may get perfect justice,
but not here.

Fifteen years after defending
Roberto Miranda, Thomas Rigsby is
still a Clark County public defender.
And even though it was his work as
an attorney that was put on trial to
win Mr. Miranda's freedom, Mr.
Rigsby said *no one was happier
than I was when his death penalty
was overturned.”

Mr. Miranda's capital murder
tial, it turned out. not only was Mr.

ice has a team
tal murder specialists who handle.
such cases. He wishes such a team
had existed in the early 1980s.

“Idon't think at that point in my
career I should have been assigned
a capital. murder case.” Mr-Rigsby-~-
said. “Did I do the best job I could? I
think did”

But he, too, acknowledges, that
“it was very possible adequate inves-
tigation was not done.”

“The returning of the death
penalty was one of the most emo-
tionally shocking experiences I've
ever had.” Mr. Rigsby said. “T went
‘home and cried. It wasn't because I
loved Roberto Miranda. It was an
evil decision. I pledged that I would
never be a part of that again.”

Regbd. Sot was. okehis lest.

Friday, April 25, 1997

cs AMERICAS CONDEMNED TT sae
Victims ranged from toddler to woman, 80, —
who called her killer“Sweet Boy’

PROTESTING
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
A protester demonstratés:
outside The Walls Unit"

during the execution
of death row inmate +
David Lee Herman

on April 2, 8

AE /The Houston Post/Sunday, June 12, 1988

Supreme Court ruling
may portend decision

on Texas’ death law
Wholesale reversals feared

By Douglas Freelander
OF THE HOUSTON POST

‘A recent U.S. Supreme Court rul-
ing on a Maryland case may por-
tend the outcome of a decision
pending in a Texas case that could
result in numerous death penalty
reversal:

Is.

The court is expected to rule this
month on the
appeal of
Donald Gene
Franklin, 37,
sipenees to
die injec-
tion for killing
a Antonio
oe in 1975.
Texas ap-
péals experts
speculate that

if the court fa- s
vas E: -* FRANKLIN:

could strike down part of the Texas
Penal Code, causing wholesale re-
versals or rehearings among Texas’
275 death row inmates.

‘At issue is jury instruction on
mitigating circumstances during
the punishment phase of trial — an
issue clarified in a separate Mary-
land case in which the Supreme
Court ruled last week.

In the Maryland case, the court,
voting 5-4 last week, struck down
capital procedures in Maryland and
vacated the death sentence of
Ralph Mills, convicted of stabbing
his cellmate to death. That ruling
mandates a new sentencing hear-
ing for Mills and could affect the
fate of other death row convicts in

Maryland.

Mills’ lawyers argued that Mary-
land law, which requires that a jury
must unanimously agree that a cer-
tain mitigating circumstance exists,
deprives a defendant of his right to
have all such evidence taken into
account.

Writing for the majority, Justice
Harry Blackmun, said: “The possi-
bility that a single juror could block
such consideration, and conse-
quently require the jury to impose
the death penalty, is one we dare
not risk.”

Franklin's lawyer, Mark Stevens

of San Antonio, said the justices’
decision in the Maryland case
“may indicate something about
their attitude on mitigating evi-
dence.”
He said he believes Texas’ law is
much narrower than Maryland’s
since, while mitigating and aggra-
vating circumstances are factors in
punishment deliberations in Mary-
land, only probable or deliberate
intent can be discussed in similar
proceedings in Texas.

Stevens said Franklin's jurors
“were unable to fairly consider
possible mitigating evidence.”

Assistant Attorney General Bob
Walt said since he hadn't read the
Maryland decision, he couldn’t pre-
dict its impact on Texas,

He said Texas law doesn’t pre-
clude consideration of mitigating
evidence and tells juries to consid-
er all the evidence before making
its verdict.

Material from United Press Inter-
national is included in this report.

SPECIAL REPORT

Newsweek |

TO DIE

OR NOT

TO DIE

Minutes away from execution on a prison
gurney, J.D. Autry won a dramatic reprieve.
An account of his life, his crimes and the
continuing battle over the death penalty

| THE ISSUE IS LIFE AND
death, nothing less. The
last-minute stay that
spared J. D. Autry dra-

neeagain Alvin Bronstein sat patiently ina
deserted alcoye of the Supreme Court,

Killer he had never met. As the American
Civil Liberties Union’s senior lawyer in Washing-
ton, it repeatedly fell to him to search for a high-
court justice willing to stay an executioner’s hand.
In six earlier cases, he had failed; there is seldom
much ammunition left at this stage of a case. Last
week looked like a macabre reprise: 1,200 miles
away James David Autry lay stretched out on a
Texas prison gurney, already tethered to an intrave-
nous tube that would deliver a fatal dose of poison in
less than an hour.

Just after midnight (11 p.m. Texas time), Bron-
stein got word that three appellate judges had
turned down Autry’s latest plea. Now, literally past
the 11th hour, Bronstein sprang into action. Coolly,
but with little private hope, he dashed off another
few lines to his handwritten petition—emphasizing
an unsettled issue about the fairness of Autry’s
sentence. Court clerks grabbed his three pages of
yellow foolscap and dispatched them to Associate
Justice Byron R. White. Again Bronstein waited.
Twenty minutes later the phone rang, It was his
ACLU colleagues in Houston. Bronstein was
amazed that they seemed so pleased.

“How did you do it?” one of them cried.

“What are you talking about?” he replied. Even
as he said it, he understood. But elation waited until
he saw White’s official order. “We saved some-
body’s life today,” he sighed.

The last-minute reprieve of J. D. Autry was just
that—a reprieve, a delay, a chance to re-examine
and reargue the question of whether a killer should
die or should not die. It means that not only Autry

nia, who account for about one-quarter of the na-
tion’s condemned population, may not even be
considered for execution until the spring of 1984.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments next
month in a case from California that poses the
question of whether a condemned prisoner is enti-
tled to a judicial review of his sentence to determine
whether it is “proportional” to those of criminals
who committed similar crimes. In effect, Byron

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

and raised again the question of whether

matized the dilemma of the death penalty OR

Autry and the 1,230 other residents now
on death row would ever be executed.

waiting for a chance to save the life of a |

but all the death-row inmates in Texas and Califor- |

O DIE

THE GURNEY IN THE DEATH CHAMBER: Out of commission in Texas—at least temporarily

43

Where once they
flouted the law,
now the nation’s
condemned killers
rely on the legal
system itself to
keep them alive.

44

THE BODY OF CHARLIE BROOKS: Death by lethal

jection helped rekindle the capital-punishment debate

White said Autry could stick around for the answer.

But, ina larger sense, the case of J. D. Autry and
its agonizing end game dramatized America’s long
struggle with the legal and moral conundrums of
capital punishment. It is a struggle punctuated, in
recent years, by judicial fits and starts. It is waged,
on both sides of the issue, with a degree of emotional
intensity that tends to obscure the problem in waves
of sympathy either for the victims or for the mur-
derers. In an effort to present a case whole, to trace
the lives both of a killer and the people he killed, a
NEWSWEEK team has followed Autry’s crime and
punishment for the last six months. Their special
report begins on page 46.

J.D. Autry isjust one resident of a small village of
1,230 death-row convicts spread out over 34 states.
Where once they flouted the law, now they rely on
the legal system itself to keep them alive. Their
lifelines are literally made of paper, highly technical
lawyers’ writs that have hobbled the court system
and turned the death penalty into all but an abstrac-
tion. Some convicted murderers have been on death
row pressing their appeals for nearly a decade, But
just 11 years ago, death row seemed destined to
become a ghost town. In June 1972, citing the
“capricious” imposition of capital sentences, the
U.S. Supreme Court struck down every state death
statute, A bare 5-4 majority held that capital pun-
ishment, as then practiced, amounted to an uncon-
stitutional “cruel and unusual punishment’”’—and
more than 600 inmates were saved.

But the court’s splintered decision contained an
implicit invitation to the states to recraft their stat-

utes, and 35 promptly passed new ones that set out
to repair the defects the court had found. In July

1976 the Supreme Court spoke again. This time,
voting 7-2, the justices found most of the new
procedures acceptable: the death penalty was con-
stitutional again.

Six months later the new laws claimed their first
killer, Swaggering Gary Gilmore of Utah canceled
his appeals and stood before a firing squad after
proclaiming, “Let’s do it.” Following Gilmore’s
execution, the first in a decade, a wave of other
executions was predicted. It did not happen. Since
Gilmore, only seyen other convicts have died, and
three of them only after dropping their legal
weapons. While executions have become rare
events, the capital-punishment issue has not
dropped from public view. One reason has been a
new mode of execution: last December, Texas in-
mate Charlie Brooks Jr. became the first Ameri-
can executed by lethal injection. J. D. Autry was
nearly the second.

he more important reason why the debate

goes on is that the issue touches a core of

moral belief in almost every citizen. To

some of its supporters, capital punishment
is a matter of retribution, the ancient rule of justice
that demands an eye for an eye. To others, deter-
rence is the object: if killers are put to death, then
potential killers may stay their hand—and at least
the particular killer who is executed will never be
free to kill again. On the other side are those who
argue that capital punishment drags the state
down to the murderer’s own level of brutality. No
true sense of justice is served, no judicial errors
can be corrected, they say, when the law itself
becomes a killer.

>¢ | NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

© 1982 Ron Creek Hunt

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

In defense of that latter view, the abolitionists
have determined to fight each new capital case to
the finish, Groups like the NAACP Legal Defense
and Educational Fund, Inc., and The Team De-
fense Project, Inc., in Atlanta, have resolved that if
the Constitution does not outlaw the death penalty,
perhaps its clauses can still be used to thwart it.
With their artful appeals, they have wrestled the
executioner to a draw. In the last 10 years, courts
have reversed death sentences in 1,094 cases be-
cause zealous lawyers have uncovered significant
mistakes at trials or flaws in the basic laws them-
selves. A few inmates have even been proven falsely
convicted.

This legal work is hard, complex and frightfully
slow. In California, the busy state Supreme Court
has dealt with just 16 capital cases since 1977—and
140 other appeals are waiting. Death-penalty ap-
peals sent to federal courts in eastern Texas drop
from sight because each judge has more than 900
cases pending, In some instances, defense lawyers
can use one case to hold off dozens of others. For
instance, the 202 inmates on Florida’s death row—
the largest in the nation—enjoyed a respite for six
months this year while an appeals panel considered
a challenge to state court procedures. Ultimately,
the appeal failed, but at least it bought months
of relief.

Delay results in a denial of justice, complains
Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers. “I’m
not on a rampage to implement the death penalty,
but the difficulty we have carrying it out under-
mines confidence in the legal system.” In a sense,
opponents of the death penalty are using the very
tortuousness of the appeals process as a weapon
against capital punishment itself. “If we want to
retain our American system of fairness, legality and
equality,” says Jack Greenberg, director of the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, “sooner or later we
will come to the conclusion that there is no way to.
make a capital-punishment system work.”

he Supreme Court has expressed its own

concern with the delays. Two years ago Jus-

tice William H. Rehnquist complained that

his colleagues were making a “mockery of
the criminal-justice system” by countenancing ex-
tended appeals. In May, Justice Lewis F, Powell Jr.
old a group of federal judges that unless the judici-
ary can find a more efficient way to handle death
cases, capital punishment should be abolished. And
last week, when Byron White granted Autry his
last-minute stay, he called for a change in the law to
limit repetitive appeals. “In my view,” wrote White,
“it would be desirable to require by statute that all
federal grounds for challenging a conviction or a
sentence be presented in the first petition for habeas
corpus. Except in unusual circumstances, succes-
sive writs would be summarily denied.”

Despite the high court’s impatience, it is obliged
to keep reviewing death-penalty cases—itself a
source of delay. This term the justices have already
scheduled two crucial appeals for arguments. One
comes from Florida and raises the question of what
minimal help a defense counsel must provide de-
fendants at the sentencing phase of a murder trial.
Shoddy performances by court-appointed lawyers
have led lower courts to upset many death sen-
tences. The Florida case will give the justices an
opportunity to set some national standards.

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983 o

The other caseis the one that saved Autry’s life. It
involves an appeal by California killer Robert Alton
Harris who abducted two teen-agers from the park-
ing lot ofa fast-food stand, brutally murdered them,
then calmly finished their hamburgers. Harris de-
mands that the state Supreme Court explicitly re-
view his sentence to make certain that itis not out of
line with those imposed on other criminals—in
legal jargon, this is called “proportionality,” In the
1976 decisions that restored the death penalty, the
justices noted with approval that both the Georgia
and Florida courts made proportionality reviews to
ensure that the penalty would not be imposed arbi-
trarily. Since then the high court has struck down as
“disproportionate” death sentences for rapists and
for defendants who neither killed nor attempted to
kill the victim. The problem in the Harris case is
that the court has also upheld state statutes, like
that in Texas, which make no mention of compara-
tive sentence review. Will the court now make
absence of such reviews a fatal flaw? Its decision is
expected next spring.

lor the moment, Harris’s appeal means an-

other delay for California’s 140 death-row

inmates. Unless Texas convinces the Supreme

Court that it should upset Autry’s stay, execu-
tions will be halted there as well. It is not clear,
however, how far this pattern will spread. Thirty-
two states have some form of proportional review
built into their sentencing schemes. Therefore, most
should be unaffected by the Harris case. But to
complicate matters further, the justices have al-
ready stopped an execution in Louisiana on the
ground that that state’s review system may be inad-
equate. According to University of Texas law Prof.
George Dix, all these proportional-review systems
are weak. He says the state courts have failed to set
standards for real comparisons, failed to collect
complete information on the sentences of all killers
and failed to provide other judges with guidance.
“If discretion is so incapable of being guided,”
he says, “maybe it means that abuse and misuse are
so inevitable that the penalty itself becomes
unacceptable.”

Whatever becomes of proportionality, the wider
struggle over the death penalty will surely go on.
Foes are already marshaling major assaults on
jury-selection practices in Arkansas and alleged
patterns of race discrimination in Georgia. If those
cases survive intermediate judgments, they will be
more fodder for the Supreme Court. On another
front, Harvard law Prof. Alan Dershowitz de-
clared this summer that roughly 300 condemned
inmates did not have lawyers. Now the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund and an American Bar Associ-
ation committee are scouring law firms for more
volunteers. The guerrilla war against the death
penalty will continue, much as popular support
for the death penalty will likely remain intact.
For the foreseeable future at least, the battle is
likely to be a standoff: capital punishment will
remain securely on the law books, and most in-
mates will remain alive on death row. The odds
favor that, if only because of one grim statistic.
Even if states began tomorrow to execute one
person a day, it would take until March 1987 to
erase the current backlog.

ARIC PRESS with SUSAN AGREST in New York,
LUCY HOWARD in Washington, GEORGE RAINE.
in San Francisco, and bureau reports

Will the court now

make absence of
“proportionality”
reviews a fatal
flaw?

JUSTICE BYRON WHITE

45

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

THE LIFE, THE CRIMES, THE
victims of J. D. Autry —and
the legal battle that saved
him only 31 minutes before

he was to die.

46

He was sitting alone on his bunk in the old Texas
death house called The Walls when the men in gray
came for him in the middle of the night. Time had
Finally run out on J. D. Autry, but he was tougher
than leather and cooler than a Rocky Mountain
morning, too cool to fight or to give voice to the fear
rising in his throat, He walked his last steps unaided
and unresisting, out of his cell, down a short corridor,
through a steel door and into a room of brick painted
a glowing hell red. A gurney awaited him there, a
standard hospital-model cot made cruciform by lat-
eral supports for each of his arms, He climbed onto it
and lay down. He felt the white leather straps tighten-
ing around his body, eight of them, from his chest to
his ankles. And then he saw the needle coming
toward him, moving closer and closer, seeking out the
vein that would bear the poisons from his arm to his
heart and his brain...

e always woke up at that moment, his heart
pounding, his body clammy with sweat, his
dark, liquid eyes searching the night on
death row for evidence that he was still
alive. His whole life had been a journey toward the
hell-red room, the 26 years he had spent arriving at
its doorsill and the three more he had survived ina
rear-guard legal struggle against its fatal embrace.
He had largely succeeded in blotting its image out of
his days, passing time and drowning consciousness

This story was reported by Tony Fuller, Martin
Kasindorf, Patricia King and Stryker McGuire. It
was written by Peter Goldman. The photographs
are by Wally McNamee,

Ll

in a brew of Western novels, TV sitcoms, Willie
Nelson ballads and happy pills, some prescribed
and some contraband. But he could not shut his
curtain scene out of his nightmares, and last week,
with his appeals and his will all but exhausted, he
found himself living his recurring bad dream. He
was marched into the death chamber and strapped
to the gurney with a needle in each arm, suspended
for an hour between life and death, while relays of
lawyers and tiers of judges haggled furiously over
his fate. When a single Supreme Court justice re-
prieved him, James David Autry, desperado of the
flesh and spirit, was a scant 31 minutes from
death—the narrowest escape from execution any-
where in America in memory,

Autry’s offense, in the bitter words of the brother
of one of his victims, was “just another murder that
happened on a weekend”—or, more accurately,
two killings and a nearly successful attempt at a
third. He and his partner, John Alton Sandifer, had
been bumping around Port Arthur, Texas, in a
borrowed pickup one warm Sunday night in April
1980, bleary on beer, pot, pills and spent homosex-
ual passion, and when they had drunk up the last of
their Schlitz, they stopped at a Sak-n-Pak chain
convenience store for more. The precise story of
what happened then may never be clear. But a jury
concluded and a succession of appellate courts af-
firmed that there had been a drunken attempt at a
robbery and that Autry had shot the cashier be-
tween the eyes when she resisted. Two men had been
heading toward the store as he was fleeing it, and
they too were shot: one was killed and the other was
crippled for life in mind and body.

The bloodletting was as empty of purpose as
Autry’s luckless life. His net profit was a $2.70 six-
pack of beer, and he still had the last bottle on ice
when the police came for him less than five hours
later. He was convicted of capital murder before the
year was out and delivered in chains to death row,
protesting his innocence every step of the way. That
he was thereat all owed less to the chancy majesty of
the law than to his own bad throw of the dice. He
had counted on his buddy Sandifer helping him beat
the charge and accordingly turned down a proffered
40-year sentence if he would plead guilty. What he
did not know was that Sandifer was doing his own
sweet deal for seven years in an unrelated burglary
and would be back on the street by the time Autry
was led off to the death chamber. 2

Yet Autry could not find it in the flat terrain of his
soul to feel sorry for himself or dwell on the slaugh-

ter at the Sak-n-Pak, When he was first told he was |

under arrest for the murder of Shirley Drouet, he
answered, “I don’t know her.” He had never met
Mrs. Drouet, a mother of five trying to stitch things
back together after three failed marriages, or Joe
Broussard, a former priest who had moved south
from New Jersey to escape the cold and the crime,
or Tommy Syarnas, a young Greek seaman whose
life's dream had been to emigrate to America. When
he thought about them at all, which was seldom, he
saw them as he saw himself, as prisoners of a fate
they could not have altered or escaped. He looked
on his life as an inexplicable series of accidents
culminating in their destruction and maybe his
own. Things just happen to you, he thought; even in
the encroaching shadow of death, he could make no
more sense of things than that.

His fatalism was the common currency of that
ragged margin of America he came from, a world of

e2o NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

AUTRY AT HUNTSVILLE PRISON: The icy detachment behind his eyes brought a chill to the courtroom

spiritual DP’s adrift across the vast spaces of the
West like dry leaves on the wind. He was the child,
one of six, of a howling, brawling, whisky-soaked
marriage that survived for three months on love
and 21 years on malice. He came of age in the
shadows behind the promise and the optimism of
the sun belt, a landscape of dead-end bars and
county jails, of outlaw values and casual violence.
He progressed from shoplifting as a child to armed
robbery in his teens, from reform school three
times to prison twice before his graduation to
death row. His life was too barren and his time on
the street too brief for dreaming; he never had an
ambition, only an inchoate hunger he tried to quiet
with drink, drugs and rootless motion. “He never
had a chance,” his onetime girlfriend, Marcia
Hamilton, said, weeping at the memory of him.
“He wanted so goddam much and he wanted it
right now. He never got any of it.”

is own view of himself was rather less senti-

mental; he was J. D, Autry, soldier of

misfortune, too ice-cool to blame anyone or

anything but hard luck for the pass he had
come to. His days on death row were lightened fora
time by a passionate correspondence with a new
lady named Crystal in Albuquerque, N.M., and
since they had never met, his letters were a kind of
piecemeal self-portrait. I’m 5-foot, 9-inches weigh
about 140 or 145 pounds now, he wrote before they
had exchanged pictures. Brown hair and eyes, I’m
slim But I have big arm muscles cause I used to lift
weights when I was done here before. And: I have
some tatoos I'd like taken off myself, I have them on

both arms & legs on my back & chest... There all

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

over but what makes them look bad is there home
made, The best one I have is on my back its a cross
with Jesus on it it covers my whole back. And: I’m
kind of redneck in some of my ways, I like country
music and chew tabacco and I love getting loaded, I
guess that’s part of the reason I’m here now.

What mattered most of all to him was being
cool; his coolness and his irony were his armor
against the world and against his furies—a re-
pressed second self that had, in the view of one of
his lawyers, passed far beyond turmoil to a state of
murderous rage. He had always been shy of stran-
gers, afraid he might say something stupid, and he
used drink and dope to ease his way in the world.
Chablis Blanco wine, Schlitz beer and 2 fin-
gers Tequila is what I like to drink, he wrote
Crystal. But mostly I just like to smoke a joint
and drink a little wine... When I get loaded—
well when I get mellow not loaded—I get loveable
too. His problem was that the line between mel-
low and loaded seemed to blur in his brief inter-
ludes in society, and when he crossed it, his de-
mons took possession of him. “Almost everything
T’'ve done,” he reflected, “I was loaded when I
done it. Every time I was on the outside, I was
loaded most of the time.”

But when he was sober or merely sedated, the
mask stayed in place; the face he presented to the
world was diffident, the speech guarded and almost
inaudibly soft, the words as vacant of tone when he
spoke of death as when he called up his early
childhood memories of frolicking with his mother’s
pet dog Patches. The window to his emotions in-

stead was his eyes, strikingly large, fluid and expres-
sive. They were his mother’s, and on death row they

Things just happen
to you, he thought;
he could make no
more sense of
things than that.

47

CRYSTAL WITH LETTER FROM J.

She kept his
letters, a serial
history of their
chaste love
ahundred
stallments,

The death of J, D.
Autry might have
balanced the
books but could not
fill the emptiness
or kill the pain.

AT THE DROUET GRAVE

48

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

had acquired some of the tincture of weariness that
shadowed hers in the fagged-out autumn of her
life—an exhaustion of purpose softened in him only
by the faint fleeting hint of irony in his smile. The
range of sentiment they revealed was otherwise
wide and transparent, flowing quickly from sadness
to impishness to introspection. In court they had
finally betrayed him; the jurors answered his stare
and saw him as they imagined Shirley Drouet must
have in the last moment of her conscious life, as a
mindless and pitiless killer.

hat his eyes had given away was the icy

detachment behind them; they brought

an almost palpable chill to the court-

room, overcoming the last reservations
within the jury and the little shudder of finality
Judge Leonard Giblin Jr. felt at having to sentencea
man todeath. Those eyes, the judge thought. I’d hate
to walk into a 7-Eleven store and see that guy back in
the milk section. No one in the room was entirely
immune to the feeling, not even the defenders who
pleaded Autry’s innocence and proposed his lover
Sandifer’s guilt, instead. It took only four days for
the trial to come to its conclusion: that J. D. Autry
was the killer and that he posed too great a danger to
society to be allowed tolive any longer.

He passed his days thereafter in a 5-by-9 cell in
the Ellis unit of the Texas prison system, a squat
red-brick pile rising out of the fields of bluebonnets
along Farm-to-Market Route 980 north of Hunts-
ville. The state used to house its condemned pris-
oners at The Walls in town, in an eight-cell death
tow within sight of the door to the execution
chamber. But once Texas revived capital punish-
ment in 1973 and made it more sightly by replac-
ing the electric chair with the needle in 1977, the
census of the damned burgeoned past 175. The old
cells at The Walls stand empty now, except on
execution nights, and Old Sparky, the abandoned
chair, lies coffined in packing crates in the corri-
dor. By the time Autry arrived in October 1980,
death row had moyed 13 miles north to Ellis and
had flooded three tiers of maximum-security cells
with men waiting to die.

His years there blurred intoan endless gray round
in which boredom filled the days and fear ruled the
nights, in which the urge to kill time was in constant
tension with the desperation to hold onto it. His
identity was defined for all practical purposes by the
stencils on his prison whites: the name AUTRY, the
initials DR for death row and the execution number
670, his place ona roll begun when Old Sparky took
its first life in 1924. His world was enclosed for 22
hoursa day in the five square yards of his cell, a cage
made minimally homey by a bunk, a sink, an open
toilet, a table constructed of empty RC cans, a few
pulpy Westerns and a radio tuned mostly to an all-
country station in Houston. For a while his closest
human contact was with a neighbor, the “Candy
Man,” an optician convicted of having murdered his
own eight-year-old boy with poisoned Halloween
candy. Autry was cool to him, since even death row
has its standards, But off and on they were friendly
and talked, mostly about their mutual claims of
innocence.

There was hardly anyone else, in any case; in the
wasteland his life had become, Autry was largely
alone. His old girlfriend, Marcia, had given up and
married someone else. His bedmate Sandifer had

abandoned him, out of self-interest and discouraged
love. His father made known his unsurprise that
J.D. had come to a bad end; when J. D. sent hima
Father’s Day card last spring, the only response was
a curt note months later. His mother, frayed and
distracted, had come down from Colorado once to
witness for him at his trial and three times again to
visit him in prison, But when she first saw him
through the glass-and-steel mesh between them at
the Ellis visitors’ center, she could not speak for
crying, and when she tried to write him thereafter,
she found it hard to think of anything to say.

For a time, there was Crystal and their mail
romance. Her name was Betty Baxter, really, but
her life, like J. D.’s, had been a long trip over bad
road, and the new name she had assumed brought a
touch of borrowed glitter to it. She was a large,
plain-spoken woman with tumbling red hair, a
worn smile and three children overflowing her mo-
bile home in a sunbaked-asphalt trailer park in
Albuquerque. She had ridden with a bike gang once
and had had her old man’s nickname, “Gook,”
tattooed on one arm. Later she had taken up with
J. D.’s younger and wilder brother, Robert, a
stormy match that could not survive his fits of rage.
J. D. was all Robert had left her when she kicked
him out of the trailer; he had encouraged her to
write J. D., and once he was gone, the correspond-
ence flowered into an affair of the heart.

J. D.’s own sexuality had been scrambled in a
young manhood spent almost entirely in the all-
male society of reform schools and prisons. He
believed himself to be heterosexual, since he had
always played what prison folkways held to be the
man’s role in his couplings with other convicts. But
his liaison with Marcia had been his only sustained
sexual relationship with a woman, and in his last
brief time on the outside he had yielded to John
Sandifer’s proposal that they set up housekeeping
together in a mobile home of their own in Port
Arthur. It had been the ice encasing J. D.’s soul that
finally came between them, not what remained of
his heterosexuality. It struck Sandifer that J. D. had
seen too little love to know how to give or receiveit. I
don’t know him, he thought near the end of the
affair. I don’t think he knows himself.

f so, he created a persona in the teen-magazine

prose and the copied-out bits of verse in his love

letters to Crystal; at the safe distance between

them, hecould betender, his heart full oflonging
and love. Once she fretted at what he might think of
her past, and he protested: J know your life hasn’t
been a bed of roses but I'll never think you a slut or
loose, And nothing you could say would make mestop
loving you my heart belongs to you forever. Fantasies
flowered in the dry soil of his mind, reveries of
marrying Crystal, adopting her kids and buying a
little farm in the Rockies, the only beautiful place he
had ever seen. I’m not perfect I have my faults, he
wrote, but if I had a chance I'd do anything in my
powerto bring you loveand happiness. It’skind ofsilly
for me to say all that cause I’m sitting on death row
and may not live another year. But you have given me
hope and something to hold onto... I didn’t give a
[bleep] if7 died or not till you started writing.

And then one day her letters stopped. She had
written one a day at the height of their passion, and
he had sometimes sent her two; she kept his in a
packet, a serial history of their chaste love in a
hundred installments. But it had all been a paper

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

transaction, difficult to sustain. There was no mon-
ey for bus fare and a babysitter so she could go see
Autry; they had only the letters, and after eight or
nine months it got hard for Crystal to find the time
or the words to keep their love alive.

Autry’s days were empty then; there was hardly
anyone left and nothing much to do except invent
ways not to count the minutes crawling by. He
watched “M*A*S*H,” “Taxi” and “Saturday
Night Live” on one of the communal TY sets hung
from the cellblock ceiling. He begged tranquilizers
from the prison doctors and bartered for them in the
exercise yard. He made boxes with matchsticks in
intricate geometric patterns; his mother used one as
asort of reliquary for her clippings about his arrest
and trial. He dabbled at religion, less out of hope or
faith than for something to do; he read the New
Testament for the stories, saw a chaplain for the
company and prayed nightly for his freedom. And
like his neighbors, he monitored the course of his
case. After what he supposed to be his last serious
appeal failed in the spring, he began sending his
belongings home and preparing to die.

he possibility that he might had seemed un-
real at first; no one had been executed in
Texas since 1964, But last Dec. 7, just 10 days
before Autry’s own first scheduled day to
die, the men in gray came for convicted murderer
Charlie Brooks Jr. and took him away to The Walls.
Death row was as still as a grave that night till the
news came over the radio that Brooks was gone;
then, shouts rang down the tiers of cells, the men
railing against Brooks’s death and their own.

A few days later Autry was taken without warn-
ing to see the prison medics. As he stepped into the
room, one of them extended a hand toward him.
Autry reflexively reached out to shake it. The doc-
tor seized his hand, gave the arm a quarter turn and
inspected the veins to see if they were prominent
enough to receive a catheter needle.

“Are you going to fight it?” somebody asked.

“No,” Autry answered, his gut churning inside
hismonotonic outer calm. They had him make outa
will and instructions on what to do with his body.
Then he went back to his cell to wait.

He was reprieved that time with 34 hours left to
live, and again in February, three days before his
next appointed execution date. But as summer
faded into fall and his third rendezvous with death
drew near, he could no longer shut out the ticking
of the clock; while he managed to maintain his
veneer of coolness, his fear gnawed at his insides.
His weight fell away as his time ran down, as if his
body were already in the process of piecemeal
surrender. He dropped Valium like salt peanuts
and still could not anesthetize himself to the pres-
ence of death in the air he breathed. One man on
his tier announced to the world that he wanted to
die, but when his execution date was actually set,
his bravado and his mind disintegrated. He had to
be strapped up in a straitjacket, and until he was
granted a stay, his howls of terror resounded down
the cellblock, echoing the scream bottled up in
Autry’s own belly.

Autry wasn’t interested in suicide. He saw a
made-for-TV movie one night about Gary Gilmore,
the hard-case killer who had died before a firing
squad in Utah by his own choice, and felt only
anger; it was as if Gilmore had breached some deep
tribal bond among the condemned. The only fate

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983 oo

worse than death, in his view, was to have his
sentence commuted to life in prison. “You stay
down here 20 years; that’s what you’d have to do
just to come up for parole,” he said. “I'd be 49 then.
I don’t know anything. They don’t teach nothing
here, just kick me in my ass for 20 years and then
give me $200 and tell me to go into the world. What
am I going to do when I’m 49 years old and been
ground to nothing here?”

He looked on death not with longing but with a
resignation born ofa lifetime on the short end of the
odds; he argued his innocence and prayed for the
success of his appeals, without much hope of being
heard. The means of his execution, upto the moment
it almost happened, offended him. “Do it like they
used to do,” he said. ““Take you out and hang you or
cut off your head or whatever they want. It ain’t
manly to go in there and lay ona table and let them
stick you in the arm with a needle.” But he felt as
powerless over the terms of his death as he had over
the downhill course of his life. Things just happen to
you, he thought, and at the end he was not wholly

“Ht ain't manly to
go in there and lay
ona table and let
them stick you in
the arm witha
needle.”

wwe

THE CRUCIFIX ON J. D,’S BACK: ‘I have some tatoos I’d like taken off myself”

Se mee +

wrong; strapped to his gurney, he had become an
object, a chess piecein a game played by strangers.

The day Autry was first sentenced to die, his
mother looked at a favorite ring she was wearing,
one with a birthstone for each of her six children,
and saw that J. D.’s stone had fallen out. It seemed
tohera sign, and in a sense it was. With his removal
to death row, all he left behind was an emptiness
where he had been and where three lives had been
caught up in his deadly train.

One of the victims, Shirley Drouet, had been
buried near Pineland, Texas, under a tombstone cut
in the shape of a heart and inscribed: WE LOVE YOU
ALWAYS, MAMA. It took her daughter, Lenora Tay-
lor, a long time to go back there, but last Mother’s
Day she did, with her own little girl, Casey Leigh,
five. They placed a red rose and some white flowers
on the grave and stood in silence. Then they walked
away. “The hurtin’s never over,” Lenora said; the
death of J. D. Autry might have balanced the books
but could not fill the emptiness or kill the pain.

49

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

RENDEZVOUS

WITH

JOE BROUSSARD.

A bullet tunneled
through his neck,
fearing the spinal
cord and bringing
his heart toa
dead stop.

A KILLER

t was just past 9 o’clock on the languid Sunday

evening of April 20, 1980, and Patrolman James

Hartley was standing outside a Texas Star con-

venience store, questioning a sorely frightened
black man named Israel Nedd. It had been a bad
spring in Port Arthur if you worked nights behind a
grocery counter as Nedd’s wife did, an outlaw time
of robbery and random shooting, and Nedd had
been keeping her company against the dark, He had
stepped out for a minute to get a pack of cigarettes
from his car and was fishing for them in the glove
compartment, he said, when these two white dudes
came careering out an alley toward the store. Next
thing he knew, he was looking at a .32 and bullets
were coming straight at him, tearing up the front
end of his car. Wild West time, man; it could have
been Frank and Jesse James for all Nedd knew, but
he didn’t take names or ask the dudes what they had
against him. He hit the floorboards until the slugs
quit flying.

Officer Hartley was cleaning up the last details
when, at 9:06, a fresh urban Mayday came crackling
over his patrol-car radio: Shooting at 7-Eleven store,
Ninth Avenue and Lewis, Hartley knew the place;
it was really a Sak-n-Pak, not a 7-Eleven, but all
convenience stores were called 7-Elevens in the

Broussard’s body in the Sak-n-Pak

language of the street. This one was three minutes
away, and he had a hunch that the same two gun-
men were inyolved. “I'll take it,” he radioed back
and headed east, siren howling. He pulled up in the
parking lot, in the glow of the big white-lit Sak-n-
Pak sign on the mock-mansard roof, and walked
into a blood-drenched nightmare—the worst he
had witnessed in eight years on the job.

Thefirst thing he saw, elbowing through a knot of
10 ora dozen people, was the barely conscious form
of Athanasios Svarnas lying belly up on the oily
asphalt with the right side of his jaw blown open;
he was alive, but he was sliding deep into a coma
and turning a livid purple. ““We’ye got one down,”
Hartley radioed headquarters. Then he pushed
through the door into the store. Shirley Drouet was
sitting on a case of Similac powdered milk behind
the sales counter, her head pitched forward, the
blood dribbling from a hole between her eyes into
her lap and onto the floor; she was wheezing and
gurgling mechanically, but you didn’t need to be a
doctor to tell she was dying. In the narrow space
before her lay Joe Broussard, his head on her feet,
with a telephone receiver loosely cradled between
his dead hands. He had been wounded in the chin
and the neck. His blood streaked his face and was
puddling on the front of his shirt.

They had been, as Broussard’s brother, Ernie,
would reflect long afterward, “like planets that line
up once in a lifetime’—three ordinary people
drawn together by blind fortune and placed in the
way ofa fourth carrying a .38-caliber revolver anda
heavy load of intoxicants and rage. Shirley Drouet,
43, was there because she had to be, working nights
at $3.45 an hour to pay for her groceries, her one-
room flat and her independence. Joe Broussard,
also 43, had stopped by on a neighborhood errand
after a weekend away in Baton Rouge. Tommy
Svarnas, 27, was a crewman on a Greek freighter
anchored in port for a few days and had hitched a
tide with Broussard, heading for the Port Arthur
Seamen's Center. They were chance playersinabad
dream; their separate paths had converged at the
Sak-n-Pak when J. D. Autry walked in out of the
night and reduced all of their lives to rubble.

hirley Drouet had known she was putting
herself at risk when she took the 3-to-11 shift
in a conyenience store. Port Arthur was a
raw place getting rawer, a blue-collar, beer-
bellied refinery town of 60,000 with the scent of
crude oil and transient violence hanging on the
muggy air. The white middle class had been in flight
for years, leaving downtown to die and ceding wide
old residential streets to a poorer and more volatile
mix of whites, blacks and, lately, Vietnamese refu-
gees. “Nobody lives there anymore,” a legal secre-
tary said from the safer, richer eminence of Beau-
mont, just up the road. Guns were commonplace,
crime was up and the late-night gas-and-grocery
stores dotted all over town, lonely and exposed, had
become favorite targets. Two dozen were robbed in
the first four months of 1980, sometimes with sense-
less brutality. “They were shootin’ ’em, stabbin’
’em,” a detective said, remembering that outlaw
time. “They killed us. They burned us out.”
Shirley was nervous, reading the headlines. She
had always been a night person and a stubbornly
self-reliant one as well; her adult life had begun in
her rebel midteens and had been a 30-year exercise
in the art of survival. But the late and solitary hours

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

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TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

at the Sak-n-Pak had begun to trouble her. The
neighborhood was changing, the store was doing
poorly and she felt vulnerable looking out into the
night with nobody else around. The dime-an-h
evening differential they paid on top of the mii
mum Wage did not seem worth dying for. Shirley
put in for daylight hours. Her request was still
pending when she died.

She had hung on anyway, trying, not for the first
time, to get out of debt after a lifetime of rainy days,
She had been born Shirley Ferrell, one of 10 chil-
dren of a working-poor sawmill hand in the East
Texas timber country. Their upbringing was strict
and Baptist, according to her father’s rigorous
beliefs, and for most of the younger Ferrells it
took; they grew up, got steady jobs, made durable
marriages, raised families and cleaved to the faith.
Shirley was different. She was pretty and untamed,
an independent spirit, her daughter Lenora said, “at
a time when it wasn’t right for women to be inde-
pendent.” She had left home and school at 15 and
had soon married a man seven years her senior.
They lived by a lake near Cleveland, Texas, and had
five children in rapid succession, But before the
eldest, Lenora, had reached her teens, the match
had sunk into sour and melancholic silence. The
picture endures in Lenora’s mind of her mother, in
those days, sitting alone at the edge of the lake in the
dead of winter—all wrapped up ina big old coat, she
remembers still, sittin’ there fishin’ all day long.

When the first marriage finally ended in divorce,
Shirley tried a second and then a third. They failed,
too, and, turning 40, she was left to make her way on
her own. She wasn’t always prudent about it; she
would find work as a waitress or a salesclerk at
decent money, then get herself bogged down in debt
and have to start all over again. But it was a fierce
point of pride with her that she could survive with-
outa man in the house. When Lenora hit a patch of
turbulence in her own teen-age marriage, Shirley
took her in. They seemed to Lenora to be barely
Staying afloat, and she confessed one day that she
didn’t think she could make it by herself.

“Don’t ever say that,” Shirley scolded, as sharply
as if Lenora were a little girl again. “You can do it.
You've got to try and want to do it badly enough.”

Lenora listened and, believing in her mother,
began to believe in herself; when her marriage came
terminally unstuck, she found work as a mill-
wright’s helper and made a home for her own little
girl, Casey. She and Shirley talked by phone for the
last time on the afternoon of April 19. Shirley was
strapped again, living in one room to save money,
and was concerned for her safety on the job. But her
spirit was still indomitably high. She and Lenora
were chatting about nothing in particular when
Lenora felt a sudden, formless premonition, like a
chill breeze from nowhere ruffling the surface of a
pond. “I /ove you, Mama,” she blurted just before
they hung up. They never saw each other again.

Joe Broussard had been anxious, too, coming
home to Port Arthur that January after nine years
away and seeing how much it had changed. He had
made a comfortable life for himself in New Jersey
since his fall away from the priesthood, but the cold
winters and the lonely crowds had got to him, and so
had the spreading shadow of urban crime. It was
only after he had moved back South to be farther
from his angst and nearer to his aged and ailing
mother that he discovered how little he knew his old

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983 6

town. The crime and the fear had preceded him;
people were buying guns, and soon Joe bought one,
too, alittle two-shot derringer, though it scared him
when he test-fired it. I’m @ real gun-toting Texan
now, he wrote his friend John Iaconetti with a
characteristic touch of self-parody. He posted the
letter on April 17. It arrived the day after he died.

is kidding had the taste of ashes then. He

had been a gentle and sensitive man, a shy

sort who seemed nevertheless to invite con-

fidence and attract friends without effort.
“People met Joe for the second time,” Iaconetti
remembered, “‘with the feeling they’d known him
forever.”” He was gay, a fact he neither hid nor
advertised once he had acknowledged it to himself,
He loved the arts, all of them, homely or lofty, He
could paint, pot, cook, crochet, hang paper, fix
plumbing, rebuild musical instruments and play the
piano or organ. His first passion was the theater;
he did sets for community productions and framed
the Playbill covers for dozens of Broadway shows
he had seen.

He had been born Joseph Aurelie Broussard, the
elder of two sons of a prosperous doctor, and had
grown up in relative comfort in Port Arthur. When
he was seven his father died, and his mother later
married a refinery foreman, also a Broussard, a
name as common as Smith in the city’s Cajun
community. Joe grew up a bit of a loner, a skinny,
angular underachiever who was happiest at his arts
and crafts. When the Broussards went fishing on the
bay near town, Joe liked to drift off into the woods
by himself—get kind of like ‘Walden’,” his kid
brother, Ernie, recalled, “back into nature.”

When he graduated from Bishop Byrne High
School, he surprised his family by announcing, “I’m
going to be a priest.” The Broussards had never
sensed any deep religious calling in him; his mother
in particular had hoped that, with his quick mind
and clever hands, he would become a surgeon. But
they did not stand in his way, and he had to discover
for himself, by hard experience, that he was not
suited for the priesthood after all.

The process of discovery took 13 years, a time

SVARNAS BEFORE HE WAS SHOT

"Into life comes a
little baby,” his
brother Jimmy
said, “and now you
got a baby

again.”

55

SHIRLEY DROUET

Shirley put in for
daylight hours. Her
request was still
pending when

she died.

Her daughter
stared at the
swollen features,
blankly at first. It
could be anyone,
she thought,

IN THE MORGUE

56

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

spent in a long and losing battle to reconcile his
priestly obligations with his still closeted homosex-
uality. For a long passage he waged the struggle
alone, an inturned and unconfident young man
given to serious bouts of depression. The friends
who knew of the secret tension between his vows
and his longings argued that he had to face up toit—
that he had in fact become a priest to deny his
sexuality. “You’re masquerading behind this
thing,” one of them told him bluntly. Ifso, Joe could
not yet bear to give up his mask, or face himself
without it. He kept it in place until 1967; then he
broke down, tooka leave ofabsence from his church
in Beaumont and never returned. “I can’t preach,”
he said, “against what I want to do.”

In the prim language of the diocesan records, he
was “laicized” soon thereafter. The term did not
capture the anguish of his formal separation from
the priesthood, or the vertigo of beginning life
again. At 34, he shipped out onan Exxon tanker asa
“messman utility’’—a bottom-of-the-roster menial
serving chow to the crew. He liked the sea and the
freedom, and his captains liked him. In three years
he was transferred to Exxon’s Bayway, N.J., refin-
ery, handling recruiting and other personnel busi-
ness for the company’s maritime division.

e never quite got used to the pace or the

brusque manner of life in New York City’s

force field, but he made a happy place for

himself at its edge. He bought a town house
in a sprawling New Jersey subdivision and redid it
himself. He haunted the theater, on and off Broad-
way. His own sets stole the show from the amateur
productions he worked in. “He'd take garbage,”
John Iaconetti said, “and turn it into magic.” He
founded his own company, the Twin Rivers Com-
munity Players, and in the summer of 1979, when
he was already packing for Port Arthur, they put on
“6 RMS RIV VU” for two nights as their first
production, It was Joe’s show, his goodbye valen-
tine to the North; he directed the cast, created the
sets and did a brief turn onstage.

He shipped his furniture off to Texas a month
later and followed it in January, heading south ina
yellow Toyota with the profit from the sale of his
town houseas his stake. His mother was ina nursing
home, widowed a second time and in deteriorating
health. Joe moyed into the 50-year-old family house
on Fifth Street and began refurbishing it by himself,
from the fioors up. He lived on his nest egg for a
time, filling his days with his papering, plumbing
and refinishing as if it were not just a home he was
creating but a family monument. He reconnected
with an old Exxon friend, Eddie Johns, and Johns’s
wife, Donna; Joe and Eddie talked about going into
business for themselves.

Their plans were still in the dreaming stage when
Joe went off with some friends on April 18 for a
weekend’s play in Baton Rouge. He seemed unusu-
ally withdrawn, letting the partying go on around
him; when they went off to a nightclub on Saturday
evening, he stayed home alone. His friends knew
about his spiritual side and shrugged off his silence.
“Tt was like he could see a lot more than other
people,” one said; it was only later that they won-
dered whether what he had seen in his inturned gaze
that weekend was the end of his own life.

Heand his chums were homeward bound ina van
when they came upon Tommy Svarnas, sun-cured

and hard-muscled, hitchhiking into Port Arthur in
the lowering Sunday twilight. They sped past him,
but somebody said, “Hell, we ought to give him a
tide,” and they went back to pick him up. Tommy, it
turned out, was a crewman on the Greek freighter
Agios Dimitrios; the vessel was in port discharging
a cargo of fish meal, and he had set out for the
Seamen’s Center, where a ship’s hand on liberty
could find cookies, Cokes and welcoming Christian
smiles. Joe felt an easy rapport with seamen, born of
his own years on shipboard and as a priest in a
seaport parish. He had picked up enough pidgin
Greek in those days to manage a conversation, and
when his friends pulled up at his place on Fifth
Street to drop him off, he offered to give Tommy a
lift the rest of the way to the center.

Tommy was a cheerful young man then, a Greek
hungering to become an American. He had been
born the youngest of four children in a farm family
in Litokhoron, a village in the hills near Mount
Olympus, and had grown up in the fields, helping
scratch a livelihood out of their few hectares of corn
and vegetables. He was still a boy when his elder
brother Demetri set out for America at 20 in search
of something better. It was a long journey into an
uncertain future, but Demetri’s American dream
came true: he progressed in two years from washing
dishes in a restaurant in Brooklyn to running his
own house-painting business in New Jersey.

As Demetri prospered, Tommy began hankering
to follow him. He dropped out of school and, two
months shy of his 16th birthday, took out his sea-
man’s papers. He had put in six years at sea when, in
September 1974, he jumped ship in Savannah, Ga.,
with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the
money in his pockets,

Tt took the immigration authorities barely a
month to catch up with him. He had unsurprisingly
headed straight for New Jersey to be with Deme-
tri—Jimmy, in his new life—and had gone to work
for him as a painter’s helper, Tommy was arrested,
held overnight, then freed on $2,500 bail. While his
case was still under review, he married an American
woman, at least partly in the hope that it would help
him stay in the States. It didn’t. On Jan. 6, 1975,
after four months in America, Tommy was deport-
ed, and the marriage soon dissolved.

ut he never gave up hope of emigrating; his
latest application for resident status had
been pending for more than a year the day
Joe Broussard and his party found him on
theroadto Port Arthur. They may havetalked about
that, Joe in his pidgin Greek and Tommy in his
fractured English. No one could say; it barely sur-
vived in Tommy’s fuddled memory of April 20 that
hehad been with another manat all. It could only be
surmised that they had setoutin Joe’s yellow Toyota
for the Seamen’s Center and, finding it closed for the
weekend, had driven a half block up the street to the
Sak-n-Pak to pick up some things for Tommy.

The planets were moving into line.

The whodunit would proye far easier to solve
than the mystery of precisely what happened that
night; the devastation of three lives left the police
with only circumstantial evidence and best-guess
conjecture to go on. A single witness had been in the
store when Autry and Sandifer materialized, a slen-
der, red-curled young housewife named Kathy Jar-
dell. She had been kneeling at the bottom shelf on
one aisle, picking out candy for her children, when

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

she heard theslam of a car door and the tinkle of the
entry bell. Two men came in, looking irresolute.
They drifted to the beer cooler, then the counter,
then the cooler, then the counter again to ask for
their brand. As they started back to the cooler, Mrs.
Jardell heard one of them whisper loudly, “There’s
a lady on the floor in the second aisle.” They meant
her. She looked up and saw one of the men—
Sandifer, she said later—staring back at her.

She found herself behind the men in line at the
checkout counter a few moments later and was
under the impression that they paid for some beer,
though no such sale showed up at the end of the
cash-register tape. They lingered while she handed
over $1.48 for her double handful of jawbreakers,
M&M’s and Dubble Bubble and went outside to her
car. Some tingle of suspicion, some echo of the
whisper in the store, made her sit there for a few
minutes watching the men talk to the clerk. Well,
maybe they’re friends, she thought, and she started
for home.

The men in fact were strangers, and whether or
not they announced it, Shirley Drouet apparently
saw a robbery coming. She had always told her
family that she would never resist—that she would
hand over the whole store if she had to keep from
getting hurt, But something made her lock the cash
register and switch off the current before the men
could get at it, and the next thing she knew, she was
staring into the muzzle of a .38-caliber Smith &
Wesson Special no more than three to five feet from
her face. There was a flash and an explosion, and a
single slug hit cleanly in the center of her forehead,
cratering the skull and cutting a wide furrow
through the brain. Shirley was only technically
alive when the men ran out, with her heart still
pumping on automatic; she had resisted after all and
had paid for her impertinence with her life.

Joe Broussard was himself newly armed against
the night with his two-shot derringer when he and
Tommy Syarnas pulled onto the Sak-n-Pak lot mo-
ments later. But when he stepped inside and saw
Shirley’s barely living body, it was the priest in him
that responded, not the “rooting tooting gun toting
cowboy” he had mockingly claimed to be in his last
letter. He left the derringer behind in the Toyota
and went for the phone to get help.

He had not finished dialing when the man with
the .38 reappeared, a shadow in the doorway mov-
ing toward him. Joe flailed out with the receiver.
The .38 answered. A bullet tunneled through his
neck, piercing his spine, tearing his spinal cord and
bringing his heart to a dead stop.

The gunman left Joe dying and started out just as.
Tommy was starting in, All that survived in Tom-
my’s damaged mind afterward was the memory of a
man grabbing his shirt, shoving him against a car
and poking a gun in his face. “You, too,” a yoice
said; then a bullet smashed his jaw and shattered
against his spinal column just below the brain, and
Tommy sank in blackness. He lay half dead on the
asphalt when the police arrived. The man with the
.38 had melted into the night, his profit a six-pack of
Schlitz, his legacy the ruin of three lives.

They took Tommy Svarnas to St. Mary Hospital
just down the street, paralyzed, deep in a coma and
suspensefully near death. “How long have I been
here?” he asked one day when the fog enshrouding
his mind had begun to part. The answer was six
weeks; it would be three months more before the
hospital discharged him, a childjgain in a malfunc-

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

tioning man’s body. “Into life comes a little baby,””
his brother Jimmy said long afterward, “and now
you gota baby again. Doublelife, you know? Allofa
sudden, every single day you see in front of you a
baby. Inside, make you weep.”

An uncle called Joe Broussard’s brother, Ernie,
in Houston. It was 11 o’clock. “Joe has been shot,”
he said.

“Ts he dead?” Ernie asked numbly.

“Yes, he’s dead.”

Ernie started east for Port Arthur in the night to
tell their mother. She was tuning in the TV news in
herroom at the home when Ernie walked in the next
morning. He flicked off the set. “Well, what are you
doing here?” she asked. Ernie told her. Then he
went to the police station to pick up Joe’s belong-
ings—a key ring, a watch, a gold ring he had bought
in Florence. There was a photo of Joe’s body on a
desk behind the counter. A policeman saw Ernie
staring at it and plopped some papers on top of it,
too late. Joe, Ernie thought; it was Joe lying dead in
a five-foot puddle of his own blood.

hirley Drouet’s brother James was the first

man in the family to reach Port Arthur, and

he had to look at her body. “We done the

best we could,” the undertaker said. James
had been in the Army but not in combat, and he was
not prepared for the damage a heavy-caliber hand-
gun could do. The mortuary arts had helped with
the bullet hole and the bruising around both eyes,
but Shirley’s head seemed to James to be swollen to
twice its normal size. The undertaker was apologet-
ic; there had been heavy bleeding beneath the scalp,
and until her heart quit pumping, it had distended
her head like water in a balloon. “Don’t misunder-
stand,” the man was saying. ““There’s nothing we
could do.” James felt ill.

There was a closed-casket funeral, with a picture
of Shirley as she had been in front of the coffin, but
there was an unreality about it—a discontinuity
between the woman in the photo, handsome and
smiling, and the body lying unseen in the box.
Maybe it’s a mistake, Shirley’s daughter Lenora
kept thinking; maybe she ought to look at the body
to be sure. She decided finally that she had to, and
regretted it as soon as she did.

She stared at the swollen features, blankly at first.
It could be anyone, she thought. Then her searching
eyes found something she recognized, a certain set
to the jaw line, and she knew. That’s my Mama
layin’ in a casket, she thought. That night they all
got together at an aunt’s house. Lenora had been
holding herself together till then, as the eldest of the
children, but she couldn’t any longer, and she cried.

The woman in the box haunted her for months
thereafter; she could not sleep without a light or
open a closet door for fear Shirley would be there
with her burial dress and her ruined beauty. “And
then one night I had a dream,” she remembers now,
“and she was walking toward mein the dream, and I
had my eyes shut. I wanted to see her so bad, but I
was scared to look. And the closer she got, Ijust had
to look, and she was beautiful! Her eyes were spar-
kling, and she was smiling, and I was trying to tell
her that I wanted to see her so bad but I was scared
to. And she was nodding yes, she knew, and she was
smiling and putting her arm around me, like she’d
come back to reassureme.” Lenora woke up then, at
peace, and while there was still a big vacant space in
her life, she was not frightened anymore.

WITNESS KATHY JARDELL

She heard one
of them whisper,
"There's a lady
on the floor

in the second
aisle.” They
meant her.

57

He wanted a
relationship, loving
and lasting,
something like his
own parents had
with each other.

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

JOHN SANDIFER IN PRISON: A vision of the future in which he would make a home for J, D, in Port Arthur

THE BOYS
IN THE TRAILER

58

utry was weaving through the darkness

on a sore leg and a fog-banked brain at

quarter to 2 in the morning, looking for

more beer and wondering where in hell
John Sandifer was. They had each made it home
from the Sak-n-Pak and had started in on the six-
pack they had liberated. But then John’s daddy and
brother had come by and taken John away, along
with two revolvers lifted from the old man’s house.
John had promised to come back to their mobile
home number 13 in a next-to-last-chance trailer
court on Rosedale Drive. He figured he could count
on him; John was in love with him, and the San-
difers, while they disapproved, had made J. D.
almost one of the family. It wasn’t the Sandifers he
was worried about, it was the beer supply. The last
bottle was cooling in the freezer, and J. D, set out
toward the corner 7-Eleven for more.

He didn’t know until he heard the sirens shriek
and felt a boot pinning hisneck toa savings-and-loan
parking lot that John had cracked. All it had taken
was some black coffee and some hard looks from his
papa, John R. (Sandy) Sandifer, and he had started
weeping and babbling, “J. D. blew that women’s
brains all over there.” The Sandifers had thereupon
delivered their still unsteady boy to the police sta-
tion, the father’s hand under one armpit and brother
Mark’s under the other. “Somethin’ happened on
Ninth Avenue some time ago,” Sandy announced at
the front desk, “and my boy can tell you about it.””
John did, in detail, taking care to make clear that it
had been J. D. and not he whohad done the shooting.
Hesigned a statementat 1:30a.m., April21.At 1:46

J. D. was lying on the lot at Fidelity Savings and
Loanina poolofbluelight witha footonhisneckand
a gun in his ear, under arrest on a warrant charging
him with murder.

He seemed unsurprised and, given his claim of
innocence, uncomplaining; he was still stoned, and
even if he hadn’t been, it was central to the nihilism
of his life that he had no decisive say in his own
destiny. Things just happened to you; you got load-
ed, you broke the law, you got caught, and there
wasn’t much you could do about any of it. J. D.
believed neither in free will, which was in his worlda
luxury reserved to those who could afford it, nor
in the fancier sociological explanations of crime,
which struck him as excuses for losers. “A lot of
people say that these things happen because of the
way they grew up or their family or the way they
were treated and all that bleep,” he said. “They try
to putit on everybody else, But none of those things
matter. I don’t think I ever planned to do these
things—it just happened on the spur of the moment.
But I'll take the blame if there’s blame to take.
Things happen.”

‘Yet it had been hard even for the first case-worn
juvenile cops who encountered him to look at the
devastation of J. D.’s boyhood in Amarillo, Texas,
and to imagine that it would lead to anything but a
badend. A mug shot survives from those days, taken
when he was a delinquent child bound for reform
school for the first time. The scared face gazing out
ofthe picture was a boy’s, witha patch shaven out of
his hair to deprive the head lice of coyer, but a man-
size freight of grievance already showed in his nar-
rowed eyes, J. D, was by then well along in an
apprenticeship at petty crime begun when he was
nine and Robert, his brother and constant running
buddy, was seven. The authorities had tried counsel-
ing the Autrys without luck and had finally written
both boys offas likely “career cases.”

The deterrent power of reform school had been
compromised for J. D. by the daily violence of his
own home. “We’re not like one of those families on
television where everyone is pretty happy and gets
pretty much what ‘they want,” said his half sister,

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

Pam. Their father, Jim, was the ruddy, blustery,
hard-drinking image of Texas machismo, a rodeo
rider and then a printer until his legs gave out; their
mother, Shirley, was a beaten, deeply lined and
equally hard-drinking woman, harder drinking in
direct proportion to the deepening of her despair.
They had married in 1952, when he was a good-
looking sailor with a winning line and she was still
pretty, spunky and game for a good time. The
neural tickle they mistook for love vanished in three
months, when Jim, so he reports, caught Shirley out
witha Marine. But the match somehow survived for
21 years. “‘I did it for the kids,” Jim said, without a
flicker of irony at how the kids had turned out.

Pam’s more compelling guess is that the two of
them needed each other—needed the spite and the
accusation that lashed them together for two dec-
ades. They made a battlefield of their marriage, and
the children became emotional pawns between
them. They lived on the move from one ramshackle
house to the next, usually worse, staying till the rent
money disappeared into booze. Their spats escalat-
ed regularly to shouting and sometimes to whatever
weaponry was available, from fists to bottles and
boards. Bones broke. Blood ran. “/’m the only one
that has scars,” Jim says, blaming most of the
violence on Shirley. But her combat wounds, ac-
cording to the children, included fractures of one
rib, several toes and both arms.

he six children for whose welfare the Autrys

stayed together grew up on the ragged near

side of poverty, material and emotional, and

all of them had brushes with the law. Their
diet was heavy with junk food and beans. Their
clothing was usually threadbare. They were regu-
larly thrashed for various acts of mischief, including
siding with their mother in a fight or seeking medi-
cal attention for her afterward. They ultimately
gave up trying to intervene.

J. D.’s survival strategy as soon as he was old
enough was running away from home and school,
usually with Robert in tow. One of the few pleasur-
able memories of his early boyhood was being set
loose to run for fun, in the street or over the hilly
terrain in Thompson Park. As he grew older, run-
ning displaced everything else as the metaphor and
later the necessity of his life. He had, as Pam put it,
a lot to run away from and nothing to look forward
to. “Nothing but hatefulness,” she said. “Why
wouldn’t someone want to kill when they seen the
things that went on in that house?”

Life with father, for J. D., was a war he could not
win, and he took out his anger and his futility on
surrogate targets. Once, he and Robert smashed all
the porch windows and broke Jim’s elbow with a
two by four when he came after them. Another time
he attacked the seat cushions in Jim’s car with a
knife and shredded them. But mostly the two boys
turned their mutinous feeling outward against the
world. They played hooky from school and audi-
tioned at drinking, joy riding and shoplifting. They
went to the K mart once when J. D. was 10 orso, and
he asked Pam with boyish bravado, “Whaddya
want?” She pointed to a doll and a couple of other
toys, and when he came out, J. D. had them all.

His formal schooling trailed off in the fifth grade;
he got his higher education in crime during a dozen
years under lock and key, with only brief interludes
on the outside. His first trip to the reform school at
Gatesville lasted a year; he came out at 14, drank

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

beer, smoked dope, resumed shoplifting and brawl-
ing with his father and went back, this time for two
years. He had barely returned to the street when he
got caught stealing a car and was sent away yet
again, for a psychiatric workup. The doctors had to
strap him to a bed in a seclusion cell just to get him
to submit to testing, and the only cure they could
think of was to send him toa tougher reform school.
“You've got a visitor in your room,” a nurse told
him one day. He walked in expecting his mother or
father and found a couple of detectives instead,
waiting to drag him away.

By then J. D. was already the despair of that
imperfect bureaucratic art called corrections; he
was at once incorrigibly a criminal and incompetent
at it. There was a touch of sad slapstick even in his
single real-world affair with Marcia, when it began
and when it ended. They met the day he had carved
up his father’s car seats and was on the lam from a
posse of lawmen. He burst in the back door of her
budget-class duplex at a dead run, startling her and
her two little children. She gave him shelter till his
pursuers came thumping on the door. While she
submitted blankly to their questioning, J.D. scram-
bled out a window and landed running again.

They took up more seriously when J. D. came out
of reform school for the last time. The authorities
had placed J. D. with Pam and her first husband,
Billy, in their shabby stucco bungalow off Route 66,
in the hope that the change of venue from the
combat zone at his parents’ house might do him
some good. For a time, it seemed to be working.
J. D. got a job rebuilding electric motors, and
Marcia and her two little girls moved in with him.
She was then destructively deep into drink and
drugs, hallucinating devils and teetering toward the
brink of suicide. J. D, sat up with her for 48 night-
mare hours, then coaxed her into a hospital to have
her stomach pumped while he stayed with the chil-
dren. She steadied some after that, and when she felt
the need to go out drinking or partying on her own,
J.D. did not complain; she always came home.

The romance, while it lasted, was the nearest
thing to an idyll in J. D.’s ramshackle life, But there
were strains between Marcia and Pam over Mar-
cia’s attitudes toward child rearing, and one day

Her combat
wounds, according
to the children,
included fractures
of one rib,

several toes and
both arms.

JIM AUTRY WITH DAUGHTER DAWN AND SON ROBERT: ‘Not like one of those families on TV’

59

ROBERT AUTRY, AGE 11

J.D. AUTRY, AGE 13

The authorities
had finally written
both boys off as
likely “career
cases.”

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

they exploded in a hair-pulling, fist-flailing brawl.
The air was thick with echoes of J. D.’s past, and he
fell into a steep recidivist backslide. He drank,
seriously. He stole cars. He burglarized houses. One
bad day when everyone was fighting, he slipped out
to the garage, sawed off the barrel of a shotgun he
had stolen, walked back in and announced that he
was going to blow Pam away. He was drunk enough
totry it, Pam thought, but she would not let him see
how scared she was, and she brazened out the
storm.

J, D. and Marcia moved out after that, squeezing
into a decrepit one-room apartment with her kids.
J. D. had lost his job. Marcia was pregnant. There
was never enough money, or food, or breathing
room, The walls were closing in on J. D., and when
he couldn’t take it anymore, he got out his shotgun
and some shells and stumbled dead drunk across the
Street to a truck stop. His bleary intent was to robit,
but his advantage of surprise dissipated when he
plopped down on a stool with the gun in his lap and
spread some of the shells on the counter.

“Do you want my money?” the owner, Nick
Kotsinadelis, prompted helpfully.

J. D, nodded, glassy-eyed. They were walking
toward the cash register together when Kotsinade-
lis knocked the gun out of J. D.’s hands, heaved him
into the meat locker and kept him on ice until the
police arrived.

he arrest was his rite of passage from reform
school to prison at 18; he served half a five-
year sentence, and when he came out, both
he and his world had changed. Marcia had
miscarried their child, had gone through a second
marriage and had disappeared from Amarillo. His
motherhad left his father in an epic last battle scene,
fleeing to the Colorado Rockies and her own wob-
bly second marriage. J. D. stayed with her for a
while and with his father for a while more, but he
had lost his fear of prison and his last tenuous
interest in the squarelife. On Christmas Eve 1975 he

| was arrested for a burglary as boozily clumsy as his

attempt on the truck stop had been. He got eight
years as a second offender. He was 21.

He had been in the Texas Department of Correc-
tions Ramsey Unit for two years when John Alton
Sandifer arrived ona three-year sentence for posses-
sion of cocaine. John was a slight, well-spoken
young man of 26 with pale green eyes and an effemi-
nate air that seemed misplaced in prison. His father
was as gutsy and as machoas J. D.’s and a great deal
moresuccessful, the possessor ofan old Texasname,
an established propane-gas business and the hand-
somest house in his neighborhood in Port Arthur’s
sister town of Groves. Sandy Sandifer’s style was
domineering and rawhide masculine; it was among
his pleasures in semiretirement to plunk down on a
lawn chair with a pellet gun and shoot a dove out of
the pecan trees for lunch for his neighbor’s pet cat.
But the rooster in him did not find its way to John,
the second of his three sons. John was the one who,
onafamily hunting trip, would deliberately aimover
the head of a deer. John, to his father’s distress,
wouldn’t even killa cockroach.

He was still a boy when he realized that he was
gay, though he dated a girl all through high school
and a halfhearted, one-month stab at college. When
he dropped out, he told his parents about his homo-
sexuality. They didn’t want to believe him. “Daddy,

it's so,” he insisted. They clung to the hope that
something—the right doctor, the right girl, the
right bit of Scripture—would set him straight. He
wasn’t born that way, Sandy thought. He turned
himself into one of—these things, He can turn him-
Self out of it. But John told them that his sexuality
was a fact of life that they would have to accept. He
left home and wandered the gay scene in Houston,
San Francisco and New Orleans, looking for some-
thing deeper than a quick coupling in a bathhouse.
What he found instead was loneliness, and, fleeing
it, he drifted into drink, drugs, petty theft and
finally prison.

e had just been transferred out of a punk
tank, a heavily homosexual cellblock, when
he first saw J. D. and felt himself drawn to
him. J. D. had a punk of his own for purely
utilitarian sex in the laundry room, but he did not
like being around punks otherwise and did not
respond to John’s first attempts at flirtation. “Bleep
off,” he told John, and John, in wounded reply, told
J.D. “You're always walking around too cool for
your own good.” But the attraction lingered for
John. He had been contemplating the desert of his
life, thinking that he did not want to look back after
10 years and still have nothing to show for his
having existed. He wanted a relationship, loving
and lasting, something like his own parents had
with each other. He persisted in his courtship,
ignoring J. D.’s insults, until J. D. finally let him sit
in on a game of dominoes and began to like him.

Their relationship was chaste in prison, its sex
scenes played only in John’s fantasy life. It was
John’s mind that attracted J. D. John wasn’t trash
like the others; J. D. liked him for his education and
his worldliness, for the way he could talk intelli-
gently about politics or sophisticated movies while
everyone else was motor-mouthing full time about
the crimes they were going to do when they got out.
John in turn saw something vulnerable in J. D., a
lonely quiet that seemed to envelop him. A sort of
rude, prison-edition Pygmalion began to take form
in John’s mind, a vision of a future in which he
would send for J. D., make a home for him in Port
Arthur and, with love and caring, reshape him
gradually into a new and whole man.

J. D. seemed to reciprocate John’s feelings,
though with less warmth and more instrumentalist
realism than John saw at the time. “He wanted me
downin Port Arthura/ot, J. D. recalled later, ‘and
I figured someday I’d probably go. I liked him, and
there wasn’t nothing else for me on the outside. I
thought maybe I could make a go of it down there.”
After John went home in March 1979, they wrote
one another as many as four letters a day, John’s
ardent and imploring, J. D.’s prosy and mundane.
There would be money, John promised, anda home,
and a job at Sandifer’s LP Gas Co., and, as J. D. told
it, all the dope he could smoke. WhenJ. D. got outin
January 1980, John sent him money for the trip and
rented a place at Broussard’s Mobile Village, a 55-
foot, two-bedroom Homette mobile home with
pale-green paint and avocado trim.

J.D. camethere after leaving prison, and while he
had always shied off in the past when John would
steer the conyersation around to gay sex, it was not
long before they made loye. In the weeks that
followed, they settled into a kind of beery, smoky
domestic tranquillity. John kept house and did the
cooking; it pleased him to serve up the first steak

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

J. D. ever tasted. The other Sandifers swallowed
their unhappiness and tried to be friendly. Sandy
gave him work, though J. D, regularly showed up
stoned ona breakfast of beer and pot. John’s brother
Mark bought thema car, an aged but still functional
1963 Falcon, for $225, Their mother, Peggy, felt
sorry for J. D. in his indrawn solitude and invited
him to her Sunday family dinners.

John was happy for those first few weeks. J. D,
was not; he was bored and lonesome in Port Arthur,
and he announced one day that he was going to
Colorado to see his mother. John begged him to
stay. J. D. promised he would come back, though he
secretly intended not to. John gave in; he helped
J.D. with the bus fare, Mark lent him a suitcase and
some winter-weight clothes, and he was gone. But
his holiday from Homette number 13 lasted only
until a job in a café had folded under him and his
beer and drug money was gone. He phoned John
collect one day to say he wanted to come back but
was broke. John wired him $300 from a fund he was
saving for a car. J. D. spent it. John sent him a
Greyhound ticket, the kind that could not be cashed
in, and J. D, came home.

J. D. seemed more withdrawn than ever; it was
as if he was encased in the shell of his hard-guy
persona, afraid of looking weak or vulnerable, and
John despaired of breaking through it. John want-
ed a home life. J. D. preferred the neon night in
a honkytonk, drinking himself blind, and when
John nagged him about it, J. D. began slapping
him around.

heir last two weeks in the trailer were a

wallow on the wild side, immersed in beer,

wine, booze, pot and sex. J. D. did what John

called some “little criminal things,” but he
developed the inconvenient habit of getting drunk
and passing out when he was supposed to be plan-
ning a mugging, and when he ran the car into a
telephone pole he was left without getaway wheels.
On the night of Friday, April 18, a road-worn
Chevy pickup was stolen in the neighborhood. J. D.
was arrested on the murky evidence, though he
insisted John had doneit, and was jailed downtown
on $5,000 bond. “You bleep,” he growled when
John came around with some cigarettes Saturday
morning, “you get me out of here.”

John scared up a bail bondsman, scratched to-
gether the $400 fee and begged Mark’s El Camino so
he could go fetch J. D. Mark said yes, against his
betterjudgment, “Ifit ain’t back herein an hour and
ahalf,” he warned John, “I’m going to come gett,
and you and I are going to have some serious
words.” His suspicion was not misplaced. It took till
3 o'clock Sunday afternoon to process J. D. out of
jail, and John killed the time drinking in the car. By
the time J. D. hit the street, John had passed out, the
battery was dead and they had to get somebody to
jump-start the motor.

They rode and drank for a while, J. D. in sullen
silence; he was angry at John, sick of Port Arthur
and looking at life in prison as a third offender. He
was thinking hazily of jumping bail and skipping to
Colorado, and he might have if they hadn’t got back
into their store of beer and pills. His resolve dissipat-
ed, and with it, his control; at one point he knocked
over the bottle of Valium blues and sat in a deepen-
ing stupor, plucking pills off the floor and washing
them down with Schlitz.

They killed the last of their beer on the road

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

again, cruising in the E] Camino. Some time in their
boozy progress, one or both of them broke into
John’s parents’ house and stole two revolvers, San-
dy’s .38 and Peggy’s .32; as would be their pattern in
adversity, each accused the other of the theft.
According to a statement dictated and then dis-
avowed by J. D., they picked out a store to rob, buta
black guy was in the way and John emptied the 32
at him. They drove on from there to the Sak-n-Pak
just as Mark Sandifer came steaming hot into the
neighborhood looking for them.

ark was a sandy-haired, wire-thin man of
30 with an easy manner, but his patience
had run out when darkness fell and John
still hadn’t returned the El Camino. “I got
to find out where my carisat,” he told his wife, Judy.
The whole family piled into her Olds station wagon,
Judy in her housecoat and their four children in
pajamas, and went out hunting for the pickup. Mark
swung past the trailer court and didn’t see it, so he
kept going down Lewis Avenue, and there it was on
the Sak-n-Pak lot. He screeched to a stop, as he

His patience ran

out when darkness

fell and John still

hadn’t returned the

El Camino.

MARK SANDIFER WITH HIS PICKUP: He found the truck parked on the Sak-n-Pak lot

would recountit later, just as J. D. walked out of the
store with some beer ina paper sack.

“Where's John?” Mark shouted.

“In the store,” J. D. answered.

A yellow Toyota pulled up, and J. D. was saying
something to the driver when John came stumbling
out of the store. “Come on!” Mark yelled, but John,
looking scared, roared off alone in the El Camino.
J.D. scrambled into the Olds, but when they had got
about a block from the store, Mark said, he started
hollering, “Stop the car! Stop the car!”

The Olds was still rolling when J. D. jumped out
the back door. He stumbled, hitting the curb, and
hurt one leg. It didn’t stop him; he pulled a silver
Smith & Wesson .38 from under his T shirt, Mark
said, and started limping back toward the store,

Mark drove on to the Homette and found John on
the front steps, shaking so badly he couldn’t get the
key in the door. “What's goin’ on up in that store?”
Mark demanded, but John was too far gone on
drink, drugs and fear to say anything except that he
wanted his daddy. Mark sent Judy home in the Olds

61

bee i

"I tried to do

what was right,” he
said, “and all!

got was harassed
for it.”

“Almost
everything I’ve
done, I was

loaded when I done
. Every time |

was on the outside,
I was loaded most
of the time.”

J.D. OUTSIDE THE TRAILER

62

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

with the kids, then repossessed his El Camino. The
beer and J. D.’s cowboy hat were on the seat. Mark
left them on the trailer steps, along with John’s key,
and went off to counsel with Dad.

When hecame back, Sandy was with him, though
the old man parked his Chevy pickup out of sight of
the trailer and sent Mark inside alone. Mark found
John in the living room and was trying again to quiz
him when, he said, J. D. materialized out of the
hallway, cocking the .32.

“Tcome for them guns,” Mark said, “and I’m not
leavin’ without ’em. I don’t care what happened at
the store—I want them guns and what you do is
your business.”

J. D. stood fast. The .32 was pointed straight at
Mark’s head.

“You can give em to me or my daddy,” Mark
said. “You take your choice.”

J. D. chose Mark, in deference to the senior
Sandifer’s Tabasco temper, and handed over the
-32. It was empty. But when Mark demanded the
-38 as well, he balked again. “I have to have it,” he
said. “I have to protect myself.”

“Why?” Mark asked.

“You know I killed them four people,” he re-
members J, D. having answered, apparently count-
ing the Sak-n-Pak casualties and the black man they
missed outside the Texas Star.

Mark demanded the gun again. J. D. putit theat-
Tically to his own head and said, “I'll just end it all
tight now.” Then he turned it on Mark. John leaped
from the couch; he was falling-down drunk, but
while he had J. D. off balance, Mark moyed in and
wrestled the gun away. It was empty, too. Mark
stuck it in his belt and dragged John outside.

J. D. snatched up a hunting knife and came after
them; he was almost upon them when Sandy scram-
bled out of the pickup, leveling a .45 at J. D. and
aiming to kill. “Don’t shoot him, Daddy!” John
screamed, jumping between them, and J. D. disap-
peared over a fence into the darkness,

he Sandifers took John to Mark’s place and

poured coffee into him until he was coherent

enough to say what had happened; then they

took him downtown to tell it to the police,
knowing they were laying him open to prosecution
for murder. What they banked on was his insistence
that J. D. had doneall the shooting. Thetwo of them
had brought a six-pack of beer to the counter, he
said, and the clerk had told them it would be $2.70.
“James pulled a gun from somewhere and said,
“Here is your $2.70,’ and then shot the clerk,” he
related, John saw her body and her blood splashed
everywhere and ran off, he said; he heard only later
that J. D. had shot two witnesses as well.

While John was talking, J. D. was waiting up for
him at the trailer, drinking the time away and
planning their goodbyes, He had come limping
home to tell John he was leaving, and after the
Sandifers took John away, he stuffed his gear into a
duffel bag and hid it in an empty trailer near theirs.
Then he sat down to wait. He did not know that
John had informed on him or that he himself was
under police surveillance—not until the beer ran
nearly dry and he walked right into their hands.

They searched the trailer first, with his glassy-
eyed consent; then they took him in shackles to
headquarters, booked him, read him his rights,
marched him into a small, windowless office and sat

him down across a metal desk from Detective Way-
lon Hughes Jr., a ruddy, thickset man with a droopy
mustache and a professional scowl that could make
babies cry. It was 4 a.m, With Hughes at the type-
writer, J. D. started to talk, blaming John for
everything just as John had blamed him. They had
filled one page and started a second when he sud-
denly tired of Hughes’s hunting and pecking and
said he would write his statement himself.

hat followed became a matter of con-
troversy of a sort common to criminal
investigations, the suspect crying po-
lice brutality, the police denying it.
J. D. wrote two pages in his own clear script,
accusing John of everything. But the police weren’t
buying and they let him know it. At 5:14 he refused
in an angry postscript to talk anymore “cause every
time I say somthing or give a fact they say I’m a
liyer.” In his recounting, the abuse only intensified;
he said Hughes pulled his hair, bruised his ribs,
clubbed him with a rolled-up phone book, talked
about killing him and finally stomped off in disgust,
Hughes dismissed the charges as the last refuge of
a felon in trouble; he had, he said, gone out for
breakfast and wasn’t even in the building then.

Tt was not raw force in any case that J. D. yielded
to but the old good-cop-bad-cop dodge, the use of
friendly persuasion where more aggressive ques-
tioning had failed. He wassitting alone in an interro-
gation cubicle when another detective, Gary Mar-
tin, drifted in, sat down and drew him into a line of
small talk, mostly about himself. The hour was late,
pushing 6 0’clock; Martin seemed friendly; J. D. was
tired and, he would swear later, ready to say any-
thing to get Hughes and the others off his back.

“Am I going to be charged with capital mur-
der?” he asked Martin. J. D. was at least that street
smart; he knew that, with a few narrow exceptions,
murder was punishable by death in Texas only if
it was committed in the course of some other
serious crime.

Martin said he didn’t know.

“I didn’t rob the store,” J. D. said, “‘so they can’t
get me for capital murder.”

Tn the recitation that followed, he was careful to
cling to that distinction, even ashe confessed having
shot three people in cool blood. According to his
yersion, they had indeed set out to rob a store, at
John’s suggestion, not his. But it had never actually
happened; when they found themselves at the mo-
ment of truth, across the counter from Shirley
Drouet, they put down some money for the beer. It
was then, J. D. said, that John started nudging and
kicking him and telling him, “Shoot her! Shoot her!
Now! Now!” J. D. did, knocking her over backward
with a single shot. He was walking away with the
beer, he said, when two men arrived in a Toyota.
“They seen us, they seen us,” John yelled, so J. D.
went back and, as he thought then, executed them,
Tommy Svarnas on the parking lot, Joe Broussard
in the store,

When he finished and signed his statement, they
led him up a battleship-gray spiral staircase to the
station-house jail and deposited him in a cell with
John. “I'm sorry,” John said. J. D. imagined then
that he was commiserating at the fix they were in
and that he would try to get them out of it. He did
not yet know that John would let him take the fall
alone and that John’s family would help to put him
on death row.

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

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TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

TRIAL AND
PUNISHMENT

ou always start off on the bottom side in a

capital murder case, Charles Carver re-

minded himself, haying tried four of them

without once losing a client. But Carver
was a worrier, his face set in a worn-in saturnine
frown, and his first glimpse of J. D. Autry coming
through the door of an interview room at the
Jefferson County Jail in Beaumont did nothing to
brighten his spirits. J. D. still looked as he had on
his arrest two weeks before, a cold piece of work
with a pile of spiky hair, a Pancho Villa mustache,
a fringe of goatee, a tuft of beard under his lower
lip and a hint of danger about the eyes. Satanic,
Michael Murphy, the junior member of J. D.’s
court-appointed defense team, had thought when
he first saw a photo of his client. Carver, the senior
partner, had been around more and was by habit
more guarded in his judgments. Still, he made a
mental note to himself that J. D. would have to be
cleaned up for trial.

Carver always paid attention to detail, which was
why he was coming to be known at 36 as one of the
best criminal-trial lawyers in Texas. His habit was to
work a case to death, and he spent so many late
nights doing it that his in-laws once warned his wife
that he must be having an affair. Jeane Carver knew
better. It was not his fidelity but his health shefretted
about, watching him chain-smoke Benson & Hedges
100s or put away another make-do dinner of canned
chili or spaghetti. He could not relax on a case, and
hewas carrying up to 150 of them ata time, laboring
over them with a sharp eye for the angles and an
untroubled conscience about exploiting them. Jeane
drew his evening baths, kept his clippings in a
scrapbook and tried not to worry about the tension
coiled up inside his loose-gaited, country-court-
house manner. “Lawyers die young,” she said, and
she didn’t want him tobe one of them.

Capital cases weighed especially heavy on him,
raising the stakes from winning or losing to life or
death, He had read about the Sak-n-Pak carnage in
the Beaumont Enterprise and had thought what a
horrible crime it was; he was himself leery of walk-
ing into a convenience store after dark without first
counting the cars and the people and making sure
the clerk was behind the counter. But when Judge
Leonard Giblin Jr. cornered him at a Democratic
Party affair and asked if he would defend J. D.,
Carver readily said yes. He had been a Southern
Baptist seminarian before he came to the law, and
whether because of his Bible-belt rearing or in spite
ofit, he had strong feelings against the death penal-
ty. It struck him as un-Christian, for one thing, and
unfair for another, since there never seemed to be
any rich people on death row. He thought it futile as
a deterrent as well. If J. D, in fact did what he was
accused of having done, he said with gallows irony,
“it didn’t deter him.”

The district attorney’s office had felt no such
compunctions; it had taken just four days to seek

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

and secure indictments charging J. D. and John
Sandifer with capital murder. Leafing through the
file, the D.A.’s chief trial man, Paul Naman, saw
immediately that he would have problems proving
that the motive was robbery, a prerequisite for the
death penalty. But Naman and his boss, James
McGrath, were moved powerfully enough by the
brutality of the crime and by J. D.’s violent past to
go for it. They sensed, moreover, that the sentiment
ofa frightened and angry community would be with
them. According to courthouse legend, a local de-
fense lawyer once asked a prospective juror rhetori-
cally if he thought he could participate in an execu-
tion, and the prospect said he probably could if it
were on a weekend.

So Carver was starting behind again, working the
edges of the case in search of loose threads. He
visited J. D. He met with Naman to find out what
the state had and hired a private investigator to help
him find out what Naman wasn’t telling him. He
even made a brassy precautionary visit to Tommy
Svarnas at St. Mary Hospital to see if he was in fact
too badly off to testify against J.D. Asit turned out,

Roy Bray

A

SANDIFER AND AUTRY GOING TO COURT

He did not know
that John would let
him take the fall
alone and that
John’s family
would help put him
on death row.

65

DEFENSE ATTORNEY CARVER

He had strong
feelings against the
death penalty, It
struck him as

un-Ch
unfair,

He was the
unflamboyant
type, the sort
who preferred
relentless logic
to theatrics in the
courtroom.

PROSECUTOR NAMAN

66

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

he was. He answered Carver’s questions with a
blank look, and when Carver lita Benson & Hedges
for him, he dropped it. His brother Jimmy found
them together and, at Carver’s cajoling, spoke with
Tommy fora few moments in Greek. Tommy didn’t
know who J. D. Autry was and didn’t remember
anything about the shooting.

As he saw it then, J. D.’s signed confession was
the heart of the matter. Like many felony suspects,
J. D. had talked even after having been advised of
his right not to, But Carver saw a chance of having
the confession thrown out, and when Naman al-
most casually offered life in prison if J. D. would
plead guilty, Carver's optimism heightened.

What he didn’t realize then was that Naman had
an ace up his sleeve, They met in Judge Giblin’s
chambers in August, four days before a scheduled
hearing on the evidence, and Carver was feeling
cocky. “You haven’t got a dawg’s chance of getting
that statement admitted,” he told Naman.

Naman leaned back and chuckled. “That may be
true,” he said, “but then again, we've got an oral
declaration Autry made.”

Carver figured he meant something J, D, had said
to the police apart from the formal statement and
twitted him for his shallow grasp of the law.

“Tm not talking about that,” Naman said. “I’m
talking about the telephone call.”

“What damn telephone call?”

“Don’t you know?” Naman asked, all innocence.
He was the unflamboyant type, the sort who pre-
ferred relentless logic to theatrics in a courtroom,
but he was enjoying the moment. “I’m sorry, I
thought I told you,” he said; there was “an oral
admission by way of a telephone call.”

What Naman meant hit home when Patrolman
John Anderson took the stand well along in the
hearing and said he had overheard J. D. calling
home in Colorado the day after his arrest to tell his
mother he was in jail for murder. “There was kind of
a pause on his part,” Anderson related. “I guess he
was listening. And when he resumed talking he said
something to the effect that he had gone into the
store and wanted to rob it, but everything had just
gone wrong, and he started shooting, and he just
couldn’t stop once he started.”

sa tactical matter, Carver let Anderson go

for the moment with only perfunctory

cross-examination and went ahead with

his attack on the full confession. He put
J.D. on the stand in shackles and prison whites to
testify that he had been stoned at the time and had
been beaten and threatened until he confessed. His
flat, mumbly monotone seryed him badly; Carver
thought afterward that a bit more outraged inno-
cence might have helped. But the decisive issue
remained J. D.’s constitutional right not to say
anything. He had been induced to confess after he
had said in writing that he didn’t want to say any
more, Carver argued, and whether the statement
had been beaten or sweet-talked out of him didn’t
matter; the interrogation should have stopped then
and there.

Judge Giblin found himself drawn toward Carv-
er’s position, and not because their two families were
beginning a warm friendship; the judge’s iron rule,
taught him by a senior colleague, was that they’re all
from El Paso when they come before you in court.
What made the call a hard one was that it ran cross-

grained with Giblin’s political interests—he would
berunning for re-electionin two years—and with his
own strong law-and-orderly convictions. He was a
bluff, hearty Cajun good-ole-boy who had becomea
lawyerin the first place because he was too short (by
an eighth of an inch) to be a state trooper and too
dim-eyed for the FBI. “I wanted to carry a gun and
arrest people,” he said, and his wife had persuaded
him that the law was the next best thing. He didn’t
like J. D.’s looks and didn’t believe his story that he
had been beaten. But the law was the law, and Giblin
had always run a tight, brisk and scrupulously fair
trial. He swallowed hard, threw out the confession
and thought unhappily: J may have let a capital
murderer walk the streets.

The sinking feeling in the judge’s stomach was
not improved by the panic he glimpsed in the eyes
of the prosecution. Paul Naman was in fact
scared, scared to death, he acknowledged later, that
J. D. would go free and kill someone else within a
week. The prospect sent him trudging back to his
boss, McGrath, for permission to deal. McGrath
gave it, reluctantly. Naman approached Carver
with offers of 60 years, then 50, then 40—the last a
distress-sale eve-of-trial offering that could con-
ceivably have put J. D. back in the world before his
40th birthday. Carver bore the offers to J. D. and
urged him to think hard about them.

ut J. D. was betting his life on John San-

difer’s love and his own jailhouse savvy, and

he said no. He seemed to his lawyers almost

maddeningly unconcerned. He suspected
that the state had to be worried to keep pressing
deals on him, and he figured he had his own trump
cards in the Sandifers, He and John had resumed
their affair in their shared jail cell, and J. D. thought
he had John’s word that the whole tribe was behind
him—that none of them would say anything to hurt
him. “There weren’t no case,” he presumed then,
“unless they talked.”

Whiat he did not know was that John was falling
out of love with him and was more concerned in any
case with his own survival. John knew he would
neyer stop caring for J. D, and would always think
of him as a man with a gentle and frightened heart
hidden somewhere inside those stunted emotions.
But he had begun to see that they had no future
together. J. D. kept spinning fantasies about their
breaking out of jail, and John couldn’t handle it. J
can’t see me runnin’ the rest of my life, lookin’ over
my shoulder, he thought. I can’t live like that,

Neither could he bear to hurt J. D. by telling him
it was all over; instead, he continued the charade of
their lovemaking after dark and began negotiating
by day to save his own life. “Tell your client we'll
give him 60 years,” one of the D.A.’s men told
John’s lawyers, Ron Plessala and Thomas Mul-
vaney, when they put out a first feeler. But the
bellicosity was a bluff. The state had no usable
evidence that John had been anything more than a
blurry-eyed spectator at the killing, and while it
looked raw and tasted bitter, they saw no choice but
to horse-trade—to barter short time and early free-
dom to one suspected party toa murder even as they
sought the death of the other.

The single chip they brought to the bargaining
table was a household burglary in John’s neighbor-
hood a few days before the Sak-n-Pak murders; the
police had found his fingerprints at the scene and a
piece of the loot, an engraved gold watch, in his

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

bedroom at the trailer. John had persuaded his
parents that J. D. had done it. No one else believed
him. The dickering opened at 40 years for a plea of
guilty to the burglary, dropped quickly to 20 and
finally to seven, which meant three and a half till
parole. The murder charge would be dropped
“without prejudice”—a face-saver permitting the
state to reopen the case against John should some
decisive new evidence come magically to light.

John’s family urged him to accept the deal; they
were sore at the world and were drawing their
wagons ina circle against it, with no room for J. D.
on the inside. The Sandifers had, in their not unrea-
sonable view, solved the murder for the police by
turning in their own wayward boy and the guns as
well. But they had been treated more as suspects
than as heroes, as if Mark had been an accomplice
and Sandy the mastermind ofa cover-up. The pres-
sures began to tell on John’s mother most of all; she
hid away with her Bible and her shame and felt, she
said later, as if she were “right before having a
neryous breakdown.” So the family took a collec-
tive yow of silence, and when John was offered his
seven-year easy ride, his father begged him to take
it, if only to quiet the wagging tongues around town.
“It’s killin’ your mama,” he said. “It’s crucifyin’
your family. If you'll cop out to that seven years, I'll
take care of you when you get out.”

When John said yes, the circle was closed, and
J. D. was alone. He did not know it yet; he was still
counting on the Sandifers to ride to the rescue. But
John could not testify forJ. D. without endangering
his own deal, and the others were preparing to
testify against him if they were granted immunity
for themselves. J. D. accordingly was flying blind
when Cause No. 38296, The State of Texas v. James
Autry, was called for trial that September and he
was led pasty-faced and impassive into Judge Gib-
lin’s faded art deco courtroom. He was the only man
there who believed he was going to win.

Carver had seen to every detail. He had repack-
aged J. D. into an approximation of the Port Arthur
boy next door, his hair pruned back and combed fiat,
his beard and mustache gone, his tattoos mostly
hidden under a wardrobe of crisp new polyesters.
His name for the duration would be “James” instead
of “J. D.,” which had a bit of a redneck ring to
Carver. The jury was mostly middle-aged, blue-
collared and conservative, but Carver told himselfit
was the best he could have hoped for. He liked the
fact that there were seven women, since he thought
them unlikely to be gung-ho for capital punishment,
and he was particularly pleased with Timothy Wille-
min, apipe-fitter with oak-thick armsandastubborn
Mormon countenance. The only real hope Carver
saw was a hung jury and a sweetened plea bargain,
and Willemin looked like the sort of independent
spirit hecould play to.

ut he still felt more than the usual butter-

flies attending a capital case, and he was

still ready to plea-bargain. With the jury

seated, he made one last run at Naman and
asked if he would buy 35 years. Naman was fight-
ing down his own butterflies, seeing the holes in
his case instead of its deadly cumulative weight,
and he was willing to listen; he insisted only that,
this time, Carver get J. D. aboard first. “Just a
minute,” Carver said, heading upstairs for the jail.
But J. D.’s answer once again was no, and the
battle was joined.

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983 o.

The state was leading with the strongest of its
three cases, the murder of Shirley Drouet, and
Carver’s defense from the beginning was a rear-
guard action. He did win some early skirmishes
narrowing the evidence, Judge Giblin having decid-
ed to err on the side of caution. Here I am, Giblin
was thinking, a little trial judge in Beaumont, Texas,
and everyone all the way to the Supreme Court is
going to be looking at me. But when Naman and his
partner Dayid Moore put on their case, all Carver
could do was watch the mosaic bits come damning-
ly together—the bodies and the blood all over the
Sak-n-Pak; the hole in Mrs. Drouet’s forehead and
the massive damage to her brain; the .38 slug fished
out of herskull and matched to J. D.’s pilfered gun;
the man who looked like J. D. running from the
scene; the locked cash register he had left behind,
powerfully suggesting that Mrs. Drouet had died
trying to stop a robbery.

Tt was all relentless, mathematical and unspar-
ingly gory. The color photo of Mrs. Drouet in death
was introduced, and her sister Bobbie took the
stand to put a name to the bruised and bloated face
in the picture. She looked as if she were about tocry.
Carver rose, 6 feet 3 inches of outraged gallantry,
with an offer to stipulate that it wasin fact a photo of
Shirley Drouet. But the identification was a neces-
sary part of the record, as well as a useful bit of
bathos, and Giblin let it go on. “That’s Shirley,”
Bobbie said, Some of the jurors stolea glance at J. D.
There was no hint of a flush under the waxy jail-
house pallor, no sorrow or pity in the eyes, no sign
that he felt anything at all.

e was equally stony, his eyes as empty of life

asan unfurnished room, when the Sandifers

took the stand one by one and buried him.

John appeared only long enough to plead
the Fifth Amendment. “If you have a change of
heart,” Carver told him sardonically, “‘we will ap-
preciate it if you let us know.” But the others,
protected by grants of immunity, were no longer so
reticent. Mark and Judy placed J. D. at the scene
with the loot, a six-pack of beer in a bag and the
murder weapon, the stolen ,38 Special. Mark told of
having disarmed him in the trailer over his loud
confessional protest: “Z just killed four people and
you know it!” Sandy, gruff and craggy, spoke in
injured tones of having then delivered his boy into
the hands of the police on a charge of murder. “I
tried to do what was right,” he said, “and all I got
was harassed for it.”

Carver did what he could with what the Sandifers
had left him, trying by implication in his cross-
examination to shift suspicion from J. D. to John
and to make it look as if John’s family were covering
for him. “Did you-all get together among your-
selves,” he asked Mark, “and agree not to discuss
this case with anyone?” Mark agreed that they had.
“With anybody,” Carver repeated, making it sound
like a conspiracy of silence. The line made some
impression on the jurors, but Carver could not
shake the basics of the Sandifer version of events
and could not erase the lingering afterimage of
Sandy, the aggrieved and wounded father who had
turned in his own son and had only his stigmata to
show for it. “I used to think one way,” he said. “I
think a little different now. Somebody broke my
rose-colored glasses. I just don’t know what can
happen to you anymore in this country.”

J.D. was already sinking in quicksand when the

TRIAL JUDGE GIBLIN

He swallowed
hard, threw out the
confession, and
thought unhappily:
Imay have let a
murderer walk the
streets,

67

JUROR TIMOTHY WILLEMIN

He had asked God
for guidance, and
the evidence of
the locked cash
register bubbled
up into his mind,

In the phone call
he overheard, J. D.
“said he started
shooting and just
couldn’t stop.’

‘OFFICER JOHN ANDERSON

68

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

state closed with his self-incriminating phone call to
his mother; with that, a hanging case against him
had been set in place ina day and a half, and even he
could see it. He was feeling betrayed by the San-
difers, though John insisted that night in jail that he
had implored them not to testify. J. D. had told
Carver earlier in the dim, sealed-off stairway that
served Judge Giblin asa holding pen that he wanted
to take the stand in his own defense. But the judge
had intimated in chambers that if J. D. went on, the
state could legitimately introduce his signed confes-
sion to impeach his testimony, and Carver reluc-
tantly told J, D. no.

Carver's hand otherwise consisted of three mar-
ginal witnesses and his own considerable mother
wit. He countered the state’s single eyewitness with
two of his own, each of whom had seen the pre-
sumed killer running away from the scene and
neither of whom thought it was J. D. Then he called
J. D.’s mother, Mrs. Stormy Stucker in her second
marriage, She was a vague and wispy woman, a
wormy little thing, J. R. Sandifer thought scornfully
when he first saw her, and not at all a prepossessing
witness for her boy. But she was all Carver had to
counter the police story of J. D.’s phone call home,
and when she didn’t answer his letters, he finally
called her in Colorado to see if she would come. She
said she didn’t have the money. He sent her the fare,
and she materialized, weathered gray like old shin-
gles in a raw climate, an apparition out of J. D.’s
American Gothic past.

he did as well as she could with her mission,

which was to show that Officer Anderson

had got J. D.’s words partly right and his

meaning all wrong. J. D. had called from
jail, she said, and when she asked what had hap-
pened, he hadn’t confessed anything; he had said,
“They claim that I went in a store to rob it and that
I started shooting.” Her memory seemed to hit a
bump in the road. “I asked him who claimed,” she
resumed at Carver's gentle prodding, “and he said,
‘The police.’ And I started crying. And he said,
‘Don’t worry, Mama, I didn’t do it. Things will be
all right.’ And then I told him that I had to go and
Thung up.”

Her eyes watered; she seemed to Carver to be
trying to cry—trying one last time to do something
for her son and not quite managing. The jurors
sympathized only with her. They searched J. D.’s
eyes once again for some answering flicker of love or
remorse and found none. He looks like a hardened
criminal, one of them, Donna Thomason, thought.
She was 48, divorced and had three children of her
own; she knew what motherhood was, and she knew
how she was going to vote, If he has no feeling for
his own mother, she thought, he has no feeling
for anyone.

A jury in a capital case in Texas deliberates not
once but twice, first on the question of guilt or
innocence, then on the matter of life and death. But
defendants who lose the first round only infrequent-
ly win the second, and the lawyers attacked their
closing arguments on phase one with energy and
eloquence, as if the life of a man and the safety of
society were riding on their words. Carver and
Murphy spun out their theory that John, not J. D.,
had done the killing and had been sheltered by the
“bought testimony” of the Sandifers. Naman coun-
tered with broad hints that the Sak-n-Pak killings

might not have been J. D.’s first—other police
departments across Texas were expressing interest
in him—and concluded that he was “a dangerous,
dangerous man.”

Tt was just past 11 o’clock on day three when they
committed the case to the jury, with only blind trust
that anything any of them said had got through. The
lawyers and the witnesses retired to the corridor to
pace and smoke. J. D. sat on the steps in the holding
room, nervous, glum and, for the first time, pessi-
mistic. Carver drifted in and out, trying to be
reassuring. J. D, mooched cigarettes from him; he
normally made his own, the most useful crafthe had
learned in jail, but as the suspense stretched out
through the afternoon, he could not roll them fast
enough to pacify his nerves,

His anxiety was well founded. The jurors felt no
real doubt as to his moral culpability, not even when
they took a first secret ballot and found themselves
split 6-6 between convicting and acquitting him.
They hadn’t liked his retouched image, for all Car-
yer’s pains, or his wintry demeanor; the evidence
aside, he Jooked guilty. What kept the jury out so
long was whether he could properly be found guilty
of capital murder under the technical niceties of the
law. The state had to show that robbery was the
motive, and with all the witnesses dead or damaged,
some jurors had their doubts. The state had to prove
further that J. D., not John, had pulled the trigger;
not all the jurors understood that, but Judge Giblin
was unenlightening when they queried him, and
they were left to find their own way.

They found it, as jurors usually do, by improvisa-
tion, force of will and that folk wisdom called
common sense. The women were split at the outset,
as Carver had hoped, but once converted, they
became hawks for conviction and drew the men
along with them. “Do youreally think Autry hadno
part in it?” Mrs. Thomason, a hawk from the start,
lectured the doyes; her law was imprecise, since
having a partin it was not enough, but her forceful-
ness was persuasive. Others fixed on their own
decisive bits of evidence. One looked at the pictures
of Shirley Drouet in death and switched his vote to
guilty, even though he questioned whether J. D. had
meant to rob the store. Another was persuaded by
J.D.’s phone call to his mother. Others boiled all the
technicalities down toa singlecurbstone question: if
J. D. hadn’t walked into the Sak-n-Pak with rob-
bery on his mind, Una Davis wondered aloud,
“what in the world did he have a gun for?”

he deadlock melted to 9-3, then 10-2 and
finally 11-1; at the end, as Carver had
hoped, it was Timothy Willemin against the
world, Willemin believed from the first that
J. D. had murdered Mrs. Drouet, but he had
doubts about the robbery question, and the harder
the others hammered at him, the deeper he dug in
his heels. People rained arguments on him; he
folded his massive arms and refused to budge.
There were stagy sighs and barbed remarks, “If
somebody would just pay attention,” one of the
women said. “If somebody wouldn't be so igno-
rant.” Willemin stood firm. “Do you want a hung
jury?” one juror scolded. “Are we going to say we
can’t decide after a whole week’s work?” Willemin
seemed not to mind,
They broke at 5:05, after nearly six hours of
haggling, and Carver went to bed that night think-
ing he might have his hung jury after all. But when

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

the jurors reconvened in the morning, Willemin
came around, not by argument but by prayer. He
had asked God for guidance, and the evidence of the
locked cash register bubbled up into his mind. Well,
this must be the answer I’m looking for, he thought;
there had been a robbery attempt and Mrs. Drouet
had tried to thwart it by shutting down the till. He
switched his vote, and, just past 10 o’clock, the
jurors filed in with their verdict. Carver watched
them. None of them looked at J. D, Their judgment
was plain in their averted eyes.

The blue slip affirming it was handed up to Judge
Giblin. He scanned it silently, then asked J. D. to
stand and passed the form to the clerk. “We, the
jury,” she read, “find the defendant guilty of cap-
ital murder.”

Carver tried one last gambit, asking that the
judge poll the jurors; he hoped that one might
buckle under pressure, like a basketball player
blowing a free throw before a hostile crowd.

The first three jurors said yes, they had
voted guilty.

“Timothy Willemin?” Judge Giblin intoned.

Willemin rose, his eyes half closed, his head
shaking no. Our Father in heaven, he was praying, I
need assurance that this is the right choice I am
making. He stood silent, awaiting an answer, for
what the clock said was 30 seconds and what felt to
Giblin like five minutes. “Yes,” he said finally, still
shaking his head no. He sat down, the roll call
continued and the verdict was sealed.

J. D. sagged. On the steps in the holding room
afterward he told Carver that he wanted to take the
stand in the penalty proceedings to threaten to kill
the jurors and to demand the death penalty for
himself. “I don’t want life,” he raged. “I'd rather die
than go to the pen for life.” Carver tried to calm him
and finally, in desperation, fetched his mother.
They stood at his feet, pleading with him until he
relented.

he issue of whether or not he wanted to die

was moot in any case; the mood of the jury

and the terms of Texas law made his sentence

all but a foregone conclusion. The state’s old
death penalty statute had been one of 41 struck
down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 as arbi-
trary and capricious in its application, and the new
one had been cobbled up with more haste than care
to meet the court’s complaints. It sharply narrowed
the definition of capital murder—not even a
Charles Manson would have qualified unless he or
his cult killers had stolen something—and it added
the theoretically clinical “penalty phase” to the
trial. The jury had only begun when it found J. D.
guilty; it had to go on to conclude unanimously that
he had killed “deliberately” and that there was
a “probability” that he would commit violent
crimes again.

Question one was in effect a settled issue, given
that the jurors had just convicted J. D. of murder.
The state wrapped up its proof on question two ina
single morning, proposing that a killer with two
prior felony convictions and a history of recidivism
could not be trusted alive. Carver had nothing but
eloquence to counter with. He was left playing
desperately to Willemin in his closing argument,
trying consciously to shame him for having voted
guilty and making an almost preacherly case, Bap-
tist to Mormon, against capital punishment. “Why
do we kill people who kill people to show people that

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

killing is wrong?” he asked. “... God himself
doesn’t judge people until they have lived out their
lives.” But Moore for the state was the unabashed
and passionate angel of death. “It may not deter
somebody else from doing it,” he cried, gesturing
toward J. D., “but we can deter one person from
ever doing it again.”

nee again, the jury retired; once again,
Carver followed J. D. into the holding cell,
this time to counsel sadly that he prepare
himself for the worst. He was right. Hehad
bet what was left of his stack on Willemin, but
Willemin had persuaded himself of J. D.’s guilt and
was as entrenched in his certitude as he had been in
his doubts. The jury this time returned in 43 min-
utes. Judge Giblin felt a cold premonitory chill.
Carver leaned toward Autry and whispered, “It’s
the death penalty—they’re coming back too fast.”
The verdict, as he had guessed, was yes on both
questions. J. D. was going to die.
The jury was polled again, this time without
suspense. As the jurors rose to affirm their yotes,

ne

SANDIFER GARDENING AT HOME: He was out on parole before J. D, went to the death chamber

"Tl can’t see me
runnin’ the rest of
my life, lookin’
over my shoulder.”

J. D. stared balefully at them each in turn, like a
snake, one thought, ready to strike. Judge Giblin
ordered him to rise. “In accordance with the jury’s
verdict rendered and accepted by this court,” the
judge said, his throat tight and his voice high, “the
court now sentences the defendant to death.” J. D.
could hear his mother sobbing in the gallery. He felt
the blood rush to his head. Spots were dancing
before his eyes. He thought he was going to faint.
Ata word from the judge, he was marched out of
court, bound for death row. He paused for a mo-
ment at the door and glared across the room at the
jurors, the dark, liquid eyes aflame; it was, Mike
Murphy thought, as if he were murdering them
with his gaze. Some of them were shaken, and when
Moore came over to tell them about the confession
they had never seen, there were sighs, whoops and
even tears of gratitude. The news confirmed for
them what they saw, or believed they had seen, in his
eyes. They thought it was unalloyed malice. They
did not know that what they witnessed was his
passage from hunter to prey and from hate to fear.

69

outside to announce
the reprieve. The

answer was a
volley of hoots
and boos.

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

>

ATTORNEY GENERAL MATTOX: The news from Washington was that J, D, had been granted a last-minute stay

16 MINUTES
TO MIDNIGHT

70

tthe end, it happened nearly asit had in his

nightmares, only this time J. D. Autry

knew there would be no waking up. “It’s

time, J. D,,” the chaplain had said with an
hour left on the clock; then the men in gray had
walked him, numb and unresisting, down the last 10
feet of corridor between his death cell and the
hell-red room at The Walls. The steel door swung
open and the gurney swam into his vision, its white
sheet and leather straps almost luminous in the raw
electric glare. J. D. hopped on it and lay down
without a word while the eight belts were cinched
tight around him and the i.v. needles found his
veins. Then he sank into himself, sweat-soaked and
frightened, and waited—waited for the curtain to be
drawn revealing him to the witnesses; waited to be
asked his last words and to answer that he had none;
waited for the warden to signal the executioners
that all was ready; waited finally for the sodium
thiopental to flow into his arms and draw him down
into darkness within the first 13-second circulation
of his blood through his taut body.

He had become in that moment what he had
always supposed himself to be, a driftwood soul
bobbing alone and powerless in tides he could nei-
ther change nor control. He was a laboratory ani-
malin America’s second experiment with that new
and more genteel form of execution called lethal
injection; he was a disembodied name in a war
among lawyers puddle-jumping across Texas in
small planes, wrangling frantically by conference
telephone and scrawling a last desperate petition
longhand in the entranceway to the U.S. Supreme

Court. He lay bound to his gurney with the saline
solution already running into his veins, ignorant of
the high drama playing out around himand helpless
in any case to affect it. He did not even answer when
the warden came to tell him that a Supreme Court
justice named White had spared his life 31 minutes
before its appointed end at 12:01 a.m. Things just
happened to you; there didn’t seem to be anything
much more to say than that.

J. D. had gone off to The Walls that morning
with the same resignation that had stunted his life.
There had been moments nearly to the end when
he still believed in miracles, but when he was
allowed a farewell phone call to his mother seven
hours before his reckoning time, he said wanly, “I
been thinkin’ about it so long it don’t bother me
anymore.” His cool by then had an air of listless-
ness, of staled hopes and dead-ended dreams. He
had quit smoking for his health in an optimistic
moment; at the last, it hardly mattered, and he
started again. He withdrew from his neighbors on
the tier and quit playing volleyball in the yard. He
paced his cell furiously through the nights, high on
cold medicine to stay awake; if you didn’t sleep,
you bought time, and you didn’t see the gurney in
your dreams. He resolved to die without a fight,
partly because resistance was uncool, partly be-
cause it was futile. “If they’re going to kill me,” he
said, with the dying flicker of a smile, “why let
them kick the bleep out of me, too?’””

Nothing till then in the three-year course of his
appeals had given him much ground for hope.
They're expediting J. D. to death, Charles Carver
thought at low ebb, as one court after another
turned him down with rare unanimity and speed.
Carver had moyed up from a small practice with his
uncle to the high-powered, high-rise firm of Pro-
vost, Umphrey, McPherson & Swearingen in Port
Arthur, but hehad takenJ. D.’sappeal with himand
labored over it long after his $3,600 fee from the
county had run out. It was a hard case made harder
by Judge Giblin’s tight-as-a-tick conduct of the
trial. Just how hard was made swiftly and brutally
plain in round one, before the Texas court of crimi-

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

nal appeals. Carver raised elegant arguments
against the sufficiency of the evidence and the ad-
missibility of J, D.’s damning phone call to his
mother. He walked out optimistic, and lost 9-0.

When the theater of battle shifted to the federal
courts, Carver found himself up against the daunt-
ing opposition of Leslie Benitez, a young woman of
liberal pedigree who had somehow become thestate
attorney general’s specialist in death-penalty plead-
ings. Her petite good looks sorted oddly with her
role, but her severe hairdo and her dress-for-success
suits announced that she was to be taken seriously,
and she was; it was she who saw the capital case
against Charlie Brooks Jr. through to its end on the
gurney late last year, her wit and workaholic habits
outmatching a human wave of defense lawyers. She
and Carver met first in U.S. district Judge Robert
Parker’scourt last January and again beforea three-
judge panel of the fifth circuit court of appeals in
March. All Carver won was time for J. D. “[His]
refined dissection of the facts,” the appeals court
held in June, “leaves untouched the outline of that
raw Sunday night in Texas.”

J, D. had been twice sentenced and twice re-
prieved by then, but when he was hauled before
Judge Giblin for a third time last month, eyes
hollow and body draped with padlocks and chains,
the nearly unanimous assumption was that he had
come to the end of his string. The judge believed in
capital punishment and looked on J, D. as a fit
candidate for it—a young man on his way to die, he
thought, whetherin The Walls or on thestreet. Still,
he avoided J. D.’s eyes, and his voice caught on the
words ordaining his death “before the hour of sun-
rise on Oct. 5, 1983.” The ritual took two minutes,
and J. D., strung out on sleeplessness and pills, had
toask Carver afterward what had happened. Carver
told him. “We'll do what we can,” he promised.
They both knew that wasn’t much; the Supreme
Court’s patience with death-house appeals had
grown irritably short, and when it turned down
Carver’s last-chance plea for a stay late last Mon-
day, all that was surprising was the narrowness ofits
5-4 decision to let the execution proceed.

J. D's life expectancy was no more than 32 hours
then and had shrunk to less than 17 when, before
7:30 Tuesday morning, he was driven in chains and
prison whites to The Walls. The autumn morning
‘was sun washed and warm; it was, as he supposed
then, his last glimpse of the world, but he barely
noticed it. A prison whistle was sounding dolefully,
and a clock set high in the stern red-brick facade
seemed to bemocking him; it had stopped long ago at
2:38, while every working clock in the world was
runningagainst him. Onceinside, he was locked into
one of eight death cells, each with brightly colored
bars and its own accent wall painted in decorator
pastels. There was a bunk, a sink, a toilet, a Bible, a
checker set and no family or friends for company—
only a couple of chaplains and a squad of guards. J.
D, didn’t feel much like talking anyway. He picked
at a lunch of pork chops and salad; otherwise he
paced his cell, listening for news and watching the
minutes vanish on his digital-clock radio.

The bulletins he caught between the keening
country-and-Western laments on station KILT
were uniformly discouraging. His case had been ef-
fectively taken over by the cause lawyers of the
American Civil Liberties Union; they had long been
hovering at the edges, with what struck Carver as a
patronizingly low regard forhis skills, and at the end

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

they had shouldered him rudely aside. They had in
fact discovered an ingenious frontier issue in the
question of “proportionality”—whether, simply
put, other convicted killers in Texas were getting off
with lightersentences for crimesasbadasJ. D.’s. But
in their single-minded concern to savea life, they re-
duced Carver not only toa bystander but to anissue.
Without checking with him before or after, they
quietly collected affidavits from J. D. among others
as to his battered Dickensian boyhood and accused
Carver of “sheer neglect or ignorance” for not hav-
ing used it during the penalty phase of the trial.

he contention achieved nothing except to put

Carver in the galling position of hitching a

tide with Benitez ina state plane to Marshall,

Texas, for a new hearing before Judge Park-
er—this time as a subpoenaed witness for the state
against his own client 14 hours before J. D.’s sched-
uled death. His tactics at the trial, as it happened,
were easily defensible; J. D. had forbade him to put
his mother on the stand during the penalty phase
and had threatened to demand the death penalty if
he testified himself. “A client’s life is worth more
than a lawyer’s reputation,” the ACLU’s man Ste-
fan Presser shrugged. Parker disagreed; his deci-
sion, after 39 minutes of hearing and 41 of delibera-
tion, praised Carver for having played a losing hand
with “‘a high level of competence” and threw out the
ACLU’s negligence claim, along with the rest of its
petition. It was nearly noon when the news crackled
over J. D.’s radio at The Walls. He had 12 hours
left to live.

The law had no time left for majesty; the lawyers
crowded around two battered oaken desks and two
telephones in a small office in the Marshall court-
house and argued the case by conference call to
three appeals judges in three other cities—the same
three judges who had refused J. D. a reprieve once

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PETITION: A handwritten appeal to White to spare a life

With J, D. on the
gurney, an ACLU
lawyer scribbled
a last-chance plea
to the court.

nN

LAWYER LESLIE BENITEZ

Her severe

hairdo and her

dress-for=success

suits announced
that she was to be

| taken seriously,

and she was,

—

Afew
demonstrators
prayed for his

life, a vastly larger
number howled

for his death.

‘A PRO-DEATH PICKET

\ 72

TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE

before. There was a maddening hour's delay patch-
ing everyone into the line, and when the judges
tetired to deliberate, the clocks in Texas said 5:21.
“I think, Your Honor, in candor, this is the last
effective court of review,” Benitez had told them,
and no one disagreed; given the current temper of
the Supreme Court in capital cases, the presump-
tion hung heavy in the stifling room in Marshall
that J. D. had come to the end of the road.

He shared the feeling; it was not so much sus-
pense he felt, or even fear, as an utter absence of
hope. With seven hours left, he was permitted ac-
cess to a phone so he could make his farewells to
his family. His father was not on the list; Jim Autry
had kept his silent distance from the first and had
been solacing himself with heavy applications of
bourbon and 7Up, expressing only the weepy hope
that J. D. would die like an Autry. “With self-
respect,” he told a visitor. “With dignity. Like a
man.” J. D.’s first chat instead was with his young-
est brother, Donnie, who was himself lately out of
jail and into a drug-rehabilitation center. “How you
doing?” Donnie asked. J, D. said OK.

hen they put him through to his mother. She

had come to Texas to make her witness to his

end but had stopped in Amarillo, where her

sometime in-laws, Harley and Opal Cook,
were putting her up. She had slept badly the night
before and had been up before the sun, puttering in
the kitchen to calm her screaming nerves. With the
bad news from Marshall at noon, she had started on
Budweiser by the 16-ounce can, but it did little
except loosen her tenuous hold on what was hap-
pening, to her or, as she called J. D., her kid. “I’ve
drunk beer,” shesaid, her tear-stained face buried in
her hands, “I’ve done everything. It ain't helpin’
me. It’s about to get my goddam brain plumb out of
my head.” She was coughing and sobbing into a
damp washcloth when the call from The Walls
came at 5:20 and the Cooks handed her the phone.
The drapes had been drawn against the heat of the
day; the glow of the setting sun through the open
front door was the only light in the room.

“Mama,” a voice said, “it’s J. D.”

She paused, struggling for something to say.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“T’'m feelin’ OK,” J. D, answered.

“Tove you too much,” she said, and agai
are you feeling?”

“All right,” he said. The clock was gobbling
minutes. His voice was as toneless as a cracked bell.

“I don’t think so,” Shirley said, and again: “Hon-
ey, I love you. I love you more than you know. You
know that.”

Hes.”

“I love you.”

“T love you, too,” the voice said,

The phone passed from hand to hand. The Cooks
were still hoping for a reprieve, and J. D. said
without conviction that anything could happen;
still, when Opal asked point-blank if the execution
were going to happen, he answered dully, “I believe
so.” He wanted them to know only that he was past
fear now. “It don’t scare me no more,” he said. “I’m
ready for it. I’ve had time to prepare for it.”

They put Shirley on the line again, and the con-
versation wandered down the labyrinthine turnings
of her mind. She wanted to know if he had eaten; he
said no—his last supper had not arrived yet. She

“How

railed at John Sandifer for having abandoned him to
die alone. She spoke, as if he were a third party, ofa
developing fight between her and his father over his
body; Jim Autry, as it happened, was content to
bury him in the prison graveyard, but Shirley pro-
posed to have him cremated and to take his ashes
home with her. “You're not making this a bit easier
on J. D.,” Harley prompted at her elbow, but J. D.
knew the vagaries of her thought and did not pro-
test. She guessed at a point that she would die soon
after he did. “If they get you, don’t get a guilty
feeling when I meet you in a couple of days,” she
said, and then, as if he had become death embodied,
she told him, “You got my mother and my sister,
You’ve got my whole side of the family but me.”

J.D. listened with practiced patience, answering
in grunts and monosyllables; sometimes, only the
sound of his breathing was audible on the line. But
when she asked if he wanted her with him at his
death, he told her quickly, “No.”

“T'll be there if you want me,” she said.

“No.”

“Are you smoking?” she asked him a mo-
ment later.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you smoking now?”

“No.”

“Let’s light us one then, ’cause my nerves are
about done.”

They lit up, 485 miles apart. “You're my good-
lookin’ kid,” Shirley said. J. D, laughed.

“T love you,” she said. “I love you very much.”

It was past 6 o’clock. The menin gray wanted him
back in his cell. “I love you lots, too, Mama,” he
said. “Don’t worry. OK. "Bye.”

There was nothing left then but to wait while
the appeals court labored over its deliberations.
J. D. was permitted a shower and a change from his
State-issue whites into civilian dying clothes, a
short-sleeved blue shirt and a pair of gray and white
checked trousers from a prison rummage store-
room; only his black and white running shoes were
his own. He ate the last meal he had chosen, a
hamburger with mustard and a side of fries from a
fast-food shop and a glass of iced tea. He brooded
over his past and especially over what he saw as
Sandifer’s betrayal. Why doesn’t he just call the
governor and tell him there was no robbery? he
thought. The notion had in fact been put to John,
safely home with his family back in Port Arthur,
and he had refused. “What could I tell the gover-
nor?” he asked; he was himself not immune to the
half-suppressed wish of the Sandifers that J. D. die
and so end a dolorous chapter in their own lives.

ut mostly J. D. paced, prayed, watched the

clock and listened to the radio plugged in

just outside his cell, the guards turning it

up whenever his case was mentioned. It was
pushing a quarter to 11 when the bad news came:
the court had rejected his plea for a stay and
had roundly scolded his new ACLU lawyers for
having waited nearly to the last hour to press it. At
that moment another of the ACLU’s guerrilleros,
Al Bronstein, was sitting in a chill marble alcove
just inside the gates of the Supreme Court, adding a
last few scribbled sentences to a handwritten appeal
and handing them over to a clerk waiting to race
them to Justice Byron R. White. J. D. did not know
that and, if he had, would not have invested much
hope in it. White was tough on capital cases. White

NEWSWEEK /OCTOBER 17, 1983

had voted only the day before to let J. D. die.

J. D. was accordingly surprised only by the hour
when he saw chaplain Carroll Pickett outside his
cell with a dozen guards, announcing that it was
time. He glanced at the clock. It was not quite 11. It
flashed through his mind that either it was broken
or something was wrong.

“This isn’t supposed to happen till 12,” he
protested.

“That is correct,” Pickett answered through the
bars, “but the procedures must begin now.”

The cell door swung open. The phalanx of guards.
parted as J. D. stepped out, then closed behind him
as he walked into the 12-by-18 death chamber a step
ahead of the chaplain. His cool had not deserted
him, not yet, not even when the red iron door
clanged shut behind him. He scanned the semicircle
of guards arrayed in battle position around the
gurney in case he resisted. Well, they’re a lot bigger
than I am, he thought, so he boosted himself onto
the cart and lay down to die.

is courage lasted until the three-inch white

straps had been buckled around his body,

his wrists and his ankles and his hands had

been taped down to the lateral supports.
Then the terror engulfed him; he felt as if he were
sinking in it, drowning in a black fear deeper than
any he had ever known. It was 11:03 when they
finished. He had 58 minutes left. At 11:05 he felt a
sharp sting in one arm and then the other as the
catheters were inserted just below the elbow. It was
done by paramedics, since the canons of ethics
forbade participation by doctors, and one made a
bad job ofit. J. D. looked down at his left arm. There
was blood from the elbow to the wrist. He broke into
a boiling sweat. I’m gonna die, he thought.

He lay there mute, chewing gum to hide his
terror, suspended in a purgatory of time. Aboye his
head was the ceiling vent from the days of Old
Sparky, built to draw off the stench of incontinence
and burning flesh. The i.v. tubes snaked upward
from his arms to a curtained window in the wall
between him and his unseen executioners; they were
already flooded with saline solution, the medium
for the lethal cocktail of three chemicals that would
follow. From outside, he could hear a rising visceral
tide of noise, inchoate at first, louder and clearer as
his hour drew near. A crowd had formed, a few
demonstrators praying by candlelight for his life, a
vastly larger number of high-school and college
students howling for his death. One man was later
arrested packing a gun; others waved signs that said
WE PAY FOR OUR BEER and, over a picture of a beer
can and a needle, THIS BUD’S FOR YOU. The time
ticked toward midnight, and the sound outside
congealed into an insistent rhythmic chant: “Kill
him! Kill him! Kill him!”

His fear sharpened as the din rose and the min-
utes oozed by. The straps on his wrists were too
tight; his hands were turning numb, as if he were
dying by stages. “What time is it?” he asked. It was
16 minutes to 12, a guard said. J. D. closed his eyes.
God, please help me, he prayed. Please.

He opened his eyes. The warden was standing
beside the gurney. The news had just come from
Washington that Justice White had granted him at
least a temporary stay—a 30-minute stay, by one
early and mistaken report, but a stay nevertheless,
J. D. couldn’t quite believe it— White wanted me to
die before, he thought—and neither, apparently,

NEWSWEEK/OCTOBER 17, 1983

could the prison authorities. They left J. D.
strapped where he was in case the stay ran out or
was vacated before sunrise. He prayed. The clock
ticked. It took a half hour more to confirm that J. D.
had in effect been reprieved for perhaps a year or
more, and unlash him from the gurney.

His hour in the shadow of death destroyed what
was left of his cool; its first casualty was his bravado
view that dying was preferable to life in prison. He
had walked to the gurney unaided, but his legs had
turned to aspic and gave way under him when he
climbed down. The men in gray had to help him
back to his cell. When he got there, his hands and his
lips were trembling so violently that he could not
light a cigarette. A guard lit one for him. He sank to
his bunk. Lying there, hecould hear the mood of the
crowd outside change from celebration to rage. Jim
Mattox, the state attorney general, had gone outside
to announce the reprieve. The answer was a volley
of hoots and boos and an angry new chant: “Bull-
shit! Bullshit! Bullshit!”

Death row had fallen silent as a grave when they
led J. D. away. On his return, still drawn and white
after anight at The Walls, the men cheered his good
fortune and what it might mean for themselves.
There were not many other celebrations in his orbit
orin those of the lives he had destroyed. His mother
had passed out in despair and could not compre-
hend the news when she was wakened. John San-
difer went to sleep thinking the whole ugly business
was over and woke up to discover it was not. Well,
hell, he thought, I wish they had done it.

mong the survivors of the crime, Joe
Broussard’s people were more charitable
toward J. D.; after all, Joe would have
been. “Joe would have been bringing
Autry cookies and magazines in jail,” his friend
John Iaconetti said. But Shirley Drouet’s daughter
Lenora discovered afterward how much she had
wanted J. D. to die, and so did Tommy Svarnas’s
brother Jimmy, when he was wakened by a reporter
with the news. The immigration authorities were
trying to deport Tommy on the Catch-22 ground
that he had sought public assistance for his careand
rehabilitation, a burden that had driyen Jimmy toa
ragged edge emotionally and financially. The re-
prieve cheated them eyen of vengeance. “One day
they say let him die,” Jimmy said bitterly. “Why
change your mind the next day? No make sense.”
And yet a sort of justice had been done, however
one felt about the larger issue of capital punishment
or the bloody particularities of the life and crimes of
J. D. Autry. The processes of the law had worked
swiftly and efficiently through most of his three-
year passage under judgment, and if the end game
had a ragged and hasty look, it was because the
system had worked—because a single justice had
decided in the night that a last measure of fairness
was more important than haste in a capital case. In
the days before his son’s brush with death, Jim
Autry sat boozy and weeping over a creased family
photo of J. D. in knee pants, barely out of babyhood.
The eyes seemed innocent then and yet already
road-weary, in odd disharmony with the little-boy
smile. “Tjust ask you,” Autry puzzled, “how do you
get from there to here?” He was crying. “Just how
far is it from there to here?” The reprieve that
brought J. D, Autry back from the dead did not end
his hellbent journey. It only deferred a last judg-
ment as to how much farther he will go.

J.D. AT HIS SENTENCING

He resolved to die
without a fight,
partly because
resistance was
uncool, partly
because it was
futile.

2B