"Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist and popular prosecution expert witness who earned the label “Dr. Death” because he rarely found defendants too mentally unfit to face the death penalty, told jurors Patterson was sane at the time of the murders. At trial, Patterson testified at length about devices the military had planted in his head.
From prison, he sent incoherent letters to the courts, including a 2004 letter to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in which he wrote that he wanted to “conduct my legal work needed to stop the execution murder assaults injury execution date murder machines grave graveyard murder ...”
Shortly before his execution on May 18, 2004, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Perry grant clemency, which Perry rejected. He worried that if he commuted the sentence, Patterson might be released on parole. Patterson’s last statement was a final testimony to his mental condition: “Statement to what? State what? I am not guilty of the charge of capital murder. Steal me and my family’s money. My truth will always be my truth. There is no kin and no friend; no fear what you do to me. No kin to you undertaker.”"
REPORTER BRANDI GRISSOM; THE TEXAS TRIBUNE; (I have followed this story with the Tribune's account of how it obtained the data it is based on from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.)
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BACKGROUND: (Wikipedia); Cameron Todd Willingham (January 9, 1968 – February 17, 2004), born in Carter County, Oklahoma, was sentenced to death by the state of Texas for murdering his three daughters—two year old Amber Louise Kuykendall, and one year old twins Karmon Diane Willingham and Kameron Marie Willingham— by setting his house on fire. The fire occurred on December 23, 1991 in Corsicana, Texas. Lighter fluid was kept on the front porch of Willingham’s house as evidenced by a melted container found there. Some of this fluid may have entered the front doorway of the house carried along by fire hose water. It was alleged this fluid was deliberately poured to start the fire and that Willingham chose this entrance way so as to impede rescue attempts. The prosecution also used other arson theories that have since been brought into question. In addition to the arson evidence, a jailhouse informant claimed Willingham confessed that he set the fire to hide his wife's physical abuse of the girls, although the girls showed no other injuries besides those caused by the fire. Neighbors also testified that Willingham did not try hard enough to save his children. They allege he "crouched down" in his front yard and watched the house burn for a period of time without attempting to enter the home or go to neighbors for help or request they call firefighters. He claimed that he tried to go back into the house but it was "too hot". As firefighters arrived, however, he rushed towards the garage and pushed his car away from the burning building, requesting firefighters do the same rather than put out the fire. After the fire, Willingham showed no emotion at the death of his children and spent the next day sorting through the debris, laughing and playing music. He expressed anger after finding his dartboard burned in the fire. Firefighters and other witnesses were suspicious of how he reacted during and after the fire. Willingham was charged with murder on January 8, 1992. During his trial in August 1992, he was offered a life term in exchange for a guilty plea, which he turned down insisting he was innocent. After his conviction, he and his wife divorced. She later stated that she believed that Willingham was guilty. Prosecutors alleged this was part of a pattern of behavior intended to rid himself of his children. Willingham had a history of committing crimes, including burglary, grand larceny and car theft. There was also an incident when he beat his pregnant wife over the stomach with a telephone to induce a miscarriage. When asked if he had a final statement, Willingham said: "Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man - convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return - so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby." However, his final words were directed at his ex-wife, Stacy Willingham. He turned to her and said "I hope you rot in hell, bitch" several times while attempting to extend his middle finger in an obscene gesture. His ex-wife did not show any reaction to this. He was executed by lethal injection on February 17, 2004. Subsequent to that date, persistent questions have been raised as to the accuracy of the forensic evidence used in the conviction, specifically, whether it can be proven that an accelerant (such as the lighter fluid mentioned above) was used to start the fatal fire. Fire investigator Gerald L. Hurst reviewed the case documents including the trial transcriptions and an hour-long videotape of the aftermath of the fire scene. Hurst said, "There's nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire. Legendary "Innocence" lawyer Barry Scheck asked participants at a conference of the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers held in Toronto in August, 2010, how Willingham, who had lost his family to the fire, must have felt to hear the horrific allegations made against him on the basis of the bogus evidence, "and nobody pays any attention to it as he gets executed." "It's the Dreyfus Affair, and you all know what that is," Scheck continued. "It's the Dreyfus AffaIr of the United States. Luke Power's music video "Texas Death Row Blues," can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2010/09/cameron-todd-willingham-texas-death-row_02.html
For an important critique of the devastating state of arson investigation in America with particular reference to the Willingham and Willis cases, go to:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/01/fire-investigation-great-read-veteran.html
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"As Gov. Rick Perry touts his tough-on-crime policies on the national political stage, the case of Cameron Todd Willingham will continue to be scrutinized," the Texas Tribune story by reporter Brandi Grissom published on September 2, 2011 under the heading, "Under Perry, Executions Raise Questions," begins.
"Scientists have raised questions about whether Willingham set the blaze that killed his three daughters and led to his 2004 execution," the story continues.
"But Willingham’s execution is not the only controversial one the governor has presided over. During nearly 11 years in office, Perry has overseen 234 executions — by far the most of any recent governor in the United States — and has rarely used his power to grant clemency. He has granted 31 death row commutations; most of those — 28 — were the result of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning capital punishment for minors.
Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman for the governor, said the governor can only grant clemency when the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles — whose members Perry appoints — recommends that action. He has only disagreed with the board three times when it recommended clemency in death penalty cases, she said.
“The governor takes his clemency authority very seriously, and considers the total facts of every case before making a decision,” she said. (Independent of the board, the governor may grant a one-time 30-day reprieve delaying an execution; Perry has issued one reprieve.)
To his critics, his parsimonious use of clemency is notable because of continuing concerns about the ability of prisoners facing capital charges in Texas to retain quality legal representation, the execution of those who were minors when they committed their crimes, the ability of some prisoners to intellectually understand their punishment and the international ramifications of executing foreign nationals.
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The Texas Tribune has compiled a database of all the executions in Texas under Perry’s leadership. Below, some of the most controversial, by category.
* Other Cases
Others with significant concerns of mental disorders:
* Michael Richard, executed Sept. 25, 2007
* Johnny Joe Martinez, executed May 22, 2002
* Bobby Woods, executed Dec. 3, 2009
* Monty Delk, executed Feb. 28, 2002
* James Colburn, executed March 26, 2003
* Elkie Taylor, executed Nov. 6, 2008
* James Clark, executed April 11, 2007
* Michael Hall, executed Feb. 15, 2011
* Milton Mathis, executed June 21, 2011
Mental Incapacity
Kelsey Patterson was sentenced to death for the September 1992 shooting deaths of Louis Oates and Dorothy Harris in Palestine.
Testimony showed that without provocation, Patterson walked up to Oates, 63, the owner of Oates Oil Co., and shot him. He shot Harris, 41, when she came out to see what was going on. Patterson then went to a friend’s home nearby, stripped down to his socks and waited in the street for police to arrive.
Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist and popular prosecution expert witness who earned the label “Dr. Death” because he rarely found defendants too mentally unfit to face the death penalty, told jurors Patterson was sane at the time of the murders. At trial, Patterson testified at length about devices the military had planted in his head.
From prison, he sent incoherent letters to the courts, including a 2004 letter to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in which he wrote that he wanted to “conduct my legal work needed to stop the execution murder assaults injury execution date murder machines grave graveyard murder ...”
Shortly before his execution on May 18, 2004, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Perry grant clemency, which Perry rejected. He worried that if he commuted the sentence, Patterson might be released on parole. Patterson’s last statement was a final testimony to his mental condition: “Statement to what? State what? I am not guilty of the charge of capital murder. Steal me and my family’s money. My truth will always be my truth. There is no kin and no friend; no fear what you do to me. No kin to you undertaker.”
* Other Cases
Others who were juveniles at the time of the crime:
* T.J. Jones, executed Aug. 8, 2002
* Toronto Patterson, executed Aug. 14, 2002
Juveniles
Napoleon Beazley was convicted of shooting John Luttig, 63, in Tyler during a 1994 carjacking. Beazley, 17 at the time, was driving around with two friends, a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun when they spotted Luttig driving a Mercedes and followed him to his home. Beazley, the trial record showed, shot Luttig in the head and stole the car, which he backed into a retaining wall and then abandoned.
A jury sentenced Beazley — a former high school class president and the son of a city councilman — to death in 1995.
The Supreme Court did not bar the execution of juveniles until 2005, but by the early 2000s, many states had prohibited the practice. As Beazley’s May 28, 2002, execution date approached, 18 Texas legislators wrote to Perry, asking him to grant clemency. Judge Cynthia Stevens Kent, the trial judge who would have to later sign Beazley’s execution warrant, also asked the governor to commute the sentence to life in prison. The requests were denied.
“To delay his punishment is to delay justice,” Perry told reporters at the time.
In a final statement the 25-year-old wrote that he was not the same person who had committed the murder. “I’m sorry that it was something in me that caused all of this to happen to begin with,” he wrote. “Tonight we tell the world that there are no second chances in the eyes of justice.”
* Other Cases
Other cases in which the executed did not fire the death shot:
* Joseph Nichols, executed March 7, 2007
Not the Shooter
Robert Lee Thompson did not fire the bullet that resulted in his 2009 execution. Thompson and his accomplice, Sammy Butler, robbed a Houston convenience store in 1996. Thompson shot one of the clerks four times. The man survived.
Butler shot the other clerk, Mansoor Bhai Rahim Mohammed, who died. During Butler’s 1998 trial prosecutors could not prove that Butler intended to kill Mohammed. He received a life sentence and is eligible for parole in 2036.
Jurors, however, assessed the death penalty against Thompson in 1998. Thompson had also been charged — but not convicted — in several other aggravated robberies, including three that involved murders.
The courts rejected the argument that Thompson should not receive a harsher sentence than his accomplice, but the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a rare clemency recommendation and advised that the sentence be commuted to life in prison.
“After reviewing all of the facts in the case of Robert Lee Thompson, who had a murderous history and participated in the killing of Mansoor Bhai Rahim Mohammed,” Perry said in a statement, “I have decided to uphold the jury’s capital murder conviction and capital punishment.”
Thompson was executed on Nov. 19, 2009.
* Other Cases
Other cases with questions about adequate counsel:
* Robert Lookingbill, executed Jan. 22, 2003
* Willie Shannon, executed Nov. 8, 2006
* Johnny Johnson, executed Feb. 12, 2009
* Johnny Joe Martinez, executed May 22, 2002
Foreign nationals executed under Perry:
* Javier Medina, Mexico, executed Aug. 14, 2002
* Humberto Leal, Mexico, executed July 7, 2011
* Angel Resendiz, Mexico, executed June 27, 2006
* Jose Medellin, Mexico, executed Aug. 5, 2008
* Heliberto Chi, Honduras, executed Aug. 7, 2008
* Yosvanis Valle, Cuba, executed Nov. 10, 2009
* John Elliott, England, executed Feb. 4, 2003
Questionable Counsel
Leonard Uresti Rojas was convicted in 1996 of shooting to death his common-law wife and his brother. The appellate lawyer appointed to handle Rojas’ case was inexperienced, on probation with the state bar and suffered from mental illness, according to court documents. He had been disciplined for not adequately serving his clients and was serving three probated sentences from the bar while he was working on Rojas’ case. He missed crucial deadlines for filing appeals on Rojas’ behalf, effectively eliminating any chance he might have had for relief.
Shortly before his scheduled execution, new attorneys took on Rojas’ case. They appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and asked Perry for a reprieve.
The pleas failed, and Rojas was executed on Dec. 4, 2002.
In a dissenting opinion published after the execution, Tom Price, an appeals court justice, scathingly rebuked the court’s decision. Death penalty appeals, he wrote, should not be left to lawyers with disciplinary problems and no experience.
“He neglected his duties,” Price wrote. “It is hard to imagine that there was no one more able or better qualified.”"
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The story can be found at:
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-people/rick-perry/under-perry-executions-raise-questions/
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THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY; HOW THE TEXAS TRIBUNE GOT THE EXECUTION DATA: BY RYAN MURPHY;
"This morning @TribData released a visualization of all executions in the state of Texas since Gov. Rick Perry took office in late 2000. The interactive was developed to run along side reporter Brandi Grissom's piece that looks at Perry's controversial past with executions.
So how did we make it happen?
The data comes from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's executed offenders page, which has an HTML table with each row corresponding to each execution. Each row has basic information for each offender (name, age, race, date of execution, etc.), but also contains two cells with links to other pages, one with more in-depth offender information and another with their last statement.
To scrape the page, we decided to give ScraperWiki a shot. ScraperWiki, one of the 2011 Knight News Challenge winners, is an online tool that makes it possible to write web scrapers in Python, Ruby or PHP in an online editor. Because the code and data is public, it is possible to collaborate with other programmers on the same scraper.
Tribune developer Noah Seger and I teamed up to build this scraper, which created an entry in a SQLite database for each offender with the information in their row.
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So what about the two links? The last statement pages fortunately had a consistent layout. We had the scraper pull the page, grab the last batch of text from the table and add it to the database for that offender.
However, we weren't so lucky with the offender information page. Some of them were straightforward, with organized layouts we could parse though. The rest? Scanned images.
With more than 300 pages represented as JPGs, going through them by hand and typing out the data was not an option if we wanted this done anytime soon. We had to find a way to not only get all of this information as text but to do it as soon as possible.
Luckily, there is a service out there that makes it possible to get a very basic task such as transcribing done quickly. Amazon's Mechanical Turk allows users to set up a workflow that pays workers for the competition on a task. With Turk, we offered 10 cents per completely typed page, and had each page transcribed twice for redundancy. We set this up on Tuesday, and were hopeful it would be done by Thursday. But we underestimated the speed of the workers. By 8 p.m. Tuesday night, it was complete.
By attaching each offender's TDCJ number to the data provided by Turk, we were able to easily merge that information with what we successfully scraped. We returned to ScraperWiki and pulled in a csv of the Turk data, we had a complete database of all of the information found in the executed offender page and were able to go forward with designing what we released today."
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
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