UPDATE: DEVELOPMENT: The Dallas News reports that the Texas high court has denied a stay of execution - but Edward's appeals continue, at the link below: "Texas' highest criminal court late Tuesday refused to stop the scheduled execution of Terry Edwards, convicted of killing two in a Balch Springs Subway robbery. Edwards' lawyers contend that he was not the shooter and that his cousin, who was with him during the crime, pulled the trigger. They say they will continue their requests before the Dallas County trial court to delay the execution, which is scheduled for Thursday. Appeals for Edwards are also pending in federal court. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decision came on the same day Edwards' lawyers asked the trial court to allow Dallas County's Conviction Integrity Unit to investigate whether prosecutorial misconduct led a jury to convict the wrong man in his case. Edwards' lawyers say they had been in touch with the unit, whose work has led to several overturned sentences. Then, last week, without warning and just days before the scheduled execution, the district attorney's office told Edwards' lawyers he would be prohibited from accessing the department created to investigate cases in which questions about wrongful sentences arise. The lawyers asked the court to delay his execution and allow the county to assign the integrity unit, citing "grave concerns" about the validity of the conviction and the prosecution's last-minute decision to prohibit access to the department. "The abrupt change of course to exclude CIU's vital role is astounding and suspicious," said Jennifer Merrigan, one of Edwards' attorneys. The Dallas County district attorney's office, however, said the integrity unit was never assigned to work on Edwards' case. "The allegation that communication with the Conviction Integrity Unit was abruptly discontinued is false," DA spokeswoman Brittany Dunn said in a prepared statement. "At no time was Mr. Edwards' case ever assigned to, or handled by the Conviction Integrity Unit." Edwards was sentenced to die in 2003 for the shooting deaths of Tommy Walker, 34, and Mickell Goodwin, 26. Edwards had been fired from the Subway restaurant where they worked weeks earlier, and prosecutors said he killed the two before fleeing. Witnesses said Edwards later was seen dumping a .38-caliber handgun in a trash can across the street from the store. He was arrested the same day and found with $3,000 from the store. But Edwards' lawyers say he wasn't the triggerman in the deadly robbery. They allege that Thomas D'Amore, the lead prosecutor, elicited false testimony from a forensic expert and unconstitutionally cherry-picked jurors so that the black defendant faced an all-white jury. They say Edwards' cousin, who committed the robbery with him and is eligible for parole, was the gunman. D'Amore has said that he didn't engage in misconduct and that the jury's verdict was justified. Lawyers appointed for Edwards said in court documents that they began discussing his case with attorneys in the Conviction Integrity Unit last year.
https://www.google.com/search?as_q="terry+edwards"&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=d&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&as_rights=
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Whether or not Terry Edwards is guilty or innocent, it would be criminal to deny his attorneys the time to investigate his case further."
STORY: "Is Texas About to Execute an Innocent Man?, by Slate Senior Editor Jeremy Stahl, published by Slate on January 23, 2017. (Thanks to the Marshall Project for bringing this case to our attention. HL);
SUB-HEADING: "Terry Edwards’ murder conviction is irrevocably flawed."
GIST: "Unless the courts or Gov.
Greg Abbott step in to stop it, Texas will execute Terry Edwards on
Thursday. This would be a reprehensible miscarriage of justice. Edwards’
conviction for capital murder was won at least in part due to a faulty
forensic argument pushed by the prosecution and what appears to be a
racially biased and likely unconstitutional jury-selection process. If
this execution proceeds as planned, it would be an irrevocable stain on a
state justice system that leads the nation in wrongful convictions. Terry Edwards is not a saint. He and his cousin Kirk Edwards
were responsible for the 2002 homicides of Tommy Walker and Mickell
Goodwin. But while Terry Edwards took part in the burglary that led to
the murder of two of his former co-workers at a Subway restaurant in the
Dallas suburbs, it’s less clear that he was the triggerman. In a series
of filings earlier this month, Edwards’ attorneys requested that his execution be stayed and a new writ of habeas corpus be considered. It will be up to the 5th
Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether new evidence ought to be
considered at the federal level, while the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals is also considering whether to stay the execution. The appeal makes for damning reading, dismantling key
portions of the case against Terry Edwards. The principal evidentiary
problem with Edwards’ case surrounds the use of forensic testimony about
gunshot residue. Despite the shooting having occurred at point-blank
range, Edwards had no blood on his body, no gunshot residue on his
hands, and none of the victim’s DNA on his person when he was picked up
by police immediately after the crime occurred. He was tested for
gunshot residue within an hour of his arrest, according to the appeal. A state forensic analyst named Vicki Hall tested Edwards’
hands for gunshot residue and found it wasn’t there. Given that negative
result, the defense called Hall to testify at Edwards’ trial; she was
the defense’s only witness during the guilt-innocence phase. On
cross-examination, though, Hall explained away her test results,
testifying that Edwards might have either sweated away or wiped off
“some of that residue.” Hall had also indicated in her forensics report
that one of the three elements that would have been found in the gunshot
residue was present on Edwards. In closing arguments, prosecutor Thomas
D’Amore used Hall’s testimony to argue that the presence of that one
element—the relatively commonplace barium—proved that gunshot residue
had been present, and that Edwards had somehow wiped off the other two
chemicals. In Edwards’ appeal, a former FBI agent writes that this wipe theory is “scientifically unsupportable”: The three chemicals, barium, antimony, and lead, exist in
the same particle, or in particles that contain two of the three. If you
remove any of the components they would be removed linearly. It does
not occur that just one of the components is removed; the components all
increase or decrease together. It is not possible that a defendant who
had gunshot residue on his hands could simply wipe two of the three
components off of his hands and not the third. Or, as one of Edwards’ current attorneys John Mills put it
to me, “It is scientifically impossible to remove trace elements of two
chemicals and not one.” According to Mills, there is reason to believe gunshot
residue would have been present on the shooter in the immediate
aftermath of the attack. Hall, the forensic analyst, ran a trace
analysis of the victim Mickell Goodwin and found all three elements on
her right hand near a defensive wound. That result is “important for two
reasons,” Mills told me. “It does demonstrate that the gun that was
used does emit a relatively high volume of gunshot residue when fired,
and it heightens the significance of the absence of gunshot residue on
Mr. Edwards.” Hall and the state, however, failed to disclose this test
to Edwards’ lawyers in advance of the trial, and his new legal team
didn’t uncover this fact until very recently. At trial, though, Hall did
testify about the negative results from tests conducted on the hands of
the other victim, Tommy Walker. D’Amore, meanwhile, has had three previous convictions
overturned. In one of those cases, Hall testified that the presence of
two of three chemicals on the hands of defendant Richard Miles indicated
that he had “fir[ed] a weapon or handl[ed] a very dirty weapon.” Miles
was convicted, but the disclosure that Hall’s trace-evidence testimony
was faulty—a fact she later admitted herself—helped exonerate him years later.
Edwards’ attorneys argue in his appeal that “Hall’s testimony and the
direct examination by D’Amore in the Miles case were dishonest in a
manner that reflects not only collusion and fraud, but also bears
substantial similarities to the erroneous forensic testimony that the
two presented at Mr. Edwards’s trial.” (Mills pointed out to me that in
D’Amore’s closing argument about the hand-wiping in Edwards’ case, he
said specifically, “We’ve dealt with this situation before.”) Whether or not Terry Edwards is guilty or innocent,
it would be criminal to deny his attorneys the time to investigate his
case further.........The most damning portion of the appeal, though, has to do with jury selection. Back in May, the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in the case Foster v. Chatman
that Georgia prosecutors had used a blatantly unconstitutional practice
to pick the jury in a murder trial. Prosecutors in that case had
written a B next to the name of every black juror, then used
peremptory challenges—which attorneys can use to strike jurors without
explaining why—to remove some of those black men and women from the pool
and select an all-white jury, which ultimately convicted a black
defendant of murder. The court found that these actions violated the
Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Nearly all of the jury information in the Terry Edwards
case—including the vast majority of jury questionnaires—has gone
missing. But Edwards’ defense team did find a “strike list apparently
maintained” by prosecutors that includes “a handwritten, encircled ‘B’ ”
next to 32 of the jurors’ names. “When we saw it, Foster vs. Chatman had just come
down and we couldn’t believe the similarity,” Mills told me. According
to the limited information the appellate team has in its possession, at
least 30 black people were struck from the jury, which was ultimately
all white with a single Hispanic alternate. Two of these potential black
jurors were struck for cause, while the other 28 were removed thanks to
an agreement made by the defense team and prosecution as part of a
jury-strike bartering system used in Texas at the time. In this case, it
seems possible that this trade allowed the prosecution to get rid of
all of the black jurors without having to use peremptory challenges.
(What the defense attorneys got out of this exchange is anyone’s guess.)
If it can be proved that the “B” in the marking means black, the courts would likely have to clarify whether this scheme was as unconstitutional as the peremptory-challenge one. “Foster v. Chatman
could greatly bolster the defendant’s [unconstitutional jury selection]
claim, provided there is some indication that ‘B’ signifies ‘black,’ ” Daniel S. Medwed, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law who focuses on wrongful convictions, told me.".........Edwards’ attorneys believe that if the latest stay request
is granted, they might be able to find those missing questionnaires or
track down the jurors to determine whether or not “B” meant black.
Whether or not Terry Edwards is guilty or innocent of pulling the
trigger in those 2002 homicides, it would be criminal to deny Edwards’
attorneys the time to investigate this basic constitutional question. If
Edwards doesn’t get that stay, he’ll be executed by the state of Texas
on Thursday. There would be no rectifying that injustice.""
The entire post can be found at:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/01/texas_is_set_to_execute_terry_edwards_that_would_be_an_irrevocable_miscarriage.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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/
