STORY: "Supreme Court Gives Duane Buck a New Chance to Appeal His Death Sentence," by reporter Dianna Wray, published by The Houston Press on February 22, 2017. (Dianna Wray, a nationally
award-winning journalist, is a staff writer at the Houston Press. Born
and raised in Houston, she writes about everything from NASA to oil to
horse races.)
SUB-HEADING: "The Supreme Court has sided with Duane Buck and reopened his case.
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GIST: "Duane Buck has long argued
that a Harris County jury sentenced him to death by lethal injection
partly because of racial prejudice after a psychologist called by his
own attorney testified that Buck was more likely to commit more violent
crimes because he is black. Now, the U.S. Supreme
Court has ruled that Buck, the Houston man who brutally murdered his
ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend in 1995, may continue to appeal his
death sentence. On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court sided with
Buck in a 6-2 ruling giving him the right to have a new hearing. In
an opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court concluded
Buck had been given ineffective counsel because his own defense lawyers
introduced racially charged testimony that helped a jury sentence him to
death and then failed to challenge that testimony on appeal. There's
no question of innocence here. In July 1995, a few weeks after they'd
broken up, Duane Buck walked into the home of his former girlfriend,
Debra Gardner, carrying a shotgun and a rifle. Buck shot his stepsister,
Phyllis Taylor, and Kenneth Butler, her new boyfriend. Gardner ran out
of the house and Buck followed. As her young son and daughter begged him
for their mother's life, Buck shot Gardner in the chest. She and Butler
died of their wounds. Taylor survived. Buck was easily convicted when he stood trial for capital murder two
years later. The only question was the punishment. That's where the case
went off the rails. As Roberts notes in his decision,
at that time Texas juries could only impose the death penalty if it was
found, unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt, that there was "a
probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence
that would constitute a continuing threat to society." The
prosecutors were making a good case against Buck. They called witnesses
that testified about Buck's apparent lack of remorse. A former
girlfriend recounted how Buck used to hit her and had pointed a gun at
her twice during their relationship. It was pretty clear that this was
not a nice guy. Buck's
defense counsel, Jerry Guerinot, a lawyer who was already on his way to
racking up a substantial record for losing death penalty cases, as we've noted
before, called his own character witnesses, even putting Buck's father
and stepmother on the stand to testify that they'd never known Buck to
be a violent person. But then Guerinot called Walter Quijano as an
"expert" witness. Guerinot asked Quijano — who has since
been found to have given problematic testimony promoting racial bias in
numerous cases over the years — how the jury should judge whether Buck
would be a future menace to society. “It’s a sad
commentary that minorities, Hispanics and black people, are
overrepresented in the criminal justice system,” Quijano replied. The
prosecution was on it like a duck on a June bug and Quijano confirmed
during cross-examination that it was his expert opinion that black and
Hispanic people are more likely to commit violent crime. With that, the
jury had enough to justify sentencing Buck to death by lethal injection,
and it had all been handed over to them by Buck's own lawyer. As
Roberts observes, Quijano's testimony did significant damage because
when the jury was deliberating punishment, it was the one piece of
"concrete" evidence they had to help weigh out the question of whether
Buck was likely to commit more violent acts. On top of that, Quijano's
statement tapped into a powerful stereotype, Roberts states, that black
men are prone to violence. And the results were troubling, Roberts
finds: "In combination with the substance of the
jury’s inquiry, this created something of a perfect storm. Dr. Quijano’s
opinion coincided precisely with a particularly noxious strain of
racial prejudice, which itself coincided precisely with the central
question at sentencing. The effect of this unusual confluence of factors
was to provide support for making a decision on life or death on the
basis of race." Just three years later, in 2000, then-Texas
Attorney General John Cornyn acknowledged that seven people, including
Buck, who had been sentenced to death based on Quijano's racist
testimony had been denied their constitutional right to be judged
without any regard to the color of their skin. Cornyn said the state
AG's office would review the sentencing hearings for these defendants. But
in 2002, the AG's office, with now-Governor Greg Abbott at the helm,
decided Buck should not have another hearing since, unlike in the other
cases, his own attorney had called Quijano to the stand. Since then, Buck's case has bounced through the court system (The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals alone has looked at the case three times),
with the state AG's office continuing to argue that this one wasn't
their problem since the testimony was introduced by Buck's lawyer.........The high court thus vacated the Fifth Circuit's
ruling. The vote split, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen
Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joining Roberts in his majority
opinion. The
decision is being celebrated by Buck's legal team. "Today’s ruling
gives us hope that the ugliness of Mr. Buck’s tainted death sentence
will soon be put behind us and he will receive a life sentence,” Kate
Black, senior staff attorney at Texas Defender Service and one of Buck's
lawyers, stated in a release."
The entire story can be found at:
The entire story can be found at:
