PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I am grateful to Dr. Michael Bowers of 'CSIDDS: Forensics and Law in Focus,' for drawing my attention to the role played by notorious forensic junk psychology experts "at the centre of Texas and the racist machinery of death," as he puts it, such as Dr. James Gregson (Texas) AKA 'Dr. Death' with whom I had a very gloomy interview decades ago, and Walter Quijano. Check out Dr. Bower's comments on Maurice Chammah's outstanding new book 'Let the Lord sort them: The rise and fall of the Death Penalty, at:
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
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STORY: "Texas and the racist machinery of death," by Reporter Jordan Smith," published by The Intercept on Feb. 9, 2021 - a review of 'Let the Lord sort them: The rise and fall of the Death Penalty." (Jordan Smith is a state and national award-winning investigative journalist based in Austin, Texas. She has covered criminal justice for more than 20 years and, during that time, has developed a reputation as a resourceful and dogged reporter with a talent for analyzing complex social and legal issues. She is regarded as one of the best investigative reporters in Texas. A longtime staff writer for the Austin Chronicle, her work has also appeared in The Nation, the Crime Report, and Salon, among other places.)
Other times they would bring in a psychiatrist to present terrible pseudoscience about the likelihood that somebody is a psychopath and certainly going to kill again.
In Dallas and a few small counties, they were using these forensic psychiatrists, one named James Grigson, who would come in and say, “This person facing the death penalty, sure, he’s never been in trouble with the law before, but I met him, or I read about his crime, and there is 100 percent likelihood that he is a psychopath who is going to kill again.” There’s no science to that. Grigson himself seems to have been the psychopath, frankly.
And then in Harris County, Houston, and some other cities, they didn’t use psychologists. Instead, they would mine your records for any accusation ever made against you, whether or not you were found guilty or it was adjudicated at all.
That’s the surface level. And then you go one notch below the surface, and you start to see race very, very strongly. There are the explicit cases. Walter Quijano was an expert witness who in seven cases explicitly said the defendant was going to be dangerous in the future because being Black or Latino tracks with committing more crimes.
There are dozens and dozens of other cases where it’s not explicit. You look at the trial transcript and read the closing argument given by the prosecutor. They say things like, “We’re all in fear of them, and we all lock our doors at night because they’re out there on the streets.” This language doesn’t invoke race explicitly, but knowing what we know about the history of lynching and the history of how politicians use crime as a coded way of talking about race, you can see how race infects these trials.
Texas changed the law in 1991. But by then, there were hundreds of people on death row, and the future dangerousness question never went away. To this day, it’s a question asked of juries. They also get to consider more mitigating factors, but scholars still think that the future dangerousness question gives the prosecution an advantage."
The entire book review can be read at:
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/09/death-penalty-texas-maurice-chammah-let-the-lord-sort-them/
